Transcript for

Episode 89:

Why You Should Make Spinning a Habit

Is spinning one of the ways you take care of yourself? Do you wish that you could spend more time spinning, but aren't sure how to cram it in to your already-overfull days? In this episode I'm going to talk about one way to make it easier to spin more.

Hello there darling Sheepspotter! Welcome to episode 89 of The Sheepspot Podcast. I'm Sasha, and my job is to help you make more yarns you love.

This month in The Guild, my membership for intermediate and advanced spinners, our theme is spinning habits. So that's going to be our theme for February here in the podcast as well.

I am fascinated by pretty much everything about habits: what they are, how they're formed, what purpose they serve, how to create them and how to break them. I think about them a lot, partly because I'm always trying to improve myself, which I've come to understand is both a good thing and a bad thing. (Trying to improve is a good thing, but the underlying insecurity that makes me want to improve not so much.) And if you're trying to get better--at anything—habits are a great place to start, because habits are automatic behaviors. We don't have to will ourselves to do them. We pretty much need to just get them going and they run by themselves. Easy Peasy. Sort of

What are habits, and why do we form them?

So habits are automatic behaviors. What does that really mean?

Our brains are always trying to conserve energy, and one of the ways they do that is that they store sequences of actions that we perform over and over again. Think about getting in your car and pulling out of your driveway. There are a lot of steps: unlocking the car, getting inside, putting your seatbelt on, starting the car, putting it into gear, and either backing out or pulling out of your driveway. I usually add plugging in my phone and choosing something to listen to while I drive. But once you perform this sequence a few times you can do it without thinking about it, right?

But put yourself in a different car, and the sequence falls apart. My husband I just bought an electric car that's quite different from our old reliable gas-powered Honda. It starts with a button. It has an automatic transmission. There's no engine noise—so it's possible to unwittingly get out the car without actually turning it off. So I have to think about every step in the sequence.

What happens when you drive an unfamiliar car is that your brain switches from that sequence of automatic behaviors, which are stored in an ancient part of the brain called the basal ganglia, and fires up a much newer part of the brain--the pre-frontal cortex, the part that makes decisions. And that kind of thinking requires more energy. So the purpose of habits is to conserve the brain's energy but putting frequent behaviors on repeat by storing them in the basal ganglia. When you get into a car that isn't yours, your prefrontal cortex kind of wakes up and realizes that the usual pattern might not work in this case and that, in order to remain safe, you need to pay attention to the process of getting out of the driveway.

The good and bad thing about this division of labor within the brain is that we don't have much conscious access to what's going on in our basal ganglia. On the upside, that means I can make my bed every day without thinking about it, and even feel a little off if I oversleep and don't have time to make the bed. On the downside, I also have a little dark chocolate before bed without thinking about it whether I'm hungry or not. Insert other bad habit here.

How can habits help us in everyday life?

So what does all this have to do with spinning? If you're not spinning as much as you'd like to, it might be useful to make some daily spinning a habitual part of your daily routine. To make it something you do every day, regardless of what's going on, regardless of whether you particularly feel like it in that moment. During the most productive times in my spinning life, I've spun ever night after dinner. I've wiped off the kitchen counter after loading the dishwasher and gone directly to my wheel. Like clockwork. When I get out of the habit, I often feel "too tired" to spin in the evenings. And of course I'm not really too tired. When I'm spinning habitually, I don't even ask myself whether I'm tired. I just start spinning.

Even better, I don't have to use my precious and limited pre-frontal cortex energy deciding to spin. I can use it to think about color, or ply structure, or other way more interesting spinning-related things. Since spinning is a major form of self-care for me, I'm much healthier when I'm spinning regularly. Spinning regularly changes my life for the better.

One of the truly diabolical things about depression, which I'm prone to, is that depression makes self-care harder. It lies to you and tells you that whatever will make you feel better won't work. Or that it's too hard. Or that I'm not worth it. So if I'm depressed in a season where I'm not spinning automatically as part of my routine and I'm deciding day by day whether to spin, I'm much less likely to spin. Same with exercise, meditation, and everything else I do to stay healthy. I need to do them automatically because if I'm relying on willpower and my pre-frontal cortex, things can go pear-shaped fast.

Knowing that you can change your life for the better by building the right habits—fiber related or not—is empowering. Routines can reduce stress by creating structure and predictability. Approximately 40% of what we do every day is driven by habit, so we might as well make sure that we're choosing habits that align with our goals and values and make us feel better instead of worse.

Coming up this month

In the next episode, I'm going to talk about how to identify the kinds of friction that may be making it hard for you to create a durable spinning habit, and eliminate them. In the episode after that, I'll talk about what the latest work in neuroscience and behavior science has to say about habits, and how you can use it to create a spinning habit—or any other habit you'd like to cultivate—more easily. I'll be drawing chiefly from the work of behavior scientist BJ Fogg on "Tiny Habits." And finally, you'll hear from some members of the guild on what their spinning habits bring to their lives.

There's a post in The Flock, Sheepspot’s free online community for inquisitive hand spinners, where you can comment on and discuss this episode if you'd like. I'd love to know whether you found this episode helpful. I'll link to it in the show notes, which you can find at sheepspot.com/podcast/episode89.

That's it for me this time. I'll be back next time with more ideas about how to create a spinning habit and keep it, and you, thriving. In the meantime, my love, spin something. You know it will do you good.