Hey, welcome back! If you're new around here, pull up a chair and stick around. I'll send you a weekly newsletter with my best tips for leveling up faster than you thought you could. I've got some great things to share (like the miraculous story of Eugene below) and some quirky and effective tips and anecdotes (like the Dilbert creator who walks into a gym and walks right out again, and why he hates goals). Are you with me? Hit reply and let me know a little bit about you, or even an idea for a future newsletter that you'd like to see.
So let’s get to it. Super-attribute number one, first and foremost, is the ability to change your habits (click here for a refresher on super-attributes).
What if you had complete control of all of your habits? What if you could put an end to all of your bad ones and replace them with everything you know you should do? Wouldn’t that be an Everyday Superpower?
The Unfortunate Man Who Changed Our Understanding of Habits
In San Diego, in 1993, Eugene Pauly was admitted to the hospital, vomiting, dehydrated, delirious, and writhing in pain. He was yelling at everyone and violent towards the nurses. The doctors had to sedate him just to run tests on him. Sadly, Eugene’s life was about to become much more difficult. He would also upend everything we knew about habits and how they work.
Eventually, the doctors found that a virus, normally just on the skin, had made its way to his brain and had done irreparable damage. They gave him a heavy dose of antiviral medicine hoping to save his life and prevent further damage.
Fortunately, it worked. Eugene narrowly escaped death and after five weeks he was discharged from the hospital. Although his physical health recovered, he had lost decades of his memory as well as the ability to make new long-term memories. Eugene would never be able to learn anything new for the rest of his life - or so the experts thought.
Eugene and his wife, Beverly, moved to be closer to their daughter so that she could help with Eugene’s care. In the first few weeks after the move, Beverly would take Eugene for walks every day, always following the same route. She had to be hypervigilant not to lose track of him because Eugene couldn’t remember his new address and phone number, and couldn’t tell his house apart from any other.
One morning after their walk Beverly came downstairs to find that Eugene had left the house. Terrified, she ran outside looking everywhere for him. When she couldn’t find him she ran back to the house in tears to call for help, only to find Eugene had returned home from another walk and was sitting in his chair.
In the weeks that followed Eugene would continue to go on walks by himself. Beverly always told him not to, but he couldn’t remember her warning, and she really couldn’t stop him. Initially, she would tail him on his solo walks. He would always follow the same path and then return home.
Eugene’s doctors were baffled. How could a man with no conscious memory of his home, address, or neighborhood leave his house and then make his way back all by himself? As time went on Eugene’s memory specialist began to notice that Eugene was actually learning all kinds of new things. He couldn’t tell you how to get to the bathroom, bedroom, or kitchen in his house, but he could always make his way there whenever he needed to.
With no conscious memory at all Eugene could still learn new habits.
What is a Habit?
When you learn to play a song on an instrument or perform a technical athletic feat, you drill it over and over until you no longer think about what you are doing. The technical term for this muscle memory is a Central Pattern Generator, or a CPG for short. Your muscles don’t actually have memories, your brain does (that includes your spinal cord, for CPGs). As Eugene showed, our memories are in our conscious and subconscious brains.
The subconscious is the machine-like part of your brain. It simply does what it is built to do - no thought required. It’s really good at not forgetting to keep your heart beating and making sure you keep breathing (something I would never trust my slacker conscious brain to do).
The cool part is that we can tap into that machine and program it to do what we want. The truth is we do it all the time. When was the last time you had to think about how to tie your shoes or hold a fork?
Our brains are constantly looking for ways to free up bandwidth because life is complicated, and before Netflix our conscious brains stayed pretty busy.
Habits are just like muscle memory, they are routines we perform without thinking.
The Catch
Of course, there is a catch (there always is). The subconscious brain doesn’t learn from books, observations, or lectures like our conscious brain. It learns through repetition. So to create a habit, you need to repeat a behavior long enough until it becomes a piece of software code that runs in your subconscious brain - easier said than done.
It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, repeating a behavior over and over again can be boring and difficult, especially when we don’t see the results right away. Dieting is always hardest when the scale seems to be stuck on a number. So, to create a habit we need to develop a system that makes performing the behavior as easy as possible until the code is complete.
James Clear at jamesclear.com has compiled some of the best information on how to do this. I’ll give you an overview below, but if you are one of the few people left on the planet that hasn’t read his book, Atomic Habits, then I would recommend you get it today.
(Originally this article was going to be about what Atomic Habits got wrong, but the book got so much right that it seemed better to start with the good stuff.)
How do we make ourselves repeat difficult and boring behavior?
Systems over Goals
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, says goals are for suckers (I am not paraphrasing). How many goals have you set and given up on? How many times have you set the same goal for yourself hoping this will be the time it works out? (If you are like me then you probably prefer not to share that number.)
That is why Scott Adams says that systems trump goals. A system for weight loss will beat the goal of weight loss every time. With the right system, you won’t even need the goal.
Goals are not great at getting you to repeat a behavior.
