Don't Stress It! - Lesson 2
Understanding The Brain. Let's talk about New Years's resolutions, willpower vs. habit-making, and a No-Brainer list.
Welcome to The Feel Good Life! A newsletter about health, prevention, empathy, and hope. I’m Dr. Mariana and you have just arrived to my medically-guided course on managing stress.
Hello Again! Welcome to Lesson 2
Today we will dive into the next part of this journey, where we are learning how to understand and deal with the stress levels in our lives.
(In case you missed it, here’s the Intro and Lesson 1.)
As we learned in Lesson 1, there is the good kind of stress, called eustress, that can do wonders in our lives. Now, finding the balance between good stress and overwhelm? That’s what this course is about. So let’s keep it up, shall we?
Now, in today’s lesson you will learn:
About Those New Year’s Resolutions
Willpower vs. Habit-Making
Challenge #2: The No Brainer List
Off we go!
About Those New Year’s Resolutions
In last class, I told you about how stress is an Enemy (capital letter fully justified) of your long-term health, and gave you a brief overview of how destructive it can be, if you don't tackle it early enough.
The good news is that you are tackling it. That’s the promise you’ve now made to yourself, via me. And today, we’re going to start learning exactly how you can keep that promise.
But first? Let’s look at a promise to yourself that you didn’t keep.
It’s New Year’s Eve, the wine is flowing freely, and you’re filled with excitement and hope for what the coming year brings. You’re also making a list of important things. Things that must happen this year, or else. You’ve put them off long enough. THIS is the time to act - starting tomorrow! RAAAR!
How many of this New Year’s Resolutions have you successfully kept up with?
Okay. How about last year’s?
Let’s stop here, because as you’re probably discovering, this whole topic is a deep well of negative emotions. How can that rush of virtuous energy on New Year’s Eve turn into apathetic disappointment and hopelessness so quickly? The answer that too many people come up with:
“I’m weak. If I really wanted to do it, I’d have done it. Basically, I suck.”
Here are two conclusive reasons you can banish this answer from your head forever:
Most people don’t stick to their Resolutions. An estimated 90% of us fail to achieve our New Year goals. You aren’t especially bad at this - you’re in the vast majority. Basically, not sticking to New Year’s Resolutions is normal - which suggests there’s a bigger problem here.
Sticking to New Year Resolutions has nothing to do with character (ie. It’s Not About You), and everything to do with technique (ie. It’s About How You Do It).
Let’s repeat that, just to be absolutely clear here:
The reason you don’t stick to your Resolutions is because you’re using the wrong technique.
It sure doesn’t feel this way, I know. You feel bad because it seems like you were born without the desirable, virtuous character trait known as willpower. It's what is needed to get difficult-to-do things done, and it seems to run out surprisingly quickly. (The good news is, you’ll completely top up your willpower with a good night’s sleep. We’ll get to that in later e-mails.)
Here’s where you have been going wrong. You tried to use willpower to stick to your New Year’s Resolutions - and that’s the wrong tool for the job.
You didn’t fail because you’re weak.
You didn’t fail because of some innate character flaw.
It wasn’t because you’re lazy or self-destructive. It wasn’t any of that.
It was simply because you used the wrong method.
There’s a way that works - and using willpower ain’t it.
Willpower vs. Habit Making
Fun fact to begin with: Did you know that former President Barack Obama wears pretty much the same outfit every day? Here’s why:
"I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make."
(This article is a fascinating read.)
Every decision you make every day costs willpower.
According to the Britannica Dictionary, the definition of willpower [noncount] is:
‘the ability to control yourself : strong determination that allows you to do something difficult.’
Attempting to stick to your Resolutions using willpower means you have less willpower for everything else in your life. It could be ugly and stressful, but at least you’d get it done, right?
However, the reality is that, more frequently than not, you don’t have any willpower to spare…
A bit of background. In over a decade of working in public and private medical institutions, I’ve seen people in a lot of stressful situations that required every single bit of their available willpower - like:
having no option but to go to work when a child is ill and has to miss school...
having to deal with drastic life changes, like moving into a care home or deal with a serious injury...
having to deal with the enormous emotional weight of taking a loved one to a care home for the first time...
having to juggle two energy-draining jobs so you can pay the rent & bills at the end of the month...
struggling to improve your employment prospects via training or job-hunting, while scrambling to make ends meet…
the terrible psychological burden of crippling debt.
