Claudia Schmidt '22
"...not changing is scarier than taking a leap of faith and failing. Your potential is limitless. So don’t let your potential drown in your habits that are disadvantageous to your success."
How many of you have a bad habit? If you believe you don’t, you’re in some kind of perfectionist denial because everyone has a bad habit. To begin honestly, my “hallmark” worst habit is biting my nails when I’m anxious. I mean that is a pretty easy habit for me to admit as it doesn’t require any form of self-reflection, and it is probably someone else’s bad habit too. And because biting nails is so common, it is deemed an “accepted” bad habit. However discovering your bad habits beyond face value, requires a level of self-reflection and change that not many people are willing to do. For the next 5-10 minutes I will be speaking to you about habits and how they can lead us to our success, or our failure.
How did I start down this rabbit hole of self-improvement? One word: Youtube. I love my youtube recommended page, it is a combination of study music, journaling prompts, how to fix my heinous posture in 10 days, and guided meditations. I mean if you were to look at it you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between my computer screen and Gary Vee’s. For those of you who are not fans of his, Gary Vee is a motivational speaker. One thing he has taught me is that I need to stop caring about what others think of me. Again, this is another generic bad habit, because at the end of the day almost everyone cares what another person thinks of them on a certain level. If I am being completely honest, I am wondering what all of you are thinking of me right now. But this isn’t uncommon for me, I am always trying to assess any situation from multiple angles through worrying. I spend so much time worrying about what others think of me, I have completely forgotten to think of myself. In realizing this, I knew I had to take a step back and assess my own situation.
Now I wondered when I began this journey of putting myself first, am I better off than the average person by waking up at 6:30, meditating, journaling, and expressing gratitude--or am I merely losing sleep and wasting time? Turns out I lost sleep, but I did not waste time. I have had my most successful year thus far in my life and that is due to the correlation between the formation of good habits and fulfilling goals. You see, excellence is not an act but rather a habit. But what makes up a habit? Why do we repeatedly do the things we do?
Dr. Joe Dispenza is a man who inspires me and is very knowledgeable and passionate about the power of the mind. Besides holding a Bachelor of Science degree and is a Doctor of Chiropractic. His post-graduate training also includes the fields of neuroscience and neuroplasticity, quantitative electroencephalogram (QEEG) measurements, epigenetics, mind-body medicine, and brain/heart coherence. In 1986 he shattered his spine during a triathlon. After a bleak prognosis, He left the hospital against the advice of his physicians and spent the next three months mentally—and physically—reconstructing his spine. After nine and a half weeks he was completely healed from only using the power of his mind.
He defines a habit as a set of automatic unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that are acquired through repetition. A habit is something that is done so many times your body knows how to do it better than your mind. I mean this very literally. We are not thinking before we are following a routine, it is a habit. A paper published by a Duke University researcher states more than 40 percent of actions people perform every day are not decisions, but habits.
I know when I read that, I felt out of control because I realized I was living in a state where I was completely unaware of how I lived my life. Habits are ingrained into our subconscious mind, and they make our behavior automatic action. You see that is the problem in saying biting nails is a bad habit because the act of biting nails is not negatively impacting your life as a whole. A lot of people in this theatre have a hallmark bad habit, but not everyone in this theatre has taken the time to assess the role their habits play in their lives.
For instance, what is the first thing you do in the morning? Do you check your phone? Do you brush your teeth? Do you drink coffee? Think about it. What about after your morning? What do you do in the day, M Block, Sports Block, Dinner? What are those routines, or dare I say, habits?
You go out and you do the same things, see the same people, walk the same path, and these events trigger an emotional response that becomes a routine. We have lost our free will to our subconscious mind. Dr. Dispenza highlights that 95% of who we are by the time we are 35 is a memorized set of behaviors, hard-wired attitudes, and unconscious habits that function like a computer program.
So why is it that we have subconsciously created this program for ourselves? Well to be honest it stems from a lack of self-awareness. People tend to wake up in the morning and think about their problems, and these problems are typically ones you were also worried about the day prior. Maybe a few weeks prior. In the words of Dr. Dispenza, If the brain is a record of the past, the moment people begin their day, they are already living in the past. These problems are memories in the brain and each of them has a connection to a person, or a place, or a feeling. Memories evoke emotions that are connected to our past. And the feeling attached to this memory whether it be sadness, pain, anger, happiness, or gratitude significantly shapes our state of being.
We should care about this because If we as people are constantly living in the past, wouldn’t that mean we are creating the same life and therefore habit?
Charles Duhigg is the author of The Power of Habit, and he speaks about the Habit Loop, which is a consolidation of a cue, a routine, and a reward. This loop helps our brain figure out if a habit is worth remembering. Therefore, our habits create our reality because our brains remember our habits whether they are beneficial to our success or not.
An example of a habit of mine that is contributing to my failure is checking my phone. The second my alarm goes off, I find myself checking who’s texted me and what people have posted on Instagram as a means to wake up. I know I am not the only one who checks their phone when they wake up so let’s think about this.
What is the cue? My alarm is going off. What is the action? Checking social media. What is the reward? Being in the loop, knowing if my mom texted me a good morning and that she still loves me. Well great, I’m in the loop. But what are the further implications and triggers from my subconscious mind that makes me want to do the same thing again tomorrow? Because of the emotion attached to it. Being in the know makes me feel good. But there are greater repercussions to a seemingly innocuous act of checking my phone. The first 10 minutes after you wake up, your brain is in a malleable state, and like habits, you can use this time to your advantage or disadvantage.
By checking my phone I could be hit with a surprise, maybe my mom doesn’t love me anymore. Or maybe I feel insecure because I saw an Instagram picture. During these precious 10 minutes, I am setting the tone for my day, because my thoughts have a direct correlation with my destiny, as memories evoke emotions and feelings become the means of thinking. And by checking my phone, I am the one responsible for creating the same life for myself every single morning.
To go back to what I said that excellence is not an act but rather a habit, to rewire our subconscious we have to be more conscious of what we are constantly doing. So we can either take advantage of our subconscious mind and make our habits work for us, or we become a part of the 95% of people who by the time they are 35 are essentially computer programs. For me, not changing is scarier than taking a leap of faith and failing. Your potential is limitless. So don’t let your potential drown in your habits that are disadvantageous to your success.
The way I look at it is that our habits are like walking. Initially, we are uncomfortable with walking. We like crawling--crawling is good--but walking is a new change; we are trying something new. When we were learning how to walk we would stumble and fall but eventually, we would get back up and try again. Through this grit and determination, we eventually learned how to run. I mean I am not one of those people, T. Smith could tell you I despise it. But regardless of my personal feelings towards the sport, it was once impossible for me to even consider how I felt about it because I didn’t even know I was capable of running. As we have grown up we have forgotten how difficult it once was for us to walk because we are so comfortable doing it now. But if we never leaped to take those baby steps, we certainly would not be running today.
So I invite you to treat your new habits like baby steps. I ask you to be vulnerable and accept that change is difficult. I challenge you to be uncomfortable. What isn’t working? Know that there is always a better version of yourself that you can become. But it is a product of time, and strong habits. I urge you to take those baby steps. I urge you to fail. I urge you to get back up and do it again.
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