Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

by Gretchen Rubin

The Habits Manifesto What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while. Make it easy to do right and hard to go wrong. Focus on actions, not outcomes. By giving something up, we may gain. Things often get harder before they get easier. When we give more to ourselves, we can ask more from ourselves. We’re not very different from other people, but those differences are very important. It’s easier to change our surroundings than ourselves. We can’t make people change, but when we change, others may change. We should make sure the things we do to feel better don’t make us feel worse. We manage what we monitor. Once we’re ready to begin, begin now.

“Researchers were surprised to find,” write Roy Baumeister and John Tierney in their fascinating book Willpower, “that people with strong self-control spent less time resisting desires than other people did.… people with good self-control mainly use it not for rescue in emergencies but rather to develop effective habits and routines in school and at work.” In other words, habits eliminate the need for self-control.

Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control.

When possible, the brain makes a behavior into a habit, which saves effort and therefore gives us more capacity to deal with complex, novel, or urgent matters.

How I Like to Spend My Time At what time of day do I feel energized? When do I drag? Do I like racing from one activity to another, or do I prefer unhurried transitions? What activities take up my time but aren’t particularly useful or stimulating? Would I like to spend more time with friends, or by myself? Do I have several things on my calendar that I anticipate with pleasure? What can I do for hours without feeling bored? What daily or weekly activity did I do for fun when I was ten years old? What I Value What’s most satisfying to me: saving time, or money, or effort? Does it bother me to act differently from other people, or do I get a charge out of it? Do I spend a lot of time on something that’s important to someone else, but not to me? If I had $500 that I had to spend on fun, how would I spend it? Do I like to listen to experts, or do I prefer to figure things out for myself? Does spending money on an activity make me feel more committed to it, or less committed? Would I be happy to see my children have the life I’ve had? My Current Habits Am I more likely to indulge in a bad habit in a group, or when I’m alone? If I could magically, effortlessly change one habit in my life, what would it be? If the people around me could change one of my habits, what would they choose? Of my existing habits, which would I like to see my children adopt? Or not?

Many strategies help us change our habits, and four strategies tower above the others: Monitoring, Foundation, Scheduling, and Accountability.

“We manage what we monitor,”

Self-measurement brings self-awareness, and self-awareness strengthens our self-control.

“When you cannot express it in number, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” If we want something to count in our lives, we should figure out a way to count it.

the best time to start is now.

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.

“What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.”

Scheduling is an invaluable tool for habit formation: it helps to eliminate decision making; it helps us make the most of our limited self-command; it helps us fight procrastination. Most important, perhaps, the Strategy of Scheduling helps us make time for the things that are most important to us. How we schedule our days is how we spend our lives.

For this reason, it’s often worthwhile to invest in systems of accountability. A chief benefit of fitness trainers, financial planners, life coaches, executive coaches, personal organizers, and nutritionists, in addition to their expertise, is the accountability they provide. For Obligers, most of all, this kind of external accountability is absolutely essential. Another way to create accountability is to go public.

The most important step is the first step.

Something that can be done at any time often happens at no time, and waiting vaguely for the right time to start again is very risky. (Starting tomorrow usually sounds like a good plan.) But the more tomorrows go by, the more intimidating it becomes to take that first step back.

What we assume will be temporary often becomes permanent; what we assume is permanent often proves temporary.

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

a high insulin level causes the body to move glucose into fat cells to be stored, which means that the body will accumulate fat; a low insulin level causes glucose to be burned as fuel. And what causes a body’s insulin level to be high or low? For the most part, diet. The more carbohydrates a person eats, and the easier these carbohydrates are to metabolize, the more insulin in the blood, and the more fat that accumulates. Therefore, Taubes argues—and this is where controversy sets in—that in order to lower insulin and the body’s tendency to accumulate fat, we should avoid eating easily digestible, high-carb food: sugar, bread, cereal, grains, pasta, potatoes, rice, corn, juice, beer, wine, soda. Taubes maintains that the quantity and quality of carbohydrates, not calories or exercise, chiefly accounts for why we get fat.

