Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2017 and was written with the coming year’s New Year’s resolutions in mind.
Is procrastination ruining your quality of life or your personal and professional ambitions? Is laziness taking over your life? Do some of your habits put your relationships, or even your health, at risk, as tobacco, drugs or alcohol can? Plenty of authors write about how to break bad habits and replace them with the habits of successful people.
We even have countless articles on how to beat akrasia, delay or procrastination, but this time we are going to turn what we thought we knew about bad habits on its head and look at a completely different point of view, one backed by neuroscience.
This article is going to be long, but it will be useful and interesting. All the more so with the new year coming, which is usually a time for resolutions. I don’t think it hurts to have more weapons for keeping them.
Statistics say that more than 85% of people abandon their New Year’s resolutions for lack of willpower. So, according to neuroscience at least, we can set willpower aside when it comes to breaking bad habits.
See also: Why you don’t keep your New Year’s resolutions: 6 reasons
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
The good news is that, to begin with, you are neither lazy nor a mess. In fact, you don’t have bad habits at all. There is a whole system of psychology built on these assumptions: Internal Family Systems (IFS), or Internal Family Systems therapy. It helps people who suffer from depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addictions and some other serious conditions.
And yes, the “internal family” part is no mistake, because, as we will see, we have a whole family living inside our minds.
If anyone doubts how well it works, various studies have shown that even among patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), after being treated with this method, only 1 in 13 patients still had PTSD after 16 weeks of IFS therapy. That is reason enough for it to at least catch our attention.
Internal Family Systems therapy can help you overcome almost any behaviour, deal with deeply rooted problems and even help you love yourself a little more. But let’s get down to business.
How do you break bad habits without willpower, thanks to IFS?
First, let’s start from the premise that you are not lazy or weak. You don’t have a single “self”; you have many different “selves” inside you that take turns steering the ship. That is why human behaviour can be so random and frustrating.
To give an example, when a faithful husband or wife commits adultery at some point and says, “I don’t know what happened. It wasn’t me,” technically they weren’t lying to you, because the person steering the ship at the moment of the infidelity was a different one from the person who stayed faithful for years.
*That said, don’t use this explanation as an excuse to cheat, because I don’t think it will fly. In the end, your partner may tell the whole family living inside you to go to hell 🙂
This theory is very old in psychology. Practically every branch of psychology today agrees on the idea of the “divided brain”, and neuroscience is no exception.
See also: 15 habits of successful salespeople
In fact, Michael Gazzaniga, author of Tales from Both Sides of the Brain among many other books about the brain, tells us that our mind has several realms of consciousness, that is, several “selves”, and that they don’t necessarily talk to each other.
It is like a family living inside our mind, and just as in families, we can talk to every member of the family and even get them to agree to work together and help each other.
Relax. Don’t get lost just yet, because the message gets simpler from here.
What does all this have to do with bad habits?
It’s simple. You don’t have bad habits; you have different selves in your head with different goals, and they are all trying to do what they think is best for the “big SELF”, that is, you.
That would be great if it weren’t for the fact that self 1’s ideas sometimes clash with self 2’s, and, worse still, may not actually help the big SELF.
Do you think the idea of two different selves living inside us makes no sense? Let’s take a look.
You get up one morning knowing you should do something important for yourself, but you end up sprawled on the sofa watching a film, and at the end of the day you feel guilty. How can you choose the pleasure of watching a film and feel guilty about it at the same time?
Simply because “self 1” wanted to enjoy a film while “self 2” wanted to do something productive. They are two selves in conflict. Almost everyone has an ambitious “self” that is afraid of being a loser and wants to achieve a lot, but they also have a “self” that only feels like drinking, partying and watching TV.
Unfortunately, the “lazy self” almost always wins, because bad habits are supposedly more pleasant and easier to acquire than good ones. In fact, the easiest habit to acquire is laziness. It is so easy that you don’t have to do anything to get it. That’s it. You’ve managed to be lazy by doing nothing.
The secret?
Finding a way for both selves to be in tune and help the “big SELF”, that is, you.
To do that, we first need to get to know the members of the family that share our mind. And this is where things get much more interesting. Let me introduce…
Exiles, managers and firefighters
This is the cast of characters living in your head and, in a way, the cause of many of your problems.
1. The exiles
This is what therapists call the “self” with deep fears, your most negative “self”, holding beliefs such as “I’m worthless” or “I’m a failure”…
Let’s say this would be your inner child, to whom a lot of bad things happen and who draws painful lessons from experiences it won’t let go of. This fearful part often unconsciously drives your actions in ways that are quite regrettable and frustrating.
