I’m not much of a fan of sitcoms, but here’s the voice over introduction to one that’s not only dang amusing, but also a surprisingly good course in habit change:

You know the kinda guy who does nothing but bad things and then wonders why his life sucks? Well, that was me. Every time something good happened to me, something bad was always waiting around the corner. Karma. That’s when I realized I had to change. So I made a list of everything bad I’ve ever done, and one by one I’m gonna make up for all my mistakes. I’m just trying to be a better person. My name is Earl.

I’ve enjoyed watching episodes of Earl via Netflix for a year or so, but it wasn’t until this morning, reading Charles Duhigg’s excellent book The Power of Habit, that I realized that Earl’s method of changing his life is a near-perfect model of real habit change, as supported by reams of research, a few superbowl championships, millions of now-sober alcoholics, and much other evidence.

Just trying to be a better person
Earl, played with innocence and a blind, cheerful, openness to whatever may come by Jason Lee, used to be a small-time criminal, stealing whatever he could, however he could–the dumber the idea, the better. In the series, he now spends his time hunting down people he’s hurt and trouble he’s caused, one item at a time, and making up for all those past mistakes. Compare this to Duhigg’s depiction of habit change, which has two main components: replacing the routine and cultivating belief.

Changing a habit by substituting a new routine
Habits, as Duhigg describes them, have three parts: a cue, a routine, and a reward. For example, the cue might be boredom; the routine, eating a bag of potato chips; and the reward, the physical pleasure of eating the chips.

Earl’s cue was anything that might get him some easy money or swag; his routine was committing the crime in whatever hare-brained way immediately came to mind; and his reward (when he got one) was acquiring some new stuff on his supposed path to the good life.

In present of the series, though, that’s all old news. Earl’s new cues are pretty much the same as his old ones: he hatches an idea or stumbles across a situation that provides an opportunity, but now it’s an opportunity to make up for something bad he’s done rather than a potential crime. He still uses whatever hare-brained approach leaps to mind to get the job done, but the core of the routine is different: instead of petty theft, it’s making up for wrongdoing. The reward is similar: he doesn’t get any physical wealth, but he counts his riches in karma now, and his satisfaction and pleasure at crossing off an item from his list is palpable, not to mention very similar to the satisfaction we see in flashback scenes of him successfully getting away with crime.

That’s the way to change a habit, says Duhigg: keep the cues and the rewards the same, but change the routine. Actually, I would suggest that should be amended to keeping the cues the same, change the routine, and allow for a modestly different reward: drinking a cup of tea doesn’t give the exact same payoff as smoking a cigarette, for instance, but the rewards are surprisingly similar.

You gotta believe!
It would be handy if changing habits were as simple as identifying cues and rewards and finding a new routine to sandwich in the middle, and in fact this seems to be a central part of habit change–but, as Duhigg points out, this isn’t enough. You have to believe. I’ll write about this more in separate posts, but this belief component has been identified as a key force in the psychological literature. In order to really change, we have to have a powerful faith that what we’re doing can–maybe even must–be done.

Earl exemplifies this through his faith in karma, which he pictures as a simplistic, tit-for-tat force that automatically responds to any good or bad deed with good or bad fortune somewhere in the space of the 22-minute episode. Since this is a sitcom, karma actually works that way in Earl’s world, which means that when Earl’s starves himself and his brother, runs out of gas, and has to walk miles and miles to dance with Too-Tall Maggy (whom he spurned in the 8th grade), by the end of the episode he has been amply rewarded and is back drinking cheap beer with no cigarette butts in it. This convenient help from the universe makes it easy for Earl to believe, and is the one place where Earl’s life change is very different from real world changes, even though both require belief to get through the trying times. Our belief doesn’t come as easily as Earl’s, and it can be difficult and sometimes impossible to maintain on our own without special circumstances.

How to believe without magical instant karma
So how do we come to believe powerfully enough that even when our efforts seem nearly pointless, we can soldier on? In real life, belief comes in two main forms: tragedies and groups. As I say, this subject will be worth a good bit of further discussion, but the short version is that most of us only really change when something earth-shaking happens in our lives or in the lives of people close to us, or else when we become part of a group that makes the possibility change seem real. This is why a person can sometimes quit drinking after a DUI incident or after joining AA, but often can’t when just trying to push through alone. Note that even the disaster approach may only provide enough belief to get started: durable belief often depends on having a group of people in our lives to permanently change our point of view.