Within the study of habits, certain tensions reappear: whether to accept myself or expect more from myself; whether to embrace the present or consider the future; whether to think about myself or forget myself. Because habit formation often requires us to relinquish something we want, a constant challenge is: How can I deprive myself of something without feeling deprived? When it comes to habits, feeling deprived is a pernicious state. When we feel deprived, we feel entitled to compensate ourselves—often, in ways that undermine our good habits.

“Much easier to say no to something once and be done with the whole issue than to go back and forth endlessly. Abstinence takes zero mental effort.”

There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need do only inner work … that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself.… The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

The biggest waste of time is to do well something that we need not do at all.

Make it easy to do right, and hard to go wrong.

“Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.”

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

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

“I eat because I’m unhappy, and I’m unhappy because I eat.”

Make sure the things we do to make ourselves feel better don’t make us feel worse.

Moral Licensing Loophole: In moral licensing, we give ourselves permission to do something “bad” (eat potato chips, bust the budget) because we’ve been “good.” We reason that we’ve earned it or deserve it.

Tomorrow Loophole: As part of my investigation of First Steps, I’d identified “tomorrow logic.” Now doesn’t matter, because we’re going to follow good habits tomorrow. And, as Little Orphan Annie famously observed, tomorrow is always a day away.

False Choice Loophole: This is the loophole-seeking strategy I most often invoke. I pose two activities in opposition, as though I have to make an either/or decision, when in fact, the two aren’t necessarily in conflict. Here are some of my own false choices:

Arranging to Fail Loophole: It’s odd. Instead of fleeing temptation, we often plan to succumb. In what Professors Lee Beach and G. Alan Marlatt dubbed “apparently irrelevant decisions,” we make a chain of seemingly harmless decisions that allow us covertly to engineer the very circumstances that we’ll find irresistible. I’ve long been obsessed by author J. M. Barrie’s strange, brilliant skeleton of a book, The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island, about three boys who set sail to seek the adventure of being capsized. I’m particularly haunted by its first line, “We set out to be wrecked”; to fail was the very purpose of their undertaking. I’ll just check my email quickly before I go to the meeting, and then make this one call … oh no, it’s so late, there’s no point in going to the meeting now. I drove across town to that gourmet grocery store to buy broccoli, and I ended up buying their special cheesecake. Who could resist? I’ll buy some scotch to have in the house in case someone stops by. My husband and I love to go on “all-inclusive” cruise vacations, and I can’t resist the all-you-can-eat food. I’ll play a video game for fifteen minutes before I start working. Okay, another fifteen minutes. I’m going to lie on the sofa so I can brainstorm ideas in comfort.

“This Doesn’t Count” Loophole: We tell ourselves that for some reason, this circumstance doesn’t “count.” I lived in a group house after college, and my housemate’s boyfriend one day said to me, in a patronizing tone, “Boy, I wish I had as much free time as you do, to read for pleasure.” He practically lived with us, so I saw how he spent his time, and I answered, “But you have lots of free time, you watch a ton of sports on television.” He said, “Oh, that doesn’t count.” But everything counts.

“Everything counts,” I said with a sigh. We can always mindfully decide to make an exception, but there are no freebies, no going off the grid, no get-out-of-jail-free cards, nothing that stays in Vegas.

Questionable Assumption Loophole: We make assumptions that influence our habits—often, not for the better—and many of those assumptions become less convincing under close scrutiny. A reader posted a good example: “I set up weird mental blocks around my time. For instance, if it’s 9 a.m. and I have an appointment at 11 a.m., I’ll think ‘Oh, I have to go somewhere in two hours, so I can’t really start anything serious’ and then end up wasting my whole morning waiting for one thing to happen.” Our assumptions sound reasonable … but are they?

Concern for Others Loophole: We tell ourselves that we’re acting out of consideration for others and making generous, unselfish decisions. Or we decide we must do something in order to fit into a social situation.

