WHY BAD HABITS ARE SO HARD TO BREAK — A MINDSET SHIFT FOR MOMS RAISING TEENS | EP. 8
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number eight.
Hello, friends. It's the first day of the boys' spring break, and next week we're taking them on vacation to the British Virgin Islands. The boys have never been, and my husband and I are very open about the fact that we're using the trip as a bit of bribery.
We think that the more fabulous trips we take them on while they're still living with us, that it will be more likely that they'll come home to visit us often once they're in college. I'll let you know how it goes. I am definitely looking forward to it, though.
Maybe it's because I'm thinking about being on vacation for two weeks and indulging in all of the good things that vacation brings, but I thought it would be the perfect time to talk about habits. So, if you've listened to my podcast, you know I talk a lot about goals and capturing dreams in our lives as we begin to grapple with the empty nest. I find that this message is so important for us as mothers with young children.
The what's next question is inevitable, whether we've been staying at home with our kids full time or not. The future seems equal parts beautiful opportunity and gaping black hole. Of course, it all depends on your perspective and for me that can change from day to day.
So, when we're working towards goals, you often hear that it's valuable to develop good habits. I recently read James Clear's Atomic Habits. The book appeals to my innate desire to give myself credit for the small things I do regularly, the checking off the to-do list.
One of the things I loved most about the message in Atomic Habits is that small, consistent changes can lead to huge results. It's powerful to realize that by setting aside only 10 minutes a day to do something for yourself, to take action related to whatever goal you have, only 10 minutes a day would add up to 60 hours of effort over the course of a year. 60 hours.
Think about what you could accomplish in 60 hours. Even if you only managed to set aside 10 minutes every other day, you would have invested 30 hours into your dream in a year. Finding time is such a huge obstacle in taking action towards our goals and the habit of dedicating even small stretches of time to your dreams can have life-transforming benefits.
Although we could all probably agree we could find 10 minutes a day to invest in ourselves or our goals, we also often discount this investment of time because it just feels too short to accomplish much of anything. Whether it's working out or starting to write a book, we realize we're not going to see a huge transformation in just 10 minutes. We're not even likely to see a transformation after a few days or weeks of dedicating 10 minutes.
It's easy to write this time off as not important and easy to skip. In fact, we'll often think I'll just make up for it on the weekend with a longer workout or whatever it is you need to do, except that the longer workout never gets done. Or if you do manage to fit in a marathon workout session on the weekend, it feels like such a punishment that you don't want to have to do it again.
It actually ends up reinforcing your desire to just not set aside this time. I've mentioned before that we are wired to seek pleasure and accomplishment. Our brains release dopamine when we accomplish things.
It's our body's way of encouraging us to do more of what keeps us thriving. Eating, drinking, resting, having sex. This hormone plays a critical role in our survival.
In the 1950s, a pair of neuroscientists, Olds and Miller, ran an experiment on rats. They actually blocked the rat's ability to produce dopamine. After a week without dopamine, the rats literally died.
They stopped drinking and eating and eventually died of thirst. So it would seem dopamine plays a pretty important role. It literally creates the motivation for us to keep ourselves alive.
It's actually weird to think about it. We're so culturally conditioned to eat regular meals, but could it actually be true that the only reason we're doing this is because of a hormone? Studies show that people diagnosed with depression have low levels of dopamine and very often those suffering from depression lack the energy to tackle even the basic tasks of life. Crazy to think about it.
If our bodies stopped producing dopamine, would we, just like the rats in the experiment, end up losing our will to do anything all because of our hormones? So dopamine is a pleasure hormone. When it's released in our bodies, it makes us feel good and motivates us to do those things that make us feel good again and again. My dog is literally lying next to me snoring, so if you hear that, that's what that is.
But even just the anticipation of particular things that bring us pleasure can cause a release of dopamine in our bodies. In fact, scientists are starting to call dopamine the anticipation molecule because of findings that dopamine is actually released in large quantities, both when we think about a pleasurable experience and when there's a high probability that we'll actually be able to have that experience in the near future. So think about this.
You decide to go get ice cream and as you're driving to the ice cream store, your mouth starts to water in anticipation. You haven't even tasted the ice cream yet, but you begin to experience pleasure as you contemplate biting into the ice cream cone. The impact of dopamine has its pros and cons.
