by Bennett Lewis, Organizational Psychologist

This morning I was trying to restore a daily morning routine to give my days some structure that will support my goals, my hopes and dreams, and my behavior.  When I sat down at my computer, I read an email at the top of my inbox from the “Daily Stoic”.  It was about Seneca’s depressing exile to Corsica, contrasted with Napoleon’s deep love of the same place.  It was a challenge for me to start reading.  My mind felt a bit like a cold motor that wouldn’t start.  I had to reread the first sentence several times before my mind kicked in and started flowing down the paragraphs.  This was a little strange to me, since I had just spent 12 minutes catching up on Facebook, which definitely involved reading…followed by another 12 minutes of playing Nonogram (a logic game).  It’s not like my mind was cold at this point, but it really felt that way.

When I finished reading the email message, I picked up my book of the same name, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, to read the meditation for today’s date.  It’s been a while since this book was part of my daily routine, but it’s part of the intentional routine I’m trying to restore, so it took me a minute to adjust the bookmarks and decide how much I was going to read each day.  It’s the middle of October, and my last bookmark was on May 20.  It’s been a while.

At the moment I decided I would read two pages per day, a thought flashed into my mind, “Facebook…”  This thought was coupled with an urge to open up a tab on my browser to look at Facebook.  It was a strong urge, an impulse to look at Facebook.  Heck, even while writing about it right now, the urge to jump onto “Facebook” has hit several times. I can feel it. Because I was just about to read a daily meditation, I caught myself mid-impulse, and felt the force of it.  It wasn’t overwhelming, but it was firm.  It felt like I was making a choice…but I wasn’t.  That is the spark of clarity, the epiphany that I’m trying to capture here.  This conditioned impulse, “Facebook”, looked and felt like a conscious choice, and maybe on some level it was, but on another level I could see it most definitely wasn’t.  It was impulse masquerading as choice.  I paused, just closed my eyes and paused, holding The Daily Stoic book in my hands (which helped keep them off the mouse and keyboard), and I breathed deeply, feeling the impulse, and also feeling the excitement of clearly seeing this impulse, this urge, and so many others I experience every day, for what they were, not conscious choice, but impulses, urges, habits, reinforced repetitive behaviors.  I just sat for a moment and felt the urge, and felt my resistance to it, and tried to feel the difference between conscious choice and conditioned impulse…the foundation of my addictions.

It seems to me that every addictive behavior I have comes in this form of an impulse masquerading as choice, whether it’s “Facebook”, or grabbing a snack, or watching a youtube video, or the one that is perhaps most embedded in my psyche, “start games”.

“Start games” is an impulsive thought that has been with me for 40 years.  It started with my old Atari 800 computer that my father bought for our family, and as the oldest child at age 10, I became the primary user.  In order to load programs (i.e. games) from the cassette tape drive, you had to hold down the start key while you turned on the computer.  Combine that with so many games that simply required you to press start to play, and the word “start” was permanently coupled in my psyche with “games”.  That pairing was further reinforced by WIndows 3.1, by clicking on the “Start” button to get to the “Games” menu (where you’d find Minesweeper, Freecell, Hearts, and Solitaire).  “Start games” is the mantra of my addiction to computer games.

I’m hoping that this insight today, of sitting with and feeling the impulse, the urge, the drive, to “simply” go on Facebook, will help me catch it in the future, and to also recognize other impulses masquerading as choice.  Now I know I know how to pause, feel, breathe, and, this is the crux of it, I know how to replace that impulse with a real, conscious, mindful choice.  And, perhaps I can turn those mindful choices into positive impulses, urges, and addictions.  After all, I’m not yet convinced it’s worth the energy to be mindful 100% of the time.  Or maybe it is.  Maybe that is a worthy goal.  Maybe I’m on the path to find out.