By Caspar Chittenden, Co-founder and Head Coach, Path Community
Living on autopilot means running your days on habit, with little conscious choice about how you spend them. Work, home and evenings repeat on a loop. Nothing is badly wrong, but the weeks stop leaving a mark. It builds through many small, sensible decisions, and it breaks when you stop and ask whether you chose the life you are living.
What the research says about autopilot
Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used a phone app to ask 2,250 adults, at random moments, what they were doing and what they were thinking about. People’s minds were wandering from the task in front of them almost half the time. They were also less happy while their minds wandered, whatever the activity. The study was published in Science in 2010. Autopilot saves effort, and it also takes you out of your own life while you are living it.
Why does autopilot happen?
Autopilot happens because your brain hands repeated tasks over to habit to save energy. The route to work, the evening routine, the replies you give at dinner all run without much thought. That is efficient for driving. It becomes a problem when whole areas of life run the same way: your relationship, your health, what you want from the next ten years.
Nobody chooses it. You skip a hard conversation because you are tired. You say yes to something you did not want because no felt like effort. You stop asking what you want because answering takes energy you no longer have by 9pm. Stack those up for a few years and the routine runs itself. When men first describe this in our circles, they rarely talk about a crisis. They talk about years that blurred together.
What are the signs you are living on autopilot?
- You cannot say what made last Tuesday different from this one.
- You arrive home with no memory of the drive.
- You are in the room with your family but your head is elsewhere.
- You say yes before you have decided whether you want to.
- Things that used to interest you barely register.
- You reach for your phone the second there is a gap in the day.
Is living on autopilot bad for you?
Living on autopilot is a normal part of how the brain works, and it does some damage when it becomes the default for whole areas of life. The cost shows up slowly: relationships that drift, health that slides, years that pass without a clear decision about where they were heading. The Killingsworth and Gilbert findings suggest the cost to day-to-day happiness is real as well.
Is autopilot the same as burnout?
Autopilot and burnout are different, though one can lead to the other. Autopilot feels flat and repetitive, but you still have energy. Burnout adds exhaustion, irritability and a sense of being unable to cope. If you feel numb as well as flat, or tired in a way rest does not fix, read the signs of burnout.
How do I break out of autopilot?
Breaking out of autopilot starts with one honest question: what am I getting from this routine, and what is it costing me? Write the answer down. Then say it out loud to another man, in a room where he will not simply nod and move the conversation on. That does more in an hour than months of thinking about it alone.
This is the territory our free on-demand masterclass was built for.
Sources
- Killingsworth, M. and Gilbert, D. (2010), A wandering mind is an unhappy mind, Science. Summary: Harvard Gazette
Inside Path Community, this is the work. Get uncomfortable enough to say it out loud, hold yourself accountable for what you commit to next, and back another man doing the same thing.
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