Knowing When it’s the Last Time

Because Sometimes, Our Behaviors No Longer Serve Us

How many times in your life have you done something for the last time?

I don’t mean the, “FOR THE LAST TIME!” one might shout in a heated moment, just to withdraw the statement after gaining some distance. I also don’t mean the same words blurted out in shame or embarrassment or even the very similar “I promise, it will never happen again.”

No judgment in those cases, it’s just not what we’re talking about today.

When we have the instinct to make an activity or behavior our last one, it’s often out of anger, frustration, or regret. It happens at a point where we are in damage-control mode, or when our judgement is clouded by emotion. These may even be valid situations when we should be strongly considering giving up whatever it was to cause that anger or regret, but there’s another breed of giving up that is worth addressing and making use of to better ourselves.

I’m referring to any instance when we decide with a cool head, that we have or are currently doing something for the last time.

Has this ever occurred in your life?

It doesn’t need to be an emotional decision. Maybe that’s the thing hardest to convey as someone who has done so, or relate to as someone who hasn’t. As the person relinquishing a once-loved activity, you’ll likely acknowledge that the thing you’re giving up has some appeal. It may have served you well in the past. It may be true that you’ve never suffered any harm at all from it.

You can resolutely know that —whatever the activity in question — it was worth doing all the times before. And still, you can realize that it’s time to let it go.

So, has this happened to you?

This was the decision that I made recently after attending the “Big Texas Beer Fest,” a large-scale local beer tasting event which I used to love.

This year, I acknowledged silently to myself while surrounded by raucous laughter, colorful tents, and the distinct clatter of a sample glass nearby falling to the floor, would be my last at this particular event. The knowledge was a little bittersweet, as it had become something of a tradition amongst my group of friends. We’ve attended for about four years in a row and always enjoyed it in the past.

The event includes dozens of local breweries, set up with booths to sample from over a Saturday afternoon. Guests receive 2-oz beer samples from the hundreds to choose from in an adorable miniaturized plastic beer glass.

In past years, my group arrived early. We stood in line before the doors opened and stayed until the last call for drinks four hours later. We got caught up in the festival scene, refilling our tiny sample glasses with additional beers for as long as we were allowed. We had to get our money’s worth, we joked.

At the announcement of last call, security guards would start ushering people out of the building. We would leave politely, but be disappointed that the event was over. Some years, we would go to a restaurant afterwards for dinner and potentially some additional drinks.

You might think you know where this is going, but let me be clear. While we were admittedly drinking more than was good for us, we didn’t get rowdy or sick. No one got in a fight or was arrested for public indecency. There was no rock bottom.

In fact, this article isn’t about drinking!

Giving up the Beer Fest was not about it becoming self-destructive. Sorry, if that’s what you were hoping for, but this isn’t that kind of story! Aren’t there enough movies about someone struggling to fix their train-wreck of a life?

Even habits that aren’t self-destructive can be worth giving up.

The biggest factor in giving up the Beer Fest and events like it, is that I no longer have an appetite for unlimited drinking in a limited period of time. This open-bar paradigm used to be something that I sought out. Even while planning to attend the festival this year, I thought it could be something I enjoy once in a while. There as a time in my life, not long ago, when bottomless beverages sounded like a great opportunity, and a great deal!

But this year, it was different. Simply put, the hype and excitement of the previous years just wasn’t there. Nothing had changed about the event, so I can only assume something has changed in me.

For the first time, we left early. At a certain point, my husband and I looked at each other and shared the pseudo telepathic glance that says I’m ready to go when you are. If you’ve been in a relationship, friendly or romantic, for long enough, you’ll know what I mean.

We ended up leaving over an hour before the end of the event, content that we had sampled enough. We had tried the newest creations from our favorite breweries and enjoyed samples of returning champions from last year. We poured out the samples that we didn’t enjoy — in buckets meant for it, not on the floor. We aren’t animals! — rather than gulping them down to finish them off and move on to the next one.

The experience was perfect pleasant, but by the time we got home, we knew that we had no plans to go back. As I mentioned earlier, the festival itself was much the same. It was I who had changed.

Last fall, my husband and I both realized that we needed to realign our habits in life. We had taken a few long trips in the summer and fall with too much drinking and too much dining out. We decided in order to recalibrate our lives, we would try an approximation of a mental fortitude program called 75-Hard. If you haven’t heard of it, keep an eye out for an article focusing on this program and its impact in the coming weeks.

