CHAPTER 4
cracking the habit code
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
—Lao Tzu
Ready to make a change in your life? What new habit would you like to create for yourself? You can change up the routine in a bad habit, transforming it into a good one, or you can start from scratch.
We human beings are more successful making changes with the support of other people, so take a moment to join our online community before you start. Go to christinecarter.com and click the “Cracking the Habit Code” button. Once you’ve registered (free if you purchased this book), we’ll send you one of the tips below each day, along with a work sheet. You’ll also be able to ask me questions online and give and receive support from others.
Not sure yet what habit you’d like to create first? Here’s an example from my own life. Getting myself into the habit of exercising in the morning is something I’d wanted to do for ages. At the time I started doing this, I was consuming a huge amount of energy trying to get myself to exercise. I’d plan elaborate workouts for myself, but alas, I’d always find an excuse to skip them. Since exercise is one of those things that I know brings great ease and power into my life—contributing dramatically to my physical, emotional, and intellectual strength—I decided that I needed to train my elephant to just do it. I learned from my research that if I got my trigger, routine, and rewards in place, I could establish the habit.
Does this mean that I exercise every single morning now? Of course not. I’m still human, not an automaton. If I have a cold or I’m on vacation—anytime my normal trigger is absent—my habitual routine doesn’t run. But most days, my alarm goes off and I get up and go through my now well-established exercise routine.
How long does it take to get into a new habit? Conventional wisdom tells us that if we can repeat something every day for three weeks, a habit will be formed.
I have good news and bad news about this. First, the bad news: It is nothing but a myth that habit formation takes twenty-one days. (The earliest references to this notion that I can find are from a plastic surgeon who noted that it took his patients about three weeks before they got used to their new look after having a nose job. Twenty-one days to stop doing a double take in the mirror is not exactly a scientific finding.) Actual science shows, not surprisingly, that there is a wide time range for simple habit formation. The easier the behavior, the less time it takes to form a habit. On average, it takes sixty-six days to form a habit. Hard things, like routinely exercising in the morning, typically take much longer than this.
The good news is that the simpler a habit, the less time it takes; automatically drinking a glass of water at breakfast, for example, takes an average of only twenty days. And neurologically, we know that the brain starts to wire itself for greater automaticity the first time we repeat a behavior. This means that even if a behavior isn’t totally automatic after repeating it every day for a week, we are still making huge strides toward forming our habits in just a day or so.
So why have I outlined a twenty-one-day plan for you below? Because breaking habit creation into small, digestible chunks makes it less daunting—and that increases our odds of success.
Read through all the tips, and capitalize on your desire to start immediately by beginning with “The Easiest Thing” (at the end of this chapter). Then, each day put one of the tips below into practice.
TIP #1: SKETCH A DRAFT OF YOUR WHOLE ROUTINE
The first step in getting into a good habit is to spend some time actually designing the habit or routine that you’d like to get into. So instead of just saying to myself, “I must exercise every day,” I needed to actually create a “flight plan” for myself that would include exactly what the elephant does once it’s on autopilot.
The key is to figure out where the routine actually starts. Most morning routines actually originate for me the previous evening because what happens the night before can dramatically influence how tired I am in the morning, and therefore whether or not I’m able to get up early and jog.
So here’s my “flight plan,” or the blueprint for my whole morning routine, which includes exercise (and begins the night before).
9:15 p.m.: Turn off all screens: TV, computer, phone, iPad (to prevent getting a second wind at night, which keeps me up too late).
This might not seem like a very ambitious exercise plan to you—some weeks I truly do only the “better than nothing circuit” and nothing more. But those weeks I’m still doing 75 push-ups, 150 crunches, and 125 squats! And after a year of habitually doing at least some exercise every morning, I woke up one day to realize that I was in the best shape of my life! Clearly I’ve never been all that athletic—not a single varsity sport in my high school career—but these days I can definitely keep up with my CrossFit-obsessed husband when we hike, surf, and ski.
The reward embedded in my exercise routine? I listen to books on tape. Really easy and gripping fiction—the stuff my teenage daughters read, like Divergent, Harry Potter, and the Hunger Games books. This is for entertainment only; no actual effort can be involved or it doesn’t motivate me to exercise. (I read a lot of other things, too, at other times of the day—books that make me think big thoughts and feel big feelings—but there is a time and a place for everything. For me, Chaucer is not for exercising. Not that I actually ever read Chaucer. But you get the point.)
When possible, I also exercise outside because I love being outdoors. If it is raining or too cold or I’m in a new city and afraid I’m going to get lost, I take to the treadmill, which would normally be boring were it not for…Downton Abbey! Modern Family! All my favorite TV shows! That’s right, folks: I sometimes indulge myself with TV first thing in the morning.1 I used to feel guilty about it, but I’ve come to realize that it enables and reinforces my health and happiness.
