Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives (16 page)

The fact is, it's easier to make pleasant activities into habits. That's why despite the extreme paleness that comes with my red hair, I can't develop the habit of sunscreen; I dislike that sticky feeling on my skin. For years, I'd been trying to floss more regularly. (Which was important, because I've been informed that I have an unusually high rate of tartar buildup. Who knew?) Then my dental hygienist suggested, “Some people find it easier to use picks than to use floss. I'll throw in some Soft-Picks for you to try.” This change made a big difference. I don't like the feeling of flossing, but using the picks gives all the uncouth satisfaction of picking my teeth. And that makes the habit feel more convenient, and so I do it.

As I looked for ways to make my habits more convenient and more pleasant, I realized that I should first consider whether I should maintain those habits
at all
. It's too easy to spend time on needless tasks, and some of my habits could be avoided altogether. Nothing can be more convenient than
that.
It's a Secret of Adulthood: The biggest waste of time is to do well something that we need not do at all. One woman complained that her family was in the habit of putting their clothes in the wash when they were inside out, and no matter how much she reminded them, she couldn't change their habits. Then she realized that she could change
her
habit, and now she washes and puts away the clothes inside out.

I decided to make bill paying more convenient. My mail habits were already pretty good: I toss junk mail right away and put real mail straight into my “special drawer,” where I keep everything I need—stamps, checkbook, a return-address stamp—and I deal with mail every Sunday night. Still, I wanted to improve, and I realized I could switch to automatic payments. Then I wouldn't have to deal with those bills
at all
.

For the next few months, as I paid bills, I gradually switched most accounts to automatic pay. Often, it takes work to make things easier, but in the end, this kind of hidden, no-action habit requires
no
effort or time, but runs in the background.

A friend described how he set up his hidden habit. “We weren't saving enough for college. Finally, after worrying for years, I set up an automatic savings account which deducts the money from my paycheck. Now I'm in the habit of saving without ever having to think about it.”

It's a Secret of Adulthood: Make it easy to do right, and hard to go wrong.

One evening as I was puttering around the kitchen, I glanced over at Jamie, who was pulling a container of indeterminate leftovers out of the fridge. This familiar sight triggered me to think about the fact that people would be more likely to eat leftovers if the food was stored in an easy-to-open container, rather than in a hard-to-open container.

I sighed. All this thinking about the Strategy of Convenience, and habit formation in general, was taking up a lot of space in my mind. Especially given my Upholder Tendency, I had to remind myself to stay the master of my habits, and even of my thoughts about habits; I shouldn't let them take over.

I looked again at Jamie, who'd come over to stand next to me to get a bowl out of the cabinet. It was an utterly ordinary moment, yet for some reason I was struck by his presence, by the fact of our marriage. We'd spent almost half our lives together. No one was closer to me, and he was standing right beside me—yet suddenly he seemed very far away. He glanced up, and he seemed to have some idea of what I was thinking; he didn't say anything, but he smiled and took my hand.

I don't want habit to deaden me to Jamie's presence. I don't want to take him for granted, to listen to him with only half my attention, to look at him without seeing him. I want my habits to help free me to pay more attention to him, and to everything else that's important to me.

For in truth habit is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. She establishes in us, little by little, stealthily, the foothold of her authority; but having by this mild and humble beginning settled and planted it with the help of time, she soon uncovers to us a furious and tyrannical face against which we no longer have the liberty of even raising our eyes.

—Michel de Montaigne,
“Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law”

J
ust as I can strengthen
good
habits by making them
more
convenient, I can squash
bad
habits by making them
less
convenient. I didn't need to spend much time exploring the Strategy of Inconvenience, because it's the mirror image of Convenience—but it's too important not to have its own name.

Sometimes, the more I have to exert myself, the better. If I want to stop using the snooze button, I put the alarm clock across the room. A friend chose a resort based on the fact that he could get Internet service only in its business center. Another friend told me he has two computers. “One is for work, one for nonwork,” he explained, “so if I want to start messing around, I have to physically get up from my chair and go to my other computer. I don't waste nearly as much time.” The irony of “convenience foods” is that for the most part, they're exactly the foods that we should make
less
convenient. As author Michael Pollan advises, “
Eat all the junk food you want
as long as you cook it yourself.”

