intended to find inner peace through the discipline of
meditation, yet couldn’t find five minutes to just sit and
breathe, sit and breathe;
committed to take a proper lunch break, and somehow found
myself shaking the crumbs out of my keyboard, evidence of
sandwich spillage; or
decided to abstain from drinking for a while, and yet had a
glass of good Australian shiraz mysteriously appear in my hand
at the end of the day?All that’s less surprising when you realize that a Duke
University study says that at least 45 percent of our waking
behaviour is habitual. Although we’d like to think we’re in charge,
it turns out that we’re not so much controlling how we act with our
conscious mind as we are being driven by our subconscious or
unconscious mind. It’s amazing; also, it’s a little disturbing.
There’s always been a lot of information out there on how to
change the way you behave. Or more accurately, there’s a dense
jungle of misinformation that grows particularly lush at the turn of
each year, when resolutions are in the air. Have you heard the one
that says that if you do something for twenty-one days, you’ll have
a new habit? Someone just made that up, and it now stalks the
Internet like a zombie, refusing to die.
Happily, there has been an increase of grounded findings,
based on neuroscience and behavioural economics, that have
helped clear a path over the last few years. To build an effective