Skip to main content

On "Why Do I Always..."

I'm asking myself a very interesting question today that was sparked by a Twitter trending topic today:  #WhyDoIAlways.  People are using this topic to examine their lives to find habits that they have which have affected them either negatively or positively - but mostly negatively.
Here are a couple of examples:
Or another one:
It's interesting, isn't it? I think every one of us could come up with a couple (dozen?) of these for ourselves. For me, one might be "#WhyDoIAlways find myself doing things at the last minute?"  or "#WhyDoIAlways allow myself to make the first exception when I'm trying to make changes in my life?"

But...I'm curious about this trending topic from another standpoint as well:  why was it created?  Because I believe there are two types of possible reasons that people are posting this stuff:
  1. They want to share some of their victimhood by pointing out stuff that they always do and that has negative repercussions, in an attempt to garner emotion from others and make themselves feel better;  or
  2. Publicly address a bad habit that they have as a first step to changing it.  
I'd imagine that most people fall into that first grouping. I know I've been guilty of such stuff in the past (even the not-so-recent past) - I want to throw out my bad habits in an effort to feel better about them and realize that I'm not the only one who does.  

But if used as a public "Step 1: identify and admit the problem" type action, this could be a really powerful tool for personal change.  Because there are few ways better to start to fix a problem than to identify it and state it publicly.  

I'm reminded of the movie Crocodile Dundee where Dundee is describing how people dealt with personal problems in the outback, and I paraphrase:  "we just tell Wally.  Then Wally tells someone, they tell someone, and pretty soon, no more problem."  It's silly, and meant for laughs, but like many such humorous snippets there's a real grain of truth to it.  

So maybe that's another part of what's going on here.  If this "#WhyDoIAlways" post is created with the right intent, and read by the right people, the writers may get some action taken on solving the problem and getting over the bad habit.  It could be as simple as an inward "wow, I do this and I'm admitting it."  But like we said, that can be the first step to improvement on a much larger scale!  

What sorts of "#WhyDoIAlways" posts could you make, and how could you start to fix them?  


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Caffeine and Cortisol - a 30-Day Experiment

No Caffeine for Me! Today, I began upon a 30-day experiment to reduce my cortisol levels by removing coffee from my diet. The goal is to see how it might be affecting my cognitive function and my belly fat. Cortisol is a hormone that is related to stress .  At a very basic level, cortisol is created as a response to stressors in our environment.  Back when we were still chucking spears at deer and chasing down antelope, cortisol was helping to preserve our lives by giving us quick energy by signalling to our livers that it was time to engage in a process known as gluconeogenesis. This process is basically the breakdown of amino acids, the building blocks of protein, into glucose - one of the two monosaccharides (the healthy one) that our bodies use for fuel. Picture this - you're walking across the street, enjoying the day, when suddenly some inattentive driver tries to turn and doesn't see you.  Your heart rate speeds up, and you get a little burst of speed to quickly sp...

Your Goals Might Not Be My Goals

I got a tweet to my @Train4AutismCLB account the other day, just out of the blue, that really got me thinking about goals and motivations.  For those who aren't in the autism community, there's a bit of a rift regarding the charity Autism Speaks, which is the biggest, most visible autism charity out there.  Many people who are higher-functioning autistics believe that one of the organization's stated goals of "curing" autism would only take away a facet of their personalities that make them what they are.  Then there are those who would love to have a cure for autism or at least some way to relieve some of the nastier aspects of autism and help their loved ones to have an easier time functioning in today's society.  It's a fine line, no doubt.  But the tweet I got was from someone whose profile said they were an aspie, which is shorthand for someone with Asperger's Syndrome.  This is a high-functioning form of autism where people are very smar...

Capture Those Crazy Ideas with Connected Mind

Are you one of those people whose brainstorming abilities are barely under control?  When you have an idea, do the details come pouring forth in a tidal wave, and get lost as they crash to the shore and pour back into the sea? That is me in a nutshell.  I'm full of ideas, but when they come it's hard for me to get them under control and organize anything.  I've tried notepads, using my good friend Evernote , and a whole host of other stuff to get those crazy ideas under control and in some semblance of readability.  But that's tough sometimes when you have eighty things going on at once.  Enter my new favorite tool, the mind map .  I don't know if you've ever come across this concept, but basically it's something like this:   The basic idea is that the shape at the middle is the "main topic" at hand.  The branches out from the main topic are the subtopics, and then the smaller branches are the details, etc. It's a simple enough conc...