Have you got a bad habit going? Something that is not only failing to add anything to your life but may even be subtracting from it? Something you want to change but don’t know how to? Follow this logical and science-backed approach to show this habit who is boss.

We all have them – things that we do that we know are not particularly helpful or sustainable, things like eating chocolate when we are sad or snapping at people when we are angry or having a glass (or three) of wine to relax. Many of these habitual behaviours feel good in the short term but don’t contribute to a happy and fulfilling life in the longer term.

Our unhealthy habits often creep up on us, we drift into them rather than making a clear and conscious choice.

Maybe it started by having a glass of wine or a beer or two to help relax at the end of your working week. And then, you had an extra busy day and you had some alcohol to calm yourself and bring yourself down and before you knew it, having a relaxing wine or beer was your get home from work routine. A positive association had been created between alcohol and relaxation.

The longer we maintain an association between a certain cue (environmental, such as getting home, or emotional, such as anger or sadness) and a certain behavior (wine, chocolate, snapping at people), the harder it is to break the habit. But break the habit we can.

Your habit is a neural pathway that can be changed

Your habit is simply a neural pathway that has become fast and automatic through use and positive reinforcement. The pathway can be dampened down and replaced by a more healthy, considered habit – we can do a U-turn on a habit that we have decided is not workable or positive in our lives. And we can approach this using the same five steps that we used to create a healthy habit.

5 Steps to changing your unhealthy habit

1. What and why do you want to change?

What exactly is the bad habit that you want to lose? What is its impact on your life? Imagine your life without it – how would it be different? How would it be better? Clearly understanding what you stand to gain from adopting your change provides motivation when the old bad habit is calling.

2. Set yourself up for success

• Make it achievable.
• Express it in a way that demonstrates what you stand to gain from the change.
• Write it down.

If you have a vague thought that you might stop smoking and drinking and start exercising for 30 minutes each day, you are setting yourself up for failure. You are taking on too much, your brain hurts at the thought of all that it is going to lose and it is only a notion swirling around in your head rather than a concrete commitment.

Compare this to your chances of success if you decided that you wanted to have a clearer head and a healthier body by replacing your week-night after work alcoholic beverage with a 15 minute mindful walk with your dog. You will feel good and your dog will be happy! You write a big reminder and post it on your fridge or have it on the home screen of your phone. Now we are talking!

A concrete, achievable and positive commitment has been made.

3. When are you going to do it?

When we are wanting to do a U-turn on a habit, we need to insert our new healthy action in where the old less desirable one was. So, if the trigger for the old habit was coming home from work, then this is where the new habit needs to go. Put your walking shoes and the dog lead near the door when you go to work and as soon as you arrive home, immediately put your shoes on and take your dog for a walk. Or alternatively, you can approach the old cue in a different way – maybe by going to the gym or meeting a friend for a walk and chat before you get home.

4.How will you reward yourself?

The best reward is achieving your goal – doing what you set out to do and realizing the benefits you were looking for. The body’s reward system is activated, you get a hit of dopamine with the associated buzz and motivation boost. And you build confidence in your ability to choose nourishing and sustainable actions into the future.

The specific activity that you choose will also bring benefits. If it makes you feel more positive (exercise, meeting friends), you are reaping more dopamine. If it makes you feel calm (eg mindfulness, nature), you are likely to be turning up the activity of the parasympathetic nervous system and turning down the stressy sympathetic.

5. What is your better than nothing plan?

A habit is only a habit if it happens each and every time that the prompt or cue occurs. Now that can be difficult given our busy lives! This is where the better than nothing plan comes in – a minimum action that we commit to when the prompt occurs, even on the most ridiculous of days. Instead of the 15 minute mindful walk with our dog, our better than nothing plan might be spending 1 minute mindfully patting our furry friend, really tuning into the sight, the smell, the feel of his coat, the sound of his breathing etc and calming our mind. Our dog may not enjoy it quite so much but our brain will be happy because it has ticked off the new habit, albeit in a minimalist form. We have avoided the trap of all or nothing thinking that might tell us there is no point continuing with our change because we missed a day or two.

Making a change doesn’t have to be hard.

Making change sounds pretty easy when you step it out like that, doesn’t it? Insert a new and achievable behavior at the old prompt and reap the rewards and benefits. Like starting a new habit, it will take at least 6-12 weeks to wire in the change – to make the U-turn at least as well-travelled as the straight road.

Do you have a bad habit that you would like to address? Today is a good day to start. Go on, follow the steps and you can do it.

Mind churn… it’s a common occurence in the veterinary industry.

