A number of my posts in coming weeks will make mention of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. I was fortunate enough to hear him speak recently in Middlebury, Vermont, and since then I’ve been listening to some of his recorded public talks, which are freely available along with a lot more interesting material at dalailama.com. Thinking about some of the things the Dalai Lama has said, I found myself faced with a question about my own life: I know a lot about how to act in my own best interests, yet some of the time I act as though I only understood short-term pleasures and not long-term happiness. Why is that?

Based on bits gleaned from psychology, neurology, and meditative practice, I came up with three things I need in order to ensure I act in the best way possible–to encourage my own success while simultaneously letting go of stress, overcoming fear, enjoying what I’m doing, and staying in touch with my highest goals and aspirations. It’s a tall order, and the three things aren’t easy. On the bright side, though, they are simple.

1. Attention
A good habit is a treasure, because it takes no special effort to follow. When I show up to Taekwondo several times a week and get a good, long workout, it’s not because I’m thinking about or planning exercise: it’s because I’m used to going to Taekwondo. In the same way, bad habits are serious trouble. In order to break a bad habit, or even to overcome it on a one-time basis, we usually need to be able to direct attention to what we’re thinking, feeling, and doing. We could also talk about attention as having to do with self-awareness or mindfulness.

For example, I might be tempted to sleep in some morning and risk being late for an appointment. It’s difficult to battle this intention if I’m just thinking about how it would feel to stay in bed versus how it would feel to get up, and especially if I have a habit of sleeping past my alarm. However, if I consciously think about things like

• “If I get up now, I can be on time–and if I don’t, I risk being late”
• “Staying in bed is pleasurable, but I like showing up on time to things too”
• “I’ll have to get up sooner or later, and it probably won’t be any easier in 15 minutes than it is now”

… and other things in the same vein, then I’m able to make a decision rather than just succumbing to my gut feelings.

2. Calmness
Buddhist teaching warns about the danger of attachment, of strong emotion. Speaking honestly, I’m not entirely sure how this applies to strong positive emotions like love or delight, though I could make some guesses. What I am sure of is that getting wrapped up in my own emotions and doing nothing about it leaves me in a position where it’s hard to change or do the things that are best for me. Being able to step back from our emotions and out of a frame of mind dominated by thoughts like “I really, really want that” or “I’m afraid!” or “I feel embarrassed” puts us in a place of calmness from which we can think about our long-term interest and our well-being–not to mention other people’s long-term interest and well being. Not having that calmness keeps us confused and short-sighted, bogged down in an obscuring cloud of emotional debris.

This site offers a wide range of tools for working with emotions, even very strong ones, including idea repair, understanding mental schemas, and much else. If I want calmness, there’s usually some way for me to achieve it.

3. Understanding
I started out thinking of this item as “knowledge,” but I realized that it includes not just understanding how my mind works, having good organizational strategies, and knowing how to keep myself healthy, but also ideas of what’s truly important, what leads to real happiness, what the value of a good relationship is, and what kinds of goals are worth pursuing. Having attention and calmness is not nearly as useful when I don’t have the understanding to use that attention and calmness by making and acting on good decisions.

That’s it: attention, calmness, and understanding. If I can remember to look for those three things, my theory goes, I’ll be on top of the world. I’ll report back and let you know how it’s been working for me. I’d be very interested if you care to do the same, whether in comments or privately through the contact form.

Photo by Hani Amir

I’m big on using writing as a tool for mindfulness and self-understanding: I do a lot of sitting down to write out what my thoughts and experiences have been on certain problem topics (whatever I’m working on in my life at that point in time) and using tools I’ve acquired, like idea repair and identifying mental schemas to figure out what’s going right, what’s going wrong, and what I can do to improve things. Yesterday, in the middle of this process, I suddenly became distracted.

