Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(67)
The inability to stop a bad habit can provoke deep feelings of shame and guilt. Why? In many cultures there is a lot of weight put on personal responsibility—the idea that if you can’t do the right thing you must be suffering from some weakness of character. This is reductive and unhelpful in the realm of behavior change, but it’s also deeply embedded in our psyches.
The first thing to remember is this: If you’ve followed some misguided advice on breaking habits and failed, I’m here to say it’s not your fault. You have inherited a flawed way of thinking and approaching the problem that has led to a cycle of frustration and dysfunction.
The second thing to remember is that you can design for the change you want in a smarter, better way.
And that’s why I’m writing this chapter for you.
It’s time to set the record straight and acknowledge that bad habits are not fundamentally different from good habits when it comes to basic components. Behavior is behavior; it’s always a result of motivation, ability, and a prompt coming together at the same moment.
The Behavior Change Masterplan
My masterplan has three phases for disrupting unwanted habits.
You create new positive habits first. Then you focus on stopping specific behaviors related to the old habit. If stopping doesn’t work, move on to phase three, which is all about swapping in a new habit to replace the old one.
There are more steps within each of these phases, which I’ve mapped out in flowcharts in the appendixes. (They were too detailed to include here.)
Traditional change methods (the ones that work, anyway) also fit in my overall masterplan. Consider motivational interviewing, a counseling method that helps clients get clear on their motivations. This is one of the few traditional approaches I find worthwhile. People who experience motivational interviewing can better understand their reasons for doing or not doing a behavior.
The use of accountability partners can serve various roles. On the surface, being accountable to someone seems to be all about motivation. Yes, motivation plays a big role, but when done well, the use of accountability partners can also affect your ability. A partner can give you ideas on how to make your unwanted behavior harder to do or even impossible. If you’re trying to cut down screen time, an accountability partner might suggest you install a timer that turns off your Wi-Fi at eight p.m. That makes surfing the web late harder to do. (Thank you, accountability partner.)
The masterplan shows where a proven change method might fit in with a more comprehensive system for untangling your unwanted habits, and it specifies the order of things. It’s not merely a list of techniques or a set of guidelines; it’s something more powerful: an algorithm for creating change in your life by untangling habits that are causing you pain.
Are you ready?
PHASE #1—FOCUS ON CREATING NEW HABITS
First some good news.
By reading this book and practicing Tiny Habits, you are already on your way to disrupting unwanted habits. Creating new positive habits is phase one of the Behavior Change Masterplan, and by focusing on this first, you learn the Skills of Change and see evidence that you can change, and this gives you more power to untangle habits you don’t want in your life.
Skills of Change
Remember how many of Juni’s new habits focused directly on her sugar addiction?
None of them.
Juni “skilled up” by practicing habits that did not carry emotional baggage. The new habits were safe and nonthreatening. This allowed her to learn the Skills of Change without emotional distraction.
Let’s suppose you have struggled with your body weight for years. Maybe you were ridiculed for being overweight. Perhaps even your medical doctor makes you feel awful at each visit. So you might think weight loss should be your number one focus.
I champion a different approach in Phase #1. Don’t focus first on weight loss or whatever is causing you pain. Create habits that relate to some other domain instead—tidiness, relationships, creativity, or anything that doesn’t relate to your body weight.
It’s much better to first build your skills and gain mastery over the change process itself. In Phase #1 you should create habits that build on your strengths. That’s how you succeed quickly, and that’s how you best learn the Skills of Change—by adding key skills and insights for the road ahead. But there’s more.
Identity shift
When you create a host of positive changes, you move closer to the person you want to become. If you feel successful in these changes, you will naturally view yourself differently and begin to embrace a new identity. In the last chapter, we talked about how this leads to more positive habits. But it also has the side effect of crowding out the behaviors you don’t want, the ones no longer in line with the identity you are embracing and the person you are becoming. As Sukumar added more and more exercise behaviors, certain bad habits got phased out. He took the stairs instead of the elevator now because he thought of himself as the kind of person who did that. Watching TV in the evenings morphed from a habit to an occasional indulgence because his evenings were spent playing racquetball with a friend or going for a walk with his wife and their dog. Sukumar didn’t exactly plan on disrupting these bad habits. But by picking up a bunch of positive habits that helped him embrace a new identity, he changed the landscape of his life so drastically that many bad habits no longer fit.