Pushing Back Against the Pull of Habit

Your team comes back from the offsite fired up with new learnings and connections. Three weeks later, nothing has changed.

That's not a motivation problem, and it's not on them. New behaviors learned somewhere else stay tied to that somewhere else, which is precisely why they don't survive contact with the office.

I studied habits for my PhD and I still lost an entire year of hard-won change within nine months of coming home from my big year of travel. Here's the science of why, and what actually makes change last.

STORY: Drawing on my own background in addiction research, I dig into why new habits learned on retreat, on a trip, or at a conference so often evaporate the moment we're back in our everyday cues and context, and the two practices that actually make them stick.

READ MORE: Want to go deeper? Books worth keeping nearby and more from past blogs on the topic are recommended below.

BOOK STUFF: This post is an excerpt from the final chapter of my book. If you like what you read, please share with a friend who will like it too.

GOING FURTHER: Want some partners to practice changing your habits with? Join Work/Play CoLab for workshops, co-working time, and community!

STORY: Pushing Back Against the Pull of Habit

The Collapse

My Leadership Redding class was supposed to pick a class project to make our community better with the $5K we'd raised. It was our last meeting of the year before graduation from the program. Facilitating groups was my area of expertise. I stood up with two of my peers, grabbed a flip chart, and eagerly collected ideas from the floor. 

I got this!

The ideas flowed.

And then we fought.

We landed on the top two ideas but then the room divided straight down the middle. What started as healthy discussion turned into angry conflict. As arms crossed over chests and voices raised to be heard over the side bar muttering, the other two classmates standing up with me by the flip chart retreated to the walls. I totally didn't “got this.”

I was ashamed that I might have led the group wrong, that my facilitation was the cause of all the strife. On top of that, I was vehemently opposed to one of the top ideas for personal reasons. No longer was this me professionally doing what I do best. The story in my head shouted: this is personal.  Righteous angry retorts rose in my throat until at the front of the room, holding a Mr. Sketch blueberry marker beside the flip chart as if it were a grenade, trembling with rage, I vetoed the idea.

Boom. Any scrap of collaboration and camaraderie left in the room died.

I limped out of that room, tail between my legs, to find I was late getting home and had missed several texts from Jason asking me to swing by the store before dinner. I raced up and down the grocery aisles and burst into the kitchen laden with bags only to encounter Jason exasperated because I forgot milk and lettuce. I threw stones meant for someone else at Jason, then fled to the duck pen with some blubbering excuse that I needed to check their water.

The tears that accumulated all day finally burst forth. With ducks obliviously quacking at my heels I had the space, finally, to practice a RAIN meditation. But I didn't. I couldn't. With tears blurring my vision, the rage and shame parted to reveal a terrifying truth at the bottom of it all: that any last vestige of the resilient, present, and flexible person I'd become on my Gap Year was extinguished forever.

Poof. Gone.

In Contrast…

Nine months after arriving home from an entire year of travel with my family during which I’d learned all sorts of new habits and thought I had come back a new person, transformed, instead I contracted back to all my old ways. Large and in charge. Dysregulated. Overwhelmed. 

I mean, contrast that horrible day at Leadership Redding with my behavior at my sister, Brenda’s wedding in the last week of our Gap Year. 

9 a.m. the day before her wedding day, I got a call from Brenda. She had a 101℉ (38℃) fever. Fuck. Omicron BA.5 COVID cases were swarming the United States. Her COVID test was negative, but what if? She was a wreck, of course. Feverish, freaked out, and not thinking straight.

Before Gap Year (and clearly nine months afterwards), I would have snapped into Go Mode—take control and save the day. I'd have barreled forward with a plan, any plan. Doesn't matter what Brenda wants. I’d have flipped out emotionally right along with her, letting my emotions and hers get the better of me. I’d have gotten completely overwhelmed. Go go go, then crash and burn.

But the Gap Year had taught me a thing or two.

First, I regulated my stress response. I box breathed. I kneaded the carpet with my toes.

Next, I listened to my emotions. I used RAIN. I felt my own helpless, disappointed, frustrated feelings all the way through.

Then, I walked by Brenda's side as she canceled a bunch of things over the next two days. She turned off her phone and took a nap. Then we sat back to wait, trusting that a path would open up before us. 

Three days and sixteen negative COVID tests later (three for Brenda and another thirteen for every member of the wedding party) I had the privilege of marrying my sister beneath the soaring cathedral-like canopy of a monkeypod tree. The Universe wasn't laid back about it either. The water pressure at my parents' house died in the middle of final food prep and showers, and the wedding coordinator vanished just as the first guests arrived. She didn't reappear until the following day, yet a path did indeed open up. 

