Choices

Regardless of what/who you believe in, there’s one commonality we can all agree on regarding human existence.

We were all created with the ability to make choices.

From seemingly simple choices (like our daily routine) to more complex choices (like our values and beliefs).

To take it a step further, I believe that these choices are heavily (if not completely) influenced by what we have personally interpreted as truth.

I was contemplating this concept while struggling to get out of bed the other morning. My alarm went off at 7:00am, and there I was faced with my first choice of the day.

To snooze or not to snooze.

It was as though my brain didn’t even have time to acknowledge that there was a choice to be made before my hand hit the snooze button on my alarm clock.

That was it. One snooze led to another, and before I knew it an hour had passed in what felt like a minute.

I didn’t understand. I went to sleep early. I wasn’t even tired anymore when my alarm initially went off. I genuinely wanted to wake up early and start my day. However, none of these factors actually stopped me from sleeping in well past the time I wanted to.

Why is that?

It seems like such an insignificant scenario compared to what’s happening in the world, but I think there’s so much that can be learned in the simplicity of life.

Here’s some context: I’ve been a snoozer for the better half of my life. It wasn’t until a couple weeks ago that I decided I wanted to make a change and become one of those morning people.

The issue isn’t that my thoughts/desires aren’t strong enough. It’s that they’ve already gone through the solidifying process of becoming my habits, which I then adopted as my character. So I’m actually trying to alter a character trait that has been developing over the course of however many years without taking the time to investigate how it came to be. I just unconsciously rushed into the “let’s change it now” mentality – which actually worked for a couple of days, but didn’t produce the lasting results I was hoping for.

I feel like this is a key factor that many of us overlook when we try to make choices in our lives that override the actuality of our current lifestyle. For some reason they just don’t stick and we’re left staring through the rearview wondering what went wrong.

As someone, somewhere, long ago once said: 

“Thoughts become words,

Words become actions,

Actions become habits,

Habits become character,

Character becomes destiny.”

Often we don’t take the time to acknowledge that this process is a real thing. We try to jump straight ahead into the application of implementing life change without ever trying to unlearn the process that led us where we are in the first place.

At some point those behaviors were just thoughts, but they have the potential to become our fate. So isn’t it important to identify where those thoughts actually originated?

To go back to my earlier example, at some point I determined that it would feel better to stay in bed longer vs. get out of bed immediately. And there’s a good chance that I actually needed to some mornings due to lack of sleep. But eventually I continued using the same logic that I adapted for survival even when I didn’t really need to. The more I continued believing that I needed to stay in bed longer than was actually necessary (and continued to act on it), the deeper that perceived truth began to embed in my brain. Thus, the habitual snoozer was born.

Whether it be sleep patterns, eating habits, relational behaviors, etc. this idea that our thoughts affect our choices should not be ignored. Once we embrace the fact that some things aren’t going to be as simple to reverse as we’d hoped, we can then begin to move towards unlearning certain patterns of behavior that are actually choices disguised as irresistible impulses.