Breaking Bad: When Good Habits Turn Against You

When you think of a habit, you probably label it as either good or bad. 

We normally think of good habits as those that benefit us and bad ones as something destructive or harmful, but what if it's not that simple? 

This is a story of what happens when good habits go bad!

How Habits Become Automatic (And Why That's the Problem)

It takes consistency and duration to create a habit, and I've got some bad news for you. That whole 21 days to create a habit thing? Total myth!

It's actually closer to 2-3 months at a minimum because change takes time. Every time you do something repetitively (a thought, emotion, or action), your brain pays attention. Eventually, your subconscious brain creates an automatic program to save energy.

Why? Because your brain has two main jobs: to keep you safe and to be energy efficient. Since your brain uses about 20% of your daily energy intake, it would prefer to run these automatic programs rather than spend your precious resources on anything new.

This is what makes established habits so tricky to quit, even when they've stopped working for you.

When a Good Habit Hurts You

For almost four years, I didn't miss a single day of Duolingo. Sickness, travel, hurricane season, twice a day, every single day. One day I realized I didn't love it anymore.

I'd completed the course, I wasn't having fun, and it kept me on my phone. So, I deleted the app, but the next morning I was itchy about it. My brain had created a habit it didn't want to let go of.

Why do we do things we don't really want to do anymore?

Habit.....or a misplaced sense of discipline, guilt, or responsibility.

For me, Duolingo started to feel like a job I had to do every day. A responsibility that I didn't enjoy anymore even though it had been a good habit originally. Plus, I didn't want to be glued to my phone anymore. I was ready for something new, and it became a habit I needed to stop. 

What was once a good habit had turned because I no longer wanted what it offered: gamification, constant dopamine hits, and daily harassment reminders to practice!

Take a moment and think about the habits in your life. Is there something you're doing, maybe even tracking, that is not fun for you anymore? A habit you now feel is a responsibility, something you're doing on automatic pilot, not because you really enjoy it anymore?

The Trap of Mental Override In Routine

Highly ambitious people often find it challenging to view their routines as anything but helpful. For example, someone I know committed to ten thousand steps a day, no matter what.

Sounds good, right?

Every day, she walked more and more and was very proud of her progress. One day, she got really sick. Instead of resting, she was dragging herself out of bed to do her ten thousand steps.

Finally, it occurred to her: "What am I doing? This is dumb. I need to be in bed prioritizing my health, and I have let a goal hijack my wellbeing."

Ambition is a beautiful trait, but unfortunately, it also pushes you to fall into the trap of what I call mental override. This is the tendency to override the needs of your body in order to chase your goals. This includes forgetting to eat or drink, doing "just one more thing", and deprioritizing rest, sleep, and downtime.

Ambitious people also have a tendency to compete against their own achievements, feel an intense need to keep building and expanding, and constantly feel the push to do more.

Burnout is often the result of mental override, but there's another outcome that's even stranger that I call the void.

The void happens when you've achieved all the things you've wanted and suddenly don't know what's next. It's that empty space between completion and creation.

We feel the stress acutely here because we're not adapting to the different chapters of our lives and not truly recognizing when it's time to create a new version of ourselves. This is partly due to the fact that your identity is made up of a collection of your habits. The good and the bad!

Sadly, many ambitious people have been conditioned to believe that quitting is bad. Even worse, that quitting means failure.

It can be really hard to let go of something you've put so much time, energy, and effort into. Since habits becomes linked, accidentally and subconsciously, to a piece of your identity it means the brain will often try to protect them.

So, when you think about stopping, you start to make it mean something about you as a person. If you don't get up from your sick bed to do ten thousand steps or run five miles, then you're lazy, you're worthless, and other people are going to judge you or think badly of you because of it.

In real life, the opposite is probably true. There are so many people who'd say: "Girl, lay down. Rest. Let somebody else wait on you."

Be honest with yourself. It's quite likely that you may have nothing so urgent that you need to get out of your sick bed to do it. If you don't learn to recognize when it's healthy to override a habit, then you've let good habits become destructive.

In other words, without discernment, you've got a breaking bad situation on your hands, my friend!

The Audit You Need in Your Life Right Now

If you're ready to reassess some habits in your life, then I highly recommend James Clear's Atomic Habits as a practical place to start. He recommends writing down every single habit you can think of, from the minute you wake up to the minute you go to bed.

Everything. Because the truth is, your conscious brain is only involved in about 3% of your decisions. The other 97% of the time, your brain is running those automatic programs. The habits you created at some point in your life that you've largely stopped noticing.

Habits include thoughts you continually think, feelings you continually feel, and behaviors you've done so often you don't have to think about them anymore. And because they're automatic, you don't even see them unless you apply direct conscious thought to look.

So, write them down.

Then ask yourself:

• Where are you right now? What chapter of life are you in?
• What on that list is no longer the best fit for where you are?
• Is this habit still working for you, or is it hurting you somehow?
• Are you bored of it? Are you ready to let it go?
• Have you learned everything you needed to learn from it?

It's okay to stop habits that don't make you feel good anymore. Maybe they did at one point, but now they've turned against you, and you don't have to keep doing them to feel responsible. It's not your duty to keep doing them forever.

You can change. You just have to be ready for it.

If you'd like help identifying where the good things in your life may have turned on you and what to do about it, book a complimentary consultation HERE. 

We'll talk about what's going on in your life and how you can let go of what isn't working anymore without guilt, shame, or a sense of failure.

Dr. April Darley is a brain-based neuroscience coach and subconscious strategist who specializes in high-level brain coaching for professionals and leaders She helps high-capacity leaders identify and recalibrate the hidden patterns between the survival, emotional, and logical brain so their decisions and execution become clear, stable, and powerful.