Earl, by contrast, spends his time with the exact same group of unprincipled, dim-witted friends and associates who urged him on to crime in a former chapter of his life–but his remedial, absolute faith in karma carries him through beautifully.

Like Earl, many of us are just trying to be better people. As far as I’m concerned, we’re lucky to have people like Earl (and Charles Duhigg, and AA founder Bill Wilson, and others) to show us the way.

Writing about the topics I write about here–habits, fulfillment, focus, goals, motivation, and all the rest–is exciting to me because I can mine useful ideas and techniques out of a wide variety of sources and try to offer them to you here in as clear and meaningful a way as I can manage. I get a similar charge out of writing articles and books (and a different but also compelling charge out of writing fiction). At times I’ve tried to offer those ideas and that kind of communication in other ways, for example by doing a limited amount of coaching, but after a great deal of study and preparation, I’m now bringing the things that I’ve learned and that I teach into a new arena: public speaking.

I’ve done public speaking before, most recently at the New Hampshire chapter of the Romance Writers of America, where I had a wonderful time and got the chance to connect with some good people. However, until recently I had never made a formal study of public speaking or set my sights on making it a regular part of my schedule. I’m now taking the lessons I’ve learned here on the road–though not very far on the road, as for now I’m sticking almost exclusively to New England, southern Quebec, and parts of upstate New York.

I’ve added a new speaking sub-site here on LucReid.com, always available through “speaking” tab above or at www.lucreid.com/speaking . There’s an explanation of my offerings, some biographical information I’ve never shared on this site before, a speaker sheet you can print off if you’re interested, a contact page, and a video page for speaking clips. If you’re curious about what I offer or just about what in the world I’m doing, I hope you’ll explore and perhaps comment or get in touch. I’m always interested in talking about these presentations with anyone who has questions or ideas.

The holiday season, at least here in the U.S., is a troubling time for habits. Diets get blown, budgets get overspent, time with family can make for difficult emotional situations, and good habits get disrupted by travel and celebrations. For all the cheer and New Year’s Resolutions, the Thanksgiving to New Year’s period is a dangerous one. With that in mind, here are some articles from the site that may help with some of the tricky parts.

If you’ve been working on building a new, good habit (or on shedding an old, bad habit), you may be interested in reading (or re-reading) “How Long Does It Take to Form a Habit?” The key thing to take away from that article is not the time period, which depends on a lot of things anyway, but how habits are successfully formed: with consistency. If you are wondering whether giving yourself a break from your great new eating plan over the holidays or smoking a couple of cigarettes with your cousins is really such a big deal, the answer seems to be that it’s not the end of the world, but it’s going to be very disruptive and set you back a ways. Exceptions seriously weaken new habit formation.

That’s not to say there’s never a reason to ease up over the holidays, just that if we’re considering it, we should probably try to be extra sure we like the bargain we’re getting. If not, there are options, even if they involve annoying family members and breaking traditions. After all, stodgy family members and unhealthy traditions are not on your side if you’re trying to do something new.

On that topic, if eating is a concern, you may be interested in “How Not to Blow a Diet Over the Holidays” and (if things don’t go well, or if you’re reading this too late to prevent some missteps) “Recovering After a Failure of Willpower.”

If you expect there may be some family friction over the holidays, while those kinds of patterns can be hard to break, there’s some usable advice in the article “How Not to Get Into an Argument.”

Considering a New Year’s Resolution, or a list of them? They’re not always a good idea, and when they are, there are more and less successful ways to go about them: see “Should You Make a New Year’s Resolution?” and “Why New Year’s Is Such a Good Time to Make a Resolution.”

Regardless, here’s hoping you have a great time winding up the old year and that you start the new one with strong relationships, deeper self-understanding, and joy.
Photo by R. Motti

The problem of overcommitment is the same whether we’re talking about not having enough time to write, not having enough time to exercise, or any other shortage of time. It’s a matter of deciding to take on more than you can reasonably do, and it’s a perennial problem for me.

