Habits, Calm, and Starlings

Habits, Calm, and Starlings

1. You might not get rid of that bad habit, but you might be able to change it

Charles Duhigg has written a fascinating book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. I listened to the audio version (10.5 hours). Books that have sociological or psychological flavor always grab my attention; I guess it's a habit.

Have you ever considered how of what you do each day is on auto-pilot? The brain likes to function that way, since the more stuff that's on auto-pilot, the more brain power is available for thinking about new or unusual problems. Habits have three components, a cue, a routine, and a reward. It doesn't matter whether the habit is "good" or "bad", it works the same way.

There's a "Golden Rule" of habits: to change a habit you don't like, keep the same cue and reward, but insert a new routine. Tony Dungy took this approach when coaching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indianapolis Colts. He knew a team could be faster than its opponent by running plays automatically, without thinking each one through. Dungy worked with the existing cues (watching how the other team was setting up for a play) and rewards (executing plays well and beating the other team). His success came from training players so thoroughly on how to react to certain cues that they just ran the "routine" for certain cues. The approach took years of work, but eventually paid off with the Colts' Super Bowl win in 2007.

Duhigg uses a number of examples to show how harnessing the power of habits leads to success. Examples include swimmer Michael Phelps, aluminum company Alcoa, retailing giant Target, civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, and megachurch pastor Rick Warren.

2. A calm body is a calm mind

While looking around in the library earlier this month, I spotted a book by Gayatri Devi, M.D.: A Calm Brain: Unlocking Your Natural Relaxation System. Brain and body functioning (and the improvement thereof) is another gripping topic for me, so I interrupted my other books-in-progress to read this one.

Remember how it feels when you're alert and focused, getting things done but not anxious about it? That's actually a delicate balancing act between your body's alerting and relaxing systems. The frontal lobes in your brain are trying to rule with logic and thinking, while your "core" brain is subconsciously monitoring conditions around you. The core brain manages your instincts and triggers your "gut feelings".

Problems can start when we feed our attentiveness to the detriment of relaxing. Our culture of multitasking just makes it worse; it's possible to be so engaged with email, surfing the web, or writing blog posts that we literally can't relax. The core brain tends to get overruled by the frontal lobes anyway, so the problem can quickly get worse. It's not the sort of thing we can think our way out of.

We all have stress in our lives, but some level of stress is actually beneficial. It can help us fight off disease conditions, defend against pain, provoke creativity, and spark enhanced performance in tasks. The key is to manage the stress, not try to eliminate all of it.

At the end of the book Devi lists a number of ways you can promote more calm in your life. Several I noted to work on are: seeking long-lasting, close ties with other people, cutting down on multitasking, and never compromising on sleep (she has an entire chapter on sleep - it's truly a wonder drug!).

3. Starlings will eat all your bird food, if you let them

I love birds, and have enjoyed keeping bird feeders for years. Starlings are a problem, though. They’re the locusts of the avian world, showing up by the dozen to swarm over my feeder. Our other guests (chickadees, finches, sparrows, cardinals, nuthatches, titmice, woodpeckers, junkos, mourning doves) have better manners and don’t eat so much. The main thing is, I just don’t like starlings, and prefer they eat somewhere else.

I did some Googling and discovered that starlings don’t like obstacles. That hatched an idea (pun sort of intended). Lowe’s has plastic fence material with 2”x2” openings. Seemed large enough for the little birds to jump through, but too large for starlings. Our cardinals and doves mostly feed on the ground, so they’re unaffected. I bought some of the fencing and rigged up a barrier around the feeder, using another shepherd’s hook and zip ties (see photo).

My initial try actually worked too well. I had the fencing rigged so all the feeder perches were obstructed. The chickadees didn’t care about that (they seem fearless in general), hardly slowing down when passing through the fence. The starlings were also keeping away, but so were the nice birds. My tweak was to slide the fencing up so the bottom perches are exposed. I figured the little birds would land there, but the starlings would still see an obstacle, and that seems to be the case. Just from watching how much bird feed we go through in a typical day, it appears the likeable birds are still feeding but without company from pesky starlings. A few starlings have figured out how to feed through the fencing, but I haven’t seen nearly as many lately. Cool!