#113: What if you don't have good habits?

'Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement', James Clear tells us in Atomic Habits. But what if you don't have the right habits - or at least, not yet? And how do you motivate yourself to do the thing for the 21 days that, according to legend, are required in order to establish a habit unless you already have the habit?

With all this talk of the importance of habits, you'd be forgiven for thinking that without the habits, there's no hope for you. But, in fact, motivation without habits is easier than you might think. You just need to be able to see past the psychological smoke and mirrors that you're unwittingly putting in your own way.

Reference: 

Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert (2003): 'Affective forecasting', Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 35: 345-411. 

Episode transcript:

That thing you’re dreading isn’t that bad.

You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.

Hello again, everyone. You know how habits are a central part of productivity stuff? Like, everyone who wants to be more productive cares about habits. I just typed into my Google search bar, ‘Habits are’ to see what sorts of things the algorithm would come up with to complete the sentence. The first suggestion I got was ‘Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement’. Wow. Deep. There was also ‘Habits are powerful’ and ‘Habits are formed in 21 days’ - so, now you know - and the rather ominous-sounding ‘Habits are ingrained and cannot be changed’. I clicked on the image results and literally every one looked like a motivational poster. It was healthy habits this, 3 morning habits of successful people that. B J Fogg and James Clear - the authors of Tiny Habits and Atomic Habits respectively - were in there, of course. I’ve got in on this habitty act myself - you can find a habit tracker on the resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website, in case that’s something you feel is missing in your life.

Now, I’m not here to talk to you in this episode about how to build the right sorts of habits. Plenty of people have done that already - I’ve already mentioned Fogg and Clear, for example. What I want to do, instead, is dive into the issue of why people who care about productivity care about habits in the first place. Why do we think having the right sorts of habits are going to make our lives better? Because I think that, by gaining some insight into that question, we can make it easier to make the sorts of decisions that we think we ought to be making.

I got to thinking about all this a lot over the past week. For a long time I’ve been exercising pretty intensely, mainly lifting weights but also running and yoga, and not really taking proper days off - or, rather, my days off involved doing such vigorous forms of yoga that they weren’t days off in any meaningful way. I noticed I was getting a few … well, not exactly aches and pains, but just not-yet-painful symptoms of my body struggling with the load I was putting it under. And I noticed that despite all the strength training, I seemed to be losing strength. So, I decided to take a week completely off from all exercise except the most relaxing forms of yoga. And, while it was in a way great to have an excuse to take it easy, it was also scary. In today’s culture of building streaks by doing a bit of something every day, breaking my exercise streak was really unsettling. I didn’t care about the streak per se. What I cared about was the pitfalls of falling out of my exercise habits. If I took a week off, what if I never went back? What if that was it for me now, and by taking time off I would be handing over my fate to Slobby Rebecca - remember her? Thankfully that’s not what happened, and I’m back in my routine now, although I’m also rethinking parts of it to ensure it’s sustainable. I use gym visits as opportunities to listen to podcasts, and for my first visit in 11 days (yes, I was counting) I chose - on the recommendation of my friend, M - Rich Roll’s most recent episode, which is his interview with the actor Ethan Suplee. As I was walking home, feeling pleased with myself for having escaped the clutches of Slobby Rebecca, and in a moment of synchronicity, Ethan voiced exactly what had been preying so much on my mind. He was talking about how he’s in the habit of working out at the gym regularly, but that at the time of the interview he’d missed a few days. This is what he said next: quote, ‘Tomorrow there are gonna be 300 reasons sitting in the forefront of my mind why going to the gym isn’t necessary that I’m gonna have to fight through slightly harder than I otherwise would’, end of quote. By contrast, he said that when he doesn’t miss a day, going to the gym is - in his words ‘a piece of cake’.

Those remarks really nail the appeal of habits, I think. When we do something habitually, we don’t need to make a conscious decision about whether or not to do it each time. Instead, we do it on autopilot. Of course, we’re also free not to do it - but in that case not doing it - doing something else instead - is what requires conscious thought. Like, if you’re in the habit of brushing your teeth every evening - and I’m sure you are - then not brushing them one evening is effortful, in a weird way. Because you’re thinking things like, ‘Can I not do it, just this once? Will that be ok? Will I regret it? Will my mouth feel horrible when I wake up tomorrow? Let me just run through everything I’ve eaten today so I can work out whether my teeth are going to rot overnight. Shall I just do it so that it’s done and I don’t have to deal with all this overthinking?’ Conscious thought can be a giant pain in the arse, can’t it? I know it’s responsible for all sorts of wonderful things, but it can also stand in our way. If there’s something we think we ought to be doing - writing, working out, doing chores, whatever - we’d much rather be able to (as a popular advertising slogan has it) just do it, without thinking about it, which is what happens when the thing is part of a habit. But if it’s not habitual, then we have to plead with ourself to do it, and of course for every good reason we work hard to come up with for doing it, we’re effortlessly able to come up with 10 reasons not to do it, at least not right now. It’s exhausting and frustrating, and it feels like such a waste, because at some point we realise that just doing the bloody thing would have been easier than all the cognitive shenanigans surrounding our reasoning about whether or not to do it.

