The Good Lie: Why Some Habits Are Hard To Change
The road to hell is paved with good intentions as the famous proverb holds. Even good habits can go bad if we're dishonest with ourselves about how things are going.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions as the famous proverb holds. Even good habits can go bad if we're dishonest with ourselves about how things are going.
According to psychologists, we form habits based on a number of factors, from purposeful choice, to small fluctuations in the routines around us. Whatever the habit, many are completely unconscious. You probably don’t give a lot of thought to whether or not your grab your right shoe or left shoe first, and most of you probably didn’t choose to start brushing your top row of teeth first, but if you pay attention you’ll notice that you probably do! Often by the time we do become aware of our “bad habits,” or those in need of change, they are so deeply ingrained that quitting them can seem like an impossibility!
Why is it that habits we’ve identified as not serving us can so easily end up being surprisingly hard to shift?
One factor might be that we are liars. We are skillful, slippery, and convincing liars when it comes to our self-talk. I’ll give you an example!
Years ago, as a member of Weight Watchers, I switched from beer to wine because it was 4 points per serving instead of 7 points for a beer. As a side note, I have no idea what the point values are for these items now, as my health choices are no longer tied to counting calories or points. The point is (pun intended), every time I chose wine instead of beer, I patted myself on the back and congratulated me on making a “smart swap,” in service of better health.
Prior to joining WW, on average I drank a beer once a week or less. I might have two beers sometimes, and every couple of months I might go for a rare third pint at a party.
Once I made this “smart” swap however there were a series of incremental changes that followed which eventually led to a habit. When I went for a drink I’d typically have two glasses of vino instead of one pint of ale, (wine is less filling after all). And since wine was a choice I’d made for health, if wine was offered mid-week with dinner, it was an easy yes.
Unwind after a long work day? How about a smart glass of wine?
Long flight? Should probably enjoy a complimentary glass of wine… it’s the smart choice!
Wine for celebration. Wine to unwind. Wine with meals. Wine to help with digestion. Wine because I’m middle-aged.
Wine for good health!
Eventually, by the time the world hit the pause button in 2020, sending us indoors with our habits for company, I was up to one or two “healthy” glasses of wine, multiple days a week, and had abandoned all other healthy choice-making I had adopted from WW during my membership.
Now I’m sure you’ve heard that red wine is good for heart health, so maybe as you’ve been reading this, you’ve been thinking… way to go Aden. You are smart. That sounds HEALTHY AF!
Here’s the thing, wine is still alcohol which converts to sugar in the body. And the amount of alcohol in one serving of wine is the same as in one serving of beer… and I was up to two or more servings of wine. There are other problems with wine too: like how the tannins affect certain people causing headaches and other symptoms, that grapes are one of the most heavily sprayed pesticide crops in the world, and that the acidic nature of some wines can lead to digestive problems like heartburn and more.
But, logic did not stop my brain from building up an association between the word “healthy” and a full pour of wine. What started out as a simple choice, that came from a desire for good health, became a happy little lie I told myself, “I’m making a healthy choice every time I drink wine.”
But we’re not here to focus on my relationship with wine. It’s simply an easy example of a habit that formed from good intent. And I am happy to report that today I am actually making genuinely healthy eating and drinking choices… though these things do fluctuate because I’m human.
Here’s why I use this specific example:
In order to change my wine habit, I had to face the hard truth that I had been telling myself a lie: “wine is good for me”
When it comes to changing the habits of thought and patterns of behavior that we think we *should* change, what can get in the way is feeling beholden to the lies we’ve been telling ourselves. Confronting our inner liar can put us in a state of cognitive dissonance, because something that we have used to govern our behavior is creating the opposite effect, and looking at that can feel emotionally challenging.
But it’s worth facing our beliefs because belief is a key ingredient in whether or not we are able to successfully shift our trigger => reward habit loop, which is something Charles Duhigg spends a good amount of time discussing in the Power of Habit, (cleverly summarized by Paul Arbuckle here). If what we believe about the importance of a habit is a lie we’ve been telling ourselves, we will quite often ‘stick to our lie’ over facing our own cognitive dissonance.
