Habit breaking

For this week we were meant to work on breaking a habit that’s been sticking around a bit too long. My habit to break is my obsessive apologizing. I have a huge cognitive dissonance between the actions I take to be more environmentally friendly and feeling unable to encourage my friends to do the same. It seems crazy that I can’t tell my friends to turn the lights off when they leave a room without having a huge internal debate about it for two days before I bring it up and then apologize for saying anything immediately afterward.
I had a huge heart-to-heart with one of my housemates about this fear that I’ve had – this inexplicable desire not to ruffle feathers or offend. I feel like usually people would be inclined to call me quite forward (too forward?) with my thoughts and beliefs on a given topic but when it comes to something as intimate as my personal practices and beliefs about something that’s as close to my identity as environmental practices I become more recluse and quiet. I realize that this may seem extremely counter-intuitive – that the things I’m most passionate are the ones that are harder for me to express. What I’ve come to realize, however, is that when I’m around friends who are as conscious about environmentalism and their choices as I myself am I’m much more comfortable. I feel as though maybe I come across as lecturing or patronizing when I bring up a conversation about environmental choices unprovoked by those I’m talking to. The last thing I want to do is make others feel guilty about the lives they lead as I feel that makes people more defensive and less likely to be open about discussing or changing their habits.
These are all the things I discussed with my housemate. I found it helpful to delve into the root source of my discomfort and figure out why I apologize so often (or one of the more cognizant reasons, at least).
So this week, in keeping with my efforts to stop apologizing for my green ways and to encourage myself to be more vocal about such things I started leaving little Post-It notes around my room and house reminding myself of my efforts with “I’m NOT sorry” and “Step Up” (as in take the initiative on the environmental front…).
I think that this type of effort is consistent with the idea of positive reinforcement: presenting myself with a stimulus – reminders of what action I want to emulate to increase the future strength of the response. I also told my housemates that they can hit, bump, nudge, shout, or spray me with water anytime they hear me apologizing unnecessarily or for something having to do with my eating habits. This falls into the category of positive punishment – presenting an unpleasant stimulus after apologizing to decrease the frequency of future apologies.
So far I’ve found that there’s been moderate improvement. I’m a lot better when it comes to my apologies about my food purchases and habits but I still apologies a lot unnecessarily out of context with environmental goals. It got to the point where my clothes have been slightly damp all week (my housemates LOVE this game…me, not so much). I’m hoping, however, that in the weeks to come my efforts improve.