If you don’t select your habits, they will select themselves.

The nature of habits are there to save us energy, they become just “what we do”. In this article I discuss mindfully harnessing this mental tool to better our lives.

With the observation of successful people and office driven productivity, it seems clear that a habit driven framework is superior to attempting to apply things like “willpower” to complete useful tasks. Habits are a self-programmable default mode device that can be an amazing asset. Habits can become a powerful framework for getting tasks done and improving your life.

With the good can also come the bad. The habit hardware in the brain is so strong that it will habituate behaviour with or without our conscious intervention. If we are not fortunate, we may end up with some odd habits that we would rather not have.

Fostering Habits

I am currently focusing on building a large collection of habits, a Pokémon inspired “gotta catch them all” type approach. There is no harm in having a large store of habits to pick from. Once we have a set of habits we are happy with, we will find ourselves just doing them. Just doing whatever we do is mentally a very comfortable state.

It is fine to have more habits than time we have to do them, because habits aren’t as demanding as scheduled tasks, their purpose isn’t to make us do them every day but to be there to give us an easy option that will come to mind when we are not sure what to do next. It might be that if we are so happy with our current habits and nothing else demands our time, we may just end up doing them every day.

The idea here is that a well selected collection of habits will form the framework to do the things we think we should be doing in our lives. For example, we should be getting enough sleep. Going to bed at a certain hour may be the scheduled task to achieve this goal, but it is our habits that end up determining whether we actually succeed in doing this task when it was scheduled or not. For example, if a certain someone had a habit of playing chess for four hours straight and his scheduled bed-time is only 1 hour away, he might utilise this habit to fill the remaining time, but he is likely to miss the scheduled task because of the nature of that habit.

My list

The new habits I’ve successfully added to create an environment of productivity:

20 min morning meditation

Morning tea (pu-erh has been an excellent morning tea)

Daily Walk with some light exercise

5 minute journal

1 hour on consuming blogs or podcasts

Cheat day

Blog work

Ones I’m still adding:

20 minutes reading

Thinking of adding:

20 minute evening meditation. There is a noticeable difference in state when spending >30 mins meditation a day.

Maintain a long-term goals journal. This would encourage being “future minded”.

Habits that were negatively impacting and had to be eliminated:

Online chess. It was simply too good at consuming my energy and keeping me playing.

Programming New Habits

In order to make something a habit we just need to do it regularly for a short period and our brain will program it in as a habit. I find it takes somewhere between 3-7 days for the new habit to start taking effect.

Step one is to have a list of habits. I have a Bullet Journal where I have recorded all of my active habits. The list is required for the first couple of days as a reminder of what actions you are trying to habitualise. Do them. Even if they’re not executed perfectly, it is important to do them every day for the first while. The more stable the pattern the more recognisable it is as a habit. For me at 9am now, I automatically think, where is my tea and journal?

Deprogramming is a little more involved.

Removing Old Habits

I have known for a few years now how to deprogram habits/cognitive addictions from my existence in record time utilising the apparent plasticity of the habits and addictions area of our brain. The idea was suggested to me in a book called ‘Rewire your Brain’.

I find that addictions take ~3 days to kill the regular addiction urge, after ~7 days the idea will stop appearing in my mind, and after ~20 days I will have completely forgotten it with only vague memories of ever having done it.

I’ve never had a serious chemical addiction other than caffeine. The habit of coffee followed this pattern, but the chemical side required its own approach. More on that later.

Know that the habits are triggered when you’re in your default cognitive state, commonly referred to as default mode network or DMN. As I understand it, this is the place where the mind manifests most of the time.

“Let thoughts come and go. Just don't serve them tea.” ~ Shunryu Suzuki in 'Crooked Cucumber'

Step 1 is to be mindfully aware, this is relatively easy in this case because the recurring thought of the habit will remind you of this. As the Zen Buddhist Shunryu Suzuki says, you don’t want to be fighting your habits, but accepting that the urge is there, and letting it pass. When it comes to deprogramming a habit I find that it is important to not engage with the thought of the habit in addition to just not doing it. I find that engaging in fantasy of thought with either an idea or memory of performing the habit is enough to reinforce it a little, this is what is referred to by Shunryu Suzuki as “[serving] them tea”. After the first 3 days the frequency and urge to engage with the habit will have diminished. Within 3-7 days I will still have the odd tempting thought that I should engage in the habit, but there is no overwhelming urge to do so. Usually between 7-20 days I can more or less go back to being mindless, as long as I don’t get carried away. The term “mindless” is meant as the opposite of mindful -- perhaps it should be mind-empty! (jokes). Sometimes in the 7-20 day range I can pick up the task again once and it will not have the same level of engagement as it once had, playing chess is a recent example.

So...

What are your habits?

I’m always in the search of new habits to add to my collection so if you have something you particularly enjoy doing regularly please add it to the comments below. If we are lucky we could end up with quite the wealth of ideas.

Thank you all for reading. Please upvote and share this article if you enjoyed it, I post new articles every couple of days. You can follow me on any of: Facebook - Twitter - SteemIt - Webpage