The Habit Never Dies, It Just Gets Quieter

You’re not going to like the first point of this, I promise. So stick around for the second half, because I promise it will come full circle and make sense.

It’s a really beautiful thought that I’ve been thinking for a long time in my life, which is that every time you speak, your voice goes out and it impacts and shapes the world itself. And even if, from the physical perspective, the signals themselves get absorbed into the world, everything you speak, everything you say, everything you do becomes a part of the noise spectrum of the world itself. And I’ve always really liked that analogy, because it means that when I speak, when I say, when I do, it is actually impacting the world itself, even if it’s just changing the baseline level of noise that exists.

So take any signal. When it attenuates, it doesn’t actually disappear. The wave is still there. It just gets smaller and smaller until it drops below a threshold where you can’t detect it. But theoretically, it never hits zero. It’s still there. It’s just too quiet to hear.

Now put your own patterns on that same curve. The voice that says, “I’m not good enough.” The pull to open a new tab the second a problem gets hard. The slide back to where you were after two good weeks. If you’ve been running one of those for 20 or 30 years, some part of you keeps waiting for the day you do enough work and finally it’s gone. Like the behavior is gone. You put the phone away and you never pick it back up to scroll and get distracted. It’s deleted, zero, gone. And here’s the first point you won’t like: that day is not coming.

The reason that can be freeing is because it gives you permission to stop shaming yourself for a deeply ingrained behavior continuing to come up even when you work on it, and especially when you don’t. But in order to do this, you must accept that this is a worthy obstacle to fight and overcome. Whatever the obstacle is, doomscrolling, procrastination, overthinking, it must be a worthy obstacle to fight and overcome. That’s a topic I talk about in other pieces of my content.

And just because these are large obstacles that have been ingrained for many, many years doesn’t mean you can’t create significant control in a short amount of time, like 90 days. What it does mean is that you can create enough control such that after this period of time, 90 days, 120 days, you have the awareness, the tools, the accountability, and the competency to handle the urges and triggers that will continue to come up. You solve for the 20% of triggers that lead to 80% of the behavior, and you create mastery over those 20. And then when the 80% come up, which are more rare, and potentially still emotionally intense, you have enough proficiency to deal with them. They may be more or less intense or emotional when they do. Like the rare things that trigger you to doomscroll, or procrastinate, or overthink. It could be the loss of a loved one. It could be really intense. When those things show up, you have greater competency in dealing with the urges associated with that behavior.

But this is the reason the curve never fully attenuates to zero. There’s always some potential trigger or obstacle that will lead you to want to engage in these behaviors you’ve been engaging in for many, many years. The overthinking, the procrastination, the doomscroll, all of it could continue to come up as a coping mechanism to triggers you have yet to experience. So you can imagine that once you have effectively buried the behavior deep in the noise, because you’ve created control over the many common 20% urges that lead you to scroll or procrastinate or overthink, there’s still always the capacity for one of these deeply triggering events to bring it back up. I mentioned a loss, but it could be a breakup, a sickness, a layoff. This doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to fall into the behavior when these deeper triggers show up. It means you’ll be more competent in handling them than you otherwise would have. But it does mean that they can still, and may still, and likely will still occur. The reality is that if you look at behavior change from this lens, you give yourself a higher probability of completely eradicating a behavior.

Let’s take a silly example, something like a childhood behavior that’s existed for a long time. When you were a child or a baby, there was a high likelihood that you would break down in emotions and cry and throw tantrums when things didn’t go your way. And you learned, through conditioning, that this wasn’t an appropriate way to behave. And what ended up happening was that early in your life, you started engaging with things you didn’t like in a different way, and you stopped throwing tantrums. Your capacity to break down in tears over a difficult event still exists. You can still cry over frustration. That’s still possible. But it’s likely not something you ever think about doing anymore. It’s a behavior that is very much eradicated, even if not completely gone, because theoretically a really intense experience could actually evoke it. However, by and large, it’s not something you think about, and it’s not something you do or engage in. It’s basically completely gone, even if it’s still there.

The point of this is to say that the same thing happens with behaviors you’re actively trying to change right now, like doomscrolling, or better focus behaviors, distractions, overthinking, all that kind of stuff. You gain control over these things. It’s just that the triggers for them never fully go away, and because they’ve been conditioned or engaged in for so long, it’s very likely that you’ll continue to feel triggers or urges associated with them for a long time. That doesn’t mean you can’t have control over it. Those aren’t mutually exclusive things. There still will be events that could potentially or theoretically bring them out again. But if you treat behavior change through this lens, what ends up happening is you quickly get to a place where the behavior enters the maintenance realm, where by and large you never think about it because you don’t engage in it, like breaking down in tears when you were a kid. You just recognize that a theoretically triggering event could bring it back up. And because that’s true, it warrants some attention, continuing to diffuse it, or paying attention to it, or just bringing it to your awareness or your subconscious, so that it never again actually gets acted out, because you have methods in place to handle these more extreme or rare moments when they occur. And as we’ve already established, you created competency and control over the many common urges for these behaviors to occur.