You go to work, work hard, do your best and head off home to rest and recover in preparation for repeating the process the next day. You get home, change into clothes that don’t smell of manure or anal glands and are animal hair-free – nice! You sit down to relax, phew – but this is where it starts to go wrong, as thoughts of work jump into your mind. You try to take your mind in a different direction, only to find yourself back at work, pondering on the cases you saw today, how you handled them, what you could have done better, what you should have said to that person …. on and on, around and around it goes.

Welcome to mind churn!

Mind churn is a common occurrence for many of us in the industry. For some of us it only happens every now and again, when a particular case or situation gets under our skin. But for others, this is a frequent occurrence. And it is exhausting! The churning thoughts take up cognitive space and can prevent us from seeing and enjoying what is in front of us.

• When we are in mind churn, we can have conversations and agree to things (apparently) that we can’t even remember. “Remember”, your partner or friend will say, “remember that we organized to go to see such and such on that day?” And for you it is a blank.
• In mind churn, we can read a book to our child using the appropriate tone, pausing in all the right places and having absolutely no idea what the story was about.
• In mind churn, we can eat a bar of chocolate and not even taste it.
• In mind churn, we can drive to a friend’s house without being able to recall any of the landmarks on the way.

Coulda….shoulda…

Sound familiar? When your mind is churning with what you coulda shoulda done, your family, friends, pets and health may only be getting the crumbs of your attention….and it is very likely that they know it.

When our mind worries away at problems, we are continuing to deplete our cognitive resources. Our so-called rest and recovery periods are no longer restful and they certainly don’t promote recovery! Instead, we continue to take fuel out of the tank, meaning we have less available for the next day and week and ….

And, the extra sad thing is that mind churn is rarely productive. Brooding on things in this manner is very unlikely to lead us to a place of insight, a place where we go, “Aha! I see what I need to do”, and allowing us to happily leave the problem behind. Instead, what it does is focus us on ourselves and our problems as we relive the pain and worry.

Is this a place you recognize? Is a churning mind impacting on your life? And what can you do to turn down the churn?? Here are 3 tips for slowing an overactive mind.

1. Understand how your mind works

To a certain extent mind churn is normal – it is our brains way of trying to keep us safe. Unless your mind is actively engaged in the present, it will scan the horizon looking for potential threats to your well-being and then reacting as required to create safety. This is called default mind network and it is normal. This function of our brain has allowed us to survive all the way from the hunter gatherer days. But, in the relative safety of our current existence, the same pathways can be set off by little things that are more at the level of a niggle than life-threatening.

And, the rules of neuroplasticity tell us that any neural pathways that we use frequently become strong, fast and habitual. When the neural pathway is creating a healthy habit, this is fantastic news. But when the strong, habitual pathways are the ones creating mind churn – things are not so rosy.

2. Utilise strategies to turn down the churn

When our mind is actively engaged in what we are doing, the churn calms right down. It is really hard to be in mind churn when you are surfing or running or making an intricate mosaic or singing or doing a crossword or playing a computer game. Aim to cultivate a hobby or sport where you lose sense of the time – this helps to reset your mind and takes you out of the churn.

Learning to be mindful is another great strategy. You can do this formally by attending yoga or meditation classes, with the help of an app such as smiling mind or head space, or informally by consciously bringing your mind back to what you are doing – maybe using 5 senses experiencing, where you think about what you can see, hear, taste, touch and smell.

3. Ask for help

Why would you want to spend your precious time doing something as unproductive and potentially damaging as mind churn? When overuse has turned mind churn from a pathway to a freeway, it is going to take time, effort and persistence to change it. Enlisting the support of a professional to help you retrain the brain pathways is a really good idea. You could consider using a coach, counsellor or psychologist depending on the impact it is having on your life. There are many other strategies they can teach you in addition to the ones above and they can make a difference.

Just imagine for a minute what your life might look like if your mind was like a calm stretch of river surrounded by beautiful gum trees rather than a seething sea? Wouldn’t that be amazing! You can get there with some time, effort and support.

If you work in a veterinary practice, you’ll know how diffcult it is to NOT take everything on….

There is a lovely little video on dvm360 (Not my circus, not my monkeys) where they use the analogy of loading more and more monkeys on your back as you go through your day.

The monkeys on your back represent the problems and struggles we face, along with those that we take on from people with whom we interact – things which may impact their ability to look after their pets or to work or to keep the home fires burning.

The video neatly represents the tendency that we people in the veterinary industry can have, to take everybody’s problems on as our own. Over time, the weight of the monkeys and the associated responsibility can drag us down and contribute to burnout – a big problem for our industry.

How do we stop loading the monkeys on our back and still do our job?

So what is the solution? Clearly, we want to have less monkeys sitting on our back. But how do we do this and remain the compassionate and helpful veterinary professionals that we aspire to be?

