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To ring in 2018, my husband and I decided to have a small get together at our house. He was feeling a little under the weather and decided to take a nap just before our guests arrived.
“So…you can get all the hors d'oeuvres ready without me?” he asked with a furrowed brow. “Of course!” I replied indignantly, waving him out of the kitchen, “All I have to do is pour drinks and take the food out of the oven!”
When our friends arrived, I requested their beverage orders, and to a person, they looked genuinely surprised. A few minutes later, I grabbed a potholder, removed the food from the oven, and began transferring it to a serving platter. My friends audibly gasped.
“Okay, you guys,” I demanded, “What’s the deal?”
They were all quiet for a few seconds. Finally, someone said, “I haven’t seen you take anything out of the oven since 2006!” They all burst out laughing. I made a mental note to figure out why.
Here’s the thing: I love to cook. I started in college and honed my craft as a cash-strapped graduate student who couldn’t afford to eat out. But when I entered the corporate world, I was so busy that I started spending less and less time in the kitchen. My husband, a prince among men, gradually picked up the slack. The change was so gradual that I didn’t even notice it—but over time, I had completely stopped doing something I loved.
You’ve probably heard the parable of the boiling frog: if you place a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out. But if you place it in warm water and bring the pot slowly to a boil, the frog won’t notice until it’s too late. As an animal lover, I am rather horrified by this analogy, but it illustrates an unsettling truth about human behavior: when things change slowly and for the worse, we often don’t notice.
Research shows that it’s the reason, for example, that increasingly unethical corporate behavior isn’t called out until a huge scandal erupts, as we saw with Enron and Wells Fargo. It’s how companies like Kodak can go from market leadership to obsolescence. It’s how democratically elected governments can become murderous, totalitarian regimes, as was the case in Nazi Germany.
On a more personal level, our failure to spot these small behavior changes can have enormous consequences. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that you’ve become more miserable in your job over the years and now hate what you’re doing. Or you’ve let your everyday stress build up and don’t notice until you are completely burnt out. Or you’ve slowly moved away from healthy eating and one day realize that you’re ten pounds heavier.
What “creep-up habits” have you fallen into over the months or years? Oftentimes, we are so focused on what we want to change about our lives that we don’t pay attention to what we want to maintain.
I challenge you to ask yourself, “What might be missing from my life that used to make me happy?” If you feel stuck, ask someone who knows you well—as is often the case, other people can help us see what we’ve been missing.
Then, make sure to act on what you learn (I, for one, vow to get back into cooking!). As psychiatrist Jean Shinoda Bolen once said, “when you recover…something that nourishes your soul and brings you joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.” We all deserve that.
