Resolution Prep Part 2: Shaping Our Environment

by | Dec 13, 2019 | Articles, Habits, Practices

In Part One of our New Years Resolution prep, we focused on how our internal mindset and personal identity can affect change. This week we start down the road of the external. The most important external factor is our immediate environment. How we control and interact with the things readily accessible to us can have drastic effects on breaking bad habits and establishing new ones.

The Self-Discipline Fallacy

Every night before bed, I put a glass of water and my journal on my bedside table, I make a protein shake and put it on the dresser, clean off the yoga matt directly next to my bed, and finally, I lay out all of my gym clothes.

The next morning I wake up, drink the water, write in my journal, do some light stretching, get some protein in me, put on my clothes, and I’m out the door for the gym in 15 minutes, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. All of these steps have been put in place the night before to make sure that the untrustworthy and sleepy future Owen has the most streamlined path to a perfect morning.

Before I started to put these things into place, I would wake up and stumble my way through the morning, finally trodding my way to the gym 40 or 50 minutes later, if at all, my mind still restless and confused. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t convince myself to get up and get started.

It took me years of horrific, sluggish mornings to realize something that no one wants to hear.

Willpower is overrated.

You see, I believed, like most people, that the best solution to becoming a better person was to work harder. I felt, through the power of psychological discipline, I could whip myself into shape. But as any food addict or social media fiend can tell you, it’s just not that easy.

The problem is that we often think of self-discipline as an overarching conceptual engine. An internal mantra, magically generating motivation and consistency. In practice, however, willpower better serves a resolution in motion. Discipline can help to fuel the fire but is almost useless without a decent starter and the right conditions.

It turned out that creating a smooth and streamlined environment, like a path of crumbs, gave morning me a no-brainer path to follow to a successful start.

The truth is that we don’t need to rely so much on self-discipline. The best way to ensure success is to make positive outcomes convenient simple while making adverse decisions near impossible. We can’t guarantee what or how our future selves will react or feel when it comes time to make an important step, but we can guide them through carefully creating guidelines around us. By shaping our environment through strategic tension and relief, we can guide our future selves to better and healthier decisions.

Tension

By applying positive tension in the way of bad habits, we can generate an environment where making bad decisions is almost impossible. Although tough at first, the goal is to change the way we relate to our bad habits and the things that trigger them.

The process of generating tension begins with observation. Take a week to think and meditate on what triggers and sustains the bad habits you are looking to overcome. Then, believe about ways you can circumvent or put up roadblocks restricting access to those triggers or patterns.

If driving by the pizza joint on the way home triggers you to buy a slice, try driving another route home.

If tempted by junk food around the house, throw it out, make it impossible to get without going to the store.

If you spend too much time on social media, interrupting dinner dates and family outings, put a content blocker on your phone, and give your friend or partner the password.

By strategically creating tension in channels of negative patterns, we can slowly start to break our relationship with them.

These practices may sound life self-flagellation, but that’s not the idea. The idea here is to start to change the way we think about our addictions and bad habits. By applying tension in the right areas, we begin to change our mindset. These practices don’t need to last forever, and they aren’t cure-alls either. However, when in place for long enough, we break the hold that our patterns have over us, we begin to see the potential of a life without them. In this way, we take the pressure off of self-discipline as a central force. Instead, our willpower can begin to passively maintain the positive mindset and lifestyle we develop when the conditions are in our favor.

Relief

Now that we understand the potential for tension as a tool, we can flip it on its head. By relieving the areas of negative tension, we can facilitate the conditions for positive habit development.

Let’s return to the example of my morning practices. One of the habits I knew I wanted to establish was stretching first thing in the morning. It seems simple enough. What I found, however, was that the idea of getting out the yoga matt, making space, and getting around to stretching first thing in the morning felt like the most daunting task from the comfort of my bed. It was a roadblock keeping me from a positive habit.

So I flipped the tension on its head to try and relieve it. Now my yoga matt stays rolled out next to my bed at all times. I can roll out of my bed directly onto the matt. A little less daunting and a little easier to accomplish.

Though simple in practice, applying this relief can make seemingly tricky tasks reasonably simple. The more we can automate the paths to positive habits, the better chance we have of doing them with consistency.

If you want to journal every day, keep your journal next to your phone charger or your alarm clock, reminding you to write every night or morning.

If you want to become a better photographer, keep your camera on you at all times. Chances are you’ll miss some great shots if you only take it out with you when you think you need it.

The more readily available and easily accessible good habits are, the more inclined we will be to do them complete them but also to feel excited about them.

