Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives (8 page)

“Sure,” I said. I gave her a hard look. “Admit it. You'll be glad to see me go.”

She couldn't even deny it! “But later I'll be
so glad
you came,” she said earnestly.

I knew Marshall was feeling the same way. He seemed glad to be rid of some clutter, and his apartment looked better than before, but I suspected that I got more of a lift out of this improvement than he did. I'd offered to help Marshall work on the “unclutter” aspect of the Foundation because I'd assumed the change would make a difference for his writing—but the clutter in his apartment didn't bother him the way it would have bothered me. And because it didn't really matter to him, probably it hadn't been interfering much with his productivity. Even among the Foundation Four, we all must make choices that reflect our values.

The deeper I went into my investigation of habits, the more I appreciated the importance of understanding each person's values and temperament. It was so easy to assume that the steps that work for me would work for others—but habits don't operate that way. Individual differences mattered even more than I'd believed when I started.

First things first—but we must all decide what comes first, for us.

I'm a full-time believer in writing habits … You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. … Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you
can
do. I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.

Flannery O'Connor,
letter, September 22, 1957

T
he Strategy of Scheduling, of setting a specific, regular time for an activity to recur, is one of the most familiar and powerful strategies of habit formation—and it's one of my favorites. Scheduling makes us far more likely to convert an activity into a habit (well, except for Rebels), so for that reason, I schedule even some slightly ridiculous habits, such as “Kiss Jamie every morning and every night.”

Habits grow strongest and fastest when they're repeated in predictable ways, and for most of us, putting an activity on the schedule tends to lock us into doing it. In college and law school, I never asked myself, “Should I go to class?” or “Do I need to do this reading tonight?” If class was scheduled, I went. If reading was on the syllabus, I read it.

A friend with a daily schedule gets up at 4:30 a.m., meditates for twenty minutes, grabs a flashlight for a forty-minute walk, eats breakfast with her two sons, showers, dresses, and is on the train to work at 7:30. (She's a Lark, clearly.) For someone else, any of these activities might be a challenge, but not for her; she's already decided what to do.

Scheduling also forces us to confront the natural limits of the day. It's tempting to pretend that I can do everything if only I get the “balance” right, but scheduling requires choices. Scheduling one activity makes that time unavailable for anything else. Which is
good—
especially for people who have trouble saying no. Every week, Eliza and I go on a “Wednesday afternoon adventure” (though we're not particularly adventurous, and usually end up at a museum). Especially now that Eliza is in the tricky teenage years, I want to make sure we have some pleasant time together each week. So I put our adventure on the schedule, and if I'm asked to do anything that would interfere, I say automatically, “I'm not available at that time.” Scheduling makes activities automatic, which builds habits.

Scheduling appeals to many people, but Upholders are particularly attracted to the predictability of schedules and the satisfaction of crossing items off to-do lists. Questioners see the sound reason behind adding an item to the calendar, and for some Obligers, merely seeing an item pop up on the schedule creates a helpful sense of accountability. However, because Rebels want to
choose
to do an activity, putting an activity on their schedule may dramatically diminish their inclination to do it.

I decided to use Scheduling to start an ambitious new habit: meditation. Meditation is the practice of focusing attention on the present moment—on our breath, or an image, or nothing—in a non-analytical and nonjudgmental way. Though it's particularly associated with Buddhism, meditation has existed in various forms in many traditions. Because of the evidence of its mental and physical benefits, increasing numbers of people practice a secular form of mindfulness meditation; according to a 2007 survey,
almost one in ten Americans had meditated
in the previous year.

I'd resisted meditation for years; it never appealed to me. My most important Personal Commandment is to “Be Gretchen.” “Be Gretchen,” I thought, “and skip meditation.” I became intrigued, however, when in the space of a month, three people told me how much they'd benefited from it. Their firsthand accounts carried more weight with me than everything I'd read in the literature.

