In my previous post, I mentioned an author named James Clear who wrote “Atomic Habits.” Well, not to sound like a broken record, but to quote him again: “The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.” He then finishes his point by mentioning the power, and necessity, of “falling in love with the system.”
It’s early on a Saturday morning, and I’m sitting at the downstairs table of a large, country cabin nestled on the edge of the White River in Arkansas, sipping coffee and watching the mist roll across the water. One of my good buddies is getting married soon, and a group of us rented this place to spend the weekend fishing, kayaking, and celebrating with him before his big day. I sat down around 15 minutes ago, opened my laptop, and started considering “What’s on my mind? What am I learning?”
I’ve mentioned more than a few times (apologies) that I intend to use this blog as a means of slowing down. Sitting here in the serenity of the morning, without service or distraction, is reminding me by the minute how unnatural it is for me to slow down. It took all of five minutes watching the water flow and listening to the birds for me to think “Wow, the world is such a beautiful place, full of God’s healing works. If I could just sit down once in a while and listen to it, take it in…” Which led to me thinking:
What happens when I don’t slow down? What is the outcome, the consequence, of that pattern of decisions? Let’s start with an explanation of self.
“The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.”
James Clear, Atomic Habits
I am ashamed… often. I don’t say this as a lead-in to some weighted confession, or even as a melancholy cry for help. No, what I mean is that I experience shame very often, very naturally. Again to reference my previous blog post (‘Blog Post 2: Wake Up and Look Around… Literally’), I have spoken in depth about shame and its effect on self-image, the domino effect from there, and what we can do to gradually disarm it. What I’ve learned about shame in my journey of growth has helped me immensely. But it has also clarified a truth about myself: I naturally perceive life through a lens of shame. In other words, if I went on auto-pilot for a while, living every day without being intentional in my health, relationships, and faith, I would naturally and automatically allow shame to influence how I observe and process life, and from there, my actions as well. It’s my “default” nature, and it enters my life most commonly through pressure: pressure to be fit, pressure to be liked, pressure financially, pressure relationally… overall pressure to do better and BE better. And when mistakes occur, shame is there waiting, geared up and ready to take over my beliefs about self, others, and more. I believe I’m not alone in this, and that almost all of us have our own experiences with it.
Well over time, we as humans develop habits of coping with these messages from shame, habits that help us seemingly escape the pain of what shame is telling us. Some habits are unhealthy, some are not. Some are obvious, some are not. It may be easy to spot the addict coping with insecurity in a bottle of tequila or wine, numbing emotions and escaping shame’s sting down that specific path. But what about the ways we find ourselves coping in the subconscious, the background, unaware that we’re stacking straws on camelbacks until an eventual breakdown? What about the gradually growing habit of discontentment toward others, shown in my ability to blame quickly as an underlying means of justifying myself so that I don’t have to accept what my shame tells me? My bad, I said I wasn’t confessing…
The point is, our coping mechanisms can often be so natural, and appear so normal, yet be so destructive. It’s like a child with chicken pox who feels such unbearable discomfort that they scratch, claw, and hurt themselves in the long run in an attempt to feel relief in the current moment. It’s natural, but hurtful. Without being careful, we often take the following path: Experience shame – Flinch – Reach or run for the quickest thing to relieve the feeling (often what we’ve learned throughout our lives and reinforced repeatedly) – Deal damage from our reaction – Feel temporary relief – Call it good until the next round. Like I said, it’s natural, but also hurtful: hurtful to others, but also ourselves. And what’s worse, it doesn’t achieve any true relief from shame, but instead, actively opens the door for it to return.
I’ve come to learn of the many, many ways that I unhealthily cope with shame. To spare you the long stories and monologues of each, I’ll settle on one today that I think specifically prevents me from slowing down: Avoidance. Some people avoid it through distraction, turning to something that feels good to numb the pain. Others avoid it through displacement, fighting to prove something about themselves that “negates” the validity of the shame. I have my ways of doing both. Some examples I often turn to are working out, video games, watching TV, hanging out with friends, and more.
“Woah, Zach, hold up. Those aren’t bad things. Sure, too much video games and TV can be bad, but working out and friend-time? What are you talking about?”
