My wife bought quite some time ago a very cheap saran wrap. It is an awful product, it is self-sticking and the in-built wrap cutter does not do what it is supposed to do. For some time we both were pretty annoyed with it until I finally proclaimed, that we must buy another, higher quality product – the one we usually buy. On our next shopping tour we bought it. That was about a month ago. Since then the new roll is lying around in the kitchen without having been opened.

Why? For some non-obvious reasons, both my wife and I are not able to throw away the old crappy product without a strong conscious effort. A reasonable explanation would be of course that the old roll is not finished yet. There is some logics to that. However, this is Neanderthal-thinking. The cheap roll costs 1.15 sFr, whereas the new one costs 3.15 sFr. And for this lousy 1.15 sFr. we are suffering for months, getting upset everytime we use the wrap.

There seem to be two unconscious and conflicting programming modes at work:

1. Keeper habit: Don’t ever throw away a perfectly useful product, however annoying its handling is.
2. Economic logic: It costs only 50% of a coffee. Why should I care at all? I don’t want to be annoyed every time I use the wrap.

And indeed the second thought – the economic logic – was the reason we bought the new roll before the old roll was over. But so far the keeper habit has won.

Now, this is, of course, a totally trivial example. But the implications of the underlying causes are quite important.

Only by thinking carefully about it consciously, while writing this post, the underlying programming of the keeper habit has become weaker. This is obviously the right time to throw away the old roll.

It shows much deeper subconscious connections of different conflicting programmings. The keeper habit is deeply ingrained in me and many other people, probably genetically programmed by my ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago, where scarcity was the norm. It made and makes me endure a lot of annoyances just for the sake of keeping something useless, because it is not finished, or because it might prove useful one day. Becoming conscious of such programming is very valuable since now that you know about it, you can slowly start changing it.

What happens is this: when two conflicting unconscious habits try to influence your behavior, paralysis is usually the result. Depending on their relative strengths this can go on indefinitely until you consciously break the loop. In the saran wrap example it took several weeks of daily use until my economic logic habit finally kicked in and managed a partial win: we have bought the new, more expensive wrap. But that success was short lived, because right thereafter the keeper habit dominated again and stopped me from replacing the old roll with the new one.

So, what can you do to detect the subconscious programmings?

You cannot directly access your subconscious programmings, unfortunately. But you can see their sometimes detrimental actions by pausing and analyzing. If you have analyzed and gathered enough cases of odd behavior, you can start deducing the most likely programming at work. By becoming conscious about it, you will automatically diminish its influence on your behavior.

In case of the keeper habit, my strategy is to write down all annoyances in my days, in particular the ones that are caused by faulty products, or products of low quality. And then step by step improving on those thieves of inner peace.

The initial point was the saran wrap: I have identified and changed it.

There are many more, I am sure. But now that I intend to find the hinderers I will spot them more easily.