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When something’s wrong with you, the first instinct is to look at your past. You may think, Why am I like this? What happened? You might spend years trying to find the moment anxiety or a habit started, as if locating it would loosen its grip.

It usually doesn’t.

Behaviors are driven by two different things: the original cause and the root cause. The original cause is whatever first set your behavior in motion—maybe it’s an interaction that occurred when you were nine. 

The root cause is whatever keeps your behavior running today, and that’s almost always something that’s happening in your life right now. It might even be something that happened in the last few hours.

Let’s suppose you have insomnia. It may have started during a hard stretch at work three years ago, but what keeps it going might be that you check your phone at 2am when you can’t sleep. That keeps your brain alert and trains it to treat the bed as a place where you lie awake and scroll. Even when the work stress is long gone, your habit remains.

So when you’re trying to understand why you keep doing something, the better question to ask yourself is: What’s maintaining this behavior?

Behaviors stick around because they serve a purpose. Scrolling at 2am kills the boredom of lying there. If you’re overeating at night, you may really be enjoying the only twenty minutes of the day that feel uninterrupted and belong to you. Avoiding a party protects you from feeling judged. 

Once you find what the behavior is giving you, your goal is to find a cheaper (as in less detrimental) or healthier way to get it.

Bottom line: If you want to make changes, don’t spend time dwelling on the past. The present is the only place you can actually make a difference. You can’t go back and fix what happened when you were nine. But you can put your phone in another room tonight.

Your habit may have less to do with your past and more about the room you’re in.

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Mona & The Sol TV Team ❤️

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