Day 68 - From Mindlessness to Mindfulness: The Art of Learning to Pay Attention

It’s hard enough to change a habit that you can physically see.  Things like going for a daily walk, sitting down to write, having a salad for lunch each day. These are easily seen but can still be quite a challenge to implant in your life. In addition to the difficulty, when we do change physically recognizable habits, they have easily identifiable, tangible results. We can simply track them if we utilize data collection. For instance, if I track something like number of salads, I can write down how many salads I ate in a week and then adjust my intake accordingly to match my goals. I want to eat 10 salads a week, I ate two a day during the weekdays, thus I see the data says I matched my goal.

What about habits of mindlessness, the ones you don’t even know you’re doing? Maybe you notice it occasionally, maybe you never notice. How do you change those kinds of habits? I have a number of mindless habits that I could focus on like judging other people, getting distracted with online surfing or television, letting my self-concern get the best of me when I think someone is dismayed with me… Of course these are just the issues that stand out, the ones I am highly aware of and will even continue when I become aware of them while they are occurring… These habits, especially silently judging others are DEEPLY INGRAINED and since I have become aware of them, after reflecting I have come to realize that they have been with me since childhood.

They are not a reason to beat myself up or judge myself harshly. There is nothing wrong with me for having these habits, they are so ingrained that I do them unconsciously, or “mindlessly” and yet I can see how they’re unhelpful to my happiness, to my relationships and to the work I want to do in the world. So it would be helpful to retrain these mindless habits. If I become aware that I am surfing the internet with no purpose, I need to stop and reflect on what I am doing and maybe safeguard myself from doing it in the future and retrain myself… The question is, how should we go about doing this?

What to Know About Changing Mindless Habits…

Before we start, it’s important to know that there are two big obstacles to changing these kinds of habits…

Primarily, they are deeply ingrained in us. Things like negative judgments based on world view, self-criticism and inward negative comments that have been with you since early childhood. If you have never addressed them, they are a part of your consciousness… You’ve been doing them for years, reinforcing them for years and so you won’t just be able to flip a switch and change them in a day or a week or even a month. Mindless activities aren’t like trying to develop abs either, when you start to try and eliminate them, you won’t see any physical results to reinforce your behavior modification…  It could take months to retrain, and in some cases, longer depending on how much focus you give this retraining, and how consistent you are in your efforts. Secondarily, if they remain unconscious and you don’t know you’re doing it, you can’t retrain it. It just keeps happening without you being aware of them, or even sometimes, you don’t know that these mindless habits are holding you back. Without awareness, you’re powerless.

So it will likely be a messy process, with starts and stops, lots of “failures” that aren’t really failures if you’re using them to learn and grow your awareness. It can get discouraging, unless you look at every failure in this way, as a necessary step to becoming more aware, a necessary steppingstone to altering these behaviors.

Now even if we become aware of our issues, and work really hard to modify them and we don’t see any visible results, continuing to work on them is difficult at best, what retraining method for mindless habits can we actively pursue? With these problems in mind, here’s how we might retrain these mindless habits…

1. Focus on just one habit. Look at my list of mindless habits above… Don’t these all seem like great candidates to take on immediately? So why not do them all at once, right? It’s hard enough to be aware of just one of these habits and trying to be aware of several habits at once is like trying to pay attention five movies at the same time. I’d say it’s impossible. Pick just one at a time because you can get to all of them eventually.