We called our modified version 70-GYST for “Get Your Shit Together”. The program involved completing a checklist of habits daily in order to build discipline and work towards a better life, such as not drinking, working out, and sticking to a chosen diet. It got us moving in the right direction, but we still had work to do. In the end, 70-GYST was a stepping stone for us to start the real 75-Hard program on January 2nd of this year.

Both of these programs resulted in a massive change in mindset, which has carried forward over the past six months. I’ll tell you more about it in a future blog, but the bottom line is that I developed a more concrete sense of purpose. I wanted to make sure that everything I allowed to take up space in my life was serving me, and I lost my patience for any activity that I could see was holding me back.

I have always had a habit of periodically reevaluating my choices. I’m aware that these choices lead to patterns, which become habits. It’s important to evaluate your behaviors and decide with an open-mind if they still serve you, or if it’s worth reclaiming that time and space in your life for something better aligned with your values. That’s exactly what I did for the beer festival, and it wasn’t the first time.

A Lifetime of Last Times

Growing up, I played computer games with my family. I sunk hours into Diablo, Warcraft, RuneScape, WoW, and many others. For a long time, I couldn’t imagine a me who didn’t immerse myself in virtual worlds. It was a part of my identity.

When I finished high school and left for college, I made the conscious decision that I would no longer play video games as a daily hobby. I still enjoyed them, but in the grand scheme I knew that my time could be put to a much better use between coursework, socialization, and — you know, learning to be a functioning adult. The investment of time in virtual games with digital prizes fell off my list of priorities, so I dropped it from my life pretty abruptly and decisively upon starting college.

For many years as an adult, I played another game, though this one a highly social game in which you build an ongoing story through collaboration and creativity. I’m talking about D&D, in case you’ve heard of it. I played this game one night per week with my husband and a group of our friends. Early on, it facilitated meeting friends after moving to a new city, and even until the end I enjoyed the creativity of it as well as the socialization, but after several years, I felt a shift.

There are so many things I want to accomplish in the course of my life, and giving up a full evening every week felt like a herculean investment of time. I decided that I could put that time to better use working on a blog, or a cookbook, building custom software, making artwork, or starting my own business.

Between my awareness of my priorities and the clarity of the time commitment involved in D&D, it became clear to me that this behavior was no longer moving my life forward, and was therefore holding me back from working on something more meaningful to me. My priorities had shifted yet again, and I decided to spend that time working toward one of my many projects.

What does it mean for a behavior not to serve us?

These examples are some that have been large changes in my life, but in reality there have been thousands. Always a deliberate shift, these changes usually end with a similar effect. Giving up the activities, foods, habits, and friendships that had reached a natural breaking point has been one way I have gradually shaped my life for the better.

How can we know which behaviors no longer serve us, or when the right time is to cut them out of our lives?

The first step is just to be aware that we are always evolving and that the things that do serve us now may not later. This fact makes it necessary to check in on habits with an objective viewpoint in case our values or circumstances have changed. If we periodically take the time to consider our behaviors, we can catch the subtle signs that indicate they have become a net negative, or just neutral in our lives.

Don’t waste your time doing anything that is a net negative. In fact, don’t waste your time on anything that is a net neutral either.

Sure, you could argue that it’s neutral to do something nice for a friend at your own expense, but you’d be wrong, and I think you know it. That’s alright. It’s healthy to play devil’s advocate sometimes. If that friend is someone of value to you, and that the friendship itself has overall is boon to your life, then your expense is an investment that pays dividends of all the benefits of your friendship. It might feel neutral in an isolated moment taken out of context, but be positive overall.

Don’t stop everything your doing to spend time evaluating every single choice, by the way. You’d never get anything done. Live your life, but as you do so, think about why you are acting in a certain way, rather than mindlessly doing whatever comes naturally.

• If a friend asks you to join them for a happy hour, do you accept because it’s just “what you do,” or because you think that some time spent with that friend will recharge you so that you can return at full energy the next day?
• If you decide to flip on the TV while eating dinner, is it just “what you do” or is it because you genuinely want to watch something, and that the time to decompress in front of the TV will allow you to focus better after dinner?

Pro Tip: If you turn on the TV to watch something during dinner, but are still there 3 hours later, it probably isn’t just to decompress. At least as a daily pattern. A show marathon once in a while doesn’t hurt, just make sure you’re doing it on purpose.