So I started timing myself. I challenge myself to ever-greater efficiency, to a faster and faster morning routine. This is fun enough for me; I particularly like seeing how short I can make my shower here in drought-ridden California. But it did add an element of complication—I had to get into the habit of noting the time before I started, and watching the clock. I learned (the hard way) that I couldn’t use my iPhone to time myself, because I’m prone to getting sucked into whatever texts and calls came in after it went into silent mode the night before. So I just moved a clock to the bathroom, and I keep an eye on that.
I know that I can get through this whole routine in an hour and a half by shortening my shower routine to a little less than twenty minutes and breakfast to about ten minutes. On a slow morning, or one where I have more time to meditate and exercise, it will take three hours.
Although this may seem like an excruciating level of detail, here’s why it’s so totally worth it. I’m not making any decisions in the morning. I do everything the same way every morning, in the same order, on autopilot. Sure, sometimes the flow is interrupted, but due to all the repetition, my inner elephant now rarely strays from the comfort of this well-worn path.
Most people don’t take the time to deliberately construct a routine, so they interrupt themselves constantly (maybe by deciding to make the coffee before showering one day but making it after showering the next day). In so doing, they alter their routine just enough that it takes self-control to get back on track. I don’t know about you, but I’m like most human beings: I don’t have a lot of self-control at six in the morning. I need to rely on autopilot instead.
TIP #2: IDENTIFY THE MINI-HABITS WITHIN YOUR LARGER ROUTINE
Once you have a draft of your full, idealized routine, identify all the mini-habits within it. My larger morning routine actually consists of at least seven mini-habits: waking up, meditating, getting dressed, exercising, showering, eating breakfast, and cleaning the kitchen. And within those mini-routines, there are several even tinier micro-habits—the way I brush my teeth and put on my makeup, and how I take my vitamins while the blender is running for the kids’ break fast smoothies, for example. Each of these things has a trigger, a set of automatic behavior patterns, and some sort of inherent reward. What are your existing micro-habits? What mini-habits do you need to establish?
TIP #3: NOW, THROW AMBITION OUT THE WINDOW
The most important thing that we can do when we are creating a new habit is ditch our ambition. You read that right. Ditch your ambition to do everything impressively. If you are anything like me, this will be the hardest part. When I decide to do something, I tend to go big. For example, every time I used to start a new exercise plan, I was overly ambitious, planning to train for a half marathon instead of a 5K, planning to meet with a trainer three times a week when I had time for only one meeting a month, planning to stretch and strength train for thirty minutes a day instead of the ten minutes that is really necessary. We ambitious people are programmed to think and behave like Aesop’s hare. We want our success instantly. We want our natural ability and speed to carry the day. But in truth, we will succeed only if we think and behave like Aesop’s tortoise.
If we want our habits to stick, we need to start really, really small. It is hard for us humans to make lots of behavior changes all at once. Creating a new habit or routine can take a great deal of energy and focus, and we have only so much self-control in a given day to work with.
Here’s the thing: It’s much better to succeed at just one small thing at a time than it is to fail at bigger things or many things at once. Almost all of us can pull off a brilliant couple of days, or even weeks, when we eat perfectly or do the full exercise routine or meditate diligently in lotus position for forty minutes twice daily.
But unless we have a really big catalyst for our change, like a very scary health diagnosis or other crisis-level event that provides us with immutable motivation, we’ll usually crash and burn soon after takeoff. We’ll have a couple of good days, but then we’ll have a bad day and skip our exercise class or order grilled cheese with fries instead of kale salad for lunch. The next day we’ll decide that the whole routine is too hard and we’ll skip it again, resolving to make revisions tomorrow. The day after that we’ll hardly think of it at all. We’re back at square one.
The alternative to being super-ambitious when we create new goals is to build slowly. When I first started meditating in the morning, my goal was just to go and sit on the meditation cushion for thirty seconds every morning. (Yes, I really did this. Usually I sat a little longer, but not always.) Maybe your goal is to just sit down at your desk and open the document you are writing your novel in, or take thirty steps on the treadmill, or clean five things off your desk.
Here’s how unambitious I want you to be. Make sure that your first “routine” is not a routine at all but a simple behavior or thought that takes less than thirty seconds to do or think. Do this knowing that you are starting to carve a neural pathway in your brain that will eventually become an unshakable habit. The first few steps can be hard, though, so you need to do something really, really, really easy—something that requires so little effort that your brain doesn’t put up any resistance when you start it, and you can feel successful for completing it. You want to create a habit that doesn’t depend on effort or willpower, so this first extraordinarily unambitious habit is about initiating the neural pathway—starting to form the groove—and nothing else.