In my mind, the first step is always to look at the underlying motivation and ask yourself the questions – why do I do it? What drives me to take on everybody’s problems?

So what drives us to take on everybody’s problems?

I asked myself these questions and came up with four reasons which could explain why we take on too much.

1. Problem solving has become an automatic reflex

Have you ever been in one of those conversations where you are telling your friend or partner about  a challenging discussion with a particular client – and all you want is some recognition of the fact that it was a tough situation that you handled well and all they want to do is to brainstorm the situation for you and point out what you could have done better?

As trained problem solvers, we can start to see the world as a series of problems that we personally need to solve. Believe it or not, some people simply want to be heard and acknowledged. So when somebody is telling you about their problems, try asking yourself, “is this a problem I need to solve or would it be helpful for me to simply listen, empathise with the person and ask them what I can do to help?”

2. Being busy and getting things done makes you feel validated and valued

As we progress from school through university/TAFE to work, we receive recognition and praise for the things we do well – our ATAR score, which training institution we went to, whether we got honours, awards, further qualifications, how quickly we can do a procedure etc.  This can write some deep neural pathways in us which link externally recognized achievements with our sense of self-worth – to the extent that we can feel as if we are unworthy if we are not achieving and doing all the time.

We may feel that if it is in our power, then we should do it. We strive and strive to meet other peoples’ expectations and to prove to them (and us) that we are worthy.  Rerouting our neural pathways and changing this way of interacting with the world takes a bit of work! Revisiting your values and then choosing to do things that are important to you whilst looking after yourself and keeping fuel in the tank is a good place to start.

3. You optimistically believe that you can work at maximal capacity at all times.

This is my personal favourite. At the beginning of your working day, when your fuel tank is full and you feel rested and full of energy, you think, yeah I can do that and yeah I can take that on – too easy. You plough on in, excited about the animals whose health you will improve and the clients and colleagues you will help. And on the very best of days, those 1 in a 100 days where everything goes totally to plan, you held your tongue at the right angle, the planets were aligned, and there were no distractions or interruptions or tasks that were a little harder than originally anticipated, you actually can do all that you hoped for.

On the other 99/100 days, normal life prevails , and there are backwards as well as forwards steps! The fuel level in your tank drops, you start getting cranky and wish that you had taken on a few less monkeys.

When we leave no room for the normal delays and distractions, we are likely to end our day with an uncompleted list and a sense of failure. Yuk! We feel much better about ourselves if we have realistic expectations of what we will achieve and then do it within the boundaries of our work day and with fuel left in the tank.

4. You believe you are the best person for the job

Yep – you may well be great at managing difficult clients or doing orthopaedic surgery or working up complex cases. BUT you are only one person and can only do so many things. AND, nobody else will ever get better at these things if you don’t take the time to empower, train and support them to grow their skills. Delegating takes longer in the short term but it saves time in the longer term and, no matter how good you are, you need a team. So why don’t you help develop the people around you so that you can concentrate on the stuff that you love doing and that is important to you. Just because you can do and do it well, doesn’t mean you should do it!

What do you think?

Do you recognize your motivation for taking on too much or are your reasons something different again? Often we behave automatically, choosing to do things that really are not good for us long term. If we can recognize our behavioural patterns and work to change them, then we have the potential to reduce the number and weight of those monkeys. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

It’s not only physical safety that’s important in the workplace, psychological safety and wellness is just as important.

I am (just) old enough to remember the days when cars didn’t have seat-belts. We three kids used to bounce around on the back seat of the Toyota Corolla. Gradually, the evidence mounted around the reduction in injury and death associated with wearing seat-belts and legislation was introduced requiring people to wear them. You may not remember the time before seat-belts, but you may remember the days when we didn’t wear thyroid protectors when taking Xrays or when anaesthetic scavengers were considered an optional extra, or when smoking was allowed in restaurants.

Our knowledge and understanding increases, and things that used to be the norm are no longer considered acceptable.

Workplace H & S has also changed

In the world of workplace health and safety, things have also changed. We now have multiple laws that protect workers at work – from the principles of common law to workers compensation to safety laws and the Fair Work Act. And so it should be – work should be good for your health and nobody comes to work to get injured.

When it comes to factors that are potentially damaging to our physical health, the large majority of employers recognize their duty of care and have appropriate training, policies, procedures and practices in place to protect their workers.

What about psychological health & safety?

Are you aware though, that employers are also responsible for ensuring the psychological health and safety of their employees?

Does your workplace have appropriate training, policies, procedures and practices to protect workers from psychological injury?

In veterinary workplaces with their recognized psychological risks (high emotional demands for example), this can be scary to contemplate!

‘Use you, abuse you and replace’ is in the past (thankfully!)

