![]() ![]() Along with setting expectations that new routines won’t be effortless, you can learn coping techniques to deal with discomfort in a healthier manner.įor instance, you can learn to re-imagine the difficulty in a positive way by telling yourself a different story. Expect discomfort and know that you’ll have to push through it. It’s important to expect that learning and repeatedly doing a new behavior requires effort. Not doing an effortful task, like doing the laundry or writing in a journal, is easy to forget because such behaviors are not a habit, they are a routine that requires effort. They expect routines to be as effortless as habits, while the only thing about routines that’s easy, is how easy they are to skip. ![]() This is where people get into trouble confusing habits and routines. I knew the faucet wouldn’t work, but I kept attempting to do the behavior with little thought.Ī habit feels uncomfortable when we don’t do it, exactly the opposite is true of routines. Every time I lifted the faucet handle and no water came out, my habit was interrupted and I’d get annoyed. Even though I was fully aware that the bathroom sink wasn’t going to work, I kept turning it on day after day out of habit. I needed to use the kitchen sink to wash my hands for a week. I recently experienced just such a predicament when the water to my bathroom sink was shut off because of construction in my building. Even if the magic habit fairy told you your hands had been cleaned and there was no need to wash them, it would take you several days, if not weeks, to undo this habitual behavior. If you’re in the habit, not doing the behavior would feel strange, even uncomfortable. Imagine intending to wash your hands and the water suddenly shuts off. We may look up something online to satisfy our uncertainty - all because we seek to escape these uncomfortable sensations. We might see a friend to relieve loneliness, or watch a show on television when we’re bored. When we feel lonely, bored, or uncertain, we act to relieve our emotional disquietude. The same rule applies to psychological discomfort. But that good feeling comes after we’re spurred into action by an uncomfortable sensation prompting us to take action. Does feeling warm again or eating food bring pleasure? Of course. Our brains get our bodies to do what they want through discomfort. All human behavior, even the itch of desire to do something pleasurable, is in fact prompted by pain. Rather, neurologically speaking, motivation is the desire to escape discomfort. Skinner popularized the notion that reinforcements and punishments drive conditioned behavior.īut, we now know that motivation is not driven by pleasure and pain. ![]() He promoted the idea that behavior is driven by the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. For years, we thought that Sigmund Freud’s “pleasure principle” is the basis of human motivation. ![]()
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