The topic for today is Will Power and habit. I can only speak from my own experience here, which may or may not be common. I am terrible at establishing and maintaining new habits. I have started habits and established them, only to forget about them and notice a week later that something I’ve done for three years regularly I’ve just plumb forgotten about. Another way to say this is that I am very very distractable.
Anchor talks about will power, and explains that this is a limited commodity in human beings. Probably we have all heard of “decision fatigue” by now. The idea is that the more decisions you have to make (large or small) and the more effortful they are, the more your ability to make the next decision will degrade. So if you are making a lot of tiny but unclear decisions all morning, and then you have to decide what car to buy in the afternoon, your “decider” will have worn out with all the little stuff and you will have a tough time making the large decision later.
For those of us struggling with large issues, it can make a HUGE difference to limit the number of decisions we have to make in a day. For example (I heard this on the radio the other day and was stunned!) the President of the United States uses this - he only has blue suits, and all the shirts go with them, so he doesn’t need to think about what he wears in the morning, he just puts on whatever he grabs from the closet. He doesn’t make any menu choices – that is up to other people. He delegates all the decisions that he doesn’t need to make to others so that he is “fresh” for the big decisions that are his job. Pretty smart.
Anchor tells the story of wanting to play his guitar more. He made a chart, and after 21 days… three check marks. Failure. So he looked at what he was doing. He would come home from work and … instead of playing the guitar, which was in the closet in the living room, he would flop on the couch and turn on the t.v. And then he would run out of time and need to be on to the next. He diagnosed the problem as one with “will power.” It was just too much effort at that time of day to get up and walk across the living room, open the closet door and get out the guitar – particularly when the remote was Right There at hand. So he moved the remote, and bought a guitar stand and put the guitar next to the couch. Another 21 day chart and … success! He had played the guitar every single day.
So if you want to do something that it is hard to get yourself to do – set it up so that it is easier to do it (he calls this the 20 second rule – he got the guitar 20 seconds more accessible!) I sleep in my workout clothes (not sneakers!) and I have my workout video cued up and ready to go in the AM. It doesn’t work every morning, but I’m exercising A LOT more regularly than I used to.
It works the other way too – making things less accessible can help to short circuit bad habits – the example he gives is of a compulsive shopper who froze her credit cards in blocks of ice in the freezer. If she wanted to buy something or go shopping she had to thaw the chunk of ice around the card out first, and that was usually long enough that the impulse passed.
