I want to live a more sustainable life, so why can it feel so hard?

A sustainable lifestyle is going from niche to fashionable as consumers turn to vintage and sustainable clothing brands and organic grocers in droves. But, while the impetus is growing, the switch to sustainability doesn’t always feel as easy as it might. So what’s the hitch? Our founder, Lucy Johnson, a qualified psychotherapist, explains why living a more sustainable life can seem like a great idea but often feel much harder in practice.

Perhaps it was your New Year’s resolution: I’m going to live a greener life. You start with great gusto thinking to yourself, how hard can this be? I’ll ease out the plastics in my life, and only buy refillables, or I’ll bike to work every day and only eat meat on a Thursday.

And then life comes along and ruins it for you. 

Psychologists call this the intention behaviour gap, and it’s been tripping us up for millennia, because, quite simply, it’s a classic human psychological trait. Our conscious mind seizes on an idea, determines it’s a good one to adopt and leaves us to get on with it. Our unconscious mind, and body, are, for the most part, blissfully unaware of the rational mind’s edict and the endeavour often ends up with pretty shambolic results.

So how do we unpick this prickly tangle of intentions and habits? 

We humans are not that keen on giving things up, so any resolution that starts “I’ll only eat meat on a Thursday” is a red flag to our often unconscious, evolutionarily-honed fear of scarcity. However, the mind is surprisingly open to suggestion. So how does “I’ll eat some pasta and vegetable dishes for a few days and save up for a delicious, juicy, expensive, pasture-fed steak on Thursday night” sound instead?

In essence, it’s about how we sell sustainability to ourselves. If we believe sustainability is about sacrifice, we’re much less likely to embrace any kind of alteration in our lifestyles. If we imagine the ways in which it could enhance our lives, by making it prettier, or healthier, or in the longer term possibly even wealthier - we are infinitely more likely to stick to new ways of doing things.

“Imagination is everything… it is the preview of coming attractions”
- Albert Einstein.

Why? Because change is hard work.

It’s challenging on a practical level. How do I go about even finding zero-waste food staples when I’ve got the Ocado link on my desktop? But it’s also a literal effort from a neurological point of view. Think of the brain as a supercomputer perched on your spine. Running it burns up, on average, nearly a quarter of our calorie intake in a day, and so the brain has adapted so that some of it runs on autopilot to conserve energy. In fact, as many as 45% of our daily actions are performed automatically.

The autopilot is your habits: millions of tiny decisions that the brain makes everyday that you barely even notice. Shopping for supper? Easy, the mini-Sainsburys on the corner. Cleaning your teeth? Grab that Colgate. These thoughts run at lightning speed along well-worn synaptic pathways, leaving you mental space to navigate the complexities of your relationship with, say, your boss or your mother-in-law.

You’re not just imagining it, your decision to try a new sustainable product really is an effort. A trip to the zero-waste store to navigate new ways of shopping, including the possibility or an embarrassing incident with the cashew nut dispenser, entails the building of new neural pathways - literal grey matter in your brain - and that takes energy, which you might be feeling you don’t have much of. 

The vital ingredients for changing our habits

So what’s the answer? Embedding new patterns of behaviour requires two vital ingredients: celebration and compassion. 

You’ll hear plenty of motivational coaches talking about starting small, and small, incremental steps are critical to success, but when you make those small tweaks to your day-to-day life, you need to celebrate every single win. Trying out toothpaste tablets for the first time? Hurray! Swapping to reusable kitchen roll? Go you! 

And when you grab that clingfilm you swore you’d forgo from the supermarket because you’re in a hurry, that’s when it really helps to ladle on the compassion. Rather than smothering ourselves in shame, and bombarding ourselves with personal recriminations, we need to lean into that self-compassion, and forgive ourselves for not fitting our illusion of perfection. 

That feeling of it “not being enough”? It can be helpful to remember that, in proportion to the climate crisis, what we do as individuals is never going to be “enough”, and remind ourselves that taking small, measurable steps is a whole lot better than doing nothing.

From a psychological perspective, celebration and compassion both tap into the reward centres of our brain. These feelings shoot dopamine along the brain’s mesolimbic circuit lighting up an area in the centre of the brain, called the nucleus accumben, creating a sensation of pleasure. However, we don’t need to know the neuroscience to know that the brain’s reward system just feels good. We’re not likely to stay the course in any behaviour change if we don’t have pretty regular moments of pleasure along the way. Why would we?

These dopamine hits - the tiny little electrical thrills of feeling rewarded - can really do the heavy-lifting when we’re altering our habits. Once we get into the habit of rewarding ourselves when we make new choices, each time we choose the sustainable option we begin to get a little eco-thrill. And if we get used to the fact that we’re not going to beat ourselves up when we forget, or get too busy, then we lose our fear of failing to, as our mind sees it, “get it right”.

In a couple of months, these little dopamine hits begin to add up to a sense of accomplishment, and each small success culminates in a deeper sense of agency. We step into a self-reinforcing circle of achievement that not only makes us feel good about our role in tackling the environmental challenges we face - but also builds our optimism and resilience about what’s going on around us.

These feelings also have the effect of motivating us to do more: we’ve tried swapping out paper kitchen roll for reusable wipes and it actually worked for us. How about cutting our energy bill by swapping out our old halogen lights for LEDs? 

And after a few months of practice, we’ve gone from a scratchy experience of taking halting sustainable steps to a more organically sustainable lifestyle that feels even better than where we started. We sometimes mess up, but who cares?

It’s what I call the pleasure pathway to success.

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