I have been using the men's room everywhere, all the time, for quite a while now--except at work (at my grad school alma mater). There, I used the upstairs unisex bathrooms for a year before switching to the men's. But I'm still fighting the old pattern. I was at school last week after an absence of about six months, and I almost went into the ladies', out of sheer conditioning. Yeah, that would have been nice. I guess I let myself get distracted.

Today I went to the main library at my undergrad school. I haven't peed there since I started transition. There's a set of bathrooms that I like because they're off the beaten track and don't get much traffic. I wasn't at all distracted; I was mindful that I would have to break longstanding patterns. So I was walking up to the bathrooms, telling myself, "Okay, don't go into the wrong one. Don't go where you used to go. Remember last week. Pay attention pay attention pay attention." And when I got there, I still automatically swerved right, to the women's. It's as if my mind said one thing and my body said another.

Fortunately, I was paying attention, but I guess I can't let my guard down at all when I'm in familiar places with segregated facilities. Does this happen to anyone else?

not with bathrooms but yeah , when i'm used to something for long time that i do it in a sort of automatic way , no matter how i'm paying attention i always do what i automatically do , but eventually i get used to the new thing
as for bathrooms , i rarely use public bathrooms no matter what , and when i do i tend to look for the empty and rarely visited ones rather than men or women's . i mean usually i go to a bathroom that no one ever goes to so i doesn't even matter if it's women's or men's . regardless how i feel about it but i care more about the 'empty' rather than the 'type'

I think it's called subconscious pattern recognition. You have done something or gone somewhere so often that you don't think about it. At a different level people practice and practice doing something so they no longer have to think about it. Sports people especially, or even typists  .

Sometimes you may find you are going home from work etc by the same route as ever, the road is closed for some reason and you sit there and say damn, how do I get home now, when you know of several different routes after you think about it.

We also associate places with feelings, smells, ambiance etc. If you had been going to the library for ages your brain just returns to how it use to function.

JMO
Cindy

Quote from: CindyJames on May 27, 2010, 04:12:52 AMSometimes you may find you are going home from work etc by the same route as ever, the road is closed for some reason and you sit there and say damn, how do I get home now, when you know of several different routes after you think about it.

This.  Or I'll be driving home and know I need to stop by the store, or mail something, but I get on autopilot and find that I'm almost home and forgot to go where I needed to go.

Jay

I can understand that it would happen when I'm not paying full attention, but when I'm telling myself NOT to do it? That's irritating. And it could be dangerous.

I remind myself of a horse I used to ride. We used to do these elaborate grand entries at the rodeo--splitting off into two lines, doing figure eights and cloverleaf patterns, splicing back together into one line, on and on...and at practice, this animal would learn the entire pattern after a couple of run-throughs. When the coordinator made changes and my horse's position was changed, he would fight with me tooth and nail to stick with the old pattern.

Smart little bugger. But I just feel stupid.

I live a double life for a large part of my teens - pretend to be a boy during the school week and revert to girl on the weekends. It got terribly confusing though and after a couple of "bathroom incidents" I got in the habit of stopping in front of the bathrooms to remind myself of how I was dressed.

it happens, I wouldn't get too upset over it. I guess I got so sick of going into men's rooms that I don't have that particular problem, but plenty of times I'll get on "autopilot" with my mind preoccupied by something else entirely and get totally distracted from my immediate goal. In this case it seem like you let your mind get distracted by thinking about your immediate goal, so there was still that disconnect between thoughts and actions and your body's autopilot took over because you were distracted thinking about which room to go into! That getting distracted by the very thing I'm doing has happened to me lots lol

Quote from: sneakersjay on May 27, 2010, 08:59:21 AM
This.  Or I'll be driving home and know I need to stop by the store, or mail something, but I get on autopilot and find that I'm almost home and forgot to go where I needed to go.

Jay

I do this on the London Underground.
I go down the escalator and automatically get on the southbound Northern line. It doesn't matter where I'm going, I always do it on autopilot. Then after going a good few miles in the wrong direction, I realise

The only problems I have with toilets is when I think I know the layout of somewhere, so automatically walk towards the toilets on the left. Only to realise that I should be in the right ones. If I payed more attention I probably wouldn't have that problem lol.

There were some studies that showed we are more likely to do something when we tell ourselves not to because we are concentrating on the thing – the thing we don't want to do.  So if you are walking down the stairs carrying a bunch of stuff and don't think about it, you'll probably get to the bottom without incident.  If you walk down the stairs carrying a bunch of stuff and keep telling yourself to be careful, don't trip – guess what?  You are more likely to trip.

We are strange and wondrous creatures, we humans.

- Kate

Quote from: K8 on May 27, 2010, 05:56:18 PM
There were some studies that showed we are more likely to do something when we tell ourselves not to because we are concentrating on the thing – the thing we don't want to do. 

Whoa. This completely explains the phenomenon that occurs when a mother warns, "It's valuable, so don't drop it" when she gives her child the heirloom gravy boat to carry into the dining room on Thanksgiving.

You know what happens next.

Back when I was a printer, my boss got tired of the number of runs that had gone into the shredder that week. So in sheer frustration, she pulled us all together and said, "The first person who ruins a full run today gets to man the shredder for the rest of the day."

I rarely ruined a full run and hadn't made a mistake like that in months. But guess who was assigned to the shredder about an hour later?

Quote from: sneakersjay on May 27, 2010, 08:59:21 AM
This.  Or I'll be driving home and know I need to stop by the store, or mail something, but I get on autopilot and find that I'm almost home and forgot to go where I needed to go.

Jay

I do that all the time, it's a little bit scary when you suddenly snap back into concentration and realise you don't remember the last 20 minutes of the journey!