Obviously, a pro is it clearly plays a role in motivating us to stay alive. That's a good thing. It also plays a role in motivating us to achieve goals beyond staying alive, like when we make new friends, spend time with the people we love, or accomplish big or small goals.
The dopamine acts like a physical reward when we engage in activities that bring us pleasure. This includes achievement, everything from checking small things off our to-do list to the periodic milestones we reach along the path of working towards any goal. The pleasure of reaching these milestones, even the anticipation of achieving these milestones, is rewarded in our bodies with dopamine.
But the impact of dopamine also has a downside and it has to do with the way we've innovated our ability to access things that give us pleasure. Think about it. When we were cavewomen, the most sugar we had access to was a berry.
There was no bread. I mean, can you imagine a world without bread? Only naturally growing fruits and vegetables, tons of protein. And our bodies were designed to give us a little hit of dopamine when we ate to encourage us to eat again in the future so we would stay alive.
Today, we don't just have berries. We have sugar, candy, ice cream, wine, bread, brownies, cookies, cheese, drugs, you name it. And this is just the pleasure we ingest.
We also have heightened and diversified the ways we can experience a wide range of things that give us pleasure, from sex and porn to scrolling social media, binge-watching Netflix, online shopping, gambling, the list goes on. We can access pleasure with the flip of a switch, the press of a button, or simply walking into our kitchen. We don't even have to hunt or forage for food.
Everything we want, all of the pleasure we could ever desire, is literally at our fingertips. You would think that this would make us happier as a society, but has it? When we think about our quote-unquote bad habits, we typically think about activities that bring us pleasure, but that begin to make us worry that we're doing too much of them or focusing on them to the exclusion of other things. For each of us, it might look different.
Some of us might worry that we eat too much of the foods we love, we could drink too much alcohol, get lost in social media or TV shows, we might overspend. Unfortunately, dopamine plays a role in reinforcing our motivation to seek out these guilty pleasures too. Now, I want to be clear, I'm not judging whether or how much you do any of these things.
You do you. There are no bad foods. There is nothing wrong with drinking alcohol.
By all means, have sex in any way you want to experience sex. There's incredibly funny content on social media and Netflix. Experiencing these things is absolutely not bad in and of itself.
We only come to see these activities as bad when we start to perceive for ourselves that there's a negative consequence for us. I've mentioned before that one of the reasons I found coaching was because I wanted to not want to drink. I didn't consider myself an alcoholic, but I did have the habit of pouring myself a glass of wine every night at the end of the day.
I also had the habit of pouring the second glass and sometimes the third glass. As I got older, this habit, which really started in my 20s, was well ingrained. But as I got older, this daily habit stopped feeling as fun in the morning, especially when I had young children to care for.
Even two glasses would leave me with a headache for most of the rest of the day. Particularly on the weekdays, I would tell myself the next morning that I would not, under any circumstances, have a glass of wine that night. But somehow I would come home and pour myself a glass.
My evening wine routine felt so automatic, it was almost like I didn't have a chance to even think about not doing it when I got home. Unfortunately, the next morning I would feel awful waking up and completely filled with shame as I drove to work in the morning. I was disappointed in myself.
I felt out of control. Because I felt physically awful, I would eat unhealthy food during the day to make myself feel better. Look, from the outside, I appeared to be high-functioning.
I don't think anyone would have thought I was struggling so much with this habit. But I was. I didn't consider AA.
I wasn't an alcoholic. I wouldn't get drunk every night. I just couldn't not drink.
So my daily wine habit had negative consequences. The next day, I felt shame. I was disappointed and felt out of control.
I had headaches. I ate more than I needed to. I perceived that I probably was a bit overweight due to the excess calories.
I was wasting time beating myself up about it. So interestingly, my goal, the immediate reward I thought I was getting from the wine, was to be relaxed and happy. But in the long run, I was feeling shame, disappointment, and physically ill.
Not particularly relaxed or happy. If you have a habit that you'd love to break, what are the consequences of your habit? And why do you label whatever habit you have as bad? If you have a habit of snacking or eating sweet, is your negative not being able to lose weight or slowly gaining weight? If your habit is scrolling on social media, are you finding you're not getting done other things you think you should be doing that would be more productive? Or finding that although you love engaging with content on social media, you also experience feelings of jealousy and insecurity as a result? Are you in debt because of spending? Again, none of this is to judge the activity. But we ourselves label our habits as bad because they begin to create a negative result for us.
