Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(24)

Sarika, a project manager for a Fortune 500 company based in Bangalore, experienced this motivation cycle for years. Before she started Tiny Habits, Sarika had tried to get in the habit of cooking for herself and exercising to keep herself healthy. She lives with bipolar disorder, which means she experiences extreme highs and lows in mood and energy. In the past, Sarika had used medication to manage her condition, but she hated the side effects. Her doctors told her it was possible to treat her symptoms with meditation, exercise, and therapy, but that maintaining a routine was critical to making this approach work. A routine would help her identify the severity of her symptoms early on so she could take action before they negatively affected her life. Sarika couldn’t always tell if a manic high or a depressive low was sneaking up on her. So it made sense to her that daily habits would be a great way for her to gauge how she was feeling. If she started watering the jade plant in her hallway every morning, she would know what it feels like to complete that action. On good days she does it without thinking. But if she feels the urge to ignore the watering jug she placed by the doorway as a reminder, she knows something is up and that she should pay closer attention to how she feels doing all of her other habits.

There was only one problem. Sarika could not maintain a routine no matter how hard she tried.

Before she found Tiny Habits, nothing was routine in Sarika’s life except going to work—and even then she rarely got to work at a consistent time. Breakfast was grabbed from a food truck, and lunch, if it happened at all, was takeout. She didn’t clean her kitchen until the mess got really bad, then she’d make like a whirling dervish and do it in an hour. Sarika loves to meditate but would go weeks without sitting on her cushion. Without medication and without these habits as a steady baseline, she often felt out of control. She was short-tempered at home and down in the dumps at work. And she felt like she was being asked to build a spaceship to Mars when her doctors told her to create habits.

Sarika was caught in a “burst and bust” cycle. One of the most problematic issues in Sarika’s life was physical therapy. After months of only occasionally doing a prescribed thirty-minute exercise routine, Sarika found that her injured knee wasn’t getting any better. She needed to do the exercises, but she couldn’t get herself to get out those elastic bands. When she couldn’t take the pain anymore, Sarika would hit a motivational high—a burst—and only then would she do what she had been putting off. But because she hadn’t been doing the exercises regularly, they felt even more painful than usual, and she would hit the “bust” part of the cycle and wouldn’t do her exercises for several days. She repeated this cycle with most every habit she tried to undertake.

What Sarika was going through is common. Many people get stuck in a burst and bust cycle that makes us anxious and disappointed whether they are trying to quit drinking soda, get up before the sun rises, cook dinner at home every night, track each penny earned or invest time each day in finding new prospects. Like most people locked in this cycle, Sarika’s emotions were all over the map—some days she’d feel fine and some days she felt bad about not being able to establish healthy habits. Her confidence was nearly zero, and she was worried that she wasn’t capable of making permanent changes.

Sarika finally found a simple method for designing her habits that didn’t feel like she had to master astrophysics. She began building her routine the Tiny Habits way, small and steady. Instead of aiming for twenty minutes of meditation each day, she started with three breaths on a pillow strategically placed in the middle of her living room. Instead of cooking an entire breakfast, Sarika committed to turning on the stovetop burner right after she entered the kitchen. Instead of thirty minutes of physical therapy exercises, she started with thirty seconds of stretching on her favorite blue yoga mat. From there, Sarika built skills and confidence and wired in these Tiny Behaviors until they took root as habits. Then they grew. She mastered the daily routine that she chased for all those years, and her health has improved now that she makes herself meals, cleans the kitchen, exercises, meditates, and waters her plants every day. Sarika told me that she feels a sense of resilience that she’s never had before.

According to Sarika, the most important part of this was not just the creation of her healthy habits and symptom management but also the confidence it gave her. She knows now that she can do almost anything she wants to—as long as she starts small.

Even if there are times when she can’t do her habits because she isn’t feeling well, she doesn’t go into a shame spiral anymore. Sarika recently sprained her ankle and was bedridden for a few days. Because she lives in a building with no elevator, she told me that in the past she would have cried and thought, Why do these things always happen to me? But this time she accepted the pain without a downward emotional spiral. She took it one day at a time, knowing that she could get back to her healthy routine as soon as she healed. The reason she felt this way is that it’s easier to pick things up again when they are small. There is no mountain to climb, only a little hill. Simple. Easy to do. And that makes all the difference—not just with Sarika’s ability to act but also how she feels day to day. She doesn’t beat herself up on the days when she’s not feeling well because she knows she can resume her bigger routine tomorrow. On the days her motivation is high, she climbs her little habit hills and finds she has the mental and emotional space to experiment and be curious about what other good things she can bring into her life. Things feel lighter and more doable. If she wants to start a new habit, she gets excited and curious instead of overwhelmed. That mindset shift is something that has rippled throughout her life.