In the weeks since making New Years Resolutions, you’ve likely rediscovered
something you’ve experienced many times before: how difficult it is to follow
through on good intentions.

When it comes to making changes that would improve our health and
happiness, we’re of two minds, and I don’t just mean that as a figure of
speech. We are determined to change at times and driven to continue
destructive habits at others because the human nervous system has two
distinct networks capable of processing information and generating
behavior. In other words, not only are we of two minds, it’s almost as
though we have two minds. The mind most familiar to us operates
consciously and rationally. It’s sort of like the Windows operating system
on your computer. What you see is what you get. And what you see when
you think about destructive habits is a desire to change.

However, the conscious mind doesn’t direct our behavior all the time.
Under certain conditions, a toggling mechanism in our brains switches
control from the rational mind to a more reflexive nervous system
network. At such times, it’s as though half our brain is tied behind our
backs. We become less capable of thinking clearly and responding sensibly.
Instead of choosing how to act, we revert to those behavior patterns that
draw the lowest mental voltage: familiar habits.

By the time I work with them, most of my clients have had years of
experience with the following pattern: They resolve anew to change, and
do all that they can to muster their resolve and determination. They hope
and pray that this time, their willpower will be sufficient to bear up under
the force of temptation when it hits. Then they proceed through everyday
life, more vigilant than usual and more ready to put up a fight. With a
heightened focus and increased exertion, they may find themselves more
able than usual to resist the pull of habit. Nonetheless, inevitably, in some
weak moment, they find themselves vulnerable again, more easily
persuaded by the siren song of habit and less able than usual to marshal
their inner resources for the fight. They succumb to temptation. Later,
when they’re back in their right mind, they may kick themselves for
giving in again. And then they may launch back in to the early stages
of this cycle with even more fervor than before.

Over years of working with clients in the caught up in this cycle, I’ve been
convinced that we can’t change habits by trying really hard. Fighting and
succumbing are both ways of reacting, ruts we fall back into which follow
the same pattern each time we repeat them. Did you catch that?
Succumbing to urges and fighting them can both become ingrained habits
that we repeat automatically, without much variation, without true
awareness, and certainly without exercising any creativity. No wonder the
roller-coaster of fighting and succumbing can continue in some people’s
lives for years without substantial variation. A change program that works
will need to help us alter both our habit of succumbing, and our habit of
resisting in the usual way.

Even in the throes of such an automatic, unenlightened cycle, we remain
human beings and thus retain our infinite potential. I’m not talking about
the capacity to become a world leader or carve an inspiring sculpture. By
infinite potential, I’m referring to the fact that our response options at any
moment of our lives remain limitless—they can’t be numbered. In theory at
least, we can do anything when we’re tempted to succumb to or tempted to
fight our urges. Unfortunately, when we’re most reactive, we’re not in a
choosing frame of mind. In fact, we’re not even in a recognizing frame of
mind. Therefore, most of the time, we don’t do anything differently even
when we could. The inertia of habit is considerable, and our usual patterns
tend to continue. Don’t be surprised when change is slow, even after you
start working with your habits in new ways.

Fortunately, in everyday life, there are those windows—those zones of
freedom—within which we still have the presence of mind to make choices.
At least some of the time, we can both recognize that now would be a good
time to do things differently and proceed to do so. These are crucial
moments, potential turning points, and we can leverage them most
powerfully by taking little actions that further expand those windows,
those zones of freedom. Like my kids, who would use the last of their
three wishes to wish for even more wishes, we can turn these key
moments of freedom when we feel like being reactive into even more
freedom by doing things that help us ease away from the fringe of the
reactive state of mind.

Breathing and noticing are two simple but surprisingly effective tools we
can use to buy ourselves even more freedom at those crucial potential
turning points. Let’s briefly explore each one.

