When the band Chicago sang, “You’re a hard habit to break,” they weren’t just whistling Dixie.
Habits can be good or bad, and the latter takes a lot of conscious willpower to drop, particularly if it has happily settled in for a lifetime.
For example, before I hosted events or interviewed celebrities, I was obliviously walking through the world, starting at least 50% of my conversational questions or statements with “So… ”
It was only when I was in front of a microphone that this verbal tic became glaringly apparent, first to best friend Lynne then, subsequently, me.
I was up on stage, running the live auction for the Breast Cancer Foundation at its 600-person gala, when a small figure appeared before me. ‘Twas Lynne, who beckoned me down to whispering distance.
“You might want to cut back on the ‘so’s, she advised.
What the heck was she talking about? Clearly she had been imbibing too much.
I went to continue with the next item up for bids, and I could suddenly feel a “So!” rising up in my throat.
Ah.
For the rest of the evening, I had to physically will myself not to use it, using a combination of deep breaths and pauses. How had I never noticed this habit of mine before?
Since then, I’ve improved a lot, but I’d be lying if I said it’s become second nature to avoid that two-letter nemesis of mine.
The ink was barely dry on my oath (“Thou shalt not exclaimeth the ‘So’ in any circumstances, as itteth be forbidden… ”) before I was struck with another bad habit I’d apparently adopted over the years: fidgeting.
When something is completely ingrained, it’s sometimes hard to recognise it, but, again, Lynne was happy (see: gleeful) to point it out.
Side note: Unfortunately, one of Lynne’s annoying habits is that she’s always right.
On any given night out, I would fiddle with my hair, adjust my top, touch my glasses, wipe the sweat from my upper lip… the movement was constant, and I genuinely had no clue that I was doing it.
Anyone who regularly reads this column or has bumped into me over the last few weeks, will be aware of the fact that I got to interview Iggy Pop onstage for his ‘Songs & Stories’ event at the Harquail Theatre. I was on a high for ages afterwards, and finally – last week – I got the chance to watch some of the videos from that night. I stared in horror at the ants-in-her-pants version of myself. My hands touched my face and top and hair so often, I looked like I was giving baseball signals to someone offstage.
“Stop touching yourself!” I yelled at the screen.
I’m now scouring the web for a straitjacket.
Some habits can be irritating from the git-go, but then others become so over time. There is no better example of this than when the bloom is starting to come off the rose in a romantic relationship.
In the courting stage, maybe you’ll bore your friends to death about his adorable little way of winking at you whenever he says your name. Or perhaps the way she spreads the peanut butter on her toast with a fork is what attracted you in the first place.
“My God, she’s so delightfully quirky!”
However, when the cracks begin to show, those adorable idiosyncrasies are like water torture.
Is there something in his eye? Can the winking not be fixed, medically? And when you find yourself hiding all the forks in the house and replacing the voids with butter knives, that’s Step 1 of an exit strategy.
Actually, for some it’s a lost cause at the starting gate. They have a habit of falling for the wrong people.
Certain habits are universally disliked. Right up there are: Picking any part of one’s body in public (extra points for orifices); interrupting other people’s conversations; using the word ‘like’ to fill pauses in sentences.
Being glued to your smart device morning, noon and night is also doing no one any favours. How about that friend who spends half of the dinner you planned checking messages, responding to emails or laughing at Facebook posts?
I’ll be the first to admit that I need to put my phone away when I head to bed and not look at it again until the morning. I am terrible for scouring the internet into the wee hours. I’ll go back to the same sites every 15 minutes just to see if there are any new stories to read. It’s the digital equivalent of opening the fridge door throughout the day, imagining items will magically appear.
How does the saying go? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?
That sage piece of advice could also be applied to overindulging in alcohol. I’ve often said that a bad hangover could be close to the worst you’ll ever feel, so why do we not learn our lesson after the first one?
One night, you mix rum drinks with tequila shots and vodka martinis, and the next morning, you feel like you’re in a helicopter sitting on a heaving ocean after eating a bad egg.
As your mother might ask: Do you really want to make a habit of this?
No matter what, there are some habits we really should try to break because they’re intensely irritating, bad for our health or downright dangerous.
But, possibly, the most dangerous habit of all is pointing out everyone else’s.
Related Videos