And now for something completely different …
I was writing about a situation that had been frustrating me and had gotten to the point of saying “OK, I don’t know what’s going on there, but it sure is frustrating.” Sometimes I stop at that point if I don’t have any further insights. In this case, I hadn’t really thought the thing through very well, so I didn’t know whether or not I had further insights. Before I could figure that out, I found myself thinking about some entertaining distractions on the Internet, a new little project I could start, and wanting to check my e-mail. Since I was fortunately already trying to pay attention to my thoughts, I pulled myself up short. What was going on with me? I was doing meaningful self-examination, and then suddenly I want to go see what’s on YouTube? Was I trying to distract myself from something?

Having that thought, I was immediately inclined to drop the subject. It was as though I had walked up to a door and found a sign on it saying “Go away! We don’t want any!” Since this was happening (metaphorically) in my own brain, that seemed like a red flag to me–and also, I just like being contrary. So I opened the door and looked around. When I did, I came face to face with the overcommitment problem I’d been mulling over recently and one of the hidden ways it has been affecting me.

Schema avoidance
So what had happened was that the thinking I was doing led me to make a connection between some of my behaviors and overcommitment, but as soon as I got close to that connection, I automatically started distracting myself. There’s a name for this phenomenon. In schema therapy, it’s a “schema coping style” called “schema avoidance.”

Avoidance takes any number of forms: it can be television, surfing the Web, extreme sports, reading, going out with friends, eating, drug abuse, drinking, or anything else that can keep a person’s attention well enough to block some other thought or feeling. It can even be something constructive, like doing the dishes or working out.

Unfortunately, coping styles (like avoidance) don’t tell us much about what the underlying problem is. The fact that I was avoiding something only told me that there was something wrong, not what kind of thing it was.

It’s worth thinking how much this has to do with procrastination. In our culture, we tend to think of work as being something we would naturally want to avoid, but there’s nothing inherently painful about work, and often other problems–like fear of failure, perfectionism, or negativity–cause us to want to distract ourselves from working.

Opening the door marked “do not enter”
So learning about ourselves when we notice we’re being avoidant means facing the avoidance and consciously choosing to stay on task, to keep thinking or talking or feeling or investigating whatever it was that set us off. If I go to open my mail and suddenly have the idea that it would be fun to go out ice skating or that it’s time to watch a new DVD, then there’s a good chance that there’s something about the mail that triggers one of my mental schemas. If at that point I want to grow as a person and get past my current life obstacles, then the thing for me to do is to go to the mail, open it, and be observant of and gentle with myself as I face whatever it is I don’t want to face.

Being observant is necessary if I’m going to understand myself better in order to change things. Being gentle is necessary because we’ve developed these schemas and coping styles for a reason: somewhere earlier in life, something along these lines was painful enough to force a schema to develop around it. If we want to unravel mental schemas that keep us from living a good life, we need to care for whatever part of us the schema is there to protect.

Got courage?
I understand this talk of being gentle with ourselves may be offputting to some readers, so I’d like to characterize it in another way: facing those things that disturb us even though doing so makes us uncomfortable and vulnerable requires focus, self-knowledge, and above all, courage. So if the thought of facing everything that makes you feel uncomfortable or bad in the world gives you a sudden urge to see what’s on TV, I don’t blame you–but I also wish you good luck pushing the avoidance aside and courageously moving forward.

Photo by rishibando

The problem of overcommitment is the same whether we’re talking about not having enough time to write, not having enough time to exercise, or any other shortage of time. It’s a matter of deciding to take on more than you can reasonably do, and it’s a perennial problem for me.

One of my character flaws
My own experience of overcommitment seems pretty simple: there’s a lot of stuff I’m excited about, and I can’t walk three feet without running into another cool opportunity of some kind. I realize that there should be a non-fiction book about a particular topic, or get a story idea, or come up with an idea for a Web site to help do something that’s hard to do, or think about how I can help a cause that matters to me or improve our house or organize better.

Most of the time, thankfully, I ignore these impulses. I’ve probably thrown away a number of ideas that would have changed my life if I pursued them, but I’ve also thrown away a lot of just-OK or actually-pretty-awful ideas, and I’ve pursued some ideas that have changed my life (like starting intensive reading research about self-motivation or applying to study at Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp back in 2001). The root of the thing is that there will never be enough time to do all the cool things that could be done in the world. In a way, this justifies the fact that we’re all individuals. True, it means we sometimes feel alone and tend to repeat each other’s mistakes over and over, but on the bright side, by each pursuing our separate passions we can collectively do most of the cool things there are to do. If I can’t do all the cool things myself, it’s reassuring to me that someone can.