A key for understanding many bad habits?
Impulsivity
. Impulsive people have trouble delaying satisfaction and considering long-term consequences; they find it difficult to plan ahead, and once they start a task, they struggle to stick with it. Also, when impulsive people feel anxious about performing a task, they often try to make themselves feel better by avoiding the task, by procrastinating. However, while some people are more impulsive than others, we all sometimes feel the urge to succumb to some immediate gratification—and often, that means breaking a good habit.

The harder it is to do something, the harder it is to do it impulsively, so inconvenience helps us stick to good habits. There are six obvious ways to make an activity less convenient:

• Increase the amount of physical or mental energy required (leave the cell phone in another room, ban smoking inside or near a building).

• Hide any cues (put the video game controller on a high shelf).

• Delay it (read email only after 11:00 a.m.).

• Engage in an incompatible activity (to avoid snacking, do a puzzle).

• Raise the cost (one study showed that
people at high risk for smoking
were pleased by a rise in the cigarette tax; after London imposed a congestion charge to enter the center of the city, people's driving habits changed, with fewer cars on the road and more use of public transportation).

• Block it altogether (give away the TV set).

For instance, when spending is inconvenient, we're less likely to make an impulse purchase. A friend controls his impulse spending by never carrying credit cards, so that he can't buy anything that costs more than the cash in his wallet. A reader noted, “For many years, I've had my salary paid into a savings account, and then moved money into my current account to spend. As there's usually a delay in the move, I have to plan ahead and perhaps delay/not purchase something until the cash is there. I've always attributed my ability to save to this system.”

Many people want to cut back on a shopping habit, and one effective strategy is to
make shopping as inconvenient as possible
. Don't take a cart or a basket. Be quick, because the less time we give ourselves to shop, the less money we spend. For women, shop with a man (women spend less when they shop with men than they do when they shop alone, with another woman, or even with children). Don't touch or taste, which triggers the desire to buy. Disable one-click shopping on sites. Erase online bookmarks. Log out of shopping accounts after every visit, and use websites as a guest, so that information has to be entered every time. Little obstacles make a big difference, and it's easier to erase a bookmark than to stifle the impulse to buy something. Change our surroundings, not ourselves.

As always, though, it's true that different solutions work for different people. For many people, online shopping is a problem, but a reader noted: “I usually only buy things online. That way, I don't make impulse purchases. I have more time to think about and research them.” (From that brief comment, I suspect that this reader is a Questioner.)

Going online is only too convenient, and getting more convenient all the time, so people who struggle to resist online shopping or “procrastisurfing” can benefit from apps such as Freedom or SelfControl, which make it inconvenient (or even impossible) for users to access email or visit websites for preset periods of time. One reader explained why this approach works: “I really only want to block one site—the
Daily Mail
celebrity gossip section. I just reset the site-block each day at a moment when I'm not particularly tempted, and I only need to summon the will-power to do this one click, then the choice is made.”

Because the inconvenience of decision making makes us less likely to act,
employers can use the Strategy of Inconvenience
to prod employees to develop good financial habits. For instance, by setting helpful default options for retirement funds, employers “nudge” employees into participating. Employees could always change the default options, but it takes effort, so most people don't bother—which means that without any conscious decision or effort, they've got the hidden habit of saving for retirement.

In the areas of eating and drinking, people come up with all sorts of ingenious ways to exploit Inconvenience: “I eat with my nondominant hand.” “I use chopsticks whenever I eat at home.” “I keep the temperature of my freezer turned very low. When the ice cream is rock hard, I have to work to chip out a few spoonfuls.” “Instead of putting platters on the table, I keep them in the kitchen, so I have to get up to get more food.” “My wife insists on keeping cookies in the house, so I tie them up in a bag that's a pain to open.” “Instead of taking wine, which I gulp down, I drink whiskey, which I have to sip.” Many colleges have eliminated cafeteria trays; when students can't easily load up on food and must make multiple trips, they take less. One study found that
going trayless cut food waste
by as much as 25 to 30 percent, and I bet people eat less, too.

In one extreme example, when
three armed men burst into the home
of renowned socialite Anne Bass and demanded that she open her safe, they discovered a few hundred dollars, some jewelry—and chocolate. She explained to the puzzled robbers that she kept the chocolate in her safe so that she wouldn't eat it too quickly. She used the Strategy of Inconvenience.

Of course, sometimes we don't make a habit inconvenient because we don't really want to change. A friend said, “I have a bad habit of checking my phone while I'm driving. It's sitting on the seat next to me, and I hear it buzzing, and I can't resist. How do I increase my self-control, so I don't check it? How do I get more motivated by safety?”

