Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

Because they want to have good reasons for their actions, some Questioners may be more willing to give themselves treats if they believe that getting treats isn’t frivolous or arbitrary. For instance, a Questioner might benefit from thinking, “I’m getting a massage, which increases immune function” or “I’ll go to the football game with my brother,

Sprinters prefer to work in quick bursts of intense effort, and they deliberately wait for the pressure of a deadline to sharpen their thinking.

My challenge, therefore, was to make my habits rewarding without sabotaging myself with rewards. How? By finding my reward within the habit itself, with a reward that takes me deeper into the habit. If I look outside a habit for a reward, I undermine the habit. If I look within the habit for the reward, I strengthen the habit.

We do well to begin by tackling the habits that help us to: 1. sleep 2. move 3. eat and drink right 4. unclutter

In the Strategy of Pairing, I couple two activities, one that I need or want to do, and one that I don’t particularly want to do, to get myself to accomplish them both. It’s not a reward, it’s not a treat, it’s just a pairing.

Andy Warhol said, “Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.” Gertrude Stein made a related point: “Anything one does every day is important and imposing.”

It’s absolutely true that a reward may help people reach a specific goal—but in the area of habit formation, the aim is to adopt a habit forever, to change the way we live for the better. Not to finish this grant proposal, but to write every day forever; not to run a marathon, but to exercise forever.

Sometimes we can even reframe a challenging habit as a treat, which makes it much easier to keep. A reader observed, “When I thought of exercise as something I ‘should’ do, it was hard to get into a routine. Eventually, I decided to count my daily walk or cross-country ski as a treat—my time for myself in a day otherwise filled with responsibilitie

“Say you want to start packing lunch for work. Instead of thinking, ‘As a reward for preparing and bringing in my own lunch, I’ll splurge on a lunch at an expensive restaurant on Friday,’ you think, ‘Now that I’m bringing in lunch every day, I’m going to splurge on a fabulous set of knives, so my habit of cooking is more fun.’ ” “What’s the differe

If they want the new behavior to become a habit, they should use if-then planning from the Strategy of Safeguards to decide, in advance, how to proceed after hitting the finish line—perhaps by continually setting themselves new goals, just as my friend with the bad knee replaced one goal with another, or by deciding what the everyday habit should b