It’s worth asking ourselves every now and again why we do things. Call it reflection, self awareness, mindfulness or whatever other label you’d like, we need it because so often we can’t remember how or why certain behaviours became a habitual part of our lives. Why is this important? Because whether we like to admit it or not, and despite our best intentions to the contrary, a lot of the things that we do to ourselves and the people around us are shitty and destructive. It’s rarely an active decision, very few people wake up and decide that they want to become bad at their job, alienate their friends or damage their health and yet, one bad habit at a time, we all end up doing those things. Those stupid, lazy and thoughtless things accumulate until we’re unhappy, unhealthy and angry with the world.

When we hit miserable points in our life we usually look for something external to blame our malaise on, be it family, friends or our jobs, and sometimes we also look for someone else to sell us a solution to all of our problems, as if a book, DVD or new kitchen can help relieve the stresses that eat us up. The reality is that, even when we are beset by crappy circumstances, they’re rarely at the heart of our problems and every time we lay blame at someone else’s feet we’re giving up on the ability to solve our own problems. Just as true is that we can’t decide by fiat that our life will be completely different starting tomorrow, regardless of which book we buy from Oprah’s book club list.

Changing attitudes and habits is a slow process and it’s even harder if we’re trying to change a whole bunch of them at once, in fact it’s a recipe for failure.

So how do we avoid the clichés and the snake oil salesmen while removing some of the crap from our life? It’s easier than we think, it can be as incremental as we want it to be and it doesn’t have to cost anything, we just need to decide to stop doing things that are shit. That might sound a bit generic, and not particularly instructive, but the reality is that most of us already know the things we do that are stupid, petty or unhelpful, but we either ignore or excuse them. We end up carrying a psychic burden for every shitty thing in our lives, whether it’s fear or guilt, but we seem to avoid what’s right in front of us and try to find solutions in new ideas or plans. So often we look at our lives as a long list of things that we feel we should be doing to improve ourselves, like exercising more, flossing regularly or reading better books, and it seems unattainable because we’re still dragging along all of the crap that consumes us. We’re getting it backwards, convinced that our problems are rooted in what we’re not doing yet, rather than seeing that it’s actually all about the poor choices and shitty things that we already have dragging us down.

We’ve been conditioned to do a lot of shitty things so we often don’t even question the shit things we do, like buying oversized houses and filling them with crap we don’t need to impress people we don’t like or the way that fringe benefit tax used to reward us if we drove our car an above average distance every year.

Deciding to stop doing things that are shit isn’t just about trying not to be an arsehole, it’s about challenging the way we think and the things that we do one at a time and shedding the crap that actually leaves us worse off. When you stop doing things that are shit, you make more space in your life to do things that you value because the clutter gets left behind. Imagine what you could achieve in the time you waste watching Today Tonight, how much less stressed you could be with a smaller car payment, or how much more at ease you could be if you let go of old slights and insults.

The hardest part of the solution is being willing to label things we do as ‘shit’ so we can start to leave it behind. It’s easy to say “I should exercise more”, but it’s hard to say “I have to stop eating fast food, cause it’s shit”. The thing is though, that it’s hard to start exercising more, while it’s actually pretty easy to stop eating food that we all know will make us overweight and possibly lead to heart disease or diabetes. Once you question why you do something, and admit that it’s shit, leaving it behind is actually pretty easy.

The best thing is that you don’t need to sit down and make a list of your failings as an exercise in self-flagellation to begin stopping doing things that are shit, more often than not, you know when you’re doing something that’s shit because you feel it in the pit of your stomach, a weight that you can choose to either carry with the rest of your crap, or avoid by finding a better solution.

Sure, that might not work for sociopaths and Herald Sun columnists, but for the vast majority of us we’re already getting the signal to assess our behaviour, we just need to listen to it a bit more often, and be more choosy about what we carry with us as a result.

When you stop doing things that are shit it doesn’t just improve your life, it improves things for everyone around you because you’re no longer seeing everything through the filter of crap that interferes with your relationships and your decision making. Put away the self improvement to do list, don’t look for a new system to follow, don’t even try to sacrifice all of your vices at once, just make the decision to gradually stop doing things that are shit.

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