2. Recognize the habit’s effects on you. Before you get started, reflect on how this habit affects you. Maybe just watch it for a few days and see how it affects your happiness, your relationships, and the meaningful work you’re doing in the world. Start to get very clear on exactly what this habit does to your life, and all of the ripples it has into all parts of your life. Then formulate a practice plan to give it focus and create a greater awareness of it. Now with this focus on one habit and clarity about what it does, you can now put your retraining plan into action. Here’s the key: create a space where you become as aware as possible of the habit. For example, if you wanted to work on the “being judgmental of others” habit, you might have a practice hour each day where you walk around in public looking at people and noticing when you have the tendency to judge them. Now you’re actively watching for the habit. Maybe it’s just 10 minutes, or even 5 minutes, depending on the severity of the habit. But it has a defined start and end, and you are deliberately practicing during this time. You can slowly expand it over time, or have multiple practice sessions a day, but it shouldn’t be all day long. Sometimes you might shrink it, or even take a day off. The key is to try to be as aware as possible of your judgmental attitude during this practice time.

3. Imagine an alternative habit that would be more helpful. What would be a more helpful habit to do instead? For example, instead of judging people, I might try to look at them with compassionate eyes. Instead of comparing myself or judging myself, I might see myself with loving eyes. Instead of shutting down when someone is unhappy with me, I might try to see their pain and what they’re going through. These are only examples, so take a little time to imagine the habit you’d rather have.

4. When you notice yourself doing the old habit, practice the new one instead. This one should be practiced during your “awareness” sessions, if you notice yourself starting to do the old habit, do the new one instead, as deliberately and consciously as you can. Every single time, as consistently as possible. If you don’t do it consistently, just notice when you don’t, just increase awareness.

5. Repeat many times. Repeat it often, until it becomes easier and more natural and more and more automatic. Reinforce each time you do it by giving yourself a mental pat on the back. Feel good about this success, even if it’s not perfect. Take a moment to feel grateful for your effort.

6. Then learn to do the new habit earlier. With some practice, you can learn to do the new habit much earlier in the process. For example, instead of judging someone and then switching to seeing them with compassion … I might look at someone and immediately try to see them with compassion, as soon as I see them. This takes a lot of awareness and practice, but it gets easier with time. You’re cutting out the old habit completely, so that the new one gets reinforced. You are actually, reframing your thinking and cutting fresh neural pathways in your brain, just like when you are retraining yourself to drop physical habits like drugs or alcohol.

7. Repeat many more times. Again, repeat this method as many times as it takes to become more and more automatic. You might add additional practice sessions. You can even try to catch yourself outside of the practice sessions, until it becomes really easy to be aware of this during the day. Practice while watching TV, or any other time you feel yourself starting to judge others negatively.

Important: see every mistake as a stepping stone to greater awareness. Remember that you’re not going to be perfect at this. It’s going to be messy. The old habit has been strengthened over years. Develop patience with yourself, understanding, and compassion. Learn to encourage yourself when things are hard, and see every failure as information to use to get better and better.

This is the method I used and it works, I promise … I’ve changed some difficult habits this way, even if it took me longer than I’d care to admit. I’m still working with this method, in starts and stops, in a sometimes chaotic way. But shift happens. It can for you as well!

One last note before I finish for the day… You might ask me why I wanted to stop my negative judgments of people.  When I took inventory of my life during my self imposed 90 Day Life Change Challenge, I saw that my negative attitude was like a thread that ran through nearly every part of my life. I wanted that thread pulled out and I decided that I would embark on a journey not only to clean up and condition my physical body by quitting alcohol and drugs, but also clean and condition my mind. Negative world views poison a person, and I believe that life is too short, too valuable and much too important to waste time judging people that I probably don’t want to have anything to do with anyway, so why waste time even thinking about them?

I’m still an asshole, just not a judgmental one…

The 90 Day Life Change Challenge update… This morning was quite awful actually… I did everything I was supposed to do and completed the series for the day but man, I did not want to fucking do it… hahahahaha  Well, it’s been a long week and sometimes even the toughest of us want to tap out… Luckily for me, tapping out isn’t on the list of options that I have made available to myself… Perhaps a broken bone, or death of a family member might stop me, but I’m really going to have to like that family member a lot to quit this far in… 

Well, I will see you in the morning, just like always… Love you like The Pittsburgh Steelers love losing in the last quarter…