Several years ago I developed a full-blown bad habit with online shopping. I can say that now because I can see how besides the obvious financial consequences, it made me feel ashamed, it wasted time, and it contradicted my personal value of frugality. And I share this personal experience because I want you to know that whatever your “bad habit” is, you are not alone.
Many of us were taught that sheer grit and self-determination can help us overcome these bad habits, but I disagree. When we know better we can do better, and what I want you to know after this episode is WHY you have these bad habits, so that you can work on them in a different, and more effective, way.
About a few other things…
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TRANSCRIPT
Monica: Welcome to About Progress. I’m Monica Packer, a regular mom and recovering perfectionist who uncovered the truest model to dramatic but lasting personal growth. It’s progress made practical. Join us to leave the extremes behind and instead learn how to do something to grow in ways that. One of the most basic ways you can make a big difference in your life is knowing what your values are.
It can be hard to define those. So to give you little help, I have a resource for you called the Ultimate Values Exercise. You can find that at about progress.com/values, and it’s totally free.
My mom was raised by parents who ranched and farmed, and my dad’s dad was a teacher and a farmer too. As a result, frugality was a huge value in my family growing up and something I still carry with me to this day, and that’s why a bad habit I developed early on in my motherhood felt so bad. It was online shopping.
It began with frugality as a focus. Actually, I was just on the hunt for the best deals, for the things I needed to get for my brand new baby. And where I got those deals tended to be TJ Max. It became a regular haunting ground as I searched for the right clothes and books and bottles for my baby, and all at great prices.
But gradually more things started to slip into that cart. And then once I got home and I had a little bit more space, both mentally and physically, I would recognize that there were things I didn’t need or want or couldn’t afford, no matter the deal. And I’d go back to TJ Max to make returns. Thanks to mainly shopping in a store, that bad habit didn’t really get to a place where it felt hugely bad until after the birth of my third child, which also coincided with me getting my first smartphone.
I bought a used one off of a friend, and during those late night nursing sessions, or even avoiding my chores during nap time, I found that I had many more hot deals to scroll literally at my fingertip. Well, I never made us get into debt or kept too many things that weren’t needed or wanted. That cycle alone of hunting and then buying and then returning became more and more a regular part of my life.
It became a habit. My online shopping habit came with obvious costs financially, even if they were the best deals, and I didn’t keep everything right, but the bigger costs were more. If I were to put this simply, this bad habit made me feel bad. It wasted time some money, but most of all, it made me feel ashamed of myself because it went directly against my value of frugality.
It was a habit I wanted and needed to conquer. I share about this bad habit because I am 100% positive that you can relate. Maybe for you, it isn’t online shopping. Maybe it’s chewing your nails. Also guilty of that, watching too many episodes of the West Wing in a row. Also guilty of that or playing games on your phone without much forethought.
I’m not guilty of that last one only because I’ve not even put the games on my phone because I knew it would just become a bad habit for me. Bad habits are something we all have. We will never be 100% clear of bad habits. And they can also feel like whack-a-mole. Just when you conquer one bad habit, another one pops up for you to deal with.
When these bad habits keep springing up, we often tell ourselves and are honestly taught this, that conquering a bad habit comes down to individual grit and determination. You simply decide to have the self-control to not do something anymore, and then you stop it. Right? I’m laughing only because this may work for some people and to some extent, and it may work for some habits during certain seasons, but in my experience both personally and professionally as a coach, I can tell you that nobody has that level of superhuman self-control to be able to apply that self-control to every bad habit in every degree throughout their entire lives.
So what should we. Do we just throw up our hands and say, well, I guess I can’t fix these. No, because as you’ve heard me say about other topics, when we know better, we can do better, and in this case do things differently. Today I want to help you know better with what’s really going on with these bad habit.
Keep listening to hear three truths about bad habits, truths that will help you do better because you can work on these bad habits differently.
Before I share these three truths, I want you to think about a bad habit you would like to work on. You can apply these truths to that bad habit and see how it applies. And from here, go and do differently. Right? Okay. Number one, bad habits don’t make you bad. They make you human. I’m going to apply this with a story from one of the clients that I’ve worked with in the past.
Her bad habit was scrolling her phone day and night. It was something she constantly found herself coming back to, not even intentionally, she just came back to scrolling her phone and shame was the main feeling she carried around, not just about this bad habit, but about herself. I’ve seen that similar shame in other women and their bad habits too, from scrolling to emotional eating to uncontrollable organizing, and yes, even that last one is a bad habit.
