Habits With Purpose: Mindfully noticing your thinking and feeling habits.
Habits are pretty much everything.
As an adult, almost everything we do, day in and day out, is habitual. When we were younger, we approached most things as a beginner because we were experiencing them for the first time. As we get older, however, we tend to become “creatures of habit”. Most of the activities in our day, including how we feel and think are done on auto-pilot.
When we think of habits, we mostly think of physical actions, like exercise, brushing our teeth, scrolling on our phones, biting our fingernails, or drinking coffee every morning. Going beyond the physical habits, our thinking and feeling habits carry a lot of weight that we may not even realize. While many of our thinking habits can be positive (finding humor, imaginative thought, flexible thinking, positive self-talk), some examples of less-than-helpful thinking and feeling habits include: Perfectionism. Rumination. Overthinking. Negative self-talk. Feelings of inadequacy. Worrying. People-pleasing. Comparisonitis. Analysis-paralysis. Procrastination. Catastrophizing.
Believe it or not, all of these thinking-habits are to protect you, even if they can also make you feel a little crazy. At some point in time, these were all survival techniques to help rise above the rest and literally survive (i.e. survival of the fittest). In the most primitive aspects of our brain we are hardwired to focus on what we perceive as negative, bad, or dangerous so we can compete with others and survive the lurking dangers.
The dangers now are not the same as they used to be, however there are still benefits and rewards that allow us to rise to the top of the competition. Take perfectionism for example: Maybe at some point in your life, working extraordinarily hard on a school project paid off with a perfect grade and accolades from the teacher, which further perpetuated your belief that you had to put the same amount of work into the next project, and over time this becomes the new norm for fear of failure, and thus a habit is formed. This striving then carries over into other aspects of your life, perpetuating the habit, maybe even becoming a burdensome and stressful expectation.
Like any habit, these thinking habits can be replaced, minimized, or stopped altogether. It requires breaking the “habit loop” of cue —> behavior —> reward. Take ‘rumination’ as an example…the cue is something that is causing you to worry (i.e. a difficult discussion you had with a co-worker). The behavior may be worrying excessively over how you feel the conversation was. And the perceived reward is the feeling that by worrying, you are doing something to solve or control the situation and it makes you feel safer in the short-term.
While most (if not all) of these thinking habits can feel invasive and pervasive, there is a way to tame these patterns and make them manageable. Some ways to break the cycle, or habit loop, could be: increased awareness around triggers/cues, challenging negative thoughts, reframing situation, journalling, mindfulness, movement, recognition of patterns, self-compassion…and seeking out help from supportive friends, family, or professional help.
When you start noticing the habits that are not serving you, you can then begin to shift into developing different habits with purpose and intentionality.
