Invisible Habits - Nick Wignall

If I say the word habits, there’s a good chance that what you picture are physical behaviors…

Going for a run each morning
Snacking before bed
Drinking six glasses of water per day
Flossing

But most of our habits are invisible. And it’s these invisible habits—habits of mind—that matter most for our emotional health and effectiveness.

For example:

If you struggle with chronic anxiety, it’s almost certainly the case that the biggest cause of your anxiety is a habit of worrying. You can’t see, smell, or touch a worry. But nothing has a bigger impact on your anxiety levels than the habit of worrying.
Or take depression. In years of working with all shapes and sizes of depression, I’ve never seen a case that didn’t involve a major habit of self-criticism—including the person criticizing and judging themselves for being depressed. Ironically, this habit of being judgmental and critical of your own depression is one of the key maintaining causes of depression.
On a more positive note, one of the hallmarks of emotionally resilient people is their ability to be acutely aware and courageously tolerant of their difficult emotions instead of instinctively distracting themselves or escaping through self-destructive behaviors like stress eating or procrastination. Emotional awareness and tolerance are mental habits; and cultivating them is one of the best ways to improve your emotional health.

In the rest of this article, I’m going to share three types of invisible habits that have the biggest impact on our emotional health.

1. Self-Talk

Self-talk is how you talk to yourself in your head.

And there are two basic modes of self-talk:

Automatic Self-Talk. This is when your mind talks to you. For example, you’re laying in bed at 11:00 pm about to drift off to sleep and your mind says: Oh no! I forgot to send that email about the Pensky file! You didn’t choose to say this to yourself; your mind just did it. Automatic self-talk are events that happen to you, not choices you make.
Deliberate Self-Talk. This is when you talk to your mind. Often it takes the form of talking back to—or getting into a conversation with—your automatic self-talk. For example, after your mind reminds you about your forgotten email on the Pensky file, you start worrying about the consequences: What’s my client going to think? They’re going to think I’m flaky and not responsible. They’ll probably cancel their account with us. That’s our biggest account… I’ll probably get fired! What am I gonna do for work if I lose this job? And in this economy! I’ll probably end up… Unlike automatic self-talk, deliberate self-talk is a choice—something you do, not something that happens to you. Consequently, it is something you have control over and responsibility for. In fact, getting better at controlling your deliberate self-talk is one of the best things any of us can do to improve our emotional health.

If you want to get better at managing your self-talk, it’s good to familiarize yourself with the different flavors or types of self-talk that tend to show up:

Worry. Worrying is unproductive negative thinking about the future. The extreme version of worry is catastrophizing, which involves immediately jumping to the worst-case scenario.
Problem-solving. Problem-solving is productive negative thinking about the future. Put another way, it’s a constructive use of the imagination.
Rumination. Similar to worry, rumination is unproductive negative thinking about the past. It’s common to divide rumination into 3 subtypes: Angry rumination, which involves ruminating on how others have hurt you; depressive rumination, which means ruminating on your own mistakes, failures, or weaknesses (very similar to self-criticism, see below); and jealous rumination, which means ruminating on how unfair it is that other people have what you don’t.
Reflection. Reflection is productive negative thinking about the past. The hallmark of reflection is that it results in new learning, growth, and positive change.
Self-criticism. Self-criticism is an excessive and unhelpful assessment of your mistakes, failures, or weaknesses. It tends to be punitive, judgmental, and extreme in nature rather.
Self-compassion. Self-compassion means talking to yourself in a supportive and realistic way during moments of pain or difficulty. One especially powerful form of self-compassion is emotional validation, which means reminding yourself that it’s valid and okay to feel any difficult emotion no matter how painful.
Self-doubt. Self-doubt is an irrational or unhelpful skepticism of your own ability, talent, or skill.

Now, when most people learn about all these different forms of self-talk, the tendency is to approach them from a normative or moral perspective:

These are bad habits and I need to stop them!

While it might be true that in some sense many of these forms of self-talk are in fact bad habits, thinking about them that way—at least initially—is usually not very helpful.

Instead, you’ll find a lot more success by simply trying to be more aware of your invisible habits of self-talk. Because the more familiar you are with them—the more comfortable you are exploring them and being curious about them—the easier it will be to catch them quickly in the moment so that you can respond to them in a healthy and effective way.

To start, find a simple way to keep track of them: Jot them down in a pocket notebook or notes file on your phone when they arise. Not only will this help you gain more awareness of them, it will also train you to take a less judgmental perspective on them, which will make it much easier to work with them in the future.

