habits

Today, I want to talk about wellness and habits. I had someone mention in a class the difference between wellness with or without considering habits. It inspired me to talk about it for a minute. So, if you want to experience a habit for even just a minute, we’re just gonna stay here and do nothing. You could call it meditation, but we’re just going to sit here for a few minutes and do nothing. (after about a minute…) that’s enough.

You can maybe feel the contrast. One moment you were decided to read this blog, and the next you found yourself without stimulus.

And when there’s no stimulus, the body looks for stimuli. It looks for a reason to respond. It wants to hear, it wants to feel, it wants to touch. It’s looking for what’s next. This looking, as well as the response itself, is very habitual. You can decide not to pay attention, but the habits will show up. Like, you can decide, “I want to do this consciously.” But normally what happens is that two seconds later, the habit shows up. The issue here with wellness is often that we think, “I can take care of myself.” If you are taking care of yourself but not considering habits, then you’re missing out on what needs to happen to support the redirecting of habits in taking care of yourself.

In habit, things go from habit to stimuli, and the stimuli always leads to a response. The response leads to another response, and it keeps going like this. We can try to alleviate the response by thinking, “I’m gonna do something nice for myself. I’m going to take a yoga class, or do some guided meditation.” But then what happens is that it might provide a break or some rest maybe for a minute, but then, the whole system reorganizes in relationship to that activity and we are off reacting mindlessly to the stimulus.

So then it might be better to consider habit in wellness and to start to notice what is my habit in dealing with a certain situation, especially a stressful situation. What’s the ongoing thought? What’s the ongoing bodily response? And if we don’t know what that is, that’s fine. So that means we can be open to noticing what is the habit. When so and so says something, I habitually feel, when such and such thing happens to me, then normally I respond this way. Here to notice habit means for us to be able to make a decision anew, to be able to respond differently.

And if that particular habit was built for a different circumstance, and now, all of a sudden it comes and starts to try to respond in a different context, then that habit might be maladjusted and not necessarily useful. So it’s good to pay attention to habit if we’re interested in wellness. So that when I take this yoga class, this activity that I’m doing to help me find some relief, it doesn’t just end up stressing me just as much as any other activity.