Myths About Habits, Debunked

I struggle with forming habits just like everyone else.  I rely on them and spend time creating and reinforcing them so I can go on auto pilot on low days and still take care of my body, relationships, and work I'd like to do.  Getting in the habit of writing every day is a tough one.  It's still forming for me. And it's worth the effort to create it. What habit are you working on?

Thorin Klosowski offered up some thought-provoking myths on habit on his blog Lifehacker. Four of them, as a matter of fact.  I like to take things in small bites, so here's the first. Tell me if you feel relieved.  I did.

"Myth: It Takes 21 Days to Form a Habit

You’ve probably heard it takes 21 days to form a habit (or possibly 28 or 30), but according to most studies, that simply isn’t the case. But it helps to know where that myth comes from. It seems like the initial “21 days” idea originated in Maxwell Maltz’s book, Psycho Cybernetics:

It usually requires a minimum of about 21 days to effect any perceptible change in a mental image. Following plastic surgery it takes about 21 days for the average patient to get used to his new face. When an arm or leg is amputated the “phantom limb” persists for about 21 days. People must live in a new house for about three weeks before it begins to “seem like home”. These, and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the time it takes to adjust to the loss of a limb doesn’t correlate to forming a habit at all. Still, self-help gurus latched onto the 21 days idea and spread the myth everywhere they could.

So, researchers from the University College of London decided to take a closer look. In their study, they found that habits take a lot longer to form. They’re also dependent on the person and the habit. On average, it took people 66 days to form a habit, but it varies for everyone (the variability was big, too, ranging from just 18 days to 254 days). Their study was small at just 96 participants, but it still shows that the amount of days it takes to form a habit is variable.

Which is all to say, there’s no magic number and no magic bullet. It’ll take time and effort to form a habit, so don’t expect to automatically start doing something in just 21 days. Habit forming is a process, not an event on your calendar, so don’t treat it like one.

Next myth tomorrow.

Want to read more now?  All four myths are found at Thorin's blog here.

One Man's Butt is Another's Burr

The license plate on the truck read Alabama. It could have been any state really. We were stopped at a light on Highway 98.  It was a beautiful day.  Summer puff clouds were building, as they do, into mountainous mounds.  The sea air blew gently through open car windows. An American flag saluted palm trees as sea gulls flew overhead.  Then it happened.

A cigarette butt flew out the window of the truck ahead of me.  It hit the ground still smoking.  There were no cars in that lane yet.  The light was still red.  With oil spills, tender ecosystems, and the ongoing discussion about our squeaky clean sand, it felt wrong to let that cigarette butt lay there.

It was ridiculous, I know, to be worried about a cigarette butt in a land of millions of disposable water bottles and plastic throw-away meal containers.  The devil is in the details, no?  We've got to start somewhere.  I tried to calculate if I had enough time to get out of my car, walk to the burning butt, pick it up after squishing it, get back to my car and buckle myself back in before the light changed.  I imagined the looks I wouldn't acknowledge from the truck's passengers. 

A car rolled over the cigarette and stopped alongside the truck.  I could still retrieve the butt.  I glanced at the light.  Was there time?  Another car slowed to a stop.  The butt was now crushed and flattened.  It would wash into sewers or be blown into someone's piña collada.

It was too late now.  I had to let it go. I wondered why we don't have signs warning of $500 fines for littering as I've seen on roads in my travels. I imagined how we wouldn't need such signs if everyone would stop and pick up one piece of paper or discarded can. How tourists would comment that locals pride themselves on the cleanliness of their town.

"We have grown accustomed to thinking of ourselves as separate from creation," says author and theologian Megan McKenna in Harm Not The Earth.  "From a biblical, but also from an ecological, point of view this position cannot be sustained.  We do not simply live on the earth, but from it and within it."  

When we  'dis' our planet by discarding toxins into its waters, cutting too many trees, littering, ignoring recycling, allowing oil wells to leak undersea for years without repair, or any of the million ways we do so, we and the earth suffer. "If we take care of the earth, we ourselves are taken care of," advises McKenna.

