Learning to Unlearn Behaviors That No Longer Serve You
There is a time and a place for everything.
There was a time and place to call your mom every night, and that was likely when you were in your late teens in a college dorm room, missing home because your desired program of study was a couple hundred miles away.
Perhaps there was a time and place for starting every morning with a run, but now that your body can’t handle the physical stress of it, your morning routine would be better served with a vinyasa yoga flow.
Maybe there was a time and place for working yourself to the bone to make your career come to fruition, but now you have a family and a successful career, and you could do to lay off the late work hours in the home office.
As we grow up and grow into ourselves, it is often necessary to unlearn behaviors that once served us well. It’s not that they were necessarily bad habits; in fact, you may have benefited from them for quite some time! But as you and your circumstances change, so must some of your behaviors.
They might not align with the life you want for yourself anymore; perhaps they don’t support your mental health at this point in life; or it could be the case that they don’t even feel authentic to who you have become. That’s okay; it’s simply time to unlearn them!
Unfortunately, because you have been reenforcing certain behaviors for x amount of time, they can be difficult to unlearn. Know that it takes some time and diligence, but the outcome is worth the while. Here are a few tips for how to tackle them, depending on what feels right to you and your lifestyle:
- Full immersion, baby! As you may or may not know, the fastest way to learn a foreign language is essentially to be thrown to the wolves through full immersion. If you have no option but to soak it in 24/7 in order to communicate, your brain will adapt quicker, and you’ll be speaking, say, French, in no time! The same goes for unlearning a behavior; if you overwhelm the old behavior with the desired one, you will stand a better chance of safely and quickly transforming it.
- Focus your attention not so much on unlearning the old behavior, but on learning the new one. If you summon the excitement and motivation to learn a new behavior, rather than dwelling on the work it is taking to do so, you will have a better success rate. Take wanting to cut caffeine out of your diet, for example: Rather than focusing on how much you miss coffee, make your morning tea choice a whole exciting event! Purchase a wide variety, research the benefits of each, and choose which you will consume that morning based on what holistic outcome you are hoping to achieve. Amp this new behavior up; it’s the star of the show now!
- Take the “tough love” approach, and practice extinction. Entirely cut out the old behavior, if this is a healthy approach. In the same example of caffeine, your body might experience painful withdrawals should you practice extinction. But in, say, an example of no longer checking your phone first thing in the morning, perhaps you quite literally put your phone across the room and don’t check it until after you have gone through your morning routine.
Unlearning behaviors that once served you well but are no longer necessary can open the door to a world of growth. Put in the elbow grease, and let’s see those new behaviors!
As always, please reach out if you need help recalibrating your behaviors to promote a healthier lifestyle.
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