Break the Pattern: A Wakefield Therapist on Why You Keep Repeating Old Habits
Understanding Why We Repeat Patterns
Struggling to break habits that are no longer serving you? Connect with a therapist in Wakefield to help!
The age-old adage that “old habits die hard” has a lot of merit! We crave familiarity and comfort in routines and patterns, as they allow us to relax a bit, to have an opportunity to free up our energy for other pursuits. Habits allow us to focus on what is more interesting to us and simply take the guesswork out of many aspects of daily life. Sometimes, however, habits and patterns can get us stuck in a rut. We can repeat maladaptive responses over and over again, despite knowing they don’t lead us where we want to go. We can essentially bang our heads into the wall over and over again, then get up once more to do it again. It can certainly feel foolish, and no one is immune to some level of shame getting evoked over doing things we know don’t work for us repeatedly (I write as I spent more time on social media last night that would have been better spent figuring out the logistics for the upcoming weekend so family activities would flow more smoothly).
Are we stupid? Foolish? Self-sabotaging? I like to think not, even though I am also vulnerable to internal voices telling me these things about myself when I see myself doing things that don’t serve me well. What is it then? If we look at the dynamic with compassion, we have to look for how it makes sense. There is always a way that patterns are serving us, or that we think they are. For me last night, I wanted to simply not feel responsible for a few moments. Then those moments lasted too long! I was craving that release of responsibility. Old habits are familiar and there is often comfort with predictability, even if the outcome is predictably negative.
Therapy can be extremely helpful for establishing new habits, patterns and routines that serve you better. Meeting with a therapist in Wakefield can help you move beyond the shame you feel for what keeps getting you stuck, and into compassionately understanding your needs and finding new routines to meet them more adaptively. You deserve to have habits, patterns and routines that support you and what is most important to you, and therapy can help you get there when you feel stuck otherwise.
Common Habit Loops That Hold You Back
There are a lot of ways that habits get established. Some habits may be what I call “behavioral,” in that they are things that you do or don’t do, that someone else might see simply by watching you. This could be something like nail-biting, your laundry routine, your bedtime routine, your eating habits or how you spend time at work.
There can also be cognitive, or “thought” habits, which are seeming reflexive ways that you respond to circumstances. For example, your boss sends you an email that could be construed as somewhat cold and your internal response is, “she hates me,” “I’m a failure,” or “this is it, I’m going to get fired.” Or perhaps it’s something in your personal life like learning that a flight is delayed and your internal response is, “this is going to be a disaster now.”
Whether behavioral, cognitive or otherwise, habits can work for us, against us, or a messy mix of both. Often, habits hold us back because they inherently are not changing over time, which means that they are not evolving along with us as we grow and evolve. If you feel like there are things you do and ways you respond because you have “always done it that way,” it might be worth taking a deeper look to see if some revisions to these habits are due.
Keeping old patterns can be great when they continue to work for us, but when they fall short, can lead us to stay in patterns that are less mature, less based on our current values and less based on our age and stage in life.
It is important to understand that habits get established in ways that are behavioral, and also in ways that are internal. The internal ones can be harder to notice, because we can’t see them with our eyes and particularly because other people can’t observe them so we rarely get feedback on them. Therapy can be particularly helpful with the internal habits because in therapy, you can share these internal processes and a therapist can help you recognize habits that aren’t serving you anymore and evolve into new ways of responding.
Increasing Awareness to Create Change
Identifying patterns and habits is critical to evolving, because it’s hard to fiddle with dynamics that you can’t grasp. An important, and often overlooked, first step is to plan to learn about your habits and behaviors with compassion, understanding and curiosity. It is only through a lens of kindness that you can look really closely and meaningfully evaluate your needs that you are trying to serve with existing habits. Starting by consciously taking a deep breath and committing to simply being kind to yourself as you seek this understanding is so, so important. Why do I make such a firm point about this? Because I see in everyone I meet with professionally, everyone I know personally and in myself as well that without this intentional kindness, we are all likely to feel shame, judgement and guilt. These feelings are natural when we see ourselves doing things that are against our better judgement, and yet these feelings really inhibit the creativity, flexibility and hopefulness that is necessary to making lasting changes.