One of my character flaws
My own experience of overcommitment seems pretty simple: there’s a lot of stuff I’m excited about, and I can’t walk three feet without running into another cool opportunity of some kind. I realize that there should be a non-fiction book about a particular topic, or get a story idea, or come up with an idea for a Web site to help do something that’s hard to do, or think about how I can help a cause that matters to me or improve our house or organize better.

Most of the time, thankfully, I ignore these impulses. I’ve probably thrown away a number of ideas that would have changed my life if I pursued them, but I’ve also thrown away a lot of just-OK or actually-pretty-awful ideas, and I’ve pursued some ideas that have changed my life (like starting intensive reading research about self-motivation or applying to study at Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp back in 2001). The root of the thing is that there will never be enough time to do all the cool things that could be done in the world. In a way, this justifies the fact that we’re all individuals. True, it means we sometimes feel alone and tend to repeat each other’s mistakes over and over, but on the bright side, by each pursuing our separate passions we can collectively do most of the cool things there are to do. If I can’t do all the cool things myself, it’s reassuring to me that someone can.

Just trying to do better doesn’t cut it
In a sense, it occurs to me, overcommitment is a bit like being over-motivated. Unfortunately, the results aren’t all good. Whenever I take on more than I really have time to do, I’m really giving up some of the things I think I’m taking on, because in the end not all of it will get done.

One thing I can do to deal with overcommitment is to become more efficient: to organize my time, focus my efforts, and learn good habits for getting things done, but this doesn’t do anything to address the underlying problem, because when I have more usable time at my disposal, I tend to take on more things to do. Even doing the things I’ve already got on my list tends to lead to me finding new things to do. For instance, I might work on getting the word out about my latest book and in the course of doing that find several new places on the Web where I could get involved and learn something or connect with new people. It’s true that I’m on my guard about that, but I don’t seem to have pared things down to anywhere near a fully manageable level yet. I get a lot done, but I also leave things undone.

Prioritization helps–somewhat
One partly successful way to approach this–and this is an approach I’ve been using a bit–is to get really good at prioritizing. If you prioritize well, then even though you don’t get everything done, at least you get the most important things done, which is great.

Unfortunately, if I take this approach I’ll still have put some effort and attention into the lower-priority things that I never got to, so it’s still wasteful. Also, I won’t be able to say for certain what I will and won’t get done. It’s not very satisfying to have someone say “Can you do this?” and for me to respond “I don’t know: let’s see whether I get to it or not.” I can address that in part by bumping anything I’ve promised anyone to the top, but that means sometimes doing things that aren’t as important just because I talked to someone about them. That’s not the worst fate in the world, but it’s hardly ideal.

Letting go
So really the solution to overcommitment is figuring out what to let go of and consciously letting go of it–keeping the workload down to a manageable level. This has a lot of benefits: you know what you will and won’t be able to do; you can make promises and keep them; you have a lot fewer things to worry about; and you concentrate your efforts on things you’re actually going to finish.

Sadly, this is much easier said than done. Even putting things in priority order is hard, because priorities change over time. Putting things in priority order and then hacking off the bottom of the list seems too painful and destructive to be borne–and yet it also seems like the required behavior. So I’d love to hear your thoughts: how would you change an overcommitted life so that you’d be doing less?

Photo by timailius

This post is a continuation of a discussion of addictive behaviors that started in my previous article, “What’s the Drug in Your Life? Part I.”

Quitting addictive behaviors
Dealing with addictions often needs two things at once: a way to address the problem or problems that made running away attractive in the first place, and a change in habit to stop the addiction. In my case, I moved to a new place where I had a number of supportive friends around me. In this context, it became clear that playing computer games was stupid: it shut out my friends and created problems with them, and it wasn’t really necessary because with my friends around me, I wasn’t lonely. The fact that I didn’t see this in my life until my change in situation broke the pattern is disappointing, but I’m encouraged that I understood myself well enough, all those years ago, to take the step that put me in a situation where I could stop acting addictively.

