Читать книгу The Ikigai Journey - Francesc Miralles - Страница 12

4th STATION

NEW HABITS

21 days to change your life

We are going to stop looking out of the window for a minute to turn the spotlight on our everyday life. Which habits govern your life? Which ones bring you closer to your goals and make you feel good? Which ones harm you and drain you of energy?

It is said that humans are “creatures of habit,” and it is true that habits are essential for our survival, since they are mechanisms that help us to automatize tasks without constantly having to make decisions. If we had to think about every single move we make during the day, we would end up exhausted.

The Happiness that Comes from Repeating

In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera said, “happiness is the desire to repeat,” and that may apply to something as simple as our choice of what to wear each day.

Mark Zuckerberg, the young founder of Facebook, has not changed anything about his attire since he made his first public presentation. He still wears the same gray shirt, the same dark gray sweater and the same type of pants and shoes. As he says: “I want to simplify my life so that I have to make as few decisions as possible other than those which serve my community.”

This is a very “Zen” way of simplifying things, which may be inspired by the iconic Steve Jobs, who for years wore the same things in all his public appearances: black turtleneck sweater, jeans and white sneakers.

When his biographer Walter Isaacson asked him about this adherence to a single outfit, Jobs explained that he had become friends with the prestigious designer Issey Miyake, who had already designed the uniforms for the workers at Sony, among many other companies.

Although the Apple staff objected in no uncertain terms to Jobs’s idea of supplying them with a factory uniform designed by Miyake, he finally decided to get a uniform for himself. This would be very practical for his daily routine and would also become his “personal hallmark” in his presentations.

Without thinking twice, Steve Jobs asked the Japanese designer to make him a hundred black sweaters in his size. When a surprised Miyake asked him why he wanted so many, Apple´s CEO replied: “This is what I wear. This way, I’ll have enough for the rest of my life.”

Although in a less radical way, another American who joined the club of those who are happy to repeat was Barack Obama, who dresses almost exclusively in gray or blue suits. When asked about this “lack of imagination” he replied: “I don’t want to make decisions about what I eat or how I dress every day because I already have too many decisions to make.”

Everyday viruses

Repeating habits that help make life easier brings us serenity and happiness. However, there are also bad habits that make themselves at home inside us, as if they were viruses, and unless we consciously deprogram them, it can be almost impossible to get rid of them.

When bad habits take control of our everyday life, they can send it off the rails. On the other hand, if we replace them with good habits, the train heading for our dreams will pick up speed and we will also free up mental space, which will allow us to be more creative. If we have a mental plan of what we are going to do, progress is assured.

For example, the novelist Haruki Murakami wakes up every day at four in the morning and sits down to write for five or six hours. When he finishes, at around nine or ten, he goes out for a run or goes swimming. He devotes the rest of the day to walking, reading and listening to music, as the mood takes him.

The 21-day rule

Charles Duhigg, a New York Times journalist, became interested in habits when he realized that each day at three in the afternoon, he needed to eat a large chocolate cookie, despite the fact he had eaten a good lunch and had problems with obesity.

In theory, he wasn’t hungry. Where was that irresistible impulse coming from? In the author’s words, “Habits are the subconscious options and invisible decisions that surround us on a daily basis.”

In researching the question as to what was driving him and how to alter his behavior, he gathered many successful cases and verified that you need to keep at a new positive routine for twenty-one days in order to cement it. Any new habit begins as a choice, and at the end of this period of repetition, the new habit becomes an automatic pattern.

The first step towards being able to reprogram our mind is to identify the routine that makes you do the thing that is not in your best interests. In his own case, Duhigg observed how he was overcome by tiredness every day at three in the afternoon, which he redressed by going down to the cafeteria and buying the chocolate cookie.

The second step is to experiment with new rewards in order to instill the new habit. What the NYT journalist really needed was to take a break, and the cookie represented the solution he had unconsciously incorporated into his everyday life. Once he was mindful of that, he replaced the “reward” with a healthier one—leaving his office and stopping by a colleague’s desk for a ten-minute chat.

He thus managed to have his break without adding to his weight problem.

To establish the new habit over the twenty-one days, so that it would become a part of his routine, Duhigg would set an alarm for the time the subconscious impulse came upon him. That was the signal for the journalist to leave whatever he was doing and pop out to chat for ten minutes with a workmate. If no one was available, he would go out for a walk.

According to several studies, up to forty percent of the decisions we make throughout the day are routines that our brain recreates repeatedly, and in some cases has been doing for years. They are not meditated acts. If we identify the ones that harm us, replace them with positive ones and make an effort to instill the new habit for twenty-one days, our life will take an almost miraculously qualitative leap forward.

How to introduce a new habit

We have based this exercise on Charles Duhigg’s techniques. It is aimed at “cleaning out” our bad habits and quickening our pace as we move towards our goals.

For a deeper exploration of habits and how we can train ourselves to form healthy ones, we recommend reading Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.

Let’s go to the practical application:

STEP 1 – Identifying how and when the habit appears:

• What is the bad habit?

____________________________________________

• At what time does it happen?

____________________________________________

• In which place?

____________________________________________

• Which people are around?

____________________________________________

• What emotions do you feel at that point?

____________________________________________

STEP 2 – Identifying the reward:

• What is your reward for carrying out your bad habit?

____________________________________________

• Which healthful habit can you replace it with to get a similar reward?

____________________________________________

For example, if we have the bad habit of eating candy in the middle of the afternoon, we can try replacing it with a fresh carrot or some nuts. If we still don’t feel satisfied, we can try going for a walk. Maybe the impulse to eat candy stems from feeling bored or anxious. The only way to know for sure is by testing different substitutes until we hit on one that both makes us feel satisfied and does us no harm.

STEP 3 – Establishing the routine

It is very hard to suddenly change a routine, which is why it is important to identify a reward in STEP 2 that is motivating enough for us to make the change happen.

Once we have established how and when the habit appears in STEP 1, and the reward that will replace it in STEP 2, we can move on to establishing the new routine that will help us get rid of the bad habit.

• When I feel like _______________________________,

what I will do is ________________________________

because it will give me ___________________________

____________________________________________.

For example: When I feel like eating cookies at five in the afternoon, and I feel lonely and bored at home, what I will do is go out for a walk to clear my head because it will give me the reward of energizing myself and the pleasure of anticipating sitting down later with a good book and a cup of tea.