- Healthline describes a framework invoking the three R's (reminder, routine, reward) before breaking up its advice into fifteen (15!) steps. My favorite step was "Ask why (focus on why you want to change)". Uh, maybe because it's not a good habit? Also, why are there fifteen steps?
- Harvard Business Review recommends that you "hack your mind using our methods", which includes "replacing the reward with curiosity"; reward your curiosity here. I guess this means if my bad habit involves carrot cake, I should wonder about what's in it instead of eating it? Though now that I think about it, is there carrot in carrot cake?
- Time is completely at sea, demonstrating a lack of basic understanding about habits in the thirty-one word opening paragraph - turning right instead of left isn't a habit, it's following directions, unless you wish to develop a habit of getting lost. The article's main tactic is to scold readers for their shortcomings - lower your stress level, develop your self-awareness, and set better goals; it's like diet advice reminding you that you're fat because you want to eat dessert (be curious instead!). My favorite recommendation was to have good habits ("replace a bad habit with a good one"). Thanks Time, thanks for the advice! But we clicked on the article because we have bad habits, one of which may include turning to you for advice.
- Lifehack opts for the philosopher's route, its first section being "How Habits Govern Your Life". I appreciate the mile-high view but, again, we are here because we already know how habits govern our lives - oppressively, like an unchecked tyrant; we are here for a revolution, not another lecture.
I must admit that despite my snarky remarks above, I actually agree with most of the thoughts in those articles. I simply find them, in the aggregate, pointless. Habits make the world go round, which makes breaking a habit a mammoth task, and not one made any easier for the fact of reading some internet columns. My complaint is the way those articles imply that the solution is somewhere after the hyperlink. TOA makes no such claims, about bad habits or otherwise - the balance of this post has no solutions for your bad habit (1).
I'd just like to point out that in my brief glance through those above links, I did not once come across any discussion of efficiency, and whether it played a role in the problem of bad habits. It's an odd omission because it seems that bad habits linger in our lives whenever they have a relatively low barrier to indulgence, whether that be in terms of time, money, or effort. Another way to say it is that bad habits linger if they have low cost, not in the sense of final damage but in terms of the initial price. This is a natural result of our tendency to improve through repetition, which means that habits become progressively easier to maintain as we increase our familiarity with a given task, process, or routine. The reward mechanism of this cycle is further reinforced by our cultish obsession with efficiency, which makes a hero out of anyone who can find the tiniest incremental gain in a seemingly optimized method. It's not simply the case that the reward is in the habit alone - there is also a reward in the process of developing the habit, and making it ever more efficient ahead of the next indulgence.
The end result is that a basic fact about a bad habit is often ignored - what we wish to change has been driven down to its lowest possible cost; change always comes at great cost. I remember how when I began cooking for myself it was easier to grill a steak than it was to roast a vegetable, so I regularly ate red meat whenever I prepared my own meals. For me, knowing the common advice wasn't enough - I knew why I wanted to change, I had the right level of curiosity, and I believe I possessed the necessary level of self-awareness, but my carnivorous habit nevertheless remained intact. The issue was that anytime I prepared a vegetable it came out worse than if I'd just left it raw, and I didn't find raw vegetables particularly appealing. The obstacle to change was that I was quite busy in those days, having found a job in a time when my peers didn't work, and I didn't have a pile of spare cash sitting around to purchase better cooking equipment. Each time I stepped into the kitchen, I faced the same decision - stick to what I knew, or start something new? Each time, I made the same choice.
The situation was an understandable result of the conditions in my life at the time - I generally felt like my limited resources were under constant strain. I spent most of my first post-college year on a scavenger hunt for marginal gains - squeezing cents out of every dollar, shaving seconds off of every minute - and I was constantly drained from the endless hustling. Like I suspect is the case for most people, I relied on efficiency as the surest way to ease the pressure. There were so many facts about my life that became defined by efficiency - my commuting route, the way I used a computer, the day I chose for laundry - that I began to see myself as the central figure in a fully optimized, finely-tuned system. This meant the mere suggestion of a lifestyle change carried the threat of destabilizing the fragile structure; the best-case scenario would merely result in one optimization being exchanged for another, but no net gain for me.
