The Ripple Effects of Quitting Bad Habits
How controlling my subconscious anxiety changed everything
Since my early teen years I’ve arisen every morning and gone to bed every night to a constant barrage of negative self-talk, recriminations for what I thought was a lack of will, and conviction. I couldn’t seem to break bad habits or form positive ones. This frustration and embarrassment fueled bouts of depression, and low self-esteem, which most people are surprised to learn that I am troubled by as I am generally viewed as an upbeat, happy person.
I had no idea these behaviors were fueled by anxiety. While I was cognizant of the negative self-talk, the occasional attempts I made to change it were futile. I never fully realized how much it overshadowed and influenced my actions and life decisions until I inadvertently treated it by taking CBD oil for joint pain.
Three nights of blissful sleep changed everything
I am a fairly intelligent, self-aware, and well-read person. Both my husband and daughter suffer from anxiety, I know it when I see it. Yet neither I, nor my loved ones, nor any healthcare professional ever recognized I suffered from it.
Until three nights of blissful sleep changed everything.
In late 2018, after researching treatments for arthritis, I tried CBD oil. I committed to three weeks. The first night I fell asleep almost immediately, a rarity. The second night… let’s skip to the chase, I woke the fourth morning with the sudden realization that I had, for three nights in a row, gone right to sleep, and woken without my typical litany of defeatist affirmations.
I’d just gone to bed and fallen asleep. I’d just woken up and showered. Wait? What?
Certain it was the CBD, I let the experiment play out until the three weeks were up. Three days later I called in an order for a month’s supply of CBD and have been taking it ever since.
While it didn’t help with the joint pain, today the negative self-talk is gone, I sleep well, and much to my surprise, I’ve made headway changing many of my negative behaviors and have actualized positive ones.
Habits are ingrained
I’m still have a hard time breaking bad habits and forming good ones.
We are all unique combinations of shared traits and behaviors. Psychology can tell us much about the methods and tools we can use to help ourselves, but it is up to us to apply them to our individual situations. Imprinted neural pathways need a concerted effort to break them. Key, is finding the method of change that works for you.
Accountability is the most important factor in habit formation or habit changing. This means that the likelihood that you will reduce your alcohol or lose weight will go up if you share your goal with friends, family or your community, either in person or online. Why Is It So Hard to Break Bad Habits
All this self-examination and analysis has coalesced into insight into my issues. One is that the internal struggle between my desires, and my anxiety has caused me to develop patterns of negative self-talk, and doubt about my abilities that have kept me from moving forward, and implementing changes.
Because the CBD freed me from the anxiety, I finally felt able to employ modification strategies to the habits I wished to alter.
Not one to ease into things, I tackled my weight first.
In for a penny, in for a pound
Going Keto was easy. I am motivated by things that challenge me and Keto was a whole new world of ingredients and cooking methods. I still spend hours a week experimenting and developing recipes. The biggest negative wasn’t giving up rice and pasta, it was bread and brownies. Until I realized never eating another cookie or piece of cake didn’t truly matter to me. I was an avid baker, I’ve had a lifetime of great baked goods. I’m not missing anything.
The negatives didn’t outweigh the positives. The effects this method of eating has had on my health go beyond the weight I’ve lost (eighty pounds since April 2019). It’s the confidence I’ve gained in successfully breaking a difficult pattern of behavior. It’s the pride my family has in my accomplishment. I look better, I feel better. My joints still hurt.
The next big thing is the small things
You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction. Alvin Toffler
The small routines and habits of daily life have proven trickier to interrupt. Perhaps the consequences are not as concrete or there hasn’t been sufficient accountability. I suspect that for some I haven’t dug deep enough into my motivations for changing them.
One habit, turning on the television in the morning, should be easy to break. Despite knowing I’m more productive and creative in the morning, my inability to resist this compulsion confounds me. My desire and need to be more productive is greater than my need to know the weather and traffic. Yet, this week I found myself remote in hand surfing the news when I should have been writing.
Is there a negative consequence of not watching the news that outweighs the positive of being productive? Is there a positive to not getting my work done? Perhaps there is a cascade of issues to deal with if I get work done that I’m avoiding? Unpacking this seems important, and bigger than this one habit.
From waves to ripples
Why, can I write fifty thousand words in thirty days for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), yet I avoid writing a thousand for a simple blog post?
The only goal for NaNo is write the words, I don’t have to do anything with them, therefore the payoff is immediate success. But, finishing a novel, editing/revising/publishing it? Moving forward means facing a future that is fraught with uncertainty. To do so means delving into a world that intimidates me, and I don’t want to deal with. It’s too scary. Everyone will find out, I’m a fraud.
