Knowing my addictions

Pradeep Vasudev
Nov 2 · 3 min read

(Starting a series of reflections on habits and addictions — this is part 1)

I just went through James Clear’s excellent Atomic Habits — his systematic and detailed description of how to create and sustain new habits that we want and how to avoid creating habits that we want to avoid.

Habits are strange and funny things — little buttons that convert us into automatons, performers of rituals, little machines that do something, and then stop. While the classic meaning of human seems to be that we are self-aware, we humans are creatures of habit — a state of lowered awareness.

Habits are everywhere with us — we want to eat on time, we want to sleep on time and the ones amongst us who deny these urges are simply stuck on a separate set of habits that they, on reflection, will uncover amongst themselves.

Interestingly, one of the habits sets that we often seem to overlook is our thought habits — our patterns of thinking that shape our view of the world. And in yin-yang fashion, our view of the world in turn shapes our patterns of thinking. Some day, I will write about this.

What do we call a habit that is out of our control — a habit that controls us? An addiction. Most of us are addicted to something or the other. Some addictions are bad, of course — smoking, drinking, narcotics, sugar. Others are mostly harmless or even good — salt, rice, Whatsapp, soap operas on TV, newspapers, Facebook.

If I ever wanted proof that my overall approach to this habit business is correct, I just had proof of it. A few seconds after I wrote Whatsapp in the earlier paragraph, I checked Whatsapp. Yes, I am an addict.

Scientists tell us that, once addicted to something, we always remain addicted to it. Even when we give it up completely, at the trigger incident of a habit, the neurons still fire, urging us to kickstart that ritual, but other neurons fire as well, replacing that ritual with another one. One kind of automaton or another.

Here is a list of addictions I have:

Behavioral

  • Whatsapp
  • Quora/Twitter/News

Physical

  • Salt

Thought Pattern

  • (The superwill narrative) I must exercise without needing to go to a gym because this self-drive strengthens my willpower
  • (The self-dependent narrative) I must always avoid asking for help
  • (The philosopher narrative) Paying attention to my appearance/ my clothes/ my hair is a waste of time
  • (The superior human narrative) Knowledge and Self-improvement will lead to financial and worldly success
  • (The unlucky narrative) I deserve greater success in finance/love/relationships/sales… but I have been unlucky because <put my favorite reason here>.
  • There are just too many to list

Scientists call some of these narratives ‘biases’ — because bias is regarded as “the systematic errors that arise out of our usage of heuristics (thumb-rules) in life”. For example, when 3 cab drivers in Chennai speak rudely with me, I decide that cab-drivers in Chennai are a rude lot. The heuristic is that most, maybe all, of my encounters with Chennai cabbies have been bad, so I extrapolate this to assuming that all Chennai cabbies are rude (the bias). Statistically, my bias is rubbish, but my encounters in the world guide me more than some abstract mathematical concept.
The thing is: I prefer to call them narratives because I believe something else — I believe that we are controlled by stories. And these stories that control us reflect make us susceptible to specific biases. Some day, I shall write about this too.

Next time — how I stopped smoking (or some other reflection I want to make;-)

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