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“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed, and the beginning of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.”
––William James
When something becomes a habit, you’re as close to acting without conscious thought as possible. In that state, no concerns or decisions exist as to whether or not to act, and there are no choices about methods to take. This is because concerns, decisions, and choices are issues we handle in our conscious mind.
We all have morning rituals, to which we hardly give a thought while doing them. How much toothpaste should I squeeze onto the brush today; do I need a minute to think about it? But what about children? The same ritual seems impossible for them; they just want to give up and go back to bed. Parts of it may even be exhausting to them, like tying shoes. But the day will come.
Remember learning to drive a car? Concentrate, take each step slowly so you don’t forget anything. How do people drive and talk and have music playing all at the same time, you wondered? But the day came.
What you thought could never be a habit suddenly becomes one, sometimes because a life change forces you to do things you never had to do before. That happened to me after my divorce. Among other things (we won’t talk about ironing) I suddenly had to prepare all my meals. I always enjoyed cooking, occasionally. But planning, purchasing, cooking, cleaning every meal? It was hard work, but then I began to find great recipes I enjoyed preparing. A key has been to never make something requiring time if I’m in a hurry. Along with discovering recipes, I also increased my ability to put ingredients together on my own for complete and satisfying meals.
Then another habit came along, diet. As this current life reconstruction was getting under way, I knew by the scale, my discomfort, and the tightness of my clothes that it was time. Now I have a whole new system in eating and exercising which has transformed me inside and out. More about that when I go through habits one by one. This post is just the introduction!
Habits are behaviors we don’t need to think about; they’re like automatic reflexes. That can be good or not so good, depending on the habit. If you’re a woman, you may remember your mother saying, “Don’t cross your legs.” But your legs had a mind of their own; you didn’t think and decide each time you crossed them. How about “Don’t slouch,” “Speak up,” “Don’t eat so fast”? We never purposely refused to do these things, but our habits were far ahead of any corrective decisions we might have made to the contrary.
This is especially true with habits we want to change because we know they are sinful or harmful to us and others. They draw us away from the God whose presence and power for living on the highest path we so desire. We want to end those behaviors and create new ones that move in the opposite direction. Yet once again we discover it’s not so easy since we’re already in the midst of the behavior before we’re aware we even started it!
“But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” (James 1:14-15).
We have a parliamentary system for creating habits. Let’s use the example of getting up early. Before it becomes a habit, the alarm sounds and something in you says, “Oh no, not yet,” and the majority vote is to stay in bed. So you hit the snooze button. And maybe you do that three more times before you force yourself, against the majority opinion, to drag yourself out of bed. While you do, you’re thinking, “Maybe I’m not feeling well today. Maybe I ate something bad for me. Maybe I need to catch up on lost sleep. Maybe bad dreams gave me intermittent sleep and I’ll be tired all day.”
Once getting up becomes a habit, though, the motion of throwing the covers off to arise immediately when the alarm first sounds is passed in a second with majority vote, even when part of you might feel a tiny bit of opposition.
I’ve never succeeded in getting up early until this most current reconstruction, but now I know if I don’t start my day at 6:00 am, I may not be able to stick to the rest of my habits, some of which commence immediately upon rising!
Making something a habit is completely different from learning something using your awareness, like if you listen to a teacher or take part in a project. It means practicing something over and over until you’ve actually rewritten the nerve cells in your brain.
Habits begin with a trigger. The 6:00 alarm is the first trigger of my day. That trigger starts a series of habits that have recently and surprisingly become automatic. I get up, turn on lights, open blinds, start the propane heater (it’s winter in Baja and no central heat), and get a teeth-cleaning chewy for my dog Oscar. That will keep him occupied so he won’t bother me as I’m doing my exercises. Then make the bed. Then weigh myself, do bathroom stuff, get dressed. Only then do I go downstairs to prepare breakfast. That one morning alarm starts all those actions, and I no longer spend a moment deciding whether or not I will do any of them. The trigger shoots the bullet, and all those actions are accomplished.
After breakfast comes the next trigger, drinking coffee at the table, which sets off the next set of routines: prayer, Bible, online Spanish lesson, then back upstairs to worship at my keyboard. Keep in mind, this is totally new to me! I can only believe God Himself pulled the initial trigger in response to my deep desires for a pure and productive life to achieve His purposes.
An interesting side note about dogs. Oscar has become the “barometer” of my progress in creating new habits. When I started doing floor exercises, he didn’t know what to make of it. He would try to lie under me as I was doing pushups. He wanted to put his head on my stomach while I was doing situps. He wanted to lick me at terribly inappropriate moments. Now he chews his dental stick and then plops back down in his doggie bed, watching me without interruption till I’m finished. When I started doing fifteen stair flights, he wanted to follow me up and down on the narrow staircase, or nip at my heels as I ascended, which was really annoying. Now, as soon as I go up and down once, he lies down at the top of the stairs and waits till I’m finished! It’s like a positive confirmation that the habit is created.
