Don’t Kick Your Habits. Embrace Them

We all have habits we’d like to stop, yet research suggests most of our efforts at self-reform fail within two years. One reason for this is that when we slip back – which is the normal rhythm of learning and growth — our threat brain response can be triggered. When I fail at my diet, when I pick up a cigarette or a drink, or when I fall once more into the same destructive relationship habits, my threat brain emotions can lead to feelings of shame, depression, self-contempt, and inadequacy.

Often we "hear" our threat brain response in the voice of our inner critic, who bullies, reprimands, and drives us. Our inner critic makes us feel bad about ourselves in order to frighten us into doing better. However, fear and other threat brain feelings such as anxiety, disgust, and anger do not support healthy change and growth. The impact of chronic stress, which is the consequence of an over-active threat response, locks us into habits that mess up our bodies, minds, and relationships.

Research shows that self-compassion soothes the threatened brain and cultivates warm awareness. People who score high on self-compassion are more likely to manage their problem habits than those who are critical and self-punishing. Warm awareness is a safe brain state that enables us to appraise and understand all experience as part of a flow of events that has carried us, willingly or not, in its current. We did not choose our genes, our parents, or our formative experiences. And we did not design the unconscious processes that influence us, or the social culture which tells us how things should be. Nevertheless, we do have to live with the consequences of our evolution, parenting, and culture. Warm awareness enables us to accept the givens of our human condition and to discover insights that free us to think differently about how our life must, is, and could be.

The first step towards warm awareness is to recognise and accept that being human is not – and never will be – easy. The capabilities and qualities we have acquired in our long evolution are mixed blessings. Our ability to think and remember, our propensity to care for each other, and our drive to create sophisticated civilisations can also work against us. And when they do, these human "advantages" can become curses. Consciousness, memory, our own character, our family, and our culture are the most potent curses and they afflict us all to different degrees. And it is when we are caught in the grip of our problem habits that we feel their painful effect the most. What breaks these curses is the growth of compassionate consciousness enabling us to become more and more aware of the truth of our lives, not as we are told it is but as it is.

However, instead of facing our problems and understanding them as our best attempt to manage our curses, many of us resort to psychological defenses – I call them spells – that create the illusion that we are coping, that we are not in threat and that everything is as it should be. These defenses include denial (convincing ourselves there is no problem), projection (getting rid of aspects of ourselves by placing them in another, e.g. the person who never gets angry but sees anger in everyone else), and regression (an "escape" to an earlier stage of development and its childish ways of coping).

Perception practices re-direct the flow of our attention and cultivate a quality of attention that supports deeper understanding. They help us to notice and regulate our emotional reactions, to become more receptive to — and curious about — our experiences, and to use our imagination to surface unconscious knowing. These practices grow compassionate consciousness by gently bringing new insight or "content" into awareness. They engage the intuitive, right hemisphere of our brain and open up the way we attend to our world by helping us to become more receptive to the meaning and message of our experiences. These practices offer an alternative to the more common strategies of denial, repression, avoidance, quick fixes, and simplistic solutions that many of us resort to when we feel conflicted, stressed, or uncertain.

Our problem habits represent how we try to cope with threat brain emotions that are triggered by the five curses. These curses influence the ways in which we think and remember, the way in which our character has been shaped by family experiences, and the way culture and social norms shape and control us. Breaking free of habits involves first understanding how our habit is trying to protect us. For each of us, that is a unique story worth discovering, and as we do, we begin to perceive that alternative versions of "truth" and possibilities for safety are available to us. Held in warm awareness, this realisation leads to a state of indifference, which, contrary to being uncaring and insensitive, is the essence of true relationship – with ourselves and eventually with others.