I don't mean to suggest that I felt stuck or trapped in the situation. Likewise, I am not implying that my efficiencies added up to significance, as if I had somehow discovered the optimal allocation of my time, money, and effort. If there was a case for change, I had the capacity to consider it. It's simply that I had a difficult time imagining the benefit of reallocating my resources. Sure, I could spend a little more time on self-improvement, but wouldn't I lose an hour of sleep? I don't think it helped me at all during these deliberations that I understood how our society always reinforced the positives of efficiency. This meant that in addition to the measurable reward of my routines squeezing the most out of my resources, I also enjoyed the reward of being efficient for its own sake, like the fact of being efficient came with a trophy. It's true that when I wanted to start eating healthier by replacing red meat with vegetables, I didn't have the spare time, money, or energy for making the change. But it's also true that the way I cooked back then was efficient, and that making a change meant handing over that efficiency and all the positives I'd associated with the fact.
The theory of breaking a bad habit almost always trips over this hurdle of reality. When people reach for a late afternoon sweet that they don't want, it may indeed be the case that some complicated chain reaction happens in the brain, which is the contention of the common advice pieces. But I suspect that there is something else that requires deeper contemplation. Maybe that cookie is an admission of the deficit carried throughout the day - not enough sleep, not enough lunch, not enough joy on a mundane Monday. To me, the idea that a bad habit is something which can be isolated from the rest of life is entertaining but hardly plausible. The sense of absolute knowledge implied in the way flowchart-toting experts describe bad habits - feedback loops, dopamine hits, environmental cues - feels like an elaborate misdirection, similar to how politicians use a barrage of facts to disguise their lie. The truth is that in our relentless pursuit of efficiency we risk cutting certain corners, and a bad habit is often how the cost catches up to us (2). The truth is that if we have a bad habit, it may be the result of depriving ourselves elsewhere. The truth is that something is making it easy to keep up these bad habits.
The key to changing most bad habits, I think, is similar to the start of anything good - we must invest time, money, and effort into the task. This straightforward approach is rarely found in the advice columns for three reasons, the first two being very basic - it's not interesting, and it's not new. At some basic level we all know, and we've always known, that changing the future requires investment - and changing a bad habit means changing your future - but simply restating these facts doesn't make for interesting reading. The third reason is a little trickier - it's the problem of our collective regard for efficiency, which makes us recoil from the thought of anything that might waste our personal resources. There are many positive ways to describe investment, but efficiency is rarely among them. Investments are a messy process, often requiring a certain willingness to commit resources despite uncertainty; in some ways it's the opposite of efficiency, which seeks to maintain a known return for a lower resource cost.
It seems to me that one important step toward breaking our bad habits requires developing a healthy distrust of efficiency. This feels like a tall order, at least at the societal level. We are so enamored with efficiency that we marvel at those who make do with so little instead of questioning why some of our most ingenious and resourceful people remain stuck in poverty; we demand efficiency from our companies before they have started paying their workers living wages. We hold ourselves to the same sort of standard, running ourselves into the ground to ensure that no drop of ourselves goes wasted. It makes me question the high regard for efficiency in the first place, for it seems like it routinely hides the real problem just out of sight. It seems that efficiency is the lie we tell ourselves to feel better about leaving certain problems not just unresolved, but left in the realm of the impossible.
When there simply isn't enough to go around, nothing can go to waste. The efficiency cult has brainwashed us all into accepting the following - we have landed on the moon, we have COVID vaccines, we have so many billionaires that it's hard to keep track of them all, we have accomplished so much, but we simply cannot solve poverty by giving people the money, or solve homelessness by giving people the homes, or solve hunger by giving people the food. The fact of our efficiency is proof - if we had enough, then we could afford to be wasteful, but we worship at the altar of efficiency. It enables us to do more, get a little more accomplished, when we are at the limits, bursting at the seams, having accomplished so little. Efficiency is governing our lives like any bad habit, like an unchecked tyrant, who knows that the future won't change while he's in charge. It's easy for me to understand why people reach for that cookie. So go ahead, I guess, have another one, and I'll save the lecture for later. We are here for a revolution; it makes the world go round.
Footnotes
1) If you are still here, knowing full well that my posts contain no solutions, then I applaud your perseverance, and I thank you for your commitment. Or are you still here purely out of (bad) habit? In any event, thank you for reading.
2) I think this also happens at scale, such as when an efficient organization lowers its quality standard, or is forced into a series of layoffs; there seems to be little possibility of meaningful innovation within an efficient organization.
