When you are struggling with a skill, the best approach is to keep trying new things and new approaches. Even if they don’t work, forcing you body and mind to approach it from different perspectives will at least get you out of the old habits.
This is also true of daily habits and routines.
To break habits you need to interrupt the pattern between stimulus and response. You must be willing to disrupt yourself.
This is one of the lessons we learn from the holidays at the Jewish New Year.
Today is the penultimate day of three weeks of holidays that began on Rosh Hashana. For those who observe all the religious observance days, this stretch can feel disruptive to life.
It’s hard to get momentum when every few days you have another holiday.
And that’s the point.
To break a habit you must continually interrupt the pattern until your old response to the trigger is no longer automatic.
The holiday season, with its consistent interruptions of life, shakes us out of our normal routines. It helps us do the work of breaking our old habits and creating new rituals to replace them.
Sometimes disruption is a good thing.
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