Things I want my kids to know

When there is something we feel we should be changing about our behaviour, but we haven’t actually done it, we often think that our problem might be willpower.

Maybe you want to reduce your screen time because it’s not helping and you end up with a headache, but you keep picking up your phone anyway (that’s me). Maybe you don’t like the fact that you have a drink most evenings and you want to reduce it, but most nights there it is, in your hand. Maybe you open up a bar of chocolate saying you will just have a couple of squares but before you know it, it’s gone. Maybe you keep looking at the social media pages of other people and comparing yourself, even though you keep trying not to.

“Why can’t I just stop this?” you might say to yourself.

“Other people seem to be able to deal with these things, why can’t I?”

“I’m an adult. I should be able to control myself for Pete’s sake.”

(I appreciate you might not use that last phrase in particular, but it’s one I have trained myself to use since having children, as a replacement for stronger language, so you feel free to replace it with whatever expletive you like).

Whatever naughty words you might use, it isn’t fair to judge ourselves so harshly about not being able to just use willpower, because that just isn’t how it works.

Firstly, there might be a reason you keep doing this particular thing. Perhaps your relationship with food or exercise isn’t a simple one and perhaps there are things from your history that make it much more emotive than it is for some other people. Maybe you compare yourself because you have had some real knocks to your self esteem. Maybe you keep picking up your phone or going for a drink because you have had a stressful period of time and now it has become something of a habit.

This leads us nicely to my “secondly…” Much of what we do is automatic and happens without us fully being aware. When you walk down a path at the side of a road, you don’t accidentally go wandering into the road, do you? You are moving your feet, you are watching for where the path ends and the road starts and you are successfully avoiding crossing that line. Automatically. Without conscious thought. More of what we do is down to this than we would really like to believe.

The word “habit” is a loaded one, and one we often think of it as suggesting a rut: something we have got ourselves into but could easily pull ourselves out of. However, in psychology it has a different meaning: a repeating behaviour that keeps happening automatically, in response to environmental cues.

This is a well-understood psychological process that happens in animals, too. We have automatic reactions and behaviours in response to certain cues. Dog hears the sound of the food being opened, it comes through to eat. The kids are in bed, you open a bottle of wine. Your bottom hits the sofa, you open up your phone. The morning alarm goes off, you step on the scales.

For some reason, we humans like to pretend that we are above this. We expect ourselves to be the higher beings that we are made out to be. We should be able to dominate our animal natures, surely? Shouldn’t I be able to stop myself reaching for a glass of wine or my phone, just by sheer force of will?

Nah.

If you want to break a habit, the first step is acknowledging that this might be more automatic than you think it is. If a habit is automatic, willpower isn’t going to do much to change things, because it happens without that part of your mind having a chance to intervene. Actually, if you are looking to break out of a habit (or create a new one) it is more helpful to think about treating it as an automatic response, which we tend to do by creating space between the cue and the existing response and ideally, practicing a new response instead, rather than just trying to sit on your hands.

That might mean leaving your phone in another room in the evenings, maybe even having a special place for it, so it is harder for it to just appear in your hands. It might also be useful to pick something else up instead, like a book or a crossword or something like that as a new response. Something you would like to have more of in your life and is actually appealing.

Similarly with wine. Giving yourself a break here would be not having wine in the house at all for a while. Rather than relying on willpower, just don’t put yourself in that position. Importantly, look for something to replace that feeling with. Maybe you have a different kind of drink that still feels like a ritual. Something with ice and bubbles in it.

The expectation that changing our behaviour is a simple matter of willpower just isn’t true, because much of it is automatic. We stand a better chance when we work with this, rather than against it.

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Thanks for reading. Until next week,

Ted

P.S. If you like this idea, Atomic Habits by James Clear is a good book on this subject.