We all have things we do in our life we’d like to change, but often shaking bad habits or adopting good ones is a lot harder than we’d like it to be. We go back, again and again, to the patterns we are used to. Why does this happen and how can we change in a sustainable way?
Well, let me tell you my experience and how I’ve been able to solve this problem.
My Story
Usually it all starts when I’m actively dissatisfied with something in my life. Maybe I keep staying up really late and not getting as much sleep as I need. Maybe I’ve been eating a ton of sugar and it’s starting to take its toll on my body. There’s a whole lot in my life I’ve been motivated to change. The first step is always…
Step 1: Get motivated and set some goals then start as soon as possible
What kind of person could I be if I really tried. When I think this way I start imagining myself changing, not just in one way, but two, four, maybe even ten ways all at once. If I can change all of these habits at the same time then I can be the person I want to be all the sooner. And, if I keep focusing on that person, that ideal me, I’ll feel really, honestly motivated and pull myself through the hardship of changing.
That’s how I’d begin at least — with the best of intentions. I was focused on making myself into that ideal person I wanted to be. I’d set a group of habits, like waking up early, exercising, journaling, and writing in the morning. I’d commit to it and then begin.
The first few days would be easy. I’d notice myself feeling good about what I was doing and who I was becoming. I’d think, “This isn’t even that hard. I can totally keep this up forever.” As I’d go on finishing out that first week the feeling would continue. This was easy. No problem. All I had to do was make up my mind and I could change my life. It’s simple.
Step 2: Keep going no matter how hard it is
The second week would feel good too, mostly. But towards the end I’d start to notice my energy decreasing. Suddenly it wasn’t getting easier to wake up and do all of that stuff I wanted to do every morning. Instead it was getting harder. Every progressive day felt like dragging heavier and heavier weights behind me. I’d pull myself out of bed and start exercising, but it felt like I was fighting against something pulling me back. I didn’t let that stop me, though. Surely these habits would get easier as they got more ingrained. Surely I’d start to adapt to this schedule and I wouldn’t have to think about it soon. It would become second nature. All I had to do was try harder.
Step 3: No seriously, keep going
The third week would be worse. The weights would get even heavier. I was still going but it was mostly out of sheer stubbornness and force of will. My energy would be even lower and I would start to hate the habits I’d set up for myself. I’d resent that I’d obliged myself to this stupid path. It would get more and more annoying until finally…
I would stop. Maybe that would be week three, maybe I would make it as far as week 8, but I always stopped eventually. I assumed that my body would pick up the slack, and this whole habit thing would start paying off at some point. Maybe it even did. It was hard for me to see beyond the annoyance of doing things a past version of myself thought were a good idea. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. I wanted to feel good right now, not at some imaginary point in the future. That past version of myself had no idea what he was committing me to. He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know how hard it would be. He just saw the result he expected and set his goals with that in mind.
What an idiot.
That idiot was me, of course. It’s not like I stopped being myself somewhere in there. I was me the whole time. The problem was I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. And I didn’t get to just skip over all the work it took to get where I wanted to go, either. I actually had to be me that entire time, every step of the way. And that me was going to be looking at what I was doing and trying to figure out if it was even worthwhile to continue this path. What’s the point of trying to get somewhere you might feel good about if you feel bad right now? It’s a hard point to argue with, especially when you feel like crap.
The Pattern
I’ve walked the cycle of this pattern more times than I ever want to count. It’s not exactly the kind of thing that’s enjoyable to pay attention to. At rough estimation, I would expect I’ve experienced this cycle probably 50-70 times. That’s a hard number to look at. To go around in circles that many times and at the end feel like you’ve gotten nowhere. It’s not easy, but being able to look at this honestly has taught me something: what I was doing wrong. First let’s look at the real pattern I was following and see what doesn’t work.
Step 1: Get excited about creating new habits/letting go of old habits
I’d start with an idea of the person I wanted to be, or a thing about myself I wanted to change. Innocent enough, and necessary. You’ve got to know what it is you want to change before you can go about changing it. I’d get fired up and know I could definitely do it if I put my mind to it. I could change myself. But that meant changing more than just one thing, obviously. I had to change a bunch of things. And why not just do them all at once?
