Personal Problem Patterns

I’ve previously talked about how I’ve begun to overcome some of my learned negative patterns of behaviour by overriding them with other patterns. Today I am going to address some patterns I would like to change but which I have not yet found a way to overcome. These are patterns of time mismanagement, over-snacking and avoiding shared responsibility.

Almost every day I have an intention of how I will spend my one hour lunch break at work. For the past week this has been an intention of writing. However, come lunch, I find myself playing a game. It is not the game playing which I consider a negative pattern; I both enjoy playing games and consider it important for me as a games designer to play games. Rather, the concern for me is the failure to stick to an intention. I have only a very limited amount of free time per day, and by spending a full hour every work day playing games I am swinging the ratio of play time to project time too high.

The other thing that happens at work is that there are free biscuits and free soft drinks. If I have one, it is very hard for me to not have another. This is the second half of my problematic snacking pattern. The first half is the first sweet I eat. I’ve managed to not drink soft drinks (rootbeer is virtually unknown in this country) and avoid biscuits (the biscuits at work are always the same, and I’ve pretty much memorized their tastes). So the problem, at this point, is not the free snacks at work. The problem is that with a company of over a hundred people and a culture of bringing in snacks on your birthday, snacks on your anniversary of starting at the company and snacks any time you come back from holiday all combine to create a constant supply of snacks that I have not developed a resistance to sampling.

The final pattern I am examining today is that of doing dishes. Or, more specifically, not doing dishes. There are many aspects of keeping a shared living space tidy which I am oblivious to. Dirty dishes is not one of them – but when I see dishes piled in the sink or the drying rack full of dry dishes, my normal behaviour is to tell myself that I do not have the time now, and ignore the problem. I ignore it even though I know that both my wife and sister-in-law find the sight of dirty dishes far more irksome than myself, and that given enough time they will fix the problem themselves, and that they already perform many tidiness operations that I am unaware of. This is a pattern that leads to an unfair distribution of shared household maintenance and therefore eventual strife. I do not want to be an unfair person, and I do not enjoy strife.The common aspect throughout all of these patterns is that in the short term I get something I like (playing games, eating and not doing dishes). All that is necessary for me to engage in the pattern is to not think about the long term implications, or to convince myself that the long term implications “don’t matter” in this single instance. I have found that the way to change patterns is to find a new situation where not thinking will lead to desirable behaviour instead of the behaviour of the current pattern and then to try to fall into the new situation instead of the old one. But to create a new pattern that is going to successfully supplant the previous pattern I need to make the new pattern sticky; I need to know that I am going to get a relatively short term gain from it.

In the three example patterns I have examined above, creating a replacement pattern is really hard. Games are already very sticky activities. They have been designed to have a perfect risk/reward balance. Trying to compete with that to do what will often essentially amount to work is very hard. Eating is one of my favourite activities. I think I get significantly more joy out of this than most people do. I do not know if my extra enjoyment is down to higher natural sensitivities or learned appreciation of the variety and nuance of flavours, but at almost any point in time I would much rather be eating than not eating. Creating a pattern where not eating is more rewarding that eating is hard. Finally, I have a learned stigma against washing dishes – trying to create any pattern where there is a short term gain from doing something that I am stigmatised against sounds unlikely.

I do not have patterns ready at hand to supplant these existing patterns. I do not have answers to these problems. But this discussion has been useful: it has shown me what I am up against and suggested directions for creating new patterns. I need to increase my perceived reward for working on personal projects if I am going to compete with playing games. The only way I am going to combat the short term reward of eating is with a short term reward of eating – I need to find things I prefer to eat but which do not contribute to the problems inherent in snacking. Finally, in order to get to a point where doing dishes is preferable to avoidance I need to address whatever it is that is stopping me from finding enjoyment in this activity. While I do not have any answers, I now believe that I understand the questions well enough to pursue my problem patterns and successfully address them.