Next-Level Habit Formation
“If You Can Master Suffering, You Can Just as Easily Master Joy.”
I have discussed the power of habits in my post on re-creation.
Until I started my Quora project, I did not know that I had any particular talent for developing habits. But the questions and answers I am drawn to suggest that I do. I am able to regularly and with little effort adopt new habits as I choose interests and skills that I want to grow in.
These are habits like exercise, eating well, meditating, and reading. Even my blog is a product of a 30-minute-per-day blog work habit I adopted.
But, after reading Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself, I am a little humbled I have been thinking of habits through such a narrow lens.
This book opened my eyes to the fact that our emotional states are habits themselves. Your emotional reaction to different events is a memorized habit you have been practicing over the course of your life.
For example, when something happens at work that annoys me and creates a negative response, that’s a memorized habit. When an attractive woman smiles at me and I get a little tense, that’s a memorized emotional response to the situation. These reactions developed at some point in time and are ingrained in my subconscious, just like putting on my pants with my left leg first.
“We are capable of reliving a past event over and over, perhaps thousands of times in one lifetime. It is this unconscious repetition that trains the body to remember that emotional state, equal to or better than the conscious mind does. When the body remembers better than the conscious mind—that is, when the body is the mind—that’s called a habit.”
These emotions are breakable, according to the author. They are also replaceable with more constructive responses.
I have talked many times before about the mind/body connection. You can create a feeling of confidence with the position of your body. Stretching and breaking the tension in your body relieves the stress in your mind.
“The brain constantly monitors the way the body is feeling. Based on the chemical feedback it receives, it will generate more thoughts that produce chemicals corresponding to the way the body is feeling, so that we first begin to feel the way we think and then to think the way we feel. To change is to think greater than how we feel. To change is to act greater than the familiar feelings of the memorized self.”
At its core, emotions are just chemicals, like dopamine and serotonin, released through your body. It is possible to change your mind and emotional state, creating a different chemical reaction in situations where you are experiencing negative emotions. You can practice this and make it a habit. You can make replacing this reaction a habit too, until your mind and body's habitual response to the stressor becomes the response you want.
Read the book for the full guide to the meditation and practice he recommends following each day. I have not yet implemented this but am working on the concepts.
As a starter, I have begun by simply noticing when the negative emotions come on. The author recommends saying out loud, “Change!” when you recognize the event.
“Whenever you catch yourself in real life thinking a limiting thought or engaging in a limiting behavior, just say “Change!” out loud. Over time, your own voice will become the new voice in your head—and the loudest one. It will become the voice of redirection. As you repeatedly interrupt the old program, your efforts will begin to further weaken the connections between those neural networks that make up your personality. By the principle of Hebbian learning, you will unhook the circuits connected to the old self during your daily life. At the same time, you are no longer epigenetically signaling the same genes in the same ways. This is another step so that you will become more conscious. It is developing “conscious control” of yourself.”
After breaking the negative experience, I imagine the state of being that I want to have in that situation, visualize feeling it, and then replace the original feeling with the new one. If the feeling is anger or frustration because of an action someone took that I don’t appreciate, I tell myself to change, and then imagine being a more calm and patient person. For example, if I am feeling frustrated because of a tedious request, I create the feeling of gratitude that my assistance is being requested in the situation, and then I try to move forward with that feeling in mind.
I am not perfect by any means here, and this is a work in progress. This requires unlearning years of habitable responses. But since reading this, I am wondering how far it can be taken.
I had a social event the other day. I am not a natural extravert. I have learned how to be outgoing and social, but I notice that my immediate emotional reaction to preparing for a social event is still heavy. It feels like a burden that I am preparing to overcome. I imagine an extrovert has a different internal chemical reaction that gets them energized and excited. That sounds much more fun and something I want to work on as well.
I also am wondering if this can be applied to exercise. A truism in fitness circles is that the mind quits before the body. Is there a connection here, where there is a mind/emotional response to a certain physical sensation, in this case pain, stress or fatigue, where we can train ourselves to respond to that physical sensation differently? By enjoying the suffering or at least responding by tuning it out to push further?
According to the book, you can quite literally change your reality by replacing your emotional habits. Not only will you change your internal state, but externalities will align as well.
I will need to see this to fully believe it, but I understand the concept. I have previously written about how much better the world treats you when you are in your best physical form, radiating confidence outward. The world responds in kind and treats you better.
I can imagine that the world will treat me better if my emotional state for annoying work projects is more positive, or if social events genuinely excite and energize me. Why wouldn’t those around me respond in kind?
As a habit enthusiast, I am looking forward to making some progress on this new project.
I will post more on this if I discover any life-changing improvements.