I hadn’t realized it for years, but recent reflection made something obvious to me: the time when I stopped playing computer games was also the time when I started writing seriously again. After years of avoiding writing (following a year or two of earnest effort and no sales right after college), I was working hard once again, and I began to see signs of success early on in that process. It led directly to my being admitted to an exclusive writer’s workshop, getting an agent, selling my first book, and winning the Writers of the Future contest.

Putting ourselves in situations where we have more supportive people in our lives on a day to day basis makes a huge difference. This can be accomplished sometimes by moving, by making different lifestyle choices, by starting a new activity (check out the free site www.meetup.com for regular activities in your area), by participating in group therapy, or by re-energizing relationships with friends or family. A bonus of this approach is that increased time spent with supportive friends, family, and acquaintances cuts into addiction time, helping address the problem both directly and indirectly. Of course, it’s counter-productive to spend more time with people if they’re encouraging taking part in the addictive behavior; avoid that pitfall!

Counseling (my personal recommendation would usually be to work with an experienced cognitive therapist of some kind) can also help: when we identify what the problem or lack was that helped drive the addictive behavior in the first place and take steps to change that in our lives, the addiction loses a lot of its power.

Benefits of quitting
More benefits can come from beating an addiction than might be immediately obvious. Of course the ongoing damage the addictive behavior was doing is gone, but another major benefit is that our brains eventually return to handling dopamine in a normal way, making other activities more pleasureable. The addiction also yields time to do other things, opening up the possibility for more pleasure and improvements in our lives.

Quitting an addiction is also seen as a mark of strength and character by other people; being successful in this tends to raise our opinion of ourselves as well as other people’s opinions of us.

Finally, quitting an addiction opens up the opportunity of stepping up and facing whatever problem contributed to the addictive behavior in the first place. Is it loneliness? Fear of failure? Depression? All of these are much easier to address without an addiction in the way to complicate things.

So, while I hope your answer is “I don’t have one,” let me ask you this question: what’s the drug in your life?

Photo by absentmindedprof

I used to play computer games, a lot, mostly of the build-a-civilization-up-from-scratch variety–Civilization, Age of Empires, that kind of thing. I’d be annoyed when people interrupted me, even for important obligations. I might have to answer the door, go back to the computer grumbling afterwards, and then two hours later the phone would ring, and I would think “Again? Can’t I have a moment’s peace?”

Addiction to behaviors
You may have noticed how similar that behavior sounds to drug addiction–and the similarity isn’t just metaphorical. It turns out that the brain chemistry of addiction to drugs is very much like the brain chemistry of addiction to food, sex, shopping, television, computer games, and much else: the neurotransmitter dopamine activates receptors in our brains when we do the thing we’re addicted to, giving us a jolt of pleasure. There’s nothing wrong with that: the same process happens whenever we feel pleasure in anything. With addiction, though, we keep repeating the activity that gave us pleasure over and over, and this causes us to be less responsive to dopamine, which creates two problems: first, we have to do more of the addictive thing to get any pleasure out of it, and second, pleasure in other things we’re not addicted to is dampened. This can keep going and going, resulting in a situation where we take every possible opportunity to do the addictive behavior and give up on everything else in our lives.

Of course, some drugs have other chemical effects on our brains that can make addiction even worse. For instance, withdrawal from shopping can be difficult, but it doesn’t usually doesn’t involve vomiting, fever, and an inability to sleep like heroin withdrawal.

Also of course, not all shopping, eating, sex, television watching, and computer gaming is addictive behavior. The next section helps explain what addiction to a behavior looks like.

What addictive behavior does
Addictive behaviors may not start because the behavior itself is especially pleasureable. As cleverly-designed as games like Civilization are, they’re not necessarily a rollercoaster of pleasure so much as some pleasure interspersed with long periods of obsessively reacting to prompts. Like sex, shopping, eating, and television, computer gaming is something that we can lose ourselves in: almost all of our attention and awareness is caught up in improving food production in our capital city, or in comparing the stitching on one jacket compared to another, or in being passively entertained by a literally nonstop parade of television shows.

This can be a key insight for some of us: addictive behavior may not be so much about wanting the thing we’re doing too much of as about shutting out something we don’t want to face. Failure, feeling unsafe, conflict, lack of love in our lives, unfulfilling jobs–these things and many more can cause us to turn away from life and lose ourselves in running up credit cards or systematically munching through a large bag of Doritoes or playing World of Warcraft straight through the night.

