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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and today I want to talk about what happens when habits go bad. Now, I'm not talking about bad habits or creating or breaking habits. I'm talking about what happens when a habit turns into a duty or responsibility that you're finding it very difficult to quit.
I'm going to give you a few examples throughout this episode and hopefully will help you recognize if you're doing this with some habit in your life somewhere. So let's jump right in. First, I want to talk to you about what happens when you create a habit. So the myth of 21 days to create a habit is just that.
It is a myth. It takes on average 60 to 65 days at a [00:01:00] minimum of consistent usage to create a new habit. Now, I have another episode you can listen that is all about habits, but I just wanted to give you that very quick primer. It takes consistency and duration to create a habit. Now, habits are things that our subconscious or brain can run automatically without conscious direction.
And your brain has two jobs. Number one is to keep you safe, and it does that by trying to redirect you to the familiar and to be energy efficient because your brain uses about 20% of your daily energy intake. So it would prefer you to run these automatic habits, subconscious programs because, well, that's just energy efficient.
And this is why these backslides happen whenever you're trying to create something new. But let's talk about [00:02:00] when you have an established habit, and by established habit, I'm going to give it a timeline of something that you have done consistently for at least one year that you now have created this automatic program for and you don't really have to think that much about it.
You've tracked it. You've done it often enough. It just has become part of your day. But here's what happens when it really shouldn't be. And I don't love to use the word should or shouldn't because it gives the illusion of we're doing or not doing something that other people think we're supposed to or not supposed to.
But I am gonna bring out the should here and just give you a couple of examples about why habits do need to change and how to recognize that. Here's an example from my own life. About four years ago, a little less than four years, I started doing Duolingo to [00:03:00] learn Italian. I was like, "You know what?
I love to learn new things. I think Italian's a beautiful language. I'm going to learn Italian." And so if you're familiar with Duolingo, they gamify the whole thing. There's badges, there's level progressions. You win gemstones and awards, and that hijacks your dopamine pathway and keeps you competitive, keeps you coming back for more.
And I did not miss a day of Duolingo for almost four years. We are talking sickness, travel, hurricane season. No matter what, I did my Duolingo at least once a day, but generally twice a day for fifteen to thirty minutes because I was trapped in that competitive cycle. Well, last year, I turned fifty, and it's like suddenly a light switch in my brain was like, "Okay, girl, you cannot think as fast as you used to."
I woke up one day, and my thinking had become much [00:04:00] slower, and this was really disturbing to me because I'm a person who prioritizes and really is proud of the fact that I have rapid-fire thoughts. And so that was a big wake-up call for me that I needed to restructure and prioritize my cognitive and physical health.
And this January, I started the new habit of habit tracking, getting a planner, putting things like strength training, Duolingo, mind training in there. But I also noticed as part of this prioritizing my cognitive health, I was addicted to television, so part of my New Year's resolution was to turn off the TV.
And then I started looking for, okay, what is something healthy that I can do that doesn't require digital input? And then I started getting crossword puzzles and [00:05:00] fill-in word books, which is great, and that made me aware of how addicted I'd actually become to an app like Duolingo. And it was on my habit tracker.
I was still doing it twice a day even though I finished the Italian course almost a year ago and I decided I'm going to learn chess now because I've always wanted to do it. But lately, over the last month, I'm like, "I don't wanna do this anymore." It keeps me tied to my phone. I understand how it's hijacking my dopamine.
I want to make sure I'm cognitively sharp, and it's going to require getting off this freaking phone. But I kept doing it over and over twice a day. First, I started to drop off. Now it's one Italian lesson instead of three, four, or five, and one chess lesson instead of two or [00:06:00] three. So I tapered down, but it was just yesterday, which is why I'm recording this podcast, that I was like, "You know what?
I don't have to keep doing this anymore because it doesn't excite me. I don't like it. I've achieved the top of whatever I set out to achieve, and my goals are different now." My goals have shifted to doing more analog things and weaning off the technology and honestly sharpening my focus again. So I deleted the app, and this morning I started getting itchy about it
You know? Duolingo popped up a notification because it was a separate place that I had to go in my phone settings to stop that, and I'm sure later today when it figures out that I have not done a lesson, it's gonna stalk me by email and send me a reminder. And so I'll have to [00:07:00] unsubscribe and do that as well.
But this is an example of why we do things that we don't really want to do anymore. So Duolingo became for me a job, a responsibility, something that I had tracked and had become a good habit originally. But now as I've evolved, my focus has evolved, my goals have evolved. It became a bad habit that I needed to stop.
So take a moment and think about what that is for your life. Is there something that you're doing, maybe even tracking, that is not fun for you anymore? It is a habit that you now feel it's responsibility. You're just doing it on automatic pilot, not because you really enjoy it anymore. Another example of something that you may actually still enjoy but that has [00:08:00] become destructive, and runners, I'm gonna pick on you guys a little bit because you do this more than anyone else I have ever seen.
But if you are trying to work on your physical health and you have set a goal of like maybe 10,000 steps a day or you're a runner and you've set this goal of it's going to be one, two, three, four, five miles a day, and something happens in your life, like you get sick. And I've seen this so many times, is even when athletes get sick, they'll still go work out because they are used to that endorphin rush, they're used to that routine.
They have been trained or conditioned that discipline is so important that they'll override their own body, their own logic to go do that thing. And two examples is I know someone who had [00:09:00] the flu, was like deathly ill with the flu, and she still would go out running every day. But instead of her normal five miles, she would do one mile.
