On Building Good Habits
How do we stop bad habits and make good ones?
I am very much a behaviorist, so I like to think of most problems as culminations of different little issues in other aspects of our lives. Take anxiety, for example. Let us imagine that “anxiety” is a small snowball that you made by hand. You throw that snowball down a big hill, and it begins to roll and grow. As it does, it picks up pieces of snow labeled “avoidance, fear, drinking habits, bottling up emotions, lack of proper nutrition, caffeine, work issues, family issues, lack of exercise, lack of sunlight, addiction, social withdrawal, poor routines, dopamine chasing,” and the little snowball becomes a massive one that is suddenly much harder to stop. That is one way to get anxiety/panic attacks. So, how do we stop the snowball from becoming bigger?
Ideally, we would want to not have a snowball in the first place, but many of us are predisposed to have anxiety through genetics, environment, socioeconomic circumstances, to name a few factors. The important thing is to reflect on what we need to change to have a healthier lifestyle and return some balance into our lives. There is not always a single miracle cure for mental health concerns. Instead, we should aim to have a plan in place that is geared toward that concern. We can exert some control over what we can control and let go of that which we cannot. In the process, the mental health concern should diminish.
Most habits that we form are meeting a need that we are either conscious or unconscious about. For example, there are many people who scroll through TikTok for hours on end at night before falling asleep because they laugh, it helps them disconnect from the troubles they have experienced throughout the day, and the videos on their feed give them rushes of dopamine (these are where the needs are). There are several negative ways the scrolling could be affecting a person. First, screen time late at night can disrupt their sleep hygiene since all light affects our eyes and alertness. Secondly, chasing that dopamine through micro-length videos is lowering attention span while building up tolerance for dopamine. Think about what kind of videos you are stopping to see. Celebrity drama? People doing something embarrassing in public? Shocking news? Political opinions? Violence? War? Pranks? If you are one of the few people that have built a healthy, wholesome feed, you are lucky, but that has to be maintained. We know what we need: we need to laugh by spending time with our friends and family, adequate time to process and disconnect our experiences from the day, and we need to find other healthy sources of dopamine. Once the habit is established, the need to scroll through the phone at night should become minimal.
Another great example from my own personal experience stems from coffee. I love the taste of coffee, but I began drinking it primarily when I was a college student because I needed the “extra fuel” to get through my long days. The habit of drinking coffee was, at times, keeping me up at night. What that meant for the next day was that I needed more coffee to get through it. Before I knew it, there was an unhealthy coffee drinking habit that was not helping me be productive, cost a lot of money, and brought back anxiety attacks on a regular basis. Instead of developing a healthy routine to support me through the long days, I used coffee to keep the pace that I thought I wanted at the time. Coffee became a problem when it began affecting my sleep, but I did not see it as a problem until I started having anxiety attacks. Consequently, I had to go through caffeine withdrawal to get out of that rut, and I had put in the work on developing the healthy routine anyway.
Steps I recommend taking:
Identify behavior and need that behavior is meeting
Identify what is and is not working (reinforcers)
Develop a plan to meet that need in a healthy manner
Change the habit and assess results
Repeat as needed
Be compassionate with yourself. Change takes time.