Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

Gretchen Rubin

How to Replace a Bad Habit with a Better One

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“You complain all the time,” she said, turning around from the passenger seat to look me in the eye as I sat squashed between our two sons. “You are relentlessly negative.”

Only a sister could make such a declaration and live to tell about it.

My first reaction was defensiveness. “I am not relentlessly negative,” I shot back, emphatically shaking my head. “And I definitely do not complain all the time.”

My sister didn’t press the issue. She simply looked at me a beat too long, eyebrows raised, as if to say, “Oh really?” before turning around to face forward again.

The conversation in the car shifted to another topic. I wasn’t angry, and I didn’t hold my sister’s accusation against her. We DeRushas tend to speak forthrightly to one another – blame it on our no-nonsense Puritan sensibilities. But I also dismissed her declaration, refusing to even consider that there might be some truth in it.

Later, though, I couldn’t get Jeanine’s comments out of my head. I argued with her in my mind, continuing to defend myself. But the more I tried to insist to myself that she was wrong, the more I realized she was right.

The truth is, I do complain. A lot.

I’m cold. I have a headache. My elbow hurts. I’m tired. The kids are bugging me. My work is boring. I have ennui. I’m sick of walking the dog. Why do I always have to be the one to empty the dishwasher? Who left their dirty socks in the middle of the living room floor? How come we never do anything fun? Is this all there is to life?

I complain for a lot of reasons: to get attention; to elevate myself; to garner sympathy and compassion; to be seen and heard.

But we don’t have to dig deeply into my psyche to identify the number one reason I complain. It’s actually quite simple: I complain because it’s a habit. Half the time I don’t even realize I’m doing it. Near-constant complaining has become my mindless modus operandi.

In her book Better than Before, Gretchen Rubin advises that we should “choose habits mindfully.” Choosing mindfully, it turns out, is the key not only to establishing a good habit, but also to breaking a bad one.

On January 1, my sister’s accusation still ringing in my ears, I resolved to break my habit of mindless complaining and relentless negativity. The challenge, I knew, was that I needed to do more than simply state my good intentions. I knew, as Rubin said, that I would need to mindfully choose a good habit that would, over time, help me begin to pave a new neural pathway in my brain.

Enter the daily gratitude journal.

Or, I should say, re-enter the gratitude journal.

Eight years ago, inspired by Ann Voskamp’s bestselling book One Thousand Gifts, I bought a cheap journal, laid it open on the kitchen counter between the coffee maker and the fruit bowl, picked up a pen, and began to list the everyday, ordinary moments that brought me joy. In total my kids and I and occasionally Brad listed 1,955 gifts over a three-year period.

The first gift listed was “spring song of the chickadee.” The last was penned by Brad, evidently on our anniversary: “18 years with my love.”

That was more than four years ago. Truthfully I don’t remember why I quit the gratitude journal. I don’t even remember when I closed the cover over its wrinkled pages and tucked the notebook into a cabinet, where it still lives today.

I keep my new gratitude journal – a beautiful notebook with a richly vibrant cover, a gift from a dear friend – on my nightstand. Every night before I click off the light, I think back over my day and pen three things for which I am grateful. Sometimes I list more than my three; occasionally it’s a challenge to come up with the bare minimum.

The truth is, I inherently lean toward glass-half-empty. My default is pessimism. Because it doesn’t come naturally to me, I need to choose optimism consciously, and one of the ways I’m trying to do that is to choose gratitude every day.

As with my prior journal, the things I’ve listed so far are ordinary, even mundane – coffee with a friend; glimpse of a sleek fox trotting across the golf course; January sun after a string of gray days. And yet I know that in some ways, it’s their very ordinariness that makes these gifts special.

Today I’m taking my “everyday, ordinary life – my sleeping, eating, going-to-work and walking-around life – and placing it before God as an offering.”

Today I’m mindfully choosing praise over complaint.

Today I’m choosing a new habit mindfully and beginning to repave a well-worn habit of complaint and negativity with one of gratitude.

