What’s Your Comfort Habit? | Max Ogles

Weekend | Worth Reading

Sundays I post a clipping I read that I found challenging, thought-provoking and potentially life-changing. It's worth reading. A post is not my wholesale endorsement of an author or their perspective. I like to learn from a variety of sources, not just the ones that reinforce my thinking.

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What’s Your Comfort Habit?

by MAX OGLES

I’m addicted to online chess. To be honest, it’s practically a family tradition; my father is an avid chess player and his father was as well. For years, I never understood why my father played chess. He had taught me how to play, but I couldn’t stand the intense, almost surgical stamina that each move demands.

Recently, though, I stumbled across live blitz chess online. “Blitz,” like it sounds, is rapid-fire chess, where opponents play not only against each other, but against a clock. Even if you outsmart your opponent, you’ll lose if you don’t do it fast enough. The games go quickly; I enjoy them because they’re short, intense mental challenges against real people. I can compete, but I only need to spend 5 minutes to finish a game.

But, as with most good things, too much is too much. Short, five-minute games can be strung together into zombified marathons, so that by the end I’ve practically played a full-out tournament. And, while some wins can be satisfying–like a spectacular sequence of moves that leaves my opponent helpless–the victories don’t accumulate much more than wasted time.

After a long series of hazy, mind-numbing games, I’m left with nothing more than temporary satisfaction, and later regret. And unfortunately, I suspect that most people can relate to this sentiment. Here are some examples:

- Sitting down to watch TV, then looking up at the clock to find it’s 3 hours later.

- Eating one single, tiny, innocent chip, then realizing the whole bag is gone.

- Buying just one more cheap book on Amazon, then discovering that it’s been several hundred dollars worth of purchases.

To some degree, these are all addictions. Maybe they’re not compulsive, life-altering addictions—but small, temporary gratifications that we tend to regret. While any one of these behaviors might be a welcome respite from a busy day at work, they can also change our behavior in unwanted ways if we let them repeat in a cycle that’s perpetually unsatisfied.

A Shortcut to Fulfillment

The trouble with indulgent behaviors is that we just never feel content. A gallon of ice cream might make me feel full, but will hardly do anything to deter my longstanding affinity for ice cream. Rather than settling on comfortable long-term behaviors, we may find ourselves settling for repetitive, short-term reward cycles.

Most people, as they work to create new healthy habits, find that they have indulgences like what I’ve described. These indulgences are ongoing, “comfort” habits that help us relax, forget our stressful problems, and suck us into a nebulous, auto-pilot state with limited control of our actions. They feel great at the time, but horrible afterwards.

Even when we recognize these undesirable comfort habits, we don’t always have the right frame of mind for addressing them. In trying to get rid of bad habits, many people make the mistake of cutting the habit off completely, essentially starving themselves of the psychological rewards that it offers them. I heard one man express this as “depriving” himself of an unwanted behavior to reach his ultimate goal. But depriving isn’t the solution. Forcing yourself into a horrible, boring insufferable life can’t be the solution—it’s just not sustainable.

What fulfills?

Most people realize that one of the best ways to end a pesky unwanted habit is to replace it with another habit. But as you shift your life from impulse and gratification to a more contented, wholesome lifestyle, you’ll want to make sure your new habits reflect that lifestyle. For example, in the book Change Anything, one of the suggested tactics is to define personal “value” words and cling to them in crucial moments. Other strategies are useful too, like simply making a list of the things that are most important to you—health, relationships, learning, etc.

Taking the time to reflect on our core values is the kind of insightful, introspective activity that is almost completely opposite from an indulgent habit. The more fulfilling activities you incorporate into your life, the less room there will be for wasteful, mindless activity. By finding the core values that mean the most to you, you can focus on fulfillment rather than gratification.

Max Ogles is a content and user engagement specialist for Change Anything.