At the Art of Change, we have been talking about the role of belief in our behavior for decades. Simply put, it works like this. If you believe something to be true, you behave as if it is true, which will set up your subconscious mind to collect evidence that reinforces your belief as truth so you get to say “I was right!”
But as my dad used to say, “being right is the booby prize.” A better goal is to be effective.
Let’s look at an improv example!
Players on stage build stories, songs, and entire universes on together through the simple process of making, accepting and building on each others offers. Many of you are familiar with the simple power of “Yes! And….” both on and off the stage. You might think that seasoned improvisers build amazingly good habits around this idea, but actually even the best of the best can fall into unhelpful habits that can really hurt the show if they’re unwilling to notice how their offers are being received.
I once had a colleague that I performed with regularly who believed that the most important thing in improv was to give the audience a good time. Any time the audience laughed he responded in his head “I’m giving the audience a good time!”
On it’s face this seems like no problem at all! The audience is happy, right? But giving the audience a good time is actually pretty nuanced. First, improv is a team sport. Sometimes going for a cheap joke ends up making the audience laugh… but will also throw your scene partner under the bus, making them look bad and compromising the story you are making together. The result, is that the momentary joke leads to a real humdinger of a bad time for the audience by the end of the set. Second, laughter can be triggered by nervousness and discomfort. When we are paying attention we can typically tell the difference, but if you’re at all distracted (maybe by congratulating yourself for your own brilliance…), the nuance can be lost. The result: you hear laughter but the audience is actually against you.
Eventually my colleagues good intent created such bad behavior on stage that people stopped inviting him to play in shows because it wasn’t fun for anyone… including the audience.
If he had simply paused to reflect “Am I really giving the audience a good time?” he could have made some valuable shifts in his play style. This is one reason that improvisers benefit from sharing post-show notes (but only if people are willing to hear them and shift their habits).
How does this show up at work? Well… simply put, it shows up in the exact same way.
One example: putting in long hours. Sometimes a project necessitates some extra effort, but there are plenty of people out there (maybe even you!) who put in extra time whether you are working against a project deadline or not.
Recently one of my coaching clients came to me with a desire for a new career path where they would “not work themselves to the bone and feel undervalued.” However solving this issue wasn’t as simple as picking a new career. Why? because this persons choice to spend long hours, didn’t stem from a request by management, nor the nature of the job. Instead there was an internal pressure driving the choice. If all they did was move to another job in a different company, they would have gotten more of the same experience.
When we took a closer look at what was happening, we were finally able to identify the lie that had been driving my clients habit of overworking. In service of wanting to do good work, they had fallen into the trap of associating time spent with proof of worthiness. Most leaders will tell you that your value to the organization stems from the results, not from the number of hours. In fact, if leaders see you churning for hours and hours while producing poor results, that’s often a recipe for a performance improvement plan!
Nevertheless, folks will slip through the cracks, because once you’re salaried, no-one is really paying attention to how much time you take, as long as you get the results that are needed. In this way, my client had developed a habit of working hard instead of smart to do their job. This led them to feel so burned out that there wasn’t a level of recognition that would ever make them feel appreciated enough to offset the damage they had done to themselves.
Here’s the bottom line:
Tying wine to good health, and bad improv to a good time for the audience, or overworking to being worthy all stem from good intent gone wild. In all of these situations, these habits led to the opposite of the desired outcome. Drinking wine led to poor health habits, selfish improv gave everyone a terrible time, and overworking was making it impossible to have any time to feel nurtured or valued.
If we are to help ourselves balance our own overactive inner liars, with our well intended inner cheerleaders, it’s important to check in from time to time!
Try asking your intuition! If you’ve developed a habit of thought or a pattern of behavior that isn’t serving you, you may have noticed that something is up. Pause, and reflect… and if you really want to make changes, realize that you may need to be honest with yourself first.
Have you ever misled yourself into a habit that needs changing? Let’s talk about it!