Habit = Need + Frequency + Knowledge

1. Take stock of your situation… I need to change!
2. Choose and define the habit you want to acquire. Choose only one!
3. Stop making excuses, and analyse the ‘bad’ habits of yours that are going to make acquiring the new one difficult.
4. Decide how you are going to reinforce the new habit through repetition. Design your own system!
5. Spend at least 5 minutes a day, every day, on your new habit.
6. Get the support of others. Tell those close to you about what you are trying to achieve.
7. Seek out the right conditions to start the process. Don’t make things more difficult for yourself than they need to be.
8. Keep a record of your actions and talk to those close to you about your successes and setbacks.
9. Pavlov works, and endorphins do, too… So give yourself rewards from time to time!
10. Keep on persevering and repeating … and in 21 days you’ll have created a new habit!

“Despite having all kinds of devices which save us time and effort, we are beginning to have the feeling that we have less time for ourselves than at any other time in human history.”

Jeremy Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, Washington

Do you sacrifice (almost) all of your free time because of the demands of work? Do you stint on sleep? These are two of the symptoms caused by the constant fear of not being up to the mark at work; and this fear has become a widespread disease, so widespread in fact that it has an official name, “Deferred Happiness Syndrome“. It is calculated that in Australia, for example, no less than 40% of professional people suffer from it. Let’s take a look at some of the symptoms…

1. Do you want a very high standard of living (a great house, the “right” car, the best education for the kids, holidays to die for …), and do you feel forced into working longer and harder to achieve it?
2. Do you feel the need to save as much as you can for your retirement, which you possibly imagine in an idealized way?
3. Are you afraid of changing jobs, and do you prefer to carry on with your current level of stress?

This syndrome has various effects. On the one hand, you forego happiness in the present, working like a slave because you think that in the future everything will be different. On the other hand, you are desperately afraid of taking any risks which might mean losing the secure position which you have at the moment. If you allow yourself to indulge any passing fancies now, so your thinking goes, you could jeopardize your lifestyle in the future. Only major health issues, or severe problems at work or at home, can actually jolt a person hard enough so that they begin to look for a different way of living their life. And the same applies to the world of work: “I can’t commit to investments in future growth, as they will divert resources away from the current activity of the company!”; “I must be a top performer and give my all every day!” In parallel with this, people’s quality of life is gradually destroyed.

There is one more consequence of the syndrome of deferred happiness: children who only see their parents in photos during the week. Of course, their parent is busing working hard to give them the standing of living which they consider to be appropriate. As one manager remarked: “I work and travel a lot, but I do it for my son. My wife doesn’t have to work, so he can spend more time with her.” However, it appears that children prefer spending more time with both parents over any other type of present. This is the finding of a study carried out by Pocock & Clark; the children interviewed said that, while they were aware of the effort being made by their parents, when they came to be parents they would choose to devote more time to their children rather than to pursuing a successful career. Only time will tell…

So said the writer George Bernard Shaw. However, despite these undoubted advantages, we all struggle against the process of growing old. We look for eternal youth in the form of creams which promise us the impossible, and fill up our supermarket trolleys with products prefixed by the magic words organic, diet or macrobiotic; and when we think that this is no longer enough, we pay a visit to the plastic surgeon’s. In Spain 800 plastic surgery operations are carried out every day, and it’s a business which generates a turnover of 900 million euros a year in Spain alone … which puts the country firmly in the number one spot in the European Union and third in the entire world (according to figures provided by the Spanish Organisation of Plastic Surgery). This desire for eternal youth is rooted in our own fears and insecurities; and possibly one of our deepest fears is not being accepted or loved. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it:

“Man’s social instinct is not based on love of others but on fear of finding himself alone.”

