Hapless Habits
By Gentry Patterson
A few months ago, on a comfortable Saturday morning, I blissfully wandered into the bathroom with my coffee cup in hand and bumped my foot against the scale, knocking free a thin layer of dust. I looked down at the accusatory black square with a twinge of mild annoyance.
Hmmph, I thought to myself, with an unnecessary degree of indignance.
Fine. Intrude on my routine? You’re definitely getting stepped on.
I stepped on the scale.
The needle on the scale started spinning like the Wheel of Fortune. “Yikes,” I accidentally said out loud, with a quick hop right back off to the bathroom floor. I set my mug down on the counter and hung my robe on the door.
Like some kind of reverse Wheel of Fortune contestant, I closed my eyes, crossed my fingers, stepped back on the scale, and hoped for the lowest number possible. One, two, I opened my eyes and took a peek…
“Yikes!” The damn thing was still spinning.
Finally, it settled on a number too big to share here in this article. Really?? I thought to myself.
I checked my pockets for my phone and keys. Nothing. All those pounds were just me. I stepped off the scale, heavy with a new level of self-awareness.
The fact was, my weight wasn’t the only thing at that moment in my life that wasn’t satisfactory. While my waist was growing, few other aspects of my life felt like they were following suit. I was feeling a sense of stagnation—not failure, per se, but definitely not success.
I slipped one arm and then the other into my robe, picked up my coffee cup, and headed back to the living room to decide what to do about this unacceptable state of affairs. Plopping down on the couch, I whipped open my trusty laptop and began the process of gathering information.
First stop, Google. “How to be successful.”
In 0.59 seconds, Google delivered me 13,400,000,000 results. Oh, thank god, I thought to myself. That was easy.
I scrolled down a ways until one result caught my eye. I can’t remember the name of the article, but it was something along the lines of “367 Successful Habits to be a Trillionaire.” I do remember thinking, Nice. Action items. Let’s do it!
So began my journey into the world of habits.
So began my journey into the world of habits.
Habit creation. Habit tracking. Habit optimization. Habit hacks.
I was all in. “Drink more water every day,” said one source. I dutifully placed my water bottle on my bed stand to “reduce friction”. One website offered a new poem every morning—I signed up. Another website offered tidbits of the daily news headlines, delivered to your inbox. I signed up for that too.
I signed up for lots of things. I set up chess matches that required me to make at least one move a day. I set a specific time in the evening to write a specific amount, at a minimum, in my journal. I downloaded and printed off checklists, which I taped to the wall beside the bathroom sink.
So the weeks passed, the checkmarks on my list accumulated, and the habits grew into a routine. And I started to feel better! I started winning chess matches. I started seeing improvements in my push-ups and pull-ups. It felt good to draw my little check marks each day, and it felt productive to be busy in an organized way throughout the day. I had my habits, I had my growth, I had what felt like what I’d been searching for—a pathway to success.
It was right about this time in my habit journey that everything seriously and abruptly changed.
For a few weeks, my girlfriend had been suffering from sporadic episodes of vertigo and dizziness. She didn’t know what to think of her symptoms, and neither did the ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat Doctor). On the very slight chance that these symptoms were the result of something serious, like a brain tumor, the doc sent Heather in for a scan to “make sure we cover our bases,” although she assured us the odds of such a thing were minimal.
The scan came back positive. A large, dangerous tumor had grown around Heather’s auditory nerve, and it was pressing against her brainstem. Surgery was scheduled immediately, and on the day of the operation, Heather spent over nine hours on the operating table.
The surgeon was able to successfully remove the tumor, but there were complications. For nearly a month, we yo-yo’d in and out of hospital rooms and intensive care, with Heather ultimately undergoing three separate operations.
Each day of that month stretched into what felt like centuries, yet it all passed in a blur. There was no routine, only urgency. Day-to-day. Chaos as nurses rushed to respond to a spike in intracranial pressure. Sleepless nights of monotonous beeping from a dozen instruments, Heather wired up from skull to toe. Intense bursts of pain, blood tests, scans, crises, rest, a quick succession of vignettes that loosely assemble together in my memory.
For nearly a month, we yo-yo’d in and out of hospital rooms and intensive care.
It was an extremely stressful time, and the very last thing on my mind was my habit checklist. I had two objectives each day—take care of Heather, and do my job. There was no question about priority. Not once did I think to myself, Wait, did I read the poem of the day? Did I make my daily chess move? These habits fell completely by the wayside, because, frankly, they were completely unimportant.
We’re back home now, but things have changed. I’ve brought back the checklist, in a way.
This time around though, it’s different. It’s shorter. Many of the items that fell by the wayside while we lived in the hospital, I’ve allowed to remain by the wayside. That doesn’t mean that I don’t play chess anymore, or read the poem of the day, or any of those other things.
They just don’t make it onto my list, because through this experience, I’ve realized something very important about habits.
Habits do not exist in a vacuum, and having habits for the sake of habits is the wrong approach. Becoming a better person is not about the checklists. It’s about who you believe you are. Self-belief is the foundation of sustainable patterns of behavior. As soon as things get serious, the habits that aren’t based in your understanding of your own identity go right out the door.
While I was in the hospital with Heather, I didn’t need an itemized list of actions to get up and make myself be a supportive boyfriend. The daily “habits” I adopted—bringing Heather food, tracking her symptoms, checking in with updates for friends and family, and so on—were automatic. I didn’t need external motivation or the tyranny of an arbitrary list to be there for her. I knew she needed help, and I believed that I could help her, in however small of ways. That was enough.
Likewise, I didn’t need a checklist to do my job. I told myself the story of I am a professional, and the actions followed naturally because I believed that story. I believed in myself. I knew I was a professional, and so I acted out the part.
Now that I grasp this connection between habits and self-belief, I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. It’s a relationship that works in both the positive and negative directions.
Negative self-beliefs spawn bad habits. If you think of yourself as an impulsive person, it’s harder to avoid impulsive behavior. If you believe that you can’t function without your morning cup of coffee, you will function more poorly if for some reason you can’t get your cup of joe.
These days my checklist isn’t made up of tasks. It’s made up of beliefs. Was I a good partner today? Was I a professional today? Did I live up to my values? Did I do the kinds of things that the person I want to become would have done on a day like today?
These are the checkmarks that matter. Who cares how many squats you did this morning? Who cares if you did 10 minutes of yoga or 10 minutes of meditation instead?
The stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves form the foundation for our behavior. There’s no use in trying to form habits that aren’t grounded in a sense of your identity. The habits that were linked to my understanding of myself as a professional and as a supportive boyfriend…
Those are the ones that stuck when things got tough. Everything else? Dust in the wind.
Gentry Patterson is an American writer and cartographer living in Birmingham, Alabama. He loves to be outside and enjoys spending time with a good book. He leads the Dead Foot Book Club.
