Emotional Engineering I, Habits: Habits for changing habits
My 🧩habits for changing my habits.
Copyright (c) 2025 Akien Maciain, all rights reserved.
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🦋 Making change…
Ever feel like there were things in your life you wanted to change, but haven't been able to?
I have learned some habits that I use for rewriting my habits, to make things just work a little better. To make things 'suck less'. It's not hard to do, it does take practice... But a roadmap also helps a lot!
🧠 Our brains really like habits…
Our brains use 20% of what we take in... Food, oxygen, everything. Only a tiny fraction of the animal kingdom devotes more than 10% of their resting energy to brain function. That short list includes some primates, some birds (like corvids and parrots), a few highly adapted cetaceans, certain octopus species, and possibly a few sharks with unusually complex sensory systems. For most animals, the brain is metabolically cheap—but for these, it’s a premium organ. This makes our brain not just anomalously hungry, but freakishly so in evolutionary terms.
Now before we go on, I want you to think about the chaos of the very first moments of learning to drive… I needed to keep one eye on the road, one on the rearview, one on the speedometer, one to each side, one or more on the instructor (my dad)… And sort what to do with shifting (5 speed!) and pedals! Since I didn’t have a Medusa’s eyes, there were a lot of decisions to make! And in a very short time.
That was all ‘Executive Function’. Conscious decision making. And a lot of it all at once. Executive function is ‘cognitively expensive’. Because of that, it’s also a limited resource. It’s tiring to use it up. If I had to commute to work every day having to make that many decisions every second, I’d have nothing left by the time I got to work. That wiped out feeling at the end of a day with a lot of brain work… Like can’t even decide what I should throw in the microwave to nuke for dinner… That’s called ‘Ego Depletion’. Executive function all used up!
But back to driving… Quickly I sorted that I didn’t need to look at the rear view as often as the forward view, and so on. Now I almost never have to think about it. Small habits that made it easier to manage all those things going on at the same time.
I had habituated driving.
⚾ How habits get created…
Ever tried to catch a ball? To become good at it only takes around 1000 catches.
Over and over, trying to track it… Sometimes missing, sometimes not… The ball takes a slightly different path every time.
To try and do that catch, the neurons in my brain have to work together. Each one of those paths caused a slightly different set of neurons to fire together… One to the next in a chain that allowed me to catch it. Or not.
🔌 When neurons fire together…
Each time a chain fired, if there were connections in that chain that had fired before, those parts of the chain became stronger.
This is called ‘wiring together’. It’s like building a progressively better roadway for ball catching as you go along. Or to master all those small tasks of driving!
Eventually, the average of their paths becomes the habit. Practice makes perfect!
👶We learn them naturally…
Clearly we pick them up quickly, if I remember correctly… It was just a few sessions before the stress levels from trying to keep up lessened to the point that driving wasn’t overwhelming. Just a few sessions more before it started to become enjoyable.
Driving… And catching a ball… They’re both things we decide to learn though.
And the learning comes from the physical doing. Over and over, small improvements.
There is another kind of habit learning…
Mimicry was my very first tool. Probably yours too… In Europe, some folks did a study, and found that the cries of babies of different nationalities were different. As they began the very first steps of learning how to talk, they began to mimic the way their mothers’ held their mouths while they spoke to their babies.
It starts with mother https://www.mpg.de/591229/babies-with-an-accent
Mimicry is one of our best habit learning skills.
🧒👀📺 While I was learning this…
I began learning how to rewrite habits quite a while ago. I had just begun to sort that I could change a habit this way when I happened to be in a mall around Christmas time (back in the days of large shopping malls).
As I was walking along I saw a kid… Maybe 6 or 7 years old… He was looking into a storefront advertising a large screen TV. I dunno what was on that screen, but the look on his face made it clear this was one of his role models.
And as I looked at him, with his intense expression… I suddenly remembered being that same kid… Looking on TV or in some movie, and thinking about being that kid, and soaking up the equivalent of ‘what would jesus do?’ about whatever challenges the fictional characters I was watching were facing.
This kid was, and as a kid I had been, soaking up habits in bulk. All this effort to almost surgically change one pattern, and this was how both he and I had picked up habits in bulk from our role models.
