Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.

Copyright © 2015 by Gretchen Rubin

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-385-3486-4
eISBN 978-0-385-34862-1

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

For my family, again

The greatest of empires, is the empire over one's self.

—Publilius Syrus

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Epigraph

A Note to the Reader

Decide Not to Decide:
Introduction

The Fateful Tendencies We Bring into the World:
The Four Tendencies

Different Solutions for Different People:
Distinctions

We Manage What We Monitor:
Monitoring

First Things First:
Foundation

If It's on the Calendar, It Happens:
Scheduling

Someone's Watching:
Accountability

It's Enough to Begin:
First Steps

Temporary Becomes Permanent:
Clean Slate

Data Point of One:
Lightning Bolt

Free from French Fries:
Abstaining

It's Hard to Make Things Easier:
Convenience

Change My Surroundings, Not Myself:
Inconvenience

A Stumble May Prevent a Fall:
Safeguards

Nothing Stays in Vegas:
Loophole-Spotting

Wait Fifteen Minutes:
Distraction

No Finish Line:
Reward

Just Because:
Treats

Sitting Is the New Smoking:
Pairing

Choose My Bale of Hay:
Clarity

I'm the Fussy One:
Identity

Not Everyone Is Like Me:
Other People

Everyday Life in Utopia:
Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Start a
Better Than Before
Habits Group

Resources to Request

Quiz: The Four Tendencies

Suggestions for Further Reading

B
etter Than Before
tackles the question:
How do we change
? One answer—by using habits.

Habits are the invisible architecture of daily life. We repeat about 45 percent of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.

But that observation just raises another question:
Okay, then, how
do we change our habits
? That's what this book seeks to answer.

But while
Better Than Before
explores how to change your habits, it won't tell you what particular habits to form. It won't tell you to exercise first thing in the morning, or to eat dessert twice a week, or to clear out your office. (Well, actually, there is
one
area where I do say what habit I think is best. But only one.)

The fact is, no one-size-fits-all solution exists. It's easy to dream that if we copy the habits of productive, creative people, we'll win similar success. But we each must cultivate the habits that work for
us
. Some people do better when they start small; others when they start big. Some people need to be held accountable; some defy accountability. Some thrive when they give themselves an occasional break from their good habits; others when they never break the chain. No wonder habit formation is so hard.

The most important thing is to
know ourselves
, and to choose the strategies that work for us.

Before you begin, identify a few habits that you'd like to adopt, or changes you'd like to make. Then, as you read, consider what steps you want to try. You may even want to note today's date on your book's flyleaf, so you'll remember when you began the process of change.

To help you shape your habits, I regularly post suggestions on my blog, and I've also created many resources to help you make your life better than before. But I hope that the most compelling inspiration is the book you hold in your hands.

I see habits through the lens of my own experience, so this account is colored by my particular personality and interests. “Well,” you might think, “if everyone forms habits differently, why should I bother to read a book about what someone else did?”

During my study of habits and happiness, I've noticed something surprising: I often learn more from one person's idiosyncratic experiences than I do from scientific studies or philosophical treatises. For this reason,
Better Than Before
is packed with individual examples of habit changes. You may not be tempted by Nutella, or travel too much for work, or struggle to keep a gratitude journal, but we can all learn from each other.

It's simple to change habits, but it's not easy.

I hope that reading
Better Than Before
will encourage you to harness the power of habits to make change in your own life. Whenever you read this, and wherever you are, you're in the right place to begin.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.

—Alfred North Whitehead,
An Introduction to Mathematics

F
or as long as I can remember, one of my favorite features in any book, magazine, play, or TV show has been the “before and after.” Whenever I read those words, I'm hooked. The thought of a transformation—any kind of transformation—thrills me. Whether the change is as important as quitting smoking, or as trivial as reorganizing a desk, I love to read about how and why someone made that change.

“Before and after” caught my imagination, and it also provoked my curiosity. Sometimes, people can make dramatic changes, but more often, they can't. Why or why not?

As a writer, my great interest is human nature, and in particular, the subject of happiness. A few years ago, I noticed a pattern: when people told me about a “before and after” change they'd made that boosted their happiness, they often pointed to the formation of a crucial
habit
. And when they were unhappy about a change they'd failed to make, that too often related to a habit.

Then one day, when I was having lunch with an old friend, she said something that turned my casual interest in habits into a full-time preoccupation.

After we'd looked at our menus, she remarked, “I want to get myself in the habit of exercise, but I can't, and it really bothers me.” Then, in a brief observation that would absorb me for a long time to come, she added, “The weird thing is that in high school, I was on the track team, and I never missed track practice, but I can't go running now. Why?”

