The Habits We Don’t Know We have

Often we don’t realize how our years-0ld habits keep us stuck. Then, we say, sarcastically, “Yeah, I’m living the dream.” I offer a way to leave the habits and reconnect with your body in a way that makes living your dream genuinely possible.

As I write this blog, the checkmarks on my calendar tell me that my husband and I have been in quarantine for 226 days.

I called a friend who I hadn’t talked to for a while and asked, “How are you doing, Sandy?”

Before she could even think about it, these sarcastic words flew out, “Oh, yeah, livin’ the dream. Absolutely, no doubt about it.”

“Living the dream” started out as something we aspired to, but more often than not, it has become a negative, sarcastic commentary on what is not going right with our lives.

Our brains habitually focus on the negative. Many scientists say this is a survival legacy from our prehistoric, mammalian lives. If we weren’t always on the lookout for saber tooth tigers, we would be sadly surprised when we turned around to learn we were now a big cat’s lunch.

There are a slew of recent, but also many classic, self-improvement books that focus on developing new habits to help us do the things we want to do. Here are some titles of these books (and I own a few of them): Atomic Habits, The Power of Habits, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, High Performance Habits, and so on. You get the picture.

But I have become much more interested in the ingrained, invisible habits that we unwittingly carry around with us everyday. They are like the basic machinery of our bodily engines. We start up our engines for the day and the habits that we have practiced for much of our over-50 lives begin humming along.

We have, over the course of our lives, carved out deep tracks in our brains. In the previous blog, I related how stress researcher, Elizabeth Stanley, helps us imagine the formation of these habits -- like ever-deepening canyons that water flows through creating an unchanging path.

The way we see our lives, our relationships; the way we hold ourselves -- perhaps stiffly, perhaps we don’t move enough; the way we tense our muscles when we are angry; the way we respond to others when we don’t feel safe. These are invisible habits that we have formed for our own safety and they served us well when we were young.

But that was then and this is now.

And just when the stakes couldn’t be higher -- we are wondering how to change what we are doing in the second half of our lives -- we don’t quite know how to unlearn those lifelong habits that, by their very nature, supported us in being aware of danger, yet set us up for a continued life of sarcasm that says we are NOT living the dream.

Habits are most often thought of as thinking tools -- change your thoughts and you will change your behavior and then you will be quite pleased with the new you. Positive psychology has made many a career advising us how to change our thoughts.

You might guess that I don’t agree with this approach.

In fact, I take a quite different approach in my monthly program, the #FierceOver50 Gathering. I have learned over time working with my precious students and clients and through fascinating courses of study that the solution is not, first, in your mind. Change begins in your body.

I am fond of saying, “You can’t think your way out of this mess.”

Being able to “live the dream,” doesn’t start out with changed habitual thoughts or even behaviors. Feeling like you are “living the dream,” happens when you shift out of the habitual body-based patterns that you live with.

You might wonder what I mean by the body-based habits and patterns we live with. Here are some examples: grinding our teeth at night, sucking in our gut to look a certain way, holding our breath because we are anxious, tense muscles around the skull and neck causing tension headaches, walking by lurching forward because we don’t have enough strength and mobility in our hips.

“Living the Dream,” doesn’t emerge from what you think, it emerges from how you feel in your body.

We learn to dismantle all the unwitting habits we live with as we learn to breathe from our center, as we learn how to massage our bodies back into connection with our inner selves, and how to move in ways that support our bodies.

If what I’m saying speaks to you, if you feel what I am saying, then my monthly membership, the #FierceOver50 Gathering offers you a very different way to reshape the habits you have been living with. Those habits were useful. They got you to this point. But they are not serving you anymore. They are not supporting your dreams.

The #FierceOver50 Gathering is $47 dollars a month. You can learn about what is included and sign up by clicking here. 

P.S. As I looked back over this blog, I realized that I told you why the Gathering is so important, but I didn’t tell you much about what it you get when you sign on. This membership program has two basic strands.

Strand One - Movement: First, I have put together a library of practices that all focus on a combination of stress reduction and movement. They include breathwork practices, self-massage techniques, and gentle, but often strengthening, movement options.

The library is always open to members, so if there is something you want to work on, you can choose. But each week I send you a note with my recommendation for that week.

Strand Two - Community: Second, we meet twice a month in virtual roundtables to connect, talk about what we are learning, and consider helpful approaches to our movement and stress reduction journeys. FYI, these virtual roundtables are optional -- I have some women who love them show up regularly, some women who drop in occasionally, and some who simply focus on their practices. Whatever works for you is good with me!

You can see a complete description of the Gathering here:Click Here to Learn More.