THINKING VS FEELING

I recently read a book on habits, and one takeaway is that you should underestimate your willpower. This is not an insult to your mental fortitude but rather a guideline to accomplish your goals with the least amount of willpower necessary. No matter how stubborn you are or how bad you want something, desire is a feeling and feelings are fleeting. While it still is possible to brute force your goals, I implore you to think about how long these results will last and how many times you can replicate this process. Why not increase your margin of error and give yourself more room to breathe?

If you want to go on a diet, that is a desire, an emotion. You might try telling yourself that “you will not eat added sugar for the next month” and quite possibly do it. But is this the smartest approach? What happens when the month is over? If you did not accomplish your goal, do you still feel motivated to keep going? Even if you did complete the month, are you going to repeat the same challenge the next month and the next month?

It is very possible to complete one simple challenge through willpower alone, but life doesn’t give you one challenge at a time. Beyond your daily tasks, stress is stacked onto your life in deadlines, bad interactions, and illness without your consent. The righteous goal of improving oneself only seems to move farther away, not an immediate concern. Think about willpower as a quantifiable value, more or less having a limit. As you introduce another class, lack of sleep, and other stress factors, your willpower and thoughts are divided into tackling the more immediate problems, and your resolve is now disjoint.

Even if you can scrape enough of the remaining willpower together to keep your promise of not eating sugar despite your exhaustion, anxiety, and lack of patience, you will be asking yourself “why am I doing this?” This doubt unconsciously grows beyond control, making conscious willpower not sustainable in the long run.

Imagine your resolve to be a mighty oak tree. As your life runs into complications beyond your control, the tree withers. As you start questioning whether your initial resolve was strong enough to persevere, the doubt grows sucking away the water and nutrients in the soil. And when you have to consciously choose each time to reject all nine soda options to dispense water, temptation comes swinging like an axe, ready to make you fold.

I am not saying that willpower is not important in accomplishing your goals. I am saying that willpower alone is not enough. No, rather it is the deliberate planning, accounting for lapses in willpower, and integrating habits into your permanent identity that makes habits executable and sustainable.

THE FOUR PILLARS

Let me explain briefly how habits are formed. According to James Clear, there are four main pillars in each habit:

Cue: What triggers the action
Crave: The incentive to take action
Response: How easy the action is
Reward: The satisfaction you feel after such action

TOOTH BRUSHING & THE LOW-KEY FACTOR

Take brushing your teeth, which satisfies all four pillars. It’s easy to remember to do, once after waking up and once before going to sleep. Cue. Your mouth feels dirty so you desire the foamy nature of toothpaste to help it feel clean. Crave. Brushing takes two minutes and a couple of easy wrist rotations. Response. And once you’re done, you’re left with a minty, refreshed mouth. Reward.

But take this same habit less than a century ago when toothpaste was an unflavored, starchy combination of soap and chalk. Although the timing and ease of activity remained the same, the crave and reward were gone, almost negated by the fact that you were stuffing chalk into your mouth.

As a result, the low percentage of people who brushed their teeth—prior to the invention of flavored toothpaste—accurately reflected the missing crave and reward aspects in a habit. Proportionally to companies amending this issue by increasing flavor options and travel packing options, the number of toothbrushers skyrocketed in the mid 20th century becoming the integrated habit that goes unnoticeable in many peoples’ daily lives.

This low-key factor is the key to successful habits: you don’t think about when and how you are going to brush your teeth, because you don’t need to. At some point on your diet journey, the food you eat is no longer a stressful decision, but just the normal food you eat.

I must emphasize you pay particular attention to this nuanced mindset. When you desire to start implementing habits, try to consider the long-term identity shift and not just the action. You don’t skip soda because you are eating healthy this month, you skip soda because you are a healthy person (identity). Similarly, a healthy person also exercises everyday, implements a balanced diet, and understands the importance of recovery as well. Target your identity first, then extrapolate actions from there.

