Why do we do the things that we do?
Many people smoke to regulate their stress rather than actually enjoying the taste. People often drink heavily as a form of escapism, rather than the social aspect.
There are often deep, underlying reasons for harmful behaviour. Without addressing these, you’re unlikely to kick any type of bad habits.
But equally, there comes a point where certain things have just become habits. If we do something long enough, it becomes an automatic instinct, even if we know they no longer makes sense.
I was reflecting on this question in regards to my health. I have chronic tension. I was functional, until I was not. A burnout precipitated the need to open up the hatch and see what was really going on underneath. I have essentially trained myself to be in a state of constant brace, and heightened vigilance. I seem to have followed a relatively typical pipeline as a high-masking autistic person (happy autism awareness day)
When you grow up not really understanding what’s going on, you learn to be constantly monitoring how you should act. It’s a bit akin to having to be an actor performing on a stage, making sure that you memorise and deliver your lines correctly (many autistic people actually do this as a coping mechanism).
No doubt, there has been things that I have needed to process. It’s a big psychological burden when someone finally explains why things didn’t really make sense to you for your whole life. I’ve needed that time to essentially re-evaluate my life up until this point.
But there comes a time to address the real, practical dimension of it all. My chronic tension has led to consistent, shallow breath and braced posture. Although this has slowly improved with rest, I’m still some way from a healthy breathing pattern and posture.
A lot of the back issues I’ve had recently have been a result of this tension. My osteopath told me that the source of my back pains were actually from a lack of breathing from the diaphragm. This was having a knock-on effect on the rest of my body.
For all the trauma and explanation, it’s now about shifting the habits I’ve built. That means consciously changing the way I breathe rather than further delving into why.
I felt prompted to write this article because I sometimes feel that people can get too caught up on talking about their traumas. Not to say that healing trauma is not a crucial element, but because I find that people use it as a reason to explain and justify, rather than as a means to actually change.
I had a conversation with someone recently who was so caught up in her own trauma that it became impossible to speak with her. She interrupted me mid-sentence on a totally different subject to talk about how women were given no rights in Ireland 50 years ago. When I tried to point out she had just completely derailed the conversation, she accused me of not caring about what she said. In the end, I had to just walk away.
Trauma cannot be used as a justification for being rude. If you genuinely want to overcome it, you also need to build healthy habits. If you’re constantly fixated on something, you have to shift your brain’s habits. This person could not hold a conversation with me without constantly interrupting me. She also kept pulling it back to what she wanted to talk about.
I’ve been in many spaces where the logic has just become ‘communicate more’. If we all just speak and speak about how hard we have it, we will solve everything. Unfortunately, that’s not actually how it works. In fact, it can actually make people end up being more self-centred and narcissistic.
At some point, we do need to take responsibility for where we’re at. Understanding our past can help bring us peace, but ultimately, it doesn’t change our current predicament. The only way to do that is shifting our habits and behaviour.