When I want excitement, I walk to the corner store without my phone. It felt strange and wrong to leave the house like this, with just my wallet and keys, like I’d forgotten to put on underwear.
Although I didn’t have a mobile phone for the first half of my life, I always felt unsafe without it for ten minutes. If I needed to make a phone call in an emergency or other situation—or, more likely, if I wanted to ignore my surroundings and check email while waiting in line—I would be completely helpless.
This uneasy, dazed feeling is not caused by not calling for a few minutes. This is what it feels like to rebel against powerful habits. After all, the more often I do it, the weaker the feeling gets.
The mind just doesn’t want you to deviate from your habits, good or bad. “You can’t do this to me!” it yells as you place your phone on the kitchen table and lock the door. “We have a deal!”
The mind is wrong about this. You can do something that feels weird and it will quickly make it feel less weird.
It feels weird because you’re turning off an autopilot that’s been running for so long. When you always do something a certain way, your entire life is formed around that particular way, even your body movements and thoughts. When your friend goes to the bathroom, your hand moves to your phone and you start scrolling through memes or sports scores. In this zombie ritual, mind and body come together to find novelty and likeness, for the millionth time.
There are no decisions, no controls, no driving. The system is executing its programmed routine, the destination is whatever it is.
Whenever autopilot kicks in, it’s uncomfortable because you’re suddenly in manual mode. Immediate and decisive action is required. The spacecraft tilted, the yoke began to tilt, and the whole thing drifted to the left. oops! Someone has to fly the plane!
But this is your plane, your life, and you’re the only one allowed in the cockpit.
Unpleasant moments when autonomous driving starts
I believe we can benefit greatly from that confusing moment when you reach for something habitual and it’s not there. It opens your brain and brings you into the present moment. Inevitably, this is more uncomfortable than letting an automated program (a habit) handle the moment, but it’s also freeing. You lose that sense of ease and comfort when you have to fly the plane yourself, but now you can actually decide where the plane will go.
Especially for those of us Cradle of Civilization types, adult life is mostly guided by our many autopilot (i.e. habit) systems, but you can gain a lot by selectively disabling one of these systems for a period of time. Taking manual control is nerve-wracking, but only because you tend to let the system handle most of the stuff.
I mean, you’re a pilot, right?
What happens when you fly manually for a while
In November, I set up a discussion forum for readers who wanted to give something up for a month in the spirit of fasting or renunciation, a voluntary act practiced by many traditional cultures for a variety of reasons.
In this group, everyone picks up and turns off a habit, a program on autopilot—drinking, eating sweets after meals, doomscrolling, making sarcastic comments—and some recurring pattern seems to lead them to the wrong destination. They kept it closed for a month.
Now in its second month, more than a hundred people have reported their experiences. Most of them reported on specific arcs of their campaigns:
1. They feel stuck or stuck in a habit and decide to change it. They don’t like the direction things are going, so they give up the habit for a while. No more staying up past midnight. No more cocktails after get off work. No more doomscrolls.
2. Doing something new can be awkward and jarring at first. Eating 600 calories for a dinner that normally has 1,000 calories makes me feel unsatisfied. Biting your tongue when you normally complain feels like you’re trying to drown a beach ball.
3. They’re tempted to go back on autopilot. Flying an airplane manually is stressful. It feels forced and unsustainable. Doing things in this new way requires a lot of effort. Is this your life now? Dinner never disappoints?
4. The feeling of “forced” is weakened. After about a week, the soda and lime stopped feeling so forced and lame. Whiskey seems less attractive to people. In fact, it can even become a bit off-putting – people discover that their old habits have short-term costs that they are suddenly free of. Sleeping better. They are saving money. At this point, the behavior still needs to be managed, but it is now manageable.
5. The direction and destination have changed. Soon the plane is pointing in a better direction, there’s less pressure to keep it pointed there, and new rewards are happening that people want to keep. Picking up a book instead of talking on the phone, or finishing dinner without dessert, no longer feels like such an effort. The brain is encoding new muscle memory and mental habits, starting a new autopilot routine, this time for a better destination.
Depending on custom, it can take more than a month for a plane to fully fly to a new destination on its own. But it’s inspiring to see how quickly you can change course if you endure the initial “Oh no, someone has to fly the plane!” moment.
Before seeing so many people describe the above pattern, I often interpreted that confusing moment of drifting dials and flashing warning lights as evidence that something was wrong, that I had taken a step too big, and that I needed to do more preparation or research before I attempted to fly the airplane.
Now I think it’s a feeling worth pursuing because it’s the feeling of being in control. I’ve been trying to recognize and accept this feeling, even in its micro forms. For example, walking into a store that makes you feel uncomfortable can trigger a moment of disorientation that will quickly pass. Now you can go to that place. The same goes for trying a recipe that seems too tricky, or talking to someone you feel a little intimidated by.
That “oh no” feeling is a good feeling, not in the sense that it’s pleasant, but in the sense that it’s good for you. This is what it feels like to learn to fly a plane to where you really want to go.
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If you’d like to join the abandonment group, you can join the forum here .