“Why?” I echoed, as I mentally flipped through my index cards of happiness research to find some relevant insight or useful explanation. Nothing.

Our conversation shifted to other topics, but as the days passed, I couldn't get this exchange out of my mind. Same person, same activity, different habit.
Why?
Why had she been able to exercise faithfully in the past, but not now? How might she start again? Her question buzzed in my head with the special energy that tells me I've stumbled onto something important.

Finally, I connected that conversation with what I'd noticed about people's accounts of their before-and-after transformations, and it struck me:
To understand how people are able to change, I must understand habits.
I felt the sense of joyous anticipation and relief that I feel every time I get the idea for my next book. It was obvious!
Habits.

Whenever I become gripped by a subject, I read everything related to it, so I began to plunder the shelves in cognitive science, behavioral economics, monastic governance, philosophy, psychology, product design, addiction, consumer research, productivity, animal training, decision science, public policy, and the design of kindergarten rooms and routines. A tremendous amount of information about habits was floating around, but I had to divide the astronomy from the astrology.

I spent a lot of time delving into treatises, histories, biographies, and in particular, the latest scientific research. At the same time, I've learned to put great store by my own observations of everyday life, because while laboratory experiments are one way to study human nature, they aren't the only way. I'm a kind of street scientist. I spend most of my time trying to grasp the obvious—not to see what no one has seen, but to see what's in plain sight. A sentence will jump off the page, or someone's casual comment, like my friend's remark about the track team, will strike me as highly significant, for reasons that I don't quite understand; then, as I learn more, these loose puzzle pieces begin to fit together, until the picture comes clear.

The more I learned about habits, the more interested I became—but I also became increasingly frustrated. To my surprise, the sources I consulted made little mention of many of the issues that struck me as most crucial:

• Perhaps it's understandable why it's hard to form a habit we
don't
enjoy, but why is it hard to form a habit we
do
enjoy?

• Sometimes people acquire habits overnight, and sometimes they drop longtime habits just as abruptly. Why?

• Why do some people dread and resist habits, while others adopt them eagerly?

• Why do so many successful dieters regain their lost weight, plus more?

• Why are people so often unmoved by the consequences of their habits? For instance, one-third to one-half of U.S. patients don't take medicine prescribed for a chronic illness.

• Do the same strategies work for changing simple habits (wearing a seat belt) and for complex habits (drinking less)?

• Why is it that sometimes, though we're very anxious—even desperate—to change a habit, we can't? A friend told me, “I have health issues, and I feel lousy when I eat certain foods. But I eat them anyway.”

• Do the same habit-formation strategies apply equally well to everyone?

• Certain situations seem to make it easier to form habits. Which ones, and why?

I was determined to find the answers to those questions, and to figure out every aspect of how habits are made and broken.

Habits were the key to understanding how people were able to change. But
why
did habits make it possible for people to change? I found the answer, in part, in a few sentences whose dry, calm words disguised an observation that, for me, was explosively interesting. “
Researchers were surprised to find
,” write Roy Baumeister and John Tierney in their fascinating book
Willpower
, “that people with strong self-control spent
less
time resisting desires than other people did. … people with good self-control mainly use it not for rescue in emergencies but rather to develop effective habits and routines in school and at work.” In other words,
habits
eliminate the need for
self-control.

Self-control is a crucial aspect of our lives.
People with better self-control
(or self-regulation, self-discipline, or willpower) are happier and healthier. They're more altruistic; they have stronger relationships and more career success; they manage stress and conflict better; they live longer; they steer clear of bad habits. Self-control allows us to keep our commitments to ourselves.
Yet one study suggests
that when we try to use self-control to resist temptation, we succeed only about half the time, and indeed, in a large international survey,
when people were asked to identify their failings
, a top choice was lack of self-control.

There's some debate about the nature of self-control. Some argue that we have a limited amount of self-control strength, and as we exert it, we exhaust it. Others counter that willpower isn't limited in this way, and that we can find fresh reserves by reframing our actions. As for me, I wake up with a reasonable store of self-control, and the more I draw on it, the lower it drops. I remember sitting in a meeting and resisting a cookie plate for an hour—then grabbing two cookies on my way out.

And that's why habits matter so much. With
habits
, we conserve our self-control. Because we're in the habit of putting a dirty coffee cup in the office dishwasher, we don't need self-control to perform that action; we do it without thinking. Of course, it takes self-control to establish good habits. But once the habit is in place, we can effortlessly do the things we want to do.

And there's one reason, in particular, that habits help to preserve our self-control.

In ordinary terms, a “habit” is generally defined as a behavior that's recurrent, cued by a specific context, often happens without much awareness or conscious intent, and is acquired through frequent repetition.

