Rewiring Old Habits
You know when you’ve finally decided - “enough is enough! I’ve got to start exercising and eating better!” - you research your options, sign up to a gym, you have a rough idea when you’re going to go… and before you know it something comes up and you’re back to promising you’ll start again on Monday?
If you’re nodding along… Welcome. You’ve found your people.
Now this cycle of slipping back into your old ways is nothing new.
We. have. ALL. been there.
And I really mean all of us. You see, you can have a perfect plan, you can pay your hard earned cash, you can put skin in the game. And that still doesn’t guarantee you’ll follow through. Not because you don’t want to make these new changes, but because you have old responses to stress that didn’t sign up to the new routine. Convincing your old responses to change is a whole different skill. They’re established, they’re comfortable, and they’re the exact committee you need to focus on if you actually want transformation.
Setting goals and making plans is easy, it’s the changing that’s hard.
Let’s think back to when you made commitments without the old timers buy-in…
Like when you said you want to cut down on sugar… then you had a stressful meeting and at 4pm you were halfway through a chocolate bar thinking, what is wrong with me?! I just can’t help myself. I guess I just love food and it’s part of who I am (even though deep down you wish that wasn’t true).
Or that time you wanted to start working out in the morning. You set your clothes out, booked your fitness class, and planned everything perfectly… but then you stayed up late scrolling through social media, and slept through your alarm the next morning. It’s not because you didn’t want to workout, it’s because the bedtime shift couldn’t care less about the morning routine.
Understanding your habits
To understand what’s happening in those moments, you need to know how your brain and nervous system actually influence your behaviour, because that’s where these old habits are wired.
Your brain is a prediction machine. Your nervous system scans your internal and external environment through your senses, and feeds data back to your brain so it can make its predictions. Your brain then interprets that data, predicts what’s going to happen and how you should respond based on past experience.
Your system is constantly asking, “am I safe?” and “how do I get my needs met in this situation?”.
If your brain interprets a stressful meeting as threatening, you feel you’re being judged, or someone’s angry at you, and your nervous system feeds back the sick feeling you have in your belly, and asks your brain, are we safe?
Your brain looks in its folder of “stressful meeting, sick feeling and finds that sick feeling means they think I’m incompetent, I’m in trouble”.
It flips through the pages to the “what do we need and how do we get our needs met in this situation?”
Your brain will know you feel bad, so it’ll want to comfort you, and it will use the strategy it’s used before. In this case… chocolate. There you go, all better now. And even though that comfort lasts all of 5 minutes, it usually successfully diverts your attention from the stressful meeting to the fact that you’ve got no self control around sugar and you’ll feel more in control by promising you’ll start again on Monday.
The point here is that wanting to build a new habit is not automatically going to reconfigure your old responses to stressful situations in your life. Sure, sometimes a new habit will naturally replace an old one, but a lot of the time, rewiring those old stress responses is a separate skill, that takes time to build because they are engrained, and relate to a primal, powerful part of your survival wiring.
The most effective way to change your stress related habits
The very first, and most powerful thing you can do, is reduce the overall stress on your nervous system. You see, your nervous system is like the rev counter on a car. It’s the live gauge of how much pressure you’re under. When those revs are constantly high, you’re more at risk of a blow out or breakdown. Which, in human terms, is when our stress response is triggered - you suddenly snap at someone (fight), you avoid addressing something (flight), or you collapse your needs and people please, numb, run on auto-pilot and disengage from life (freeze).
When stress is a constant, your nervous system will keep needing to cope with that stress, meaning you’ll engage in whatever old strategies you’ve used to soothe stress before. In addition, your stress response, like everything in your body, gets more efficient the more you use it. So the more you get stressed about things, the easier it will be for you to get stressed about things.
The opposite is true. The more your nervous system feels safe, the further away you are from your tipping point, and the less likely you are to engage in unhelpful coping behaviours. Which is to say, you have more capacity to cope with stress. And the more you actively regulate your nervous system, the easier it will be for you to feel regulated.
That’s why things like yoga, meditation, and Pilates can feel so transformative. It’s not that they change your stress response so much as they help your nervous system bring down its revs so you have more time to choose better ways to respond.
The good news is that you don’t need to go to yoga or meditate for an hour everyday, in fact, little and often is actually more effective because it helps prevent stress from building up throughout the day.
Three ways to regulate the nervous system throughout the day.
Deep breathing : filling your lungs with air until you can’t take any more air in, then taking a sip of air through your mouth and holding your breath for 4 counts. Then exhale as slowly as you possibly can, as if you’re blowing through a straw. Repeat 4 or 5 times.
Neck tilt & eye movement : tilt your head, expose one side of your neck, and look into the corners of your eyes at the ceiling. Same deep breathing in and slow exhaling out. Repeat 3 times before changing and doing the same on the other side.
Cleansing breath : for a more activating type of regulation, especially good when you feel anxious, or find yourself ruminating, reach your hands above your head and inhale as much air as possible, then pull your arms down fast and exhale forcefully through your nose. Do it for about 20 breaths, and repeat 3 times. Between each round, close your eyes and notice how your body feels. (This may be a working from home one though as your colleagues might think you’ve forgotten where you are!)
Remember : we’re not trying to solve your problems with breathing, or moving your body so much as it’s teaching your body to feel safe enough to find better solutions to your problems.