Changing Behavior

A very effective way of changing my own behavior has been to write down in a journal what I am doing. This has worked for me with both diet and exercise regimens. The act of writing down what I ate each day or how many weights I lifted holds me accountable to myself.

Keeping a journal also seems to provide a sense of separation between me and my actions. I feel that I can more objectively see what I have actually been doing versus what I think I have been doing. I become an independent observer of my own actions, and the experience is very similar to watching a video tape of myself. I can quickly see if I am truly eating healthier foods or lifting heavier weights. It is all recorded in the journal, just as it would be on a tape. Journals and tapes don’t lie.

An often unexpressed benefit of journaling is that it allows you to quickly look back over time and assess your progress. Flipping just a few pages back, within less than 5 minutes, I can see how much I have improved. This has been key in shifting and reshaping my own behavior. When the urge to eat junk food hits, I quickly and easily thumb through the pages of my notebook and I instantly feel inspired to get back on track. The fact that is written down or recorded so that it is visible quickly has significance. Seeing your own improvement instantaneously is a subtle, but very effective form of positive reinforcement.

Used over a period of many months, a journal also ends up being a great way to record the history of your progress. Recording a longer history of improvement is a good way to keep setbacks in perspective. For example, if you have been eating healthier and then go away on vacation and eat whatever you like for a week, a lot of people feel they “ruined” months of hard work. But, that is just a small snapshot of the bigger picture. They are still better eaters in the long run and are healthier than they were before. If you like to garden and you plant seeds every Saturday for two months, when spring comes, not every seed will grow. But, you still have a growing garden. You planted the seeds, knowing that some may not be fruitful, but that others would blossom. The end result is the same: over many months, even if some days didn’t produce the desired results, you have still become a healthier eater or you have built a relaxing garden. Put another way, if your progress was charted on a graph, over the long run, the slope of your “progress line” is going in the right direction.

Seeing that you are going in the right direction sticks in your head and helps to maintain long term motivation. All of your days of past success are right there in front of you and when they are added up, it feels as though you won a jackpot. The evidence that you have done so well over a long period of time really outweighs the temporary temptation to eat junk food or to take a nap instead of going to the gym. The first time you realize that you have built a history of success in changing your behavior, it comes as such a surprise that the realization tends to stick with you. It sticks because it is unexpected and the reward (realizing that you have changed for the better) far outweighs momentary desires to go off track.

This is a sudden breakthrough in how you see yourself. You are no longer a person who “tries to eat healthfully”, but instead you are a “healthy eater who occasionally indulges”. Similarly, you are no longer a person who “tries to lift weights 2 days a week”, but instead you are a person who “lifts weights a couple times a week, every week”. In other words, the jarring revelation is that you have become the goal you sought to achieve. This is very similar to learning how to drive a car. You spend a few months practicing and “learning to drive” and then one day, you are “a driver”. Being a “driver” is part of your identity and the behavior (driving) is used every day.

Such breakthroughs tend to be abrupt and have long reaching effects. I think this is because they completely wipe out the strong negative feelings that often accompany adopting new behaviors, such as frustration, struggle, and exasperation.

Journaling also serves as a means of breaking the old, negative behaviors. Whenever you feel tempted to go back to old ways of eating or laziness, the journal is a new cue for the desired new behavior, cutting off the old behavior before it has time to grow again. Writing in the journal or reading past entries are fantastic replacement activities to do whenever the urge to deviate arises. Instead of eating junk food, you write in or you read your own journal. You replace one behavior with a new behavior.

Journaling is an effective tool for me in changing my behavior and I hope it will benefit you, too.

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