JANE HOUSHAM
The future is flexible
You’re a fairly normal sort of person. You know what you like. You get up in the morning and you’ve got your routines – they help you get the day started. You usually have coffee and toast, or maybe you’re a cereal person – but it isn’t that big a deal, just something to get you on your way. You’re out of the house by pretty much the same time every day: you’ve got to be or you’d be late. Lunch is usually a sandwich at your desk – you like to catch up with the news online. The afternoons pass quickly enough and before you know it you’re home again and there’s your favourite TV to look forward to – or perhaps it’s your regular night out?
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oes that sound like you? Or if not exactly like you, then can you map your own routines onto that picture?
Would you go so far as to say you love your
routines? Do they make you feel comfortable (you know where you are with them)? In a very real sense, human beings need routines – if you had to process every single thought and decision as if you were coming to it for the first time, it would be exhausting, maddening. Not thinking so much is something the brain is hard-wired to do. But there’s a downside to living on ‘automatic pilot’ (and for some people routines can account for up to 90% of their daily lives): if you always respond to situations in ‘your’ way, you’ll miss out on more considered – and different – reactions that might bring you a better result. Sleepwalk through life
and you could miss out on a lot of potential to grow and change and experience new things. Changing ingrained habits is a challenge – we all take that for granted. Losing weight or giving up smoking are some of the toughest to crack and often we get locked into a pattern of repeated failure. Such failures are generally put down to a ‘lack of willpower’. In reality, it’s almost impossible to
remain focused on good intentions day in, day out: your attention wanders, an old habit trigger will go off and, before you know it, you’re back in your rut again. Willpower doesn’t stand a chance: a much better way to achieve the changes you may long for is to become less reliant on habits. Let’s imagine a different sort of
day. Perhaps you set your alarm clock to go off an hour earlier than usual so you don’t have to rush. Instead of coffee and toast, you have a bowl of fruit and yoghurt. You go to work by a different route – perhaps you get off the bus a
stop earlier than usual and walk the rest of the way, or you drive by the back roads instead of down the motorway. At lunchtime, you go outside and read a book in the sun. Later, rather than flopping on the sofa to watch your soap, perhaps you ring an old friend or try out a new recipe. The possibilities are endless, and perhaps they don’t seem very earth-shattering, but small shake- ups like these will set you on your way to the mindset where you can make the big changes that will really make a difference. Not only that, you’ll almost certainly enjoy these modest changes. In their new book, Flex: Do Something Different, Ben Fletcher and Karen Pine set out the thinking behind their very successful behavioural flexibility programme. Ben and Karen are both senior members of staff in the School of Psychology here at the University
14/04/2012 18:06
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