HABIT GOALS
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 84.
Hello, my friends. How are you doing? Let's do a check-in with where we are. It's mid-January, if you're listening when this podcast just comes out.
And for many of us, motivation of the new year may have worn off a little. The holiday and winter break were a literal whirlwind. Kids were out of school, home from college.
In fact, as this episode goes out, there are still quite a few college kids who haven't gone back to school yet. As I reflect on the time with my son at home, it's funny how kids can both be home and not home. It's like one day, they're around all day, up in their room, sleeping, eating at all hours.
And the next moment, they're out with friends, sleeping over, staying out late. You honestly don't know what to hope for. When they're home, you're happy, but worried they might be having some issue with friends or feeling lonely.
And then when they're out, you're worried about them driving safely or what time they'll get home, if they'll be drinking, or they might have friends over to hang out at your house and then everything's a total mess. There are so many good things about the holidays, but it's also kind of a surreal time with sometimes surprising lows. If you spent time on social media, you might have seen other people's feeds with pictures of families doing all sorts of fun things over the holidays with their teenage kids.
But if this isn't your experience, if your kids go out of their way not to spend extra time with you, you're definitely not alone. I was talking to one of my sons about his New Year's plans, and he was on the fence about what he was going to do, hang out with friends locally, have people over, go to the city. He was still unsure of what he was going to do literally the afternoon of New Year's Eve.
And so I invited him to hang out with me and his dad. He smiled and said, thanks, Mom. Worst case, I'll be home with you.
Kind of clear where I was in the pecking order. But also I didn't take it personally. I knew in my heart that he didn't mean it as a slight, but notice how I could have chosen to take it personally.
My point with all of this is that as moms, our New Year almost doesn't get started until about now, when our kids are settled back at school, in the swing of the schedule again. We're still wading through the piles of laundry and putting away presents and decorations. It hardly feels like a clean slate.
How many of us resolve to get started with our goals this Monday, only for another week to roll around without us quite getting to it. So if this is you, you are definitely not alone. And honestly, there's no time limit on getting started with your goals.
In fact, there's something to be said for staying committed to a goal, even when you have no evidence that you've made any progress. The only way you can truly fail is if you give up entirely. So if you still have a goal in mind, you're far from a failure if you haven't gotten started.
Last week, I kicked off a new mini series on goals. I started with body goals in large part because I wanted to show you how to apply thought work in a totally different context. Particularly since so much of what I talk about relates to our lives with teens as we approach the empty nest.
One hope I have is that in seeing how this work is applied to other goals that you might be able to see the application of the skill set in a whole new way. In fact, one of my clients reached out after listening to last week's podcast on body goals, and she said this exact same thing. She realized that she didn't feel any stress or resistance about body goals as she does with other areas in her life.
And she got curious about why. She explored why she felt largely content in her physical health and abilities, but in other areas wants to grow and sometimes doesn't feel the same level of confidence or success in her efforts. Here's something I want you to consider.
Could tackling goals be a skill set that you already have and have in fact already mastered? Even if there are other goals where you haven't yet experienced the same success, maybe it's just a matter of recognizing that you already have within you the ability to figure this out. As I said last week, and I'll reiterate many times throughout this series, and in fact throughout this podcast in general, one of the ways to break through the obstacles standing in your way is to get really curious about why you think this goal isn't possible. In this series, I'm going to be covering a number of different goals, and I invite you to listen in on all of them, even if that particular episode doesn't relate to your own specific goals.
You might be surprised to learn how you're already fostering success in a different area. So last week, I covered body goals. Today, I want to focus on habits.
Later in the series, I'll return to the goals of creating connection in our relationships and finding purpose as we approach the empty nest. As you listen to each of these episodes, take note of how much of the practice of thought work and mindset centers around this concept of who you need to be to achieve your goal. Notice how universally you can apply this skill set.
With all of these episodes, I want to reiterate that as we explore the process of achieving various goals, I will not be giving you a how-to guide. Unlike many of the other experts or influencers you might be following, this isn't about how to achieve the goal. I'm also not going to be trying to convince you that you should be doing something different.
Your goals are entirely up to you. Your habits, how you show up in your life, it's all up to you. My purpose with the series is to show you a path to being someone who, when she sets a goal, is able to create the confidence and motivation to work through achieving that goal.
Last week, as I explored body goals like weight loss and exercise, I shared that achieving goals is about creating a new relationship with yourself. And this is one of the universal facets of goal achievement that I will return to again and again. So what do I mean by creating a new relationship with yourself? Well, no matter what your goals are, whether it's getting fit, quitting bad habits, improving relationships, letting go of anxiety, being happier, procrastinating less, figuring out what to do once your kids leave the nest, all of these goals, what's required for you to be able to achieve them is to be someone who does what's required to achieve that goal.
