Oops, I Did It Again: Breaking Bad Habits

Last night, I fell into one of my bad habits again — staying up late watching the news and scrolling through TikTok. What was supposed to be a quick 15-minute tea break turned into two hours of checking different channels, reviewing various perspectives, waiting for news headlines, seeking more analysis, and then switching to TikTok to see what people were saying and how they felt.

Ever since I was 17 years old, I've been fascinated by the news. My father was a journalist and editor, and news and current affairs were just part of my life. I remember watching him pace up and down, intrigued and excited on the day that Mandela was released from prison. It was an amazing story. I would come home from school to him shouting about the latest world events.

My dad was larger than life, and he was deeply fascinated by world events — reading about them, understanding them, and reporting on them. It's no surprise that I inherited this fascination and interest in the news.

My bad habit started when I was about 16. I would stay up late working on my art projects, and in the background, before the days of on-demand television, I would have the sound of BBC News keeping me company during late-night work sessions. I can remember my dad questioning me, but as a high achiever, I had a vision for my art that needed to be achieved, and I had an interest in current affairs — I wanted to know what was going on.

As a 17-year-old student, I wasn't what you would expect — a news addict interested in current affairs. I never really fit into the boxes people put me in. Muscle memory of climbing into bed, doing my mind maps late at night, working on my art with the news in the background became ingrained.

Last year, I was fascinated by different perspectives. People would say, "Robyn, you don't even come across as a deep thinker. You should've been in sales. You need to be passionate." The contradictions amazed me, and I wanted to know why.

Over the last 12 months, I've been on a journey to understand whether the characters others see in me are real. I've learned that they are all parts of me. As a byproduct, I developed a model to help me identify my habits and understand how they show up in different situations.

Like my dad, I was intrigued by the story of the day — the late-night Signal conversation. Yes, this is another chapter in a volatile period of US politics, but my first thought was, "Are they really using Signal to discuss war plans?"

Over the last six months, I've been supporting a defence organisation to implement better collaboration tools for this exact scenario — to securely and safely manage conversations only with those who are allowed access within the sovereignty jurisdiction permitted.

One thing I've learned in a modern workplace environment is that giving people technology is not enough. It takes a while to actually get people's habits to change, and something tells me that maybe these guys' habits had been to use that app.

To change, we need to take our unconscious beliefs, reprogram them, and create a sustained reward system that becomes the default state. Over the last 12 months, I've been working on understanding how we change these habits.

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