Well, almost any good thing can be unhealthy if the underlying motive is shame avoidance. In my case, working out is too often motivated by insecurity about my body and fear of judgment. Video games and TV are an instantly gratifying distraction from the shame I might feel if I slowed down. Hanging out with friends is often born from “FOMO,” or “Fear-Of-Missing-Out,” which we often joke about in our culture without realizing how real and negatively impactful it can be. All of these things are good and beneficial in the proper setting and circumstances. But when they’re practiced under unhealthy motivation, they feed a vicious cycle and contribute to a growing mound of unaddressed pressure. Therefore, my life ends up looking something like this:
- Wake up
- Go about my day
- Encounter circumstances that stack pressure (finances, fitness, responsibilities, relationships, work, dieting, marriage, etc.)
- Distract or Displace
- Encounter shame from my avoidance tactics, and pressure to fix myself
- Repeat
As you can see, it’s a cycle. And the potential for pressure is so high that it’s basically a guarantee for all of us. After considering this for a while, it’s not difficult to realize why it’s so easy for us to develop habits of avoidance. Without being careful, we naturally take on so much that we eventually either break under the pressure or start policing ourselves into proving why we’re good enough to not feel any pressure: i.e. working out to ease the insecurity or playing too many video games to avoid the feeling altogether. We begin REacting to pressure without being PROactive about it. And shame grows thicker.
So let’s pause for a moment to reorganize our train of thought on this…
- Life gets busy, and pressure easily comes at me from all angles.
- Shame uses this pressure as a tool for making me feel inadequate and insecure.
- In an attempt to escape these emotions, I turn to various avoidance tactics, sometimes using shame as motivation to work harder and “be better,” and other times choosing to avoid the feeling by escaping to something that offers instant gratification. When I attempt to displace shame by working harder, I set myself up to constantly focus on my insecurities and I’m never pleased with anything good that I do. When I avoid and numb my shame, I end up indulging in something that produces even more shame.
- The pressures of life are never addressed, their influence never fades, and shame only adds to its arsenal.
- As pressure builds, I grow irritable toward others, impatient, inconsiderate, and more.
- I get very defensive of anything that might interrupt my coping mechanisms because I’ve learned to idolize them. When something throws off my schedule and cuts off a workout early, or takes away my TV or video game time, I’m angry about it.
- I stop pouring into relationships and stop pursuing habits that help my mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
Well, this got serious quickly.
Not long ago, I was in a bad cycle of this. My days consisted of waking up (usually late), going to work, working out, coming home, eating dinner, and playing video games until bed. My wife finally mentioned that my cycle of this behavior was hurting our relationship: something I was aware of and therefore ashamed of, leading to the cycle continuing as a means of escaping the pressure. When she brought it up, I remembered frustratedly replying –
“I want to WANT to spend time together and do other stuff, but I just don’t want to. I don’t know what’s going on. All I want to do when I get home is eat food and play games. And I think it’s because I spend the whole day at work doing things I don’t want to do and feeling miserable, so all I do is think about the moment that I can get home and do something FUN, something that I can guarantee will feel good. And if I don’t, there’s this underlying fear that I’ll be even more miserable at work tomorrow because I didn’t offset it with something gratifying the night before.”
It made matters even worse that I couldn’t provide any clarity and answers as to why I continued this cycle, and desired those things, knowing it wasn’t helping. I wasn’t even aware that shame was at work within me, and that I was turning to coping habits. I wasn’t aware that I’d begun idolizing those habits, believing they were the only things that could help me somehow have a “good week.” All I could manage to make sense of was “I dread going to work.” So the logical takeaway was to get a better job or find out how to like my current job, and continue filling my evenings with instantly-gratifying indulgence.
And herein lies the answer to our original question: “What happens when I don’t slow down?”
Put simply: Brain Fog. You know, like when you can’t seem to focus on anything, you forget your train of thought easily, you can’t retain information, you get super confused, frustrated, etc…?
Yeah, that. When I don’t slow down, I enter the cycle of pressure – shame – avoidance – frustration – confusion – repeat. Once I’m as far as the “frustration” step, shame’s already toying with me. I’ve experienced pressure, reinforced my insecurity in it, and reacted to it in some unhealthy way. And now, I’m just angry with the results. Now, I’m just confused and too overwhelmed to do anything, leading quickly back to feeling pressured to fix it and ashamed that I can’t do so. And the wheel turns again…
So what does slowing down have to do with any of this? What about “pumping the brakes” has anything to do with a proper or improper coping response?
Well, when I do slow down, it feels like the dust settles for just a moment. It’s as the brain fog and confusion of my cycle subsides for just long enough for me to observe my situation with better clarity. It’s like wiping off foggy glasses, putting them back on, and saying “oh dang, look at that!” at the world around you.
