The Secrets to BREAKING Unwanted HABITS

SPEAKER_00: Hi, this is Shelley Treacher from the Binge and Overeating Recovery Podcast. Today I'm going to be talking about how to break a habit. But first I'm going to share with you a comment because I know that it's something that you'll relate to. So it might just be comforting to hear someone voice how you might be feeling. So somebody says, I'm getting bigger by the day and I feel trapped by my body, habits, and situation. It's a difficult place to be. It is a difficult place to be, and my first feeling around this is a feeling of sadness. I wonder if you felt the same. And I want to encourage you to be kind to yourself. Today's theme is about changing habits, but of course you will find it hard to change your eating habits if coping with a difficult situation is what's causing you to eat in the first place. As it is for many of us. This week I was interviewed on the Metro's Mentally Yours podcast about how we're coping with this next phase of the pandemic. Things are starting to open up in England, and what I'm experiencing is that a lot of people are really anxious about what to do right now. And I don't think we can underestimate the difficult circumstances that we're in at the moment. For the comfort eater, one fear is about being seen again after so long and after having comfort eaten through the pandemic, and now being a different size to what people were used to. I'm willing to bet that the worst habit you're in right now, though, is self-blame and self-frustration. So your first job is to release those through understanding of how and why you got here. And you really can't end underestimate the effects of this pandemic. It's been a daily torture for all of us, and our nervous systems have responded to being under threat pretty much every day for over a year, almost a year and a half. So you might find that your system needs to calm down before you can even contemplate going back to anywhere near socializing and normal. It's not easy to put yourself first, but that is what we all need to learn how to do. I work with a lot of brilliant therapists, and even they, or I should say we, struggle with triggering, self-confidence, and comfort eating. So you're in good company, this is a very normal experience, especially now. If you want to follow my progress on giving up sugar for a month and watch the techniques that I actually use to give up comfort eating, then it has begun. You can find me live in my Facebook group, Comfort Eating Recovery Support Group, or on my YouTube channel. You can also find the recordings posted on Instagram and on TikTok. Or you can listen to next week's podcast, which will be a mix of some of the recordings that I've done. And just to add a caveat here, my aim is not to promote dieting or restriction, or even health really. It's more to show you the emotional and psychological techniques that I use and promote to stop comfort eating. But if you want to join me in giving up something small that you really would like to give up, I'd be more than happy to have you join me. So let's turn to habits and what habits are and how you can break them. Habits may be defined as actions you take on a regular basis without thinking about it. The work of C. Duhig tells us that there is a cue which triggers off a habit. He quotes research suggesting that 40% of our activity is habitual. He explains that there is a cue or a trigger and the automatic, unchallenged action that habitually follows that. So for example, after dinner you might be in the habit of eating sweets, or going to the cupboard and binging on biscuits, or if you pass the kitchen if you're at home all the time, you may have the routine behaviour of popping in to get something from the fridge. To begin to combat overeating, the idea is that we need to alter our cue or our response. So do something different. For example, go for a walk or phone a friend after dinner or squeeze a teddy bear just inside the kitchen door instead of going to the fridge. Can you think of a cue or routine that you've got that you could change, no matter how small, in fact, it's probably best to start with something small. The final part of changing this cue routine behaviour is reward. Dohig stresses that it will help to associate this new habit with a reward of some kind. The teddy, for example, might touch into your soft, affectionate side and make you feel loved or love. Or instead of going past a shop that you habitually go past and then go into for snacks, take a prettier route where you can see that cat in the window or a beautiful tree. It's a formula. You just create another formula, a different kind of trigger, a different response and a different reward. The new good habit with the association you're creating with it equals a feeling of reward. For me, instead of doing the usual thing that I do in the morning when I go into the kitchen, which often I've got to say has led to me having a little bit of dark chocolate in the morning to pick me up. Now that I've been giving up sugar, what I've been doing is putting on an uplifting song and spending a little time just selecting what song I might actually want to listen to. First things, first as soon as I go in the kitchen, I've got it set up so that I can do that straight away. It takes a tiny little bit more effort to stay still and choose what I actually want to do. And then I make a juice for myself, something really delicious and that feels wholesome. It does take a little bit more effort, but it is a reliably happy watershed in the day for me. I always end up feeling good. And it tends to kick me into gear for the day a lot better than a piece of chocolate would. Often I was finding that the chocolate made me feel a bit edgy with the caffeine hit, because I