A Mindful Approach to Behaviour Change
Habits are tricky things.
As well as controlling body system functions and interpreting information from the outside world, the brains’ second job is to conserve energy and therefore it automates as many of the activities of our daily lives as possible. Activities that we repeat often – like checking our social media feed or having a mid-morning chocolate bar with a cuppa - don’t then require the mental effort involved in making a decision. Simples.
Until you reach your middle age whereupon you realise you’ve collected a whole host of unhelpful and unhealthy behaviour patterns across the first half of your life and frankly its sabotaging your goals. Perhaps you’ve got into the habit of having a glass of wine every night ‘to unwind’. Maybe your bedtime has got later and later over the years and you are now lucky to get 4 or 5 hours before a workday. Despite widespread awareness of the importance of good diet, sleep & exercise and the dangers of alcohol, smoking and substance misuse it remains exceptionally difficult for people to initiate and maintain behaviour change.
‘In order for us to clean up the house, we must first see the dirt’ and this is where Mindfulness can prove incredibly useful intervention.
The term Mindfulness was translated by Rhys David (an English scholar) from the Pali word sati meaning “memory, recollection, being-aware-of”. In Mindfulness meditation we practice paying close attention to our present-moment experience which may at times include strong emotions, difficult thoughts or unpleasant sensations. These thoughts and feelings are sometimes the triggers for this automated habitual response. It is very likely that your unwanted habit has formed as part of a self-soothing strategy, one that has eased emotional discomfort for you in the past or given you a little hormonal or neurochemical boost when you were feeling low.
What’s more, different types of meditation seem to confer different benefits to the brain. Studies show clear differences in brain activation and connectivity during focused-attention (e.g. meditating on the breath) vs. open-monitoring (e.g. choiceless awareness) meditation. The first engaging attentional control and the latter cultivating emotional nonreactivity. Over time meditators repeatedly practice acceptance and awareness of emotional and physiological responses which leads to reduction and eventual extinction of emotional reactivity.
Healthy emotional regulation is crucial for successful behaviour change
Without it we would be letting our fears and insecurities, our feelings of stress & anxiety paralyse us in our inaction. Mindfulness-based interventions tackling alcohol and substance-misuse have demonstrated fewer drug-use and heavy-drinking days at 12 months compared to relapse prevention alone and a reduction in cravings.
Mindfulness practice also encourages self acceptance and over time greater levels of self-compassion and kindness towards oneself start to build. It’s therefore likely that once an individual is holding themselves in greater self-esteem that in itself acts as an additional mechanism for motivation, self-development and learning. As awareness builds and greater attention is placed on our internal motivators, patterns of behaviour and conditioned thinking we begin to exhibit behaviour that puts positive cues in our environment to encourage healthier habits to form.
By far the easiest way to tackle an unwanted behaviour is to adjust an existing habit to make it healthier rather than trying to work upon removing the underlying trigger for that behaviour. For example, if you are in the habit of having half a packet of chocolate biscuits with a cup of tea every night before bed then consciously change it up. If you now firmly associate drinking tea at suppertime with a need for biscuits swap it out for a large glass of water or stick with the cup of tea and switch the chocolate biscuits for plain crackers. I doubt you’ll smash half a packet and the habit will soon die out with consistent pattern interruption over consecutive nights. It’s also super helpful to piggyback on to existing habitual routines such as choosing to do your pelvic floor exercises at the same time as brushing your teeth. If you’d like to work on a shifting an unwanted habit or develop strategies to achieve a healthier way of living, then get in touch to discuss our coaching options.