If you want to learn more about self-talk, including how to build healthier habits of self-talk, here are a few resources:

2. Habits of Noticing

While it’s important to be more aware of the content of your thoughts (e.g. different types of negative self-talk) and ways of thinking (e.g. automatic vs deliberate self-talk), thoughts and thinking are just one part of our mental lives.

Another equally important part is awareness, which means the act of observing or noticing things—both in your external environment (e.g. the particular shade of green on the old sports car that just pulled up beside you) and your internal environment (e.g. noticing that a worry about the Pensky file popped into your head rather than immediately worrying about it).

See, many people struggle emotionally because they get lost in their thoughts and emotions. Usually, this is because they’re not very skilled at merely observing their thoughts and emotions without getting into the content.

For example:

You find yourself worrying about how unhappy your child is in their new school rather than noticing a worry about your kid pop into mind and then deciding whether that was something you actually want to spend time and energy thinking about. When you get lost in worries, you get very anxious.
You find yourself ruminating on how your parents wronged you as a kid by not being affectionate enough instead of noticing a memory from your childhood pop into mind and intentionally deciding that dwelling on that memory is unlikely to be helpful and shifting your focus elsewhere. When you get lost in rumination you get very resentful and angry.
You find yourself daydreaming about all the ways your life is going to be better once you get that new promotion at work rather than observing that initial fantasy pop into your imagination and making a choice about what you wanted to do with it. When you get lost in daydreams you often end up procrastinating on or avoiding the real work.

The solution to dilemmas like this has less to do with changing your specific thoughts or emotions as it does getting better at quickly noticing your mind falling into these patterns so that you can make a different choice.

You think you need ”better” thoughts and emotion, but really you need better habits of noticing.

When it comes to building these habits of noticing and increasing your self-awareness, it helps to distinguish four different types of self-awareness:

Physical Awareness. How well do you notice changes in your body or physical state? For example: How quickly do you notice that your shoulders are tensed? Or that your posture is bad? Or that you’re mouth breathing? While these can seem like minor inconveniences, spending long stretches of your day in non-optimal physical states can take a toll not only on your physical health but also your emotional health—too much mouth breathing, for example, is associated with increased stress and anxiety relative to more nose breathing.
Mental Awareness. How good are you at noticing what your mind is up to? Can you quickly catch automatic thoughts and refrain from getting into conversations with them? Can you shift your focus off of something unproductive (envying your coworker’s new house) and onto something helpful (that report slide deck you’re supposed to be assembling for tomorrow’s presentation)? Because of the principle of cognitive mediation, how we feel is directly impacted by how we think. Which means if you want to feel better, it’s important to be more aware of how you’re thinking and how that might impact your body, your emotions, and even your behavior.
Emotional Awareness. How willing are you to pay close attention to your emotions, especially the difficult ones? For many people, because difficult emotions are painful, they develop habits of not noticing—avoidance strategies like intellectualization or self-criticism as a means of not having to experience those emotions. But you can’t manage your emotions well if you’re constantly ignoring them, and as a result, don’t understand them. On the other hand, some people pay too much attention to their emotions and fixate or obsess over them, which ends up being just as unhelpful as avoidance. The heart of emotional resilience is being able to be aware of your emotions and attuned to them without taking orders.
Behavioral Awareness. How well do you notice what causes your behaviors, especially the problematic ones? When you lose your temper and yell at your kids, are you really aware of what happened to produce such a response? When you find yourself stress eating late at night, are you aware of the impulse to eat and what’s really contributing to it? When you find yourself passively going with the flow and agreeing to other people’s requests, are you aware of what need that passive communication style is filling?

Obviously, we all have a lot of room for improvement across all these dimensions of self-awareness. But if you want to get started improving your habits of noticing, start small—both in terms of your ambition and scope….

Pick one of the above four types of awareness and focus on that.
Aim to be more neutral and simply observe your patterns of noticing (or not noticing) rather than evaluating them (or yourself) as good or bad.
Give yourself a small project to work on with a definite start and stop date. For example: For the next week, I’m going to try and notice the emotions that preceded me losing my temper.
Ask for help. It’s not necessary, but you can dramatically speed up your progress in this work if you can recruit a trusted friend or partner to help you in your project of building better habits of noticing.