LAND ON THE MOON

How can you apply this to starting habits? Well, not every habit you desire will be as easy as brushing your teeth, but you can make it as easy if not easier to begin with. Aspiring to become a writer may seem daunting, and when you promise yourself to start writing everyday, it may feel impossible to accomplish. Taking into account your hectic schedule and the possibilities of emergencies, let’s simplify the action of writing to its very core and start with writing one sentence a day. This is not only doable but now repeatable. Even on your worst day of work, harassed by angry customers and your boss, barely able to scrounge together enough energy and ingredients to make what resembles to be a meal, one sentence seems manageable. When starting a habit, it’s about completing the action with confidence not only on your best days but your worst days too. If you had immediately assigned yourself to write short novella drafts everyday, on your worst day, that would feel unmanageable. Plan to land on the moon if you can’t make it to the stars.

The reason why you start so easy is because that first sentence, that first step, is always the hardest part about making a habit. It requires a jumpstart of willpower and careful planning around your personal limits for repeatability. To be able to simply write one sentence a day, consistently, enables confidence and an unconscious cycle of writing each day. When you realize you have a little more energy in the tank, your own curiosity drives you to write that next sentence and the next. So the habit evolves naturally: from a sentence into a paragraph, a paragraph into a page, and a page into stories. A habit is solidified when it happens unconsciously, and the key to long term progression starts with small repeatable steps.

MANIPULATING TEMPTATION

As I am writing this, I am fasting for Ramadan: meaning no food or water during the day. This seemingly arduous task can be made much easier or more difficult depending on the planning. I had left a water bottle right next to my computer from last night, and as I continued writing, I noticed that I began eyeing the bottle when I felt a little thirsty, yet I ignored it and carried on. A few paragraphs later, and I’m getting frustrated and running out of ideas. The slight exhaustion from waking up early was getting to me. So, I stuck my hand out. My brain shut off and suddenly my mouth was filled with water and emergency sirens began ringing in my head.

“JERRY DO NOT SWALLOW RIGHT NOW”.

I stumbled out of my chair, rushing to the bathroom, promptly spitting out my water. I had almost broken my fast on accident, and it was due to the alluring trap I had coincidentally set for myself. Plan accounting for lapses in willpower not ignoring them.

If you don’t want to drink water, don’t leave water bottles within an arm’s distance. If you don’t want to be tempted, try to the best of your ability to remove such temptations. And if you want to be the one introducing a new habit, figure out the most cunning way to tempt yourself into the action you desire. Make the action convenient for you and take advantage of your mind’s vulnerability. Bring a foam roller to the tennis court if you want to remember to cool down and stretch after. Put a water bottle next to your bed, if you want to drink water before going to sleep. Habits work better when linked together.

SUNSCREEN HABITS

Let’s take a look at a habit that is not as easy as brushing your teeth. Something that is neutral if not failing in all the four pillars: putting on sunscreen.

Action: Putting on Sunscreen
Cue: Before going outside and every subsequent 2 hours
Crave: Avoid sunburns and skin cancer at age 50
Response: Difficult, hard-to-reach spots on body
Reward: Slimy hands, oily face, drips into your eyes

It fails in regard to almost every aspect of the pillars. Without the recent surge in promoting dermatology health in advertisement and pediatrician consulting, sunscreen would not be nearly as accepted as it is. However, still upwards of 45% of men and 27% of women never use sunscreen.

If you are reading this and thinking to yourself, “putting on sunscreen is not that hard”, that’s because you have done it already. You have made something, intrinsically not appealing, into a habit. You don’t put on sunscreen because someone tells you to, you do it because it is a part of who you are. Now as you approach new habits such as diets, getting into painting, and reminding yourself to put your keys back, remember the four pillars and try to plan diligently so you suffer less. New things seem daunting to embrace, but against the odds, you made putting on sunscreen, a slimy, sticky substance that burns your eyes, an unconscious habit and you can do it again.

Arthur Ashe once said that:

“True Heroism is remarkably sober.”

And I believe greatness, similarly, is not the result of a flash of willpower but rather the slow, flowing, mundaneness of sunscreen habits.



WORKS CITED

Ashe, Arthur R., and Arnold Rampersad. Days of Grace: A Memoir Alfred A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1993.

Clear, James. Atomic habits: an easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones. Penguin: Avery, 2018. Printed Material.

Holman, Dawn M., et al. “Patterns of sunscreen use on the face and other exposed skin among US adults.” Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology vol. 73,1 (2015): 83-92.e1. doi:10.1016/j.jaad.2015.02.1112

McCormick, Malcom., et al. “Wedding.” Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/track/3fDmodv1uclXZZu27E0jz8?si=b1efbb002cfb4fd3