Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(4)
A change myth was holding Amy back—the pervasive idea that you’ve got to go big or go home. We live in an aspiration-driven culture that is rooted in instant gratification. We find it difficult to enact or even accept incremental progress. Which is exactly what you need to cultivate meaningful long-term change. People get frustrated and demoralized when things don’t happen quickly. It’s natural. It’s normal. But it’s another way we’re set up to fail.
When Amy found the Tiny Habits method, she discovered that the best way to eat a monstrous whale—as little Melinda Mae did in Shel Silverstein’s poem—was to take one bite at a time. Amy ditched go big or go home and decided to go tiny. Every morning after dropping her daughter off at kindergarten, she pulled over on the side of the road and wrote one to-do on a sticky note. Just one. Each one was something she could accomplish right away: send out one sales e-mail, schedule a project meeting, draft a quick introduction to a patient guide. The simple act of focusing her energy on writing down one task led to a chain reaction that propelled her entire day and eventually led to the successful launch of her company. The feeling of success stuck with her as she drove home with her Post-it fluttering on the dashboard. And when she pulled into her driveway and grabbed the bright-pink sticky note, she took it inside to achieve a quick success.
One tiny action, one small bite, might feel insignificant at first, but it allows you to gain the momentum you need to ramp up to bigger challenges and faster progress. The next thing you know, you’ve eaten the whole whale.
TINY DOESN’T RELY ON MOTIVATION OR WILLPOWER
When it comes to chatter about behavior change, a lot of what you hear will mislead you. Be careful. Even highly cited academic theories often fail to transform people’s lives in the real world.
As you know, motivation and willpower get a lot of airtime. People are always looking for ways to ramp them up and sustain them over time. The problem is that both motivation and willpower are shape-shifters by nature, which makes them unreliable.
Case in point: Juni from Chicago, who had more motivation to make a change than anyone I’ve met. Her addiction to sugar was threatening her health, her family, and her job. An early morning radio show host with an insanely busy schedule, Juni was always on the move. Instead of sitting down for lunch, she’d down a caramel macchiato from Starbucks. The pace of life on the air was intense, and she thought she needed the sugar to keep up. Juni believed that having that type of energy required stimulants, and ice cream was Juni’s drug of choice—bubblegum and cookie dough, to be exact. She’d crash hard when she got home, her two children playing video games as she lay zonked out on the couch.
A few years before I met Juni, her mother died from diabetes. It should have been a wake-up call—all the motivation Juni would ever need. But she tried to numb the pain with more and more bubblegum ice cream. Juni gained fifteen pounds that summer. Soon after, both of her sisters were diagnosed with diabetes. Then her grandmother, who also had diabetes, died. The disease was picking off members of her family one by one. After years of writing off her sugar addiction as a “sweet tooth,” Juni recognized that it was dangerous. She had lost control.
At this point, her motivation spiked. She tried going cold turkey a number of times, which worked—for about a day. Maybe two. Then she’d get down on herself, feel bad, resume the sugarfest, and watch the scale creep up.
Juni thought that conquering sugar was a matter of willpower, that she wasn’t strong enough to say no. This was frustrating and confusing for her because she always identified herself as someone who was incredibly strong-willed and determined—you don’t make it to a major market radio show any other way. But the idea that stopping a habit is a matter of willpower couldn’t have been further from the truth. Soon after Juni joined one of my Behavior Design Boot Camps for business reasons, she looked closely at her personal life and realized that her sugar addiction was a design issue, not a character flaw. The fact that her motivation would seesaw wasn’t her fault; it wasn’t a moral failing.
Once Juni understood a key maxim of Behavior Design—simplicity changes behavior—she refocused her personal efforts to create a constellation of habits, tiny in size but big on impact, that helped her to kick her sugar habit for good. She redesigned her environment and swapped out all her go-to sugary snacks with snacks containing less sugar that she still liked to eat, not unappealing substitutes like celery sticks and carrots. She cultivated a series of exercise and eating habits that crowded out and undermined her desire for sugar. Juni also discovered that her unresolved grief was prompting many of her sugar-bingeing behaviors—so she created a few more habits, always starting tiny, to help her process her feelings in a more positive way. When a wave of grief welled up and threatened to overtake her, Juni took that as a prompt to journal or reach out to a friend instead of reaching for the nearest candy bar. Perhaps most important of all, Juni was able to approach every new habit with a mindset of openness and self-compassion. There were moments when she fell off the wagon with sugar, but she didn’t look at this as a failure of character but as a design insight she could use to improve what she did in the future.
Keeping changes small and expectations low is how you design around fair-weather friends like motivation and willpower. When something is tiny, it’s easy to do—which means you don’t need to rely on the unreliable nature of motivation.