julie dworman

July 24, 2010

Changing Bad Habits

We all have bad habits. When pressed to list my bad habits, everything I list is something that I’m very much aware is bad for me, but I still do anyway. I often find myself in a place where I want to change my behavior, but I feel that I don’t know how. Or of course I do know (just stop it, right?) but I’m just not ready to take the step past admitting that what I’m doing is bad for me (and this can be physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually, and so on). I often make plans with myself to change, which usually involve the words “after today” and then go on to describe exactly what I’m going to do in the future. I’m sure it’s not a surprise that this kind of thing usually doesn’t work.

I’m aware that this is a common human complex. It’s simple even. This is something we all experience. I’m not writing with a perfect solution, but I’d like to share some of my experience.

I think the point is that when you feel this way, you’re already at a spot where you know what the solution is, but you hesitate when it comes to execution. I’d like to quote parallels between two songs that I really enjoy:

From Kevin Devine’s “Me and My Friends”:

I wanna stop it
I wanna stop it
I wanna stop it
But it’s the only life I know how to live

and later,

I wanna stop it
…
but tonight, brother, pour me one more

And from David Bazan’s “Bless this Mess”:

Through a darkened mirror I have seen my own reflection
And it makes me want to be a better man
…after another drink

The main problem that I understand here is a universal tendency of viewing the present and the future as two distinct realities. I do this all the time. In the spring, I was dead certain that I wanted to spend the vast majority of my summer learning to play piano. I was facing four months of freedom from school, and it seemed obvious to me that I’d find plenty of time in those four months to become rather proficient at piano. But here I am, past the halfway mark, and I’ve barely made a dent of progress. Why? Because I haven’t practiced, obviously.

Practicing piano was something I expected I’d just do when I had time for it. When I was at school this past semester, I’d frequently wander into a practice room (at Smith, a practice room is a beautiful, cozy little place with a piano, a music stand, one or two chairs, a window, and a mirror that you can go into at any time, and we have dozens of them) and sit down at a piano, and feel truly content, and like I could spend an entire day fiddling around, as if I had an entire world in front of me that I was itching to explore. But I was so busy with schoolwork friends babysitting sleeping exercising life that I never had time to do this. But I always told myself that I’d do it when I had the time to. This can be a really good way of thinking (setting goals) but I made one big mistake: I made it a priority in my future, but not in my present. At the time, I could only realistically make it a priority in my future. But I never actually shifted my frame of mind into making it a priority in the present.

I’ve only practiced piano about half a dozen times this summer. And for most of those sessions, I sat down, played through a few familiar things, and gave up after ten minutes because I felt frustrated that I didn’t have the focus, or rather the structure, from practicing regularly. Even when I had the time and thought, “I should practice piano now,” I’d mess around for a few minutes and then give up. I’d sit back and think that practicing was useless because I’d never get better because I was only practicing once every couple of weeks, and so trying to get better was just a big waste of time. But of course, it’s this very attitude that has been stopping me from getting better!

Long-term goals are important and can be both very valuable and useful. But it can be very detrimental to set certain kinds of long-term goals, for example, goals that can be accomplished in a shorter time than you’ve allotted yourself for the particular task. Stuff like: in two years I’ll be in better shape, in five years I won’t be a smoker anymore, I’ll run every morning next month, I’ll stop eating chips tomorrow afternoon… There’s a fine line between what are real, productive goals, and what are ways to excuse present harmful behavior masquerading as goals. But I think it’s easy to spot the difference. If you have a long-term goal that has you convinced it’s okay to slack off now, you’re cheating yourself because that’s *not* a goal, it’s an excuse. Every goal you have should empower you to do something you’re proud of, not hold you back by making you think it’s okay to be lazy. If you always keep a “goal” tucked safely into the distant future, you’ll be just like a dog going after a treat attached to a moving string: moving through time and space, but never really getting anywhere.

I had this same complex with updating and maintaining this website as I did with practicing piano. One of my summer goals was to have a t-shirt. It was something I decided I’d do, and when I looked past the summer and into September, I envisioned my winter cap with a t-shirt for sale. Then I realized that the summer was halfway over and I hadn’t done anything to make this a reality. I would think, “It’s silly of me to get a t-shirt because I haven’t updated in months.”

But then one day I decided to make having a t-shirt a priority of my present. And I just jumped into it. Now I’ve been doing what I can to update the comic, and I’ve got a t-shirt for sale. This has only been going on for about a week, but it’s going well. The most important part about it is it’s becoming a habit; it’s becoming an engrained part of my present, which gives the habit the power to become a part of my future as well. What I need to do to become better about practicing piano is apply this same mindset there. It’s what any of us needs to do with any goal we might have: we’ve got to stop separating the present and the future, and realize that one is the direct result of the other (and realize this in the present, and not in the future, and…).