Get Your Groove Back

A blog about getting back into the groove of things.

As we get older and go through the ebbs and flows of life (and work), we find ourselves getting out of our groove. This blog is about getting back into the groove of things. A positive, supportive article that helps you to understand how to get yourself out of a rut and back on track with whatever it is you are passionate about. Keep checking back for useful tips that really work.

Knowing why you want to get your groove back is the first step toward getting it back. When you understand why you want something, you can make a plan for how to get it. And if the plan doesn’t work, you can look for another one. We often try to answer “why” questions with an “if/then” statement: “If I do X, then I’ll be happy.” But this kind of reasoning is not very good at creating plans. The problem is that if/then statements are not conditional enough. They don’t tell us what to do if X doesn’t happen. The basic problem with an “if/then” plan is that there are too many possible states of the world in which the plan will fail. The “if” part will always be true, but the “then” might not happen or it might have undesirable side effects or it might require other things that are hard to arrange.

When you try to change too many things at once, you end up changing nothing. You can identify your bad habits by noticing the things you do that make you feel bad. The first step is to quit one thing. It may be tempting to pick something small. And it’s true that if you’re trying to lose weight, it won’t help to quit smoking. But that’s not the kind of bad habit we’re talking about here. We’re pertaining to a habitual thought or behavior that is driving you crazy even though there’s no physical addiction involved.

There is no magic potion for getting your groove back. You can’t snap your fingers and make a habit disappear. But you can replace it with a different one, because habits are made of behaviors, and behaviors are made of choices. In theory, you should be able to get rid of a bad habit by choosing a better behavior to take its place. In practice that works only if the new behavior is actually simpler than the old one or if it somehow provides a reward that will motivate you to keep repeating it.

The simplest way to quit smoking, for example, is never to start in the first place. But once you have started, if you substitute a new behavior — chewing sugarless gum, say — for each cigarette you smoked, after a while the new behavior becomes automatic and you stop smoking without ever going through a period when you were smoking and chewing gum at the same time.