Substituting Habits
When I realise I can’t find 10 minutes to do yoga or meditate, but I seem to be able to easily find several sets of 10 minutes to mindlessly browse the web, I try to substitute the one for the other. The conversation in my head goes a little like this:
“Okay, you know you want to do a little yoga as a habit each day. Or most days. You know it’ll be good for your body as you get older.”
“Yeah, but you know, I haven’t done any yoga for months and I don’t know how to get started and I have all this other stuff to do…”
“It’s true you have all this other stuff to do, but a) you are trying to make a choice to do yoga because you’ve identified it as important and b) despite having all this other stuff to do, you still spend a lot of time just mindlessly distracting yourself.”
So when I catch myself ‘mindlessly distracting myself’ (and often I don’t manage to catch myself) then I say “right, if you can spend 10 minutes watching YouTube, you can spend 10 minutes doing yoga. Just roll out the mat and do 5 sun salutations.”
Keep the pieces bite-sized. Start with the smallest chunk of time that isn’t going to freak you out. 5 minutes. 2 minutes. Whatever. And set it up be low friction. If it takes 10 minutes to find your yoga mat and change into your yoga clothes and move the bed out of the way and so on... you’ll never do it. Set it up so that it’s accessible.
I’ve been trying to learn to play cello for some years. One very important bit of advice I got early on was to set it up so that practicing was easy. My cello, music, music stand, tuner, notebook, etc. are all in one corner. It takes me just a few seconds to go from “okay, I have time to practice” to actually practicing. Making that bar low is very important. For all sorts of things, especially things that you want to make into habits.
I think of a habit as something that looks like a choice, but isn’t. If you have a ‘habit’ of going to have ‘a quick look at Twitter’ whenever some problem confronts you at work and the ‘quick look’ turns into a lost hour that you regret later, you’re not really making a choice to take a break. You’re following an engrained pattern of behaviour that overrides and overwhelms your rational, choice-making mind so quickly and so subtly that you typically don’t even notice it happening.
Regaining control in those situations requires stopping the automated behaviour and making a conscious choice. It’s hard. It really is. But you have to get to making a choice first; if you don’t even get to the choice point, then you have no power over the situation at all. Then when you are making the choice, bear in mind that every time you make a choice in favour of continuing a habit you would rather not do, you are reinforcing that habit. You are quite literally wiring the neurons together that make it easier for that habit to become subconscious. Conversely, every time you choose to take a different path, to move towards the behaviour you want, you are weakening the old wiring and strengthening the new.
That’s why I think of habit substitution as a double-win. When you choose to not do something you wish to spend less time on, and instead consciously choose to invest that time in a new area, you do three things: you weaken the old habit, you build the new one, and, perhaps most importantly, you teach yourself that change is possible.