Can we change?


CAN WE CHANGE?

Mario D’Couto

 
           “Can we change?” this is a question that I ask myself at times. There is no doubt that most aspects of our lives are governed by the choices we make and yet sometimes there is the struggle that we face from time to time where we wish we could do that particular thing we are supposed to do but for some reason don’t do it. From maintaining consistency in one’s exercise routine to keeping to a diet, from desiring to quit something that we know is perhaps not good for us to actually implementing it, there are numerous examples that we can cite. I, for one, don’t claim to have any sort of mastery but I can say that I’m definitely on the road in trying to understand myself and life in general at a deeper level, striving to become a better version of myself each day.


           Perhaps, it would be good to take a look at how the dynamics of human habits work. Habits is the brain’s way of saving effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often. This effort – saving instinct is a huge advantage. An efficient brain allows us to stop thinking constantly about basic behaviours such as walking or choosing what to eat, where we can devote that time and energy to something else that is more important.

            However, there is a flip side to it. Sometimes, when our actions become a part of a routine (eventually leading to a formation of a habit), we fail to become aware of other things that can happen. Take the fast food industry as an example. Imagine you are on your way back home and you are hungry, wouldn’t it make sense to stop by at a McDonald or a Burger King or any of your favourite fast food joint. Given the times we are in now, ordering one’s ‘favourite food’ can even be done from the comfort of one’s own home and with the offers that come up like a discount or a cashback offer, it only seems to add fuel to the fire. After all, what harm could be there to consume a dose of processed meat, salty fries and sugary soda or whatever ‘junk food’ that may be, occasionally. The truth, however, is habits emerge without our permission.

            Studies indicate that families usually don’t intend to eat fast food on a regular basis but what happens is that once a month slowly becomes once a week and then once a week becomes twice a week until it becomes a regular ‘family activity’. Every McDonald’s, for example, looks the same. The fast food franchise deliberately tries to standardize the store’s architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards – the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centres to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern; all the better for tightening the habit loop.

            The above example is just one of the many cases of how different companies and the media, manipulate the psychology and habits of people through various schemes and advertisements. Hence it’s important to take note of where you devote or spend most of your time and energy. This therefore brings us to another point: when a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. What this means is that it stops working hard and diverts our focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit – unless you find new routines – the patterns will unfold automatically.

            Habits never really disappear and it can be a bane in as much as it is a benefit. They are encoded into the structures of our brain. It is advantageous to the extent that we don’t have to learn our daily activities again and again. For instance, it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation or learning how to brush one’s teeth or tie one’s shoelace and so on. Yet, the problem is that the brain is neutral. It can’t tell the difference between good and bad habits. Hence if you have a bad habit lurking somewhere buried deep within, that will be a problem..

            The good thing is that for every problem, there is a solution. If eating right and exercising regularly is a mammoth task, one should strive to create new neurological routines that would overpower those bad habits that prevent us from eating right and exercising regularly. If we take control of the habit loop – we can force those bad tendencies into the background. By simply understanding and learning how habits work and the structure of the habit loop, we will be in a better position to control them. Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears. Research has proven that once someone creates a new pattern, it becomes as automatic as any other habit.

            There’s a story told about two young fish who were swimming when they came across an older fish swimming the other way who nodded his head saying, ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ They went pass by and eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’ How many of us are like those two fish swimming in the water without ever realizing or becoming aware of our own surroundings or what we do? Leonardo Da Vinci once lamented, “The average human looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance and talks without thinking.” The water can be seen as analogy of our habits. If we try and focus to become more aware of the unthinking choices and invisible decisions that surround us every day, they will become visible again.

            The way we habitually think of our surroundings and ourselves create the worlds that each of us inhabit. If you believe you can change – if you make it a habit – the change becomes real. This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose to be. Once that choice occurs – and becomes automatic – it’s not only real, it starts to seem inevitable.

            The tricky thing about habits is that they are so diverse that we cannot put them into ‘pigeonholes’. But yet, despite the diversity, there is a common thread that runs through them which we can draw out and with time and effort, it can be reshaped. The framework is as follows,

Ø  Identify the routine
Ø  Experiment with rewards
Ø  Isolate the cue
Ø  Have a plan

            This can be further divided into another 5 steps,

Ø  Location (Where are you?)
Ø  Time (What time is it?)
Ø  Emotional state (What’s your emotional state?)
Ø  Other people (Who else is around?)
Ø  Immediately preceding action (What actions preceded the urge?)

            This can be tough but there are people who have been able to turn their lives around. One particular example I would like to highlight is the life of William James, who became famous for helping to found psychology as a formal discipline, for establishing the school of functionalism in psychology and for greatly advancing the movement of pragmatism in philosophy. During the initial phase of his life, he felt like as though he was going nowhere and that he was not good at anything. He almost came to a point of committing suicide. It was at that point that he decided that before he did anything rash, he would conduct a yearlong experiment. He would spend 12 months believing that he had control over himself and his destiny, that he could become better, that he had the free will to change. There was no proof that it was true. But he would free himself to believe all evidence to the contrary, that change was possible. He once wrote in his diary regarding his ability to change, “I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I will assume for the present – until next year – that is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be is to believe in free will.”

            Over the next year, he practiced every day. In his diary, he wrote as if his control over himself and his choices were never in question. He got married. He started teaching at Harvard. He began spending time with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who would go onto become a Supreme Court Justice and Charles Sanders Peirce, a pioneer in the study of semiotics, in a discussion group they called the Metaphysical club. Later, he would famously write that the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change and that one of the most important methods for creating that belief was habits. Habits was what allows us to do a thing with difficulty the first time but soon do it more and more easily and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi – mechanically or with hardly any consciousness at all. Once we choose who we want to be, we can grow the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded tends to go back into the same identical fold when it was creased or folded.

            As tough it may seem, the underlying truth is that change is possible. You are not restricted or condemned by your circumstances. By working on your habits, with time, effort and persistence, you can change and that’s liberating.

[If you would like to know more about how to strategize or implement the changes you want to see in a more practical way, check out my other two other blogposts/articles,

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