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Setbacks
So one really important question about habits is, “What do you do when you mess up?” You know, “How do you handle failure?” And one thing that’s interesting is that a lot of people kind of assume that if they really are hard on themselves when they screw up, that that’s going to help energize them to do a better job in the future. But that is not the case. Research shows that people who really load themselves up with guilt and shame do a worse job, and that it’s people who show self-compassion who really can get back on the horse more easily. So say you’re a person who’s screwed up taking your medication. Well, if you really feel ashamed of yourself, you might not go into your doctor because you don’t want to admit what you’ve done, but if you say to yourself things like, “Well, that wasn’t my best day,” or, “Well, we’ve all done it,” or, most importantly, “How am I going to learn from this? How am I going to learn from this moment of failure so that I can do better in the future?”
Now, there’s an old proverb, “A stumble may prevent a fall,” and that’s a very good way to frame a failure, is you could say, “Well, I had a stumble. You know, I really wanted to do X, Y, Z, and I didn’t do it this time, but what can I learn about how, going forward, I can resist a temptation or I can stick to a habit more easily?” So look at a stumble as a way to prevent a fall, something that you can learn from, so that, in the future, you can do a better job. But there’s sort of a paradox of habit formation. On the one hand, you want to remind yourself that one slip-up is no big deal, and that’s absolutely true. But it’s also true that, when you’re trying to form a habit, consistency matters, especially at the beginning. So, you want to tell yourself, “I really, really, really don’t want to slip up, but, if I do slip up, it’s not a big deal.” You sort of have to hold both of those ideas in your head at the same time, and they will both help you form better habits.
Bad habits
One of the mysteries about habits is, “Why do we repeat bad habits over and over, even though we know they’re not good for us, even though we know that they’re not making us happy?” And a lot of times there’s a couple of things going on. It may be that it’s a conflict between our now-selves and our future-selves. Our future-selves think, “Oh, it would be great if I gave up sugar, but, right now, I feel like eating this brownie,” and so there’s a tension between what I want in the long term and what I want in the short term. Or, sometimes, and this is more subtle and hard to pick up, there might be two things that I want. I want to come home from work and chill out and relax and have fun and goof off, but I also want to live in a house that’s clean and orderly and well taken care of. Well, those two things are in conflict. So what am I going to do? So if I don’t resolve that conflict in my own mind, it’s going to be hard for a habit to stick. I have to think through, “What do I really want? What’s really important to me in this situation? Do I really want to have that leisure time? Or do I really want to spend that time maintaining my household?” There’s no one right answer. Maybe there’s a way that you can have both things. That’s one of the advantages of really focusing in on some kind of value conflict. But if you don’t really think it through, a lot of times you just spin your wheels. You don’t understand, you get frustrated because you’re not able to form a habit, but it’s really because there’s two desires that are in conflict in your own mind.