On Automaticity

[When] we momentarily lose touch with ourselves and with the full extent of our possibilities…we fall into a robot-like way of seeing and thinking and doing… If we are not careful, those clouded moments can stretch out and become most of our lives…[The] sheer momentum of your unconsciousness in this moment just colors the next moment. The days, months, and years quickly go by unnoticed, unused, unappreciated.
 — Jon Kabat-Zinn in Wherever You Go, There you Are.

Automaticity has become one of my greatest fears.

To think that we can mindlessly waste away minutes, a few hours, a lazy weekend day without having made an explicit, conscious decision to spend the little time on Earth in that way. (Tim Urban has a sobering set of diagrams in his article, ‘Your Life in Weeks’ that especially drove this home for me.)

I am so, so guilty of this. I encounter it when I open a new tab, and my hands just start typing f, a, c, e, and the next who-knows-how-many-minutes disappears. I encounter it when I realize that hours have gone by, and I’m just watching some television show I’ve already watched half a dozen times. I encounter it in the briefest moments of boredom, when there’s just one person in front of me in line, and I have the impulse to pull out my phone to check something.

These automatic reactions go unnoticed so easily, even as they claw away at what amounts to meaningful lengths of time I our lives. It’s especially menacing because those small slips feel so non-threatening. It’s just a few minutes here, a few hours there, a day every now and then.

However, the truth is that automaticity extends much more viciously than the somewhat innocent and lazy occurrences I describe above.

The routine angry commute, the nine-to-five job, the 20 hours a week of television that Clay Shirky references in Cognitive Surplus. I would posit that some of us spent as much as 80% of our waking hours on autopilot.

Even the residual 20% — that we might typically reserve for family, friends, hobbies — can be rendered automatic and mindless when the weight of that 80% of our day pulls us away from the present. We’re tired and disengaged. We’re frustrated and angry. We’re distracted by everything that might happen tomorrow. We’re haunted by moments in the past that repeat on us in our heads.

This is a human tragedy of the highest order. These days, when I have the mindfulness to catch myself in those moments, there is immense sadness and a tinge of fear from that feeling that I’ve lost control and agency of my own life.

—

So how do we deal with this?

We have to first recognize that this is how we’re biologically built. We fall back on habits and reactions constantly in order to conserve the energy expended in decision-making. We also seek what is easiest; we follow paths with the least resistance to give us the greatest temporary pleasure. We let our thoughts and emotions guide us even though we don’t have to listen to them.

The solutions that I offer are oft-repeated, and there are dozen of books I can reference that expand on these ideas with great insight. I still find myself constantly needing to repeat them to myself in order to fight back against automaticity.

• Pause. Automaticity only takes over when we don’t pause, catch ourselves and observe what it is that we’re doing. Most recommend adopting a meditation practice in order to cultivate the ability to catch ourselves and take that pause.
• Small decisions matter. Jeff Olson effectively dedicates an entire book — The Slight Edge — to this thesis. Impact in the long run is a function of the accumulation of small actions that seem inconsequential independently. When we constantly find ourselves reacting, we are effectively taking a lot of small steps in directions that may be pointless or even detrimental.
• Build habits and reactions with intention. Because we know we will fall back on our habits and reactions, we need to build the habits and reactions that we want. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg has been one of the most popular books on the subject if you’d like to explore more of the how.
• Allow ourselves to be bored. In a time when we can mindlessly engage with something on our phones and be entertained whenever and wherever, we can get addicted to mindless entertainment. The more we fuel the addiction — the harder it is to break free of those reactions. I love the suggestion that Cal Newport makes, which is to simply practice letting yourself be bored and to resist pulling out your phone in those moments.
• Plan out our days. The most practical advice is perhaps just to explicitly plan out each day when we have the consciousness to make those decisions. In Deep Work, Cal Newport recommends dividing up your workday into blocks, and assigning activities to those blocks, thereby scheduling every minute of your day. Ask ourselves: “What makes sense for me to do with the time that remains?”