Step 2: Set goals that are beyond your reach
At this point I’d figure out everything I wanted to change and compile a rigid schedule to keep myself locked in and on task. There were only so many hours in a day, and I had to make maximum use of them. Then I’d figure out how long it would take me to do certain things if I stayed on track. How long would it take me to write a novel if I wrote a thousand words every day without fail? Stuff like that. I knew my goals might change a bit over the course of months, but I figured I had a pretty good plan
Step 3: Hold yourself to unrealistic standards
It would take a couple of weeks or more, but eventually I’d start to run into significant resistance working myself like I was a machine. I never really understood why this happened. I was getting good sleep and eating well. I usually wasn’t drinking alcohol or doing anything like that either. If I was doing all these good things for myself, what part of me was resisting? I’d keep pushing on and on, but eventually it would fall apart.
Step 4: Fail and feel like crap
After I stopped doing those those “good” habits, I’d inevitably turn back toward the “bad” ones. I tended not to be all that aware of it at the time, but I was seeking out comfort in things that, while they didn’t serve me long term, certainly helped me feel good while I was experiencing them. This would send me deeper and deeper down the chasm of feeling worse about myself and using all manner of immediate gratifications to feel better, if only for a moment.
Step 5: Get frustrated with feeling bad and set new goals
And the circle is complete. I’d get fed up with doing all these stupid things that didn’t help me and realize all I really had to do was put my mind to it. I could change my life if I really tried.
So here’s the pattern:
- Get excited about creating new habits/letting go of old habits
- Set goals that are beyond your reach
- Hold yourself to unrealistic standards
- Fail and feel like crap
- Get frustrated with feeling bad and set new goals
- Repeat as necessary
Each part of this pattern serves its purpose. When you feel like crap, you want to feel good so of course you stretch out and reach toward something better. You genuinely want to achieve those goals, so you’re hard on yourself. You think if you’re hard on yourself then your success is guaranteed. But if you’re too hard, at some point you just can’t do it anymore. That’s when you let go of trying and you end up someplace you don’t want to be again. Spend enough time there and you want to feel better. Over and over.
What’s the part in this pattern that’s broken?
Well, I can look at my own emotions when I’m going through it and see something happens in the middle that’s pretty damn important. When I’m pushing forward and trying to get better but feeling like my days are just getting harder and harder, I start to feel resentment. That’s the big one for me at least. When I’m weeks into some habits I’ve been trying to set up and I feel I’m constantly doing things I don’t want to do because a past version of myself decided it was a good idea. I want to feel good NOW, not in some distant place in the future. That past me felt good because he was imagining that future, not because he was living in the present. I have to be the present me every step of the way. I have to live each day.
Feeling this builds my resentment bit by bit until I’m just looking for a reason to do what I want. Maybe I have a crappy day at work and my emotions are all out of whack. Maybe I buy a new game that’s super fun and I think about playing it all the time. Maybe one of a thousand different things comes along and I decide to give up those habits. Usually it’s subtle at first. Just giving myself a day off because I’ve been working so hard. Maybe I wake up a little bit late because my alarm clock didn’t go off. That’s no fault of mine, I can’t be blamed for that. But now I’m already off track sooooooo
Screw it.
And I’m gone. Sometimes it’s quicker, sometimes it takes weeks for me to subtly step out of a pattern of habits. But it always happens. And it happens even faster when I try to put a bunch of habits on myself at once.
This all leads to a pretty dark place eventually. Repeat this pattern enough times and it sure as hell feels like you can’t really do much of anything. However, when I really thought about it, I had set myself up for that failure every single time. And I’d done this without even realizing it.
Humility
So, what was I doing wrong?
My first mistake was the most obvious one – trying to change a bunch of things all at once. This sounds really attractive because you are imagining that person you’ll be when you make all those changes. That’s like, a super-great version of you. That’s exciting. You’re going to be awesome. You’re going to be yourself, but better. Hell yes. How can you go wrong?
Well, the thing is, you still have to be you every moment on the path getting to that place. That means doing all of the things that, for some reason, you haven’t been doing up till now. Maybe you think you’ve just been lazy or careless or stupid. But I don’t think that’s true. I think the reason you haven’t been doing all of those things that are good for you, and have been doing those things that are bad, is this:
The bad things work.