Not all of these are medical issues, but they have medical consequences. They, and a million other tricky aspects of living a modern lifestyle, come with a burden of stress that affects your health and completely drains your willpower. And the result?
You don’t have any willpower left over. Day after day, you hit Empty.
Then, wanting to fulfil today’s obligation to your New Year’s Resolutions, you reach into yourself for the necessary willpower - and there’s nothing there. So nothing gets done.
As I said, Willpower alone doesn’t work. Normal life is too busy - too draining. You need something better, something that doesn’t require such a colossal daily expenditure of effort. You need a no-brainer that works even when your willpower is at an all-time low.
In short, you need habits.
(Did you know? Creating habits for yourself is a way of self love.)
So how exactly do you create a new habit? Is it just a matter of willpower? What if you don’t have any willpower right now? How do you make it stick?
Sounds familiar?
Yes, we’re back to the New Year’s Resolution situation. It’s exactly the same - with the same flawed thinking at the heart of it that leads to unrealistic expectations and disappointing results.
Except this time, it’s potentially a lot more serious. Even dangerous. It’s your health we are talking about.
It’s not about guilt, shame or blame. It’s not the doctor’s fault - neither is it the patient’s. There’s just something missing that would make it all work - like a machine lacking a critical cog, gear or microchip. The whole process is rendered inoperable because of this one thing that would make it all work: habits.
The good news is, habits are easy to build, if you follow the right approach - particularly because once you’ve got them up and running, they require almost no willpower to keep doing. They’re automatic. Eventually, you do them without even being fully aware you're doing them. That’s their superpower - and when that happens, results appear out of nowhere, like magic.
The only downside? Habits take time to build. You’re going to need to commit a bit of your willpower at the beginning, for those first few critical days or weeks. You’ll need to consistently show up until those habits are a part of your life, the same way brushing your teeth is, or having an evening meal.
Yes, stress is an invisible killer, but habits are our near-invisible protectors. They get things done on our behalf that we’re hardly aware of.
All we have to do is learn how to activate them - and that’s what we'll be working on next.
On An Important Learning Note
Before we continue our learning through the next lessons of this course, let's tackle a few potential concerns. Here’s what this course isn’t going to do:
1. It’s not going to bury you in theory. Life is short, and you’ve got important habits to build. Plus, we’ve already established that knowledge is only part of the solution. Instead, this course is practical. To get the full benefits, you’re going have to try stuff out, via the Challenges at the bottom of each e-mail, and eventually via your own experiments so you're the habit-maker here (but of course I’ll be here to guide you, every step of the way).
Deal?
2. It’s not going to batter you senseless with complex medical jargon. Trust me, neither of us wants that. Particularly because it’s a problem with the medical profession as a whole. But it's not going to be a problem on my watch. However, any time you don’t understand a particular term I’ve used, please hit Reply and I’ll be happy to explain. You deserve clarity and full understanding in order to make the changes you want in your life.
3. It’s not going to require huge, scary amounts of willpower. We’ve already established that making significant changes to your lifestyle using willpower alone is really, really difficult. Why should this course follow that approach if it usually doesn’t work?
Answer: it shouldn’t - so we won’t.
The Challenges I’m setting you in every e-mail are small and simple (but powerful). They’ll require a few minutes of your day at the most - and the most important ones will eventually be turned into habits, that you’ll do automatically, without being aware of it.
And today’s challenge will show you exactly what that’ll look like.
Challenge #2: The No-Brainer List
What are your morning no-brainers?
Remember Challenge 1 from our previous lesson? That list of things you do in your first hour of being awake? It's time to pull it out and look at it.
How many of those things did you think about before you did them? How many required an actual decision?
Conversely, how many did you do because you always do them at that time in the morning?
The things that didn't require a decision are your no-brainers - and they're powerful. They're strong. You can tether a habit to them, and that habit will hold.
Here's a personal example: like most tea addicts, when I first walk into the kitchen in the morning, I fill the electric kettle with water and I turn it on. A full kettle of water takes around 5 minutes to boil. That's 300 seconds, which is just enough time to run through 3 quick sets of stretching exercises for my legs, which I want to do to toughen up for some serious running later in the year. And my reward? A delicious cup of tea.
Your early morning no-brainers are the triggers for your new morning habits.
Now, go dive into your routine and find them! ;)
See you in lesson #3 —> (You can access it right here.)
Much love,
Dr. Mariana
Image Credits: Pixabay; Unsplash