Unfortunately, distracting ourselves from our problems rarely does anything to make them better, and the addiction tends to create problems of its own, damaging relationships, threatening physical and financial well-being, and otherwise pushing out things we’d need to do to make our lives better in favor of more and more of the addiction.

The second article in this series can be found here and talks about ways to overcome addictive behaviors.

Photo by DJOtaku

Here’s an article with some useful points about breaking bad habits, based on the results of studies by psychologists at the University of Southern California: “Obesity and Overeating: How to Break a Bad Habit.” The key points here are 1) that negative behaviors are sometimes driven more by habit than by short-term pleasure, and 2) that changing minor environmental factors can help break bad habits. While there are many situations where these particular concerns don’t apply, they point to some easy and potentially effective methods of breaking bad habits in situations where they do.

The idea of willpower is certainly appealing: I imagine how I want to be; compare that to how I am; plot a course between the two; and somehow have the strength to follow it.

Since virtually everyone (I’m tempted to say “everyone,” but since I haven’t been introduced to everyone I’m thinking that would be presumptuous) has problems with willpower sometimes, I suspect that we can all agree that the idea of a reservoir of strength is neither very attractive or very useful. After all, if willpower is just something we have or don’t, then clearly all of us (or at least, everyone I know) doesn’t have enough. If, on the other hand, it has to do with actions we can easily take, then we’re in luck: we can have more of it. As you can guess, I don’t think much of the “reservoir” theory.

As to actions, most willpower seems to come from two kinds of those: focusing attention and making good choices easier.

Focus
There are any number of ways to use focus to make progress: we can envision goals (see “Motivation through visualization: the power of daydreams“), create feedback loops (see “How Feedback Loops Maintain Self-Motivation“), pay attention to the attractive aspects of things we want to do or unattractive aspects of things we want to avoid (see “Tools for Immediate Motivation: Attraction and Distraction“), moderate our moods through tools like meditation (see “Strengthen Willpower Through Meditation“) and idea repair (see “All About Broken Ideas and Idea Repair“), schedule, note on task lists, or mentally picture ourselves doing behaviors that will help us.

The array of tools we have to build willpower, actually, is enormous. All these tools that deal with focus, however, come down to the same kinds of things: raising our own awareness about what we want to do and/or putting ourselves in a mindset to be more inclined to do them.

Ease
The other major category of tools for building willpower has to do with making constructive action easier. For example, scheduling time to go running three days a week after work so that there will be no conflicts, setting out running clothes in the morning, getting good running shoes, and having a treadmill to use in bad weather all contribute to making running easier. If I want to make running a habit, then any barrier I remove to running means less effort I have to put in to run, which in turn means that I’ll be able to successfully run more of the time.

Ease often has to do with preparation and planning. Often we’re a lot less likely to tackle things we want to do if we find we don’t have what we need or if we’re having trouble blocking out the time. Preparation and planning get these complications out of the way and lessen the amount of focus and effort needed to stay the course.

Commitment is another way to encourage ease in building habits. By commitment, I mean reconciling ourselves to the consequences of what we need to do, then thinking, talking, and acting accordingly. Some examples: telling people (firmly) when we won’t be available because our goal requires us to be doing something, reminding ourselves that it’s all right to use time or resources in pursuit of a goal, associating with other people who have the same or similar goals, and not letting ourselves foster broken ideas about what we need to do to make progress.

The short question
The short question, then, that helps us align with our own goals, is this: “What can I do to focus better or make things easier?” Even if a particular approach isn’t working out, this kind of question can often point to other approaches that will. Or, as a last resort, you could always come here and start digging into past posts. Reading things here can be used to procrastinate, but if you find anything that helps you as you go forward, you get to chalk it up to “useful research” instead.

Photo by Anirudh Koul

Here’s an error I’ve made a lot over the years: thinking that just because I know how to deal with something, I have that thing taken care of.

For instance, I know how to use idea repair to deal with negative emotions, and I’ve practiced it so much that a lot of the time, I catch broken ideas as they’re emerging and nip them in the bud. But when I don’t do that, it becomes necessary to take further steps: I would need to sit down and very deliberately go through the process, following the steps:

1. What am I telling myself?
2. Are there broken ideas in that?
3. What kinds of broken ideas are they?
4. How do I restate them, repaired?