Just trying to do better doesn’t cut it
In a sense, it occurs to me, overcommitment is a bit like being over-motivated. Unfortunately, the results aren’t all good. Whenever I take on more than I really have time to do, I’m really giving up some of the things I think I’m taking on, because in the end not all of it will get done.

One thing I can do to deal with overcommitment is to become more efficient: to organize my time, focus my efforts, and learn good habits for getting things done, but this doesn’t do anything to address the underlying problem, because when I have more usable time at my disposal, I tend to take on more things to do. Even doing the things I’ve already got on my list tends to lead to me finding new things to do. For instance, I might work on getting the word out about my latest book and in the course of doing that find several new places on the Web where I could get involved and learn something or connect with new people. It’s true that I’m on my guard about that, but I don’t seem to have pared things down to anywhere near a fully manageable level yet. I get a lot done, but I also leave things undone.

Prioritization helps–somewhat
One partly successful way to approach this–and this is an approach I’ve been using a bit–is to get really good at prioritizing. If you prioritize well, then even though you don’t get everything done, at least you get the most important things done, which is great.

Unfortunately, if I take this approach I’ll still have put some effort and attention into the lower-priority things that I never got to, so it’s still wasteful. Also, I won’t be able to say for certain what I will and won’t get done. It’s not very satisfying to have someone say “Can you do this?” and for me to respond “I don’t know: let’s see whether I get to it or not.” I can address that in part by bumping anything I’ve promised anyone to the top, but that means sometimes doing things that aren’t as important just because I talked to someone about them. That’s not the worst fate in the world, but it’s hardly ideal.

Letting go
So really the solution to overcommitment is figuring out what to let go of and consciously letting go of it–keeping the workload down to a manageable level. This has a lot of benefits: you know what you will and won’t be able to do; you can make promises and keep them; you have a lot fewer things to worry about; and you concentrate your efforts on things you’re actually going to finish.

Sadly, this is much easier said than done. Even putting things in priority order is hard, because priorities change over time. Putting things in priority order and then hacking off the bottom of the list seems too painful and destructive to be borne–and yet it also seems like the required behavior. So I’d love to hear your thoughts: how would you change an overcommitted life so that you’d be doing less?

Photo by timailius

Blogger Dr. Grasshopper, who practices internal medicine in a large urban hospital, posted this today: “Why Your Doctor Comes Across As An A**hole.” Does your doctor seem uninterested in you? Do you feel hurried out of the examining room? Do you ever feel like your big concerns are being brushed aside? Dr. Grasshopper’s post and the article it strongly recommends (“Neuron overload and the juggling physician” in The Lancet) help shed light on issues you and I might not have considered before. They also cover some interesting points about what needs to be fixed in our health care system. They’re the kind of thing practically anyone could benefit from reading in terms of understanding more about their health, their insurance, and their health care providers.

How we’re like doctors
But I have an additional reason to point to the Lancet article in this post, and it’s that many of us have the same problem those doctors do: too many things to juggle with a brain that is designed to only ever juggle one thing at a time.

In my post “How to Multitask, and When Not To” from a couple of years back, I talk about neuroscientist John Medina’s observations on how attention and focus work. His two key points are:

1. We can only focus our attention on one thing at a time, and
2. Every time we change our focus, we have to do extra work, and we increase the likelihood that we’ll make an error.

For example, if you’re studying from a textbook while sorta-watching a TV program in the background, then you’re creating constant interruptions as your attention moves back and forth. Every time you start paying attention to the program, your brain has to shut down everything you were thinking about what you were reading and then fire up pathways that relate to the TV show. When you look back to the book, the process has to happen again in reverse, but with a good chance that some of the pieces you had in your head a moment ago won’t be included in the re-activation and will be lost.

