72: The Hidden Reason You Struggle to Change Your Habits

Do you want to start a new habit, practice or ritual that supports you and that you know will be good for you and yet you don't do it? Or maybe you do it once or twice and then you fall off and end up feeling frustrated with yourself. 

Or perhaps there's something in your life that you want to stop doing, but you just can't seem to break the bond with that habit.

In this episode, we explore why habits can feel so complicated, even for smart, driven women who know exactly what they want.  

What You Will Learn in This Episode:

• What makes a habit become a habit
• Why relying on willpower alone backfires
• Why resistance arises when you try to start or stop a habit

Here are the journalling questions to help you get clear on what’s actually happening inside your habit patterns.

1. What am I afraid might happen if this habit actually works?
2. What am I protecting myself from by avoiding this habit?
3. Which part of my identity is tied to this habit?
4. 
   
5. What might I need to face if I were to stop this habit?
6. From this place, what do I choose as my next step?

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Transcript

Tertia [00:00:00]:
Do you want to start a new practice or ritual that supports you and you know that is good for you and yet you don't do it? Or you do it once or twice and then you fall off and then you just feel frustrated with yourself. Or perhaps there's something in your life that you want to stop doing, but you just can't seem to break the bond with that habit. In this podcast episode, we're diving into habits and why they can be so tricky, even if you are a smart and driven woman who knows what she wants. Welcome to the Feminine Embodiment Podcast. This is your space to awaken your feminine energy, rise into confidence, and live from your most embodied and authentic self. I'm Tertia Riegler for Feminine Embodiment Coach and I'll be your guide as we travel to the heart of your truth and the fullness of your magnetism while you remember the innate power that is already inside of you. This episode is a result of a conversation that I recently had with a client. This client wanted to deepen her embodiment and do her embodiment movement practices more regularly, but somehow something always got in the way and on those days when she really had the time to do the practice, she said that she felt a lot of resistance and ended up avoiding it. We spoke about this and she said she couldn't understand because she has a lot of willpower and she knows what she wants and why was this happening? And so I thought this would be a helpful conversation to have here on the podcast since you may be in a similar situation where you want to start doing something or you want to stop doing something. Perhaps you want to stop checking your emails late at night, or perhaps you want to stop over preparing for presentations. Maybe you want to start taking a lunch break and taking your lunch away from your laptop outside of the office. Maybe, like my client, you want to start moving your body more or deepen your embodiment. So what are habits? Habits are any action that if you do it for enough times, any action, any behavior, even a way of thinking. If you do that for long enough, then it becomes an an automatic action behavior thought. In other words, you don't have to put any effort into it to make it happen. You don't have to start it up like turning on your car because it is already running in the background. It's a pathway that exists inside your system. There's a forest nearby where I often go for walks, and there's a particular place in this forest where the path winds through the trees. A Little bit. And even if you've never walked there before, you will still know where to go, because the path has been walked out by all of the people who go for walks in the forest. And so it's the same with if there's a behavior that we repeat enough, it's like this little path in the forest that gets noted. And the more people who walk there, the more clearer the path becomes. I also want to talk about willpower. We can define willpower as a mental resource, right? So a simple example of willpower is when your alarm goes off at 5:30 in the morning, and even though your body wants to stay in bed, you make yourself get up because you said you would. So willpower lives in our thinking brain, it doesn't live in the body. And our thinking brain uses a large amount of energy. It is less effective when we become stressed, or when we are overstimulated, or when we are overwhelmed. And also our brains can become tired quickly. Think about when you've had a hard day of a lot of mental exertion, how exhausting that can be. So willpower relies on the energy that's available in our brain, and willpower also relies on the energy that's available in our bodies. So if you didn't have enough sleep, or even if you are dehydrated, you are going to have less energy available. So there's less fuel available for that willpower. And then as women, we have a third factor that influences our willpower and that is our menstrual cycle. So we have a different capacity at different stages in our cycle because of the shifts in our hormones. So you will find that at some stages in your cycle, you have higher motivation, you're more emotionally resilient, more able to initiate tasks than on other stages. And so I always think of willpower as this finite amount that, yes, you may have. Certainly in my case, it's like that I have a lot of willpower available in the morning, and then as the day goes, my willpower reduces because of how much of that I might be using, how much energy I have available, and also of course, what's happening in my cycle. So we can't rely on willpower, no matter how driven we are, to sustainably and consistently bring change and build habits. So there must be something else at play here. And that's what I want to dive into now. And I want to speak to why we then avoid taking up a habit or starting something that we know is good for us. So when we avoid doing something that we want Even if it is something that we deeply desire, something that we know will be good for us. For example, starting to do exercises or some kind of journaling practice or a meditating practice, or even doing our yearly budget or taking breaks. We're