The missing advice on habits

A useful tool in establishing something new is to make it easy to do that behavior (i.e., to use affordances). You place your training clothes on the chair the night before in preparation for the following morning workout; you remove all ultra-processed foods from the cabinet; and similar examples.

But there is more to the story. If you go deeper, you can practice doing that behavior in the opposite situation—when it’s hard to do it and there are no affordances, or even anti-affordances.

This means establishing a habit, or more accurately, changing something deeper in the whole organization of the self.

Say you stopped smoking by removing all cigarettes from the house. Now can you continue not smoking with a pack of cigarettes in the house? Further, can you one day smoke one cigarette from that new pack and then never smoke again?

If you can’t do this, you’ve built a castle of sand, ready to be destroyed at any time by your multiplicity of emotions, facets of personality, and behaviors regaining their prominence after being masked away instead of transformed deeply.

Deep transformation can happen, and it can take time. This is part of the process, which must be somewhat playful in its nature to allow the reorganization to occur.

---