By becoming an arbiter of your choices, you will stop living on autopilot and cultivate the habits that serve you rather than those that sabotage you. Keep the ones that have a net positive impact on your life.

It’s possible that “net positive” includes unpleasant activities that need to be performed as an investment — in a skill, a relationship, or other future benefit. These activities will exist, and you’ll decide to keep many of them. On the other hand, net positive can also include behaviors with no future value, but which bring pleasure or enjoyment in the near-term, as long as they are balanced and not self-destructive. What? Did you think we would sacrificing all of our current pleasures for our future good?

Surprise! There are cases where pleasure wins out in the negative-positive algorithm.

By “pleasure”, I don’t mean dopamine. If that’s all you want, you can get it from cheap entertainment, alcohol, porn, and junk food. Those are still largely net negatives. The positive pleasures that I’m talking about are those with depth, which bring fulfillment or rest. You may have a non-productive hobby, but performing that hobby relieves frustration, or causes a shift from your normal thinking patterns. If a few hours of rest will let you double your productivity when you return to the grind, the math just adds up.

As another example, drinking alcohol in isolation would surely be a net negative. In context however, I currently find that it can create value. Despite my decision about the Beer Fest, I have not given up drinking altogether, thought it’s something I routinely reevaluate about myself, and could see doing in the future.

I value some situations, such as an evening discussing my husband’s novel ideas over a bottle of wine, as a net positive in the current scope of my life. Sure, we could do the same without wine, but having it there makes it easier to disguise the productive discussion as a date, and the slight buzz of alcohol seems to benefit the process of generating outrageous ideas which just might work to tie the disjointed story elements together.

Evaluating Your Own Behaviors

When evaluating your own behaviors, take the short-term and long-term effects into account. Think about the time commitment of the behavior, the financial impact, and how it will effect your progress toward your goals. Some other areas to consider are relationships, career, and health. Once all of these have been factored in, if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll have a pretty good idea whether the behavior should stay or go.

For me, the process of deliberating on a particular habit before making a judgement if it stays or goes is not extremely structured. It starts with a gut feeling, letting me know there’s something to investigate, and after some time and thought one direction naturally feels right. All the factors mentioned above are included in my internal processing, but I don’t make a pros and cons list for each area or draw out a chart in order to assign value and calculate a numerical representation of value for each behavior.

Honestly, that would take too long, so I don’t recommend it.

In fact, the time commitment has often been the largest reason for me choosing to cut out behaviors or hobbies. It allows me to focus on fewer things, and invest in the activities that are the most meaningful to me.

But I do have one shortcut to recommend if you aren’t certain of the value of your behaviors. If you struggle to factor in all of the elements that contribute to the value of an activity, start with time. If all other costs were equal, are you spending your time in a way that aligns with your values and priorities? If you can confidently say you are, at this point in your life, Congratulations! You can check self-evaluation off your to-do list.

If not, then it’s time to start making small shifts in the direction you want to go.

The Elephant(s) in the Friend Group

I can’t end this article without admitting that the biggest reason for me to not give up behaviors even when I know I should, has been my friends. I suspect it will be the same for many of you.

When you make big changes to your life, it will impact your friends and family. It’s unavoidable. However, if you are changing for the better, that’s not a bad thing. You could inspire them to change with you and end up raising your friend group up alongside you. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen, and amongst a handful of friends you will likely have to accept that some will not. Be respectful of their decision either way.

But more importantly, be clear about your own intentions and be honest about your reasons. If you change silently, you are both more likely to clash with confused friends and also more likely to regress yourself. So, perhaps the most important recommendation: don’t leave the door open for your friends to prevent you from making the choices you want.

For example, if you’ve decided that Beer Fest no longer serves you, don’t offer to go to Beer Fest in order to keep your friend company. You’ll find other activities to share, maybe some that are new to both of you. You can also create opportunities for those friends to come with you on your self-improvement journey, but accept that they may not.

If it’s important to you to work towards a better life — and if you’re reading this, I believe it is — then it all stems from being intentional about your life.

Everything takes time, and you shouldn’t expect to do a total overhaul of your life overnight. If you start your evaluation with the most time-consuming of your current behaviors, you’ll quickly start to see incremental improvements.

Invest the time and mental effort to evaluate your habits and behaviors, and learn to recognize when they no longer serve you. Over time, you can eliminate the behaviors that hold you back or waste you time. With all the time you save, you’ll be able to try new things and add in behaviors that drive you forward toward your goals.