Routines are not habits, alas.
I said in an earlier post that last year — and especially last semester — was pretty rough for me. I overextended a bit at work, I faced some challenges as a parent, and I consistently fell short on some personal goals — any of which would have been enough to ramp up the stress a bit.
But that was all layered on top of our country’s five-alarm fire (which is, almost unbelievably, burning even hotter), one party’s refusal to help put it out, and our news media’s inability to do much besides pour more fuel on it. It’s hard enough to focus on work and family and creativity without air raid sirens and sweeping floodlights.
I’m usually able to fend off overwhelm using a system of routines that I’ve developed over the past few years — ways of launching the day, or reducing stress, or maintaining focus. Indeed, I thought that I had honed these routines into habits, and that they had displaced old, unproductive habits, and that those older habits were gone forever.
But I guess old habits never really die. Mine seemed to have been patiently waiting to rush in the the moment I got distracted. Worse, I think they’d been working out — building new skill sets, developing new strategies, forging new alliances — so when they saw their opportunity, they could close in and seriously kick my ass.
I’m still trying to get my bearings back. But I think I’ve figured out at least part of the problem: routines aren’t habits.
Technically, habits — if they’re really to be considered habits — are automatic. Antecedent, behavior, consequence. Trigger, response, reward.
As an example, take my habit of late-night snacking. (This is only one example, and certainly isn’t the most significant….)
There’s a trigger — some complicated mixture of elevated cortisol (a symptom of stress) and lowered willpower, with a pinch of hunger. (My lack of clarity around that trigger is one reason the habit has been so hard to break, I’m sure.)
As the term suggests, that triggers (automatically) an action: I raid the refrigerator (sometimes even consciously ridiculing myself as dig through the lunch meat). And that action leads to a reward: assuaged hunger, most directly, but also a sense of comfort. (Yay, serotonin!)
I thought I’d kicked that habit last summer, mostly through changes I made in my sleep habits (influenced by Matt Walker’s book): I built a bedtime routine that displaced the triggers that led me to rummage through the refrigerator late at night. Indeed, I followed the routine consistently enough that I believed I’d created a new habit: trigger (alarm on my watch); behavior (lock up, brush teeth, crawl into bed); reward (improved sleep, and all the benefits that come with that).
Yet about halfway through the semester, as personal stress piled on public stress, I abandoned that routine, seeking escape in the well-engineered dopamine factory of YouTube. And that created an opening for my old habit — late-night snacking — to sweep in with a vengeance.
On paper, this just looks stupid. I can list many rewards that come from adequate sleep: I’m happier; I focus better, which makes work more manageable; I’m more patient with the kids;. I manage the news better. At the same time, there are many unwanted consequences around late-night snacking: gained weight, indigestion, reduced sleep (both quantity and quality) — each of which has its own cascade of unwanted consequences.
But those rewards are all delayed. And that’s the difference between routines and habits. Routines are products of the pre-frontal cortex. They’re rational, based on long-term thinking. Habits are products of the basal ganglia. They don’t care about the long term — even if that “long term” is only fifteen minutes away. Rewards for habits are immediate.
I’m five or so weeks into the new semester. So far, I’m managing to tread water; I haven’t missed any deadlines, and I’m not behind in my grading (yet). I’ve been rebooting my routines, which have again — however slowly — displaced some of those annoying habits.
I’m on guard now, too, mindful of the power of immediate rewards.
But it’s not going to be easy. Trump’s post-impeachment impunity, the Iowa fiasco, the media’s habitual horse-race coverage… all this lays down a 60-cycle hum of anxiety, a kind of cortisol noise floor that doesn’t leave a lot of headroom for personal stress.