Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives (18 page)

Unless I can sweat for an hour, it's not worth exercising.

One very sneaky Questionable Assumption Loophole is the belief that a habit has become so ingrained that we can ease off: “Keeping track of travel expenses has become second nature to me,” “I love my morning writing sessions so much, I'd never give them up.” Unfortunately, even long-standing habits can be more fragile than they appear, so it pays not to get complacent. People tend to overestimate their dedication. As one reader posted: “I gave up Nutella in December 2011. A few years later I thought I would be able to handle the Nutella once more so I bought two jars on sale. I ate 4,000 calories of Nutella over 36 hours.” I experienced this with driving. I'm a fearful driver, and for many years I didn't drive at all in New York City. Finally I tackled this fear and started driving again. I still very much dislike driving, but I
do
drive, and I aim to drive at least once a week to stay in the habit of driving so that I don't develop that fear again. More than once, however, I've caught myself thinking, “Wow, I'm so much less afraid to drive than I used to be. In fact, I don't think I have to drive once a week anymore.” Hah!

Concern for Others Loophole:
We tell ourselves that we're acting out of consideration for others and making generous, unselfish decisions. Or we decide we must do something in order to fit into a social situation.

It will hurt my girlfriend's feelings if I leave her to go for a run.

So many people need me, there's no time to focus on my own health.

It would be rude to go to a friend's birthday party and not eat a piece of cake.

I don't want to seem holier-than-thou.

When I try to change this habit, I get irritable, and my family complains.

I can't ask my partner to stay with the kids while I go to class.

At this business dinner, other people might feel uncomfortable if I don't drink.

I'm not buying this junk food for me, I have to keep it around for others.

A reader with a great deal of insight into her own loophole-seeking posted on my blog: “I blame my lack of motivation on the needs of others. When I get up early, I feel wonderful. It's a very creative and productive time for me. However, both my sweetie and I love using our pre-wake up time as cuddle time. Although he's very supportive and encouraging of me to get up, my sleepy brain that doesn't want to get out of bed blames my lack of motivation on him—I don't want to let him down, etc. I do the same thing with my mother and eating healthy foods when I am at her home. Although she's supportive, I find myself reaching for the second cookie because ‘I wouldn't want her to feel bad or think that I didn't like them.' I know that these are excuses—not reality—but I still end up feeling resentful towards other people.”

Fake Self-Actualization Loophole:
Often, a loophole is disguised as an embrace of life or an acceptance of self, so that the failure to pursue a habit seems life affirming—almost spiritual.

You only live once (YOLO).

I'll be sorry if I don't at least try it.

I should celebrate this special occasion. (How special? National Cheesecake Day? A colleague's birthday?)

Life is too short not to live a little.

I have to take advantage of this now or miss out forever. (
Fast-food joints exploit this loophole
; customers buy more when a limited-time offer is tied to a season, an event, or a specific holiday, such as pumpkin spice lattes or heart-shaped doughnuts.)

It's too nice a day to spend doing this.

I'm afraid of missing out (FOMO).

I want to embrace myself, just as I am. (I try to remember to “Accept myself, and expect more from myself.”)

When I was explaining my Abstainer approach to an acquaintance, she scolded me: “You only live once! Eat a brownie, enjoy life!”

“We only live once,” I said, “but I'm happier when I skip the brownie.” Which is true.

For most of us, the real aim isn't to enjoy a few pleasures right now, but to build habits that will make us happy over the long term. Sometimes, that means giving up something in the present, or demanding more from ourselves.

“One-Coin” Loophole:
One of the most insidious of loopholes is the “one-coin” loophole—insidious because it's absolutely true. This loophole gets its name from the “
argument of the growing heap
,” which I learned about in Erasmus's
The Praise of Folly.
According to a footnote, the argument of the growing heap is:

If ten coins are not enough to make a man rich, what if you add one coin? What if you add another? Finally, you will have to say that no one can be rich unless one coin can make him so.

In other words, even though one coin certainly isn't sufficient to make a man rich, a man only becomes rich by adding one coin after another.

This teaching story highlights a paradox that's very significant to habits and happiness: often, when we consider our actions, it's clear that any one instance of an action is almost meaningless; yet at the same time, the sum of those actions is very meaningful. Whether we choose to focus on the single coin or the growing heap will shape our behavior. True, any one visit to the gym is inconsequential, but the habit of going to the gym is invaluable.