But as a physician, I can tell you this is not great because you're forcing your body to switch gears away from healing to do things like muscle repair. And so your goals are at conflict. They are not matching what is actually best for you because when you have the flu, the best thing is to rest. Your immune system works better when you're lying down.
It works better when you aren't giving it a lot of complex things to break down. This is why chicken soup is one of the best things. It's easy to digest. It has vegetables for all of your vitamins. It's got protein to preserve your muscles and your energy. [00:10:00] But if you're going out running, chicken soup isn't going to be enough.
Now you've got to do these carbs to keep the energy up, and now your body is having to divert its precious energy away from healing and toward digestion. These are strategies that don't work for what you have going on at that moment. Now, if you need to move, the better strategy would be go for a slow, gentle walk.
You are still reinforcing the habit of movement, but you're not pushing the body past what it's asking you to do. Another example was someone on my emailing list, she's a business owner, and she had committed to ten thousand steps no matter what. Just like me with my Duolingo, no matter what, we're gonna do those lessons.
And she worked herself up and was very proud of no matter what, ten thousand steps until she got really [00:11:00] sick. And she was like, "I gotta get out of this bed and do my ten thousand steps." And finally, it occurred to her as she's dragging herself to try to do ten thousand steps, _"What am I doing? This is dumb._
_I need to be in bed prioritizing my health, and I have let a goal hijack my well-being, and this is not okay."_
Most of my clients tend to be high-achieving, ambitious people that fall into this trap of mental override, competing against their own achievements, where they need to feel like they're building higher and higher and higher, and they've gotta do more.
And of course, that leads to the things like burnout or what happens when you achieve all the things, then there's this weird void space of what is next. And it's because we're not adapting to these different chapters of our lives, and we're not truly consciously [00:12:00] recognizing when a habit has turned on us, when it's okay to let it go.
Because highly ambitious people have been conditioned for quitting is bad. Quitting means failure. I have so many clients who are athletes or elite workout people, and this is really hard for them. It's really hard to let go of something that you have put so much time and energy and effort into. And one of the reasons it becomes difficult is over the course of time, that habit becomes linked accidentally or subconsciously to a piece of your identity.
So at this point, if you were to stop that, you're going to make it mean something about you, that 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, you haven't achieved [00:13:00] anything. Other people are going to judge you or think bad about you when the opposite is probably true.
There are so many people that might be going, _"Girl, lay down. Rest. Let somebody wait on you." _There's nothing so urgent that you need to get out of your sick bed and go do that. That is a priority shifting. And so I felt it was really important that you sit down today and do an audit of all of your activities, and you can find something like this in James Clear's Atomic Habits.
I highly recommend that book if you are someone who has hit this different chapter or point in your life where you're like,_ "Okay, I need to make some changes, but I don't know where to start." _And he recommends writing down every single habit that you can possibly think of. Everything you do from the minute you wake up to the minute you go to bed.
Everything. Write it [00:14:00] all down because the truth is you're not consciously aware of most of the things that you do. Your conscious brain is only involved in about three percent of your decisions. So ninety-seven percent of the time, your brain is being energy efficient running these behind-the-scene programs of habits that you created at some point in your life.
Habits can include thoughts you continually think, feelings you continually feel, or activities or behaviors that you have done so often you just don't have to think about them anymore. And because you're in that scenario, you don't even see them anymore unless you are applying direct conscious thought to change them.
So write down these habits and ask yourself:_ Where are you right now? What chapter of life are you in right now? And what needs to change because it's actually not the best fit for you anymore?_ [00:15:00] Another recent client example is her body's changing, and she is an elite fitness person, and it's very distressing.
But the truth is hormones change. Women's bodies change, and the workout you did at twenty is not gonna be the workout you likely need at forty or fifty. And it's about us letting go of the identity we created at twenty or some previous version of ourselves and our ego and pieces of our identity that say, _"Who are you if you're not doing this thing?"_
This is normal. We all go through it. It's part of the process of change, and it's part of the process of your brain's inner defense mechanism. It wants you to keep doing routine familiar things, not only because it's safe but because it's energy efficient. [00:16:00] And it knows that when you need to make changes, it's gonna have to work hard.
It does not want to do that, my friends, so it will try to, , rain on your parade, pop your balloon, and get you to do what it's used to doing, which is the old routine. And these are normal reactions. Normal feelings, normal thoughts, normal changes, but we have to be adults and look at what we're doing with fresh eyes.
Audit our behaviors and really put our ego aside and go, _"Is this still the best match for me, or is it hurting me somehow? Am I bored of this?" Am I ready to let this go? Have I learned everything I needed to learn from this process or habit and can I move on and do something else?_ It would be interesting what you [00:17:00] find when you do this audit.
So drop me a comment. I wanna know what you found. Is it something like a workout routine? Is it Duolingo? Is it calorie counting? Is it weighing yourself every day even though it makes you feel horrible? It's okay to stop these habits that don't make you feel good. Maybe they did at one point, but now they have turned against you and you don't have to keep doing these things to feel responsible and it's not your duty to keep doing them forever.
You can change. You just gotta be ready for it. All right, my friends, I hope this episode was helpful. Please let me know if I can help you on this journey of identifying where the good things in your life may have turned on you suddenly and what you can do different by booking a free consultation with me over on my website [00:18:00] aprildarley.com.
We'll talk about what's going on in your life and how you can create a new identity and a new strategy that works for where you are now and where you want to go and how you can easily let go of the things that aren't working for you anymore without feeling guilt, shame, or failure. Until next week my friends, have a great one.
Goodbye
