Saturday saw me take a trip to my local Supermarket. I was after standard fare - bread, cheese, milk, you know the sort of thing. Anyway I wandered in there to get my stuff and was left speechless when I arrived at the milk isle only to find that it now offered cheese.
“So what?” you ask “cheese was on your list”. And yes indeed it was, and you are right and yet this location change was echoed throughout the whole supermarket. Everything had been moved, and it meant I had to wander down every isle to find everything I wanted. Consequently shopping took a lot longer than I had hoped.
The shifting of product within a shop is common practice. It is designed to shake the customer up so that they do indeed have to traverse every isle searching for their purchases, which means that they have to cast an active eye over every product the shop has to offer.
You see our mind is an incredible learning machine, and most of the learning is done unconsciously. Whenever you are doing a new activity, your unconscious mind is paying close attention, and once you have done the activity enough times, it tells your conscious mind “it’s okay, I can do this for you!”, autopilot is engaged and your unconscious mind will do your shopping for you, leaving your conscious mind to think about other things.
This is, of course very cool, and you are probably not even aware that your unconscious drives you to work, does your shopping, gardening, nose picking etc etc whilst you daydream about being a popstar or something.
So when the supermarket moves everything about, autopilot is necessarily disengaged as your conscious mind needs your conscious to address the process and learnt the new pattern before the unconscious can take over. You need to teach your unconscious how to shop for the essentials again.
Now your unconscious isn’t choosy, it enables autopilot for repetitive actions both good and bad, and it is through this process that people develop habits.
The interesting point here is that to break or change a habit, the first step is to bring the habit back in to the conscious mind, and as the supermarkets show, this is a fairly simple process.
So today I’m going to suggest how you can bring habits back in to the control of the conscious mind so that you can then teach your unconscious mind something else to do instead.
Do something different.
That’s it. Plain and simple. You need to do something slightly different so that the unconscious pattern can’t be fed in to autopilot. Here are some examples:
If you want to change your eating behaviour, try swapping the knife and fork in to opposite hands, or eating that chocolate bar left-handed. If you want to quit smoking try smoking with your other hand, lighting it wrong-handed, or smoking on one leg. Whatever works for you works for you.
Try something different which keeps autopilot off, and then do that new pattern repeatedly. Studies suggest doing something consistently for 21 days results in a new unconscious pattern. That’s not the truth, it’s the result of studies, so try something different today and notice the effects, enjoy!
