Mindfulness for Habit Mapping and Behavior Change
A Life-Changing Toolkit to Change your Perspective on Anything and Everything
For the past year, as I’ve gained experience as a personal trainer, I’ve also been training as a mindfulness-based behavior change facilitator with neuroscientist and mindfulness expert and professor and director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, Dr. Jud Brewer. While it’s been great to have these tools for coaching my clients on sustainable habit and lifestyle change, I have selfishly benefitted right alongside them as I’ve learned to apply mindfulness to my own habits and behaviors.
Last week I had the opportunity to share my learning and training, specifically a mindfulness tool called the Habit Mapper, with my colleagues at work and was honored to hear them share their own habit loops and struggles.
Ever since, I’ve felt a little closer to my peers at work and more able to bring my full, vulnerable self to the gym each day, which I personally find to be a signpost of a great workplace environment. I’d love to share the Habit Mapper tool I shared with them here today, in case you can also find it valuable for mapping out your own habits or working with and coaching others to gain awareness around their own behaviors.
Turns out, most anything we do, positive or negative, is a habit or pattern that we repeat based on the rewards or results we get from it. It’s just the way the brain works — we have various triggers (doesn’t really matter what they are; could be thoughts, feelings, or situations); then we engage in certain behaviors (again, these vary — as examples: overeating, smoking, or worry/anxious thinking), and then we get various results or “rewards” in psychology speak, from those behaviors — often a short term positive result followed by longer term negative results.
Developing awareness of these habits is the first step to being able to work with them.
So let’s take an example — we’ll keep it concrete at first and then we ‘ll go for a more cerebral/intangible habit.
Let’s say you have a stressful day job. You are up before the sun, you work 8–10 hours, and by the time you drive home you’re feeling exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally. While some part of you knows that going to the gym and/or cooking a healthy meal would be good for you, in the moment, you often find yourself resorting to swinging through a drive-through for some fast food and settling in for a night of netflix before crashing on the couch, heading to bed, and repeating the pattern the next day.
In this case here’s your Mindless Eating / Numbing Out Habit Map:
Trigger: feeling stressed and tired after a long day of work
Behavior: going through the drive through, sitting on the couch & watching Netflix, crashing
Result: short term — relief from your stress and exhaustion — the high-fat, high-sodium, maybe high-sugar food triggers a dopamine release that feels good in the moment; the Netflix helps you numb out and not have to think too hard about things….but…long term — you may also experience lower energy, weight gain, or even feelings of regret or shame.
Once you’ve mapped the habit — you have awareness! My training uses a “gears” analogy to describe how we can “drive’ through the different levels of awareness as we work with our habits.
The video above and images below provide a brief overview of both a habit map and the gears. Basically it goes like this:
- Reverse Gear: Mindless habits, lack of awareness
- First Gear: Waking up to our habits, awareness (no change yet)
- Second Gear: Disenchantment with your habits, feeling stuck (a great question to reflect on in second gear is “What did I get from that? 🤔)
- Third Gear: the bigger, better offer to our habits. In this stage, mindfulness practices, breathing practices, and curiosity can take the place of our bad habits and become a more satisfying, intrinsic reward.
Now let’s try mapping out a sneakier habit map — something less tangible, like worry thoughts or anxious thinking.
Here’s one potential anxiety habit map:
Trigger: having to have a hard conversation at work
Behavior: anxious thinking/worry / rumination
Result: feeling even worse and/or more anxious about what you have to do.
Now that we have a habit map we can work with it! This can be especially helpful with intangible mental habits like worry or anxious thinking, because getting our thoughts down on paper makes them easier to recognize and work with.
By mapping out the habit, we are already out of mindless reverse gear and into 1st gear: awareness! Even though nothing has changed yet this is huge. We can now start to play with the 2nd gear question:
“What did I get from that?”
Second gear is about exploring all of the results, short and long term, of the habit (in this case, the mental habit of anxious worry and rumination).
Perhaps short term it feels better to worry. It often feels like worrying provides us with something to do and a way to try to control our experience.
Long term, however, we may also experience muscle tension, headaches, interrupted sleep, difficult/negative feelings, and mental/emotional exhaustion.
These results aren’t great. 😒
But here’s the thing — right when you feel the most yucky, stuck, and bummed out about your habits, that’s the golden opportunity for change.
Here’s how it works:
Once our brains can grasp that actually, the mental habit of anxious thinking and worry isn’t very rewarding — which requires that 2nd gear of disenchantment to kick in enough to realize “oh, this feels bad” — then and only then will the brain look around for a bigger better offer — a different, better behavior, such as a mindfulness practice, taking a beat to take a breath and check in, do a body scan, or whatever we may need to feel better.
It all comes down to rewards-based learning.
If you want or need a little more of a deep dive on how to hack your brain’s reward system to change habits, check out this 7-minute video from Dr. Jud on how habits are formed and rewards-based learning:
Every little thing we do is a habit loop — there’s a trigger (which doesn’t matter as much as we think it does), there’s our behavior (good or bad) and there’s the result/reward. If and when we can be stoic enough to reflect on our results and how rewarding they really are (or aren’t, in many cases), our brains can update and choose something the feels better.
Life is full of circumstances that kind of suck. Families or marriages fall apart. Work is stressful. Health issues come up. We even lose those we love and deal with grief and other hard feelings that we may or may not feel equipped to process.
Having the tool of mindfulness, and in particular a concrete practice like habit mapping can make these difficult situations easier to navigate.
Getting your thoughts, feelings, and experiences down on paper can slow your brain down to the speed of your body. It allows spaciousness to get curious and explore your embodied sensations. Once you can really feel, you can gain awareness and space that may lead to a shift (note that you don’t want or need to force that shift; trust that by practicing awareness it will eventually organically happen; it will be unforced and it will feel better, immediately; rewards-based learning and awareness is very different from willpower and forcing change).
On the one hand, nothing will have changed — life will still present challenges, day in, day out, that will feel difficult.
On the other hand, nothing will be the same — you will have a toolkit to be with your experience, ride it out using the gears, stay with your feelings, and come out the other end with emotional awareness and a better, more adapted behavior.
Maybe the next time you’re driving home late after a long day, you’ll remember the disenchantment from 2nd gear and decide to swing by the supermarket to grab a prepared meal with some protein and fiber in it instead of the drive-through…takes the same amount of time, but feels better. Once you feel better, the next time a hard situation comes up at work, you may feel better equipped to notice how flooded you feel, and be able to map out your feelings, process them, calm yourself down, gain perspective, and have a difficult conversation in a more productive way.
The changes are micro, and often indistinguishable from the outside, but inside, you’ll feel like a different person. Over time, as you build the muscle of mindfulness, it will become easier and easier to resort to it as a strategy as opposed to other habits like numbing out through overuse of social media, netflix, drinking, smoking, etc. It will feel better. I wish nothing more for myself, and for you and every other person I encounter every day:
May we be healthy.
May we be happy.
May we be at peace.
I’d absolutely love to hear what if any experiences you’ve had with mindfulness and/or habit or behavior change. I think it is the secret sauce of approaching daily life with a greater capacity to ride the challenging waves that come up with more curiosity and ease. Even the hardest moments and days feel a little more tolerable when I’m able to be with my experience instead of pushing it away, resisting it, or trying to escape from it.
How about you? Please share a comment or clap below if anything resonated, or pass this article along to someone you feel could benefit from it! ❤
