While looking for news and science on the topic of using rewards to help you change your habits — or maybe others want to call your habits addictions — the concept of using curiosity to help you change your habits came across my screen. Really? Curiosity can help you break a bad habit?
I had to explore this idea some more. There wasn’t much out there for me to read or watch, so I decided to ask you what you thought about this notion: Can you overcome your “bad” habits through curiosity? If you pay attention to the feelings that arise when you are triggered to “do” one of your habits, a habit you want to change but can’t quite master, and then if you explore that feeling with curiosity, can that combination of steps help you overcome the habit?
Interesting, huh! Thinking back to some of the habits I’ve formed or changed shows me that sometimes curiosity has been part of the source of the change, if for no other reason than I was curious about something and figured a way to make changes.
Most commonly, deciding to change, triggers, and swapping one habit for another have worked in helping me end a bad habit — sometimes, kinda. Can curiosity help more than the more common approaches I’ve taken? Could it do as good a job, or even better, than the tactics I’ve used before?
Successfully stopping habits, like drinking alcohol, have been accomplished by deciding to do so. When you don’t like how your body responds to something and you can create a strong enough emotional reaction against the cause of that response you can quit. Most of the time. I quit drinking alcohol after I realized my speeding heart rate, fast breathing, and increased snoring were physiological responses I didn’t want to have.
When I found myself reacting to sugar the same way as I did alcohol I conjured up the same emotional reaction and quit processed sugar. For eight months. That was the longest I’d ever gone without sugar! But, that Thanksgiving I decided I wanted to have pumpkin pie; it was the lowest sugar dessert on the menu, I could avoid the wheat crust, and be back to not sugar the next day. Wrong! I haven’t replicated that emotional reaction that helped me quit sugar the first time. That’s frustrating!
Coming up with a new trigger, like connecting brushing my teeth in the morning to my morning water, has helped me change from the bad habit of not brushing my teeth in the morning to brushing them regularly. A new habit I attached to my morning routine was my morning stretches. The triggers I’ve used have mostly been to start new habits, not to break old habits that didn’t serve me. Triggers aren’t helping with my sugar avoidance.
Swapping habits sometimes helps, especially when what I’m swapping isn’t as bad or worse than the original habit. When I quit eating grains I substituted various items for the spaghetti. Salad makes a delicious bed for spaghetti sauce. Spaghetti squash works for me too. But sometimes just ending the connection to the habit works as well — like avoiding pasta-based dishes all together.
Since I can’t seem to kick my sugar habit these days, though I must admit it’s not nearly out of control as it was when I quit eating it last spring, I’ve decided to give Curiosity a spin. Join me in breaking your favorite-habit-to-hate habit. Here’s how it use curiosity to break habits.
The experts out there, like psychiatrist Judson Brewer and doctors at the National Institute of Health (NIH), suggest that when you are triggered to “do” your habit — like lighting up a cigarette, stop for a moment. Notice your feelings. Play in them and explore them. Wonder what’s going on with that feeling that makes you want to reach out for your cigarette?
Do you really need that cigarette, or do you need to satisfy the feeling that you associate with picking up (and lighting) a cancer stick? What can you do instead to support that feeling? Squelching it doesn’t work, and probably isn’t healthy either. Ignoring it has a similar effectiveness. But, curiosity….
Being curious about the feeling, and its associated response, might help you overcome the response. You become mindful of the connection between the feeling and the response. You can challenge yourself on that response to that feeling. You can consider alternative responses to that feeling. You might find that just acknowledging the feeling is sufficient, and it “goes away” on its own volition. Or, you might find that the space you created between the trigger for the feeling, and the response to the triggered feeling, is enough to let go of the habit.
You don’t have anything to lose by trying curiosity to break habits. If you have failed with all of the other approaches you’ve adopted in the past, give this one a try. Practice being mindful. Be curious. Be healthy.
So, I’m going to be curious about my sugar fascination and addiction. I’ll explore the feelings, the triggers, and the whole package connected to my sugar cravings and consumption. My intention is to quit eating and wanting sugar.
I’m curious to learn how well this works. 🙂