When I want a thrill, I walk to the corner store without my phone. Leaving the house like that, with only wallet and keys, feels physically strange and wrong, like I forgot to wear underwear.

Even though I didn’t have a mobile phone for the first half of my life, ten minutes without it somehow feels unsafe. If I need to call in an emergency or something – or, much more likely, if I want to ignore my surroundings and check email while I’m waiting in line – I will be utterly helpless.

This uneasy, lost-at-sea feeling isn’t caused by being without phone access for a few minutes. It’s just what it feels like to defy a powerful habit. After all, the more often I do the thing, the weaker that feeling gets.

The mind just doesn’t want you to deviate from habits, whether they’re good or bad ones. “You can’t do this to me!” it shouts, as you lock the door with your phone sitting on the kitchen table. “We had a deal!”

The mind is wrong about that. You can do a thing that feels weird, which will quickly make it feel less weird.

It feels weird because you’re turning off a kind of autopilot that’s been running for a long time. When you always do a thing a certain way, your whole life forms itself around that certain way, right down to your bodily movements and your thoughts. When your friend heads to the restroom, your hand just moves to the phone and begins thumbing through memes or sports scores whatever. The mind joins the body in this zombie ritual, hunting for novelty and Likes, for the ten thousandth time.

There is no deciding, no controlling, no piloting going on here. The system is executing its programmed routine, and the destination is whatever it is.

Whenever autopilot kicks off, it’s jarring, because you’re thrust suddenly into manual mode. Decisive action is required, immediately. The craft lurches, the yokes start tilting, and the whole thing drifts to the left. Yikes! Someone has to fly the plane!

But it’s your plane, this life of yours, and you’re the only one allowed in the cockpit.

The unpleasant moment when autopilot kicks off

I believe that we can benefit a lot from that moment of discombobulation, where you reach for the habitual thing and it’s not there. It turns your brain on and brings you into the moment. Inevitably, this is less comfortable than letting an automated program (a habit) handle the moment, but it’s also freeing. When you have to fly the plane yourself, you lose that sense of ease and comfort, but now you can actually decide where it’s going.

Especially for us cradle-of-civilization types, adult human lives are mostly guided by our many autopilot (i.e. habit) systems, but you can gain a lot by selectively disabling one of them for a little while. Taking manual control is nerve-wracking, but only because you tend to let the system handle most of it.

I mean, you are the pilot right?

What happens when you fly manual for a while

In November I started a discussion forum for readers who wanted to give something up for a month, in the spirit of fasting or renunciation, the kind voluntary doing-without many traditional cultures have practiced, for a variety of reasons.

In this group, each person chooses and shuts off a habit, an autopilot program — drinking alcohol, having sweets after dinner, doomscrolling, making sarcastic comments – some repeating pattern that seems to be taking them to the wrong destination. They keep it off for a month.

We’re on month two now, and more than a hundred people have reported their experiences. Most of them report a certain arc to their campaign:

1. They feel stuck or trapped by a habit and decide to change it. They don’t like where things are headed, so they renounce the habit temporarily. No more staying up past midnight. No more after-work cocktail. No more doomscrolling.

2. Doing the new thing is awkward and jarring at first. Eating a 600-calorie dinner when you normally have 1000 feels dissatisfying. Biting your tongue when you’d normally complain feels like you’re trying to submerge a beach ball.

3. They’re tempted to put autopilot back on. Flying the plane manually is stressful. It feels forced and unsustainable. It takes so much effort to do things this new way. Is this your life now? Dinner is disappointing forever?

4. The “forced” feeling weakens. After a week or so, the club soda and lime stops feeling so forced and lame. The whiskey seems less magnetic to the mind. In fact, it might even become a bit off-putting — people discover that their old habit had short-term costs they’re suddenly free of. Sleep is better. They’re saving money. At this point, the behavior still has to be managed, but it’s manageable now.

5. The direction and destination have changed. Soon, the plane is pointing in a better direction, it’s not so stressful to keep it pointed there, and there are new rewards happening that the person wants to keep. It no longer feels so effortful pick up a book instead of the phone, or end dinner without dessert. The mind is encoding new muscle-memories and thought habits, making the beginnings of a new autopilot program, this time to a better destination.

Depending on the habit, it might take longer than a month before the plane is fully flying itself to the new destination. But it’s encouraging to see how quickly you can change course if you endure that initial “Oh no, someone has to fly the plane!” moment.

Before seeing so many people describe the above pattern, I’ve often interpreted that moment of discombobulation, with its drifting dials and blinking caution lights, as proof that things are going wrong, that I’m taking too big a leap, that I need to prepare or study more before I try to fly the plane.

Now I see it as a feeling worth seeking, because it’s the feeling of taking control. I’ve been trying to recognize and embrace this feeling even in its micro-forms. Walking into a into a shop you don’t feel entirely comfortable in, for example, triggers a moment of disorientation, which quickly fades. Now you can go to that place. Same with trying a recipe that seems too tricky, or talking to someone you feel a bit intimidated by.

That “oh no” feeling is a good feeling, not in the sense that it’s pleasant, but that it’s good for you. It’s the feeling of learning to fly the plane to where you actually want it to go.

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If you want to join the renunciation group, you can join the forum here.