don't drink coffee anymore. But I was still chasing that little bit of a wake-up. But dancing, I've got to say, wakes me up in a much more exciting way. I've also, between clients and between the things that I do at work, I've started just taking a little turn in the garden and deadheading the flowers, looking at what's come out for that day, making a note of what needs watering and what needs doing, but really just enjoying the garden and the fruits of my labour. I actually got this one from one of my clients. She regularly takes turns in the garden just for pleasure, and I thought, what a great idea that only takes like a couple of minutes if you want it to, and also can take longer if you need to. The idea of automacity, where something happens automatically, is central to habit forming and of course then to habit breaking. You hear all kinds of numbers quoted for how long it takes to build a new habit or to break a new habit, and you hear twenty one days quoted quite a lot, but you can hear anything from twenty one days to six months, or longer, or shorter sometimes. But I couldn't find any research, so I can't think that there is any to suggest that any of these might be accurate. What research actually suggests is that the earlier you repeat something, as in you introduce a new habit and you start repeating it, the earlier you do that repetition, the more likely it is to stick. Research shows that there are three main characteristics of a habit. The first is that we're only vaguely aware of performing them, like when you drive to work and you don't notice the traffic lights, or when you repeatedly go over time working despite having told yourself that you will stop at six. This is not all bad, it's one of the major benefits of a habit. It allows us to zone out and to think about something else like dreaming or about the weekend. But obviously, we're in habits that we need to break now that we're not even aware that we do. So the first thing would be to become aware of them. The second characteristic is that the act of performing a habit is kind of emotionless. Habits lose their emotional investment, or we lose interest in them. And I think this happens around two weeks. I don't know if you've tried to break a habit and you've done so well for the first two weeks, and then two weeks later you just fall out of the habit and fall back into the old habit. I think this might be where the emotion starts to fall off and the investment and the passion about it just isn't interesting to you anymore. The third characteristic is that a habit is a connection in context. We tend to do the same things in the same circumstances. It's partly this correspondence between the situation and the behavior that causes habits to form in the first place. So change makes it easier to change. And I don't know if you found this, but like at the beginning of the pandemic, we all made a lot of changes because there was a big change. I know that different times in my life, when there's been a big change in my life, I've been inspired to change other things, and my life's taken a different direction, and I've stopped smoking and stopped doing all kinds of things and started doing things that were healthier for me that have stuck because there was a dramatic change. It's like there's some power in there being something different going on. Here's the explanation for that. Research found that if people wanted to cut down on TV and increase exercise, it was easier to do so after a big move or a change. This explains why some of us found it easier to exercise at the beginning of lockdown. New surroundings or situations don't have all the familiar cues to our old habits. Without these cues, our autopilot doesn't run so smoothly, and our conscious mind keeps asking us what to do. Whether we notice it or not, we are heavily influenced by those around us. The researchers in this study found that participants' behavior was disrupted by any changes in the behavior of those around them. So clearly, coming back to the idea of deconstructing a habit by becoming conscious of what your habit is, you have to get things from your unconscious into your consciousness. David Bell says one thing Freud put on the map is that we're all much more resistant to change than we would like to believe. All of us. He says resistance is what happens when our unconscious holds us back from making the changes we consciously desire. We are a bag of contradictions. The research of Habib even suggests that we get a high from near missus, as well as success in our addictions. This research was done with gambling, but I'm guessing it also applies to food as well. So, to sum up what that means so far, the steps to change include identifying a habit that you want to change, replacing it with a new habit, removing the negative triggers or the temptations, and replacing them with new rewarding triggers. Keeping in touch with what, how, why, and when might help you to do this. So write it down every day. Keep a weekly or a monthly evaluation and keep on making minor adjustments. Just keep a track of what's going on for you in your mind. And use reminders, especially after the first two weeks. And do the new habit at the same time each day. When you start, make it really simple. The idea is here that you are more likely to stick to it if it's easy. This is a really great start, but I also did a bit of research on the internet to find any interesting tips or tricks that other people are using. So here are some other things that you can try. So you can start by having an experimental attitude. If you see your new habit forming as an experiment, you can't fail. Treat it as information gathering rather than investing it with success or failure. This'll give you a little bit of a different