TIP #4: LOOK FOR “KEYSTONE” MINI-HABITS
Sometimes there are mini-habits, like the ones I listed above in my morning routine, that are embedded within our larger plan and act as “keystone habits”—habits that have the power to shift or dislodge our routines and create a chain reaction. For example, a keystone mini-habit to ensure that I perform my morning exercise is to turn off all screens at 9:15 p.m. the night before. I turn my computer all the way off. I set my iPhone to go into “do not disturb” mode automatically so that I don’t get any texts, calls, or alerts. I don’t let myself turn on the TV, which I find too stimulating at night. This keystone habit dislodged a whole series of bad habits that I’d gotten into, both at night and in the morning.
My rule of no screen time after 9:15 p.m. opened up time for me to meditate in the evening, spend more time with Mark and Macie (my other children are asleep or reading in bed by then), and read. All these things contribute to feelings of ease and happiness in my life. It also meant that I naturally started going to bed earlier, when I was tired (imagine that!). These things are all very rewarding and therefore motivating to me. Going to bed earlier in turn made it easier to get out of bed in the morning, which made it possible for me to re-engineer my morning routine to be more relaxing. See how a small habit can create big change?
Lest you think that I have some sort of superhuman discipline around technology, please know that I’m not exerting a lot of willpower to do this. My computer is set to automatically go off at 9:15 p.m. My iPhone automatically goes into silent mode. My colleagues at work and my friends and family know that not only will I probably not read and respond to email at night, but they are encouraged to make fun of me if they notice that I’m breaking my own rules. So it’s not that I don’t ever check my email or send a text after 9:15 p.m. Lord knows I sometimes do. It’s just that I’ve set myself up to follow my rule more often than not, especially when I need to get up early in the morning.
Another example: I noticed when I was getting into the habit of exercising in the morning, a key factor for my success was simply setting an alarm. This might sound really obvious, but before I engineered this habit, I would often wake up without an alarm and get through my morning fine. But changing my wake-up time every day required more energy and undermined the solidity of my key trigger. Waking up just fifteen minutes late would derail my whole morning. So I learned (the hard way) that a keystone habit was simply setting an alarm the night before.
TIP #5: PLAY OFFENSE
It is extremely important whenever we are establishing a new habit to really think through all the seemingly minor details. We need to decide what the key factors are for our success and how, specifically, we can set ourselves up to overcome any obstacles that we may face.
So take a minute to think about what tools you need to embark on your new habit. What obstacles will you likely face? People who plan for how they’re going to react to different obstacles tend to be able to meet their goals more successfully. For example, research shows that recovery from hip-replacement surgery depends in large part on having patients think through obstacles to their recovery and then make a specific plan for how they will deal with those obstacles.
It’s very painful to get up and move around after hip surgery, but recovery is generally much more successful if a patient actually gets up and walks around a lot. In this particular study, patients who had just undergone surgery were instructed to think about getting up and walking around afterward and then plan for the pain they would feel. So if their goal was to walk to the mailbox and back every day, they had the participants actually think, Okay, I’m going to get about halfway there and it’s going to hurt like heck and I’ll want to turn around. And this is the key part: Patients wrote down what they were going to do when they got halfway there and it hurt like heck. These patients recovered faster—they started walking twice as fast and could get in and out of a chair by themselves three times faster than people who didn’t make a specific plan to deal with the pain.
A large meta-analysis of eighty-five studies found that when people make a specific plan for what they’d like to do or change, anticipating obstacles if possible, they do better than 74 percent of people who don’t make a specific plan for the same task. In other words, making a specific action plan dramatically increases the odds that you’ll follow through.
What obstacles can you predict and plan for? Don’t forget to include the people in your life who (often unintentionally) throw up roadblocks. For example, my husband was not a fan of my morning exercise routine when he noticed how early I was going to bed, and I was successful only when I planned out how I’d respond to his attempts to convince me to stay up later with him. I had to firmly explain to him that he was hindering my success and I needed him to be a supporter, not a detractor, of my morning routine. I let him voice all his “better ideas.” He thought I should be able to work out mid-morning like he does (that doesn’t work for me since the morning is my best writing time when I’m home, and when I’m traveling there is no consistent trigger) or in the afternoon when my energy is flagging (nope, I’m either picking up the kids from school, or I’m at work—again, no consistent trigger). Eventually he stopped trying to convince me that his routine would work for me, and executing my routine got easier.
TIP #6: IDENTIFY YOUR TRIGGER
Consciously designate the trigger for your habit: something that is the same every time you want your habitual routine to be enacted. My morning routine is triggered by my alarm going off at about the same time every day. (So the alarm is a trigger, and so is the time of day.)
If you’ve got a habit that you don’t want to do every day, choose a trigger that occurs only when you want to do the habit. For example, “Do a thirty-minute yoga video twice a week” isn’t a habit. It’s a to-do item for your task list because there’s no clear trigger and therefore no clear automaticity. But if you work only three days a week, you can use work as your trigger: “Do a thirty-minute yoga video every non-work weekday as soon as I walk in the door from dropping the kids off at school.”