Maybe I
should
try it, I thought. After all, was I going to let my sense of identity, my sense of Gretchen, congeal in ways that kept me from trying new things?
Happiness expert Daniel Gilbert
suggests that a useful way to predict whether an experience will make us happy is to ask other people currently undergoing the experience we're contemplating how
they
feel. He argues that we tend to overestimate the degree to which we're different from other people, and generally, an activity that one person finds satisfying is likely to satisfy someone else. I half agree with Professor Gilbert. As my oft-invoked Secret of Adulthood holds, we're both more alike than we think, and less alike. What finally made me decide to try meditation was someone telling me, “I know people who tried meditation who haven't stuck with it. But I don't know anyone who thought it was a waste of time.”

To learn to meditate, I did what I always do, and headed to the library. After reading books such as Thich Nhat Hanh's
The Miracle of Mindfulness
and Sharon Salzberg's
Real Happiness
, I came up with my plan. Though
Salzberg suggests starting with twenty minutes
of meditation three days a week, twenty minutes sounded like a
long
time, so I decided to make meditation a daily five-minute habit.

When scheduling a new habit, it helps to tie it to an existing habit, such as “after breakfast,” or to an external cue, such as “when my alarm rings,” because without such a trigger, it's easy to forget to do the new action. An existing habit or cue works better than using a particular start time, because it's so easy to lose track of the hour. Instead of “meditating at 6:15 a.m.,” therefore, I inserted “meditate” into my schedule right after waking up and getting dressed.

When I woke up that first morning, I felt unusually tired, even though my handy sleep monitor reported that I'd slept for six hours and fifty-two minutes. “Maybe I should wait to start meditating when I'm more energetic,” a devious part of my brain suggested. “It will be tough today, when I'm sleepy.” Hah! I knew better than to believe
that
. The desire to start something at the “right” time is usually just a justification for delay. In almost every case, the best time to start is
now
.

So right after getting dressed—I was already wearing yoga pants, because I wear yoga pants every single day—I set my phone alarm for five minutes (the alarm sound of “crickets” seemed suitable), pulled a pillow off the sofa, and put it down on the floor.

I settled myself in the lotus position with my hands palms up, right hand cupped inside left, and the tips of my thumbs forming a triangle (very specific, but that's what the book said to do). I checked my posture, then remembered that my knees should be lower than my hips, so I hopped up to get another pillow.

After a few minutes of squirming to get my balance, I sat up straight, lowered my shoulders, relaxed my jaw, deliberately composed my mind, and began to focus on my breath flowing in and out, smoothly and deeply.

After about ten seconds, my mind wandered. I tried to notice this shift without judgment and returned to the focus on my breath. Thinking about breathing reminded me of that scene from the Woody Allen movie
Husbands and Wives
where the character Sally lies in bed next to a man, and while he's kissing her, she thinks about the fact that he's a “hedgehog,” and she starts sorting her friends into hedgehogs or foxes. That got me thinking about the Archilochus fragment “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” and that got me
thinking about the Isaiah Berlin essay
“The Hedgehog and the Fox,” and that got me thinking about my mixed feelings about Tolstoy …
now
back to my breath
. I thought about breath for a few seconds, then thought about the fact that I'd have to remember to write about having been distracted from my breath by a scene from a Woody Allen movie.

I observed myself thinking. I observed myself thinking about the fact that I was thinking. I observed myself thinking about the fact that I was thinking about the fact that I was thinking. All this meta-cognition was dizzying.

Breath.

I wondered how much time had gone by.

Breath.

I sure wouldn't want to do this for twenty minutes. Or even ten minutes.

Breath.

I tried to observe these distractions without frustration or judgment. They were just floating by. At last! I heard the sound of crickets.

Over the next few days of meditation, I noticed a few things. First, as soon as I started to focus on breathing, my breath felt constricted and artificial
. I thought I'd mastered breathing by now
.

Also, I kept teetering off my pillows. Thoreau warned, “
Beware of all enterprises
that require new clothes,” and I wanted to beware of all meditation practices that required new stuff; on the other hand, if I was going to meditate every day, a better sitting pillow seemed like a worthwhile investment (even for an underbuyer like me). I looked online and was amazed by the assortment of meditation paraphernalia on offer. I'd never heard of a “zabuton zafu set,” but when I saw a picture, it looked like exactly what I needed. I hit “Buy now.”

