Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(42)

Step 4: Select your best option from step 3 and create a Tiny Habit Recipe. For example: After I realize I must stand in line, I will practice standing on one foot, then the other.



Step 5: Start practicing your Pearl Habit. (And notice what happens to your irritation level.)



And before we move to the next chapter, here is PAC Person to remind us what we have learned about the sources of prompts.





Prompt





Chapter 5



Emotions Create Habits





Linda had a postcard taped on her fridge next to her kids’ finger-painted masterpieces. It was a black-and-white illustration of a 1950s housewife talking on the phone. Above the woman’s perfectly coiffed head was a talk bubble: “If the kids are alive at five o’clock, I’ve done my job.”

When Linda saw it, she laughed out loud.

It had made her smile, then it made her think. It represented an attitude of self-acceptance that she badly wanted but felt was too difficult to adopt. The idea that you could feel satisfied with what you were doing for your kids made sense to her logically, but it was totally inaccessible emotionally. Which is why she put the postcard on her fridge.

When her husband came home and saw it hanging there, he raised his eyebrows at the irony.

“It’s aspirational,” Linda said with a sigh.

Back then, Linda was a full-time stay-at-home mom with six kids under the age of thirteen. She loved being home with them and wouldn’t have had it any other way, yet she felt constantly underwater and overwhelmed. When she laid her head down at night, every thought was about what she didn’t get done that day. Images from the day spun up in her mind: Cheerios littering the backseat of her car (I should have vacuumed it); piles of unfolded laundry (I should have put it away); her son’s face falling after she snapped at him for pushing his sister (I should be more patient with him); the dirty plates piling up in her sink (I should have done all the dishes; my mom would never have left them like that). What had started out as small deficits on her to-do list ended up amounting to something much worse. Every undone task that paraded through Linda’s mind at night morphed into a rumination on all the ways she didn’t measure up as a mom or a partner or a human being.

Some evenings, as Linda put the milk back in the fridge for the umpteenth time, even the 1950s housewife seemed disappointed in her. Not only did Linda never knock off mom duty at five o’clock, she also couldn’t give herself credit for all of her hard work. Glancing at the woman on her fridge ended up being less of an inspiration and more of a reminder of just how far away she was from that attitude of plucky self-acceptance.

When Linda told me this story years later, it didn’t surprise me.

In my research, I’ve found that adults have many ways to tell themselves, “I did a bad job,” and very few ways of saying, “I did a good job.” We rarely recognize our successes and feel good about what we’ve done.

Feeling good about your tiny successes may feel strange to you. Like Linda, you might focus only on your shortcomings as you scamper through your days and trudge through your years. I’m here to tell you that you are not alone. And that’s why I’m writing this chapter for you.

In the pages ahead, I will show you how to gain a superpower—the ability to feel good at any given moment. You can use this superpower to transform your habits and, ultimately, your life.

Feeling good is a vital part of the Tiny Habits method. You can create this good feeling by using a technique I call celebration. When you celebrate in the Tiny Habits way, you create a positive feeling inside yourself on demand. This good feeling wires the new habit into your brain. You’ll find that celebration is surprisingly effective, and it can be quick and easy, even fun.

Celebration is both a specific technique for behavior change and a psychological frame shift. Imagine how different Linda’s nightly ruminations would have been if she’d had a way to make things feel a lot less lopsided. Because the truth is that her day was filled with both deficits and surpluses, stressful moments and successful ones. She may not have vacuumed the car, but she got her kids to school, soccer, and violin lessons on time. She may not have folded the laundry perfectly, but she had washed and dried all the dirty clothes. She may not have done all the dishes, but she had fed her kids a healthy meal that they enjoyed together. At the time, Linda didn’t understand the importance of embracing those small victories as a way to change her behavior and her life. Those wins were there all along, but Linda, like many people, needed the skills to know how to celebrate them.



A confession: I didn’t tell you everything about why my tooth-flossing habit was so successful so quickly.

Sure, I dialed my behavior in from a B=MAP perspective.

I made flossing easy to do. I found a great prompt. Bam—it’s all looking good, right?

Well, there was one more piece of the puzzle. I stumbled on it during a time when I felt so much stress that I could barely get through each day. A new business I had started was failing, and my young nephew had died tragically. Navigating the personal and day-to-day fallout of those events meant that I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. I was so anxious most nights that I would get up at three a.m. and do the only thing that calmed me down—watch videos of puppies on the Internet. In the morning, I’d stumble out of bed and start the day. As I washed up in the bathroom, I avoided looking in the mirror. I didn’t want to be reminded of the reality that I knew would be staring me in the face: I looked terrible, felt terrible, and was scared to face the day.