“Forget about self-control and motivation,” I suggested. “How about muting the phone and putting it on the floor of the backseat? You won't know it's buzzing, and you wouldn't be able to reach it anyway.”

“Oh.” He looked disappointed. And I realized that he didn't really want to stop the habit of checking his phone.

I'd been looking for ways to make aspects of my life more inconvenient as a way to help me stick to my good habits, when I was struck by the dreariness of this endeavor.

I called Elizabeth. “Do you think I'm a killjoy?” I demanded. “Am I turning into a humorless habits machine?”

She laughed, but paused before she spoke. “Well, yes and no. I really am interested in what you're thinking about, so I like to hear about it.”

“But … ?”

“But yes, sometimes it can be kind of grim.”

“Like when?”

“I mean, I find it amusing usually. But I remember when we were in Kansas City, we went to Winstead's diner, and you didn't let Eleanor get fries. I'm like, ‘You cannot tell a little girl she can't have French fries. A burger and fries, that's the American meal!' But,” she added, “it's true that Eleanor didn't care.”

I was laughing. French fries! Always with Elizabeth, the French fries. We were both so predictable.

“But don't you remember,” I protested, “I told Eleanor she could have French fries
or
a Frosty.” A “Frosty” is the signature Winstead's chocolate milk shake. “And she picked the Frosty. I mean, fries
and
a Frosty?”

“Well anyway, sometimes your habits do seem—judgmental.”

“You think I'm judgmental?” One of the nicest things about Elizabeth is that even though she has decided opinions and high standards of behavior, she somehow never seems judgmental.

“Actually, I think you've gotten less judgmental from doing this project. You have more appreciation of the fact that people are different from you.”

“I used to think I was pretty typical, but now I see that I'm extreme. I can't judge people according to what works for me.”

“That's good.”

When conviction is present, and temptation out of sight, we do not easily conceive how any reasonable being can deviate from his true interest. What ought to be done, while it yet hangs only on speculation, is so plain and certain, that there is no place for doubt; the whole soul yields itself to the predominance of truth, and readily determines to do what, when the time of action comes, will be at last omitted.

—Samuel Johnson,
The Idler
, No. 27

O
ne of the paradoxes of habits? Habits are surprisingly tough, and habits are surprisingly fragile.

For that reason, even though habits come fairly easily to me, I use safeguards to protect my good habits. Instead of
resisting
temptation, I try to
anticipate
and
minimize
temptation—both in my environment and in my own mind—and I plan for failure. I've got the habit of exercise, I've been exercising for years, and I feel physically uncomfortable if I go several days without exercise, and yet this habit always feels slightly at risk. There's a downward pull toward bad habits that requires us to maintain an active, concrete effort to protect our good habits—remarkably, even the good habits that we
enjoy
.

The Strategy of Safeguards keeps one lapse from turning into a full relapse.

The story of
the wily Greek hero Odysseus
is often invoked as an example of Safeguards. The goddess Circe warned Odysseus that as he and his men sailed near the land of the Sirens, they'd hear the beautiful singing that lured sailors to their deaths. So Odysseus, following Circe's advice, plugged the sailors' ears with wax and ordered himself bound to the mast so he couldn't succumb to temptation. We must play the role of both Circe and Odysseus by warning ourselves of temptations and challenges, and establishing the safeguards that will protect us.

The fact is, we're surrounded by temptation. One study estimated that
people spend about one-fourth of their waking time
resisting some aspect of desire—most commonly, the urge to eat, to sleep, to grab some leisure, and to pursue some kind of sexual urge.

To defeat a possible temptation, we must first recognize it. Catholicism includes a helpful concept, the “near occasion of sin”—a person, thing, or other external circumstance that's likely to entice us to go wrong. If we identify these near occasions of sin, we can take steps to avoid them. Therefore, the first step in the Strategy of Safeguards is the elimination of the cues that lead to those temptations. After we identify the siren calls that would prompt us to break our habits, we can figure out how to avoid them.

The simplest thing to do is to hide the reminder of temptation: the iPad, the bottle of wine, piles of clothes catalogs.
Out of sight, out of mind
—it really works.

Sometimes we can avoid a cue altogether. Unbeknownst to me, Eliza had developed the habit of stopping to buy candy on her way home from school, as I discovered only when she told me that she wanted to break the habit. We talked it through, and she came up with an obvious safeguard: “I won't walk home along Lex,” she decided. Lexington Avenue offers several candy-buying opportunities on every block. “If I don't walk by the stores, I won't buy candy.”

