Why are we so hasty and impatient when it comes to making changes and achieving progress? I have noticed that the biggest obstacles that I have faced when trying to incorporate a new habit that I know would have a massive positive impact on my life in the long run, have been my own lack of patience and sense of urgency. Every time I start a plan to implement a new habit, I initially understand the resistance and discomfort I am going to feel when trying to incorporate a new behaviour into my life. The slow changing part of our brains, which runs on autopilot, does not take well to change. It wants nothing more than to maintain the status quo. Change is something that it detests vehemently. The bigger the change, the more resistance it puts up. Therefore, there are several people who have experimented and come up with ways of getting around this resistance and one of the best ways to do so is to make such small changes that the brain does not put up resistance to them so you can just slip these changes through without the brain noticing.
Of course, we all know that despite our brain putting up resistance, we are many a time able to break through such resistance and accomplish tasks that we need to get done. This can be done by utilising our willpower. There is however one main problem with utilising willpower. The problem is that willpower is finite, very short in supply and gets depleted quite soon if we use a lot of it. When we are trying to make a change, in most cases we cannot put our entire life on hold or change the entire structure of our day-to-day lives in order to incorporate a new habit. Therefore, though we can initially achieve a lot more progress by powering through the resistance with willpower, this is going to affect other areas of our lives. Having depleted our willpower in doing a lot of the new behaviour, we then lose the willpower that might be necessary to do other activities that are essential to our day-to-day life. Hence, we begin to realize that it is getting increasingly difficult to sustain this new habit or behaviour we are trying to incorporate and we quit that behaviour. This is usually the reason why most of us fail in building a new habit. We ask too much of ourselves and our brains too soon, and our slow changing brains cannot keep up and puts up massive amounts of resistance, and we finally give up, unable to break through the resistance. Over the course of the last decade, I have tried and failed to do many things precisely due to this reason.
The antidote to this issue is, to start with a very very tiny version of the behaviour or habit we are trying to incorporate so that it does not put our brains on the defensive. This method of introducing laughably small changes into our life is the cornerstone of the Mini Habit and Tiny Habit strategies that I have spoken about before on this blog. I have been able to achieve a lot of change and incorporate many new things into my life by employing these strategies. However, the step at which I have failed quite a few times is when it came to solidifying the mini-habit or behaviour before trying to do more of it. The Mini Habit and Tiny Habit strategies are extremely powerful and sustainable but they do not get you results overnight or very soon and hence they become very difficult to sustain. Not because they are inherently hard to execute, but due to our own unwillingness to be patient.
We live in a world of 21 and 30-day challenges. There all sorts of 30 day challenges relating to nutrition, fitness, journaling, meditation, gratitude etc. However, we do not see many or any 300-day challenges. Just the concept of a 300-day challenge sounds ridiculous to people. 21 and 30-day challenges rely on a few things that make them very popular. One of the most important of them is the fact that they promise drastic results. As a result, the measures that one is required to take in these challenges is quite drastic. When we take up these challenges, if someone told us that the challenge was for 300 days, most of us would never take up that challenge, as we inherently know that the actions or changes required to be made as a part of these short challenges are too drastic for us to sustain over as long a period as 300 days. The second major attraction of these challenges is the fact that the time period during which we need to commit ourselves is quite short. Therefore the twin carrots i.e. the promise of drastic results and the relatively short nature of the commitment period make these challenges very enticing. Though it seems like I am painting a negative picture of these kinds of challenges, they are not inherently bad. Many people achieve many great results by attempting and completing these challenges. Sometimes, the results that a person is able to achieve within a short period of time motivates them, as they realize that change is possible and this leads them to delve in and keep on taking action for longer and getting more and more positive results. This however, is more of an exception rather than the norm. Most of the time, the changes that need to be made are so drastic that people are not able to sustain it even for 21 or 30 days. Additionally, the people who do manage to complete these kinds of challenges have stretched their willpower to such an extent that it kind of snaps back to the usual starting point like a rubber band and they stop taking action which leads to them backsliding and losing all the progress that they have made. I have had this happen to me many a time.
As a result, nowadays I always take the consistency route and like to build habits over far more longer periods of time such as 90, 100 or even 300 days. However, a major roadblock that I have run into time and again with this method is my own lack of patience. Since our brains are wired for immediate rewards and the world we live in surrounds us with instant gratification, most of us do not have the patience that is needed to make long lasting and sustainable changes. There are a few mistakes I feel we all end up making when aiming for change, that makes achieving long-term change so elusive. One of them is that we try to increase the pace of the change too soon. When introducing a new behaviour and trying to make it a part of our daily life, it is essential to ensure that the new behaviour is not something drastic that requires a lot of willpower or that calls for drastic changes in our lifestyle. Therefore, we start small and ensure that we continue the mini sized habit or behaviour, but then when a few weeks or even a couple of months pass by and we do not see any tangible results, we get frustrated. We feel that we are not making any progress and that we will never get to our goals at this rate. Hence, we switch it up and decide to go all guns blazing and drastically increase the intensity of the change or action that we are trying to turn into a habit. This works for a while, but again the intensity of the change proves too much for our brains to handle and hence after a period of time we give up.
At the end, when looking back at the results, we see that we were able to achieve spurts of tangible results but ultimately we are still back at square one and are unable to achieve the long-term change that we desired. Now, maybe some of you have not fallen into this pattern, and cannot relate to what I am saying. Nevertheless, from my own personal experience and from what I have seen with many people this seems to be quite a common pattern. What I have realized in these cases are that our expectations and lack of patience is our own worst enemy. For long-term change, it is very essential that we do not try to do too much too soon even if we feel like we can do it. In the book The Slight Edge, which is one of my personal favourites, the author Jeff Olson draws a distinction between the Optimal Rate of Growth and The Fastest Possible Rate of Growth. The optimal rate of growth is always far less than the fastest possible rate of growth. In fact, if the rate of growth of any system is too fast, it can become overwhelming and lead to a collapse of the system. I think this is exactly what happens when we try some of the 21 or 30-day challenges or try to accelerate the changes that we desire to achieve. These short intense challenges aim for the fastest possible rate of growth and not the optimal rate of growth. As a result, more often than not, it leads to a collapse as it ends up being too much for our brains. Hence, it is vitally important to keep this in mind and aim at achieving optimal rates of growth over longer periods of time, as this gives us the best possible chance of achieving long-term sustainable habits that will form a bedrock for success over time.
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