Habit

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”― Mahatma Gandhi

It was a rather short grocery list. Just the basics. Egg, milk, bread, fruits, Greek yogurt, cheese, avocado, Gatorade. Took me less than 10 minutes to pick up the items from the store shelves, pay at the self-checkout kiosk and come back to the parking lot. But where is my car? I have quite a strong visual memory. I totally remembered that I parked within the first few spots along the alley that is directly aligned with the main door of the grocery store. But absolutely no sign of any Tesla in those spots. Not even in the corresponding spots in the adjacent parallel alleys. I started to get a bit nervous within. Is my memory completely failing me to remember where I parked just 10 minutes ago? Then as the muffled sound of something playing in the car audio inside a locked car nearby wafted towards me, I suddenly realized that I was driving a rental car today, as my Tesla is getting some work done. I was lucky that s soon as I came close enough to the rental car, my phone was connected via Bluetooth to the rental car’s audio system and started playing the audiobook ("The Worlds I See" by Fei-Fei Li) that I was listening to while driving towards the grocery store. The familiar sound of the audiobook rescued me from the embarrassment of not being able to locate my car.

I was looking at the right spot, but looking for the “wrong” car.

This is a prime illustration of what habit does to you. Your brain takes a passive role and “automaticity” takes over. In my case, for the last five-plus years, the reflexive action is to look for my Tesla. I think we all have habits, many of which make us more efficient, amuse us, or at the very least, not harmful to us.

Take for example, my habit for the last one and a half years to start my day with solving multiple word puzzles. It started small during the COVID time with solving Wordle. I used to solve Wordle at a random time of the day whenever I had a down time and if I remembered about Wordle. Eventually solving wordle became part of my morning routine. And I added more and more word games to that routine, thanks to being part of a word-game-enthusiast friend community. At some point it has become a set of six (sometimes seven) word games that I would solve before even leaving the bed. Sometimes that would pose a problem, as it would interfere with the limited time I have to get ready in the morning to go to office, now that we are again working from office. So even though solving word games is not necessarily a bad habit,---in fact some would say it is good habit as it kickstarts my brain every morning--I consciously made a decision to break the habit of having to solve all of the word games at a stretch every morning. I just wanted to prove to myself that I am flexible enough to not be a “slave” to my own habit, irrespective of whether that is a good, a bad or a harmless neutral habit. The point is to break the cycle of dependency.

I am not that big into New Year’s resolution. Except 2018 when I decided to start playing tennis to reverse diabetes. Every other year I loosely tell myself that maybe this year I’d finally stop chewing my fingernails, but I don’t take that seriously at all, and inevitably I fail. But I think this year I silently took the resolution of “not playing all the word games at once” seriously enough. I am still playing my most favorite games almost every day—Connections, Wordle and Spelling Bee. And I play those first thing in the morning. But the others (i.e., Waffle, Squareword, Mini Crossword and Wordiply) I play at random times of the day whenever I can fit them in and if I remember to play.

Let me see how long this “resolution” lasts. A marketing study showed that the third Monday of January is the most depressing day of the year. It even has a name—“Blue Monday”. Apparently around this time “the major-lifestyle-modifying New Year’s resolutions almost always end in failure.” (Is ‘Blue Monday’ really the most depressing day of the year?). Well, I am writing this blog past the “Blue Monday” (which was January 15 this year), and my “resolution” is still going strong. Maybe the secret is to not make “major” lifestyle modifications, but trick yourself into achieving a major result eventually by starting with a “minor” habit change.