Blog

Thanks to Lindsey Bass for providing a second installment on her series of reflections on habits. Enjoy her thoughts!

Dr. Andy Brown

Craving the open air on a road trip, windows down, and wind in your face is the opposite of sitting quietly in your work-from-home space. That desire for this experience is similar to the intense experience of driving a race car. The anticipation of feeling the power behind the wheel of a car as intense as the Hellcat fueled the action of renting that car and made the experience so rewarding for Andy. The experience he shared was thought-provoking, personal, and persuasive to the life and habit reflections that resulted from his experience of an attractive vacation.

When we travel, we search for travel packages that meet our needs and enhance our desires by looking. We scour the internet for hotels or resorts that look clean and safe, and the beauty of the destination feels ‘attractive.’ When we think about those things, our bodies and our minds know cleanliness and safety by using far more senses than just sight. Similarly, beauty is something we feel and experience uniquely as individuals. Sure, some things may seemingly be perceived as a commonly shared opinion of beauty – maybe a breathtaking sunset, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Eiffel Tower, or the Sydney Opera House. The world often makes assumptions about the “majority” and places emphasis on group opinions. But here, in this world, in your world, you can design it around your sensational experience of attractiveness.

Driving across the country from the northeast corner all the way to the southwest corner of the country, I became distinctly aware of how comfortable and simultaneously blind I can be to surroundings that aren’t actively attractive to my senses in the moment. When Niagara Falls feels powerful, energizing, awe-inspiring, and yet, it evokes a poignant emotional response that I couldn’t quite name. That sounds a bit confusing if we are still only looking at attractiveness as how something looks. Instead, as I process this unexpected emotional response, I think about what the experience imparts on all of the senses. My sense of sight was intrigued but blocked by a large amount of fog; touch was disconnected from the falls as I held on tightly to my dog’s leash, but the power of the falls seemed to connect through the ground to my whole body. The sound was mesmerizing and astounding, with the dialectical tension between comfort and terror. The smell of snow and ice consumed my nostrils, while the humidity in the air was relaxing and chilling to my sense of taste. With the seemingly negating emotional experiences, it seems like my label would have been considered less attractive, yet, it is the opposite as I relive the experience. My senses deeply desired many of the experiences I had at Niagara Falls, and I found them to be an incredibly attractive experience for my entire body.

It is important to note why humans are prone to fall in love with the “heightened versions of reality,” the tourist-attracted wonders of the world, and the critically acclaimed restaurants along the way. We are seeking that “bliss point” of what we are involved in – the precise combination of ingredients that keeps you coming back for more (Clear, 2019). Big companies design products that are more “attractive” to the consumers, and they often have entire departments committed to finding ways to engage our brains and create that exciting and enticing response – the dopamine spike! What a beautiful idea to commit to our personal experiences with such care and commitment. Without dopamine, we can lose desire, and then actions stop, even meeting our basic needs. Dopamine isn’t just about pleasure. Rather, with regard to our habits, it fuels the brain when we experience pleasure and when we anticipate it. Predicting that something will be fulfilling spikes your dopamine level and increases motivation because you are anticipating a reward. The idea of visiting Niagara Falls looked completely different in my mind (think warm misty views with lots of sunshine from the Maiden of the Mist tour stock images), but the sensational experience overpowered and continued to produce dopamine through the experience because my anticipation set up my body and mind to accept the cold, icy, and powerful views for what they are in this season.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, reminds his readers that the second law of habit shifting is to make it attractive. Now, as this experience with Niagara Falls suggests, it has nothing to do with how well-lit and styled the photos are to capture how the falls looked. It’s not about how it will be seen as ‘attractive’ for social media, but rather, how pleasing it is for you. On top of feeling pleasing to you, something being labeled as attractive to you can also mean that the thing has beneficial qualities, such as the humidity in the air and providing a new perspective for where the power of the falls builds in anticipation for the drop – just like that dopamine surge in our minds. This level of awareness of attractiveness notes the features of something that persuade a person to accept what is being offered.

With the idea that our environment matters more for making actionable changes than solely for our level of motivation to do so. When it comes to making the adjustments we want in our lives, there are things we might need to do that we don’t want to do, and visa-versa, things we want to do that we don’t need to do. Feeling like we need to do something becomes another task on a list of never-ending to-do’s; wanting to do something (like filling your home with live plants, taking a well-deserved trip, or visiting a wonder of the world) is far easier to make happen because it sounds nice, comforting, and downright attractive. So, we can stack them. Temptation building (Clear, 2019) allows us to continue working towards our needed habit shifts by placing something we want to do with something we need to do. I needed to drive across the country from Maine to make it to our new home in California in a concerningly short six-day timeframe with two high-energy dogs and an even more high-energy three-year-old. The task was necessary, but we stopped at places we wanted to visit and could provide things that our bodies needed throughout the traveling experience. The act of practicing temptation stacking in this way offered an opportunity to see the attractiveness of many other habit shifts in my life that could benefit from a similar approach. How often I feel blinded by one sense of the word attractive will no longer dismiss the rest of my sensory experience nor hinder my desire to make changes in my life. I want my life to be a whole-body sensory experience that is deeply and unconditionally attractive – it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else.

Lindsey Bass, guest blogger

Lindsey is a new professional in the counseling field who is conditionally licensed in Maine and is a National Certified Counselor and a Certified Animal Assisted Therapy Professional. She currently works doing equine assisted psychotherapy as well as providing tele mental health services. Populations of particular interest to Lindsey include military children and families, new mothers, and those who have endured traumatic birth experiences. Lindsey is embedded in the submarine military community herself and is also a mother to a three-year-old and fur parent to two Shiba Inus.