Yesterday I found myself turning into my old house, from which I moved six months ago! Don’t even start to tell me it takes 21 days to change a habit! After six months of daily driving in and out of my new(ish) drive, my brain circumvents the more recently programmed habit and relapses! OMG!
So what caused my brain to forget, in that moment, all of the retraining it had undergone? And where does that leave those of us who are tenaciously clutching on to the notion that if we keep our noses clean for 21 we can terminate our unhealthy eating habits and become a goddess?
One simple cause in this case was that I reintroduced an old trigger. I drove a different way, in fact the old route I used to take to my old home, and in doing so, allowed my brain to reactivate an old neural pathway that associated with my old address.
Another cause was how firmly entrenched the old habit had been. I had previously lived at the address for fifteen years… now that’s a hard core habit right there!
So how can we even dream of changing habits that we enjoy? That we’d rather not have to change, but are keeping us fat, when we seem to have an innately wired death grip on habits we have no desire to even maintain?
It’s all about that Trigger.
Identify and eliminate the trigger. In this case, the trigger was the old roads that I don’t usually drive, that lead to my old address. So next time you succumb to an overwhelming urge to follow through with an deep-rooted habit, don’t be self-defeatist, instead be constructive and analytical.
Write down 10 ways you might be able to dodge that trigger in future!
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