Because the premise of this is actually that the work itself starts by targeting the behavior itself. And because you’re now committing to working on yourself and on this behavior for the rest of your life, that’s what this commitment means, the work itself actually starts to change in the way that you target it. It’s not just two or three hours of self-reflection every day on doomscrolling. Over the course of time, as you gain control, and you quickly gain control over just a couple months of effort, the work itself changes, because you become more competent in handling the main obstacles. And you continue to dedicate yourself to the work, because by doing so you give yourself the capacity to become competent in handling any sort of behavioral blocker, or urge, or trigger associated with this behavior.

So yes, you have to commit to the work, on yourself and on these behaviors, for the rest of your life. It’s just that, like I mentioned earlier, the work itself changes. It goes from an hour of work a week or something like that, to minutes. And the type of work you’re actually engaging in is no longer deeply thoughtful or reflective or behavioral-change work, but merely a bringing back to your mind, or your presence, or your awareness, of these behaviors you wanted to reduce or remember. And that work itself can even just be being proud of yourself for the behavior change that you’ve created. So it’s not that you’re going to consistently be doing really hard reflective work for the rest of your life on the specific behavior. The work will just change as you become competent, and then the work turns into methods of bringing awareness to it, being proud, or working on the next thing.

And this is something I believe is a pretty unfortunate consequence, because a lot of people who don’t overcome certain behaviors like doomscrolling or procrastination are never able to work on the higher-level obstacles, like building something genuinely compelling to them and putting it out in front of the world. Because in order to get to that place and deal with those obstacles, you have to be able to put significant amounts of time in to focus and engage and build. But if you can’t get past the procrastination and distractions or the overthinking, you’ll never be in the place where you get to really test yourself. So by doing the initial work on these things and becoming a master of them, you start to have the privilege of working on the higher-level things. And by doing that, you continue to bring awareness to these lower-level things, the distraction and the overthinking and the procrastination, because you must. But it’s different, because now you’re working on the higher-level thing.

And I want to be honest about my own version of this, because it’s important. It’s not that I haven’t experienced growth. I have. It’s just that the reasons it happens now are different. I don’t scroll my phone anymore because I’m randomly led by a trigger to scroll. The reasons I find myself now more inclined to waste 10 or 15 minutes on Instagram are because I’m trying to do Instagram research for my business, for conveying messaging, marketing, advertising, all that. And so sometimes, yeah, that leads me to scroll for an extra 10 or 15 minutes longer than I would. But the difference is a difference in competency, where these distractions with scrolling are because I’m intentionally integrating them into my life, whereas certain behaviors are completely eradicated and lost and forgotten, because I don’t have a need for that trigger or series of triggers to be near me. The scrolling one is unique for me, because for a long time after I got rid of it, I just didn’t doomscroll, because I didn’t have any reason to engage with social media. And then when I brought it back because of my work, I found that those triggers still existed. They’re always there under the surface. So I had to work on my competency of not scrolling while being on the platforms. And even if I’m integrating this Instagram research into my life and I find myself scrolling for an extra 15 minutes, the reality now, when that happens, is that I have backstops in place. I have tools and competencies that minimize the amount of time I personally lose, and I end up losing an hour or two a month, usually less, as opposed to where I was years ago, or where the vast majority of people are today, losing many hours per day, literally two, three, four, five, six hours per day.

So come back to that first point you probably didn’t like at the beginning, which is that non-productive or consumptive behaviors like procrastination, overthinking, doomscrolling, or even self-doubting behaviors and limiting beliefs, they attenuate, but they are never fully eradicated. Instead, you create mastery over them, such that they become the baseline noise that you’re capable of handling and that doesn’t affect you. But because they still exist, you recognize that you must continue to work on yourself for the rest of your life in some capacity in order to keep them there. Because if you stop doing any work on yourself and you slowly slide back into old behaviors, eventually one of these things is going to pop up, and you’ll find yourself scrolling again, or procrastinating again.

So it might sound a bit unfulfilling, or unsatisfying, as an answer. But the reality is that in order to effectively pursue behavior change, you must commit to it for the rest of your life. And by doing so, that is the most efficient way to completely and entirely eradicate it. It can sound a bit perplexing or counterintuitive, but I believe it is the most efficient approach to long-term, sustainable behavior change.

Peace.