My therapist once told me that the hardest thing in the world to do is to change. It's so difficult, most of us literally have to have a heart attack before we change... at least our diet and exercise. This I have found to be true. In fact, many people don't even change their lifestyle after a heart attack.
I've spent a lot of time trying to catalogue and understand the roots of my behavior. This has been helpful for a certain part of coping with depression. Unfortunately, it doesn't account for all behavior. I've come to find that some behavior exists merely out of habit. Even once the initial reason for the behavior is gone, the synaptic pathways are loathe to change. I find myself slipping into depressive behavior now sometimes out of habit, not out of cause. I'm simply used to moping around so I do it. I am finding this is difficult to change. Because it's a habit it's hard to notice that I'm even doing it.
I am finding more and more that I have to rethink behavior modification. I'm used to looking for causes and circumventing them, or finding more mature responses to them. That is increasingly not working. So I'm working on a new strategy to deal with this next layer of problem. Fortunately, in terms of depression, these are problems I don't mind having, given the alternative. I'll be writing another article soon on more specific behavior modeling.
"The butter melts out of habit,
You know that toast isn't even warm"
-Ani Difranco, Out of Habit
No comments:
Post a Comment