Unfortunately, cues lurk everywhere, and often we can't control or avoid them. A cue might be a place, a mood, a time of day, a transition, other people, or a pattern of behavior. Even a fleeting sight or sound or smell can be a trigger. In one study,
people given sandwiches in nontransparent wrap
ate less of the sandwich than people whose sandwiches came in transparent wrap. Television, with its relentless stream of ads, poses problems for those tempted by junk food; conversely, the absence of cigarette ads helps those trying to quit smoking.
Hospitality expert Jacob Tomsky
notes that, when checking into a hotel, some alcoholics ask for an empty minibar. Eliminating cues stops temptation before it starts, so it never overpowers us. As Montaigne observed, “
The infancies of all things are feeble
and weak. We must keep our eyes open at their beginnings; you cannot find the danger then because it is so small: once it has grown, you cannot find the cure.”

Because it's impossible to eliminate all cues from our surroundings, we need additional safeguards. The next step, and a highly effective habit-formation tool, is to make detailed plans of action for keeping good habits, with what researcher Peter Gollwitzer calls “
implementation intentions
,” also known as “action triggers” or “if-then” planning. “If
_____
happens, then I will do
_____
.”

With “if-then” planning, we try to plan for every habit challenge that might arise, so we don't make decisions in the heat of the moment—we've already decided how to behave.

Resolving ambivalence and indecision in advance, when we're in a cool and detached frame of mind, serves as a safeguard, because it means we can act quickly and without internal debate when the need arises.
People who use if-then planning
are much more likely to stick to their good habits than people who don't. While it's not possible to anticipate every situation that might arise, this mental preparedness is enormously helpful. As Dwight Eisenhower observed, “
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything
.”

Over time, I created a list of some of my own if-thens:

If I want to get a lot of original writing done, I go to the library, where I don't have Internet.

If offered wine, I decline. (Almost always.)

If I'm writing, I shut down my email.

If I'm invited to dinner, I eat a snack before I go, so I won't be too hungry.

If I'm writing and need to verify some information, I write “look up” in my text to remind me to deal with it later, rather than allow myself to be distracted by the fun of research.

If-then planning is one of the most important tools within Safeguards, because it arms us to face any high-risk situation with a carefully considered plan. We can be prepared for the times when we go on vacation, travel, have a new baby, get a new job, move, go to a holiday party … the list goes on. Once we've put the effort into making an if-then plan, it takes much less energy to put it into operation.

If-then planning does demand mental energy, however, as well as a certain pessimism. This exercise is probably easiest for Upholders, who enjoy making and keeping rules. When Questioners become convinced that this approach is effective, they may embrace it as well. Obligers may find it difficult to stick to their if-then plans—“If I want to skip going to class, then I must email the teacher to explain my absence”—if no external accountability enforces it. Rebels resist binding themselves, so they usually won't make if-then plans.

The Strategy of Safeguards can help us avoid breaking good habits—and just as important, it provides a way to deal effectively with lapses, those times when we falter in maintaining a good habit. As the proverbs hold, “A stumble may prevent a fall” and “He that stumbles, and does not quite fall, gains a step.” I remind myself that a stumble doesn't mean total failure. In fact, a stumble may be helpful, because it shows me where I need to concentrate my efforts in order to do better next time. Planning for a stumble during habit formation almost seems like giving ourselves permission to stumble—but it's not. It's a way to protect a habit.

When we do stumble, it's important not to judge ourselves harshly. Although some people assume that strong feelings of guilt or shame act as safeguards to help people stick to good habits, the
opposite
is true.
People who feel less guilt
and who show compassion toward themselves in the face of failure are better able to regain self-control, while people who feel deeply guilty and full of self-blame struggle more.

Instead of viewing our stumbles as evidence that we're weak or undisciplined or lazy, we can see our stumbles as part of the habit-formation process. Imagine a person who hasn't been taking his medicine. If he feels ashamed, he might avoid visiting his doctor; or he could tell himself, “It happens,” “We've all done it,” “I'll do it differently next time,” or “What I do most days matters more than what I do once in a while.” That kind of self-encouragement is a greater safeguard than self-blame.

Indeed, guilt and shame about breaking a good habit can make people feel so bad that they seek to make themselves feel better—by indulging in the very habit that made them feel bad in the first place.

This accounts for the striking poetic justice of bad habits.