If you are changing a bad habit into a good one, you’ll need to work with your existing trigger. Perhaps you are in a habit of going out to get a venti (20-ounce) caramel macchiato at 11:00 a.m. every day, but you want to save yourself the $5.50 you’re spending on this habit and drop the pounds you’ve put on by consuming so much sugar every morning. You may have several triggers here: time of day, low blood sugar, boredom at work, the need for a break or social interaction. You’ll have to work with all the triggers that are relevant for you. This is not as easy as simply making a list of your existing triggers. You’ll need to be aware of them before you can actually work with them. So if you aren’t sure what triggers a habit you are trying to change, take several days to simply notice and write down everything that happens—thoughts, feelings, patterns in your environment, behaviors you notice before your habitual behavior.
Even if you aren’t changing a bad habit to a good one, you’ll be more likely to stick with your new habit if you use an existing trigger. So vow to exercise (or meditate or clean up or whatever it is you want to get into the habit of doing) every day when you get home from work, or right after you brush your teeth at night, or while you wait for the water for your tea to boil. In the venti caramel-macchiato example, your trigger might be the urge to get up from your desk at 11:00 a.m.
After much experimentation, I found that the only trigger for exercise that worked for me was waking up in the morning, something I obviously had to do every single day. Because I work from home and travel a lot, finishing up work in the afternoon didn’t serve as a good trigger because there was no cue that was the same every day, like walking in the door from work or changing out of my work clothes. Lunchtime was also too unpredictable. If I didn’t have a lunch meeting, then I found that I was always too hungry or too full to go for a run.
TIP #7: DESIGNATE INTRINSIC REWARDS
We human beings may say that we are pursuing happiness, but really what we tend to pursue is reward. Anything that we might desire counts: a cashmere sweater, a pretty little cupcake, attention from a mentor, a sense of accomplishment, a positive feeling. When our brains identify a potential reward, they release dopamine, a feel-good chemical messenger. That dopamine rush motivates us toward the reward, creating a real sense of craving, wanting, or desire for the carrot that is being dangled in front of us.
Fortunately, we can make dopamine work for us rather than against us as we build our habits. To get into a good habit, you’ll need a really rewarding reward. Rewards need to be immediate or, even better, built into the routine when possible.
We can do this by making the activities themselves more rewarding—more fun. This is what I did when I switched my silent, sitting meditation (a very serious, long vipassana—like eating kale for the mind) to meditating along with a Deepak Chopra recording (short, inspiring, and easy—like an iceberg wedge salad with bacon and blue cheese). I was getting a lot out of the longer vipassana meditations when I did them, but I wasn’t meditating regularly. Just as any salad is better than none, I decided that at this stage in the game, any meditation is better than none. It might not be a sure road to enlightenment, but it’s closer than hitting snooze in the morning.
I’m also a huge fan of the “Yay me!” reward. Even something as small as a short mental victory dance can trigger a little hit of dopamine, enough to tell your brain to repeat whatever you just did. So when I hear my alarm and sit up in bed, I congratulate myself. I do this for all the important mini-habits built into the overall routine: turning off electronics at night, setting my alarm before sleep, turning off the light before 10:00 p.m., putting on my workout clothes before I do anything else in the morning. If you heard my running internal commentary, you’d think I was utterly crazy, what with the “Yay me! I did it again!” constantly throughout the evening and early morning. But it works!
TIP #8: MEASURE YOUR PROGRESS
Another important aspect of successfully getting into a habit is measurement. What we measure, we improve. (Or “What gets measured gets done.”) For example, we know that when people weigh themselves every single day, they lose more weight than if they weigh themselves just once a week. This is because measurement drives awareness of behavior. For example, if you record everything you eat in a food journal, you’ll be much more aware of what you eat than if you weren’t diligently noticing and recording your food in take. So much of what we do is unconscious. Measurement is about making ourselves conscious of our bad habits while we train ourselves to unconsciously act out good habits.
In this day and age, tracking or measuring our progress is easy. (It’s so easy that we can sometimes get caught up in the measurement of things by spending more time playing with our recording devices than we do establishing our habits. Google the terms “quantified self” or “Health 2.0” or “body-hacking” and you’ll find a huge amount of information about how people measure their every move.) I like the app Way of Life to track new habits and mini-habits, and I measure my runs using an app called MapMyRun. My children have elaborate “habit trackers” that they post online for their father and me to monitor (they are usually working on little habits like keeping their dirty socks out of smelling distance from my office). One of my friends diligently records her weight every morning using a scale that sends the data to an app on her iPhone.
TIP #9: FIGHT SELF-SABOTAGE
A potential land mine to avoid: As you track your behavior, don’t let yourself feel so good about the progress you are making that you unleash what researchers call the “licensing effect.” The licensing effect occurs when we behave virtuously and then “cancel out” our good deeds by doing something naughty. When we behave in line with our goals and values—whether it’s as large as exercising every day for a month or as small as not taking a plastic bag at the grocery store—we ironically risk backsliding. (It’s as if the elephant says, “I’ve been good! Just let me lie down here, or at least have a snack!”)
