Greener Living Through Mind Tricks

This is my first entry to the Affluent Persons Living Sustainably or APLS Carnival. January’s topic is mind tricks used to help choose the greener option, especially when it is not, at least at first glance, the easier one. The selected entries will be hosted by VWXYNot? on January 22 so be sure to visit and read what everyone has to say.

When we first decided to live a greener life, Richard and I did not realize how challenging it would be at times. We thought we would do our research and start working our way through a checklist that surely someone had put together.

While we found suggestions for changes we could make, it turned out that it wasn’t the big one-time changes that would make the largest difference. It was the many small habits that we needed to address to really green our family.

The difficulty in addressing habits is that they are, well, habitual. As in actions that are performed without thought. We thus had to think about the things that we weren’t thinking about! Since we weren’t thinking about them, recognizing the habits in need of change was often difficult.

Our budget was limited so we couldn’t bypass this issue by greening everything in our life at once. We decided to target our spending by first concentrating on what went in our bodies, figuring this would get us the biggest bang for our (limited) buck. Narrowing the field was our first mind trick.

Thank goodness we chose just one area to focus on because who knew we had so many habits related to food that needed a greener approach? It turned out that not all the choices, in this or in other areas, were black and white so we needed a mental construct on which to base our decisions. The one we continually came back to was, “Will this decision provide our family with more choices or fewer choices in the future?”

Faced with a choice to buy something we wanted but didn’t need, this question gave us the answer – we’d have fewer choices if we spent money just to satisfying a craving so we wouldn’t make the purchase. If we had to pick between an item that could be reused and an item that was single use, we’d select the reuseable option to increase our future choices. If we had a choice between organic food and nonorganic food, we’d go with the organics to preserve our health, thus maintaining our future options. Asking ourselves if a decision would give us more choices or fewer choices in the future was our second mind trick.

We had two children during this period so time constraints became a serious issue. We found ourselves making healthy decisions for our children but not always for ourselves. The girls were eating organic everything but we were sometimes ordering off of Wendy’s Value Meal menu. The third mind trick we used was asking, “Would I share this product/food/experience with my child?”

If the answer was no, then we needed to rethink. This was a hard one, both because it typically required forethought to have other options available and because it was sometimes difficult to spend on ourselves. We had to remind each other about the importance of self-care often. Over time, we’ve become better about planning and caring for our own needs more consistently.

This question looped us back to the first question, although in a spiral rather than a complete circle. Now, instead of wondering only if a decision would increase or decrease options for our family, we asked if it would do the same for other families. Thinking about the global impact of our choices was our fourth mind trick.

This is our current sleight-of-mind and I believe it is the one that will have the greatest impact on our life. We know there are other families around the world who are living without many choices. We’re continuing to green our family so all children, ours and others, will have a bright future.

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