Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. --Viktor E. Frankl

Pinball is a game where you use flippers to bat a steel ball around an electronic playing field, scoring points as the ball bangs into lighted targets, holes, lanes, ramps, and other objects.

If you watch someone play pinball, it seems random. Pinball, in fact, was outlawed because it looked too much like random chance instead of a game of skill. City fathers across the country banned and sledgehammered the devices, alleging that pinball was more like slot machines for kids. Pinball fans had to fight the perception, and proved in the 1970s that pinball takes legitimate skill and have won their right for pinball to continue to exist.

As a pinball player, I remember the first time that I watched a really good player, though. Instead of using the flipper to reactively bat the ball as soon as it touched the flipper, the player I was watching held the ball and let it rest on the back of the flipper! That hold changes everything. It pauses the game.

From a stopped ball, a player can think ahead, look for targets, and aim. The player can perform better both tactically and strategically and score more points, more extra balls, more credits, and earn his initials on the high-score list.

Compare this to our own selves, ricocheting through our own day. We spend much of our day in habit-space. We react to triggers/cues with pre-programmed responses that thousands of repetitions of behaviors that result in self-reinforcing rewards. When we're actually thinking ahead, and behaving differently to new intentions -- that's usually the rare exception. The general and seemingly desired rule seems to be to behave "intuitively" or naturally like we see everyone else effortlessly doing.

When we act carefully and with intention, it takes much more effort. This is one reason why weight loss, while simple, is also difficult. CICO is simple. Getting a human to do it reliably over the great amount of time needed is what makes it hard. We can observe this because people tire of all the thinking and decision-making involved. "I'm thinking about food all day," says the dieter. "I'm obsessing over the numbers," observes the calorie counter. "I have no idea what to eat," says the adult who has eaten every day of their life.

Before they started working on their efforts, they weren't thinking about it much at all and it was effortless. The good news, though, is that if they push through these valid and frustrated feelings, that it does get easier. Habits bend. Cues can be intercepted. We can hack our behaviors and form new effort-free automatically-executing habits.

Key to this is learning how to stop our impulse-reaction and think for a moment. There's actually time elapsing between the impulse to eat and finding ones face in the fridge, and if we can inject a pause in that space, we can do something else. So what can we do?

• log/track/photograph food before choosing/eating it
• write in a journal about what we're doing/feeling before we decided to eat
• take a walk, brush our teeth, have a bath
• get a glass of water
• prepare to eat mindfully: set a space at the table, turn off screens, turn on music, light a candle
• focus on the feeling or absence of physical hunger
• opt to prepare most of our meals and snacks instead of choosing already prepared meals and snacks

Recently, I started doing something new that has helped me "hold the ball" after dinner. It's my habit to have something sweet, so I started baking my sweets one serving at a time. This helps me add space between urge and reaction because I don't have anything immediately ready-to-eat when the stress or boredom hits.

Even when we decide to (or cave in) and go off plan, adding that pause and allowing for some additional thinking can help us go off plan in a superior way than randomly bouncing around the pantry. It may feel like failure, but eating two crackers when you would have otherwise eaten the box is "failing better." If we're going to dig a hole in our plan, let's at least make it a smaller hole. (Tip: Thinking ahead and failing better can also become habits -- it gets easier every time.)

So let's think with guilt-free cool heads about our impulse-reactions and see how we can add some space -- time we can hold our ball, pause the game, and think ahead.

^{♂55 5'11/179㎝ SW:298℔/135㎏ CW:183℔/83㎏ [3Y AMA], [1Y recap] MyFitnessPal+Walks🚶Hikes+TOPS}

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