Consciously or unconsciously, we tend to feel that healthy or virtuous activities entitle us to partake in less-good activities. Smokers will smoke more, for example, when they believe they’ve just taken a vitamin C tablet. Similarly, philanthropists tend to give away less money after they’ve been reminded of their humanitarian attributes. One study even found that sometimes when certain people buy eco-friendly products, they become more likely to cheat and steal!
Avoid the licensing effect by reflecting on your goals and values rather than your accomplishment. Why did you ride your bike in stead of drive? What larger mission are you trying to fulfill? How will you or others benefit from the habit you are working on? Questions like these can help us avoid self-sabotage.
Another way to avoid the licensing effect, also called “moral licensing,” is to avoid using moral terms to define our progress. Perhaps you are working on staying calm rather than yelling when your kids are bickering. Measure your progress by tracking the number of deep breaths you consciously took when triggered by their bickering rather than patting yourself on the back for being such a nice, calm parent. Becoming a “better parent” is a moral term, while taking deep breaths is more neutral. Avoiding moral judgment can help you avoid “moral licensing.”
TIP #10: BUILD YOUR WILLPOWER MUSCLE
The rider—our willpower or self-control—is like a muscle in that it fatigues. The more we use our self-control throughout a given day, the more fatigued it gets until our rider is basically asleep, slumped atop the big beast. The elephant can now do whatever it wants.
This is not good news in our astonishingly complex world because the rich environments that we live in are constantly depleting our willpower—sending our riders to sleep while we still need them. Use of willpower in one realm depletes it for all other realms. So if we’re trying to stick to a budget, making any calculation about money will tax our willpower. Simply having a bowl of candy (or anything that you are trying not to eat) in view can be a real willpower depleter. For many men, turning away from the incessant media images of seductive women expends energy needed to be present at home with their wife and kids. Anytime you are trying to impress somebody—at a job interview or on a date—you’ll deplete your willpower. Trying to fit into a social group or office culture that doesn’t really fit your values takes willpower, and therefore will deplete it. The same is true if you have to control your irritation with a bad team player, or if you have to control your desire to compete with people on your team at work. Constantly shielding our attention from a steady onslaught of emails, texts, calendar alerts, Facebook notifications, and tweets takes willpower.
But there’s some good news, too. Our rider is also like muscle in that it gets stronger with use. The weirdest thing about the research on willpower is the phenomena that when we start consciously working on one thing that takes self-discipline, we also tend to start improving our lives in other areas as well. For example, when researchers asked college students to pay attention to one area of their lives—trying to improve their posture throughout the day, or to attend to their finances for a few weeks—they frequently do other things that might end up on a New Year’s resolution list, too, like watching less TV, working out more, and improving their eating habits.
The important thing is to focus only on one small thing, but know that benefits are accruing. Even though you may be working on only one mini-habit, you’re building up the willpower you’ll need to take on more.
TIP #11: PRE-DECIDE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE
When our limited store of willpower is depleted, we are likely to do what is familiar or easy rather than practice a new behavior. We can outsmart this brain booby trap three ways. First, pre-decide as much as you possibly can (where you will go, how you will get there, what you’ll bring with you). So instead of deciding whether to drive or walk to work in the morning right before you leave, commit the night before to the decision to walk in the morning.
Second, and this is the critical part, structure your environment to support your decision. Put your work shoes deep in your backpack and your walking shoes by the door. Knowing that you are going to be tempted to drive, put your car keys in an inconvenient place that you won’t want to venture into in the morning. (Have access to a dusty attic? That’d be perfect.)
Finally, make a specific plan for what you will do when challenges arise, because they will. If you wake up to find it raining, pre-decide that you’ll wear your blue rain jacket and take that huge golf umbrella your dad left in the closet. If you wake up late, pre-decide that you’ll ride your bike instead of drive.
TIP #12: COMFORT YOURSELF
To boost follow-through on our good intentions, we need to feel safe and secure. When we are stressed, our brain tries to rescue us by activating our dopamine systems. A dopamine rush makes temptations more tempting. Think of this as your brain pushing you toward a comfort item…like the snooze button instead of the morning jog, onion rings instead of mixed greens, or that easy taxi to work rather than the less-than-comfortable urban bike ride.
As Kelly McGonigal, author of The Willpower Instinct, writes, “Stress points us in the wrong direction, away from clear-headed wisdom toward our least-helpful instincts.” When we’re relaxed, we’ll choose the locally grown organic apple, the earlier bedtime, the stairs instead of the elevator. And when we’re stressed? Personally, I have a weakness for tortilla chips and spicy queso.
When my friend Dan Mulhern gets nervous before a presentation, he forgets essential stuff (like the power cord for his computer, his remote control, all copies of anything he printed last minute, his business cards). The way he tells it, he doesn’t show up with anything he didn’t pack the night before. However, he never forgets to bring a Diet Coke: That’s the elephant for you.