not avoiding the activity itself. We're avoiding the internal experience that we will come across that this habit will reveal. I often say that our brains, love certainty, and new habits can create unknown outcomes. You don't know how you're going to feel or what you're going to uncover or what might shift in your life if this new thing that you want to start doing actually works. And by staying away, by avoiding this habit, by not bringing a new way of living and being in, it keeps everything familiar, it keeps everything predictable. So we can stay inside our comfort zone, where we know our environment, where we know our own strengths, and when we know our own limits. Now, I don't know about you, but my experience has been that if I stay in my comfort zone for too long, it actually starts feeling deeply uncomfortable, and it stops me from being fully satiated by life. Another reason why it can feel deeply uncomfortable to start doing things or bringing on habits that are good for us is certain habits. Think, for example, like asking for help or setting boundaries with someone in place, that can feel really vulnerable. It can feel really scary because there might be a part of us that might be worried about what the repercussions are going to be. And there are other parts of us that feel very exposed. So by avoiding bringing in habits, we also avoid feeling vulnerable. We might even. And this is the third point that I want to add here, we might even come to see or face to face with some truths that we might not be ready to acknowledge. So we might discover through maybe a practice, like an embodiment practice, or like journaling or like spending time in reflection. We might find out I'm not as happy as I pretend to be, or I want something different than what I've built, than what I've had. And that can be not only deeply vulnerable and uncomfortable to face this, but also once we've seen something, once we know something, it's very difficult to. Well, it's impossible to unsee it or to unknow it. So when we come face to face with these truths, when we find the truth of that in our experience, then our next step will be to take a different action or to choose something different. And I deeply, deeply respect how scary it can feel to rock the boat. The flip side of the coin is also true for why we stay attached to habits, why we keep on doing things even if we know we shouldn't. And I'm putting that in quotation marks, even if we have habits that we know aren't good for us. And again, it's not because we, we don't have discipline or we don't have willpower. It's usually because whatever it is that you are doing meets a deeper need. So you might find yourself checking emails late at night because this is how you feel assured that you're not going to miss something. Or you keep on doing workouts or exercising even if you have an injury because you yearn to get the sense of achievement. You might always stay busy and find something to do because keeping busy and distracting yourself avoids you from having uncomfortable feelings. And I'm using these examples as real life examples of things that I have experienced myself. And there might be other examples that you can add to this. I see that so often our habits, those things that we do that we don't want to do, it's very much tied to our identity, tied to who we believe we are. And as soon as we start to challenge that, as soon as we start going against, I'm someone who responds quickly. I'm someone who always pushes through. I'm someone who is very reliable, even if that pushing through, reliability, always responding quickly, even if that harms us in the sense that it is extractive of us, it makes us put other people's needs ahead of our own. If our identities are caught up in this, it's very difficult to change that. So that makes sense. And then the final thing that I want to say here as to why it can be so difficult for us to break these automatic patterns and habits that we fall into is whenever we are stressed, our brain defaults to the habits that are already there. So whether you find yourself in a situation, situation where you are wanting to start a new habit and it just doesn't want to take off, or you would like to stop a habit that is not so helpful. There's something that these have in common and that is that they are protecting us in their own way. The resistance and the struggle is a way of protection. My experience has shown me that for habits to really stick or for habits to really drop, for us to have a sustainable change that lasts, we need to be making conscious choices rather than automatic ones. We need to start wiping out that pathway that we keep on walking even if we don't want to. And we need to start making a new path in its stead. So I have some journaling questions that I am going to leave you with. And this is a good point for you to start to begin to explore the relationship that you have with your habits. And I will leave the questions for you in the show notes. So the first question is, what am I afraid might happen if this habit actually works? If this takes off, if this becomes a regular instance?

Question number two, what am I protecting myself from by avoiding this habit?
And then the next two questions are more for those habits that you want to let go of. So question number three is, which part of my identity is tied to this habit? What does it help me believe about myself? Is another way to phrase that question.
And then question four, what might feel vulnerable or uncomfortable? What might I need to face if I were to stop this habit? And then the very final question is, once you've reflected on these, the final question is, from this place, what do I choose as my next step? I would love to hear any insights that you landed on as a result of this episode. So you can message me on Instagram or you can send me an email. The links for both will be in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you. If you enjoyed this episode, then please would you consider sharing it with a friend? Sharing it with someone who also needs to learn a little bit more about the dynamics behind habits. That is one of the ways in which you can help me let this podcast grow. And it's also a way to help your friend. Thank you so much for joining me today and I will speak to you in the next one. Bye.