Bad habits are bad in certain ways, but not because they are innately bad. An example of why bad habits aren’t innately bad is this, you know, someone’s bad habit might be another person’s good habit or someone’s bad habit in a particular season of their life might be a good habit in another season. For me, a bad habit that is a good habit right now for me is streaming a show at night.
In the past, during, during certain seasons of my life, that became an uncontrollable bad habit where I found myself just continuing to press play after play after play. But right now in my season, it’s a good habit. I, streaming a show at night helps me wind down, helps me take time to connect with Brad as we watch a show together.
So this habit of streaming a show isn’t innately bad. But how does one like this become bad over time? It’s for two reasons. Bad habits are not bad because they are innately bad. I’m gonna be saying bad a lot right now. They are bad for two big reasons. One, they feel bad, and two, they carry bad consequences.
The main reason they feel bad is when these habits are done out of alignment with three big things in our lives. Our values, priorities, and intentions. Values and priorities are what matter most to us. They include responsibilities, relationships and more intentions are what we intend to do for the day or for the moment.
Bad habits feel bad when they interfere with what matters most to us, and they are coupled with a lack of intention. We’re not intentionally trying to do that thing. And the second part again, of why I shared bad habits are bad is because they can carry bad consequences. You know, when you interfere in what matters most to you, of course there’s going to be consequences.
Maybe your relationships will suffer. Maybe you aren’t meeting your responsibilities at home or at work or otherwise. And maybe just that lack of intention innately feels really terrible when you are not intending to do something and you keep coming back to it. We can’t avoid these consequences, and that’s why I don’t want us to just go right to this like apathy route where we just say, oh, I can’t, I can’t change these bad habits.
I guess it’s just part of being human. Now, we do want to work on our bad habits because we want to be people of substance. We want to truly honor our values. We want to honor our priorities, and we want to honor our intentions day by. But let’s go back to the truth. Bad habits don’t make you bad. They make you human.
The reason why I’m so hell bent on telling you this is because the shame that we can attach to our bad habits does not help us heal them. Shame makes it way worse. We have to be able to detach the guilt and shame from certain behaviors and just be able to call the behaviors for what they are. This is a lack of intention.
I did not intend to do this, so that’s, that’s something I’m gonna call out for myself. Ooh, that goes against my value of frugality or that goes against my value of development or creativity. This is going against my priority today of connecting to my child that I really wanted to do. So detach the guilt and shame call the behavior for what it is.
And from there you insert a whole lot of compassion. Compassion, which by the way, is what helps you make real changes over time, deep and lasting change. Before I go on to the next truth, I want to redefine what bad habits are because for a lot of us, we think bad habits are the things that I do when I don’t have any self-discipline or self-control, and I can never stop them because I’m a terrible human.
I just came up with that definition right there, and wow, that came outta my subconscious quite easily. Let’s redefine what bad habits are so that way we can notice them in our lives, see how they’re interfering with our lives, and then be able to do something about them. Here’s my definition. Bad habits are the regular and often subconscious behaviors that interfere with our values, our priorities, and our intentions.
If I were to put that in a different way, I would say bad habits are the misaligned ways we try to cope with being human. Bad habits don’t make you bad. They make you human. Now with each of these truths I’m going to share one thing I want you to identify in order to apply this truth to a bad habit you have.
So when you acknowledge that bad habits don’t make you bad, they make you human. Next, what I want you to do with this truth is to identify what values, priorities, and or intentions are being blocked with a bad habit that you wanted to work. When you’re able to see, oh, this is getting in the way of this or this person, or even just my productivity in a day.
That almost becomes your why, your deeper why to working on a habit. It’s what helps you step in and also apply the compassion cuz it’s not about you just railing on yourself and having the identity of a person who’s doing bad habits and a and a bad person, period. It’s just a little bit of space for you to say, this is how it’s getting in the way of my life and this is why I wanna work on it.
Two more truths are coming. But first, let’s take a quick break to hear a word from our.
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I just spoke about values and how bad habits can interfere with them. If you’re not sure what yours are, take me up on a free resource I developed just for this community. It’s called the Ultimate Values Exercise. If I were to just point at you and say, what are your values? And if you come up short, you’re not alone.