I see you who gather trash unceremoniously during your beach walks, looking for no attention, a cleaner beach their happy reward. Thank you.

The statistics for animals and plant life are appalling.  It is estimated that 60% of the ecosystems that support life on earth... are quickly being degraded and depleted.* They are not expected to last until 2050.  

Thirty species are lost every day in the world.  That means more than ten thousand each year! In this century alone, more than half of all the known species will be gone.

As I go about my days now, I look for one piece of trash I can remove. It's not much, but it  makes a difference, if not to the tourists, at least to the beautiful people who live here.  Everyone knows we have a lot to protect.  It's not just the sand we like squeaky clean.

* from "To Serve and Preserve," an article by Ched Myers, quoting David Helton, originally published in Sojourners, March 2004.

Some things never change. The struggle informs.

5-28-15

Paying attention to the struggle, writing about it, sitting with it without trying to "fix" it right away, these are my processes of late.  They are gentle to my spirit and reveal truth the way I learned it as a child.

Something's not working about cleaning up my office.  Old energies are stuck here, I think to myself.  Old habits, too, of too much work to complete in a day, so I might as well leave it on top to begin working on it in the morning, repeated too many times until a nice big pile looms like a mountain I don't have the energy to climb. Or so I tell myself.  And too many decisions to make.  I like Kondo's sink-cost: the mental and physical toll of keeping unused items is greater than throwing them out.  The "pile" sitting there keeps me from going through it.  I get only the top three or so items done before... what IS it that keeps me from emptying the pile or giving it a new home?

Stories I tell myself.  Self-limiting beliefs that need cleaning out like my winter clothes from the closet.  Gotta donate some of those.  They don't bring me joy anymore and I'm trying the Kondo status quo: all will be thrown out unless I can think of a good reason to keep it.  No music when decluttering, Marie Konda says.  I think my new rule will be no computer on when I'm cleaning off the desk.  No email or internet to distract me. 

It's a start.  We'll see if the desk looks better tomorrow.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. Click the following link for article in The Atlantic about the phenomenon of this book.
http://tinyurl.com/ospyt8b

Tilted.

Reflections from the seashore, as true today as when I wrote it five years ago... 

6-12-09

In our early morning walk along Sandestin’s beach this morning, I found myself most of the time on a slant.  Life’s like that, no?  It either pushes us a little off kilter, or we look at it from a skewed, slightly tilted, self-centered perspective.

We’re just 12 days into hurricane season this year and all has been quiet.  Gentle waves.  No serious storms.  Still, the wave action over the past weeks has pushed and pulled the sand in such a way that occasional drop-offs and slanting wet sand at the water’s edge make for a tippy walk.

On a lovely stretch of the beach, the sand leveled out.  The sound of the waves was softer here because they rolled gently, with no sudden dropoffs to crash them more violently to the shore.  I wasn’t on a slant anymore and so I stopped and enjoyed the moment.  The shallow flatness that stretched before me beckoned me in to the warm Gulf waters.  I drank it the moment and repeated the mantra my husband and I say daily.  It just doesn’t get much better than this. 

As I stood gazing out on the emerald/aqua blue waters looking for dolphins, turtles and such, the waves lapped gently against my legs, splashing up to my knees.  Each time the tide receded, it took a little sand away from around my feet.  My feet were slowly sinking in a little hole the waves were creating.  I stepped out of the hole and moved along on my walk.

The heat of summertime often calls to us to stop and enjoy the view as well we should.  It’s a beautiful season that makes most of us smile just at the mention of it.  As the children come in and out of the door this summer, as tables are set and cleared, as the ebb and flow of our summer lives move around our feet, it is good to pay attention when we’ve stood still long enough in one place and notice when we need to move our business along a little so that it doesn’t fall into a hole, so that the checkbook balance doesn’t slant in the wrong direction, so that we enjoy as much of life’s beach as we can.  One day at a time.  