Take something common like nail-biting, for example. No adult bites their nails because they think it’s professional, sophisticated, hygienic and attractive. Yet every nail-biter has been lectured or scolded about how germy, gross and immature nail-biting appears when they do it, and they have usually admonished themselves many times over for doing it. So if they dive into how to get themselves to stop, they are likely to be missing what is really driving them to do it. They are likely to want to scold themselves whenever they catch themselves doing it and create some sort of negative feedback system to kill off the behavior. This may work for a while, but is likely to lead a nail-biter back to biting in time. Imagine instead, if you were to slow down about why you bite your nails, realizing that you actually don’t really know how to maintain your nails otherwise because you have never had to cut them as an adult, so when they start to grow out, they are uncomfortable. Maybe that will allow you to have the humility to stop at a drug store and pick up new clippers and spend some time playing around with clipping and filing your nails to feel good, even though it feels a bit embarrassing to need to do learn this at your life stage. Yet by learning this, it can help you keep your nails short enough that they don’t bother you and you can then eliminate that reason for biting. Alternatively, you may be well-aware that nail-biting is what you do when you are stressed. If you look compassionately at that struggle with stress management, you can consider what you really need instead to get the release that you currently get from nail biting. By reflecting for long enough, you may find that you think you will need some sort of physical stimulus in your hands or in your mouth, so you allow yourself time to find some sort of fidget to use that satisfies the urge to pick for now, or maybe you buy a bunch of toothpicks to hold in your mouth to satisfy the bite urge for now. All of this with a goal to move on from these tools over time, while recognizing that this step is in the direction you want.
Starting with compassion is critical to allowing yourself to really see what you need to find in order to know the real itch that you are trying to scratch with a maladaptive habit or pattern. Once you have that compassion and patience front and center, then it is really time to go looking and reflecting! Meeting with a therapist can be really helpful in this process as so many habits and particularly emotional patterns can remain invisible otherwise. Having a therapist you trust to provide you with this feedback in a caring manner can make a huge different to making invisible patterns more visible and being able to move forward with more ease.
Managing Setbacks and Staying Motivated
It may sound idealistic, but I truly believe setbacks are not actually setbacks. Instead, they are data points to learn from and then integrate and use to your advantage. Can it be discouraging to resort to old patterns and habits? Absolutely! I will never argue with that, yet I find that the concept of setbacks really invites guilt and shame, which I noted really don’t tend to help with moving forward. Instead, allowing that disappointment to be present and knowing it’s because you crave something different, then moving into how to learn from the experience, can help you resume your progress with more ease. It allows you to maintain your hopefulness. Maybe you learned that certain dynamics simply are too powerful for you to change your habits amidst just yet, so you adjust your expectations. Maybe you learn that certain vulnerabilities leave you simply way too depleted, so you can plan for a different approach when you are depleted. Either ways, viewing seeming setbacks as informative, rather than as shameful, can help you keep moving. Keep in mind that therapy, of course, can be a helpful and continuous support through the inevitable ups and downs.
How a Therapist in Wakefield Helps You Break Free from Old Habits that are Holding you Back
A therapist in Wakefield can take a personalized approach to understanding how you developed these habits, learning the aspects of them that are helpful and creatively make adjustments to them that feel realistic, in order to make the change you hope to see in your life. Keeping you accountable to self-compassion, a therapist can ensure that you keep your mindset open and flexible so that you can meet your needs adaptively and continuously. This support can help you build the more fulfilling life you deserve.
Tired of repeating the same old habits? A therapist in Wakefield can help you understand and change the patterns holding you back. Schedule a free consultation to make sure your habits are serving you well.
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