The Power of Positive Habits

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Habits can have both a positive and negative impact on your life, work, and relationships. They can drive the greatest successes in life and love or your greatest regrets. Each of us has a set of habits that we are a part of how we work and operate every day. For example, you may have good habits such as paying your water bill as soon as it arrives in the mail or drinking 1 cup of coffee each morning. You may also have bad habits such as eating candy while watching shows on TV or smoking cigarettes when you are stressed out. 

Habits are effective, automatic responses to external triggers. In the previous example, you wake up and walk into your kitchen than make a cup of coffee. The trigger here is that you’ve walked into your kitchen in the morning. Without even thinking about it, you’ve started the coffee pot and gotten your favorite mug from the cabinet. The same is true of negative habits. For example, you may sit down at the end of the day to watch a few shows on Netflix and suddenly feel an overwhelming urge to grab a bag of chips or a candy bar to snack on while you watch. You don’t even realize how much you’re eating.  The trigger there was sitting down and starting a show.

Habits occur as a result of repeated action that results in a positive response. For example, when you sit down to watch a show and decide to eat a snack, your brain gives you a tiny shot of dopamine as a reward for filling your body with fuel. This ancient mechanism was meant to encourage you to starve, but in today’s day and age, it will continue to push you to eat as much as you can even when you have plenty. However, because you did it once, the next time you sit down to watch a show your brain is saying, “Hey! We got a dopamine high the last time we ate a snack when we were doing this.  Let’s get a snack again!”  You feel a sudden urge to get a snack and so you do.

The more you repeat an action caused by a trigger the more they become connected to each other. Imagine a river flowing through the countryside. Over time the movement of the water erodes the ground underneath it forming a deep ravine through which the river flows. The water coming endlessly from its source will always push the water through that ravine. The longer the river flows the deeper and more permanent it is course becomes. Your habits are very similar to the river. The habit is a neural pathway that has become imprinted in your brain. The more you repeat the habit the more deeply ingrained it becomes. Over time the habit can become so deeply ingrained it can seem impossible to reverse it.

It is of course, completely possible to reverse or eliminate a habit. In the late 1800s, the City of Chicago had a tremendous problem. They had numerous industries along the Chicago river that were dumping their waste directly into the river. The river itself flowed from the Mightly Mississippi River into Lake Michigan.  Chicagoans got the majority of their drinking water from Lake Michigan which meant that the water that people were drinking was poisoned with all kinds of chemicals and waste. In 1892 the city embarked on an 8-year project to fix this issue. They began to build a series of dams and locks that would reverse the flow of the river. By 1900 the city of Saint Louis and caught on and realizing that the waste and trash from Chicago was about to flow down the Mississippi toward them prepared to file a lawsuit. In response, the City sent engineers out to blow the damn up that night before the lawsuit was filed. Once the damn was blown the river reversed course, beating the lawsuit of Saint Louis to the punch. What had flowed for thousands of years into lake Michigan was now flowing in the other direction.  Chicago had changed the course of a river.

If Chicago can change the course of a river you can change habits of your own. I struggled with overeating and a lack of exercise for a long time. I was overweight, tired, and began to feel sluggish not just physically but mentally as well.  I knew that I needed to make a change in my life for a long time and while I knew it I struggled to overcome my deeply ingrained habits. I thought running would be a good solution but found that my knees would hurt and my feet would go numb, so I stopped running and what weight I had managed to take off came right back on. After some time I resolved to try again and instead bought a bicycle. 

I had started riding bicycles as a young child with my first Schwinn Pixie bicycle with training wheels. As I got older I got bigger bikes and used them to expand my world. Riding around my block, to the playground, and as I got over across town across the county. Biking was a way to open my world and gain freedom. When I turned 16 I got my driver's license and used the money I had saved from working part-time jobs to buy a car. Instantly riding my bike became uncool and I put it in the garage.  My parents eventually got rid of it many years later when it was clear no one was going to ride it again.

Years later after my experiment with running to lose weight had failed I bought a new bike. I began to ride just a couple of miles a few days a week. A few days a week turned into most days and a few miles turned into 10 miles. Eventually, I was riding 10 miles per day almost every day and occasionally taking 40 - 60 mile rides on the weekend. I didn’t initially lose weight though as I was overeating after riding. To combat overeating I started looking at what I was eating every day.  I tried to keep a mental note of what I was eating, but that turned out to be nearly impossible. I settle on an app that would allow me to enter everything I eat and track my calorie intake against a budget. 

The app I downloaded was called Lose It!. Lose It! Allows you to enter each food item that you’re eating and the portion that you’re eating either by volume or weight. I figured weight would be easiest and got a digital kitchen scale. Now, whenever I had the urge to eat I was reminded to log it into my app. It caused me to start looking at the food I was eating and how many calories were in it. If I wanted to have a bit of chocolate after dinner, I realized I would need to eat a little less dinner than I might normally have or to choose different foods at dinner.

Now I had created two different triggers for two different habits.  Each morning when I woke up I would have my cup of coffee(That habit has been with me a long time now) and then would feel the urge to go out for a bike ride.  Finishing my coffee is my trigger to get dressed and jump on the bike. My second trigger was picking up food.  That caused me to take out my phone and open the Lose It! App. Logging my food opened my eyes to the choices I was making and drove me to make healthier choices because overeating was now easy to see as unappetizing. 

Creating or changing your habits works the same way. You can create habits by identifying a trigger that will result in a positive response for you. You can also break habits by either removing the trigger from your life or creating an alternate trigger that will drive your behavior in a different direction. Many people that quit smoking will trade the cigarette for a sucker or stick of gum. Neither of these is particularly high in calories or bad for you and provides a great alternative to the cigarette. Over time they begin to associate the urge to smoke with the sucker or the gum and crave it instead of the cigarette. You can do the same thing in your life.

I have had great success with changing my habits to create a positive response in my life. I get plenty of exercise and eat a much healthier diet. I’ve also lost over 60 pounds from the experience. I feel better physically, feel sharper mentally, and have more energy to spend time with my wife and kids. You can change your habits and impact your life in positive ways too.  What habits do you have now that you want to change? I’d love to chat about it. Post below or reach out to me through my website LeaderLifeline.com if you want to chat privately. 

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