The takeaway: Sometimes the best thing that we can do in pursuit of our new habit is to preemptively comfort ourselves in healthy ways before the elephant takes matters into its own hands. What makes you feel safe and secure—and doesn’t sabotage your goals? Perhaps you need to seek out a hug or watch a funny YouTube video. (As we saw in Chapter 2, positive emotions act as powerful brakes on our stress response.)
TIP #13: TAKE A NAP
We can shore up our willpower with sleep for two simple reasons. First, even mild sleep deprivation makes our brain’s alarm system overreact to stress. As noted above, more stress equals more enticing temptations and less willpower. Second, sleep deprivation impairs how our body and brain use glucose (our primary fuel), which in turn impairs the metabolic process by which cells absorb glucose so they can use it for energy. We all know from experience that self-control takes a lot of energy, and low energy equals low willpower. Getting seven to nine hours of sleep each night can help us muster the self-control we need to get into a new habit.
I know, I know, you don’t have time to sleep. You’re very busy and important. Or you think you are the exception to the rule—that you are a part of the 2.5 percent of people who feel rested with less than the seven-plus hours of sleep that doctors and sleep experts prescribe. Maybe you wish you could get more sleep, but you just can’t find a way to put sleep above your other priorities.
Ask yourself what your other priorities are. Your health? Your happiness? Productivity and success at work? Raising happy and healthy children? Here’s the truth: You will not fulfill your potential in any of these realms unless you get the sleep your body, brain, and spirit need. A mountain of research supports this claim.
If you aren’t getting at least seven hours of sleep a night, make this the first new habit you take on. If it feels totally impossible to you to get to bed earlier, try increasing your sleep by four to five minutes a night until you’ve adjusted your schedule enough that you are getting eight hours of shut-eye. For example, it might feel totally impossible to get to bed before midnight. But surely you can hit the hay by 11:56 p.m. Add a few minutes every day for two weeks and you’ll gain an hour (and all the increased productivity, creativity, and happiness that come with it). Stick to it until you’re going to bed early enough to get eight hours of sleep.
My friend Jennifer Granholm, who was the governor of Michigan during the economic downturn, doesn’t really like to sleep, and she insists that she doesn’t need more than six hours a night. Many people tell me that, like Jennifer, they do fine on less than seven hours of sleep. It is true that 2.5 percent of people are able to flourish with less sleep than the rest of us. Jennifer is an exception in so many ways that I just might concede that one of her many gifts may be that she needs less sleep. Are you a Jennifer Granholm? Here’s how to tell. Let yourself get seven to nine hours of sleep for a week or two—perhaps while you are on vacation. Does your mood improve? Your productivity increase? Your self-control become formidable? You be the judge.
TIP #14: TAKE TEATIME
Although I wasn’t an English major at Dartmouth, I hung out in the English department, where every day at 3:00 p.m. tea and cookies (ten cents each) magically appeared in the library. Turns out that the daily treat helped me and many others study. Self-control takes a lot of brainpower—it burns a lot of energy. That energy is fueled by glucose, or what we commonly think of as “blood sugar.” So exercising willpower can take a big toll on our blood-sugar level. (Researchers have figured this out by measuring people’s blood-sugar levels before and after they perform tasks that require self-control.)
We all know that it can be hard to focus or resist temptation if we are hungry. (This experience is behind the common advice to not shop for groceries when you’re famished.) The curious thing is that it isn’t really about our absolute blood-sugar levels or how much fuel we have in the tank as much as it is about whether or not our blood sugar is rising or falling.
A series of famous studies has established that people who are given lemonade, or anything that boosts blood sugar, perform much better on tests of self-control. It’s as though our brain is budgeting our blood sugar: If glucose is dropping, the brain switches into conservation mode and doesn’t activate the areas needed for good self-control. But if glucose is increasing, the brain thinks, “Well okay. I’m going to have enough fuel to get through this difficult task, so I’ll boost the willpower center.” Heaven help us if we are trying to resist the temptation of a sweet food—which our brain sees as both a dopamine-stimulating reward and a blood-sugar assist—while we are hungry.
A similar effect on our attention and self-control is seen when we start to get even mildly dehydrated. Research participants who are only 2 percent dehydrated—not enough to feel thirsty—start to have trouble focusing their attention. Drinking water corrects their brief attention deficit disorder. Researchers aren’t sure why, but they theorize that it is the brain’s way of getting us to pay attention to our basic survival needs rather than our big thoughts or ambitions.
TIP #15: NEVER SAY NEVER
When temptation is right in front of you, it’s hard to turn down. But when we tell ourselves “no,” we often increase the urgency of a temptation by making it forbidden fruit. Instead of telling yourself that you can’t have that cookie or you can’t watch TV, tell yourself you’ll have the cookie in a few hours if you are still interested, or you’ll record the show and watch it after you’ve gone for a walk. And then go distract yourself!
