21 days

A post a day in May 3/31 

Six of us were spending the evening online, working on personal vision boards for the upcoming summer. I expressed how much I was looking forward to stopping for ice cream on the way up to the cottage, but also how impossible it felt to think that, in just a few weeks’ time, it could really be a fun spur-of-the-moment activity. The others didn’t disagree and the conversation turned to how normal it has become to do less, stay closer to home, and limit our interaction with others. And this, even though here, in Manitoba, the government has lifted all Covid-related public health measures.

While some businesses still request that masks be worn, there has been a general move towards returning to ‘normal’ and getting back to gathering in groups and crowds, at concerts and meetings, and so on — often without social distancing or masks. This leaves those who are more cautious or concerned on our own to make decisions about how to navigate the bigger world — or whether to enter it at all.

What puzzles me is why, after more than two years, I am not only not jumping at the chance to just get out there but not really wanting to. The answer may lie, at least partially, in the psychology of habit forming and breaking.

It is popularly held that it takes 21 days to make or break a habit, though a bit of research reveals that this 3-week timeline comes from only one particular source: “a widely popular 1960 book called Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon who noticed his patients seemed to take about 21 days to get used to their new faces.” More current studies show that the timeframe varies significantly, ranging between 18 and 254 days.

Regardless, my Covid-induced home-sticking routine is, more than two years in, a well established habit, and to break it isn’t going to be so easy. 

Research shows that breaking a habit is easier if we replace it with something, rather than just stopping the one we want to lose. “It's much easier to start doing something new than to stop doing something habitual without a replacement behaviour,” says neuroscientist Elliot Berkman. “That's one reason why smoking cessation aids such as nicotine gum or inhalers tend to be more effective than the nicotine patch.” (Decades ago, I quit smoking by exchanging the inhaling of nicotine with the eating of finally shredded cabbage.)

My current task, then, is to introduce a new habit into my life to replace my stay-at-home mindset and which will get me, consciously and incrementally, to that ice cream cone en route to the cottage. 

I’m thinking this could look like me getting on my bike and cycling over to one of Winnipeg’s many ice cream or gelato shops: I would have ventured from home on wheels and ended up with an iced treat. The view wouldn’t be of Lake Winnipeg, but the action, if repeated over a number of days (maybe as few as 18, but surely not as many as 254), will have helped form new pathways in my mind and, thus, helped establish a new habit of leaving home for more than just the chore of grocery shopping.

You’re welcome to join me: Eating ice cream is always more fun with friends.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Ice cream photo by GG LeMere on Unsplash. 

'Great gardens' collage by me.