And do I do that? Do I go through all those steps? Sometimes, absolutely. Other times, if I’m not paying attention, I might brush it off, saying to myself “Well, I know a lot about this kind of thing, so I can surely handle it.”

Uh … I can? Without actually doing anything about it? Not really.

So that’s the problem. Sometimes it feels like knowing how to deal with something makes it unnecessary to do the grunt work to actually deal with it–and that just ain’t so. Ironically, as a good illustration, knowing this (see “Knowing Isn’t Enough: The 4 Steps Between Knowledge and Action“) hasn’t necessarily kept me focusing on the steps I need to take for the knowledge to work rather than just relying on having the knowledge.

So what will I do differently going forward? I’ll put more attention on cultivating awareness of how well I’m following through on what I know. Interestingly, while just having knowledge doesn’t necessarily solve any problems, awareness–being mindful, that is–sometimes does automatically solve problems. If we are aware of our goals, have the knowledge to pursue them, and notice when it’s time to put that knowledge into action, we often take that action, barring other kinds of obstacles or hang-ups. So just knowing how to use idea repair won’t help me, but being aware of when it’s time to put it into use and of the necessity to take the specific steps will get me using it. (For instance, see “A Very Clear Example of the Power of Awareness.”)

For the next little while, the slogan I’ll focus on (seriously: I just taped it to the wall and am rehearsing it in my head) will be “Are you taking the steps?”

Photo by Joe Gatling

In an article last week (“Should You Make a New Year’s Resolution?“) I talked about New Year’s Resolutions and how to tell whether or not it’s worth it for you to make one. In this post I’d like to touch on a related subject, which is the value of New Year’s as a time to commit to a goal–that is, to make a resolution.

I’ll say first that the New Year certainly isn’t the only good time to commit to a goal. Almost any time, even when things are at their worst, can be a good time to change things for the better (see “Why the Worst Time to Change Things Can Be the Best Time to Change Things“).

Even so, the New Year offers some special advantages:

• With the winter holidays over, for many of us the New Year is a great chance to incorporate something different into our normal routine without having to worry about the interruptions of vacations, holidays, or most other unusual circumstances. While it’s essential to find ways to continue to pursue our goals even when we’re pulled out of our routine, it’s easiest to get a habit rolling when things are at their most normal
• There’s an emotional advantage to getting a new start, and even though on some level a new year is just a change in numbers, it does a real feeling of something new beginning that we can harness to our advantage.
• Maintaining a winning streak can give extra durability to habits we’re trying to build (see “Harnessing a Winning Streak“), and January 1st is a convenient and effective date on which to start a new winning streak.
• In a very real sense, it’s never a bad time to improve our lives. Even without its special advantages, January 1 is still a good date to start something positive.

I would offer a few cautions about starting a new goal, though:

• Don’t start something new that will disrupt a good habit you’re already working on or that will sap too much time or attention from other priorities.
• As tempting as it may sometimes be to try to remake our entire lives, choose only one goal to work on energetically at a time: choosing two or more almost always results in overstretching our time and attention, leading to failure. And be sure to choose the one thing that’s really most important to you.
• Choose a set of behaviors (something you can control) and not an outcome (something you can’t control). For example, you might resolve to eat healthily and exercise (two ways to pursue a single fitness goal), not to get skinny; resolve to adopt good task management practices, not to “be more organized”; or resolve to work on your business idea, not to “get rich.”
• Prepare first. It’s often hard to give proper support to a spur-of-the-moment resolution. By planning in advance you can make schedules, enlist help, read books, join groups, or do whatever else you need to give yourself the best chance of success.
• Don’t give yourself a “bad habit bachelor party”: that is, don’t behave badly as a last gasp, as this will make it harder and more jarring to behave well. Making good choices is a reward to yourself, not a punishment, something that it will make you happy to embrace, not avoid.

This series will continue next time with a suggestion of a good way to review an entire life and take stock of what one goal is most worth pursuing for a particular person.

Photo by legalnonresident