As I turned around to walk back, I shifted from looking out at the sea. I put my head down to concentrate where to put my feet in the sand.  The sun was rising and so was the humidity and heat.  I was beginning to tire.  As I looked down the beach to see how far I still had to walk, it reminded me of a timeline of one’s life or business.  I passed little markers along the way: a child’s plastic shovel and sand castle mold, a lone Coke can which I picked up to deposit in the trash later, big holes dug at the water’s edge to catch the sea.

The plastic shovel reminded me of my baby days in the business when I worked hard digging up new bookings and recruits.  The lone Coke can reminded me of the carelessness of some people I’ve met along the way:  hosts who treated me like hired help or cancelled inconsiderately at the last moment, consultants who copped an attitude with the company when they missed a company deadline or made a mistake in judgment and, unwilling to bear the responsibility of their actions, made sarcastic statements like “Now I know what kind of a company I’m dealing with.”  The big holes reminded me of those who have passed the rocky, adolescent stage of their business timeline with its ups and downs (both internal and external), and have built their businesses deep and wide. 

I was surprised when I looked into the big hole I passed.  There was actually water in the bottom.  I think that was a first for me, for the water almost always seeps into the sand and ultimately back to the sea.  As I studied this particular hole today, it had strong, deep lines along its sides.  The builder of this hole had not scooped with hands, but used some sort of tool to go straight up and down the sides creating unusual depth for a beach hole. 

The result was water that remained long after the work was done.

This is my hope for you: a life you’ve cultivated through the years that is as deep and productive as Jacob’s well, always drawing others to it for sustenance, friends, faith and fun.

What if...?

As we approach the next Presidential election, I am pleased that I've cancelled my landline. I know I won't miss the political commercials and surveys. I wish I could say the same for what the media will present to us. What can we do to make the pre-election period palatable? What if each candidate speaks only of the qualities of the other. Now, to date, they have done so with derision and the populace at large either shuts down in disgust, or rallies in shallow or thoughtless adoration like prebuscents awash in adoration of the latest pop group. What if the candidates actually waxed eloquently of the other in sincerity without derision? We would see their generous nature, how well they could address adversaries around the world, how selfless their service to this country could be, and dare we hope, how they could rise above partisan politics and create a unified approach in a country whose name begins with the word united. The better they would speak of the other, the more we would admire their oratorial skills and character in a twist of reverse psychology that would be as fresh and welcoming as a daffodil in the snow. What if one started? It would be lopsided at first, of course. The candidate receiving all the accolades would be delighted, scratching his head perhaps, but carryingn on as usual. Any derisive slam toward the other would not be returned with anything other than complimentary reflections of the good the other has done in some part of his past. The media would begin searching for complimentary stories of "the other" in order to present a balanced approach to their reporting. Eventually, the second candidate and his staff would be asked what they could say about "the other" since he was saying such gracious things about him. If they say nothing, they seem ungracious by comparison. If they say small things, they will appear stingy and self-centered (shock of shocks!). If they begin to play the game, if they begin to return gracious words for gracious words, we would have a titanic shift that could finally sink the atrocious politics we the people suffer every four years. What if half the money raised by either candidate for his or her election would go to pay down the country's debt? Wouldn't the people be most grateful for the candidate who raised the most money then? Wouldn't both candidates end up being winners in one way or another? What if angry words spoken by either candidate or their staff were viewed as evil? What if we forced our enemies to say one nice thing about the other side the way we tell our children to say something nice about the sibling they can't stand at the moment, knowing they will probably grow up to like each other? What if we truly understood our interconnectedness? Our global consciousness? The effect each of us has on the other? Our oneness through, in, and with the one God, by whatever name you call Him or Her? What if...?

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First Four Words

I play with words all day, every day.  Have fun with this one.

The first four words you see describe you.  I got sentimental, love, drama, and courageous.