The devil is in the details. And not always the kind of details on a tax form or a few questions you missed on a test, but the ones you nonchalantly worked out for convenience; probably long ago, without much, if any thought at all. So what happened next? Well, minutes turned hours, hours to days, and days to years. The exception became the rule and the one coffee from Starbucks in the morning instead of pot coffee turned into hundreds of dollars spent a year. Snoozing the alarm and going back to sleep became pushing back a whole day’s schedule for a few extra minutes in the safety of your bed. The cliche of a seemingly insignificant action snowballing into a large catastrophe is known as the butterfly effect. More than likely the butterfly effect plays out in our lives daily. After all the path most traveled is the path of least resistance and we usually call this path “habits”.
Good or bad habits usually rule a large part of our day. Habits can be very mindful decisions made day after day, adding purpose to your life and making the doer a better person in general. Habits can also be simple things with unintended consequences that require no thought process and are wasting your time, money, and life. Habits have essentially written your past, control the present, and simultaneously predict the future. So if something usually was a certain way, then unless you have found a better way or developed reasoning for why the current way is invalid, that probably is how things are.
Chances are we all have some habits we would like to change. Very few things worth doing can be done without trying and effort. Changing a daily or even weekly routine requires much effort. A huge reason this is the case is that your life is already tuned to do the things you have been doing. You might find yourself driving the same way home as you always do, right by McDonald’s but you cant give in if you wanna lose that weight! Why take away the things in life that give you a little joy in a world that is full of hardships? Well, suffering gives us the opportunity to grow and get stronger. Nobody should have been able to survive the holocaust, but they did. You are stronger then you can imagine, so noticing what you can shed is a blessing not a curse of correction! When we make a conscious effort to drop the things we don’t need, the things that are hurting us, it can actually be painful. This is could be a boyfriend/girlfriend, drugs, bad entertainment, etc.. It’s painful because we are pruning the tree, we’re ripping off the leaches and extracting the tapeworms. This is not suffering for no reason, however, all turmoil is prosperous and when a blister is gone a callus takes its place.
How can someone just change a habit in one day they don’t like about themselves? If I knew a magic formula I’d probably be rich, but I believe the key factor is determination. “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always had”. So basically if you want something that you don’t have, you gotta try something that you never have. So how do you change a habit? The same way you made it, one day at a time. One thing that helps me to shorn away things I don’t like about myself is to remember the low points. Don’t blame yourself for losing that soccer game, blame the bad habits you let yourself fall into and change them. Try writing down how you feel about the low points and reread it often.
It takes conscious effort for you to change a habit you have. But in doing so the reward is potentially limitless, the butterfly effect works both ways.