The benefits of single focus
Even if you only pay attention to 10 minutes of TV during an hour of studying, the number of times you go back and forth between those two things will make your studying much, much less efficient. It’s much better to study for a solid block of time and then watch TV for a solid block of time: you’ll remember more and still have more time to pay attention to the TV show (if that’s what you want to do with your time).

OK, most of us reading this already know that watching TV while studying doesn’t work well. The reason this applies to so many of us is that the same thing is true for any situation where we’re trying to give attention to two things at once–like trying to figure out what to do about a scheduling conflict over the weekend while composing an e-mail at work. It gets even worse when our attention is distracted by many different things.

An example
This is what can sometimes happen to me: I’ll be working on a computer task (for example), be distracted by a new thought about a writing project, realize I need to arrange something for one of the kids, then recall I still haven’t returned a friend’s phone call, then remember that I was supposed to be working on the computer. Each change of focus comes with an inefficient changeover of my mental setup, and the whole process is likely to be enhanced by stress at having so much to worry about and guilt at not getting more of these things done. What’s worse, I may not be staying with any of these tasks long enough to make actual progress.

How not to fall into this trap
The solution is a good organizational system that’s always kept up to date (so that you don’t have to worry about whether or not there’s something in it that you haven’t checked or updated recently) and setting up tasks one after the other, never intermixed if you can help it. (See my post “Useful Book: Getting Things Done” for what I suggest is the gold standard for organizational systems.) If you add to that organization and focus a habit of getting rid of tasks and distractions that aren’t important in your life–or at least getting comfortable with giving them such a low priority that you understand they may never get done–then you have an approach that can yield a much calmer, more productive, and happier day-to-day existence.

Will this help doctors? Maybe not. After all, the problem doctors face is that they’re required to do more work than they can do effectively and at their highest level of skill. Insurance companies and related forces prioritize doctors’ practices. Fortunately, most of us are the ones prioritizing our own lives.

Photo by lovefaucet

In a post this past weekend (“Something Completely Different: a New Direction for the Willpower Engine and ReidWrite“), I talked about the new focus I’ve pulled together for my writing and this site. What I’m finding as I pursue it is that it’s creating a natural unification of efforts in my life, and this unification is making my life easier, my mind clearer, and my efforts more useful.

Just one goal
I’ve always been bad at following my own advice to have only one major goal at a time. This isn’t because I have any doubt whether it’s a good idea: it is. It’s just because when I tried to narrow things down to one goal, what I would find was that I got down to multiple goals that were each so important to me that I couldn’t bring myself to discard any of them; the best I could do was to put some on the back burner.

I want to be clear here that when I say “goals,” I’m talking specifically about goals for doing new things that I’m not already achieving, goals that need extra time, attention, and focus. Splitting those scarce resources among multiple goals isn’t effective, because it’s hard enough to help ourselves change in just one way at a time; more than one way is usually overwhelming.

The joy of just one thing
But recently, I resolved to take all of the research I’ve done into the psychology of habits and self-motivation and build a novel out of it that will help people experience how to actually change their lives. It’s a tricky job despite the very great success of some books that have tried similar kinds of challenges, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ishmael, Eat, Pray, Love (though of course that’s a memoir rather than a novel), and even Ecotopia. It seems easy to me to stumble by either preaching–which loses the reader; or by not bringing in the really useful information–which loses the point. Still, I was never the guy who liked taking the easy jobs.

What’s particularly joyful for me about this whole process is that I’m able to single-mindedly pursue one project without the distractions of a lot of other projects, even though there are innumerable little jobs that are part of that project. At the moment, while of course my efforts go into other important things on a daily basis, when I have time to think about or work toward something big and expansive, I know exactly what that thing is: it’s this novel. That kind of one-project focus is a rare and miraculous thing for me.

It’s a little bit like a handy solution to a fiction writing problem, when you find that two characters can be mashed together into one and that this adds a burst of new possibilities and payoffs. Hey, the thief could also be the guide! you say. Suddenly everything is easier.

