Habits, Good and Bad

In the past couple of days, I've read a couple of interesting articles that got me thinking about habits.

The first is from Zen Habits.  In the article, the author shares his disdain for resolutions and proposes that, instead, we should be forming habits to establish long-term change.  I thought it was interesting because most of my resolutions involve forming new habits.  I don't really have a fixed objective, like to lose 20 pounds or to save $5,000 or what have you (though those are very good objectives).  Most of my resolutions involve completing a task on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.  The wording of my resolutions wasn't really a conscious decision on my part, but I'm glad I'm focusing on habits instead of set objectives. 

This isn't to say that I agree with the author - I don't think that setting fixed objectives is necessarily a bad thing to do.  I think that different types of resolutions work better for different personality types.  Most people need a goal - a prize to reach for.  This might be true for people who are very competitive.  I think I have the kind of personality where I need to focus on the process more than the endpoint, so that I don't drive myself crazy or get discouraged.

The second article is from Real Simple.   This article is about breaking bad habits, like poor posture and gossiping.  As I read the article, I realized that none of my resolutions involved breaking bad habits - just forming good ones.  Of course, this is because I don't have any bad habits to break [Insert SarcMark here]

In a way, my resolution to use a planner was a way to break my bad habit of forgetting birthdays (as I wrote this sentence, my mom texted me to remind me that my grandma's birthday is this week - how fitting).

I think that it was important to me to use positive language in making my resolutions, for the simple fact that it is easier to measure the presence of something than the absence of something.  In one of my college psychology classes, we learned that when making requests or giving commands, it's important to use language to convey what we would like the person to do rather than what we don't want the person to do.  For example, if you're in a grocery store and your toddler is sitting in the the cart and keeps reaching out to knock things off of shelves, it would be more effective to say, "Keep your hands in your lap" instead of "Stop knocking things off shelves!"  The branch of positive psychology tries to focus on people's good qualities - and trying to get people to increase behaviors that makes their life better - rather than trying to fix neuroses or deficits.  I tried to apply the same principles to making resolutions.

I'm pretty sure that this strategy, combined with my positive reinforcement behavior chart, means that I am my own lab rat.  There's got to be a good country song in there somewhere.