One of the following stories is a lie, and the other one is the truth. Read on and guess which is which!
(This is a longer one, so here’s the TL;DR: If you feel energized by the idea of something or your headspace is extra perfectionistic, complete a project (including habit set-up). Start habits, one at a time, when you’re feeling neutral.)
Story A
Once upon a time, my life was pure chaos. I was a new mom, out of shape, with a disorganized house and a mountain of credit card debt. Every day was a trial, and I was struggling to stay afloat. But then one day, my manager recommended a book about habits to our team. I purchased the audiobook, and I listened to it every chance I got. In the car, while I cooked dinner, even during the rare opportunities I got to take a bath. Everything in the book made perfect sense. After about a month of listening to the book in fits and snatches, I even managed to finish it. I was obsessed with the ideas it held, and I implemented everything I could. Eventually, I was able to perfect my systems, all of my habits were in place, and I was able to eat healthy, exercise, keep my house 100% spotless, and life became exactly what I wanted it to be.
Story B
Once upon a time, my life was pure chaos. I was a new mom, out of shape, with a disorganized house and a mountain of credit card debt. I also had an apartment with a horrible German cockroach infestation. I could explain the fact that we didn’t have roaches before we moved into this place, that we saw them on our first night checking out the empty apartment and contacted management to fix it right away, that the problem wasn’t us. Logically, it was not my fault – but it was my responsibility. But then one day, after I saw a swarm of roaches on my cat’s food, I was so disgusted that I worked with our apartment’s pest control service to do a giant “clean-out” project. It was days of work that involved us taking everything out of every cabinet in our apartment, wrapping it all in plastic bags (which we would later throw away), and getting us, our plants, and our cats out of the apartment for half a day in the Texas summer heat. It was a huge project and a massive ordeal, but it worked.
Once we finally got everything put back together, and rewashed all the dishes just in case, I swore I’d never let a night go by with a single dish in the sink again. I shoved everything into the dishwasher at night and ran it without pre-rinsing, then opened it in the morning to let everything air dry during the day. I also made that my only evening chore. All of which made the “lazy” self-talk alarm go off in my head, but I ignored that chatter because I had to get the thing done. Somehow, that new habit actually stuck. Some nights I broke the chain, either skipped it because there weren’t really enough dishes to wash or asked my husband for help. But a year later, and I’m still doing it, and when I start the oven, nothing crawls out. We’re free.
Did you guess which story was the truth? If you picked B, congratulations, you win!
There’s definitely some truth to Story A. I was given a recommendation to read James Clear’s Atomic Habits by a manager at my company. I did devour the audiobook as fast as I could consume its content. I do really, really love the ideas it provides, but it was not an end-all be-all to fixing my life. If I broke the chain, my negative inner voice said that it was my fault for being a horrible, undisciplined, crappy excuse for a person.
Sound familiar?
Here’s the thing: Habits are hard. Now don’t get me wrong. I actually started my dishwasher loading/unloading habit after reading that book. I still remember a lot of what I read, because it was useful. I love the concept of 1% better, the melting ice metaphor, the idea of making it as easy on yourself as possible – and some of those ideas are a huge influence on this post and on some of the improved functionality of my life.
But when I get into a self-help zone, I immediately go overboard. I’m a by-the-book perfectionist former gifted kid burnout. When I want to improve my life, my mind starts buzzing with a thousand ideas about what I could do, so many little thoughts that I can barely write them out before they’re replaced (and I type 90 wpm). I’ll make an ideal schedule, a “perfect” list of ten or more habits, and spreadsheet them out to start crossing off starting the next day or months and years into the future because something inside me thinks that perfect habits means a perfect life. Then on day one, I’ll start executing them flawlessly… and then I’m drained and everything fizzles. I miss a day, miss another day because I’m sad I didn’t get it perfectly, hate myself about it, and everything goes back to normal.
What I’ve learned is that when I have what I’d call New Idea Energy (similar to new relationship energy). It’s that burst of motivation and drive to DO something you get when you see something new on the horizon, habits are the worst thing to start! Habits have to be executed when you’re at your lowest energy point. When you have New Idea Energy, focus on projects. Not habits.
A project is something that you’re free to go ham on. It should be something that occupies the back of your mind when you’re away, something that you spend every spare moment doing when you’re able to. It’s okay to set your inner perfectionist a little bit loose, or to be hyperfocused on it. But most importantly, it should be something that has an end point.
If the only thing that excites you is the idea of a habit, no problem! What you do is pick one habit (ONE!), and create your own project of preparing to make that habit as low-energy as possible. Use that energy to take care of your internal four-year-old, the part of you that you know will whine and drag their feet.
Want to improve your tooth brushing habit because you just got home from the dentist and you swear you’re never going to have a cavity again? Clean your bathroom counter, buy a new toothbrush, set up reminders on your phone, find a kid’s app that rewards you for brushing your teeth (my son uses Pokémon Smile and it’s free and adorable).
Want to do your dishes every night? Sure, you can clean the kitchen while you have the energy. Go out and get the good dishwasher detergent. Watch videos about how dishwashers work. Buy yourself a pack of chocolates you can reward yourself with on the way out of the kitchen. Then, make the decision that it’s okay not to pre-rinse. It’s okay not to clean your whole kitchen every night just because you know someone who does, and you’re not lazy if you do things differently from how you were taught.
And no shade to James clear, but if you skip a night or two or five, if you break the chain, that’s okay too. Start again. Start over, over and over, until you have the habits you wanted. You’ll get there. We both will.
