By Dina Aldabbagh

Every single choice we make slightly shifts the projection of our lives. It’s like the sails of a ship — you make the choice to go to sleep a bit earlier tonight, you shift slightly to the left. You make the choice to go to sleep five hours later tomorrow, you go quite a bit further to the right. You make the choice to sleep one hour earlier tonight and one hour later tomorrow, you stay going relatively straight. This is how all our decisions function in our lives. Every single choice is the ever-so-slight adjustment to our path forward. This can be looked upon both positively or negatively — dealer’s choice. You could say that it’s a very good thing that one small misstep doesn’t throw off all your good work, and therefore as long as you have a positive trend, you’re allowed to be imperfect. Or you can choose to champion how unfortunate it is that one good thing doesn’t have much of an impact on your life, therefore it’s so hard to really change the things you want to change. I choose to look at it like this: how fortunate is it that life is so forgiving that we are allowed to be erroneous human beings as long as the average trend is a positive one? And that we are able to do many small things to improve our lives, thus taking off all the pressure of doing the one perfect thing to fix your life — or inversely, ruin it. It’s preferable to me that consistency outweighs intensity.

This does, however, prompt us to take a look at our habits — aka the small things that we do consistently. The more developed of a person you become, the more fine-tuned your habits need to become as well. Don’t let that scare you — just work with the habits you know you need to change now. As you elevate yourself as a person, your capacity for harder things grows as well. What seems unrealistic or unsustainable to you today will be your norm in the future. You’ll look back and think, “A past me wouldn’t have been able to imagine that this is how I live today.” Today, you may think daily exercise is an unrealistic standard to put on yourself, but if you continue to commit to one workout at a time, two years from now, you’ll see it as the bare minimum for your life — the first, foundational step. This applies to all habits. The habit itself is neutral, it’s not easy nor hard; its level of difficulty is determined by your current perception of it. Hence, the more you do it, the easier it feels to you. Hard today, easy tomorrow. Your capacity adjusts. 

I notice how easy it is to create a new habit in our lives — a new dependency. It’s absurd. If you just do the same thing three days in a row, you’ve suddenly created a new area of expectancy in your life — a new craving. If you have a sweet treat after dinner one time, it’s a one off experience, a slight shift to the left. However, if you have a sweet treat after dinner three days in a row, you’ve now shifted three degrees to the left — keep going with this trend, just one, small degree at a time, and your ship is projected to hit the shore of an entirely different island than originally expected. If you were to try this, eating a sweet treat after dinner day after day consecutively, you’d notice by day seven that you’d have a craving so absolutely hard to ignore, that you’d feel like you’d have to give in or something would go wrong. This is what dependency feels like. Lucky for us, it applies to both positive or negative habits. But I want to challenge you a bit further — maybe it’s not necessarily a “bad” habit, but rather a habit that takes you further away from your goal. If you have a specific island you want to land on, then you have to ask yourself if this habit is steering your ship in the proper direction or in one that you don’t want to go in. It’s not always so black and white — which is why you don’t need to always consult your family, friends, or the internet on whether you “should” do something or not. What they consider a “good” habit may be steering you away from where you’re trying to go. You just have to ask yourself, “Is building this habit something that takes me closer to my goal, or further away from my goal?”

It’s neither a good or bad thing to have a sweet treat after dinner, until you add the context of what your goal is. If your goal is to thoroughly enjoy your night, not think so hard about things, let loose on a movie night with friends, then having yourself a post-meal treat would be getting you closer to that goal, so: good thing. But if your goal is to lose 20 lbs, then you have to add in the context there — and it may be a bit grey. Have you held back from having dessert for the last four nights? Then maybe having this sweet treat tonight would actually be a good thing, as it would bring some balance into your diet and not make you feel like you’re restricting foods from yourself — which could send you way off the other end if you were to feel that way. Or, perhaps you did have a sweet treat after dinner the last two nights, then having one tonight may be creating a dependency of having something sweet after dinner — which could be a bad thing in regards to your goal of losing weight. Do you want to condition yourself to have dessert after meals? Ask yourself this as you’re making the decision. 

In pursuit of the goal of losing 20 lbs, creating a habit of eating something sugary after having a full, satiating meal, would be adding extra, unbeneficial calories to your daily diet and could take you further from your goal when exercised consistently. That’s why we must be careful about what ways of life we are conditioning ourselves to expect and operate under. What we do consistently is what we see consistently. It’s not what we do every now and then, it’s what we usually do. Be mindful of what habits, therefore dependencies, therefore cravings, that you are creating and fostering.

Do you ever notice how your mom or dad will always wake up at 7 am, even on weekends? You tell them, “Sleep in, it’s Saturday,” but they can’t, because five days a week — therefore 261 days a year, therefore 72% of the time — they wake up at 7 am for work, which ultimately conditions them to wake up at that time for the majority of the other 28%. Even if they wanted to wake up at 10 am on the weekend, their body is used to waking up at 7 am, and the body does what feels right; what feels right in the body is what it’s used to doing. Even against their intentional desire of sleeping in more, their body prompts them to wake up at the time that they’re conditioned to. We can want to do something so bad, but because of our dependencies, it feels like an impossibility. Waking up at 7 am then accordingly becomes a dependency because the body depends on it to feel in homeostasis. 

Your body’s sense of equilibrium is elastic; it adapts to what you teach it to do. If you condition yourself to do something, even if not what nature perhaps intended, that’s what your body will ask of you to feel in balance. You teach your body what to expect by what you do on a daily basis. So ask yourself if what you’re doing is what you want to teach yourself to do. If you don’t want to teach yourself to eat dessert after every meal when you’re not hungry anymore, then choose not to do it one time. Let one time become another time, and slowly you’re deconditioning your body from a craving that isn’t in your best interest. At first, it may require sheer will to make the change, but once you start assimilating to this new comfort zone, your body will ask of you the things that are in accordance with that zone. 

One choice at a time: a one degree shift. That’s what every decision you make means to you.