2. The managers
The manager steps in to help you function with those fears. It is the protective parent of the little child (the exile). The manager is that annoying voice you sometimes hear in your head telling you that you’re not trying hard enough, that you need to do much more for your future, that you should get your damn butt off the chair and work your tail off to chase your dreams.
If you gave in to your inner child’s fears, you would be paralysed, and the manager would hound you every moment to get your act together. The manager tries to stop emotional pain from becoming conscious. It motivates you to improve, to work hard, to be more productive.
Some people have a more extreme manager, which is why they strive to be overly perfectionist, try to control everything, obsess over their appearance, try to please everyone, and so on…
There may come a point when the manager fires you from the company, which has probably already happened to you at some point. You give up. There are no more voices, no more hope. The manager abandons you; it fires you. This is where…
3. …the firefighters come in
When the manager has failed, this other “self” appears. It has the same interest as the manager, except that firefighters are emergency responders. They are activated not to prevent the fire but to put it out. The problem is that firefighters want the well-being of the “big self”, but they will give you what they think well-being is after you have already set off the problem.
The manager doesn’t like the firefighters’ methods, because to put out the fire they use alcohol, drugs, excessive shopping, promiscuity and, in extreme cases, suicide or homicide.
In other cases, when the manager has failed, the firefighter fails too. In real life, the firefighter’s failure is called depression.
These three characters face off against each other in your head every day. They all have contradictory goals.
Since we can’t get rid of any member of this family living inside us, all we can do is try to keep the firefighters calm and off duty, get the manager to trust you, and reassure the inner child so it feels safe and more confident.
See also: How to make lasting, consistent changes in your life
Here are the three steps to keep these characters in check and reach our goal
1. Stay calm
Breathe deeply and sit somewhere quiet. Relax. Stay centred. Responding to things in an agitated emotional state tells the manager it needs to step in and, worse, the firefighters start getting ready to break down your door and come in.
Think about the main bad habit or the problem you have right now.
Is it an overprotective parent pushing you to work too much? Is it a slacker who is always tempting you to put things off? Is it a voice telling you that you’re not attractive enough for others to like you?
Imagine, as the manager of your own life, that this voice is real. We need you to think of it as real because we are going to have a serious conversation with it. Creepy, right? You may think that talking to yourself is crazy, but recent research has shown that talking to yourself is a sign of intelligence, helps improve memory and boosts athletic performance. So…
2. Talk to those voices
If you are going to follow this advice, don’t do it in the middle of a café. The self-talk should be done in the second person, because technically you are not going to talk to yourself but to whoever is behind that voice.
See also: 25 habits of successful people
And remember that all these voices belong to one of the characters living inside us, so be clear that “they” really do want to help you, even if whoever is trying to help you doesn’t always know how.
To the voices telling you that you’re worthless, that you’re not attractive, or urging you to do things that hurt you, ask questions such as:
What is your role in my life?
What are you trying to protect me from?
Let’s imagine we put this question to the inner child and to the manager: what are you trying to protect me from?
The inner child would tell you: “From everything you could lose if you start your own business and fail,” or “From asking that girl out and hearing her say no.”
But… how do you think the manager would answer that question?
“I want to protect you from procrastination, from mediocrity. I want to stop you from being a slacker. I want you to go out and conquer the world, because with work, discipline and persistence you can do it.”
“I want to protect you from the regret of never having told that girl how you felt, because you already had the ‘no’, and now you’ll never know her answer. If you had trusted yourself more, maybe she would have said yes. You had nothing to lose by speaking your mind.”
3. Talk to the inner child
Remember that the inner child is your smallest, most fearful “self”. It is very easily frightened, and if it gets nervous the firefighters may have to come and smash everything.
Ask that child what the fears that paralyse it really are.
Fear of failing, of doing any job and getting it wrong, of not being accepted by others…?
That child will give you the answer to the question of “why you have bad habits”. These fears are often unfounded and are working against you. Inside our head, when the child is in the spotlight, those fears are real. For the manager, on the other hand, those fears don’t exist.
All you have to do is persuade the manager to teach that frightened child everything it knows and get the two of them to work together. The manager can solve the dangers and problems the child sees. And if you manage to get the child to stop being afraid, the manager won’t have to step in and the firefighters can carry on doing whatever firefighters do when they’re not putting out fires.
You don’t need willpower. You need to get to know these three forces (characters) that live with us and manage them properly.
According to IFS, loving yourself means loving each of your selves and getting them to work in harmony for the good of the big SELF.
Needless to say, if you have a truly serious problem, go to a professional therapist first; there will be time to put this approach into practice later.
Sources used for this article: Introduction to the Internal Family Systems Model, by Richard C. Schwartz / U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs / Barking Up the Wrong Tree / The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk
See also: 9 fascinating psychological facts you should know about yourself and your brain
Featured image: Serene Zaina, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