Now, when I say this, it sounds so obvious, except if you haven't achieved the goal, then right now you are not doing what you need to do to achieve that goal. Again, sounds obvious. What's not obvious is that in order to achieve your goal, you actually have to be the person who achieves the goal ahead of time.
Now, we're going to be exploring this much more as we go through this series. But for now, let's get into habit goals. Broadly, we can put habits into two categories, good habits and bad habits.
Now, generally, I'm not in the business of characterizing anything as good or bad. This isn't up to me. Each of us have to decide this for ourselves.
But what I mean by quote unquote bad habits are those things that we don't really want to do. Some examples are over drinking alcohol, overeating, snacking, procrastinating, overspending, scrolling on social media, binging Netflix. Now, none of these things are bad in and of themselves.
In fact, eating, spending, scrolling on social media, all of us do these things to a certain extent. But for each of us, there might come a time when we decide we're overdoing one or more of these things to a point where we experience some consequences, even if it's just the shame or guilt of having done the thing when we told ourselves we wanted to do less or none of that thing. In contrast, those habits which we generally might think of as quote unquote good, again, these things are not inherently good.
But we tend to think of good habits like exercising or eating particular kinds of foods, say vegetables or more protein, maybe drinking more water. It could be meditation or yoga, walking outside, reading more. Now, in contrast to the way we think about bad habits, which are things that we don't really want to do, but we do anyway, good habits are things we don't do that we really want to do.
So here's the question. If we want to do something or don't want to do something, why can't we just stop or start doing that thing? For example, if the habit you want to stop is eating snacks in the afternoon, or at least stop eating unhealthy snacks, the solution is to simply not do that thing. In fact, you could argue not having the snack is easier than having the snack.
You don't have to go to the kitchen and expend the energy to get the snack. You don't have to spend money on the snack. But as we all know from experience, if you're craving a snack, it can feel really uncomfortable to not have that snack.
It isn't, in fact, easier to just not do something. Except when you start focusing on starting good habits, because in this case, our goal is to start something we're not doing. In that case, it makes sense that it's not always easy to start doing that thing.
Starting a good habit requires effort. You have to remember to do it. And then you have to overcome the urge you experience in the moment when it's time to do that thing, and that urge is to not do it.
So if your goal is to exercise in the morning, it's so much more comfortable to sleep a little longer than to drag yourself out of bed to exercise if your current habit is to sleep rather than exercise. So let's talk about habits more generally for a moment. Habits are defined as a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that's hard to give up.
So whether you want to start a good habit or stop a bad habit, again, good and bad in quotes here, only you are the judge of your own habits. But in either case, there's a habit you have right now, and your goal is to change that habit to something different. The current habit is settled, regular, a practice, and it's actually part of the definition of a habit that it's hard to give up.
So let's talk about why. There's been a lot of research done on habit cycles, and I really like Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit. In his book, he explained the components of a habit.
The first component is the circumstance you're in. It can be referred to as the cue or the trigger. Think about this as the time of day, the location, or the situation that you typically find yourself engaging in the habit you currently have and want to change.
So if the goal you have is morning exercise, your cue or trigger might be the alarm. If the habit is an evening drink, the trigger could be coming home at the end of the day. Or if the habit is an afternoon snack, it could be the time of day that's your trigger, when you find your energy falling after lunch.
Sometimes the trigger can be a situation, like you eat or drink after a stressful interaction. So think of this component of the habit as the time of day, the place, or the situation where you have the habit that you want to change. The second part of the habit is the urge or the craving, the desire to engage in the existing habit.
So if the habit you want to stop is having dessert after meals, then the trigger is the completion of the meal, and then you're going to have an urge for the dessert. Your habit, your current practice, is to have the dessert. And so when you come against the trigger, in this case the meal, then you're going to experience the urge for the dessert, even though you've told yourself what you want is to have dessert less or not at all.
In contrast, if your goal is to wake up and exercise, then the urge you're going to experience is to keep engaging in your existing practice or habit of sleeping in and not exercising. So just notice that the urge you experience is to keep doing what you've always done, rather than stopping or starting the new habit. My friend, this isn't something wrong with you.
This is a perfectly natural aspect of habits that were automatically triggered in certain circumstances to engage in habits that we've practiced over and over and over again. This science is really helpful to understand as you work towards changing your habits. The third component of the habit is the typical habitual action you take in response to the craving or urge.