To apply the Strategy of Scheduling, we must decide when, and how often, a habit should occur. Generally, advice about habit formation focuses on
fixed habits
, that is, habits that always happen in the same way, without conscious thought. Every day I'm up and brushing my teeth before I know it; I put on my seat belt; I meditate after I get dressed.

However, I've noticed that I have both
fixed
habits
and
unfixed habits
. An
unfixed
habit
requires more decision making and adjustment: I'm in the habit of going to the gym on Mondays, and I write every day, but every Monday I must decide when to go to the gym, and I must decide when and where I'll do my daily writing. I try to make my good habits as fixed as possible, because the more consistently I perform an action, the more automatic it becomes, and the fewer decisions it requires; but given the complexities of life, many habits can't be made completely automatic.

I'd given up the idea that I can create a habit simply by scheduling an action a certain number of times. Although many people believe that habits form in twenty-one days, when
researchers at University College London
examined how long people took to adopt a daily habit, such as drinking water or doing sit-ups, they found that on average, a habit took sixty-six days to form. An average number isn't very useful, however, because—as we all know from experience—some people adopt habits more easily than others (say, habit-embracing Upholders vs. habit-resisting Rebels), and some habits form more quickly than others. Bad habits can be easy to create, though they make life harder, while good habits can be hard to create, though they make life easier.

We may not be able to form a habit in twenty-one days, but in many situations, we do benefit from scheduling a habit
every day
. The things we do every day take on a certain beauty, and funnily enough, two very unconventional geniuses wrote about the power of daily repetition. Andy Warhol said, “
Either
once only, or every day.
If you do something once it's exciting, and if you do it every day it's exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it's not good any more.” Gertrude Stein made a related point: “
Anything one does every day
is important and imposing.”

One of my most helpful Secrets of Adulthood is “What I do
every day
matters more than what I do
once in a while
.” Perhaps surprisingly, I've found that it's actually easier to do something
every
day than
some
days. For me, the more regular and frequent the work, the more creative and productive I am—and the more I enjoy it—so I write every single day, including weekends, holidays, and vacations. Similarly, it's easier for me to post to my blog six days a week, instead of four days a week, because if I do it four days a week, I spend a lot of time arguing with myself about whether today is the day. Did the week start on Sunday or Monday? Do I deserve a break? Did yesterday “count”? When I post six days a week, I don't have to make any decisions.

Along with meditation, I identified two new habits to follow every day. First, I wanted to email more often with my sister. I don't get to spend nearly enough time with Elizabeth, and it's hard even to find time to talk by phone. I could at least schedule a daily email—even if I only wrote a few words in the subject line.

Also, I decided to take a daily photo of something beautiful or interesting. I hoped this exercise would sharpen my sensibilities by requiring that I watch, throughout the day, for a subject worthy of photographing.

Doing a habit
every day
is helpful; does
time of day
matter?

For most people, whenever possible, important habits should be scheduled for the morning. Mornings tend to unfold in a predictable way, and as the day goes on, more complications arise—whether real or invented—which is one reason why I'd scheduled my new meditation habit in the morning. Also, self-control is strongest then; I heard about one corporate dining room that encourages healthier eating habits by requiring people to place their lunch orders by 9:30 a.m., no changes permitted. By contrast, self-control wanes as the day wears on,
which helps explain why sexual indiscretions
, excessive gambling, overconsumption of alcohol, and impulsive crimes usually happen at night.

To clear time to schedule a new morning habit, many people try waking up a bit earlier, but this can be tough. One trick? Use the autumn end to daylight saving time as a painless way to add an hour to the morning. Most people relish the extra hour of sleep when time “falls back” (fewer car accidents occur on the Monday after the time change, because people are better rested). The time change, however, offers an easy opportunity to change daily habits. We can start waking up an hour early, and we can do a lot with that hour.