perspective. Another thing you can try is interrupting your negative thought pattern with the word but. For example, I can't quit work at six because I have so much to do. But I could reduce my workload by working out what I really need to do and what I could drop. Another thing to try is to spend time with people who are what you want to be. A study showed that you're more likely to become the people around you, or become like the people around you. So make sure you like who that is. Another interesting suggestion that I read, and some people may not like this, this might be triggering, but for some people this might really work, is to replace the labels for food with something that describes what the food actually does to you. So the examples that this person gave was changing fast food to fat food and using the words big biscuits or French thighs. You could have something like heart attack burger or diabetes chocolate cake or mindless cabernet sauvignon. This could also work with the opposite when you're trying to encourage yourself to do something that's good for you. So you could call, like I might call my morning juice my happy juice, which it really is. Or best asise for exercise, or open walk for, you know, however a walk makes you really feel what it does for you. Also knowing your reason for breaking a habit can be really powerful. Especially if you link your goal with your values. For me, I'm motivated on a deeper level that's really important to me to be healthy so that I can actually handle the growing spotlight that I am undertaking. I'm talking out more, more people are listening to me, and a passionate part of me wants to be able to handle that and rise to the occasion. So I've started looking after myself to an even deeper level than I was before. Unfortunately or fortunately, I think this is endless. You can go a long way with being mindful and present and inhabiting the best of yourself. Another approach you can take is to ask what the future you would want from you right now. You can also visualize your goals and your why. Imagine and feel that outcome. Imagine yourself dealing with any obstacles and feel the reward at the end of your successful journey. Another thing you can try is replacing the idea of using willpower with the mindset of determination. I can relate to this in this project with you. I feel pretty determined because I want to prove that it's possible. And of course, having a buddy can really help you to break a cycle or a habit. I recently started meditating every day again. This time I have a friend who I report to every night. And I love hearing back from her even if she's not doing it. It's inspiring to me that she feels inspired to meditate when I say that I have, and vice versa. We're neither of us perfect at it, but it's so nice to just feel connected to her every day just for a little moment. So here we have the reward system built in too. Gretchen Rubin talks of knowing and understanding what's best for you as a useful tool in breaking habits. She divides people into categories based on how we respond to inner and outer expectations. One category she has is the obliger. This is someone who thinks more about external validation than internal, so may fail if there's no external accountability. She asks us to think about things like when and what exercise might be best for us. For myself, I know that I would hate running, where I love dancing, and that my best exercise time is in the morning. Another thought behind changing habits is replacing an empty need. Like me with my nice music and juice in the morning, I examined what the chocolate in the morning was doing for me. It gave me a lift in the morning which I thought I needed. A little dance in the kitchen or a turn around the garden with a juice is doing the same job, but actually better. The research shows that how people who have high self-control do it is by forming habits. They automate their behavior to reach their goals, so that they can then perform them without even thinking about it. This makes so much sense to me when I think about dance performance. In order to get to actual performance or the fun part of the dance, I've had to learn and practice the dance on repeat until it's become automatic in my body memory. Then I didn't have to think about it. Dohig says, you can easily change this habit. You just need to spend time experimenting with other routines to see what can deliver something similar to that old reward. Which leads me to want to finish with two reminders. The first is don't be hard on yourself. Remember that this leads to feeling bad, so will likely increase your chance of going back to the old habit or way of coping. And then secondly, to remind you to do this for yourself. Find and change what you want to change for you. This is the ultimate reward. Thank you for listening today. Next time, I'm gonna give you a report on how I'm doing with quitting sugar for a month and what the emotional repercussions of that have been and how I'm coping. And then I'm gonna start talking about relationships, support, and how you can cope with rejection. Because one of the other areas of expertise that I have is working with people to have happier relationships. Especially with people who are single who are not happy about being single. So if you're in that situation, you're gonna want to start listening in the next couple of weeks. I also want to let you know that my program is now open. At the end of August, I have a six-week program understanding your eating. So if you're wanting to go a little bit further and to meet some people who understand what you're talking about, please sign up for an intro session. I would love to meet you. That's it for this week. Thank you again so much for listening. I'll see you next Wednesday!