People stepped in, everyone laughed and cried, and it all turned out beautifully. Most importantly, I showed up differently.

The Pull of Habit

After coming home, there was a lovely travel honeymoon glow. I could use my traveler’s eyes to finally see and appreciate the world-class natural beauty and flourishing cultural vibrancy of my tiny rural hometown. I took daily walks with my husband marveling at the skittish fawns following their mothers, the smell of oak mulch, and the sight of Mount Lassen in the distance bathed in pink sunset light. I cherished the connection with friends and the soft familiar comfort of home. 

But as time passed, the honeymoon glow got slowly washed away by the daily routine of waking, doomscrolling, tea, breakfast, school drop-off, work… By Halloween, I stopped journaling. By Valentine's Day, I'd go days without a single brain break. Did I actually go to the vibrant cultural events? No. Had I taken my paddle board to any of those dozen lakes? No. I’d even been excusing away walks when it rained or when I was busy. They were more weekly than daily. 

In Agnes Callard's controversial New Yorker essay, she argues that “Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we're at our best. Call this the traveler’s delusion.” We travel because we want change, but end up changing little or not at all ourselves and instead inflict change upon the people and places we visit. The typical traveler's reflection is given away by their language: “I went to France.” “I saw the Mona Lisa.” “I took a French cooking class.” All with the self as the subject, something foreign as the object, and zero change in between. Callard claims that “Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.”

She's right about the observation, wrong that there's nothing you can do about it. 

I spent a year and thousands of dollars for what? Over nine months I slowly, steadily shrank back to exactly the same overwhelmed woman who left. Everywhere you go, there you are. 

I, of all people, should have seen this coming.

The Source of the Problem Is All Around You

My earliest experiments in Howard Fields’ lab examined reinstatement behavior. Rats were taught that certain lights, sounds, and smells meant they could push a lever to get a cocaine injection.

Then, I'd change things up. The rat returned on extinction day to find different lights, silence, and the cocaine pump turned off. They'd scramble and poke until they learned that these new cues meant cocaine was gone. Slowly they'd recover and become bright-eyed again, grooming, exploring, and napping just as any untrained, curious rat would. New learning got written on top of the old lesson.

Then I'd change things up yet again. On reinstatement day, the cocaine-associated lights, sounds, and smells returned. Even though the cocaine pump stayed off, the cues triggered rats to race back to the lever and push and push and push.

That's the defining feature of habits: they are beholden to cues and context, not someone's attitudes and intentions, so much so that people are often unaware of the cues controlling their behavior. Things started off goal-directed with a rat or person taking direct action to get a desired outcome. That goal-directed action was effortful, flexible, and sensitive to changing needs and shifting reward values. But practice practice practice and goal-directed action became automatic habit. Now it was effortless and cheap, freeing up cognitive capacity for other things. The downside was that habits are inflexible, insensitive, and durable: need → trigger → response → reward.

Psychiatrists have long known that people in recovery from addiction experience intense craving and are most likely to relapse when exposed to environmental cues related to old addictive behaviors. The feel of a cigarette between fingers, the car exhaust and fast food smell of the corner where drugs were sold, even the sight of a specific ATM machine could bring on tremors and irrepressible wanting. No matter how much the person intellectually wished for something different, see cue → push lever. 

What's true for people with addiction was true for me. The feel of my favorite well-balanced kitchen knife in my hand, the earthy smell of dried oak leaves, the same-old drive to the kids' school, all of these served as environmental cues shrinking me right back to my old habits.

I'd spent forty years blindly following trigger cues in my home and hometown, taking everything so personally and snapping into Go Mode until my entire way of being was automatic and habitual in my everyday context. I'd wake up in my soft comfortable bedroom nestled into familiar sheets and fall mindlessly into a daisy chain of unhealthy morning behaviors. I'd hold a Mr. Sketch marker in my hand at the front of a room and snap into large and in charge behaviors whether the situation called for them or not.

Travel gave me the freedom to break old habits and practice new behaviors. Recent research describes how relocating, changing jobs, or having a baby is one of the most reliable openings to break old habits and create new, healthier ones because the big shakeup alters so many cues at once. Old habits lose the cues and context they depend on, and the brain opens up into a more flexible goal-directed state. For instance, an intervention promoting new sustainability habits like conserving water was far more effective in families that moved houses in the last three months versus those who had moved a while ago, or had not moved at all. And

an elegant study following college students who transferred universities found that exercise and reading habits were not only disrupted by the switch, but shifted behavior to more intentional control.

