The behavior I chose that I’d like to change was grinding my teeth. I measured myself Friday through Monday (for three days), noting when the behavior occurred. I could not measure myself at regular intervals, since the behavior was not regularly occurring. Instead, I asked my friends to keep a lookout for when I was grinding my teeth, and also wrote down every time I noticed it. I realized that stopping grinding my teeth required noticing that I’d started.
Over the course of the three days, I realized that I ground my teeth primarily in response to stress, boredom, and/or having lots of down time to think. I also noted, as mentioned before, that being mindful of my actions, or being present in my body, was the only thing that made me stop grinding my teeth.
Given these findings, I drew 2 different models representing the habit ecosystem.
The first was a connection circle. As noted at the bottom, I identified only positive cycles in my connection circle. Notably, anything that led to stress led to grinding teeth, which would then lead to more stress. There were a few factors that lessened my teeth grinding, but I had no negative cycles.
After drawing a Connection Circle, I was ready to draw a Causal Loop Diagram, (CLD). I referenced this webpage for help. I identified the positive reinforcement loop mentioned above, i.e. that anything leading to stress led to more teeth grinding, which led back to stress. I also tried to draw out a potential balancing cycle: I know that contemplation leads to mindfulness, which leads to less grinding teeth. So, I was able to identify that if I had a positive link between from grinding teeth to contemplation instead of the other way around, i.e. if I thought more after grinding teeth instead of grinding teeth while thinking, I could have a balancing cycle that would lead to less grinding teeth. This was a valuable insight that the CLD depicted far more clearly than the Connection Circle.
I think this study was lacking enough factors that decreased teeth grinding, which only became apparent when drawing up the models. If I were to do this study again, I would try and actively note down what was making me stop, or what was making me pay attention to needing to stop.
(Featured image and models taken from here.)