For me, slowing down stops me from instantly and automatically reaching for a coping mechanism. Like watching a water droplet fall in slow motion (check it out, it’s really interesting), I see things I was unable to see when I was living life at full speed. I quickly become aware of some important things about myself and my circumstances that I was previously skipping over, things that now change my perspective. And miraculously, my priorities and desires begin to shift, even if only slightly.
At the beginning of this, I mentioned James Clear’s quote about goals and goal systems. The purpose of mentioning this, and then proceeding to ramble on about pressure and shame, was to lead to this lesson I’ve been learning, a lesson that this still and quiet morning is reinforcing: Shame tricks us into prioritizing the wrong things.
If you start with my unhealthy coping mechanisms and work your way backward, you’ll eventually trace everything back to an initial, foundational desire to find joy and fun in my everyday life. It’s innocent at first! But along the journey toward that, potholes of insecurity-inducing pressure tripped me up. Eventually after taking so many spills on these, I learned how to numb the pain in various places, leading to habits that felt good and personal goals that promised fulfillment. But it cost me some very valuable things: patience, gentleness, kindness, self-control, and more. All I wanted was daily joy and fun, and I ended up endlessly chasing insecurity-driven goals under the belief that this would help me.
I think sometimes, I can get so focused on my goals that I never slow down to ask why I’m chasing them, or how I’m doing along the way. But once I slow down, the fog clears enough for me to realize two things – I made my well-being dependent on achieving my goals, and most of the goals were based solely on insecurity in the first place! Now, I’ve talked at length in my previous blog post about addressing shame from a foundational level, so I won’t go into that again here. Rather, I’d like to offer some more practical, everyday advice for addressing our cycle of avoidance.
Slow down. Breathe. Give yourself space, and permission, to set aside your pressure. Be still for a moment.
I challenge all of us to dedicate time every day to slow down, even if it’s only for a few minutes. Press pause on life, give yourself space to let the dust settle, and for a moment, look at yourself and your situation with more clarity. Where do you feel pressure? How are you coping in everyday life? What are you coping with? What shameful image is it that you are running from deep down? Are your coping habits helping, or keeping you trapped in a cycle? Spend some time here.
Then, think of some ways you can slow down. Don’t focus on big, long-term goals. Just think about some everyday things you can do that can help. Make your bed in the morning, journal every day for a couple of minutes, set a consistent night-time routine, write a note to yourself every day with one encouragement, meditate, try breathing exercises… come up with things that help you slow down in life, and build a simple, daily, repeatable system. Then, prioritize falling in love with your system, not your goals. Your goals are a product of your system. And falling in love with your goals will lead you to believe that your fulfillment comes when the goals occur. It’s focusing on winning the game. But we are more concerned with continuing to play the game, day in and day out. In other words, we are aiming to continue a life of growth and health (playing the game), rather than believing we will eventually arrive at a magical place of “no more growth needed” (winning the game). Once you begin loving your system, it will grow. You’ll naturally feed it and nurture it. You’ll begin to love the things that you didn’t love before because you see how beneficial they are. Fall in love with the system and you’ll prioritize habits and decisions that greatly benefit you every day. Fall in love with your goals alone and you make yourself vulnerable to compounding pressure every day the goals aren’t perfectly met.
That’s the whole point of me even writing this. I started this blog to challenge myself to incorporate slowing down into my system. Slowing down can look like many things: meditation, prayer, taking a walk, sitting still, deep breathing, writing, folding laundry, you name it. As long as it gives you space, free from your coping mechanism distractions, where you can think and process life, then it counts as slowing down in my book. And for me, taking time to sit still and write helps organize my brain. Folding laundry helps direct my attention back to organization and cleanliness, which helps me calm down. Going on walks reminds me of the beauty of the world directly around me. These things momentarily stop my default cycle from continuing and allow me to step out of shame and back into balance.
“Fall in love with the system and you’ll prioritize habits and decisions that greatly benefit you every day.”
The point is, that my joy and focus are now both in my daily system. I’m excited because I get to continue growing and learning every day, without pressure to achieve some domineering goal. Goals aren’t bad, but they don’t help you to continue your journey if they’re your sole source of motivation. Without loving the journey, or the system, you’ll likely default back into a cycle that points away from your goals and destroys your system. Again, goals aren’t bad. But those who achieve their goals love their system, and their security isn’t based on the goals. They trust the process and love their system. That way, whether goals are achieved or not, their love and health remain.
Make slowing down a part of your system. And next time you find pressure saying “Are you there yet?!”… simply smile and answer “No, thankfully.”
Z