#34 Switch-Off Your Autopilot
~ 10 minute read time ~
“If your habits don’t line up with your dream, then you need to either change your habits or change your dream.”
You’re driving home from work, the same route you’ve done for years, listening to the same radio station, thinking about what’s for dinner and then… you arrive home. You have no recollection of various parts of your journey, you navigated traffic lights, long sections of road with other vehicles, got home safely yet you did all this on autopilot.
You enter your house, your partner asks about your day and you mumble something about, yeah same as usual.
Automaticity, or automatic behaviour according to Wikipedia:
“is the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit. It is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice. Examples of tasks carried out by 'muscle memory' often involve some degree of automaticity.”
“We become we repeatedly do.”
Remember when you were a child learning something new for the very first time? You probably felt a little clumsy, unsure if you’d ever learn the skill then become frustrated, but then over time you mastered it so well that you no longer needed to be aware that you were even doing it.
Things like riding a bike, chopping onions, driving a car etc were all difficult until we learned the ability. Repeated enough times, it becomes automatic and the brain hands over the reins to the subconscious, our ‘autopilot’, to take care of most of the mindless stuff which frees up valuable mental resources for the other complex stuff in our lives.
The mind and the brain do this so well that many of our habits - good or bad, are just done without thinking or our intervention, and we often don’t even realise we do it or continue to do it.
All well and good right? For the most part yes, we don’t need to focus on how to walk - we just walk.
The issues begin to arise when we allow too many areas of our life to run solely in autopilot mode. It’s useful to have shortcuts which free us up for the more important things in life - like being present for our relationships, reading to our children, exercising our bodies and in our conversations with close friends/family. However, pain can be caused for both you and significant others in your life if you then try to apply shortcuts to these important moments.
How often have you been watching TV when your partner asks you a question then gets upset because you hadn’t been listening? Have your kids caught you trying to skip pages while reading to them, just so you could get downstairs and play on your console games or watch the match?
There’s no judgement here, I’ve been guilty of all the above and suffered as a result. Often the pain doesn’t come until a long time after, when you reminisce about how you wish you could have another go around or you don’t quite remember something when everyone else tells you what a great time it was?
The word ‘mindfulness’ has been overused and generalised in recent years, its meaning has been lumped in as a catch-all term for focusing on something.
Actually, it’s misleading because we need to be less in our minds, because that’s where much of our default behaviours live. I prefer to talk about conscious awareness, attention or presence. How can we be more aware or fully present in a given moment?
This is your call to arms to become more aware in your life. Wake up, you can improve key areas of your life if you just focus more attention and awareness on them.
Awareness is the elixir, it has the magical power to shine a light in the dark parts of your life, the stuff you’ve packed away in the recesses of your mental attic. It may seem uncomfortable initially, but once you pull out all the dusty boxes and start to sift through - you can ditch the junk (old limiting beliefs), you can re-categorise (tidy up faulty or lazy thinking) and keep the good stuff (reconnect to the things that lit you up).
Sounds like too much effort?
Yes, it does mean you may have to re-prioritise and move things around to create the time and space to do this ‘work’, but it’s worth the effort. I’ve gone through this process for much of the past 2 years, and it has only been accelerated by the lockdown because much of the external blockers fell away and I was left to rummage around my mind having a Marie Kondo-style clear out.
And you know what? I feel lighter, better and more free as a result than I have for a very long time. I had to re-evaluate everything and do some serious heavy-lifting:
failing marriage - gone
unfulfilling job - gone
negative self-talk - gone/changed
anxious/fearful thinking - mostly gone, continues to be a work in progress.
It has been the hardest yet most rewarding period of my life. At the toughest times, I used the Stoic thought experiment of envisioning the 80 yr old me sitting in my rocking chair and reviewing my life. I asked future me what he thought of my current situation! He gave me permission to change things radically, because he didn’t want to die with regrets.