Curing the waves of cripppling anxiety has left a ripple of deeper questions, and underlying issues. I’m resisting actions that will move my writing practice forward. Self-sabotage is a hallmark of resistance, something I’m well versed in (read Steven Pressfield’s, War of Art to learn more). I’m a poster child for imposter syndrome. But recognizing the behavior and changing the behavior are two different animals.
My stomach forms knots. For a moment, I feel like I can’t breathe. My mind starts racing through the usual thoughts and questions.
“Why would anyone pay you? You don’t know what you’re doing.” “Where are your credentials? Who do you think you are to try to help and teach? You barely have it together man.” “If only they knew who you really were, they’d run the other way.”
This is impostor syndrome. This is the famed “resistance” Steven Pressfield talks about in The War of Art. (Ayodeji Awosika in his article on overcoming imposter syndrome.)
The consequences of curing my anxiety
What if I finish my novel? It will require learning a whole career’s worth of new skills… writing a marketing plan, building an authors platform, posting/responding to social media, developing a website and blog, email lists, newsletters, mining data and metrics, hiring editors, formatting (okay my husband is a printer I got that one covered), but you get my drift. Not to mention all attending consequences of selling your book to strangers, who will have opinions, and wants and need and demands for your time and attention. Nope. Writing this one simple blog post, finishing a novel…it all leads to a big scary place. What’s on Netflix?
Curing my anxiety means being able to face reality. Becoming an author means being a business, and it’s intimidating, and I’m fricken dying!!!
Just when you thought you knew where this post was leading, a plot twist!
I was finally making headway with the major issues in my life when, BAM! Not only had I completely transformed my eating habits, but by April I’d began a yoga practice, and was making great strides in my mobility, flexibility and strength. Man, I was doing it, being all insightful and successful, then I had the rug pulled out from under me.
In May I began having optic migraines, I thought it was the yoga and took a week off. A shadow appeared in my right eye, I self-diagnosed a detached retina. I was at the doctor’s office by ten am, at the retina specialist by two pm, and by five pm, I had tumors in both eyes.
We knew it was metastatic breast cancer. I’d been diagnosed the first time in March 2011 after I’d found a lump in my left breast. I had a lumpectomy, chemo, radiation, and had been cancer free for six years, until October 2017. Then a routine mammogram caught a recurrence of breast cancer in the same spot. Not wishing to take anymore chances, I opted for a double mastectomy, had full body scans, and multiple biopsy to ensure nothing had escaped.
The all is not lost moment
You recall I am an optimist, despite incurable cancer, despite the monkey wrench to every plan, despite… other life events that would leave one not so full of hope and good cheer, I remain able to see the humor in the situation. At nearly fifty-six, I am wise-old-owl enough to have perspective, and gratitude.
Since August I have been a clinical trial patient taking three drugs that are keeping people alive much longer than they did in the past (life expectancy of two-to-five years used to be the prognosis, now it could be ten, even fifteen).
One drug’s side-effect is hypoglycemia. I do not suffer from that because I eat a Keto diet which means I do not have to take yet another drug to control that side effect… Thank you Keto diet!
How fortunate and coincidental was it that I found CBD, and gained control of my anxiety and diet mere months before being diagnosed. Talk about a ripple effect!
I have had two scans so far that show the twenty-six tumors throughout my body have had major changes. A few have disappeared, most have shrunk considerably. I’m not going anywhere just yet.
Now that I’m not about to drop dead
A brief public service announcement
Discovering that CBD eased my anxiety was happenstance. It shouldn’t have been. That I found relief and control over my emotional life by accident is tragic. If you are suffering from the inability to effect changes in your life, if your habits cause you to be depressed, or have become addictions, it may be more than just lack of proper motivation that constrains you.
I should have sought help from a mental health professional decades ago. Please, do not hesitate to ask for help. There is no shame in needing assistance, even with things you think you should be able to control.–Lynne
It’s been a year since I first started taking CBD and discovered how anxiety had been ruling my life. After that, everything changed. I’ve been able to take back control of my thoughts, my actions, and my habits. The knowledge that the factors for success are within my power leaves me with no excuse to not complete the multitude of novels that have gone unfinished until now.
Making progress is an exercise in self-reflection, establishing goals, discovering the motivation to reach them, and not dying (that’s an important one). It’s still work, but productive work that will lead me where I want to go — forward.
“This post and Instigators Write Publication are created through The Unmistakable Creative Listeners Tribe: a group in which smart creative gather and help each other to bring their dreams to life. To learn more, click: https://the-unmistakable-creative-podcast.mn.co/."