And then because we find it hard to break the habit, our own judgment of ourselves and our weakness when it comes to our habits becomes yet another layer of negative, another negative consequence. In my initial search to find my way out of my daily habit to have a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, I read Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit. This was a number of years ago.
I was fascinated to learn about the habit cycle. Duhigg explained that there are four components of a habit. The first is a cue or a trigger.
This is the circumstance or environment that typically creates the situation where you engage in the habit. So in my case, coming home from work was a trigger. But I had other triggers.
It was Friday, Saturday, lunches or dinners with friends, holidays, vacations. It probably would be easier for me to list the circumstances that weren't triggers. For some reason, Sunday night has never been a trigger for me.
Triggers could also involve for me negative or stressful interactions with people or being alone, bored, having a deadline or stressful event. If you have a particular habit that you've been wanting to break, what is the circumstance that triggers you? And that brings us to the second component of a habit. First is the trigger, then comes a craving for a change in circumstances.
Our brain interprets the circumstances or the trigger and imagines a response that will make us feel a certain way. So I would come home, the trigger, and I'd have a craving for a glass of wine. I would experience desire for wine because I imagined it would make me feel relaxed and happy.
The change in circumstances that I desired was a change from the stress of the workday to the relaxation of being home. Okay, so then comes the third part of a habit cycle, responding to the craving. Of course, in this example, I would come home, crave the wine, and I would drink the wine.
Trigger, craving, response. And the last component of the habit cycle is to experience the reward. Most immediately, that was the relief of my desire for the wine, the response to my craving.
So the four parts of the habit are trigger, craving, response, and reward. Our bodies release dopamine both as part of the craving or anticipation of taking the action and as part of the reward of actually doing the thing. So let me think back to the very first time I ever had a glass of wine after work.
I was working with a group of 20 somethings in investment banking, and we regularly went out to drink after work. We didn't do it every day, but in the beginning, I rarely drank by myself at home. But when we went out, it was really fun.
Too much fun, actually. I came to associate fun and relaxation after work with having a drink. And I'm sure every time I drank, my body reinforced this feeling even further with a hit of dopamine.
It's this association between the reward, happiness, fun, dopamine, and the trigger, in this case, the end of the workday, that begins to build a habit without us even knowing it's happening. Eventually, I began to want that feeling even when I wasn't going out after work with friends. End of the day, time to relax, time to have fun, time for my reward.
If it was a good day I wanted to celebrate, if it was a bad day I wanted to feel better. And the triggers began to expand. Stressful day at work, drink.
Start of the weekend, drink. This habit cycle is actually a really beneficial thing for us as humans, believe it or not. It helps us be more efficient in the way we live our lives.
A study done by Duke University found that 40% of what we do each day is habitual. The habit cycle, cue, craving, action, reward, is a facet of how we learn. Because the craving involves a desire for a change of state, depending on the circumstances, we're motivated to take action.
The dopamine or reward we experience for taking the 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 to do them. Think about driving your car to a place you go regularly.
Every time you go, you don't have to think about where you're going. In fact, I can't tell you how many times I've been halfway to my kid's school and I don't even remember how I got there. My brain was lost in thought on some other topic while also taking exactly the right turns to get where I needed to go.
Our brain's ability to turn a series of actions into an automatic routine allows our brain to save energy and perform common tasks efficiently. We don't have to learn how to do those tasks every single time we do them. We literally don't have to think about doing them anymore at all.
We don't have to relearn how to drive a car or how to get to our children's school. We've learned and now it's routine. Our brain energy can be used on other things.
The craving for a change in state is key to why we form habits. We develop a craving for the reward. So whether that reward is getting our kids to school or relaxing at the end of the workday, because we desire the reward, our brains begin to form associations about the circumstances and actions we have to take to achieve the reward.
And remember, dopamine reinforces both the craving and the reward. So even anticipating the reward makes us feel a bit of pleasure. I remember long winter breaks.
Oh my gosh, how much I look forward to driving my kids back to school at the end of the break. So we anticipate the reward and therefore we desire some action. And those actions become habits, good or bad.
There are those that service and those that don't. I want to take a second to point something out. This is how our bodies were designed.