Breathing is one of the few automatic nervous system functions that we
can take over and direct for ourselves. We can’t make a point of slowing
our heart rate or stop sweating because we want to stay calm. We can,
however, take a few slow, deep breaths when we realize that bodily
tension is building. This enables our body to stay more relaxed when we
were starting to get keyed-up. Interestingly enough, this has a profound
effect on the mind, because the mind takes its lead from the body. When
the body’s tense, the mind tends to fixate. It narrows attention down and
can only choose between a restricted set of reactions. Old familiar habits
like succumbing and fighting are usually top on the list. When the body is
relaxed, on the other hand, the mind gets the message to broaden our
awareness. In this open frame of mind we can observe things we’d
otherwise miss and consider a multitude of possible options. We remain
free to repeat a destructive habit, practice an adaptive habit, do something
we’ve never done before, or even to forbear taking action altogether.

In addition to taking a few slow, deep breaths, we can also notice some of
the input that flows into our senses at any given moment. For instance, we
can look at one thing in our environment, one visual point, as we take a deep
breath. As we focus fully on that one thing and the way it looks at this very
moment, something interesting happens in our brains. They have a limited
capacity for processing information, and “what’s real now” gets priority
over plans, memories, abstract thoughts, fears, and fantasies.
Because our nervous systems operate according to this Reality First
principle, we can interrupt reactive mental habits by tuning in to and
becoming mindful of current sensory input.

Personally, when I practice noticing, I usually go back and forth between
three senses. I find and fixate on a particular sight during one inhale, then
as I exhale I direct my attention from what I was looking at and tune into
what I can hear. After I single out a particular background noise, I focus on
it during my next inhale. Then I rub my hand against a nearby object like
the dashboard of my car and attend closely to its peculiar texture as I
slowly inhale again. If I go through these three senses a couple times
each, I find that by the time I’m done breathing & noticing my mind has
usually freed itself up from where it was lodged. I can then decide what
I want to think about and consider some response options that are more
sensible than the reactive habits that felt so compelling a few moments
ago.

During the first month I worked with him, I encouraged Steve to practice
two exercises between our weekly meetings. The first was to keep a record
of those times when he found himself caught up in a reactive state of mind.
He did this by recording in a little notebook his “spots & thoughts.” At least
two or three times a week, usually once he was back in his right mind
again, he wrote down something about the situation or time of day
(the spot) and something about what was going through his mind
(the thought) when he felt more emotionally reactive than usual.
This exercise helped him become more aware of both how frequently he
shifted into an emotionally reactive mode and the events and situations
in his life that tended to trigger it. After his first week of tracking spots
and thoughts, I encouraged him to practice the breathing and noticing
sequence in a few of the moments when he caught himself starting to
feel reactive.

At first, Steve used the breathing and noticing when he felt the pull of
pornography, the habit that he had hired me to help him overcome. He
said at the beginning of our third session, “I was surprised how much that
breathing and looking and listening thing helped. It seems to dissipate and
defuse temptation a bit. A couple of times it went away and was gone for
good. Then on Thursday it kept pounding away at me, and eventually I
slipped up. But it seems like a promising tool that I can put to use in the
future. In fact, it helped me keep my cool when I was upset at my fifteen-
year-old. He violated his curfew on Friday night and I did it as I was sat
there in the living room waiting for him to get home.” Steve clenched his
jaw and let out a sigh: “There’s the neighbor’s mailbox… (another sigh)
There’s the feeling of the carpet against my toes…”

I was glad that Steve had something new he could do, something he could
use that would sometimes break the spell of obsession in the heat of the
moment. However, I knew that if he just kept trying to catch his
destructive urges and turn things around once he felt a strong pull, he’d
continue to fight a losing battle. I knew that he would be more likely to
succeed in the long run if he started to pay attention to the landscape
upstream from the waterfall. Then, he could get better at turning around
before the current got so stiff. Instead of focusing solely on avoiding the
destructive habit itself, I encouraged him to focus on identifying and
managing the factors that switch on his reflexive mind and disengage
his capacity to decide how he’s going to act.

