Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives (21 page)

The third category of dangerous treats? Screen time, particularly television (however viewed).
Americans spend about half their leisure hours
watching TV. Although I don't watch much TV, I'm determined to keep it a treat instead of a default activity, which it can become, all too easily. Television stays a treat, I concluded, if:

• I anticipate with pleasure watching a particular show (I'm not just flipping through the channels).

• I watch with someone else.

• I turn off the TV when the episode is over.

• I feel energized, not listless, when the episode is over.

Screens of all kinds tend to drain energy, if used too long; they consume time that could be spent in other activities; they make it easy to stay up too late; they make it easy to eat mindlessly. Technology is a good servant but a bad master. Like habit itself.

Although treats make it easier to stick to good habits, if we make a habit of a treat, it may stop feeling like a treat. In “treat creep,” a rare treat gradually turns ordinary, or a small indulgence grows larger over time. Philosopher
Immanuel Kant permitted himself
only one pipe
per day, but as years passed, his pipe bowls became much larger. Taking a bath with fancy bath salts once a week is a treat; taking that bath every day might make it a background activity of life. I can tear through all of the magazines in my stack, one right after the other, or I can dole them out as treats. Things can be part of an ordinary day, or we can consider them treats.

Of course, whether a particular habit is “good” or “bad” is a matter of opinion..

“If you're cultivating good habits,” a friend told me, “you should give up your habit of drinking so much diet soda.”

“Nope!” I answered. “I don't consider it a bad habit.
Regular
soda is terrible, but I never touch the regular stuff.”

“It can't be good for you.”

“Well,” I said with a shrug, “I don't smoke, I hardly drink, I eat low-carb, and I don't believe that diet soda is harmful. Would I be better off drinking plain water? Maybe. But this is my treat.”

Perhaps because of my Upholder nature, marching through my daily calendar sometimes feels like an energy-boosting treat.

One day, in fact, my sister said to me, “I had an epiphany. You would have made a great monk.”

Elizabeth knows me very well. “It's
so strange
that you say that,” I replied. “Just last week I was reading
The Rule of St. Benedict
.” This extraordinarily influential, thousand-year-old guide sets out the rules for monks living in monasteries. “I love the monastic approach to the day. Every hour with its own name and its own activity, all laid out.”

Not everyone (e.g., certainly no Rebel) is attracted by the idea of having each day ordered, but I love the monkish
horarium,
or “table of hours,” the highly specific routine that runs on an annual cycle, with variations for the days of the week and the seasons. Every part of the day has its own character and purpose, with time set aside for prayer, manual work, rest, eating, sleeping. Few decisions, no hurry, time for everything.

I was particularly intrigued by the hours that monks set aside for
lectio divina
, or spiritual reading. This is another kind of treat. To be happy, even us non-monks need to make time for transcendent matters—such as beauty, creativity, service, faith—but too often these get pushed aside for more urgent demands, and life begins to feel empty and purposeless. Scheduling
lectio divina
is a way to make sure that the spiritual gets attention—whether a person decides to read holy books and attend religious services, as a monk would do, or adapts this habit to make regular time to leaf through art books, read biographies of great figures, spend time in nature, go to concerts, volunteer, or meditate. For some people, politics is a spiritual concern, tied to transcendent values such as justice, opportunity, and freedom. And from what I've observed, sports seems to have a spiritual value for some people—with its aspects of devotion, loyalty, hope, and perseverance.

Once we've truly adopted a habit, it comes easily, without decision making. But until that point—and many habits, alas, can never be completely taken for granted—giving ourselves a little boost with treats helps us maintain our self-command. Goethe pointed out, “Whatever liberates our spirit without giving us mastery over ourselves is destructive.” And whatever liberates our spirit while giving us mastery over ourselves is constructive.

In the acquisition of a new habit
, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to
launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible
 …
Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life
. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.

William James,
Psychology: Briefer Course

F
or me, the Strategy of Pairing was such a familiar approach to habit formation that it took me a long time to notice it. I'd used it often in my own life, and it came so naturally to me that I didn't give it much thought. When I happened to mention it, however, people responded with so much interest and enthusiasm that I realized it deserved to be studied as its own strategy. In the Strategy of Pairing, I couple two activities, one that I need or want to do, and one that I don't particularly want to do, to get myself to accomplish them both. It's not a reward, it's not a treat, it's just a
pairing
.

For example, I'd briefly explained the Strategy of Pairing to an acquaintance, and a few months later, she reported that it had transformed her habits.

“I have to tell you,” she said with enthusiasm, “thanks to what you said, I've been going to the gym regularly. It's
amazing.
I could never get myself to go, and now I go all the time.”

“Really?” I said, pleased that she was giving me credit, even if undeserved, for this before-and-after. “Uh, remind me … what exactly did you try?”

“I'm using the Strategy of Pairing. Now I watch certain TV shows only while I work out. That's why I go! I
want
to go to the gym, because I have all these shows I'm addicted to.”