Unfortunately, habits you want to quit function the same way as habits you want to establish. Triggers, unwanted and undesirable, kick them into gear; we’re often in the middle of doing them before we’re aware they’ve begun. I’ll be giving significant space to the undoing and re-doing of undesirable habits, but let me say here that it’s important to identify the triggers for a habit you want to quit, and to establish new triggers that will stop it in its tracks before its acting out begins. I won’t list the specific unwanted habits just yet, but I believe you’ll recognize these triggers:
Location
Certain other people
What you purposely or accidently see online
Your emotional state, especially depression, anger, sense of failure
Time of day
Loneliness
Cycle (yes, men have them too)
A reward we give ourselves for abstinence
ROUTINES: These are series of actions that start with a trigger. I’ve already discussed how a couple of my triggers are the starting point for a routine of habits. A completed routine leads to the trigger for starting the next one. Routines function like an emotional tuner, meaning you can change your mood just by going right on to the next routine without taking time to stew, pout, or be angry. One guy who runs an hour a day says he’ll run a bit longer if he’s just received unwarranted criticism or rejection. It’s one way that developing habits can keep us at the emotional and spiritual level we want to maintain in our BEing.
Our routines of habits yield rewards. If they didn’t, we’d never persevere in making them instinctual. Some of those rewards are easy to understand, while some are uniquely effective for us while incomprehensible to others.
I hate running. I can’t get past the out-of-breath, painful feet, sweating misery, and I have no desire to ever make it a habit. I can understand, though, the reward it gives to those who love it. I also realize two things: FIRST, running is not for everyone, nor should those who love it not be able to understand why others despise it. SECOND, it is also possible that something we once totally rejected may suddenly become appealing, and then enjoyable. Who knows, one day I may become a runner, but I seriously doubt it.
Some habits that are part of my daily routine are new to me, things I never thought I would do daily, much less enjoy. For most of my life I didn’t have an overweight problem. That meant I may have looked fit, but truthfully, I was never in shape. Little muscular definition, no arm strength, love handles. I was a master at wearing just the right clothes to hide parts of me. Even most recently, when I was 25 pounds overweight, people would say, “Oh, you’re in such good shape.” I wasn’t really interested in impressing anyone that way, but the older I got, the harder it became to walk even the slightest incline and keep breathing, or to lift the five-gallon water bottles and propane tanks I have to buy here. Dead in the morning even if I slept well, drowsy in the afternoon, didn’t want to give Oscar his daily exercise if it meant I had to run around the yard.
Now I exercise as soon as I get up in the morning. I also walk fifteen stair flights up and down before lunch and again before dinner. I could never have believed I would do such things, and even like it! It only proves “something” can happen when our primary desire is to do whatever it takes to BEcome the person we want to BE, something that will change us to DO what we never thought we would want to DO, much less actually DO.
An in-shape body is the least important part of exercising for me. Let me be honest (as I always try to be in this blog). From what I see, the majority of men my age are overweight. Most of them seem perfectly content, and I watch them eat food I limit or refuse, foods I love that seem to shout out my name. It’s natural to think, “Really, if I gain 25 or 30 pounds, will I die? Will it really matter? Will I not go to heaven where I’ll get a perfect resurrection body? So why not ‘eat, drink, and be merry for tommorow we die?’” The reason why not is because there are more important rewards. First and most obvious, I’d rather be in the physical and mental state I’m in now even if it means denying something I really want.
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25).
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:1-2).
I’m sure you’ve had the experience of coming up with a great idea while not sitting at your desk and thinking. I often lose track of counting reps while exercising because an idea pops into my head. Then as soon as I finish, I have to run to write it down. It’s often the very next section of the blog I’m writing in which I was stuck! Or it might be a sudden revelation of the meaning of some Scripture I didn’t understand. Sometimes I stare at the Bible and pray, “Lord, I don’t get this at all and it seems vital; won’t you reveal it to me?” And then nothing, until I’m walking stairs or cooking a healthy meal or doing some other unrelated routine. It's just one more way these habits result in giving me something more worth having than the rewards I used to give myself.
In 2003, a high school in Naperville, Illinois, launched an initiative called “Zero Hour PE” for 19,000 students, who ran on the field or exercised on stationary bikes before their first class. The results were tremendous. While students who only took regular PE classes improved by 10.7% in their reading and comprehension tests, those who took “Zero Hour PE” showed an improvement of 17%.
We could never establish good habits or get rid of bad ones without rewards. People look at others who stick to good habits as highly self-disciplined. But they don’t realize that the habit formers are receiving rewards. They’re a different category of rewards, yet equally or even more satisfying than winning money or eating a whole pizza.
I’m going to get much more specific in the coming posts. Stay with me. And be blessed as you commit yourself to:
“Seek first (whatever will help you live now in the supernatural realm of) the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and then all these things (all you long for both here and hereafter) will be given to you” (Matthew 6:33).
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