Partnership Educators,
Whether we are aware of them or not, we all have habits. Some habits act as building blocks for a healthy activity, like me choosing to read during some of my free time without really thinking about it. And some habits may reinforce unwanted consequences, like my propensity to turn on the TV news when I get up in the morning without really thinking about it. A habit is a routine behavior. It's a tendency, and it's often a subconscious one.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg states, "Every habit, no matter its complexity, is malleable." Whether it's a healthy or unhealthy habit, we have the innate ability to change our behavioral patterns. That brings me back to my morning news watching. I found that it was an unhealthy habit for me to watch the news in the morning because no matter what media I consumed news in, it tended to be negative and it started my day in a way that wasn't healthy. So I started thinking about a way to start a new habit to change my daily outlook. More on that in a moment.
Often when it comes to breaking habits, I hear myself say things like, "I know what I need to do. I just need to find the willpower to do it." But, what is true is that breaking a habit isn't just a matter of willpower. Most psychologists say that willpower is like a muscle - you can only exercise it so much until it fatigues. This is why most of my "Don't eat candy" campaigns seem to fail with me. Willpower certainly hasn't been enough on that front.
Chris Bosh, NBA Hall a Famer and author, is a voracious reader and he equates his reading habit to a book he was assigned in middle school. Chris wrote in his new book, Letters to a Young Athlete, "In my experience, the best evidence in the way that expanding your mind transfers to athletes has to do with visualization. Whenever I would read in school, I would work on visualizing the stories and characters in my head. I could see Harry Potter and his friends going to Hogwarts for another semester to learn magic. I liked that image of the green light across the water in the Great Gatsby. I found that the more I practice I got with that, the better I was to visualize what happened on the court. .... There isn't a part of my brain marked, "Basketball Visualization" and "Visualization for Everything Else." There is one part of my brain for visualization and the more I strengthened it in the classroom, the more it helped me out on the court."
I give you that quote because it is a great example of someone with a great healthy habit that was developed by our efforts to connect what we teach to relevant topics and purposes for our students.
In order to change one habit to more to a better one, you have to first identify the routine that is causing you the problem. You remember my news watching and how that was affecting my own happiness. Don't get me wrong, I still watch some news but just not in the morning. Next, you have to figure out what reward you are getting from it. For me, I think TV watching was a passive activity that didn't require a lot of thinking and so it started as something to do before I had to make decisions. Lastly, you have to figure out what the cue is that starts the habit. For me, it was getting up in the morning and not having anything else to do to start my day.
What I did next was very hard and I still struggle with some days. Now, I will say that I am completely off the news in the mornings now but what I am trying to replace it with is still an ongoing work in progress. I decided to replace it with a short exercise routine. So now I lay out my exercise materials each night and place them where they can't be missed. This is supposed to be my new cue. For the most part, it works but some days I will ignore it I have to admit. I haven't gone back to the news but I don't always hit my routine. My new routine includes things like packing away the fitness materials and unpacking them each day so that keeps in alive for me each day. I have successfully transitioned to the new routine but now it is increasing the amount of what I do. We will see.
It doesn't take large-scale changes to start a new routine from an old one. At one point watching the news was a decision and over time it became an automatic action because my brain created a formula for waking up. Charles Duhigg says that to recreate this formula, we have to start making decisions again. While habit formation sometimes happens on accident, it can take time and effort to break habits. The desire to change a habit, how established it is, and the consequences of not breaking the habit all factor into the equation. Truthfully, it shouldn't matter how long it takes you to break a habit. Every step you take is progress and gets you that much closer to making lasting, and sustainable changes.
Thank you for introducing our students to the power of habit formation. Many of the things we do with kids, like reading great books, don't have the first intent of building a habit like Chris Bosh that equates to a skill that added value to his professional career. But it is important to know that these things that we do with kids, positive or negative, help to reinforce many of the habits that will carry on throughout their lives. Thanks for being a powerful part of raising our kids.
Have a great weekend,
Rob