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So tell me, do you keep a gratitude journal? And have you ever tried to quit a bad habit by replacing it with a better one? 

The Spiritual Habit of Digging Dandelions

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Last year, when I heard the honey bee population was suffering from a mysterious insect-world apocalypse, I decided to offer up my lawn for the cause. I would not drown my dandelions in Round Up nor pry them from the earth with a slim forked garden tool. Instead, I vowed, I would let them flourish and propagate in order to provide nectar for the struggling bees. It would be my sacrifice, my contribution to Earth.

This year, come April, I took one look at the blur of yellow blanketing nearly every inch of my front yard and decided bees be damned. Pulling on my gardening gloves, I grabbed the dandelion plucker from the garage and proceeded to rid my lawn of the noxious weed, one bright bloom at a time.

Three days later my front yard was free of dandelions. I also had a raging case of elbow tendonitis (which would later require a cortisone injection that felt a lot like giving birth out of my elbow, but that’s another story).

While I might not recommend my particular OCD approach to dandelion digging (It’s the Upholder in me. As my husband said, “Do you not understand the concept of moderation?” No, in fact, I do not understand the concept of moderation), I do recommend the habit (or discipline, or practice, or whatever you want to call it) of dandelion digging in general, which comes down to this:

Monotonous physical repetition frees the mind and soul to open, breathe, and rest. 

I thought about a lot out there on my knees, scooting from bloom to bloom, pushing the metal prong deep into the moist dirt, wrenching the gnarled, stubborn roots free and tossing them with satisfaction into the metal bin beside me.

I let my mind wander as I listened to the staccato call of the chickadee, the trill of the cardinal, the scamper of the squirrels up the river birch bark. I let my body relax into a rhythm, the cool grass bleeding circles of damp on the knees of my jeans, the plunge and push and pull of my fingernails in the dirt.

Digging dandelions isn’t “spiritual” in the traditional sense. I didn’t pray or ruminate on Bible verses out there on the front lawn. I didn’t do anything, actually (besides dig dandelions). I simply let thoughts come, and then I let them go. I noticed and focused on my environment – the pungent smell of early spring dirt, the fresh scent of new growth high up in the pine boughs, the rise and fall of voices up the street, two neighbors chatting in the morning sun. I let myself be immersed in the sights and sounds and smells of creation, which to me often feels like the best kind of prayer anyway.

It doesn’t need to be dandelion weeding specifically, by the way. Any monotonous, repetitious chore is conducive to this kind of spiritual discipline: folding laundry, washing dishes, raking, Windexing windows, painting the baseboards in your bathroom. The key is to move your body repeatedly and automatically and to let your thoughts come and go.

Try making a habit out of doing your most monotonous chores mindfully. Eventually, you’ll find, your to-do list will recede into the background. You’ll breathe more deeply. And your spirit will feel more at ease.

A Word about the Four Tendencies: 
Remember last week when I described Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies? You’ll see, as we dig into these non-traditional spiritual habits over the next few weeks, that some will be more conducive to particular Tendencies than others.

The spiritual habit of digging dandelions (or doing monotonous chores mindfully), for example, will probably work well for an Upholder (because we respond well to both inner — “Practicing mindfulness will be good for me” —  and outer  — “My neighbors will appreciate a dandelion-free lawn” — expectations) and the Obliger (who feels accountable to others…like the neighbors). If the Questioner is sold on the rationale (“Because I believe doing a repetitive, monotonous chore is a good way to practice mindfulness, which I want to learn”), then digging dandelions (or something similar) might be a good fit. As for the Rebel…well, only the Rebel can decide what will work for him or her!

Tune in next Tuesday for another Spiritual Habits post.

How Our Habits Can Impact Our Spirituality

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I’ve been reading a lot about habits lately. Most of what I’ve been reading (books like Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, by Gretchen Rubin, and The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg) has focused on habits as they relate to our physical lives: more exercise, more sleep, healthier eating, less alcohol, less fingernail gnawing, and the like. But it struck me, as I read, that learning how to form and keep good habits can be applied to our spiritual lives as well. After all, what are spiritual disciplines if not habits – routines and practices we engage in regularly to keep our spiritual lives alive and well?