As he began to track the “spots & thoughts” associated with his other,
less disturbing emotional reactions, he discovered what most of my
clients do: that he didn’t get to the point where he felt a strong urge
for pornography all at once. Instead, he discovered that he had been
unknowingly spending large chunks of time during the week working
himself up into a state of vulnerability. He did this the way we all do:
by becoming reactive in other ways that are less troubling and thus
less noticeable.

For instance, Steve started to notice that he was more prone to
experience sexual temptation after a stressful week at work. “Then I
feel too wound up to sleep, so I stay up and channel surf. I find myself
lingering on those titillating dating shows or those infomercials for sex-
related 900 numbers. It only takes a bit of that before I’m fully into it
and I’ve lost my resolve to abstain. Next thing I know I’m spending money
we don’t have on that garbage with no regard for how I’ll feel later or how
my wife is going to react when finds out I’ve relapsed again.”

With coaching, Steve started to identify the earliest stages of the pattern
that eventually culminated in those relapses. He kept a lookout for those
times when he started to work himself up at the office or at home. Using
his spots & thoughts notebook, he discovered, for instance, that his mind
and body got particularly keyed-up when his inbox got too full or he
started to get phone calls from employees in other departments of the
company who were waiting on one of the databases he was programming.
He’d start going full bore, which had obvious advantages. He’d usually get
more done more quickly. However, in that super-focused state of mind, he
was also less likely to notice that he needed to take a break, grab
something to eat. He was unresponsive to subtle urges to stretch, stand
up, or take a little walk. As he paid more attention to these stressful
periods, he realized that he even avoided taking bathroom breaks, at
times  until he was in pain from a full bladder! He observed that
eventually, his gung-ho mentality reached the point of diminishing
returns even in terms of productivity. His concentration would fade, he’d
make more computer programming mistakes. He also noticed a moderate
but distinct lagging of his morale during intense times.

After identifying this earlier part of his pattern, Steve started to use
breathing and noticing to interrupt what he called his productivity
compulsion. It surprised him to be working on this, because just weeks
earlier he hadn’t even entertained the possibility that his drive to deliver
a good product at work might play a role in his destructive habit. Now
Steve  relied on breathing & noticing, the same skills he’d been using to
interrupt sexual impulses, to break the spell of the reactive frame of mind
that kicked in at work. He still worked hard when demands were intense,
but a few times a day he’d push himself back from his desk, take a few
slow, deep breaths, and notice the sound of air rushing through the
heating duct, a branch on a tree in the courtyard of his office complex,
or the texture of his corduroy pant leg as he rubbed it between his finger
and thumb.

This helped him reestablish a calm state of mind. Sometimes he could
see that he was fixating too much on one topic and was at risk of missing
the forest for the trees. A few times he returned phone calls that he might
have otherwise forgotten about. Usually, he continued the work he’d been
doing, but sometimes the task now had a noticeably lighter feel to it.

Over a period of weeks, the sexual urges that had haunted him for
seventeen years diminished and became less pesky. Steve concluded
that by changing the way he responded at work and at home, he was
preventing the buildup that used to eventually cry out for sexual
release. Steve slipped in his progress several more times during the
time I worked  with him. However, after the fact, rather than kicking
himself and assuming  that he was “back at square one,” he looked at
each lapse in an effort to determine what factors had increased his
vulnerability. Each time, he learned something new that he could apply
in his ongoing efforts. As he did this, I could tell that Steve was
responding as a human being, exercising his infinite potential. He was
being thoughtful and deliberative, rather than lapsing back into a
familiar sequence like “berating myself for messing up” or “trying
harder this time.”

Of course, the portrayal I’ve given of Steve’s progress is
oversimplified. After all, I met with him eleven times over a period of
just less than a year. However, what you’ve read is the essence of what
helped him and dozens of other clients struggling like him to change their
habits. Try out these principles and practices for yourself. Then, please let
me know how it goes for you. Sometimes change is a miraculous process,
and I’m interested in hearing about what you learn along the way.