They can be useful for setting a direction for your life and for informing what systems and habits you need to get you moving. You may never compete in a Triathlon if you don’t make that a goal, but setting that goal without using a system and habits won’t get you there either.
Be the Behavior
You are more likely to repeat an action if it defines you. It is easier to establish an exercise habit if you decide in your mind, “I am the type of person who exercises every day,” compared to the person who decides, “I am trying to exercise every day.”
Write down somewhere the type of person you are and tell it to a few friends. This will help cement that behavior as part of your identity.
Make it Easy
Start small. This part is critical. Don’t be afraid or ashamed to make your initial routine very short and easy. Just do what you are willing to do without burning through a lot of willpower. Follow the rule of just keeping the habit to 2 minutes in the beginning. There will be time to improve the habit. When you are starting, you just want to get the habit software in your brain. If all you can do is a warm-up stretch for your exercise habit then start with that and gradually add more.
Overdoing it is just going to make it easier for you to justify skipping the next time. In the early stages, you need to stop when you still want to do more, so that you look forward to the next time.
Establish a cue. Your habits will naturally tie themselves to a cue or trigger. Returning to the machine metaphor, we use what programmers call an “If-Then Statement”. When event b occurs then you do action c. Our subconscious brain works the same way.
When you create a new habit, you need to choose an event trigger that you can stick to. The closer the cue is in time, space, and relation to the habit the easier and stronger the habit will be.
Have a backup cue. You also need a second trigger for each habit. Eventually, you will be thrown off of your normal routine. The backup cue will keep the habit going on those days.
Shape your environment. You need to make the behavior as easy as possible, and this may mean moving a few things around. Make healthy food easy to get. If you want to get better sleep, make sure you have a good bed. If you are trying to read more then you should have a comfortable place just for reading. If you are short on space then have a unique setup to use just for each habit. It can be as simple as using a certain placemat when studying at the kitchen table.
If we can get our environment right, then often the habit will seem to form itself.
Make it Hard
Breaking a bad habit is more difficult because the habit wiring is already in our subconscious, and, unfortunately, there is no getting that wiring out. The good news is we can wire a new habit over the top of it.
Eliminate the cues. Figure out the cues for your bad habits and avoid them. If you are breaking a dangerous habit, that may even mean severing ties with the people who have become your cues.
If we can eliminate the “If” event from our “If-Then Statement” the “Then” part will never have a reason to occur.
Shape your environment to make it difficult to repeat the habit. Throw your junk food in the trash or stick it in a place that you can’t get to without some real effort. Put your heater on a timer and dial up the temperature to sweat you out of bed in the morning. Do whatever you can think of to make that bad habit difficult to keep.
Get a replacement habit. If you can’t avoid a time and place that triggers a bad habit, then you will need to create a new habit for those same triggers. In your subconscious brain, you don’t get to delete your code, the habits are stuck, but you can code a new habit to take precedence over the bad one.
Be accountable
If you are having a particularly difficult time with a habit, either starting or stopping, then join a group, or a sports team, or a competition, or whatever. You need to put people in your life that have a similar goal, and to whom you can be accountable, even if that accountability just means showing up each week.
What gets rewarded gets repeated
The biggest trick for getting yourself to repeat a behavior, or stop a bad one, is to come up with a reward for every single success. When you get something right you need to give yourself an immediate dopamine hit.
A good reward should not contradict the behavior. It’s not helpful to treat yourself to Ben & Jerry’s for having followed your diet all day. The rewards don’t need to be grand or elaborate, either. It may be as simple as checking a box or putting a pebble in a jar. Obviously, the better the reward the more likely you will repeat the behavior.
It is a sad but helpful realization to know that we can be trained just like a dog with treats.
Don’t Miss Twice
As I mentioned earlier Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, gives himself full permission to walk right into the gym and then turn around and walk right out and go home without any shame or embarrassment. He does this because he understands that some days we don’t have it in us. That is just the way it is. If all you can do on those days is an absolute terrible job of your habit, then that is all you do. Take the habit all the way back to the 2 minute rule if you need to.
If you absolutely can not perform even the smallest version of your habit that day then go ahead and miss, but never - and I mean never - miss two days in a row. That is how you keep going and prevent a new habit from getting wired over the one you have worked so hard to develop.
Luckily you don’t need get too worried about weekends, holidays, or vacations. Don’t miss twice means that you perform habit on the days where the habit is part of your routine. You can skip workouts on weekends, but you should still need to floss your teeth.
Conclusion:
Levelling up control of your habits will level up everything else you do in your life. That includes developing of the other super-attributes. That is why it is the most important Everyday Superpower. You can think of the other super-attributes as a palette of colors we can pick and choose from. This one is our paintbrush. It is a must-have.
So good........this is helpful for me but I'm also thinking of how I can teach these simple but powerful concepts to my 16 year old son and his friends. I'm tutoring him and two of his friends on the ACT for college admissions. The most important thing I'm asking them to do is DAILY study effort. I'm going to share a few of these nuggets from you post with them.. Even two minutes a day will help cement the habit. Thank you for this!!!