Now, some of us are massive overthinkers, and I suspect that makes this problem even worse. If you’re an academic, you’re probably an overthinker. Academics are people who have found a way to get paid to think harder than most people are willing to about things that people want to know about - and, yes, ok, sometimes about things that nobody really wants to know about, or at least not in the level of detail that academics are going to do. Having a mind that doesn’t shut up can be useful when it comes to doing research, but as researchers everywhere know, it’s a double-edged sword, because that mental not-shutting-up doesn’t always work the way you want it to work. Sometimes it works against you, like when you know you need to do something that you’d really rather not do. As if doing the thing you’d rather not do isn’t enough of a nuisance, you’ve also got to walk upstream through an absolute torrent of unhelpful thoughts. If the thing you’d rather not do is part of a habit, then you avoid this. The stream is flowing in the direction you want to go. You might not really want to do the chore or the workout or whatever it is, but the decision is made already. You might grumble about it, but you’re doing it.

I have reservations about habits - even good habits - though. I mean, they are useful for the reasons I just explained. And they’re efficient. Imagine how exhausted and fed up we’d all be if we had to motivate ourselves anew to brush our teeth every evening rather than just picking up the toothbrush unthinkingly. But there are a couple of things that concern me about habits - or, at least, there’s something that concerns me about the idea that habits are the best way to go about motivating ourselves to do valuable things. One is that there is a perfectionist edge to caring a lot about habits. When the habit is in place, not doing the habitual thing can make you feel anxious. In a way, that’s what you want - you want not doing the thing to feel worse than doing the thing - but it can backfire. We all know people who have felt so disappointed about losing their Duolingo streak that they jacked it in completely, which shows us that valuing the streak - the habit - has come to overshadow the value of the activity that the streak was designed to encourage, which was learning a language. And sometimes there are very good reasons to break even positive habits - like taking a break from exercising because you’ve been overdoing it. Placing too much value on maintaining the streak can lead people to act against their own best interests here. Another issue with placing too much value on the importance of habits is that it leaves everyone who isn’t currently in the habit of doing the thing a bit stuck. To form a habit, you have to put in the effort and do the thing repeatedly for the 21 days that Google’s autocomplete function tells us that it’s going to take, or - just on the off-chance that there’s a bit of nuance involved here - however long it takes. Which means that, in order to develop the habit that’s going to help you with your motivation, you need to find a way to get the motivation without having the habit.

Now, as I said, there’s plenty of advice out there about how to establish habits, so please feel free to explore that. What I want to turn to now is the experience of getting ourselves to do something that we’re not in the habit of doing. Going to the gym after a period of time spent not working out. Returning to work after a holiday. Sitting down to do your tax return. These are all the sorts of things that lots of us dread, to various extents, and which it can be a struggle to find the motivation to do. What came to mind as you heard me mention each of those things? I expect one thing that cropped up for you, assuming that these are things you’d struggle with, is a sense of ‘ugh’ - just a grasp of how unpleasant these things can be, emotionally. And perhaps, too, that sense of ‘ugh’ was accompanied by a representation of the unpleasant event - perhaps the anticipation of how bad it will feel to struggle to rise off the sofa and get into your workout gear, or the shock of the alarm sounding on your first day back at work, or sitting down to the mountain of paperwork that you need to sort through in order to do your tax return. So that task has, for you, an emotional aspect - the ‘ugh’ - and a cognitive aspect - the way you represent the task in your mind. To get the thing done, you’re going to have to motivate yourself around all that.

Interestingly, though, when we think about future events, we tend to be wrong on both counts: cognitive and emotional. We tend to be wrong about what the event will be like (the cognitive part) and we tend to be wrong about how it’s going to affect us emotionally. We get these things wrong thanks to a handful of errors associated with affective forecasting, a phenomenon described in detail by the psychologists Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert. ‘Affective’ - with an a at the start, not an e - relates to emotions; ‘forecasting’ - obviously relates to prediction. In essence we tend not to be very good at predicting what our emotions are going to be like in the future. An important aspect of this is impact bias, which is - to quote from an article by Wilson and Gilbert to which I’ll link in the episode notes - ‘the tendency to overestimate the enduring impact that future events will have on our emotional reactions’. This leads us to overestimate how happy nice things will make us feel and how unhappy bad things will make us feel. Let’s take a look at how affective forecasting might play out in relation to the unpleasant future experiences I mentioned a moment ago, using the example of sitting down to do your tax return. I’ve chosen that one because, while I can imagine a return to the gym or a return to work being a positive thing for some, I’m struggling to believe that anyone looks forward to doing a tax return. So, when I mention that, there you go, thinking perhaps of that box into which you’ve been shoving a chaos of receipts, forms, bank statements, and other nasty bits of paperwork. You’re going to have to open it and get everything into some kind of order. You’re going to have to reacquaint yourself with the process of how you do this exercise. You’re going to have to sit there until it’s done, perhaps for hours and hours. There’s no way out, and no escape from how dreary it’s all going to be.