3. Mental Time Travel

Human beings have many incredible abilities. Two of the most psychologically important are memory and imagination…

Memory. Sure, most animals have some form of memory. But it’s mostly confined to instinct and procedural memory (e.g. how to crack a nut open). Human beings, on the other hand, have a remarkable capacity to remember abstract facts and information (semantic memory) as well as recall rich details of personal experiences from the past (autobiographical memory). Combined with language and the cultural transmission made possible by civilization, our general capacity to store and revisit information from the past—our own as well as our ancestors—is remarkable.
Imagination. We humans also have a great capacity to use our imaginations to explore future and hypothetical realities—from composing symphonies to building rocket ships to trying new spice combinations in our favorite curry dish. Our ability to explore the future is pretty wild when you stop and think about it.

Of course, as is the case with any powerful tool or ability, memory and imagination—our ability to mentally travel backward and forward in time—can be used well or poorly. And few things impact our emotional health more than mental time travel.

We’ve already mentioned many examples of mental time travel, so here’s a quick refresher:

Problem-solving is a helpful form of mental time travel where we imagine potential problems in the future and address them proactively.
Worry is a form of mental time travel where we (mis)use our imaginations to think unproductively about all sorts of hypothetical negatives in the future.
Reflection is a helpful form of mental time travel where we remember mistakes, failures, or errors in the past in order to learn from them and grow.
Rumination is a form of mental time travel where we unproductively replay and dwell on failures and mistakes in the past.

Notice how there are helpful and unhelpful uses of mental time travel in both directions. But something I want to call out more explicitly is the tendency to use mental time travel as a defense mechanism.

Here’s how it works:

Something upsetting happens and we understandably feel bad emotionally. Maybe you feel sad because you’re remembering spending time with a loved one who’s passed away. Or your spouse is leaving on a long business trip and you’re feeling anxious.
This emotional pain is happening in the present—the here and now. And because emotional pain feels bad our natural instinct is to avoid it.
So, not surprisingly, many of us get in the habit of escaping the present—and all the emotional pain it holds—by mentally time traveling, either into the past or into the future. In other words, mental time travel serves the function of distracting us from emotional pain in the present.

This dynamic explains one of the most important but confusing experiences in all of human psychology: Why do we respond to painful emotional experiences with mental habits that only make us feel worse?

For example:

Why do we worry in response to feeling anxious when we know worrying only leads to more anxiety? We do it because in the very short term worry gets us out of the immediate anxiety in the present by pretending to be problem solving in the future. We’re trading very short term relief of present anxiety for much more future anxiety.
Why do we ruminate on past mistakes even though there’s nothing to be gained from it and it only makes us more ashamed? We do it because in the very short term rumination gets us out of the immediate pain of the present by pretending to be solving something in the past. We’re trading very short term relief from present pain in exchange for much more pain in the future.

Now, you might be reading this and thinking:

Well, that’s dumb… why trade a tiny bit of short term relief for way more pain long term?

If so, just ask yourself:

Why do we eat a candy bar when we know the very fleeting feeling of pleasure is in no way worth the 350 calories we just consumed?
Why do we make a sarcastic comment to our spouse when we know the very brief ego-boost we get in the moment is in no way worth the stress, tensions and guilt that comment will bring long term?
Why do we procrastinate on responding to those emails first thing in the morning when we know the very brief relief we get from avoiding them will only make things busier and more stressful later in the day?

We human beings are constantly making “dumb” decisions that trade long-term happiness for short term pleasure or relief. So the fact that we do this with our emotions shouldn’t be all that surprising.

Still, unhelpful mental time travel is one of the biggest causes of emotional suffering out there. And if we can get even a little bit better at noticing it—and then choosing a different path—we can go a long way toward improving our emotional health.

As usual, the first step is simply awareness. Try to pay attention to when you use mental time travel to avoid emotional pain in the present. Once you start noticing some patterns, you’ll be better able to focus in and try to break some of those habits.

Of course, being more aware of the urge to escape the present with mental time travel is just the first step. Because even if you do identify and resist that urge, the question remains:

So then what do I do in the face of difficult emotions like anxiety, shame, or anger?

Well, that’s a pretty big topic, but here’s the teaser…

You don’t need to change or cope with difficult emotions; you need to change your relationship to them.

Emotional resilience—the ability to respond to difficult emotions in a healthy and productive way—is less about regulating or modifying our emotions, and instead, treating them as friends—with respect and care. I call this philosophy or approach to emotional health The Friendly Mind.