Fake Self-Actualization Loophole: Often, a loophole is disguised as an embrace of life or an acceptance of self, so that the failure to pursue a habit seems life-affirming—almost spiritual. You only live once (YOLO). I’ll be sorry if I don’t at least try it. I should celebrate this special occasion. (How special? National Cheesecake Day? A colleague’s birthday?) Life is too short not to live a little.

“One-Coin” Loophole: One of the most insidious of loopholes is the “one-coin” loophole—insidious because it’s absolutely true. This loophole gets its name from the “argument of the growing heap,” which I learned about in Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. According to a footnote, the argument of the growing heap is: If ten coins are not enough to make a man rich, what if you add one coin? What if you add another? Finally, you will have to say that no one can be rich unless one coin can make him so. In other words, even though one coin certainly isn’t sufficient to make a man rich, a man only becomes rich by adding one coin after another. This teaching story highlights a paradox that’s very significant to habits and happiness: often, when we consider our actions, it’s clear that any one instance of an action is almost meaningless; yet at the same time, the sum of those actions is very meaningful. Whether we choose to focus on the single coin or the growing heap will shape our behavior. True, any one visit to the gym is inconsequential, but the habit of going to the gym is invaluable. Focusing on the one coin is a way to deny the conflict between our values: a person isn’t choosing between the desire to stay close to his extended family and his desire to skip the weekly family brunch to sleep in—because one missed brunch is no big deal. But when he considers the accumulated cost of the missed visits, the conflict looks different. I haven’t worked on that project for such a long ...

To keep going, I sometimes need to allow myself to stop.

Organizational theorists Thomas Malone and Mark Lepper identified several sources of intrinsic motivation: Challenge: we find personal meaning in pursuing a goal that’s difficult but not impossible. Curiosity: we’re intrigued and find pleasure in learning more. Control: we like the feeling of mastery. Fantasy: we play a game; we use our imagination to make an activity more stimulating. Cooperation: we enjoy the satisfaction of working with others. Competition: we feel gratified when we can compare ourselves favorably to others. Recognition: we’re pleased when others recognize our accomplishments and contributions.

But it turns out that extrinsic motivation undermines intrinsic motivation, so rewards can turn enthusiastic participants into reluctant paid workers, and transform fun into drudge work.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.

If I give more to myself, I can ask more from myself. Self-regard isn’t selfish.

I began by collecting examples of other people’s inventive treats: browsing through art books, cookbooks, or travel guides; taking photographs on a walk; napping; having a session of “fur therapy” (petting a dog or cat); wandering through a camping store; looking at family photo albums; keeping art postcards in the car visor for a quick diversion in stalled traffic; going to a comedy club; going to baseball games; listening to podcasts; coloring in a coloring book; visiting an amusement park; learning a new magic trick.

Sometimes treats might not look like treats. Writer Jan Struther observed, “Constructive destruction is one of the most delightful employments in the world.” I find that true, and tasks like shredding mail, emptying out files, or even peeling hard-boiled eggs can feel like a treat. Funnily enough, clearing clutter is also a treat for me, when I’m in a certain mood. On my blog, people wrote about their own untreatlike treats: ironing, writing code, doing Latin translation.

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead. —JAMES BALDWIN, No Name in the Street

The fact is, changing a habit is much more challenging if that new habit means altering or losing an aspect of ourselves. I regret the loss of even the most trivial identity-defining habits. For instance, for years I didn’t own a purse. I liked being “the kind of woman who doesn’t own a purse,” and I delayed buying a purse, even though in many situations carrying a purse would have been far more convenient than lugging my backpack around. Relinquishing this part of myself caused me a pang, even though it was such a tiny part of my identity.

It can be thrilling to add a new element to our identity.

I actually wanted to explain what I’m doing, and I also felt I had to, to prevent myself from changing my mind and deciding to have a glass after all. Once I made a statement about it I felt I couldn’t go back. Explaining reinforced the decision to say no.