I’m pretty good at forming and keeping good habits. I’ve been running three or four miles three or four times a week since ninth grade. I go to bed early and aim to get at least seven hours of sleep each night. I eat a side salad with my dinner most nights of the week.

I’ve always assumed my ability to form and keep good habits is largely a result of my Triple Type A rule-follower personality, and as it turns out, I am right. I’m good at habits because, according to Gretchen Rubin, I am an Upholder, which means I “respond readily to both outer and inner expectations.” I both make and follow rules for myself, and I readily follow the rules others make for me. I’m kind of a robot that way.

Upholders are typically self-directed, have little trouble keeping commitments and resolutions, and easily meet deadlines (in fact, according to Rubin, Upholders often turn in assignments early. Hello – I turned in the Luther manuscript two weeks before my deadline). The downside to the Upholder Tendency is that we often struggle when rules aren’t clear, we feel compelled to meet expectations, even when the expectations are pointless (for example, whenever I get the new issue of Better Homes and Gardens in the mail, I feel driven to read it cover to cover right that very second, like I have a pleasure-reading deadline breathing down my neck), and we tend toward gold-star seeking, hoop jumping, and mindless rule following.

Rubin identifies three additional Tendencies in Better Than Before. Here’s a brief summary:

The Questioner — Questions all expectations and will meet an expectation only if it’s justified. Questioners are motivated by reason, logic, and fairness and typically like to decide for themselves whether a course of action is a good idea. They also traditionally like to research and acquire plenty of information before making a decision. The down side to Questioners is that they can suffer from “analysis paralysis,” and they tend to reject expert opinions in favor of their own conclusions (which is not always a bad thing). [By the way, my husband is a Questioner – he comes from a family of lawyers. A Questioner and an Upholder in marriage…this is why we almost broke the Myers-Briggs personality test when we took it as part of pre-marital counseling].

The Obliger — Responds readily to outer expectations but struggles to meet inner expectations. The Obliger is motivated by external accountability. They do well when they know there will be consequences for their decisions. Because they go to great lengths to meet their responsibilities, Obligers typically make great colleagues, employees, and friends. However, they struggle with self-motivation and, because they have difficulty telling people no, they are susceptible to burnout.

The Rebel — Resists all expectations, out and inner alike. Rebels need to work toward goals in their own way. They wake up thinking, “What do I want to do today?” rather than “What should I do?” or “What do I have to do?” As Rubin points out, “At times, the Rebel resistance to authority is enormously valuable to society.” On the other hand, Rebels often frustrate friends, colleagues, and family members because they refuse to be told, or even asked, to do anything. [I strongly suspect my youngest child is a Rebel. Help me, Jesus.]

Now. There’s a reason I am telling you all this (besides the fact that it’s fun to figure out which category fits us best). Over the next few weeks I’m going to be writing about Six Spiritual Habits. For the record, I’ve never liked the pairing of “discipline” and “spirituality.” Even for a Triple Type A rule-follower, “discipline” feels too punitive to me. But “spiritual practices” or even “spiritual habits”…that feels right. During this series, I’ll come back to Rubin’s Four Tendencies from time to time as I talk about how the six spiritual habits work for me and how they might work best for you.

Let me tell you in advance: my spiritual habits aren’t exactly traditional. You won’t find me writing about Scripture memorization or contemplative prayer, at least in the ways they are traditionally practiced. But I’m hoping that by inviting you into some of my non-traditional spiritual practices, you might be encouraged to seek new and different ways to connect with God as well, and perhaps even integrate some of these practices into your everyday or weekly routines.

See you next Tuesday for the first Spiritual Habits post.

So tell me: Which Tendency are you – Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, or Rebel? You can learn more about the four Tendencies at Gretchen Rubin’s website  and take her Habits Quiz  to figure out which Tendency fits you best.