🧴 Our Habits Are Contagious…
Not only can we pick them up from TV…
🫀 The Framingham Heart Study shows that both heart healthy and unhealthy habits, and even happiness and complaining… Are spread to us by who we socialize with. https://www.framinghamheartstudy.org/
👥 Researchers discovered these habits spread through social networks… Not just families, but friends and coworkers too.
📈 For example: If a close friend becomes obese, your own risk jumps by 57%. Similar ripple effects occur with smoking, exercise, and mood.
💡 Takeaway: Our habits are socially contagious… Surrounding ourselves with healthy, positive influences really does shape our own outcomes.
(Based on Christakis & Fowler's analysis of Framingham data, 2007–2009)
What’s our take away on this? You want a new habit, find somebody who does it well that you can admire. Real or fictional.
📢 Sometimes habits can be changed with something as simple as wording…
Ever hear something like: ‘don’t leave your socks on the floor!’
This request takes away a behavior that, for some value of, is already working for that person. So now they’re going to do the same thing they’ve always done, and just feel momentarily bad about it.
Changing it to ‘put your socks in the hamper!’ doesn’t take away anything, it adds a behavior!
If you know that term, it’s a reframing of the request.
🔪 Sometimes habit surgery is just required…
Reframing, EFT, EMDR, Therapy, Psychiatry… These are all tools for replacing habits. Reframing, EFT, EMDR and tools like those are highly effective once you’ve narrowed the problem down… Therapy and Psychiatry and the big guns in this field…
Sometimes, I use reframing to do habit engineering… In fact, not too long ago, my wife decided to extend her world by shopping for another guy. This is within the agreement set for our relationship, but it had been a very long time since she’d exercised that. The fact that she was investigating that after that protracted time… Well, it brought up a lot of old insecurity.
Which is kinda hilarious, as she has another partner, and I have two others as well… But insecurity is also a habit, a very deep seated one.
So I was writing to my partner in her far off land, and I wrote that “I have my panties in a bunch.” To indicate how irritated I was that I’d been jumped by the green insecurity monster… I continued writing... Moved to other tasks… Maybe a couple of hours goes by…
And I have some more time to edit the letter (yes, it was a real letter)… And I come back, and I look at that phrase. That’s not adequately explanatory. “I have my panties in a bunch because she’s shopping for a boy”. I look at it again. Hm. Not all of me does. I’ve been doing work on this very topic literally for decades. A lot of me doesn’t. So who does?
Edit again: “My past patterns have their panties in a bunch”
I wrote that… And then I just looked at it for at least a full minute. And while that minute was passing, something huge was sliding across the floor of my mind… Off the stage and into basement storage.
I had literally just accidently reframed the jealousy I’d been working on for 40 years away.
That was utterly amazing to watch happen. I have had three such enormous and immediate shifts in my life.
But before that recent event came along, I had realized I couldn’t use reframing to fix everything in my head that annoyed me.
So, as a DIY’er, I developed the Habit Replacement Practice…
👣 Step by step Habit Replacement Practice…
1) 🔎 FIND HABIT: Identify the habit you want to replace.
What is it that, to change it, would make life suck less? What are the positives and negatives of this habit… Because if the new habit doesn’t meet mostly the same needs, it’ll be far harder to stick with it.
Let’s pick ‘when my mouth gets dry after smoking something, I reach for candy'.
2) 🔎 FIND TRIGGER: Identify the trigger…
The trigger is some observation of the world outside or the world inside, that kicks off the habit. Like ‘when my mouth gets dry’
3) 🔎 FIND NEW HABIT: Identify what you want to replace it with…
If possible, the new habit should be as easy/satisfying/stimulating/whatever as the one you wanna replace. At least, get as close as you can… ‘I’m gonna reach for xylitol gum’… which is just as tasty (now we’re at break even), way way better for my teeth (now we’re at +1), and they last waaaay longer (now we’re at +2)… I refer to the plusses as ‘wonderfulness points’.
4) 🏋️ PRACTICE: Practice it and know that you will 💥 FAIL at doing the new thing…
FAIL just means “Further Advance In Learning”