The fact that we have habits, it's how we have evolved. If we didn't have habits, we would be sitting around learning how to get out of bed in the morning or figuring out how to eat every day. Our habits help us survive and evolve.
They're a beautiful, unbelievable facet of our lives as human beings. So let me just point out that there's absolutely nothing wrong with any of us that we have habits. Whether you label them good or bad, your habits are a part of who you are as a human.
And if we didn't have them, we would be a mess. This is such an important point because I know we all spend a lot of time judging ourselves for our habits. Whether it's snacking after dinner, eating dessert, not waking up to work out, having too many glasses of wine, procrastinating, poring over social media.
Whatever it is, the habit that you have that you would like to break, there's nothing wrong with you that you have it. You've simply trained your brain to desire the reward you get for doing this thing, your habit. That's it.
You've trained your brain to crave the reward. So much so that you probably don't even think about it anymore. You just find yourself doing the thing.
Even if you told yourself you wouldn't today or if your intention was to do less of it. So there are tons of books about breaking habits. As I mentioned, one of the reasons I was drawn to Charles Duguid's book is that I hoped it would help me learn how to stop wanting to drink.
It felt like a bit of a relief that the only reason I was drinking, even when I didn't want to drink, or at least I didn't want to want to drink, was because I had formed the habit. So one of the things that experts on habits recommend is that you substitute the routine or the habit with some other action that creates the same reward for you. In other words, you should redirect the habit rather than resist it.
So if your habit is to eat a bag of chips after work and this creates pleasure for you, then the advice would suggest you should go do something else that creates pleasure. Read a book or get a massage. Some people also suggest tricking your brain to think it's getting pleasure from food by replacing a high calorie food with a low calorie snack.
With my habit, having a glass of wine, one of the rewards I wanted was to relax. So I originally thought, great, there are tons of things I could do to relax when I get home. I could do yoga, go for a walk, meditate, read, take a nap.
So I tried this technique a lot. But part of the initial problem for me was that switching to this new less negative routine required creating a new habit. But my habit cycle with wine was well forged.
I still had to come home. I still had the craving, the desire. And what I wanted was a glass of wine.
What I was used to getting was a glass of wine. And nine times out of 10, I would have the glass of wine. Interrupting that neural pathway to go meditate took energy I didn't have at the end of the day.
I would have to actively remind myself to do the other thing, meditate or go do yoga. Sometimes I would do those things and still come home to the craving and habit. I would be home still dripping with sweat from a hot yoga practice.
And I would be pouring myself a glass of wine. Creating the new habit takes practice. And I wasn't able to easily put in the work.
And look, I wasn't motivated to put in the work either. That meditation practice, the yoga class, the dopamine hit I got from those things didn't compare to the hit I got from the first glass of wine. Not even close.
On the good days, I would feel great doing yoga or sitting and doing meditation. And there would be some days when it was easy not to have the glass of wine. But you know what? Even on those days when I did the yoga, those days that I had actually gone and found relaxation, my reward, through some other activity other than drinking, even on those days, I still had the craving for wine.
And honestly, the only way I knew how to deal with the craving was with willpower. And willpower is not consistent. And for me, willpower is almost non-existent at the end of the workday.
The habit would still win at least 50 to 75% of the time. So I tried redirecting my daily wine habit to other activities that were more healthy. Sometimes I was successful, but other times I was back to resisting it, resisting the strong pull of the craving.
And this is what happens when you resist something. Think about pushing a ball filled with air underwater. The minute you stop pushing it under, it comes exploding up above the surface.
And this is often what happens with willpower. You can only resist the craving with willpower for so long. And then the craving comes back with a vengeance.
And guess what happens when you finally give in? No matter how long it's been since you gave in, you were only reinforcing the habit even more because you're intensifying the craving by resisting it. Honestly, when you think about it all this way, it would seem like you have to be a superhero to kick your habits. But really, this is exactly why it's hard.
If I've done nothing else, I hope I've illustrated for you why it's so hard for all of us to break the habit cycle for those activities that are causing a negative result for us. I want to assure you, I am not a superhero, but I have stopped drinking every night. I don't abstain from alcohol.
I drink when I want to drink, but I don't feel out of control about my drinking anymore. Not at all. Sometimes I drink on the weekends.
Sometimes I don't. I rarely drink during the week, but sometimes I do. Drinking is no longer a problem for me, nor is it a habit.
