Santa Ynez Valley Senior Citizens Foundation

Welcome, come on in.

U R here: Home > Article>Page 2


Difficult Times (cont.)
by R.E. Darby


About Those Habits


Our travel habits are one of the main issues. Whether we are talking about local travel or out of town travel, we Americans are so used to our comfort that we take it for granted and this makes it difficult to even realize the existance of problems or the need for changing our behavior in order to address those problems. So, it's a matter of awareness as well as caring. Many of us never think about habits at all, much less how to deal with them once we become aware of them. Now, I'm speaking about habits that for some reason have become liabilities rather than assets, many of our habits start out as assets and then time and circumstances can change this. The thing to remember is how we formed habits in the first place, because that's the key to changing them.

Geez, Habits?


The caring part is about motivation, without it we would have no reason to undertake difficult tasks like changing our habits. Knowing how we form habits is the key to knowing how to change them. We simply replace them with different habits using the same conditoning principles that established the original habits, only the new habits are intended to result in different and hopefully better outcomes. Changing our habits is not the problem here, the problem is when those changes require sacrifices or cutbacks or downsizing our comfortable lifestyles in some way. So, we not only have to establish new behavior habits/patterns, but also our thinking habits/patterns as well. A good strategy here is to take a large picture approach and change our upper level mindset first. It is more efficient to change our mindset on a higher level rather than addressing every little issue separately. That way, all the little issues will automatically be included under one umbrella of thought.


Mindsets, What Good Are They?


Mindsets are a great capability that our brains have that we can take advantage of in order to automatically configure many areas of our lives. But there is an unforeseen benefit that results from understanding this capability of ours. This same capability is also responsible for some of our less attractive attitudes and beliefs. It is after all just another tool that we possess, and tools can be, and often are, misused. Almost all of our attitudes and beliefs are based on some basic mindset in that particular catagory of beliefs. If our mindset does not include the idea that we are consumers in more than the merchant sense, but also as a species consuming resources on a global level, our behavior will reflect that condition and we simply won't think about the long term impact and consequences of our consumption.
Next Page