Focusing on the one coin is a way to deny the conflict between our values: a person isn't choosing between the desire to stay close to his extended family and his desire to skip the weekly family brunch to sleep in—because one missed brunch is no big deal. But when he considers the accumulated cost of the missed visits, the conflict looks different.

I haven't worked on that project for such a long time, there's no point in working on it this morning.

I'm not going to wear my helmet. What are the chances I have an accident today?

I should keep track of business expenses, but there's no point in keeping one receipt.

Why work on my report today, when the deadline is so far off?

A year from now, whether I went to a video arcade today won't matter.

What's one beer?

By reminding ourselves that the heap grows one coin at a time, we can help keep ourselves on track. Also, the mere act of adding one coin to the heap strengthens a habit, just as each subtraction weakens it. So each coin is actually two coins: the healthy habit itself, and the protection and reinforcement of that habit. The habit of the habit is more important than the habit itself.

For this reason, it can be helpful to keep a habit symbolically, even if we can't keep it literally, to keep a habit in place. Someone who can't go for a run because his wife is sick can go for a short walk. Someone who can't write for an hour because the kids are home from school can write for ten minutes.

Usually, loopholes are invoked in the heat of the moment, in the eagerness to justify junking a habit. I spend the first hour of my day doing email, but one morning I had several very tricky, annoying emails to answer, and I wanted to walk away from my desk. As I sat there, I could feel my mind generate appropriate loopholes, just like a cell phone searching for a signal. “I'm usually so diligent,” “One hour of email won't make a difference,” and “If I don't answer these now, I'll feel more like answering them later” sprang into my mind without effort. Then I reminded myself that I'd already decided: “I spend this time answering email.”

By catching ourselves in the act of invoking a loophole, we give ourselves an opportunity to reject it, and stick to the habits that we want to foster.

Conscious self-denial leaves a man self-absorbed and vividly aware of what he has sacrificed; in consequence it fails often of its immediate object and almost always of its ultimate purpose. What is needed is not self-denial, but that kind of direction of interest outward which will lead spontaneously and naturally to the same acts that a person absorbed in the pursuit of his own virtue could only perform by means of conscious self-denial.

—Bertrand Russell,
The Conquest of Happiness

O
ne evening, I mentioned to Jamie that I was investigating a new habit strategy. When I'm grappling with an idea, talking about it helps me to understand it better. Jamie doesn't always enjoy the role of sounding board, but this night he was game.

“What's the strategy?” he asked.

“The Strategy of Distraction.”

“That sounds easy. I get distracted all the time.”

“No,” I answered, “this isn't the kind of distraction that happens accidentally. You have to do it
on purpose
, which can be hard.”

Then Jamie was himself distracted from our conversation by his need to pack for a business trip, so I stopped my explanation, but I couldn't stop thinking about the Strategy of Distraction.

When we distract ourselves, we purposefully redirect our thoughts, and by doing so, we change our experience. Distraction can help us resist temptation, minimize stress, feel refreshed, and tolerate pain, and it can help us stick to our good habits.

Of course, it's not enough to be distracted; we must distract ourselves in the right way. Checking Pinterest isn't a good distraction for the person who wants to break the habit of late-night online shopping; reading a mystery would work better. Also, making a purely mental shift can be difficult, so distraction works best when it involves physical activity: walking around the block, woodworking, or cleaning out the kitty-litter box. Of course, if it's an enjoyable distraction, such as playing catch with a child, so much the better.

Using the Strategy of Distraction doesn't mean trying to
suppress
an unwelcome thought, but rather deliberately shifting attention. When we try to squash a particular thought, we may trigger the “ironic rebound,” so that paradoxically, we think about it all the more. The more I try to avoid thinking about how exhausted I'll be if I don't fall asleep, the more insistent this thought becomes, until I'm so agitated that I can't possibly sleep. So I don't try to avoid thinking “I need sleep,” but instead turn my attention to something else.

Although people often assume that cravings intensify over time,
research shows that with active distraction
, urges—even strong urges—usually subside within about fifteen minutes. So now whenever I'm tempted to break a good habit (or indulge in a bad habit, two sides of the same coin), I say to myself, “I can leave my desk—in fifteen minutes.” The delay of fifteen minutes is often long enough for me to get absorbed in something else. If I distract myself sufficiently, I may forget about a craving entirely.

A friend told me that if she's tempted to splurge while shopping, she resists pulling the impulse purchase from the shelf. “I tell myself, ‘If I still want it by the time I've finished shopping, I can go back for it.' But by that time, I've forgotten about it, or it's too much trouble to hunt it down. I only go back if I
really
want it.” Also, telling myself, “If I want, I can do that, in fifteen minutes,” often works better (even for an Abstainer like me) than telling myself “no.” “No” can sometimes lead to the dreaded backlash effect, in which feelings of deprivation make the forbidden more enticing.