Now, for you - you may not need such a major upheaval as we’re all different, our appetite for change and our behavioural drivers are all different. Some people would do better to focus on smaller, gradual and incremental changes if that’s all that’s needed.
For me, I just needed a huge spiritual reboot, because I’m generally quite lazy and unless it’s motivated by change being less painful than staying the same, I probably won’t do it. It’s amazing how discomfort and pain will keep you honest in your attempts to avoid it!
Still unsure?
I’m not trying to convince you of anything here - you will do what you want. I’m just asking you to be honest with yourself while sharing some of the lessons from my journey in the hope that you can benefit from it without having to go through similar.
If you’re genuinely happy as you are, then keep doing that - you’ve found what works for you so stay in your lane. Or if you know you’d like to work on a few things, or focus specifically on one area that you know keeps coming back rearing its ugly head in your life, then there is some powerful wisdom from those who have come and gone before us.
Do you want to be healthier or fitter? Look at the habits that prevent it from already happening.
Do you want more free time? Look at how you’re spending your time, create new habits around it.
Do you wish you could save or earn more money? Again, check your habits around finances.
The Top Five regrets of the Dying are:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish I had let myself be happier.
If we turn the above into a list of questions for ourselves then they can become a helpful yardstick by which we can measure how we’re doing, and point to where we need focus to make changes - either subtle or not-so-subtle.
Am I living a life that’s true to myself? Do I care too much what other think of me?
Am I working too hard at the expense of what’s truly important to me?
Do I have the courage to express my feelings, telling others what I want?
Is there someone I need to call, catch-up or re-connect with? Do I need to let go of any old arguments and just make the first move? Am I in touch with my friends regularly enough? Do I keep saying no because “life gets in the way”?
Am I denying myself happiness by worrying too much? Do I feel anxious, guilty, shame or selfish if I try and let myself be truly happy?
Let go of what no longer serves, bring awareness and kindness to what needs to be mended or healed - both for yourself and others, stop carrying heavy energy. Do you make the majority of your decisions based on fear, safety and damage limitation or are they made from a place of optimism, love and hope?
Switch-off your autopilot, try and catch yourself when you’re not being fully present in key moments. Your kids only grow up once, work can wait, the artificial busyness we build into modern life can be chipped away as we’ve learned during lockdown this past year.
Wilfully choosing to be overly busy or ‘manic’ at work is a form of avoidance which steals time/attention from areas of your life where you’re less comfortable.
Sometimes change starts when we simply acknowledge that we have a choice.
Don’t be in a hurry to rush back to ‘normality’ when restrictions start to ease, especially if it means not carrying the lessons forward. People will struggle if we rush towards a ‘new normal’ to find we’re suddenly overwhelmed when the taps of life are switched back on and we can’t cope by still being in autopilot mode.
Take back the reins of your thinking and your habits, regain your personal power, don’t allow your subconscious mind to run the show because you’ll miss out on the journey. We’re intelligent humans, not sheep who just follow the flock into the pen.
To make it more manageable - choose one area you want to see improvement and focus on how you move things around to commit to making it happen. We know habits are clustered patterns of behaviour that become embedded into our daily lives over time.
If you genuinely want to change troublesome parts of your life, take ownership and review the habits that cause the issues, then look at replacing a bad habit with a better habit. It takes a singular focus and consistency over time, but with awareness and a solid strategy with positive rewards we can overcome the challenges of boredom, stress and sadness to re-direct our efforts towards building new habits.
Good habits are the foundation stone upon which a good life can be built.
“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”
Love
LP x
Resources
Books:
Unf*ck Yourself - by Gary John Bishop
Atomic Habits - by James Clear
The Power of Habits: Why We Do What We Do, and How To Change - by Charles Duhigg
How To Do The Work: Recognise Your Patterns, Heal Your Past, and Create Your Self - by Nicole LePera
Videos:
The Power of Habit: Charles Duhigg at TEDxTeachers College
Psychologist’s Tools For Reprogramming Your Subconscious Mind | Nicole LePera on Impact Theory - Tom Bilyeu
