Note to readers: Healing Space is a weekly series that helps you dive into your mental health and take charge of your wellbeing through practical DIY self-care methods.
For some of us, the thing we leave behind is social media, for others it’s a workplace, a set of friendships, colleagues, or patterns of behaviour, such as ordering in a greasy dinner, or a losing investment streak built on poor choices, that we now recognize as no longer being in our best interest.
Or rather we want to release these, but we get in our own way. We often find ourselves saying ‘I wish I could let this go’ but don’t really do anything to make that happen. Why is it so hard to change ingrained patterns of behaviour?
It can help you to put the last first.
Beliefs and habits rarely release us on their own. They become ingrained, so they are best replaced rather than eliminated. So, before you change an eating habit, or an exercise pattern, a decision-making process, ask: what do I want it to be? Have a clear idea of what doing something differently would look like. If you don’t want to work in this industry anymore, what do you see yourself successful doing? If you want a different dining pattern, what would you like to see yourself eating, at what time, instead? And don’t lie to yourself. You may see yourself as a Korean pop idol but if you’re practically unlikely to be one, you may have to re-calibrate to a more realistic expectation. What do you really want to eat for dinner? It may be dal and rice or a parantha. No use picturing yourself chewing lettuce because it’s what you think you’re supposed to be eating. You want something warm, spicy and homely. When you’re honest with yourself, you can cater to the feeling rather than falsifying it. Can you eat the dal without the rice or grease? Can you allow yourself the evening meal and compromise on the daytime meals and snacking? When you tell yourself the truth, you give yourself options to work towards it. Then you can build an honest replacement habit, one that makes you feel genuinely good about it and yourself. The same goes for friendships, work commitments. Perhaps you want to feel accepted, a sense of belonging, an ease instead of being in an important group that you fear you have to constantly keep up with.
What do I want in place of what I have? Most of us never get around to answering this question for ourselves. We just don’t want what we already have, that’s all we know. That’s why we rarely release it, because we have no conception of what we’re moving towards.
What you want instead doesn’t always have to be a precise picture. For instance, you may know you want flexible work timings, work from home options, a reduced commute, more independence in action; you are creating a composite image. You are now able to eliminate what won’t give it to you. To do this, you need clarity about why you won’t accept certain things in your life anymore. The stress is putting you at risk for heart illnesses, the eating out is affecting your insulin resistance, your poorly researched decisions are losing you money in real time, the friend keeps getting you drunk or putting you in situations you don’t want to be in… often there are real life consequences for the patterns you are stuck in. We also tend to disregard how we feel. I feel miserable when I wake up after a binge session, I feel irritable, my mood is off whenever I meet said person, I panic, these are valid reasons not to engage also, even if nothing specific has taken place. It is perfectly valid to want to feel better. It’s only when you prioritise what you want, and distinguish it from what you don’t want, including how you don’t want to feel, that you can begin to make a change.
A combination of these two forces will give rise to the second one, the courage and drive to break off a pattern. As you begin to move towards the replacement pattern, you will find the process is a back and forth. You will break the pattern once, slip back twice. They key here is to not limit your fresh starts. When you recognize that it’s a process and not one chance, you are free to start over again, repeatedly. How many times can you try again? If you were playing a video game, how many times would you reattempt the level? There is no store at which fresh starts are rationed. What makes you feel that you have to get it right the first time you try to make a change? It may be a while before you find the right job, the new group, the right diet or replacement habit. If you slipped up yesterday, start again today, now. Now is a constantly recurring variable. In time, if you have chosen your replacement habit honestly, for how it makes you feel, prioritizing your best interest, your nows will line up and lead you to where you want to be.
Cutting out the toxic
1. Identify the pattern. Observe how it plays out, its peak and fall.
2. Identify the trigger. What feeling or thought makes you reach for the toxicity?
3. What activity or state of being would you like to replace it with?
4. How would you like to feel that you don’t feel now?
5. Check your self-defeatist talk. So what if you slip up? Start again.
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