It can be really complicated and a huge brain exercise in trying to just drum up some words that describe your most important. That’s why this exercise does it all for you step by step. I walk you through how to break it all down in ways that are doable and connected to your deeper soul. You can go to about progress.com/values to get the ultimate values exercise completely for free right to your inbox.
Again, that’s about progress.com/values.
Let’s go on to the second truth about bad habit. Bad habits go deeper. I wanna bring it back to my client who scrolled on the surface level. This behavior looked really lazy, and that’s why her shame was so entrenched with this habit. But when we went deeper and what was leading to this behavior and encouraging it, it was so much more about just being lazy and wanting to detach from her responsi.
In fact, this behavior was about this client trying to numb chronic anxiety, especially the anxiety she carried about her main daily responsibilities. She was the primary caretaker of her children and because a traumatic childhood of her own with parents who were not very connected to her, she found herself feeling a lot of things while she was even doing the mundane chores around the house.
And those deeper issues were things that. Most seemingly easily avoided by scrolling. You’ve heard me say that habits go deeper, and I’m talking about all kinds. This is especially true for bad habits. Remember my definition that bad habits are the misaligned ways that we tried to cope with being human.
When we think that bad habits are just about us, or we only go to the surface level reasons of us having poor self-control or being terrible procrastinators, if we’re even leaning into a bad identity, we carry with that habit. We’re not gonna get anywhere. Instead, we need to go deeper on what’s really happening underneath the surface of this habit.
Soon I’m going to share a coaching call that I did with my friend Lisa. We did it on her Instagram stories couple months ago in the fall. And we are talking about her bad habit of not doing the laundry and putting it away. And when we dug into what this was about for her, it was not about the laundry.
It was actually about her feeling inadequate and carrying around the identity of someone who struggles to follow through. Bad habits go deeper. Once you’re able to own this truth, your next step on how to apply it to a bad habit is to identify how your bad habit is going deeper. When we know better, we can do better.
In both of these first truths, knowing better helps us take a step back and see things for what they. We’re not taking on the identities of people who do these things. We’re not carrying the shame and blame. We’re able to create some space from them, which helps us also with time, better work on them. I can promise you this is how you can change these bad habits.
That client who had the bad habit of scrolling it, it was such an entrenched behavior for her. It did take time, and that is not something we are going to say anything otherwise about. Yes, bad habits still take time and effort to work on, but she got a lot farther and a lot faster by adopting these two truths at first.
We were able to identify for her that it was interfering with her values of connecting with her children and the priorities and intentions she had set for her days. Right. Then we went to the other thing to identify how it went deeper for her, connected to some traumatic things from her childhood and the anxiety that she was carrying around with her now as the primary caretaker in her home.
That space I described, I saw that in real time with. When we dug deep and, and were able to identify those things about this bad habit, I saw a literal sigh of relief in her understanding more about this bad habit did not make her lean into it more. It helped her work with it better. That meant she was able to first help her own anxiety and then work on the bad habit.
Sometimes that’s how it goes, but knowledge is power. So let’s start with being able to call out these bad habits for what they are. Bad habits don’t make you bad. They make you human and bad habits Go deeper.
Now let’s share the final truth about bad habits that I want you to own: Bad habits work. This one might surprise you because didn’t I already share that? Bad habits interfere with what matters most to us. That doesn’t seem like it’s working very. Bad habits would not stick around if they weren’t working.
To some extent. That’s just basic brain science. We only do things if they’re working to some extent. When I say working, I want you to think of that in quotation marks because bad habits are trying to help with the deeper things that are going on in our lives. That’s us trying to to function with just being human, but bad habits work only to some extent.
And at some cost, the way they work best actually has to do with feelings. Bad habits are most effective when it helps us either feel good or not feel. I want to do a quick breakdown on this. The feel good effects of some bad habits go innately with a dopamine. That scrolling for my old client was definitely a feel good, bad habit.
It was helping her feel good instead of feeling bad, right? My online shopping was a feel good, bad habit too. The other side to this is that some bad habits make us not feel they’re around to help us seemingly tried to cope with life. Guiding us to avoid hard feelings and stress by numbing these out, numbing the hard emotions out, alleviating anxiety helping us not feel the overwhelm.
What is it for you with my friend’s bad laundry habit that I’m going to share in a future date? It was more of a not feel for her. Avoiding the laundry helped her avoid the feeling she had about not being a person who followed through, which I know is very. Of course there are bad habits that do both of these.