“Excellent!” I said. “Are you ever tempted to sneak in an episode at home, too?”

“No, because I know that if I did it once, I'd do it all the time.
Only at the gym
is my rule. I was sick for a few days, and I thought, ‘I can't go to the gym, and I'm just lying here, so wouldn't it be okay to watch my show?' But I didn't let myself.”

I've used pairing to help me stick to the habit of exercise myself. Although I've shaped myself into a dedicated if low-intensity exerciser, I still sometimes feel the pull of my couch-potato nature, and pairing helps me keep my gym habit strong. I love reading magazines, and Jamie and I still subscribe to lots of old-fashioned print magazines—nineteen, the last time I counted—and I allow myself to read them
only
at the gym, when I'm on the cardio machines. (The fact that I can easily read magazines while I exercise may suggest that I'm not exercising very hard—and I'm not. But at least I'm showing up.) My sister does the same thing with her home treadmill and the
Real Housewives
shows. “It really makes me
want
to do the treadmill,” she explained. During college, I used pairing to get myself to exercise: I wouldn't let myself take a shower unless I'd exercised. I'd go a day, or maybe two, without a shower, but pretty soon I really wanted that shower.

Pairing can work in all kinds of circumstances. When I lived in San Francisco after college, I took a good walk every morning, because I bought my morning bagel from a bagel store half a mile from my apartment. If I wanted the bagel, I had to go for the walk. (I find it much more satisfying to walk with a purpose: to go to a favorite coffee shop, to hike to the top of the mountain.) I know someone who does “car praying”: he says his daily prayers during his commute home from work. Someone else watches TED talks while shaving. A friend who travels frequently for work has a rule that she never works on an airplane; she only reads novels. That habit makes her business travel much more fun, and she keeps the habit of reading. A reader wrote: “I do ‘Commercial Cleaning.' When a commercial comes on, I do a chore—wash six dishes, put a load in the dryer, dust the dining room. Once the commercials are over, I sit down again. It's amazing how I can get so much done in little spurts. Plus I don't consider myself such a slug at the end of the day.” A man told me that he keeps his pill box next to the coffee-maker and doesn't allow himself to make his morning coffee until he's taken his daily medication.

No surprise, Upholders and Questioners find the Strategy of Pairing easier to use than the other Tendencies do. Depending on the situation, Obligers may find it difficult to usethis Strategy because there's no external accountability. There's no one to say, “Nope, you can't make coffee until you've taken your medicine.” Nevertheless, some Obligers do seem to be able to use it successfully. Rebels are unlikely to try this approach.

I'm always on the alert for exciting new habit-formation ideas, and my friends often pitch me their favorites. A highly organized friend suggested a pairing. “Give my habit a try,” she told me. “When I walk from one room to another at home, I carry something with me. I don't put it away, necessarily, I just move it closer to its destination.”

“But how will that make a difference?” I asked, skeptical.

“You'll see.”

She sounded so confident that I decided to give it a shot. And this simple pairing—walking and carrying—is surprisingly effective. Things get put away much more easily, without a lot of special effort or extra trips. I'm walking from the bedroom to the kitchen, so I bring my giant mug. I'm walking from the front door to my bedroom, so I bring the book that needs to be shelved. It seems like a small thing, but it definitely cuts down on the clutter in my apartment.

Pairing provides the satisfaction of multitasking, since by definition, two things are getting done at once. A friend emailed me soon after she started using the Nike FuelBand: “If I spend a half hour in the park with my dog in the morning, I want it to be useful in addition to just exercising the dog, and now I'm more conscious of how many steps I'm taking. I also started listening to audiobooks while walking the dog, so now I'm making that time count in three ways.”

We can also use the Strategy of Pairing to discourage ourselves from following an undesirable habit. We might pair eating with the civilized habit of sitting down at a table—which means not eating directly from a container, and not eating at a desk, in the car, on the street, or standing in front of the fridge. If I watched TV by myself, I might binge-watch through a favorite series in a few nights, but because I only allow myself to watch those shows with Jamie, and Jamie refuses to watch more than one episode at a time, I never forsake all life responsibilities in order to watch TV.

I looked for other ways to apply the Strategy of Pairing. First, as part of my ongoing effort to move more, to strengthen my Foundation, I'd been trying to go for a long walk each weekend—but it felt like a real burden.

One of my twelve Personal Commandments is to “Identify the problem.” What was the problem? I got bored during these walks. I decided to pair my walks with time with friends and emailed two friends to suggest a regular walking date. Both were game. One friend can go only occasionally; the other can go more regularly, though it usually takes a few emails to set up. I actually don't mind the slight logistical hassle; because the walks aren't quite predictable, they feel more like a treat. Over time, in fact, I realized that although I'd formed this habit to get more exercise, it's actually more important as a habit pair to strengthen my relationships. The time with a friend is more valuable than the steps logged on my UP band.