So this might be the action of having the snack or the dessert or the glass of wine. It could also be the habit of not waking up to exercise or not meditating, not drinking water. This is basically the action you're taking that you want to change.
So we have the trigger, which leads to a craving, and then the action or the way you respond to or relieve that craving. Finally, and this last part of the habit is really important. When you engage in the habit, you experience a reward.
At a very basic level, the reward you feel is the immediate relief of the craving. So if your regular habit is pouring a glass of wine at 5pm, then at that time you experience the trigger, then a craving. And when you take the action of drinking the wine, you first eliminate the craving.
Have you ever experienced a craving and just sat with it for a bit? Like really just sat with it and tried to experience it without distracting yourself or using willpower? Just sitting with that craving can be uncomfortable. It's the feeling of desire that's unmet, and it's much less satisfying than the relief and then the pleasure or the dopamine hit of engaging in the existing habit, whether it be eating or drinking, scrolling on social media or shopping, maybe just relaxing rather than getting up to exercise. So part of the reason I'm sharing this research around habits is to show you what you're up against.
We so quickly go to the there's something wrong with me answer when we're trying to do something that seems like it should be easy to do, and yet we find it's not. But what if there's absolutely nothing wrong with you, but that you have simply practiced doing one thing for so long that it's uncomfortable to change? In fact, it's worth mentioning, and I know I've mentioned this before, that the habit cycle is an incredibly helpful thing from an evolutionary standpoint. Habits are a critical part of how we learn.
The dopamine or reward we experience for taking action reinforces the actions we take so that we're motivated to take them again. The more we take these actions, the more they become routine and the less brain power we need to take them. In fact, our brains are so powerful in internalizing the circumstances of our surroundings when we experience rewards that this whole process of learning is subconscious.
As a matter of fact, if we were trying to survive out in the wild and we found a stream of water which we need to survive, our brain would internalize the circumstances, the sounds, the smells, the foliage surrounding the water, so that we would actually find that it was easier to find water again in the future because our brains would be looking for those signs that water was nearby. It's fascinating how powerful our brains are in helping us learn how to survive. Habits also help us be more efficient because we don't have to relearn how to do something every time we do it.
You don't have to learn how to brush your teeth or tie your shoes, you just do it automatically. So bottom line, whatever habit you're currently doing that you want to change, you've simply trained your brain to desire the reward you get for engaging in your current habit. You've practiced this habit, so it's automatic.
That's it. Now the typical way we engage in changing habits is to use willpower. Think of this as a literal battle of wills.
You're pitting your desire to start a different habit with your well-practiced, subconscious, automatic habit and desire to continue doing what you've always done. I don't care how much you want to change. I don't care how strong your why.
At the end of the day, if you're using willpower alone, you're going to have to white-knuckle resisting the urges to continue your existing habit. These are just the facts. And what makes it even harder is that your current habit comes with a current reward.
Both the relief of responding to the urge and the dopamine you experience from engaging in the habit. It's a short-term win pitted against the long-term reward of creating a new habit that we think will make us feel better and experience fewer and no negative consequences in the future. But all we feel in the present moment is discomfort.
So when it comes to breaking habits, willpower will only get you so far. I also mentioned this concept last week when it came to body goals, that motivation is just not a reliable tool for change. Our moods, the time of day, the stresses we've encountered during the day, or if it's early in the morning, how well we slept, what time we went to bed.
All of these things impact our level of motivation. Motivation is also a limited resource. Every time you use it throughout the day, it's a little harder to use it the next time.
If you pass that plate of cookies, you might be able to use motivation the first time to resist your urge. But by the third or fourth time, your motivation's sapped. And eventually, you grab one of those cookies.
With habits that we want to change, we face the cognitive dissonance of wanting two things at one time. You want to start doing one thing and continue doing the thing that you've always done. And in truth, we're often more motivated to continue our current habit.
We actually oftentimes want the existing habit more than we want to switch to the new habit. At a basic level, we want the reward of doing the thing. It feels better in this moment to respond to the craving or desire.
But there's actually more going on here that reinforces this habit and makes it even harder to change. And this is where curiosity comes in. Why is this habit so hard to change? Notice how often we tend to blame ourselves and tell ourselves the old story about how there's something wrong with us that we can't change.
Notice how this shuts down curiosity. In fact, this is our brain answering the question, why do I do this? With a definitive, because there's something wrong with you. First of all, this isn't true.