Unifying goals turns into unifying sites
Interestingly, unifying my focus also is resulting in a unification of my Web sites. I had already realized that I wanted to bring together my psychology of habits blog and my writing blog: my original writing blog at reidwrite.livejournal.com is getting folded into my original willpower blog at www.lucreid.com . But I realized today what the name of the new compounded site should be, and what else it should include: this site will become the new LucReid.com, and the out-of-date writing site I have by that name is getting updated and folded into this site as well. It’s interesting to me how it all seems to be coming together.

Photo by interestsarefree

My Taekwondo instructor at Blue Wave (a very good New England Taekwondo association) is Master Gordon White; see my interview with him on his Taekwondo motivation here. Master White has a lot of good advice for us when it comes to Taekwondo sparring, including one of my favorite defensive tips: “Don’t Be There.” My friend Keyna Houston, who earned her black belt at the same testing I did back in March, made a handy picture (above) to illustrate the principle. If someone is trying to kick you in the head, for instance, the most useful thing you can do is to have your head somewhere else when the foot arrives.

In Taekwondo terms, this means using footwork and being aware of what your opponent is doing. If you’d like to see this in action, the difference between avoiding the kick and having it connect is demonstrated beautifully in this video, which you can skip if you’d like to just get to the point of this post.

Interestingly, kicks to the head have a lot in common with temptation. Like a kick to the head, it’s very hard to effectively block temptation. Also like a kick to the head, temptation can knock you flat. So one of the best defenses against temptation is to simply not be there.

What I mean by this is that a particular temptation arises when our minds are having certain thoughts. For instance, if the temptation you’re trying to avoid is buying something you can’t afford, temptation happens when you’re thinking about that thing, surfing the Web for prices, trying it out in a store, or otherwise occupying your attention with it. If your temptation is getting involved with someone when you know that wouldn’t be a good decision, it arises when you’re spending time with that person, corresponding with that person, or thinking about that person. Thinking, in this case, is “there,” the strike zone, ground zero, the bullseye on the target. When you’re in that space, you’re in danger of being hit with a kick you can’t block. When you’re not in that space, you’re relatively safe.

Given that, how is it possible to not be there? Well, just like in physical space, the way to not be in one place is to be in another. Find something else to focus your attention on or another way to meet your need. It’s hard to eat cookies when you’re chewing gum; it’s hard to feel lonely enough to be driven to make bad choices when you’re spending time with a good friend; and it’s hard to spend money on something when you aren’t shopping for it.

A single use of this technique won’t keep you safe forever. Just as in Taekwondo sparring, as soon as you evade one blow, your opponent is likely to move in to close the gap or to try to draw you in. But also as in sparring, the only way you can win the match is one choice at a time.

In a previous article, “How to Have a Good Day: The Night Before,“ I talked about ways to help make a day go well through preparation. In my last article, “How to Have a Good Day: 4 Ways to Make the Most of a Morning,” I continued the discussion by talking about things that can be done in the morning to help improve the rest of the day. This third article offers more strategies to improve a day by handling the morning well.

• Do one constructive thing early on. Accomplishing something worthwhile, even if it’s a small thing, tends to give a boost in self-confidence and optimism, especially if it’s a task that has been lingering or that has more impact that something its size normally would.
• Keep an eye out for broken ideas. “Broken ideas” or “cognitive distortions” are patterns of thinking that do more harm than good; you can read about them here. By reminding ourselves to be aware of our own thoughts and being vigilant for broken ideas, we can head off emotional problems and distractions.
• Be prepared to face trouble. Any day can potentially bring trouble: unexpected expenses, illness, things breaking, people not coming through, and so on. Since trouble can’t be eradicated from our lives, it helps to be of a mind to face it. When we’re distracted, unprepared, or in a bad mood, it’s often difficult to steel ourselves to tackle problems that arise, and instead we may tend to avoid, make bad compromises, give up, or struggle unnecessarily. Reminding ourselves to do our best to take problems in stride will help lower stress and increase our ability to fix issues that come up.
• Meditate. It’s true, meditation takes time, and it’s not easy, at least at first. But meditation has proven itself valuable again and again in studies and human experience in terms of aiding focus, lowering stress, and increasing happiness–which makes it a very useful practice for first thing in the morning. For more on this, see my article “Strengthen Willpower Through Meditation.” Yoga can have similar benefits in the morning, and even beginners can benefit through use of tools like yoga DVDs.
• Exercise early. Exercise ups metabolism, improves mood, and increases immediate physical well-being (even if you’re a little sore from the workout). It also starts the day off with a constructive accomplishment, which as we’ve already discussed, has its own good impacts.
• Use music to your advantage. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys adding music to other activities rather than being distracted by it, you can take advantage of music’s ability to make a noticeable impact on mood and emotions. Memories and associations, rhythms, the act of singing along (if you’re inclined), and other aspects of music give it a direct line to the parts of our brains that regulate emotions. For more on this, see “How and Why Music Changes Mood.”