The need to be accepted in modern-day society is bound up with notions of beauty and youth, the supreme values of today’s age. Looking middle-aged or old is definitely not the order of the day, especially in the case of women. A man with grey hair may be deemed to appear interesting; many women, on the other hand, try to hide the oncoming of greyness. This search for youth is at heart a striving for love and social recognition- but it comes, paradoxically, at a very high price to our happiness. Neither is it practical: trying to find satisfaction in something which, like it or not, has a sell-by date, is like betting on a horse that will lose the race, despite the forecasts of all the pundits to the contrary.

In a survey carried out in years ago in France, 89 per cent of the respondents thought that man needs to find meaning in his life. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl posited that modern society’s collective neurosis is grounded in a sensation of existential meaninglessness. It is precisely to paper over this sensation that we pursue things which we are afraid of losing, whether it be youth, good looks, a house which is the envy of our neighbours, or a prestigious job. Deep down, we have come to believe that our identity and our own personal worth depend on what we have and not on who we are. And this is the source of all our fears. Although we can hardly lose who we are, we most definitely can lose what we possess- including our youth. Perhaps we have been trying to seek happiness where it is not to be found. As Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at the University of Harvard, puts it:

“While we as individuals want to be happy, society wants us to spend and consume”

If we try to think about the people who have been most important to us in our own lives, we are hardly likely to single out those who were the best-looking, but those who have loved us just as we are, warts and all … those who have made us feel important and unique. Antoine de Saint-Exupèry, the author of The Little Prince, put it this way:

“The most important things in life are invisible to our eyes.”

How right he was! Real beauty cannot be seen, and we can all aspire to it, regardless of our looks. The more we can accept and love ourselves as we are, the happier we will be. And isn’t happiness what we’re all looking for?

There’s no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.

Albert Ellis, psychologist

Possibly, one of the clubs with the largest membership lists in the world is the club of people who’ve been sacked. Even so, we often find it difficult to tell even those close to us that we’ve been fired, and losing one’s job is usually a deeply painful experience. Albert Ellis, one of the most influential psychologists of the 20^th century, explains why this is so. He says that our way of thinking follows an ABC pattern: A is the initial fact which sets our thoughts in motion; B is our mental maps; and C is our subsequent behaviour.

When faced with being dismissed, the break-up of a relationship, or any painful event (the A of Ellis’ formula), there are some people who might say to themselves (Ellis’ B): “I’ll never get another job”, while others might opine “my dismissal was completely unfair” or “I can’t stand this happening to me”. All these reactions will clearly lead to despair or to anger (stage C). When we are mad at the world, all this negative energy only serves to harm us and is really unbearable for those we come into contact with. However, the same event can be lived through differently if we think: “this is an unpleasant experience” or “unfortunately, I’m now one of the millions of unemployed”. The objective facts haven’t changed, but our way of experiencing them, and the time it takes us to get over the pain will be very different (to the relief those close to us). The key to this difference is the mental maps we use to interpret reality. This explains why two people see things quite differently when confronting the same situation. So, being laid off, or any kind of unpleasant occurrence, is something that we may not be able to avoid (A), but we can choose the mental maps we to use to view the event (B).

Our capacity for self-deception in order to justify ourselves can be observed in all areas of life. To take a work-related example, we might say, “When I presented the plan, people were too tired to pay attention”, when the fact of the matter is that the presentation was crushingly boring. Or again, this time in the realm of personal relationships, we could say, “I don’t care about what he said to me” when in reality you were very affected by his words. Unfortunately, cognitive dissonance can also undermine the very fabric of our lives: just think of the multitude of people who do not dare to question their own lives because doing so might imply taking potentially traumatic decisions, such as splitting up with their partner or radically changing their career path. The first step to avoiding cognitive dissonance is to be aware of its existence; we then need to take decisions based on a realistic appraisal of the situation and of our abilities.

We all have a tendency to deny reality because we want to avoid taking decisions which in the short term will prove to be painful. In addition, our brain is delighted to provide us with all sorts of reasons to avoid suffering, and to furnish us with a blinkered view of reality and a selective memory in order to avoid any kind of self-doubt. However, our need for a false sense of security makes us slaves to ourselves.