And second of all, what's the upside in telling yourself this story? I often coach women who have been to therapy, and therapy is an incredibly beneficial tool for helping us process trauma and gain tools to process our emotions. But what also often happens is that in therapy, we explore the historical roots of our current belief systems, emotions and behaviors. And while this process can be therapeutic, if there are belief systems that you have that are creating subconscious and harmful consequences for you, the one downside of this is that we can start to believe that we are a certain way because of our past trauma, or because of how we were parented or because of traumatic events in our life.
These events and circumstances no doubt played a role in shaping who we are today. But the real question is, is it possible for us to create a new identity for ourselves now, the opportunity here is to create a new relationship with ourselves to be able to move forward to create change in our lives, rather than staying stuck in an identity defined by our past. When it comes to everything from relationships and opportunities for personal achievement, to things like daily habits and goals, who we are, who we think we are, plays a critical role in the way we perceive the opportunity for us to change and create more success in our lives.
This is again why curiosity is such a powerful tool. And throughout this goal series, I'm going to reiterate this again and again. Let's get curious.
When it comes to changing habits, let's take ourselves off the hook from our past failures and past experiences and acknowledge that all that's happening is that we've practiced our existing habit over and over. And it's uncomfortable to change this habit because we've trained ourselves to anticipate the short-term reward or dopamine hit from continuing our existing habit. So now if there's nothing wrong with us, one would think that all we have to do to change the habit is to experience a bit of discomfort in not responding to the craving, right? But it's easier said than done.
Let's even get curious about that. Why is it so hard to just stop doing this thing we don't want to be doing and start doing things that we feel uncomfortable to do? Seriously, we do things we don't want to do all the time. I have never in my life wanted to unload the dishwasher, but I do it every day, at least once.
I rarely want to cook dinner, but I do it, maybe not every day. We're actually very capable of doing things we don't want to do. But beyond the habit reward cycle that keeps us stuck in certain behavior patterns, there is an emotional benefit to your current habit.
Women have told me that snacking helps them when they're stressed, that certain foods bring them joy. We often tell ourselves that wine will help us relax or that cocktail makes us feel like we're celebrating. We watch hours of TV and scroll on social media to find happiness or to de-stress.
Staying snuggled in bed is relaxing and cozy. Even when it comes to habits like nagging our kids or procrastinating, there are reasons we do this. There are emotional benefits.
Nagging our kids might make us feel like we're more in control, that we're moving towards a solution. Procrastinating might either be because we're choosing fun over work or maybe avoiding the drudgery of the task. There are so many reasons we are motivated to take actions, and one of the key reasons is an emotion, something we're trying to create.
We want to feel better. We are mentally choosing in this moment the action that our brain perceives to be more comfortable, more pleasurable. But our brains aren't always telling us the truth.
Remember the mindset traps I've been exploring on this podcast. I've talked a lot about the motivational triad, how our subconscious minds are motivated to help us seek pleasure, avoid pain, and make things as easy and efficient as possible. Our brains on autopilot are going to default to pleasure and comfort.
So this tool of curiosity in really understanding why you're taking the action you're taking can help you take the subconscious to the conscious, to the supervised. Your amygdala or primitive brain may be motivated to stay comfortable, but your prefrontal cortex or your higher brain has the ability to supervise, to plan, and understand, to focus on what you really want. Using your higher brain, you can get curious.
What emotions are you trying to escape? What is that emotion that your brain thinks it's creating when it engages in that habit? What do you think about yourself and your ability to change? I said this last week when talking about body goals, and I'll say it again here. It's not about the action. It's not the habit that's the problem.
In fact, the habit is actually what your brain thinks is the solution. But if you've decided that this so-called solution isn't actually creating what you want in your life, now you get to ask yourself, what is it that I'm trying to solve here, and how can I understand that? Curiosity is the way to achieve any goal. The interesting thing about habits is that the how is very clear.
Just stop one thing or start another. You know exactly what it is you want to do, so the problem clearly isn't knowing the how. It's an understanding who you are right now that thinks she needs the current habit or isn't capable of the new habit.
You have an opportunity to understand who that version of yourself is and then become the woman who decides to change her habit and then keeps her commitments to herself, even if it's a little uncomfortable in the short term because you have to experience some cravings or desires to keep doing the old thing. My friend, achieving goals or changing habits is about creating a new relationship with yourself. It's about building trust and confidence in yourself and also understanding how to build feelings of self-love and happiness, rather than looking to external things for short-term pleasure or comfort.
Who do you need to be to achieve your goal, my friend? This is the work we do in MOM 2.0. This program takes you through a model step-by-step to understand your motivations, your desires, and who you need to become to achieve what you want in your life, from habits and health to relationships and purpose. Who do you want to be and what's stopping you from being that version of yourself right now?
Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program MOM 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
