Do your habits have to be your identity?

We’re responsible for our actions — and the company we keep. (Image credit)

I was the last customer at a favorite cafe. While an employee swept the floor and I packed up to go shortly before closing time, we struck up a conversation. She confessed that she has a tendency to procrastinate.

“What are you procrastinating about?” I asked.

“Everything,” she replied.

She said that she had just transferred to a new college and was anxious about her tendency to procrastinate. She’s always been this way and she’s not sure how to change.

To me, that was the key piece of information. If you’ve always procrastinated, you don’t know how it feels to not procrastinate. Work is a perpetual source of stress, anxiety, and shame — and don’t we want to avoid things that make us feel that way? Thus, we set up a cycle of procrastinating in order to do so, which still leads us directly to stress, anxiety, and shame in the long run. And then we become someone who procrastinates. The habit turns into an identity, embedding itself into our self-concept.

There is another option. In order to shift the habit of procrastination, we can dismantle the identity we’ve adopted for ourselves and choose a new one. Procrastination doesn’t have to be an identity — a perpetual reality we can never escape. It’s simply a habit, and habits are, in turn, simply the result of a series of choices over time. We can make new choices if we’re willing to see ourselves as someone who is capable of making them.

For example, there’s are some mornings when I do not want to get out of bed. “Oh, here you go,” the inner narrative goes, “letting yourself down by not following through on the plans you made for yourself.” If I let that thought take hold, I will sit there and look at my phone or go back to sleep or do anything to avoid the shame. That thought does not actually motivate me to get out of bed — it makes it convenient for me to stay there and be the person it’s suggesting that I am. In order finally get up, I have to consciously think something like, “It’s okay. It’s normal to want to stay in this cozy bed. But you’ll feel so much better about yourself if you get up. You can do it!” In that moment, the baggage of identity (“You lazy piece of…”) is released. I can see that getting up is a choice I can make right now, and I have room to make that choice. And, as promised, I feel good about myself, making it easier to make such a choice in the future.

For my friend at the cafe, she can begin to chip away at her procrastination habit by finding a task to complete on time — and another, and another. I have guided countless students through this process, and it is magical when they experience, for the first time, having no obligations hanging over their heads. No late assignments. Nothing for anyone to nag them about. No shame to cause them to seek out additional self-destructive habits. They had never known that this light, peaceful feeling existed, but now that they’ve experienced it, they want to keep it. Now, they do their work in order to perpetuate their good feelings, rather than avoiding it in order to escape bad feelings. The vicious cycle has turned into a virtuous one.

It can be difficult to turn our back on an identity we’ve carried for years or to change a habit we’ve built an ecosystem around. But it doesn’t have to be. That’s another choice we can make: We can see a habit as a fundamental part of who we are, but that is optional. It’s never too late to do things a different way and build new habits — and new aspects of our identity that suit us better.

Are there any habits you’re trying to change? Are you prepared to let go of your identity as a person who has that habit? What else will you need to change in order to make it work? When have you been successful changing a habit? If you feel like sharing, the comments are open.