Waiting fifteen minutes proved effective against my growing “checking habit.” When I was sitting at my desk at home with three monitors, or out in the world with my phone, I felt a more and more frequent urge to check my email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and all the rest. By the time I'd checked everything, I could start all over again. I wanted to get this habit under control before it became an official Bad Habit.

This checking habit was inflamed by the phenomenon of “intermittent reinforcement.” Usually my email isn't very rewarding, but occasionally—and I never know when—I get an email that's
great
. This kind of unpredictable, variable, instantaneous reinforcement is the hallmark of many powerfully habit-forming actions, such as playing slot machines. Checking is also rewarding because it offers the possibility of resolution, which people crave—I get replies to my emails, I learn the definition for “claustral,” I see that 150 people commented on my post. And that feels good.

Checking certainly yields rewards from time to time, but I didn't want a habit of constant checking, and delay helped me nip this habit in the bud. Now when I feel myself reaching for my smartphone, or clicking over into email and social media on my desktop, I tell myself, “Wait fifteen minutes.” Sometimes I still want to look, but often I'm already in the middle of something else, and the impulse has passed.

I've heard all sorts of funny variations of Distraction. One person does twenty jumping jacks before eating a snack; another drinks a glass of water between each glass of wine; someone else takes a few minutes to be very aware of the bottom of her feet. I've heard that taking a whiff of grapefruit or peppermint helps curb appetite. Many people keep their hands busy as a way to avoid snacking. “Giving myself a manicure keeps my hands busy,” a friend explained, “and I can't eat anything out of a bag if my nails are wet.”

Distraction can also make it easier to keep my good habits by taking my mind off my worries or giving me relief from the blues. If I can ease myself into a better state of mind, I'm better able to use self-command. No surprise, studies suggest that distraction works best if it directs our minds to something absorbing and pleasant, rather than distressing or highly arousing.
Shrek
, not
Schindler's List
.

I figured that the Strategy of Distraction could help me soothe the agitation I feel whenever I'm harshly criticized, and soon I got the opportunity to test it. Usually my reader email is kind, or at least constructive, but in the space of one week, one reader attacked my appearance, one reader told me I was a bad role model for my daughters, and one reader characterized my practice of providing bookseller links (with full disclosure of my affiliate relationships) as “getting kickbacks.”

When I get those kinds of emails, my habit—which is challenging to keep—is to adopt a mild tone. Sometimes I even get a cordial response back. (One person sent me a harsh email, and
three years
later emailed me to apologize.) To make myself feel calmer before I responded, I used Distraction, poking around on the Science Daily site to help myself muster the self-control to give a civil answer.

Along the same lines, I've noticed that some people exploit their smartphones to distract themselves from negative moods. Because he was going to a funeral, a friend would miss an important meeting that we'd scheduled. “Call me tomorrow afternoon and tell me what happened,” he said.

“I can't call you!” I told him. “You'll be coming out of your grandmother's funeral.”

“I'd like for you to call. It will be a distraction.”

The Strategy of Distraction can also help people fight the siren call of
potato-chip news
. I'm not drawn to potato-chip news myself, so it took me a while to understand this challenge.

“Potato-chip news” is news that's repetitive, requires little effort to absorb, and is consumable in massive quantities: true crime, natural disasters, political punditry, celebrity and sports gossip, or endless photographs of beautiful houses, food, clothes, or people. Its information is usually sensationalized to carry the maximum emotional effect—to make people feel shocked, frightened, envious, outraged, insecure, or indignant.

Most of us enjoy potato-chips news occasionally—to track the Oscars or the Olympics. But those who regularly spend hours indulging in it may find they are angry with themselves for watching, and distraught by what they're watching, yet unable to step away.

Many people consider spending excessive time on potato-chip news as a bad habit in itself, and it can also inflame other bad habits, because people get so agitated by it that they lose self-command and turn to bad habits for comfort. One person wrote, “I was so worried about the election that I ate half a pan of peanut-butter brownies in front of CNN.” It's important to follow the presidential election, but still, we need to deal with remote events in ways that don't derail our attempts to manage ourselves.

