How Does Mindfulness Build Habits?

self-awarenessmindfulnesslife lessonsawarenesshabithabits
Written By Raine Creative

Self-awareness creates mindfulness of habits

I recently read Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick by Wendy Wood. Though sometimes overly clinical – it gave some useful information about habits.

But this led me to this realization - Habits are the result of mindfulness that becomes rote and routine

To change anything at all, or to develop a new skillset, we need to find, create, and build new habits.

A large swath of the things we do in our lives is habitual. It becomes rote and routine and automatic as such.

This is extremely useful. Since mindfulness – conscious awareness – is not our natural state of being, doing things subconsciously and habitually allows us to use conscious awareness for specific things.

When mindfulness/self-awareness is not our default

But there’s a downside to this. Because it’s not our default - nor really taught to us nor explored - our mindful, conscious awareness tends to get shunted to crises, emergencies, and the unexpected.

With one exception – the start of a new process. Taking on a weight loss program, learning a new skill, developing a new ability, and the like. To start anything new in our lives requires us to be consciously aware.

Identifying and changing habits

How do you identify your habits, and then change them?

Recognize the things you do by rote, routine, and automatically – with little to no thought. These are your habits.

All habits can be changed.

It’s a matter of recognizing and acknowledging what our habits are. After that, we need to take mindful actions to change them.

This week’s Applied Guidance for Mindfulness Tool:

When it comes to reaching any plateau with anything that you’re doing – habits need to be checked and altered.

This week’s applied guidance tool is a 6-step process to do just that.

Step 1 - Acknowledge the plateau

This is important because it’s easy to deny the issue, blame someone or something for it (ourselves included), or declare failure and allow it to negatively impact our overall health, wellness, and wellbeing.

Step 2 - Look for where the habit went wrong

How did the automaticity, rote, and routine shift away from the intention of the inciting action? This might take some time and deep analysis to recognize and understand.

Step 3 - Forgive yourself

I’m pretty sure that everyone experiences this in their life – so don’t be unkind to yourself that you plateaued. Forgive yourself so that you can release this and move forward.

Step 4 - Mindfully choose new actions

Don’t let your habitual behavior continue. Instead, choose mindfully, with conscious awareness, what actions to take now.

Step 5 - Repeat Step 4 frequently

Applied mindfulness is not one-and-done. It’s ongoing – or else a new habit to replace an unwanted habit can’t take hold.

Step 6 – Rinse and repeat

It took time to reach the plateau you’ve reached. Allow time to get off it again. How much time? Depends on lots of factors I can’t tell you about because I’m not you, and your mileage may vary.

Raine Creative
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