Photo by Roshnii

Some days can be one problem after another; on others, everything seems to be going out way. While there are steps we can take to troubleshoot a bad day while it’s happening (see “Having a Bad Day? Here’s Why” and “How to Stop Having a Bad Day“), we can also help encourage good days. In my last article (“How to Have a Good Day: The Night Before“), I offered some steps we can take at night to help make the next day as good as it can be. Today’s article continues the topic with steps we can take in the morning.

• Set aside some time to think. It’s often inconvenient to try to make time in the morning, especially when it means getting up earlier, but doing so is powerful. When we don’t have time to think about what’s going on, we generally act on habit, so that bad habits–like being late, eating poorly, or avoiding stressful responsibilities–can often start a day off on the wrong foot. Our brains have developed to take cues from the world around us and interpret them to predict the future, so that a few bad habits first thing in the morning can set the stage for a downward spiral. By contrast, starting off with a few good choices provides encouragement, happiness, and self-confidence.
• Remind yourself of your goals. Whenever we want to move forward with a goal, it’s worthwhile to keep that goal in mind as often as possible. If you’ve ever had the experience of making a strong resolution, keeping it for a little while, then forgetting for a few days or weeks when something else came up, you probably remember coming back to it later to feel completely derailed. Reminding ourselves clearly and explicitly of a current goal first thing in the morning helps keep our focus and mental efforts on that goal.
• Remind yourself of immediate payoffs. Although major goals are by definition long-term, a good goal usually has short-term payoffs as well. Examples include things like feeling physically better when not eating junk food or finding things that are needed while organizing, but progress on any goal also can have the effect of increasing self-confidence, relieving stress, and generating a sense of accomplishment. Reminding ourselves of these immediate payoffs provides a reason to care about our goals even when the long-term results don’t feel important, as sometimes happens when we’re wrapped up or emotionally involved with other things.
• Be willing to let go. Sometimes the first step in increasing happiness is being willing to surrender things we’re upset about–to stop focusing on upsetting incidents or self-defeating thoughts. As ridiculous as it sounds, I sometimes picture things like this floating away from me as helium balloons. Corny or not, an approach like this gives me a way to separate from what’s bothering me. Consciously committing to doing this when necessary through the day–and starting with any trouble that may already be brewing in the morning–can relieve stress and aid focus.

There’s more we can do in the mornings to encourage the day to go well: I’ll take up the other techniques in my next post.

Photo by OldOnliner

It’s easy to think of ourselves as trapped by emotions or ideas, but it’s interesting–and extremely useful, I would say–for us to remember that willpower comes down to making good choices, and that making good choices comes down to our state of mind, because at least in theory, we can get into an excellent state of mind with only a few moments notice.

Today’s post isn’t about the how of changing our emotional states, which is covered in many other articles on this site, such as “How Preparation Enables Stronger Willpower,” “How to Stop Having a Bad Day,” “Antidotes to bad moods and negative emotions,” and especially “All About Broken Ideas and Idea Repair.” Instead it’s about the what and the why: what does it mean to change our state of mind, and why is that important?

What makes up a state of mind?
State of mind has a number of components, including things like alertness that aren’t entirely under our immediate control. For instance, if I haven’t slept all night, I’m going to have noticeably less power over my ability to focus and think clearly.

