Switching It Up.

“The road to hell is paved with…blank pages,” I said yesterday and, this morning, for quite some time, I was staring right now that pathway to damnation. And the interesting thing is that I knew exactly what had lead me that way.

You see, I had quite a few things I needed to get done this morning before work, and very little time to do them in, so I had to stave off my usual morning rituals to try to put together a new one. It took a while for me to get into the swing of it, bumbling around like a ghost who’d lost its way, and it became strikingly obvious how much of a creature of habit I am. Most people are; heck, even one of my cats gets distraught now that my routine involves yoga, which he finds strange and, judging by his meows, a little terrifying. But I do find it interesting that, for a little while, anyway, when we deviate from an established path, part of our brain shut down a little and make it more difficult to function. It recognizes the actions as not the norm, and seems to have trouble catching up and reorganizing itself.

What is it about our brains (or, well, some of our brains, anyway. I’m sure some people can change things in the blink of an eye and not be in the least bit phased) that has difficulty breaking from a habit? They even say it takes 30 days to truly break a habit, and, even then, I’m a little skeptical. Eventually, my routine this morning worked, I got some stuff done (though admittedly not as much as I’d have liked!), and everything’s good. But why did it take at least half an hour to start being effective?

Do you feel you’re a creature of habit? How do you feel when you try something different? Or are you one of those magnificent bastards who can adapt to anything with alacrity and skill?

I’m…definitely not the latter, ha!