Habits Are Everything
Watch a video of any elite athlete or performer before a big game or show, and you will likely see one thing: their pre performance habits, the things that they do every single time in exactly the same way.
This is because habits are everything. Not just for game day, and not just for elite performers. For normal people like you and I, for raising our children, for being happy in our relationships,
crimes against humanity game, for being happy as individuals.
Our routines and habits allow us to access a part of our brain that runs on relatively little gas. The newer (in evolutionary terms) part of your brain your smarty pants prefrontal cortex, the area that sets you apart from the family dog works pretty well, of course. But it requires effort and willpower to make it tick. The more you use it throughout a day, the less reliable it becomes. Low blood sugar? Your decision making will falter, whether you realize it or not.
Good thing there is a back up plan in the older part of your brain: your basal ganglia, a primitive knob of tissue deep in your noggin that acts as your own personal auto pilot. It controls your breathing and swallowing, and that weird way that you sometimes drive to work while sort of unconscious.
Your basal ganglia is, among other things, your habit center. And once it is programmed, it requires no effort on your part to accomplish truly amazing feats. (Really. Charles Duhigg, in his inspiring book The Power of Habit, gives a detailed account of the way Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps won his world records by honing his habits.)
This means that when we are too tired to think as we parents often are we default to our habits,
card game against humanity. Which made me realize: Our habits are our most critical cornerstones for happiness.
I have long advocated finding habits and routines with our children that actually work. A working routine, I believe, doesn’t have to be the most efficient or productive routine; it’s simply one that makes us feel good, or at least it doesn’t make us feel bad.
We need a dinnertime routine that creates feelings of gratitude rather than annoyance, for example, and a morning routine that doesn’t make us want to lay our heads down and cry before we even get the kids to school. We also need bedtime routines for ourselves and our children that don’t leave us exhausted and irritable.
An important caveat: Cultivating habits and routines doesn’t mean that we go through life mindlessly. I mention this because mindfulness when we consciously pay attention to what we’re thinking, feeling, and experiencing in the present moment, without judging our thoughts and feelings as “good” or “bad” is a research tested way to reduce our stress and, generally,
cards against humanity best expansion, be happier.
How can we be mindful about things we do habitually?
Well, consider how we breathe. On the one hand, our breathing is on auto pilot we aren’t thinking, “Okay, now I need to breathe in! Now breathe out! And in! And out!” At the same time, though, we can pay attention to our breath as a part of a meditation or another relaxation practice.
So when we make something a habit say, washing the dishes right after dinner we don’t need to become mindless about it. We can still pay attention to the way the water feels on our hands, for instance, or even appreciate the fact that we have dishes and food to eat off of them in the first place. Habits can make something relatively routine and effortless, but not necessarily mindless. In fact, I find it much easier to be mindful about something once it is a habit once I’m not trying to figure out what I’m going to do, or how I’m going to do it.
So our habits can routinely make us feel grateful, or joyful, or they can prompt us to pay attention and be mindful. But HOW?
I have spent years pondering this question,
cards against humanity cards, subjecting my clients and readers to my habit tracker and methods for getting into better routines. A few months ago, I realized that I still wasn’t in certain habits I intended to be in. For example, I wasn’t exercising very consistently; I had to schedule it on my calendar, making it vulnerable to more urgent matters. And so I re immersed myself in the science of change, and the science of habits. There is compelling new research here to share.
In coming weeks, I’ll be posting a newer, easier method to change bad habits into good ones. I’ll be writing about the most powerful happiness habits: the ones that will make you feel more content and less overwhelmed, that will make parenting feel more effortless. I’ll even write about habits that will make you feel more in love with your spouse.
Habits are a critical component of the happiness equation. It is one thing to know what to do to be happy (or to raise happy children, or to create a happy marriage) but it is quite another thing to actually be able to do those things. You know that you should exercise and meditate and eat kale, for example. But do you often do those things? Perhaps the missing piece is a habit.