Habits are such mysterious things. When we do something for the first time, we are completely using the conscious mind. Think of the first time you drove a car or bicycle, the first time you swam or wrote or sang or danced. Any new action, any unfamiliar action makes you really present. You cannot afford to be lost in your thinking while you are doing these things. Neurons are firing and wiring in your brain. A new path is being laid.
As you keep repeating the activity, the more familiar you get with it. The path of the neural network becomes stronger and stronger. You need less and less consciousness to perform the same action. Finally you reach a point where it starts happening automatically. You can be thinking about something else and your body takes care of driving the car or brushing the teeth or walk up the stairs.
It’s a wonderful gift from our body to us to make our lives much easier. Imagine if you had to relearn how to walk everyday. Life would get too chaotic. Nothing would get done. You would have to learn everything again and again. The body by building these neural pathways helps us save time and energy. Its almost as if we are running on autopilot.
Now, the other side of the coin also has to be looked at. If everyday we are stuck to the same routine, same work, our body tends to start running on autopilot all the time. You wakeup, eat breakfast, go to office, have lunch, work some more, come back home, have dinner, watch TV and sleep. And on and on you repeat. Because you are running on autopilot, you don’t have much use of the conscious mind to be present. It starts spending time thinking. All your attention is on the dreams that are being created within you. Similar to when you dream when you are asleep, you dream throughout the day with your eyes open. You become a somnambulist, a sleep walker.
The more time you spend in your thinking, the further away you move from reality. When something challenging happens around you, your dream is temporarily broken and you wake up to reality. You are not used to it. You are addicted to your thinking so you end up trying to resolve your challenges by thinking too. You don’t know what else to do. Your entire life is running on autopilot, how can you expect to be creative here? Autopilot means your system is running on an old operating system. It hasn’t been updated in a while. This challenge is completely new, completely fresh. Life always is new and fresh. No two moments are alike. You cannot have a template solution for all problems. Its like using the same prescription for all illnesses.
What is required is de-automatisation. You will have to practice taking over now and again. Just as you are walking suddenly bring your awareness to your walking. Turn off the autopilot and fly the plane yourself. Notice when you have been pulled in by your thinking and become a witness to it. There’s nothing else to do. The habit of being lost in your thinking has to be understood and dissolved.