I became convinced, however, that the defining aspect of habits isn't frequency, or repetition, or the familiarity of the cues for a particular behavior. These factors do matter; but in the end, I concluded that the real key to habits is
decision making
—or, more accurately, the
lack of decision making
. A habit requires no decision from me, because I've already decided. Am I going to brush my teeth when I wake up? Am I going to take this pill? I decide, then I don't decide; mindfully, then mindlessly. I shouldn't worry about making healthy choices. I should make one healthy choice, and then stop choosing. This
freedom from decision making is crucial
, because when I have to decide—which often involves resisting temptation or postponing gratification—I tax my self-control.

I'd asked myself, “Why do habits make it possible for people to change?” and now I knew the answer.
Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control
.

One day, after checking the time difference to make sure that it wasn't too early in Los Angeles, I called my sister, Elizabeth, to talk to her about my research. She's five years younger than I am, but I call her “my sister the sage,” because she always has tremendous insight into whatever I'm pondering at the moment.

After we talked about my nephew Jack's most recent antics, and the latest news about the TV show that Elizabeth writes for, I told her how preoccupied I'd become with the subject of habits.

“I think I've figured out why habits are so important,” I told her. As I explained my conclusions, I could picture her sitting at her crowded desk, dressed in her unvarying outfit of running shoes, jeans, and hoodie. “With habits, we don't make decisions, we don't use self-control, we just do the thing we want ourselves to do—or that we don't want to do. Does that sound right to you?”

“That sounds about right,” said Elizabeth agreeably. She's used to hearing me talk about my obsessions.

“But here's another question. How do people compare to each other? Some people love habits, and some people hate them. For some people, habits come fairly easily, other people struggle much more. Why?”

“You should start by figuring that out about yourself—you love habits more than anyone I know.”

When I hung up the phone, I realized that as usual, Elizabeth had supplied me with a key insight. I hadn't quite understood this truth about myself before she pointed it out: I'm a wholehearted habits embracer. I love to cultivate habits, and the more I learn about them, the more I've come to recognize their many benefits.

When possible, the brain makes a behavior into a habit, which saves effort and therefore gives us more capacity to deal with complex, novel, or urgent matters. Habits mean we don't strain ourselves to make decisions, weigh choices, dole out rewards, or prod ourselves to begin. Life becomes simpler, and many daily hassles vanish. Because I don't have to think about the multistep process of putting in my contact lenses, I can think about the logistical problems posed by the radiator leak in my home office.

Also, when we're worried or overtaxed, a habit comforts us. Research suggests that
people feel more in control
and less anxious when engaged in habit behavior. I have a long blue jacket that I wore for two years straight whenever I gave speeches, and now it's quite tired-looking—yet if I feel particularly anxious about some presentation, I still turn to that well-worn jacket. Surprisingly,
stress doesn't necessarily make us likely
to indulge in bad habits; when we're anxious or tired, we fall back on our habits, whether bad or good. In one study, students in the habit of eating a healthy breakfast were more likely to eat healthfully during exams, while students in the habit of eating an unhealthy breakfast were more likely to eat unhealthfully. For this reason, it's all the more important to try to shape habits mindfully, so that when we fall back on them at times of stress, we're following activities that make our situation better, not worse.

But habits, even good habits, have drawbacks as well as benefits. Habits speed time, because when every day is the same, experience shortens and blurs; by contrast, time slows down when habits are interrupted, when the brain must process new information. That's why the first
month
at a new job seems to last longer than the fifth
year
at that job. And,
as it speeds time, habit also deadens
. An early-morning cup of coffee was delightful the first few times, until it gradually became part of the background of my day; now I don't really taste it, but I'm frantic if I don't get it. Habit makes it dangerously easy to become numb to our own existence.

For good and bad, habits are the invisible architecture of daily life. Research suggests that
about 45 percent of our behavior is repeated
almost daily, and mostly in the same context. I bet my own percentage is higher: I wake up at the same time every day; I give my husband, Jamie, a good-morning kiss at the same time; I wear the same outfit of running shoes, yoga pants, and white T-shirt; I work at my laptop in the same places every day; I walk the same routes around my New York City neighborhood; I work on my email at the same time; I put my daughters, thirteen-year-old Eliza and seven-year-old Eleanor, to bed in the same unchanging sequence. When I ask myself, “Why is my life the way it is today?” I see that it has been shaped, to a great degree, by my habits. As architect Christopher Alexander described it:

If I consider my life honestly
, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.

Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, having a drink at a friend's house, driving on the freeway, going to bed again. There are a few more.