They both help us feel good and not feel at the same time. And even if that seems to be the case with most of your habits, it again comes down to identifying how when you know better, you can do better. So how is it helping you feel good? Or how is it helping you not feel, or a combination of the two. Our feelings are really, really powerful, and this is coming from someone who spent a lot of years avoiding feelings either through the guise of productivity or numbing Feelings are powerful because that’s how our brain.
Basically functions. When things feel good, we do more of them, and even numbing is better than the bad feelings. This is why bad habits then become so powerfully entrenched in our lives too. This is why they can become like whack-a-mole. If you’ve ever gone through a social media cleanse because you’re like, I need to get rid of this bad habit of just scrolling the phone a lot, and then you find yourself doing something else instead, this is why.
It’s because of the power that bad habit had in either helping you feel good or not feel, and then we’re back to the power of not identifying ourselves alongside the bad habit of saying, we are bad. Instead, we can see, oh, no wonder why this other bad habit has come up. Or, no wonder why this bad habit is so hard to get rid of.
It’s because it feels good in these ways, or it’s helping me not feel in these ways, or a combination of the two feelings are powerful. Once you’ve adopted these three truths and you’ve identified the three things that are connected to them, this is when the real work begins. Working on bad habits involves knowing a lot about how our brain works.
It involves some self coaching and time, and also support. Instead of you leaving this episode feeling despair, I want to give you, I shared with you at the beginning of the episode my story of becoming an online shopper, this bad habit that I had. Now, to be honest, it still creeps up here and there, and it also was not an overnight success and overcoming it, it took time.
But I can tell you that in applying these truths and working on this bad habit over time, with a whole lot of compassion alongside knowledge, This is not a habit I struggle with nearly to the capacity I did before, even after the birth of my most recent child when I found myself scrolling more through the deals that were going on, I was able to say, oh, I know what this is.
I know what it’s really about, and I know what it’s trying to help me do. I know it’s how it’s trying to work in my life, and that meant I could step in in other ways to take care of what this bad habit was trying to take care of. For me, working on bad habits is something we all can. With a little bit more knowledge, a little bit more support, and a lot more compassion and time.
I hope this episode gave you the hug and kick in the pants that you need to. I’ll review the progress pointers from this episode. It includes the three truths and what you need to identify with those truths. Number one, we all have bad habits. Bad habits are the regular and often subconscious behaviors that interfere with our values, our priorities, and our intentions.
Number two, bad habits do not make you bad. They make you human identify how a bad habit is unintentionally interfering with what matters most to you. Number three, bad habits. Go deeper. Identify how your bad habit goes deeper. Number four, bad habits work. Identify how yours is. Feel good or not feel good in nature.
And number five, overcoming our bad habits is rarely an overnight process, but it’s more than possible for all of us, not that you know, and hopefully own these truths. Let’s think about how do we apply them practic. That’s where my course comes in, the sticky habit. In this course, I share how to create supportive habits in ways that stick.
But this past December, we finally added a whole bonus module called Bad Habit University, and this was because a lot of women wanted to come into the course to work on a bad habit. Instead, they had to learn how to first form good habits, and a lot of that process then led to us working on bad habits because we had more of the ways to hack our brains and to work in on habits and ways that stick.
A lot of it applies to bad habits. Now, working on bad habits is not something that I can teach a. At the end of an episode real quick. It does take time and it does take more, even more knowledge than what you heard today. So I would encourage you to check out the Sticky Habit Method, and again, it includes a full bonus module for Free The Bad Habit University.
I wanna share one testimonial that came from the chorus from someone who was able to complete it. Her name is Kelly. She said quote. Sticky habit method has been the missing piece for me and habit formation. I know it will still be not a smooth road, but the mindset shifts and practical tips will keep me on the path that will help me form habits aligned with my values.
The biggest mindset was recognizing that the problem wasn’t me failing, it was the system failing. This takes out the shame and makes it a game for me. I’m able to recognize why I fail, not shame myself and get back on the wagon. I love this testimonial for many reasons. It hits on a lot of the things we discussed today, but one of the biggest for me is how she learned how to deal with failure better, because most methods out there assume that you will not fail, and that is a huge mistake.
We all fail. And the sticky habit method includes failure, not only as part of the process to form habits and to work on bad habits in ways that stick, but as a necessary part to both. Again, you can learn more at about progress.com/sticky habit method. Thank you so much for listening. Now go and do something with what you learned today.
It became a regular haunting ground.