Now that sounds a little weird at first, but let me explain. You can imagine a bunch of new, awesome habits to pick up and think you’re going to be a more awesome version of yourself when you are doing all of that, but the thing is you don’t actually know how to get there. You don’t understand how to take each step toward the person you want to be in a way that’s sustainable. The problem is balance.
Right now, with whatever shitty habits you have, you are at least somewhat balanced. You have adopted these habits without really thinking about it too hard. And even if it feels bad, it’s a sustainable network of habits. I think that’s the right way to think about habits too – as a network. If you change one, you necessarily change the entire balance of the network. So choosing to change four habits at once ends up being a major disruption to that network. You don’t know what this will mean. You don’t know what those “bad” habits were giving you. They very well may have been things you needed. Maybe you’re annoyed with yourself for waking up so late every day, but maybe your body needs more sleep. Maybe you hate how much junk food you eat, but maybe it helps you feel good when you’re eating it. These “bad” habits aren’t just horrible shit we do, they serve a psychological or physical purpose. These habits are serving our needs, they just aren’t doing so in a way that’s good for us long term.
This isn’t easy to accept, and it doesn’t mean you can’t change, it just means change tends to be more difficult than we are willing to take into account. If you are striving toward good habits, but just rubber-banding back into bad ones over and over I think this is at least part of the answer. Those bad habits are part of your network too, and they’re part of what makes it sustainable. Take them out and you disrupt the whole network. In a worst case scenario you might even end up with more bad habits after a failed attempt at making yourself better, and that doesn’t serve you at all.
There’s a lot more here to keep in mind than just the person you wish you could be. I think it’s possible to get there, but I think the path to getting there isn’t so straightforward.
How not to force a habit
One aspect of the answer is the thing nobody wants to hear. I know I sure as hell never did. You’ve got to take it one step at a time. If you go in trying to change a bunch of stuff at once, and disrupting the whole network, things are not going to go well. It’s an exciting proposition, but not a realistic one.
Start slow and start with the easiest part.
Now by easy, I don’t mean the thing that’s the simplest to change or seems to be giving you the most problems. I mean start by giving yourself advantages.
Most of the time we think of habit change as either dropping something you do that’s bad for you, or picking up something that’s good for you. However, there’s a third option. Changing something you already do. Before you go all crazy trying to do a bunch of awesome shit, start small and easy. My recommendation is to start with your engine. Start taking care of yourself more effectively. The simplest place to do this is with your sleep. Go to bed at the same time every night, wake up at the same time every morning, and get a solid 7 to 8 hours of sleep. Keep the same times, even on weekends. This seems simple. And maybe it seems annoying to not be able to stay up late on the weekends, and I get it. I love that shit too. But I started realizing what it was costing me, and when you think in those terms, it starts to become less attractive. We tend to really only look at the things we want to see, especially when it comes to things we like. If you’re in love with staying up super late on the weekends because you get all that time to have fun and do whatever you like, maybe you’re addressing a need in that. Maybe you’re giving yourself something you need. I’d recommend looking into it and seeing if there’s something else you can do that might work instead, because jacking with your sleep has a TON of effects you do not want. I recommend checking out this video if you’d like to dip your toes into what sleep really does for us: https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpower
Obviously you don’t have to start with sleep if you don’t want to. I can’t tell you anything to do. I point it out specifically because of the power it has on us. Every animal in the world wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t important. But I would recommend starting with taking care of yourself better and adding to your life instead of taking things away from it. What might this look like? Maybe it would be something like choosing to eat one healthy meal a day. That’s a good start. Just hold yourself accountable for that. Don’t try and stop eating junk food, just eat that one healthy meal and keep doing that. Keep doing that for a long time. Keep doing that until it becomes part of who you are. This takes time. You have to give yourself that time. Otherwise, you’re going to hate that asshole who got you into this mess and you’ll stop doing the things that are good for you in favor of the things that feel good right now.
So the crux of the whole thing is just this:
Take it slow, and take it easy. Give your network of habits time to change. It has to adapt with you. There’s no cut and dry amount of time this takes. You have to feel it out for yourself. And if you’re anything like me, it’s going to take a lot longer than you want. The best thing you can do for yourself to create that person you want to be someday is learning how to take care of yourself well. So take it slow, and take it easy.