Nevertheless, I couldn't always walk with company. Eleanor listens to audiobooks all the time—mostly the Harry Potter books, the
Little House
books, the Narnia books, and a history series called
The Story of the World
—and inspired by her example, I bought the audiobooks of Philip Pullman's
His Dark Materials
trilogy. Listening to these books made me
so happy.
Once I even walked an extra five blocks, just to listen longer.

I wanted to do more walking—and less sitting. As a writer, I spend most of my day in a chair, but I'm so restless that I imagined that I was on my feet a reasonable amount—to get something to drink or eat, or to go to the bathroom, or to check something in a book. However, when I set my UP band to vibrate whenever I sit still for forty-five minutes, I learned that I was doing a
lot
more sitting than I'd assumed.

This matters, because studies suggest that plain old sitting is a bad habit. Sitting is the new smoking; studies show that the
average American sits for at least eight hours
a day, and while we sit, our metabolism changes for the worse. Sitting for several hours a day seems to raise people's risk of early death, even for people who exercise. Plus I noticed that walking around boosted my concentration and energy level.

To combat over-sitting, I decided to pair talking on the phone with standing: if I want to use the phone, I must stand. For years, I've wanted a treadmill desk—a treadmill with a desk on it, so that I could walk while on the computer or phone—but my office is too tiny to hold one, so standing is the next best thing. I don't talk on the phone a lot, but often enough that this pairing means that I do add a fair amount of movement to my days.

Pairing is effective—sometimes,
too
effective. It's easy to allow a bad habit to form by creating a pair. Some familiar bad habit pairs: “I always get drunk on Saturday nights.” “I always read an email as soon as I get it.” “I always go shopping when I'm traveling.” Once the pair is formed, breaking it up feels like deprivation.

A friend loved eating candy at the movies so much that when she decided to change her eating habits, she had to quit going to the movies. Another friend had paired his morning cup of coffee with a cigarette, so when he decided to quit smoking, he switched to tea.

But just as pairing can create bad habits, it can also be used to contain a bad habit. A reporter told me, “I had a bad habit in college. Every time I finished an exam, I let myself eat a croissant. I
love
croissants.”

“But that sounds okay,” I said. “It's a good pair, because you got to have croissants sometimes, but since you didn't take that many exams, you didn't get them often. It was self-limiting. It's not like you were going to take an extra exam just to get another croissant. You figured out a way to stay in control of your croissant habit.”

“True.”

“Also, taking an exam is no fun, but this pairing made it more pleasant.' ”

I'd been thinking about the power of the Strategy of Pairing, and at one point, I had an inspiration. Few things bring me as much pure happiness as encouraging someone to form a good habit—and I can
occasionally
be a bit pushy about it. So I'm sure my long-suffering sister wasn't surprised to see an email pop up in her inbox:

From: Gretchen

As you know I've long been obsessed with treadmill desks. I want one desperately but alas, can't fit one into my office and still be able to open the door. A bit of a drawback. However YOU should get one!

I visited my friend A. J.
to see his treadmill desk. He said he works on it all the time. He got used to it very quickly, and loves it—says he feels so much more energetic, feels sluggish on the days when he can't use it. He walks SEVEN MILES most days, and he walks very slowly. It's very quiet—less noise than an a/c.

The fact is, it's very tough for you to exercise these days. You've got a lot on your plate, and you're only going to get MORE. This might be a way to cross exercise off your to-do list without even noticing it. While you work, you walk.

I would LOVE to buy this for you. I never did get you a birthday present. Please consider it! I wish I had the gumption just to order it, and beg your assistant to help get it situated in your office, but I fear that springing a treadmill desk on someone is like giving them a kitten they didn't ask for.

Think about it …

From: Liz

What an amazing offer!!! Let me ponder!

Several hours later, I got another email from her, with a report not just about her decision, but also about that of her longtime writing partner and co-show-runner, Sarah:

From: Liz

So … drumroll … With much excitement and gratitude I'm accepting your incredibly generous gift! I truly think this treadmill desk is gonna be a game changer. It's exactly what I need. I've already told everyone at work I plan to become an obnoxious bore on the subject.

Another drumroll … Sarah has decided to get one too! She said she can't lounge on a couch while I'm walking all day. Our plan is to put the 2 treadmill desks in my office, in front of a white board. We'll keep two mini desks in her office. We're convinced we're going to lead a major TV writer trend.

THANK YOU! I love it already!

Less than a week later both treadmills had arrived, and I called Elizabeth to hear the report.

“So?” I demanded. “How is it?”

“It's really great!” she said. “We used them all day.”

“Was it hard to get used to it?”

“Not at all. We were in my office a lot, rewriting a script, so I was walking for about three and a half hours. I wasn't going fast, sometimes as slow as 0.8 miles per hour—but I still walked 4.55 miles in total. I'll be able to go faster when I'm more used to it, and depending on what I'm doing.”

“More than four and a half miles? That's great
.
”

“I'm really into the
distance
, Sarah's really into the
number of steps
. As soon as she saw the number of steps she was walking, she instantly took to it. We're going to keep track and see how far we go.”