Distraction can help. By mindfully shifting attention away from potato-chip news, people can break free from its time-sucking grip. They can read a novel, play with a dog, do Sudoku, anything to pull away from the screen. Sometimes people limit themselves to written news accounts or establish time limits. One person told me, “I've been ‘shopping' on StreetEasy for over three years. I try to limit myself to visiting the site a couple of times a week, but it's hard.”

Of course, one person's bad distraction habit might be another's good distraction habit. A friend reads the sports and pop-culture site Grantland to distract himself when he wants a beer on a work night; on the other hand, someone else said, “I've realized I can't take a five-minute break and go to
ESPN.com
. I read one thing, then another. Plus I'm from Cincinnati, so I care a lot about the Bengals, and if I read something about how the Bengals suck, it puts me in a really bad mood, and I can't work.”

Although I'm not attracted by potato-chip news, I sometimes find myself falling prey to a related problem, the “bad trance.” The bad trance often hits when I'm exhausted—as when, paradoxically, I feel both too tired and too wired to go to bed. Often, when I'm in the bad trance, I'm overindulging in something I don't even enjoy. I'm watching bad TV, finishing a boring book, eating food that's not delicious, clicking around a website that doesn't interest me, or most inexplicably, flipping through a magazine I've already read.

In a good trance, or flow state, time passes swiftly yet feels rich, and when I emerge, I feel energized and exhilarated. In a bad trance, time feels neither full nor empty, and I find myself sitting with my mouth half open, regretting the time I've wasted. Every once in a while, I do love to lie on a hotel bed and spend an hour channel surfing, but I don't want to make a habit of going into the bad trance. I watch for the symptoms—a feeling of lethargy that makes it hard to get out of my chair, coupled with a feeling of listless curiosity—and make the effort to distract myself from the lure of the trance.

One unexpected benefit of going to sleep earlier has been the marked decline in the frequency of my bad trances. When I'm not exhausted, and when I'm not up too late, I don't fall into this habit.

Distraction can be helpful, but it can also be distinctly
unhelpful
. For instance, the “ping” of new email kept interrupting my thoughts when I was working, and once I knew I had a new email, it was very hard to resist reading it. Intermittent reinforcement! So I used a few minutes of my next Power Hour to figure out how to turn the sound off.

Also, to avoid unhelpful distractions, I often leave my home office to write in the library near my apartment. I don't work in an office, so I'm not interrupted by coworkers, but at home even the
possibility
of interruption distracts me. At the library, I know that the phone won't ring, the doorbell won't buzz, the mail won't arrive.

A friend who works in his studio apartment figured out a way to avoid the distractions of napping and snacking. Every morning he makes his bed, eats breakfast, and “goes to work” for the day, which means he doesn't allow himself to sit on his bed or go into the kitchen, except at mealtime.
Author Jean Kerr spent half her writing time
in the parked family car, where she had no distractions from her four young sons, and where there was nothing to do except work.

Although working at the library solved my distraction problem, at one point I began to wonder if I “should” train myself to work better at home. Shouldn't I develop the self-control to resist the siren call of email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all the rest? Shouldn't I manage myself so I didn't have to pack up and go to the library?

Then I realized—no. My existing habits work very well: when I'm at home, I do work related to the online world, such as email and social media; to do the harder work of writing, I go to the library (or less often, a coffee shop). Why force myself to change? I love the library! It's a
treat
to work there. It's one block from my apartment, so I don't spend a lot of time going to and fro. It's helpful to walk out into the fresh air and sunlight, and to have a little break between “home” and “work.”

Besides, I know myself. I'd need a lot of self-control to develop the habits to limit my Internet usage when I'm at home—but at the library, the Internet never tempts me. Why waste self-control energy unnecessarily? It's easier to change my surroundings than to change myself.

I've discovered another, quirkier focus booster. When I sit down to write, I always have the urge to stick something in my mouth—gum, a snack, a hot drink—because it helps me concentrate. I can satisfy this urge, I've learned, by chewing on a plastic coffee stirrer. I picked up this idea from Jamie, who loves to chew on things. His favorite chew toy is a plastic pen top, and gnawed pen tops and little bits of plastic litter our apartment. Every time we go to a movie, he grabs a straw to chew while we watch. He also chews on plastic stirrers, and I decided to try it myself. I've been
astonished
at how helpful this small habit is. I keep stirrers in my office and backpack, and whenever I sit down at my computer, I pop one between my teeth, and it helps me to focus. Chewing on a plastic stirrer is probably the adult equivalent of using a pacifier, but it works. Perhaps it's the placebo effect—but after all, the placebo effect is quite effective. I do worry that it might not be a good idea to chew away on plastic. Oh well.