Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(40)
Pearl Habits—Creating Beauty from Irritations
When you learn to design and redesign prompts in your life, you’re opening the door to new ways of managing situations that would otherwise distress you.
Getting good sleep has been a challenge for me in the past few decades. I’ve long understood the importance of quality sleep, but it’s probably been my number one health issue. I knew that noise in my bedroom was causing me to wake up in the middle of the night because the wall control for the air-conditioning clicks every time it turns the A/C on and off. I was planning to install some high-tech thermostat gadget, but I found a faster, simpler solution. When I was awake one night and anticipating the next click, I decided to make this noise my Anchor for relaxing my face and neck. So my recipe was After I hear the click, I will relax my face and neck.
My Recipe—Tiny Habits Method
After I . . .
I will . . .
To wire the habit into my brain, I will immediately:
hear the click of the air-conditioning unit,
relax my face and neck.
Anchor Moment
Tiny Behavior
Celebration
An existing routine in your life that will remind you to do the Tiny Behavior (your new habit).
The new habit you want but you scale it back to be super tiny—and super easy.
Something you do to create a positive feeling inside of yourself (the feeling is called Shine).
It worked, and I soon wired in this habit. When I hear the click, I relax. Because of this positive result, I’m actually happy when I hear the click because it’s reminding me to relax so I sleep better.
I call these habits Pearl Habits because they use prompts that start out as irritants then turn into something beautiful.
My example isn’t exactly earth-shattering, but I recently learned that my friend Amy did something similar by leveraging the power of after in a creative, positive way.
Amy tackled a much trickier problem, and she created a remarkable Pearl Habit along the way.
As she and her husband were separating, the word “acrimonious” was thrown around by everyone from her lawyer to the children’s court-appointed therapist. Even when they finally worked out the logistics of custody, her ex-husband was still angry with her, and she wasn’t too happy with him. But they couldn’t avoid each other.
Amy began to notice a pattern after a few months. She would have an unpleasant exchange with her ex-husband, and she would flash back to that throughout the day and feel upset or angry or guilty all over again.
So she decided to try something.
She couldn’t control what her ex-husband said to her or how their interactions unfolded. His verbal assaults were like bad weather—sometimes she could see them coming and other times they came out of nowhere. What was predictable was how she felt in the aftermath. So that’s what she decided to change. Her objective was to take the focus off him. Using her husband’s behavior as her prompt, Amy made a plan: Any time she felt defeated or attacked by her ex, she would immediately decide to do something nice for herself—listen to a new album from her favorite band or the audiobook that she wanted to finish but never had the time to. Sometimes Amy drove straight to Starbucks for a cup of her favorite tea. But whatever she did had to make her feel good. Since Amy had precious little time during the day for herself, she realized that making her new behavior a “self-care” habit gave her double rewards—she could wrestle back some control and do something nice for herself. After I feel insulted, I will think of something nice to do for myself was her winning Habit Recipe.
My Recipe—Tiny Habits Method
After I . . .
I will . . .
To wire the habit into my brain, I will immediately:
feel insulted,
think of something nice to do for myself.
Anchor Moment
Tiny Behavior
Celebration
An existing routine in your life that will remind you to do the Tiny Behavior (your new habit).
The new habit you want but you scale it back to be super tiny—and super easy.
Something you do to create a positive feeling inside of yourself (the feeling is called Shine).
It worked beautifully. Instead of insulting him back or feeling attacked, she would say to herself, Oh, look, another insult. Guess it’s time to watch that movie I’ve been wanting to see. Instead of reacting to him, she’d say good-bye, get on with her business, and formulate her evening plans. Her days didn’t get derailed, she didn’t find herself replaying the conversation in her head, she . . . let it go. She began to see his insults as inadvertent gifts. After all, he was the one prompting her to take good care of herself. She recognizes that this is a funny kind of logic, but thinking about a difficult situation as generously as possible helped her to get through it.
Ideally, Amy wouldn’t have had someone in her life who made her feel that way. But we can’t always edit all the toxic people and situations out of our lives. Sometimes we have to put up with people who treat us unfairly, get on our nerves, or behave badly. But we can take control of our side of the equation. That’s what Amy did with her brilliant use of prompts. Using someone’s behavior as a prompt for a healthy response as opposed to a self-defeating one is a great idea that can work for all sorts of situations where we feel powerless. And Amy discovered that the positive impact far exceeded her initial intent. Her kids, who were sometimes caught in the crossfire, seemed less stressed after the weekly handoff. She also noticed that her newfound calm seemed to rub off on her ex. It was as if she’d taken the air out of his anger balloon. He would still make the occasional cutting remark, but his heart didn’t seem in it anymore. For the first time in a long time, Amy dared to hope that one day they could actually be friends. Or at least civil coparents. This additional shift rippled out to him, and it wasn’t long before he cut out the insults altogether. Amy remembers him cracking a joke one day when she dropped their kids off. They laughed together for the first time in more than two years. It felt surreal. They had reached a kind of unspoken truce that only a year ago had felt like a moon shot.