I almost forgot to brush my teeth this morning and it has me thinking about the challenge of changing our habits.
I’ve been brushing my teeth right after rising for what, maybe 40 years? It is as deeply ingrained a habit as any I could identify. And yet, today, I walked downstairs into the kitchen and started to prepare my coffee (another longstanding habit). But my mouth tasted wrong, and I paused as I set the water to boil. Had I failed to brush my teeth?
So, I walked back upstairs and rectified the situation.
I know it’s not the world’s most fascinating anecdote, but it is a useful one to give insights into the nature of habits, and how we can depend upon them to move us towards the lives we want to live, and how difficult they can be to change when they move us away from the lives we no longer want.
Our lives are filled with these autopilot moments. I wake up, greet the cat (who has his own habits and routines), use the restroom, and brush my teeth. Every morning. What went wrong today? Why did my autopilot fail me? I changed the routine. I have been adjusting to wearing a CPAP at night, and I like to wash my face after taking it off. This is a new behavior, and I’m still working it into my morning habits. So, today, I washed my face and, apparently, decided I was done and walked out of the bathroom and down the stairs.
I believe if I can work washing my face into my morning routine, it will become a new habit. But clearly it isn’t automatic yet. I’m gonna get it wrong for a while until the new neural pathways are built in. However, I also know that because I’m building it into something that is already habit, I have a much better chance of it becoming routine quickly. If I decided to add washing my face to another part of my morning, say during the precious 15 or so minutes of downtime I enjoy before I walk out the door to begin my commute, I’d be far less likely to get it done.
Habits more easily build onto preexisting habits.
So, if you want an afternoon walking habit, build it into something you already do in the afternoon. If you want a lunch vegetable habit, build it into your lunch preparation routine. If you want a nighttime winddown habit, it will be more successful if you build it from something else you do habitually, like right after you put away dinner.
On the other side of the habit structure, when we want to break habits, it may be easier to replace a habit but keep the rest of the routine, then to change the routine entirely. If, for some reason, I decided that I would now make my coffee and then come back upstairs to brush my teeth and wash my face (gross, coffee breath and morning breath!), that would be much more difficult for me to do consistently.
So, if you want to stop nighttime snacking, consider finding something else to do while you watch your nighttime show. Or replace the less goals-aligned snack with a more goals-aligned one. If you want to stop nibbling sweets in the afternoon before the kids arrive from school, replace that behavior with something truly rejuvenating before the chaos begins.
And going back to lessons from my near-miss on the morning teeth-brushing, I think it’s instructive that I wasn’t hard on myself for forgetting to brush my teeth. I didn’t tell myself I was a terrible, disgusting person who clearly didn’t want it badly enough. When I noticed the problem, I fixed it as soon as I could, with a neutral mindset. Similarly, as we are practicing new habits, it is essential that we acknowledge neutrally as possible that we are learning, pick up from where we left off, and keep practicing. We won’t get it perfectly right out of the gate. That’s ok, and it’s actually an important part of learning a new habit, too. I am more likely to remember to do my teeth-brushing-face-washing routine tomorrow morning because I forgot it and fixed it today.
Building habits and routines is the antidote for fickle motivation and discipline. The more habitual a behavior is, the less emotional energy and time you will have to spend getting it done. Brushing my teeth is no big thing. Eventually, washing my face in the morning won’t be, either. I trust that I can work with how my brain forms and sustains habits and continue to build the future I want for myself, and I know you can, too.
Progressive Strength 