Short Loops
Short Loops |
| In life, we all face consequences for our actions. You drink a lot and risk a hangover. Eat junk food? You risk heart problems, weight problems, and diabetes. Maybe even cancer. Ignore your dream, you won’t achieve it. Short loops embrace the concept of thinking through your actions, and experiencing the consequences, in your mind, before they happen. This short loop is a way to circumvent the actual experience and to replace a ‘long loop’ with a quick connection between your actions and what you reap. You long loop is one where you do the thing, you live it, and at some point you face the consequences. Health issues have long, long loops it feels next to impossible to connect those potato chips with heart disease. But knowledge is power, and if you know that saturated fat is bad for you, as is salt, and you know that eating that a lot has the potential to exacerbate heart problems, you’re on your way to ‘thoughts’ of a short loop, which will give you the feedback you need to make the right choice for your heart without waiting until you’ve lived the long loop and it’s too late to change it.
I love to drink wine, and I do it often. I am easily influenced by those around me, so if others are drinking I generally do too. If I’m celebrating then I’ll drink as well. The occasions add up to me drinking almost daily. I have employed short loops to ‘teach myself’ to think through my decisions about drinking a glass or 2 of wine instead of doing it on autopilot and then facing the consequences (mostly weight gain), which ensue. Seeing the connection between my actions and the consequences makes it so much easier to choose wisely. One example of a short loop you can probably relate to is that of calorie count posting by restaurants. In the past, without those, I ordered what I wanted with little thought. Now that I can see, 1000 calories in chips and guacamole, for example, I choose not to eat that. The choice is actually quite easy to make as the restaurant has created the perfect short loop for me. Order that, eat that, and gain weight, end of story. I love short loops, even if they aren’t as easy to grasp as calorie counts. Leaning into short loops for what you want, as opposed to avoiding something works as well. I want to write blog posts and create a following. I have been thinking about it for more than a year but I’ve done very little. My short loop process is to imagine I have written a post a night for close to a year, I have an active blog with followers, and I’m creating positive change in the world through my writing. None of this is true (yet!) but visioning it helps motivate me to just write this one post. This writing is a stepping stone to my dream, to which the short loop creates a connection. What do you want to give up? What do you want to bring into your life? What short loops can you create to achieve these goals?
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