Toward Ecosophy

Let's talk some more about training the will. 

We've talked about habits. Those are the patterns that keep your will going when you have other things on your mind. As we discussed last week, habits are good servants but lousy masters. One of the central goals of will training is therefore to establish habits that serve you well, and eliminate those that try to boss you around. 

Many people have had the experience of trying to break a habit and failing repeatedly. That's one of the things that establishes the habit of failure -- the habit that, above all, you need to break. The usual cause of failure in changing a habit is trying to get rid of it without replacing it. The key to success, in turn, is to choose habits you don't want and replace them with habits you do want -- or at least can live with. 

Here's an example. I know a guy who'd gradually developed the habit of drinking alcohol. It wasn't a serious problem for him, but he'd seen one of his parents become dependent on booze and knew how that movie ends. He tried just stopping a couple of times, with very limited success, and then we talked. On my advice, he replaced it with another habit -- drinking strongly flavored black tea. Instead of pouring himself a drink in the evening to wind down, he made himself some tea, and sipped that while doing the things he normally did of an evening. It worked. No fuss, no bother, no white knuckles, just one habit gone and a less physically damaging habit in its place. 

Why did it work? Because the new habit gave him everything the old one did except the specific, narrowly focused chemical rush of ethanol, and it replaced that with a different chemical rush, the one you get from the caffeine and other stimulants in tea (and in some of the flavorings -- look up sometime how many spices have effects on your brain.) 

You can do the same thing. If you've got a habit you don't want, replace it with a habit you do want -- or at least are willing to live with. Make sure the two of them are similar enough that the new habit meets the same emotional needs that the old one did. Remember that your goal here isn't to display your heroic virtue or, for that matter, to prove to the world that you can't do anything right. (An astonishing number of people have that emotional habit in place.) Your goal is to swap one habit for another, and turn a master into a servant. 

That's one of your assignments for this week. If you don't have any habits you want to change, good for you; see if you can find a habit you want to have that you don't have yet, and take it up. Your other assignments are to continue with last week's project, changing the specific exercises you're doing. Remember -- one exercise involving conscious action, and another involving conscious attention.  By doing this you're replacing an unhelpful habit -- the habit of neglecting your will -- with a helpful one -- the habit of training your will. 

Got it? Good. We'll go further next week.