As I learned in my high school English class when we studied in Dante's
Inferno
, poetic justice dictates that the punishment be tailored to fit the crime. So in Dante's vision of the Ninth Circle of Hell, a fiend punishes the sowers of discord and schism by continually splitting apart their bodies. The poetic justice of bad habits is relentless and cruel, because
the punishment for a bad habit is … the bad habit.
As a friend said to me, “I feel too anxious to tackle my bad habits, but my bad habits are what make me anxious.” One survey found that some women who worry about their finances use
“retail therapy” to feel better
—they shop in order to cope with their anxiety. Gamblers who worry about money distract themselves by gambling. When procrastinators fall behind, working on the task makes them so anxious that they have to stop working in order to feel better; as someone wrote on my blog, “I feel anxious because I'm not getting anything done, so I get a massage to feel better. But I don't get anything done, because I'm busy with things like getting a massage.” People who feel listless and dull watch TV to make themselves feel better, then they feel listless and dull because they've been watching hours of TV. The character Fat Bastard in the
Austin Powers
movies makes the same point: “I eat because I'm unhappy, and I'm unhappy because I eat.”

The favorite medicine turns to poison, and temporary comfort becomes a source of more guilt, regret, and feelings of lack of control—which can lead to more indulgence in bad habits. It's a Secret of Adulthood: Make sure the things we do to make ourselves feel
better
don't make us feel
worse
.

To form good habits, we want to stumble as rarely as possible. A stumble may prevent a fall, true, but all falls begin with a single stumble.
So it's very, very important not to stumble
. That's the paradox: a stumble is no big deal, and yet a stumble is a very big deal.

Also, the more faithfully I adhere to my new habits, the more likely they are to stick. A study showed that
when people were trying to form habits
, perfect compliance wasn't necessary, but the earliest repetitions of the habit helped most to establish it. With time, the gains became smaller. The bottom line? I should start strong with my habits, and use safeguards to protect them, especially at the beginning.

Because stumbles occur more frequently as a new habit is being formed, it pays to be particularly vigilant in the early days, and in the context of well-known stumbling blocks: tension with other people, social pressure, loneliness or boredom or anxiety, and—perhaps surprisingly—positive emotions, such as joy or excitement.

Counterintuitively, minor temptations can be more challenging than major temptations. A student might not say, “I'm going to spend the afternoon at the beach with my friends,” but he'd think, “I'll check out sports highlights for fifteen minutes before I start working,” then fifteen more, then fifteen more, and pretty soon three hours have gone by. Little temptations sometimes slip past our guard.

The key is to catch ourselves in a stumble right away. Because of the colorfully named “what the hell” phenomenon, a minor stumble often becomes a major fall. Once a good behavior is broken, we act as though it doesn't matter whether it's broken by a little or a lot. “I didn't do any work this morning, so what the hell, I'll take the rest of the week off and start on Monday.” “I missed my yoga class over spring break, so what the hell, I'll wait to start in the fall.” A friend's wife used if-then planning to avoid this “what the hell” trap. As she made her plan to quit smoking, she told her husband, “After I give up smoking, if by some chance you see me having a cigarette, remind me that I've still ‘quit,' I haven't fallen off the wagon altogether.”

Dieters seem especially susceptible to this kind of pattern, where a minor misstep turns into a major binge, in what's known as the “abstinence violation effect”: “I broke my diet by eating this one mini-cupcake, so now I'm going to eat the whole box.” Also,
when dieters figure that they've blown their diet
, they tend to do a worse job of tracking their consumption, at the very time when the Strategy of Monitoring would be particularly helpful. By continuing to monitor consumption, a person gains a sense of awareness, and even more important, a sense of control. Counterintuitively, monitoring can even be reassuring. If I'm thinking, “Oh yikes, I just ate a
ton
of meatballs,” I feel out of control. By entering “6 meatballs” into my food tracker, I take control. Six meatballs is a lot of meatballs, but it's just six meatballs.

A friend described how once she stumbles, she falls. “It's like I rush to gobble down as much forbidden food as I can that day,” she told me, “because I know the next day I'll have to start to eat right again.”

“
People do tend to self-regulate day by day
,” I said.

“Or maybe I even wait until Monday, or the first of the month.”

“How about this,” I suggested. “Instead of feeling that you've blown the day and thinking, ‘I'll get back on track tomorrow,' try thinking of each day as a set of four quarters: morning, midday, afternoon, evening. If you blow one quarter, you get back on track for the next quarter. Fail small, not big.”