But the key elements of our states of mind, attention and mood, are things we can influence. If our attention is set on the most beneficial subject available to us, and if we have brought our emotions into balance, then we’re generally in a calm, open state that allows us to make good choices.

For example, if I have the choice of washing the dishes or watching TV, and if I’ve resolved that it’s important to wash the dishes, then there are a lot of things that could affect my state of mind to make it hard to stick to my resolution. For instance, if I were depressed or angry, I might be having trouble caring about things like whether or not my dishes were done. If I were telling myself what I’d be “missing” if I didn’t watch TV or that I “should be able to have a break after the day I’ve had,” then I would be pointing my attention at things that would tend to prevent me from making good choices.

How we change our state of mind
Emotional states feel very difficult to shake sometimes, but in truth if our attention changes focus, our emotions can follow suit within just a minute or two. Changes of emotion aren’t immediate, though: a lot of our experience of emotions is physiological, and while our brain chemistry changes constantly, it takes a small amount of time for the chemicals to shift, as compared to our near-instantaneous changes of attention or thought, which involve sending electrical impulses through our brains.

So let’s say I walk through the door upset, distracted, preoccupied with wanting to watch TV, and telling myself that doing the dishes is self-punishment. Under those conditions, the dishes probably won’t get done unless I have a strongly-ingrained habit or something changes. But if I have enough time and attention to spare, along with the awareness of what I really want, I can change my state of mind. First I let go of unhelpful thoughts like “I’m going to miss the new episode of my favorite show!” and “I shouldn’t have to do dishes after my long day at work.” Then I will want to bring my attention to any subject that’s helpful, like remembering what it was like getting up the other morning to a gleaming clean kitchen. I’ll also want to use whatever techniques I have available, like breathing exercises, meditation, or music, to help me calm down, focus, and cheer up.

Under these circumstances, it’s possible for a completely different state of mind to surface, one in which I’m happy to be doing the dishes because that’s the exact right thing for me to be doing at the moment. If other kinds of thoughts get in the way of my experiencing that mood, I would need to deal with those individually, for instance by using idea repair.

We’re not always successful (at least, I’m not) at getting into a positive state of mind, but the important takeaway here is realizing that a positive state of mind is nearly always available, however uncomfortable or unhappy or cussed we may feel. The trick is to get better and better at seeking it out.

Photo once again by Stuck in Customs

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You look at your life and decide you need to change something. It might be eating healthier foods, getting your papers organized, or not watching so much TV. At first you’re excited about it, especially when you try it out and you actually start to make some progress. Things are going well.

Then a problem crops up. Maybe you’re invited to dinner and the menu is so far from your healthy eating list, you can’t see it from there without a high-powered telescope. Or you have an important engagement in the evening and don’t get home until 10:30–too late to easily do your filing for the day. Or you find out there’s a marathon of your favorite show ever airing over the weekend.

What often happens to us in these situations is that we make an exception. It’s so inconvenient–nearly impossible, we sometimes tell ourselves–to keep with our program that we can make one completely reasonable exception. And then another exceptional situation comes up, and another, and pretty soon we realize we haven’t been making progress at all and give up in despair.

When this happens, it isn’t that the universe is against us: in fact, this is exactly how we should expect things to go if we try to break a habit. By definition, doing things by habit means taking the easy road, and so breaking a habit–or forming a new one–means taking the difficult road.

To put it another way, habits aren’t made and broken by only changing our behavior when it’s convenient to do so: the real changes in our behavior come when we have to push really hard to maintain our new intentions. It doesn’t take much effort or thought to, for instance, keep up with filing papers when we have plenty of time and no interruptions. The real test–and the time when we have the greatest opportunity to change our own mental processes–comes when things get inconvenient, when we’re tired, distraught, distracted, embarrassed, busy, or when we don’t have all of our materials or tools on hand. When we choose to say “I’m going to stick with my goals anyway” in this periods, we become able to change even deeply-ingrained habits. But when we wait for change to become convenient, we’re likely to be left waiting a very, very long time.

By the way, one of the best ways to deal with inconvenient situations is to plan ahead of time for them: see “How Preparation Enables Stronger Willpower.”

Photo by all-i-oli