Working in a vet clinic back in the 1990s, I was told that we use you, abuse you and replace. Nice, I thought. I always give my best work when I feel valued!! That was more than twenty years ago though, things have surely changed. The legislation has been there for quite some time now and these things should no longer be happening. Right? So, why is it that I speak to vets on a regular basis who are stressed out, over-worked and burnt out?

There is no doubt that there are many employers who provide supportive workplaces and appreciate the work-life balance of their staff. If this is you, be proud! Unfortunately, there is also a small minority of employers and workplaces who are damaging our graduates – people who still believe in the use/abuse/replace philosophy, or maybe think that cutting costs is the way to grow vet clinics rather than investing in happy, productive staff that generate good income or maybe are simply treating others the way they have been treated in the past (the old I did it so everybody should do it model).

Where does the younger generation of vets fit?

Some of these people truly believe that the younger generation just don’t know hard work. That they are soft and lack work ethic. This is not what I see or hear when I speak with vet students or talk with distressed newer graduates. The large, large majority of people want to work and are happy to work hard, as long as they also have time to do other things – spend time with friends and family, enjoy hobbies etc.

They just don’t want to eat, sleep and breathe vet. Sounds fair enough to me.

We all have individual responsibilities too

Of course, this is not a one-way street and employees also have responsibilities. Each of us has the individual responsibility to look after ourselves – to get enough sleep, to eat well, to exercise, to maintain healthy relationships, to develop ourselves both personally and professionally etc. From a legal viewpoint, employees are required to be fit for the inherent requirements of their job, both physical and psychological, as described in their job description. And they need to advise their employer if there is anything that prevents them from performing their duties. With this information, perhaps in conjunction with medical advice, the employer and employee can work together to manage the risk. It really is no different to relationship-centred care between veterinarian and client.

We all need a supportive workplace

But, to feel comfortable to speak up, a supportive workplace that respects the privacy of the individual is essential. The workplace culture needs to recognize that psychological injuries should be treated the same as physical injuries. We all go through hard times where we are not coping so well and that this should not be a source of shame or a sign of lack of backbone or strength. We will all differ in our ability to cope with adversity and we can all grow this capability with help and ongoing personal and professional development.

Just as it is no longer acceptable to smoke at work or to take Xrays without PPE, it is not acceptable to slash and burn your staff. As Bob Dylan said – the times, they are a changing.

Make lunch breaks the norm and take one small step towards a healthier workplace

Why is it that unhelpful habits form so easily? You have a busy week and get behind on your work, so you choose to skip lunch or maybe to eat it whilst you are doing something productive such as writing histories or filing lab reports.

Some days, stopping to eat can seem an inefficient and unnecessary way to use our time. And before you know it, food multi-tasking becomes the norm for you.

You may even not bother with the food part of the equation.

Other people see what you are doing and a workplace culture of not taking a break is born.

Stopping for lunch is NOT a luxury

Whilst stopping for lunch can seem like a luxury in our busy lives and workplaces, it really isn’t. We just aren’t that important or indispensable that we can’t take the time to provide fuel and recovery time for our body and brain.

Taking a lunch-break should be the rule, not the exception to the rule.

Bah humbug I hear you say. I have way too much to do.

We all eat on the run and it doesn’t do us any harm.

Well maybe you do have a lot to do and maybe you don’t take breaks currently and maybe it hasn’t caused any harm yet. So what?

The best thing that you can do at lunch is to stop.

When you do stop for lunch it doesn’t have to be for a long time – ten or fifteen minutes is better than nothing. If your work is physically demanding, take the time to sit as you eat your lunch – you could go outside and watch the world go by, chew quietly with your eyes shut or chat with colleagues (as long as it’s not about work). If your role is more mentally than physically demanding, then going for a short walk could be more beneficial.

Consider these tasty luchtime facts;

Eating a nutritious lunch provides food for the energy-hungry prefrontal cortex (PFC)

The PFC is the part of the brain responsible for thinking, analyzing and decision making. An optimally performing PFC is a bit useful in our jobs don’t you think?

Eating mindfully is good for our digestion, portion control, weight management etc etc

Sustainable high performance requires periods of rest and recovery.

If we are sitting on a computer, thinking about work, or checking our phone for that matter, our brains are still working. Our brains need to have rest periods just as much as our bodies do.

The time we spend taking a break will be made up with increased productivity after a rest.

Counterintuitive but true.

Entrenched cultures can be changed.

You may be part of the eating whilst working culture and you can also be part of the change.

Employer or employee? You can still start the conversation…

Whether you are the employer or an employee, why don’t you start the conversation about lunch breaks? Role model taking a break and positively reinforce those that do.

Take a break and make one small step towards a more positive and healthy culture.