It's Habitual

"The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague." - William James

I saw this quote on a blog I read sometimes early this week and I've just been thinking about it all week. I even printed it up and put it on my desk at work. I kept thinking that there were some things in my life that I would just really REALLY like to become "automatic and habitual" and I made a list  of them. Then, I started thinking about all the things I have done in the last three or four years that have, in fact, become automatic and habitual.... healthy habits that I just didn't have before that now are just a given part of my existence, something I rarely give that much thought to and where exceptions to those habits are so rare as to be true exceptions and when those exceptions are over, I just go back to the good habit by default. Exercise was the biggest one that came to mind, but there are others. And I thought to myself that I rarely give myself very much credit for those things, so I made a list of those too.

Things that are now automatic and habitual that were not always:

- Exercise 
- Bringing my lunch to work
- Cooking dinner
- Eating said dinner at the table
- Drinking water, plain water, throughout the day and not much else

These positions are now my "default". Sure, exceptions come and go (for example, no exercise last weekend while I was drinking and partying it up at my 20 year high school reunion), but they are exceptions. I might purchase a burger for lunch from time to time, but it is the true exception to the rule of bringing my lunch to work every day.

So anyhoodle, my point is I was thinking about how I wish I could get some other behaviors to be my "default". Those would be:

- Not eating candy off desks at work
- Not getting Starbucks on weekdays/workdays
- Secret snacks
- No Vending machine snacks

These are behaviors (all basically surrounding the consumption of sugar when I am bored, stressed or any number of other "reasons") and I just wish that my "default" was to not do them. I wish I could just BE the person who doesn't eat candy off desks, or walk over to the Starbucks when a tedious task at work presents itself, or who doesn't get a milkshake while the boy is at taekwondo and I am conveniently alone by myself for a small amount of time with nothing to really do to occupy myself. I want my default to be that I DON'T do those things, and when I do them I want it to be the exception. And right now, those behaviors are not the exception, they are the rule. 

So, I was thinking this morning about how I managed to make the other things on the first list habitual and automatic and the answer is that I took it small bits at a time. I keep trying to make the eating sugar thing an all or nothing proposition, I keep trying to take on all of those behaviors at once, and that's not the way I found success with any of the other habits. Even water, which you would think would be something that you either just do or don't do, but you would be wrong. It started after my surgery, I gave up soda because I didn't want the carbonation causing issues. But I didn't want to drink just plain water, so I drank Crystal Light. I drank, like, two quarts of Crystal Light a day. Then, I decided I wanted to get a little less of that, so I started watering it down, so it was like half water and half crystal light. And then, about a year and a half ago, I thought I just wanted to stop doing Crystal Light, so I just started doing plain water, and now it is all I drink and I don't think about it much. So, even something like drinking water rather than soda or other drinks was something that was a gradual shift and I could tell a similar tale about all of those things on that first list. 

So, my thought is that I am going to try to take on one of these bad habits at a time, a "minimum standard" situation, just like I did with exercise. So, for the month of October, I am just going to focus on not getting snacks from vending machines and see how I feel about that at the end of the month. If I feel like it has become something I don't miss and don't think about doing anymore, then I'll move on to the next thing, but if it is still something I am struggling with, I'll keep at it for another month. 

These things take time, which is something I know well.