Moving Forward

Using our tools of tension and relief, we can shape our environment to create perfect conditions for success and consistency. Informed by our intrinsic identity, these tools begin to form our external world and motivations in our favor.

Resolution Prep Part 1: Intrinsic Purpose and Identity

by | Dec 6, 2019 | Articles, Habits, Practices

With the sight of New Years on the horizon, I am devoting the coming month of articles to the things I have learned and practiced in the art of resolutions, habits, and personal challenges. Hopefully, some of what I discuss in the coming weeks can help us all prepare to make and maintain the changes we want to see in our lives and practices.

Perhaps the most crucial aspect of resolutions is how we identify and find the purpose of the goals and systems we are looking to develop.

All the Wrong Reasons

One of the most consistent sources of insecurity over the years has been my weight. Since early elementary school, I was always heftier than most. My weight was a constant source of ridicule from friends.

By the time I was in high school, what I now understand as body dysmorphia, was gasoline fueling the psychological destruction of my friend’s “jokes.” Junior year I decided I had enough. I was tired of the treatment and tired of how I looked. I would do anything to lose weight. In a short and starved seven months, I dropped 70 pounds, all for the wrong reasons. Praised replaced the ridicule, a small victory. My dysmorphic monster-in-the-mirror, however, could not be fooled.

What I didn’t understand was that this harsh and unhealthy response wasn’t a sustainable source of motivation. Without a real sense of purpose behind my decision, external motivation could only sustain for so long. Since that first bout of weight loss, I yoyoed back and forth for years. I was sure that if I could get the numbers down, I could overcome my dysmorphia. But the goal post kept moving, and the numbers were never good enough. Soon depression and lack of motivation put the weight back on. And around we go.

This past summer, I decided to dig a bit deeper. I figured I was focusing too much on the wrong ideas. What was it that I wanted to see and feel about my body that made me want to lose weight?

I discovered that I wanted to see and experience the qualities and feelings of someone who is physically fit, not merely obtain the body composition of someone fit. I needed to expand my vision to see that the weight was just a superficial element of the whole identity that I was looking to project.

So I re-aligned my practices to go in search of that feeling. I made fitness a part of my identity. Proclaiming this new identity promoted the importance of consistency and excitement over a number on a scale. The only way to validate the feeling and prove my new character, to myself and others, is to put in the work. Developing this more profound sense of identity gave my goals a real purpose.

Since then, it has been eight months of consistent and endless motivation. My health and fitness are no longer objective qualifications but personal and purposeful measures. I feel better and healthier than ever. Even more important, I get to prove that to myself every day.

Discovering and Maintaining Intrinsic Identity

We rarely, if ever, want the superficial or material outcome, even if we may think we do. What we are truly searching for is the feeling, ideology, status, or lifestyle that comes with owning that object or achieving that goal. For example, when someone says they want to be “rich,” they often seek a financial threshold, when in reality, what they long for is the lifestyle and status of those who are “rich.” Attaining, the former does not constitute the latter.

The point here is not to invalidate or shame any superficial goals. The first step in finding intrinsic motivation is to dig deeper into that desire and figure out what the deeper, ideological need is. Why is this goal important to you? Once we have a better understanding, we can begin to change our vocabulary and how we visualize our goals.

“I want to read a book a week” becomes “I want to be a reader.”

“I want to lose 30 pounds” becomes “I want to be athletic.”

Qualitative goals, while specific, can only ever be transient. Identities and feelings, on the other hand, require sustenance. Our “book a week” is a step. Defining those steps can be necessary along the way, but that step has to lead to something bigger, a broader sense of purpose of identity. Without this understanding, the steps will feel unfounded and arbitrary.

The second step is to proclaim our new identity to the rest of the world. Tying our practice to our identity, and being open about that, guarantees self-fulfilling consistency and devotion. We’ve hinged our accountability on how we define ourselves. Is there anyone who prides themself on being an athlete that isn’t actively athletic? We either are, or we aren’t. Our actions support and verify our identity.

Once we have established our identity in ourselves and our actions, we have taken a significant step towards long term change. Consistently reminding ourselves of our purpose will maintain our resolve and efforts for as long as we choose to define ourselves by it.

Moving Forward

As we prepare for our looming resolutions, let’s spend some time thinking about what it means to us and who we are. Establishing our purpose as it relates to our identity will prove to be an essential source of motivation. It is the foundation on which we will develop our practice, encourage consistency, and inform the methods that we use to maintain our resolution for the long term.