When Ladders Turn to Crutches - Sober October Edition

Welcome back folks. If you’ve been participating in Sober October, I hope it’s been going well so far! We’re half way! And for everyone else, I hope last week’s article got you thinking about easing up on your daily 8 cups of coffee, or nightly wind down featuring cannabis or alcohol – just for a little while. Remember that this doesn’t have to be a forever thing. We’re doing this to give our physiology a chance to reset our tolerances, perhaps gain some clarity that we’ve been lacking, and if nothing else, to participate in a little challenge and opportunity to cultivate some discipline in ways we haven’t done before.

I was pulling on my beard earlier this week trying to figure out exactly what should be covered for this weeks post. Though it may be a tad self centered, I thought – hey, why not cover what’s been on my mind since the beginning of this challenge – the power of habit.

Last week we touched on tolerance, and some ways to work around or manipulate tolerance so that we can get a bigger bang for our proverbial buck (or actual buck, 1 cup of coffee vs 5 is definitely easier on the wallet. Starbucks addicts I’m looking at you). So, it felt right to take a step back and talk about our habits, how they’re formed, and why they can be so sticky and tough to break.

Zones of Comfort

I would love to write a whole piece on how our habits stem from our desire to decrease negative experiences and promote positive ones, and how our genetics, childhood, and early life experiences play a heavy role in our habit selection and what we perceive as negative and positive and so on, but I don’t want to take too much of your time here. My goal here is to have you walk away with a new perspective or curiosity as to why we do the things we do, day in and day out; behaviours that we engage in purely to cancel out the effect of old, stubborn habits that no longer serve us.

Try to think back to a time where you didn’t have habits. Think back to a time where literally everything you did each day was entirely different than the day before. Hard, huh? 10 points to anyone who remembers a time like that. Now obviously we are constrained by biological determinism that assumes there are things we do everyday, or almost everyday, like eat, sleep, evacuate, breathe, think etc. And when you think about it, our daily habits consist of these biological processes and behaviours that we do in between them, or to postpone them, or to speed them up. Habits are essentially behaviours that we engage in that are more or less predictable and repetitive. It seems that from the moment we wake up, most of our thinking and planning is already done for us; lift head from pillow -> “gotta pee”-> run to bathroom -> “thirsty” -> drink water -> “feel tired” -> make coffee, and so on. You can see that most of our habits are aimed at satisfying biological needs and preferences. And I imagine that most of you reading this are at an age where you’ve got an idea of the habits you enjoy and the habits you don’t enjoy. You also may have somewhat consciously setup your habits such that they are “supportive” of each other. An example that plays into our theme of Sober October is with the use of drugs.

Running in Circles

I enjoy coffee so I’ll use that as an example. Maybe I’m the only one here that does this, but sometimes I can drink myself into a panic. The whole nine yards, racing heart rate, sweaty palms and pits, nervous thought patterns, shortness of breath and the ever-pleasant gastric distress. So what do I do? I have to take a minute, sit quietly, focus my attention on my breath and begin to calm my body down. It’s a fantastic skill to have when you need it but using it in instances where I’ve brought on the arousal myself seems a bit silly. I often laugh at myself; “You’ve done it again, why do you drink so much coffee that you can see sound”. So here’s a case that because of an old habit that was once useful (drinking galleons of coffee to get me through long bouts of studying for school), I continue to “accidently” drink myself into a panic and then must focus energy and time to reduce that nasty feeling. If I were able to get a grip on this old stubborn habit, I would have more time and energy to do things I enjoy.

I hope that not many of you can empathize with this specific example, but I do think that we all have similar scenarios in our lives where we engage in certain behaviours entirely to reduce or cancel out the negative effects that stem from old habits. We’re on a cycle of taking uppers after downers, and downers after uppers. And remember that we are doing this because we are trying to appease or override some biological process, that is there for a reason.

This isn’t a case to stop using any endogenous chemical to change the way you feel, but rather an incentive to examine why you reach for that cup of coffee immediately upon waking after a long night of tossing and turning because your evening night cap kept you up.

I hope this was an appropriate dive into some of the motives that drive our habits and will get you examining your behaviours and motives behind them. And if during this, your alarm bells of “this is so me” are going off, think of taking it easy for a few days, just to see what life could be like off that yo-yo lifestyle that so many of us are living these days.

Have a great week everyone.