More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: What we assume will be temporary often becomes permanent; what we assume is permanent often proves temporary.
Routines are chains of habits, and when just one seemingly insignificant link weakens, it can disrupt the entire habit chain.
It can be surprisingly hard to recognize when change threatens to wipe the slate clean—another reason why Monitoring is helpful. When we monitor, we notice as soon as a good habit becomes disrupted.
Joining a group is a clean slate of relationships. It’s a way to enter a new social scene and, often, an area of learning. Every time I’ve joined a group, I’ve made new friends, gained knowledge, and had fun.
the Strategy of the Lightning Bolt.
sometimes we’re hit by a lightning bolt that transforms our habits, instantly. We encounter some new idea, and suddenly a new habit replaces a long-standing habit—without preparation, without small steps, without wavering—and we pass from before to after in a moment. The Strategy of the Lightning Bolt takes its power from knowledge, beliefs, and ideas.
But if it strikes, the Lightning Bolt can be enormously powerful, so we should watch for it and take advantage of its effortless, instantaneous change whenever we feel it at work in our minds.
When we try a new habit for the first time, it feels full of promise, even if it’s arduous. But most of that excitement is gone the second time, and the habit’s drawbacks are more apparent. Plus, there’s the discouraging feeling of having lost ground, of going backwards.
Abstinence is as easy to me, as temperance would be difficult.”
Like Dr. Johnson, I’m an Abstainer: I find it far easier to give up something altogether than to indulge moderately. And this distinction has profound implications for habits.
one way to deprive myself without creating a feeling of deprivation is to deprive myself totally. Weirdly, when I deprive myself altogether, I feel as though I haven’t deprived myself at all. When we Abstainers deprive ourselves totally, we conserve energy and willpower, because there are no decisions to make and no self-control to muster.
“Abstainers” do better when they follow all-or-nothing habits.
If I never do something, it requires no self-control to maintain that habit.
Moderators shouldn’t try to abstain; if they try to deny themselves, they can become very preoccupied with indulging.
for Abstainers, having something makes them want it more; for Moderators, having something makes them want it less.
many people use the Strategy of Abstaining to control their use of technology.
for Abstainers and Moderators alike, there can be a kind of “Lent pleasure” in abstinence, in relinquishment, for a limited time.
giving up something for a short time reawakens our pleasure in it. A
Temporarily to give up color, or coffee, or a credit card makes us appreciate it much more. Alternatively, temporarily giving it up may help us to see that we’re happier when we permanently drop it from our stock of habits.
“I can’t give myself a negative,” she told me. “I have to make this a positive thing. So I tell myself, ‘Now I’m free from French fries.’ ” “ ‘Free from French fries!’
Research—and my own experience—suggests that the less we indulge in something, the less we want it.
The amount of effort, time, or decision making required by an action has a huge influence on habit formation. To a truly remarkable extent, we’re more likely to do something if it’s convenient, and less likely if it’s not.
even the tiniest tweaks in convenience affect people’s eating.
In what’s called the “mere exposure effect,” repeated exposure makes people like each other better.
If we tell ourselves, “Oh, I can’t exercise, it’s too inconvenient,” we don’t see ways to make it more convenient; identifying exactly why exercise feels inconvenient helps to reveal possible solutions. Identify the problem.
purchasing more convenience can be challenging for an underbuyer like me. I have to remind myself that habit convenience is a wise investment.
habits stick better when they’re pleasurable.
It may be an illusion, but an activity seems easier—and therefore more convenient—when it includes an element of fun, satisfaction, or beauty.
it’s easier to make pleasant activities into habits.
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: The biggest waste of time is to do well something that we need not do at all.
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: Make it easy to do right, and hard to go wrong.
Just as I can strengthen good habits by making them more convenient, I can squash bad habits by making them less convenient.
A key for understanding many bad habits? Impulsivity. Impulsive people have trouble delaying satisfaction and considering long-term consequences; they find it difficult to plan ahead, and once they start a task, they struggle to stick with it. Also, when impulsive people feel anxious about performing a task, they often try to make themselves feel better by avoiding the task, by procrastinating.
The harder it is to do something, the harder it is to do it impulsively, so inconvenience helps us stick to good habits. There are six obvious ways to make an activity less convenient: • Increase the amount of physical or mental energy required (leave the cell phone in another room, ban smoking inside or near a building). • Hide any cues (put the video game controller on a high shelf). • Delay it (read email only after 11:00 a.m.). • Engage in an incompatible activity (to avoid snacking, do a puzzle). • Raise the cost (one study showed that people at high risk for smoking were pleased by
...more
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.
sometimes we don’t make a habit inconvenient because we don’t really want to change.
Instead of resisting temptation, I try to anticipate and minimize temptation—both in my environment and in my own mind—and I plan for failure.
There’s a downward pull toward bad habits that requires us to maintain an active, concrete effort to protect our good habits—remarkably, even the good habits that we enjoy.
To defeat a possible temptation, we must first recognize
the first step in the Strategy of Safeguards is the elimination of the cues that lead to those temptations.
hide the reminder of temptation: the iPad, the bottle of wine, piles of clothes catalogs. Out of sight, out of mind—it really works.
Eliminating cues stops temptation before it starts, so it never overpowers us. As Montaigne observed, “The infancies of all things are feeble and weak. We must keep our eyes open at their beginnings; you cannot find the danger then because it is so small: once it has grown, you cannot find the cure.”
make detailed plans of action for keeping good habits, with what researcher Peter Gollwitzer calls “implementation intentions,” also known as “action triggers” or “if-then” planning. “If ________ happens, then I will do _______.”
If I’m writing and need to verify some information, I write “look up” in my text to remind me to deal with it later, rather than allow myself to be distracted by the fun of research.
a stumble may be helpful, because it shows me where I need to concentrate my efforts in order to do better next time.
Indeed, guilt and shame about breaking a good habit can make people feel so bad that they seek to make themselves feel better—by indulging in the very habit that made them feel bad in the first place.
To form good habits, we want to stumble as rarely as possible. A stumble may prevent a fall, true, but all falls begin with a single stumble. So it’s very, very important not to stumble. That’s the paradox: a stumble is no big deal, and yet a stumble is a very big deal.
the more faithfully I adhere to my new habits, the more likely they are to stick.
it pays to be particularly vigilant in the early days, and in the context of well-known stumbling blocks: tension with other people, social pressure, loneliness or boredom or anxiety, and—perhaps surprisingly—positive emotions, such as joy or excitement.
Little temptations sometimes slip past our guard.