But the evidence points to you being wrong about what the experience is going to be like and wrong about how it’s going to make you feel. It’s likely that you’re representing it to yourself in a way that highlights all the worst aspects but overlooks the more positive aspects. As far as fun things go, doing a tax return isn’t ever going to compete with a free, month-long luxury beach holiday, but there really are going to be some highlights. Assuming there are other things on your task list, doing the tax return is a good excuse to ignore those with a clear conscience, which is a small win. Perhaps you’ll get to use the tax return task as an excuse to get some peace and quiet, away from other family members and chores. You might enjoy the drinks and snacks you allow yourself while you’re doing it. And even the parts that seem inescapably bad - like opening that box full of paperwork - aren’t endless. That ‘Oh God, not this’ sense, which occupied your mind before you started and which represented the entire task in your mind, is only going to last maybe 30 seconds. Five minutes in, you’ll have things in something approaching a sensible order, and you’ll derive some satisfaction from making progress and getting on with it. Even before the drudge work is done, you’ll find your flow, and you’ll be resigned to getting it done. Often, we end tasks like this thinking ‘It wasn’t as bad as I thought’. We find that the worst parts are soon over, that the task does not consist entirely of the worst parts, and that the intensity of our negative emotional response to the task is less than we expected. And, don’t think that recalling last year’s experience of doing a tax return is an antidote to this error, because we’re terrible at recalling the details of our past emotions, too. Wilson and Gilbert, again, quote: ‘If emotional experiences could be retrieved in their original form, there would be no need to go to the trouble to recreate positive experiences such as vacations or roller coaster rides; we could relive them by recalling and "replaying" our past reactions to these events’.

The good news, for our purposes here, is that your struggle to motivate yourself to do an unappealing task is informed by a completely messed up - cognitively and emotionally - view of what doing the task is likely to be like. If you can make a habit of the task so that you don’t need to think much about any of this stuff, then great. But if it’s not currently a habit, it’s helpful to bear this in mind. It’s also why you often hear advice like, ‘Just do it for 5 minutes’ and ‘Break the task down into smaller tasks’. The idea here is not only that motivating yourself to do something for 5 minutes, or to do just a small part of the task, is easier than motivating yourself to do the entire thing for however long it takes until it’s finished, although that’s certainly a part of it. The idea is also that once you’ve made a start, it will be relatively easy to continue, and that’s because before you start, you overestimate how bad it’s going to be.

But we can add some more nuance here too, drawing on what Wilson and Gilbert say about affective forecasting. When your mind turns to the unpleasant idea of that thing you’d do anything to avoid having to do, here are a few questions you could explore to help you get yourself going:

First, you can address the cognitive part of your anticipation by asking: Is the way I’m representing this task to myself telling the whole story? So, are you just thinking of the mountain of paperwork related to your tax return, but overlooking the coffee and cake you’re going to treat yourself to while you’re doing it, or the excuse to shut yourself away for the afternoon, or being able to turn down an unappealing invitation you’ve been trying to wriggle out of, or, of course, how relieved and satisfied you’re going to feel when it’s done? And, when you think of your return to work, are you focusing on the sound of the alarm going off and the misery of the commute, but perhaps overlooking the pleasure of catching up with colleagues and listening to your favourite podcast (it’s this one, right?) on your journey home? Taking care to paint a nuanced picture of that experience you’re dreading is going to lead you to recognise that there are some positives, even if you’d still rather be watching Netflix or lying on a beach.

Next, tackle the emotional part. Ask: When I imagine how this experience is likely to make me feel, am I right about the intensity and duration of the emotions involved? Intensity and duration are aspects of emotional response described by Wilson and Gilbert, and we tend to overestimate both of them, so remind yourself that the answer to this question is almost certainly going to be ‘no’. But you can add some helpful detail here too. When you imagine how you’ll feel when the alarm goes off on Monday morning, or when you open that ghastly box of paperwork, you’re looking at a few seconds of unpleasantness. Which is not to say that what follows is going to be unbridled bliss, but you’re really through the worst of it before you know it. The worst parts aren’t as bad or as long-lasting as you expect they’re going to be. Basically: it gets easier from the moment you start.

And finally, especially if you’re the sort of person who wishes that the task they’re struggling to get done was enshrined in a habit, zoom out a bit and ask yourself this: What would be different, really, if I was about to do this as part of a habit, rather than having to talk myself into it? Here’s part of an answer: nothing about the task would be different. What’s different - and the reason why it’s harder to motivate yourself when you don’t have a habit to help you out - is your thoughts about the task. Your thoughts can be distracting, of course. But you don’t have to let them make the decisions for you. That part of you that’s saying ‘I don’t wanna!’ is a bit like a toddler having a tantrum because they don’t want to put on their shoes. It’s a lot of fuss about not very much. Don’t try to reason with the toddler. Just have them put on their shoes, safe in the knowledge that 30 seconds later it will all be forgotten and they’ll be asking you whether you eat your bogeys.

Motivation can be really hard, friend. But it doesn’t have to be that hard. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make a start on my tax return, 7 months ahead of the deadline.

Just kidding. But I am going to the gym.

Speak soon.

I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!

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#114: Ego, resentment, and recognition

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#112: David Hume and the battle between reason and passion