TIP #16: GATHER YOUR “CABINET”
As the saying goes, no man (or woman) is an island, and when we are establishing new habits, it is best not to go it alone. You don’t have to be the president to need a cabinet of close advisers for advice and inspiration, so surround yourself with people who understand what you are up to and support you. I can’t underscore enough how critical this is for success.
The first and most obvious reason that we need a support team is that our cabinet can help hold us accountable, acting as a bit of external willpower when our self-control falters. Most of us care what other people think of us, and when we make our intentions public in some way—even if our public is just an inner circle of close friends—our intentions have more power. Beyond that, other people can keep us on track when we are so depleted that we no longer care what other people think. When I was trying to wean myself from my diet based on sourdough bread, my husband was a huge help. When I’d ask him to order me a tuna sandwich on a sourdough roll for lunch, he’d come back with a plain tuna salad for me (and then run for cover). Similiarly, whenever I need help getting back into my morning routines after a vacation, my good friend Kendra Perry, a life coach, holds me accountable by texting me daily.
Second, there is a plethora of empirical evidence that we are herd animals, and we typically do what our peers do. (Please don’t think you are the exception to this rule. While I don’t doubt that you are in many ways a maverick, odds are that you also look and act a lot like your peers in many other ways.) Compelling research demonstrates that our behavior is influenced not just by our friends but by our friends’ friends’ friends. This is the elephant at work. He or she is more likely to follow the herd than the rider on its back, especially if the rider wants it to take an unfamiliar path. Because the behavior of others is highly contagious, we do well when we hang out with people who are already in the types of habits that we are trying to establish. This means finding a meditation or running group if you want to meditate or run habitually, or simply hanging out more with people you admire (which is fun anyway).
Behavior change experts Chip and Dan Heath build on Haidt’s elephant and rider metaphor by writing about how we can “shape the path” for the elephant. Choosing the herd that we want to follow is a great way to do this. We can also decide which herd we don’t want our inner elephant to follow. If you are trying to eat more healthfully, by all means don’t start dating a junk-food devotee. Or if you are trying to drink less alcohol, surround yourself with friends who are more likely to invite you out for a hike than a drink, so that you don’t feel isolated because of your new habit.
TIP #17: EXPAND (REALLY, REALLY) SLOWLY
Once you feel the pull of your unambitious habit—you feel yourself automatically going to sit in your meditation chair or heading to the treadmill or ordering a side salad at lunch—take another tortoise step. Meditate for an additional minute or walk for an additional thirty steps or think about replacing your after-lunch double caramel macchiato with a lower-in-sugar latte. And then once this feels easy-peasy, add a little tiny something else to your routine.
Remember that if you resist the urge to be more ambitious or do more, you’ll increase your odds of being successful over the long haul. And while it might feel a bit frustrating to think that after ten weeks of exercising every morning, increasing by only one minute a week, you’ll be exercising for only ten minutes a day—not enough to lose that extra ten pounds you’ve been meaning to get rid of—consider that you’ve gained three uber-important things.
First, you’ve gotten yourself in the habit of exercising! This is everything your doctor ever wanted for you. Second, you’re getting ten more minutes of exercise every day (over an hour a week) than you were getting eleven weeks ago; this is something that your body loves you for. It is enough to give you a little more energy, help you sleep better, and give you a little hit of human growth hormone—all things that will make you feel younger, smarter, and more alive. All these things are going to help you get into your groove, making your life easier. So YAY YOU! And third, you’ve shown yourself that you can get into a habit and stick with it. The sky is the limit now!
Even once you’ve expanded to your full-length routine, designate a routine that may not be ideal but is better than nothing—a routine that you can always come back to. I have my little two-minute three-exercise routine that I affectionately call the “better than nothing circuit.” If I’m traveling or I oversleep or am just not feeling all that well, I can do this simple circuit of three exercises in my pajamas. And because it takes only a few minutes, I just do it—there isn’t any internal resistance to doing it. Here’s the key: I do this every single weekday because I want the groove of this habit to be deep, and because I’ve chosen to anchor my exercise to something I do every weekday: wake up to an alarm and then meditate. For the rest of my life, as long as I wake up to an alarm, I’m going to wake up, go to the bathroom, get dressed, meditate, and then exercise (even if I only do a two-minute routine).
If I’m really not feeling well, I make myself go through the entire routine in my head, visualizing myself doing each of the exercises. This may sound crazy, but what I’m doing is preserving and deepening the neural pathways in my brain that lead to the habit.
TIP #18: EXPECT (AT LEAST MINOR, SOMETIMES MAJOR) FAILURE
Unless you are some sort of superhero, you will not be able to get into this new habit perfectly the first time. You’ll trip and fall and royally screw up. Research indicates that 88 percent of people have failed to keep a new resolution. In my experience as a human being and a coach, 100 percent of people starting a new habit lapse in their attempt. Faltering is a normal part of the process, but it’s important that we distinguish between a lapse and a relapse.
