27 days
I’ve tried writing this post a couple times, and it’s come out a dispassionate, confusing mess so far. Mainly because I was trying to remain neutral rather than telling it from my own perspective. Well, here it is from mine.
They say it takes 27 days to establish or break a habit. I bring this up because there are a couple habits I’d like to break, and a couple others I want to start.
There are a couple tricks I have up my sleeve that I’m going to use to help me. First, With the habits I want to break, I’m going to replace them with another habit, even if that habit is just stopping and breathing, and patting myself on the back for changing. Nature abhors a vacuum, and I think it will be easier to break a habit by replacing it than by just trying to stop.
To anchor the new habits in place, I’m going to use a trick that animal behaviorists know and that works just as well with people. If you reward an animal with food for a particular behavior every time it performs that behavior, it will only do that behavior when it desires the reward. But, after establishing the link between the behavior and reward you only reward the behavior intermittently, the behavior becomes much more fixed, because the animal doesn’t know when it will be rewarded and when it won’t.
So, for the first few days when I do my new habits, I’m going to reward myself with something small yet meaningful, and then randomly reward myself to help reinforce them. I suspect it won’t take long to break the old habits with the new ones getting established so quickly.
What I’m talking about here may seem small, but it’s really the foundation for changing my world around completely. Think about it for a minute. On one side, 27 days seems like a long time - 4 weeks, 1 month, whatever you want to call it. On the other, I have about 13,500 days of natural life expectancy remaining - 450 months, or somewhere around 35 - 40 years. 27 days doesn’t seem like such a long time compared to that.
To me, it’s pretty earth shaking that I can change my world completely, or at least be well on my way to doing so in such a short period of time. We have the ability to change our world completely at any time, by taking our first small, or sometimes large steps in a new direction. That’s pretty cool, and intimidating at the same time.
I know some of my friends will see some big changes in me, while others won’t notice anything at all, and that’s ok. It may be that my friends change as I change. Since like attracts like, I know I will be seeing different people come into my life as the new habits, including new ways of thinking, become established. I’m looking forward to the changes.