Mental Habits + Physical Supports
Compassionate Changes For Unhelpful Habits
Written by Larissa
At the beginning of the year, there are usually a bunch of posts, blogs, and advertisements that attract our attention toward creating “good” habits and breaking “bad” ones. While it can be beneficial to take inventory of our habits, the intention with which we pay attention is incredibly important.
Is it actually important to you? Or is it just something you feel like you “should” do? Are you trying to chase down a better version of you in the future like–if I can nail this down, then I’ll be successful/happy/etc? Or are you actually taking care of the human you are today, taking into account your available time and energy and creating a reasonable action plan?
If you said yes to the first and last questions, congratulations, these mental habits will help you in profound ways! If you said yes, or even maybe, to the middle two, you are in good company. Almost everyone I know, including myself, has tried versions of these mental habits on, too.
What Are Mental Habits?
Things like cognitive distortions (overgeneralizing: thinking “I always…” “they never…”), cognitive biases (like decision fatigue, or difficulty in choice), and your own inner dialogue/critic, are all forms of mental habits. All-or-Nothing Thinking is a cognitive distortion that can grab ahold of us, and we suddenly feel like a failure when we miss a yoga class, a deadline, or an email. It’s a distortion of mind that has us thinking about our worth as a person, rather than allowing yourself to be human. Humans forget, drop the ball, and say the wrong thing at times; that’s just human. But about 95% of us have fallen into all-or-nothing thinking!
What’s really happening is your wise brain, or wise parts of you, are taking over and putting you back into default mode to try save energy. It takes a lot of energy to change habits! Many of us already live with low-level stress–your brain is always trying to save extra energy, just in case we get chased by a bear. If that seems dramatic, I promise it isn’t. Your brain doesn’t differentiate from too many emails-or sleepless nights, or not enough nourishment-from a literal bear chasing you; your brain is simply responding to stress.
If you’re only relying on your less-than-helpful habits, the challenging news is that we always return to our habits when we are stressed; as the saying goes, “we think we’ll rise to the occasion, but we actually fall to our level of practice.”
The great news is that our helpful habits are also increased when we run into stress. This means don’t wait until you are stressed to try to work with your mental habits! Begin to focus on healthy and helpful mental habits for just a few minutes a day, so when stress occurs, you have helpful habits of mind to fall back on.
How Do I Work with My Mental Habits?
Intention is important; I prefer to call habits helpful and unhelpful, rather than “good” or “bad”.
A “good” thing can be too much at times. For example, you might get praise for being a hard worker, but we all know that pitfalls of workaholism. Even delightful sunshine can give us a burn if we’re in it too long (not really a problem right now in West Michigan, thank goodness for hot yoga 🙂.
As far as “bad” habits go, that label usually just adds shame and judgment to something we’d already like to change. This adds more stress hormones out into our body, putting us in a lose-lose situation. If I can see a behavior as simply, unhelpful–it’s much easier to be kind as I practice adjusting behavior–as opposed to seeing myself as a person with bad habits, which almost always conflates to “bad person” in our minds.
This right here: considering how you’re talking to yourself, is a way to begin working with mental habits. Though in order to consider this, you first have to be aware of how you are talking to yourself.
Awareness First, Then Hold Yourself With Tenderness
I used to follow this little formula: “Awareness Leads to Choice.” Then I realized I was missing a HUGE piece of the puzzle, because just being aware of thoughts rarely led to change. What I added to my formula is: hold whatever is in your awareness with tenderness for as long as is needed, for change occur.
- Awareness: Become aware of your bodily sensations, your thoughts, feelings, and reactions (many of these are mental habits).
- Tenderness: Hold, stay with, your body, thoughts, feelings, experiences with as much tenderness and gentleness as you can muster.
- Choice: Allow change to occur–choose kindness for yourself, more grace for others, and more space between stimulus and response–as opposed to forcing, coercing, or wrangling yourself into changing.
Force works for a time but isn’t sustainable in a way that will bring you joy and ease.
How to Shift Your Mental Habits:
We’ll begin the process by simply observing and becoming more aware of our habits, specifically our mental ones, which can be hard to uncover unless we’re looking for them. This usually requires us to slow down a little bit, otherwise our mind just runs with its most familiar neuropathways (just in case BEAR!).
We’ll also use simple physical modalities, like: touching your fingertips together, gently tapping your collar bones, and making small circles with certain joints.
Why? Because our physical form is so much more clear to us than our mental forms. Your body is tangible and visceral. Whereas your thoughts are fleeting, and sometimes we aren’t even aware they are there. How can you witness something you don’t yet see? Your body is always right here, and is our anchor and stable foundation of support as we begin working with our mind and mental habits.
Try This On:
- Take a deep enough breath that you feel movement in your torso and soften your jaw when you exhale.
- Wiggle your toes.
- Using your eyes, rather than your head: look to your left, then to your right.
- Place a hand on your chest, and notice the weight, temperature, and contact.
- Now, close your eyes, and say one nice thing your hands did for you today.
Did you notice more sensation in your torso, feet, and eyes as you did this? Great! That’s awareness. Moving your awareness to new physical places helps hone your concentration, increases your proprioception (awareness of your body in space- body wisdom), and gets you out of routine thought patterns.
That last step is working with your mental habits; seeking ways to thank your body, or noticing positive things about yourself. Any one step above can be practiced anytime throughout the day to build more awareness, tenderness, and a greater ability to choose helpful mental habits.
Simple tools like these can make it easier to handle anything that comes your way, the tough days and the best days. Win-win.
Please join us to slowly build more resiliency, ease, and joy into your daily life. Our morning sangha (community) is a supportive space for care, connection, and practice.
Join us for 7:30am meditation Monday–Friday via Zoom, or practice anytime on Insight Timer. We’d love to breathe with you.