While abroad, I rehearsed patterns like savoring, flowing with whatever comes, and emotional awareness with exotic cues and foreign context all around. Back home, these new behaviors were wobbly as a kid on training wheels, still goal-directed, not quite habits yet. They lost their travel-associated cues and context, and on top of that, competed against forty years of habits with home court advantage. No wonder I succeeded in changing my patterns at Brenda's wedding in Hawaii but not at the Leadership Redding meeting in my hometown.

This is precisely the challenge with new behaviors learned elsewhere while traveling, on retreat, at conferences, during company offsites. The learning is wobbly and tied to the “elsewhere”. When you get home or back to the office, the new learning loses out to old habits that were learned and practiced there.

But there's hope. Habits aren't as strong and sticky as we think.

The Solution

The solution is intentional practice at home combined with intentional pattern disruption. 

Step 1: practice new behaviors in your everyday context

It’s called multiple-context exposure and allows learning to attach itself to a broader context beyond the unique circumstances in which it was learned. 

I practiced forest bathing in my backyard.

I practiced brain breaks in the grocery line.

I practiced RAIN meditations in the shower.

I practiced finding beauty in the moment while waiting for the kids to get out of school.

I practiced going with the flow.

Consider what behaviors you learned while elsewhere and how you can practice them on the home court. Psychologists call it habit substitution: habit replaced by habit. I call it the do something else strategy. 

Step 2: intentionally disrupt old habits and patterns

Most of us think that the best way to break old habits is with a strong force of will. “Just stop it!” as that hilarious Bob Newhart skit says. But trying to interrupt a habit in progress is the least effective route, because habits don't wait for your attention to catch them. The cue fires, the response follows, and by the time you've realized what’s happened, you're already three steps into the pattern. Far more effective are the following:

• Hide the cues – Make the cues that trigger problem behaviors as inaccessible as possible. My book coach, Tiffany Hawk (who’s amazing by the way), bought me a lockbox for my phone so that it can’t distract me while I’m writing. I don’t wear a watch because it triggers my time scarcity issues.

• Make it hard – This is often called “adding friction” and makes the behavior harder to execute because the automatic trigger → response gets interrupted. For instance, I loved how travel helps me build richer maps of a new city so at home, I reset my car's GPS to always point north. Now I have to think more about the relative position of locations in space. Or another example, to break my horrible doomscrolling habit, I installed an app on my phone that forced me to box breathe after every ten minutes spent on social media or news. (Check out Screen Zen if you’re interested.) 

• Link to identity – One of the best ways to keep things goal-directed and intentional is to use identity framing and link the habit change to a central  aspect of your identity or core values. For example, I used identity framing to shift from I meditate at least ten minutes a day → I am a present, grounded person. I also used it to shift from large and in charge “I got this” → I am someone who trusts a room and trusts the process.

Just like doing reps at the gym, I practiced and practiced across many home cues and everyday contexts until new behaviors became available anywhere. And whenever I found a see cue → push lever pattern in myself, I intentionally reshaped my cues and context to disrupt it. Not to say that I was good at it. I failed again, and again, and again. But the person I am now is way closer to who I was at Brenda’s wedding than the one holding a blueberry marker like a grenade. 

Sure, everywhere you go, there you are. But honestly, that’s a good thing. I’m not the same woman who cried in the duck pen. What I’d tell my old self is that it’s not her fault. Blame the safe, comfortable, familiar cues and context if you want to, but that’s something you have more control over than Callard gives you credit for. 

Sure, travel is a boomerang. You end up right back in the same place you started, but not necessarily the same person.

READ MORE: 

If reading review articles about habits is a bit too much, I highly recommend James Clear’s Atomic Habits and B.J Fogg’s Tiny Habits. 

Or you can look back on my blog at some of my other posts on the topic: Intention to Action, Writing a Book One Tiny Habit at a Time, and Ode to Being Phoneless.

BOOK STUFF:

This post is an excerpt/adaptation of the final chapter of my book, “Wanderlust: The Science of Why We Travel and How To Bring It Home” that’s currently in the hands of my agent and looking for a publisher. Keep your fingers crossed for me! If you like what you read today, please subscribe to my newsletter to stay abreast of that glorious day when you can have the full book in your hands!

GOING FURTHER:

Want some partners to practice alongside? Work/Play CoLab brings leaders together every month for a live workshop, two co-working sessions (body-doubling on Zoom, it works), a book club discussion, and ongoing community chat in between. Show up for all of it or just what fits. Find more info and enroll to join us this month as we discuss The Art of Gathering Your Network.