You are driving your car and need to change lanes. Do you have to think about signaling, checking the mirrors and maybe changing gear? I bet your movements flow so smoothly you hardly notice them at all. Why? Because after enough repetition the act became automatic.
We have different words and phrases to describe this type of behaviour: “functioning on auto-pilot”, “automatic”, “thoughtless” (if the result is unpleasant) and “routine tasks”. My preferred term is “habit”.
But what about emotions and feelings? Emotions trigger chemical chain reactions in our bodies and feelings are how we make sense of these chain reactions. Can they really become habits too? Yes. And here’s how.
What is a habit?
A habit is simply something you do regularly. This can be one action or several added together. Often you repeat this action at the same time every day, week or month. A habit is considered successful when it seems to “happen” to you, as if it was out of your control, when it is so automatic that you no longer have to actively think about taking action.
We form habits over time. Some we learned so long ago that we don’t even think of them as habits anymore. How often and when do you brush your teeth? That’s a habit you learned as a child and have practised ever since.
Other habits, especially the ones we deliberately choose to learn as adults, require effort at first. We start with reminders and use all kinds of techniques to make a habit stick. These are the habits we notice because we feel like we earned them through hard work.
How emotions become habits
Our bodies perform hundreds of routine tasks every day, we just don’t call them habits even though we had to learn them over time. For example, at some point in our lives most of us learned how to sit, stand and walk. And we do it in a particular way that’s typical for us. Try skipping to move from point A to B and you’ll see that your body will naturally want to get back to walking because your muscles are used to work together in specific ways.
Our brain is the same. Neurons that fire together wire together. Your amygdala triggers emotions and at the same time adds them to new memories to give meaning to the events in your life. The more often you experience the same emotion, the easier it comes to you because your amygdala has more memories to draw on.
Ever met a very negative person, or cheerful person? Have you ever asked them why they are like that and got the answer “I was born this way”? Well, they are wrong. They practised having the same emotions every day.
Learning emotions
From Pixar we learned that we often experience a mix of emotions (Inside Out). We are rarely just angry. Sometimes we feel fear first and then we react angrily. Emotions are plans for action that are supposed to help us lead better lives.
So when we are afraid and react with fear and our reaction works out for us, meaning the situation changes so that we no longer have to be afraid, the amygdala files “fear followed by anger” away under “good plan”. When I use the word “learns” here I don’t mean it in the way you consciously learn. The part of your brain that is in control of your emotions does not think. It reacts.
When you stumble, your brain gets information from all kinds of body parts, like your sense of equilibrium in your ear, and automatically does what is necessary to prevent you from falling. After a while, you get really good at this and hardly ever fall. You learned. Or your brain learned, if you prefer because the conscious part of you did nothing.
That’s how emotions become habits. The more often a certain emotion is triggered, the more memories you have associated with it, and the amygdala runs the same program again and again and again. The chemicals set off by that emotion accumulate over time. Every reaction is stronger than the last one, re-inforcing the loop, because the stronger the emotion the more important the memory.
How feelings become habits
Feelings are the conscious processing of events. First date. Your heart beats faster, your palms are sweaty and your breath turns shallow. Are you excited, nervous or even afraid? It all depends on how you learned to call the chemical chain reaction going on in your body.
If you grew up surrounded by people who treated fear lightly and laughed it off, you’re more likely to interpret your reaction as excitement. But if those around you thought and talked about fear incessantly until they turned it into anxiety, you learned to think of it this way too. You draw the conclusion that you are nervous, anxious or even afraid.
Even the time of day can trigger a certain feeling. “I’m not a morning person.” If you tell yourself this long enough, your brain makes sure you wake up grumpy every morning. Do you feel proud when you finish a task at work or do you simply not care? Your feeling is a habit you learned.
Thoughts are habits too
Most of our thoughts are the same every day. Some we have been repeating for years. Did you notice? If this is news to you, don’t worry. That’s normal too. Consciously focusing on your thoughts is a skill that needs to be learned through practices like meditation and Yoga.
Once you are aware of your thoughts, you can change them. Why is this so difficult though? Because our thoughts, including the ones about our emotion reactions, have become habits.
Have you ever questioned how you feel about a subject? Imagine you win a million Euros/Dollars in the lottery. How do you feel about that? Whether your answer is a positive or a negative feeling does not matter. The point is that it’s not universal. You learned to interpret the emotions money triggers in you in a certain way.
New habits
The not so great news: Thoughts trigger emotions and emotions trigger thoughts. The physical chain reactions in your body – yes, even the panic attacks – are habits. Call these reactions fear, anger and shame often enough, and they become so automatic that even the slightest event that reminds your amygdala of another time you felt these emotions will trigger them again. Stronger each time.
And now for the amazingly great news: Do you know anyone who’s always cheerful? Who finds something positive to say even in the most annoying, scary and horrible situations? Someone who seems to “just be that way”? They weren’t born that way either! Positive emotions and feelings are also habits.
No matter what your default emotions and feelings are right now, you can change them. Since dominant emotions and feelings are just habits, you can replace unwanted ones with new ones that serve you.
Full disclosure: that cheerful, ridiculously and annoyingly positive person is me now. How did I get here? New habits. My dominant emotions and feelings these days are excitement, happiness and, yes, exilharation. It took a bit of time and, as with any new habit, there were setbacks. But was it worth it? Lol. Yes. And if I can do it, so can you.