If you imagine yourself climbing a hill, a lapse is a little trip, or maybe a trip and a fall. It might hurt, and you might want to stop climbing. A lapse becomes a relapse when we actually do stop climbing. A lapse might be a bad day; a relapse is a week so bad that you give up altogether. It is critical that we distinguish between our lapses and a full-blown relapse, and that we respond appropriately to each lapse. To restate this: It doesn’t matter if you have a lapse, or even a relapse, but how you respond does matter. The next few tips will guide you through these inevitable lapses and relapses.
TIP #19: BEWARE THE “WHAT THE HELL” EFFECT
Say you’ve sworn off sugar, but one morning you eat a piece of pie for breakfast. You’re now at risk for what researchers formally call the Abstinence Violation Effect (AVE) and jokingly call the “what the hell effect.” If you’ve already blown your diet today, why not go hog wild? What the hell—you can begin again tomorrow, right? Wrong. The more damage you do during your binge, the more likely you are to slip again the next day, and the less confidence you’ll have in yourself that you can change. As soon as you notice a slip, try the following to avoid getting into that “what the hell” moment:
• Don’t get too emotional about your slip or succumb to self-criticism. Instead, forgive yourself. Remind yourself that lapses are part of the process, and that feeling guilty or bad about your behavior will not increase your future success.
• Rededicate yourself to your resolution (now, in this instant, not tomorrow). Why do you want to make the changes that you do? How will you benefit? Do a little deep breathing and calm contemplation of your goals.
• Make a plan for the next time that you will face a similar challenge. What will you do differently? What have you learned from your slip? What temptation did you face that you can remove? Is there a keystone mini-habit that you need to tweak? Were you stressed or tired or hungry—and if so, how can you prevent that the next time?
• Reach out to your cabinet ASAP. Ask them to support you in getting back on track.
TIP #20: REGROUP, REVISE, AND DOUBLE DOWN
This may be blazingly obvious, but in order to do better tomorrow, you’ll need to know what caused your trip-up. So again, what obstacle did you fail to see or plan for? How does your routine need tweaking? Is your trigger consistent? Does your reward need bolstering? Did you take on too much too soon? Figure it out, and make a specific plan for what to do if you find yourself in a similar situation again.
When I was first trying to squeeze a workout into my morning routine, I felt like I was failing more mornings than I was succeeding. Every day brought a new tweak to the routine. For example, at first I thought that I could get away with seven hours of sleep at night. But after three or four mornings of pushing the snooze button I realized I was too tired and had to turn the lights out earlier. Then I thought that I could read before bed on my iPad; that was a no-go, too, as the light from the screen kept me from falling asleep quickly. In the morning, my built-in reward wasn’t rewarding enough until I let go of the “need” to listen to something “smart” (literature or the news or TED talks) while I jogged and let myself listen to something “fun” (funny memoirs and Dan Brown novels). I also needed to make it logistically easier, so I got an armband to hold my iPhone so that I could listen not just while running but also while I did push-ups.
For several days in a row, I didn’t foresee minor obstacles that proved challenging, like not having the right workout clothes with me, or feeling really hungry mid-workout. But after I’d encountered each obstacle once, I could make a plan for what to do the next time. It took about six weeks before I settled into my routine. This habit is now fully grooved. The neural pathway has been formed in my brain, and I’ve kept at it for a couple of years now. (It is still constantly evolving in tiny tweaks, depending on my workout and training needs or to make it work with my ever-changing work, travel, and family schedules.)
Getting in a major habit like this one has not only paid off in terms of more energy and strength, better sleep, and greater patience with my kids, but it has also become foundational experiential evidence of the power of habits—even though I had to make so many tweaks in the beginning.
TIP #21: SEE RELAPSE AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO BEGIN AGAIN, STRONGER
I’d venture that all of us start this process of forming a new habit from the context of having failed before, often many times. So what do we do if we’ve tried this before, or if we spend twenty-one days forming the perfect habit, only to go on vacation—or something else that disrupts our normal routine—and come back feeling like all is lost?
All Is Not Lost. Anytime we get into a habit, or even start to get into a habit, we start to train the elephant, to carve a path that we can retrace again later. So think of each time you start a habit cycle as an upward spiral that has circled back to where it began but is now one level higher. It may feel like you are back at square one, but neurologically you aren’t. You’re actually in a better place than you were before (maybe only slightly, if it is a perennial New Year’s resolution that lasts only a couple of weeks, or maybe you’re in a much better place if you actually got into the habit for a while). So if you relapse, simply begin again with step one, keeping in mind that you are now armed with lots of new knowledge about what worked and what didn’t.
In sum: Instead of seeing a lapse or a relapse as an indication that you aren’t good enough to establish a habit, see it as a clue that will help you better create a good habit that will stick with you for the rest of your life—and help you become a good habit creator who can do this again and again.
