Change your habits, change your life.
Every morning, I have an egg in a hole.
That’s a wholesome breakfast food, friend. Cut a hole in a slice of bread, slap it down on a cast iron skillet sizzling with butter, and fry an egg in the hole. Fruit jam on the cut out piece, plus coffee, and that’s all of the basic food groups (being: protein, grains, fruits & vegetables, coffee, and butter) in 3 minutes. I do it out of habit.
In Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair article about Obama, here is our President talking about how important habits are to presidential life:
‘You have to exercise,’ he said, for instance. ‘Or at some point you’ll just break down.’ You need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. ‘You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,’ he said.’ I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.’ He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. ‘You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.’
Unlike Obama, I don’t have to make decisions each day about which Republican congressman to lean on to keep the country from going over the fiscal cliff, or where to send the next illegal, deadly drone strike. But like Obama, I know that it takes cognitive resources – brain energy – to make conscious decisions, while unconscious decisions require no such expenditure of energy, and so I try to do as many of the mundane day-to-day things as possible out of habit. Obama does it because he has really important decisions to make. I do it because habits make me efficient, and being efficient means I have more time to do important things like think up the next queerfit workout.
NYTimes reporter Charles Duhigg plowed through a mountain of scientific papers and studies to learn everything he could about the science of habit formation (and of habit change). From that, he wrote a bestseller. The Power of Habit is a smart, serious book filled with talk about neurons and cognitive science, and is adamantly not a self-help book with a glib how-to list of, say, Five Steps to Making Good New Habits. But really now, there’s nothing wrong with a list. The ponderous grandfather of psychology William James wasn’t above making lists – here in the fabulous Brainpickings.org is his three maxims for the formation of new habits – so I’m here going to do what Duhigg didn’t want to do and give you…
Five Steps to Making Good New Habits:
September 28, 2012
KungLi
