Breaking up is hard to do.

Breaking up is hard to do.

Or so the song goes.

The song is about the end of a romantic relationship, but the topic on my mind isn’t about couples splitting up.

I want to contemplate cutting ties with bad habits.

Just to begin with a disclaimer – for those who didn’t know me in a faraway past life – I used to smoke cigarettes. Regularly. And I thoroughly enjoyed it! So, I speak from the heart and not from the pulpit on this one.

Why is it that it seems so difficult to shake those nasty habits and yet they become so easily integrated into our lives? And yet when it comes to the good habits, they seem so difficult to adopt.

I mean a habit is a habit, right?

Despite labelling them both habits, we can’t really compare the two when it comes to making them integral parts of our lives (or leaving them far behind). On the one hand the bad habit provides us with a feeling of instant gratification and on the other, the good habit usually only provides us with a long-term, often intangible benefit.

The choice between the two goes back to the base of the infamous marshmallow test. Can a child resist eating the marshmallow long enough to be rewarded with not one, but two of the soft fluffy mounds of sweetness? Or does the deep desire to be rewarded immediately win out?

The test focused on children and the findings were used to try to determine the correlation between impulse control at a young age and future success. The result? The impulse control shown in the child corresponded with a higher success level in adult life[1].

But delaying gratification is not just child’s play. As we get older, we are consistently put in situations where we have to make choices and where the outcomes provide us with either the satisfaction of instant gratification or the promise of a delayed reward.

The choice is ours, but just like the child tempted by the reward of an immediate fix, it’s not always easy to make the “right” choice.

This is even more so true today, in a world where we are literally bombarded by stimuli releasing dopamine into our brains on a constant drip, making it so much more difficult to delay rewards[2]. The nicotine high that comes from vaping is almost instantaneous, requiring virtually no effort, whereas the high one gets from a good workout only comes after the hard work gets put in!

Is this not where the praised mantra of living in the moment must be taken with a grain of salt?

Good habits require foresight. And that long vision is also need to ditch the not so healthy habits.

We need to set our sights on that finish line and chart our course.

When the goal is incorporating a good habit into our lives, the path should be cleared: no hurdles should be standing in the way of us adopting this behaviour. It could be as simple as preparing our swim bag the night before, and putting on our suit when we first get up and then driving straight to the pool. No time to make excuses.

When trying to cut ties with a vice: distance is our friend. Any impediment we can put between ourselves and the unwanted habit will help to make it more difficult to indulge. Think of how cigarette smoke used to billow everywhere: in the office, in the home, even in school! Now, you want to light up? It will cost you! Not only financially, but you also have to head outside, and stand 9 metres away from the door. Less enticing when it’s -30 outside!

Regardless of whether we are trying to start something new (and good) or ditch the bad, what’s important is that day one is a win. Day one brings us one step closer to the finish line. Once we win day one, we can tackle day two.

It’s all about incremental progression. It’s the turtle rather than the hare. Slow and steady wins the race.

We’ve got this!

(I am off to go pack my swim bag now!)

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[1] While the conclusions of the marshmallow experiment regarding the predictably of future success based on a toddler’s capacity to postpone pleasure have been put to the test recently, the concept of delayed gratification is still highly relevant.

[2] For a good overview of the dopamine conundrum in today’s digital society, watch this great video which is simple yet very informative – I highly recommend sharing it, especially with teens! How I tricked my brain into like doing hard things (dopamine detox) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QiE-M1LrZk