I don't have to think about it anymore when I come home from work. So what's changed? I mentioned this is one of the reasons I found coaching. What I learned about myself that changed everything in a very short period of time was that drinking solved a problem for me.
And there was nothing wrong with me because this was the case. This last point is important to reiterate because we all tend to feel such shame and disappointment in ourselves about our habits. When we're not able to quit or stick to the promises we make to ourselves to not do the thing, we begin to think there is definitely something wrong with us, something incomplete or unworthy in us.
So I first started to really believe that my habit was simply a product of my body's perfect chemistry, an evolutionary necessity that has kept the human species thriving and innovating throughout centuries. The very thing that has kept me motivated throughout my entire life was also the thing that was making me feel stuck. So once I understood that I was not broken, I was open to solutions.
But redirecting my routine, just doing something else when I felt the craving for a glass of wine wasn't helping me break the habit. Experts also suggest changing your environment as another way to break the habit, but not coming home from work was really not an option. Granted, I didn't need to stock my wine fridge, but I was going to have to learn how to be around wine in this world without drinking it.
Changing my environment just felt like another way of resisting the craving. The solution that finally worked for me was understanding that wine was solving a problem for me. At the most basic level, drinking wine was solving my craving.
Because look, when you don't drink the wine, you're left with this uncomfortable, unmet desire. But once you take the drink, problem solved. But at another level, drinking wine was solving other problems for me.
And this is connected to the rewards I was getting in the short term, or that I thought I was getting. Sure, I got a hit of dopamine, but honestly, that effect wears off pretty quickly. The first glass of wine, the first bite of cake, those first few bites of chips, those can seem heavenly when you've been craving them.
But do you even notice the taste of the second glass or the second bite of cake? The third, the marginal return of each additional brownie or glass of wine is pretty small. No, for me, the reward I thought I was getting was the relaxation. I would tell myself I deserved it after a long day.
I deserved the reward, deserved to relax. I didn't realize how closely my brain associated that desire for relaxation with the glass of wine. Like if you took away the glass of wine, I couldn't relax.
And that's the sticky part of it, because if I thought I needed wine to relax but didn't drink, I would be left with this uncomfortable craving, and I wouldn't feel relaxed at all. It was almost like a punishment. I come home from the work at the end of the day, I deserve to relax, and now I don't get to relax.
So here's what I learned about myself. Before my craving came a thought, wine will make me relax. I deserve it.
And I believed it was true a hundred percent. I would think the thought and I would crave the wine. It seems so simple, but questioning this thought was everything.
Is it really true that wine makes me relax? My unquestioned belief was, hell yes. But when I began to unpack why I believed so strongly that it was true, I began to see cracks in the facade. Yes, I enjoyed the rush of anticipation, the dopamine as I thought about the glass of wine on the way home.
I enjoyed the first sip or two, but then I would actually feel numb, disconnected. When the initial high of the first glass wore off, I would want a second and a third, but each glass produced less and less of a hit of dopamine. I wasn't relaxed.
I was numb. Sometimes this would be preferable to whatever bad feeling I had at the end of the day, stress or frustration, but ultimately, I don't know that the prevailing result of my drinking was ever relaxation. In fact, the next morning, I would feel anything but relaxed.
So what are the benefits for you of your bad habit? How do you think it helps you in your life? What problems does it solve? What feeling do you think it helps you create? Or what feelings does it allow you to avoid? For me, because there were so many different situations where I looked to wine to solve a problem for me, discovering all of the ways that this bad habit helped me, benefited me, took a bit of time and exploration with my coach. But once I understood and questioned all of my beliefs about how wine benefited me, I was able to let go of them one by one, to create new beliefs about wine and its role in my life. And without my beliefs about the benefits of my habit, I was left with just craving, an uncomfortable sensation I felt when I didn't drink wine, but I was in a situation that was typically a trigger, like coming home.
And you know what is fascinating? The craving would always go away pretty quickly once I really stopped resisting it. But this didn't have anything to do with willpower. And so I leave you with this.
Our habits are powerful. They have the ability to empower us to move mountains, but they also can keep us hopelessly stuck. Sometimes conquering the habits that create these negative consequences is the first step in moving the mountain.
It has been for me. Until next time, friends. Thanks for listening to The Small Jar Podcast.
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