The Action Catalyst
REMASTERED: Better Than Before: How To Change Your Habits, with Gretchen Rubin (Behavior, Productivity, Goal Setting, Self Improvement)
Tue, 18 Jun 2024
Best-selling author, speaker, and podcast host Gretchen Rubin talks about why habits are superpowers, why rewards are dangerous (but treats are good), and how the easiest habits to change are the ones that are, well…the most habitual.
I think a lot of times people get discouraged because they try and fail to form a habit over and over. But in fact, they haven't set it up in a way that's right for them. And so that's why they're not succeeding. What you see is that the people who are happier, healthier, and most productive are the people who have figured out themselves and they've set up their lives to suit them.
Top leaders. Meaningful conversation. Actionable advice. Bulldoze complacency. Ignite inspiration. Create impact. Produced by Southwestern Family of Companies. This is the Action Catalyst.
Are you interested in advertising with the Action Catalyst? Our listeners could be hearing about your brand right here, right now. For details, shoot us an email at info at theactioncatalyst.com.
Gretchen Rubin has books that were both instant New York Times bestsellers, The Happiness Project and Happier at Home. And she truly is one of the world's leading thinkers and writers on habits and happiness and better than before. It is a book all about how we change our habits. So Gretchen, thanks for being here.
Well, I'm very happy to be talking to you today.
Yeah. So I love the idea of habits and changing habits.
You know, as you said, I wrote two books about happiness, and I had been spending a lot of time thinking and researching and talking to people about happiness, and I began to notice a pattern that often when people talk about, well, a happiness boost that they've had, but really even more often a happiness challenge that they face, they often were pointing to something that at its core involved a problem with a habit.
So somebody would say, like, oh, I'm exhausted all the time. But really to me that sounded like, you're not going to bed early enough. Like, why aren't you able to form the habit of turning the light out at 11 instead of at 2 a.m.? What's going on with your habits?
And often people would talk about a habit that they knew that if they made it or broke it would make them happier, but somehow they just weren't able to translate that into action. And then I had a lunch with a friend who made this casual comment that got me obsessed with habits. And she said the thing is I would be happier if I exercised. And when I was in high school, I was in the track team.
And I never missed track practice. But I can't go running now. Why? This just floored me. I was like, what is it? It's the same behavior. It's the same person. What's different? What meant that at one point to have it was effortless and now she can't do it. Try as she might. And so then I was like, okay, that's it. My next book, Habits.
I love it. Do you believe that there is kind of a one-size-fits-all solution to changing our habits, or do you think it's something different?
I think that so many people say start small, or do it for 30 days, or have a cheat day, or do it first thing in the morning. And all those strategies work well for some people, sometimes, but they don't work for everybody all the time where we would all have perfect habits. And I think really what I found when I really delved into this is that There is no magic one.
And what we really need to do is to think about ourselves, understand ourselves, the significant elements of our behavior, and then shape our habits to suit us. Sometimes people are like, well, this is what Steve Jobs did, so this is what I'm going to do. Well, that doesn't tell you anything about yourself.
I mean, maybe it'll give you some interesting ideas, but it doesn't mean it's going to work for you. And I think a lot of times people get discouraged because they try and fail to form a habit over and over. But in fact, they haven't set it up in a way that's right for them. And so that's why they're not succeeding.
But if they took a different approach, they might very well have a different outcome. And so in Better Than Before, what I'm trying to do is talk about, well, how do we understand ourselves as it comes to kind of our habit nature? What should we understand about ourselves? And then how might we put that into practice to shape our habits and suit ourselves?
Some people drink a lot of coffee and some people drink a lot of booze and some people stay up late and some people get up early and some people... Work steadily and some people work all at the end and some people work a lot every day and some people work just a little bit every day.
I mean, what you see is that the people who are happier, healthier and most productive are the people who have figured out themselves and they've set up their lives to suit them. If they are morning people, they do their most important work in the morning. But if they're night people, that's not how they go about it.
You know, it's all about fitting your circumstances to what's going to allow you to succeed, figuring out what is the combination to that combination lock. But a lot of it is just how you're hardwired. So everybody might say to you like, oh, you should get up early and work on your PhD thesis. But if you're a night person, getting up early is not going to work for you.
It might make sense on paper, but it's not going to work for you. Yeah.
So you have an opinion on using rewards and incentives and treats. What's your philosophy on how rewards fit into having good habits?
Well, rewards are very, very dangerous when it comes to habits. Whoa. They're very dangerous. And so you have to distinguish between a reward and a treat. Treats are good. Rewards are very dangerous. So a treat is something that you get just because you want it. You don't earn it. You don't deserve it. You just want it. So you get it.
And we should really load ourselves with healthy treats because when we give ourselves treats, we feel comforted and taken care of. And our battery gets energized. And so that gives us more self-command. And we want our self-command to be as high as possible. We want self-control. We want willpower to be – we want those reserves to be very high.
And when you do those little things for yourself, whether it's doing a cluster puzzle on your iPad or buying yourself new music on iTunes or, you know, whatever it might be, people have all different treats, then that's good. Now, there are unhealthy treats, which are like food and drink. You don't want to do something to make yourself feel better that's going to end up making you feel worse.
So treats are good because they boost our self-mastery and they keep us from getting into that dangerous land of feeling deprived. I need it. I've earned it. I should get this. That's when we start giving ourselves unhealthy treats. I need this. Rewards are bad because the reason that habits are superpowers is
is that they get in and out of the dangerous, draining, difficult job of using decision-making and using willpower. If it's a habit, it just happens automatically. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to judge it. You just do it automatically. I do not decide to wake up at 6 a.m. I do not decide whether to take dessert. I just know. And that happens automatically.
It doesn't take anything from me. And so that frees up my mind and it frees me from having to use my self-control because It doesn't take any health control. I know exactly what I'm going to do and I do it. A reward, though, always requires a decision. Have you earned your reward? And that interferes with a habit because I'm saying, well, if I run, I get to have a beer. Well, I ran half today.
Do I get a beer? But I hurt my foot, so I really couldn't run, but I still want the beer. Do I get the beer? I'm on vacation. Who could run? I should get the beer. And then sometimes what happens is you make a habit of reward, and the habit itself falls away. You have a beer every night because you got used to that, but you're not even running. But they're also bad because...
When you give yourself a reward, you're telling yourself that you're only doing something in order to get the reward. So you're undermining intrinsic motivation because you're giving yourself an extrinsic motivation. So you're saying, well, this is why I'm doing it. And with a habit, you want it to just happen automatically. You don't want to be judging it.
And you don't want to give it a negative association. You want to do it because you want to do it. And if you're rewarding it, then you're just teaching yourself that it's something that you wouldn't otherwise do. When also often we give ourselves perverse rewards. We give ourselves rewards that exactly contradict whatever we want.
Like my friend said, the minute I lose 10 pounds, I'm going to have a big piece of chocolate cake. The one kind of reward that is good is a reward that takes you deeper into the habit. So let's say you're doing a lot of yoga. You would buy yourself a new yoga mat because the person who does a lot of yoga needs a new yoga mat.
Or let's say you're doing a lot of work on a side project and so you buy a new fancy laptop because the person who's doing all this extra work needs technologic support. That makes sense. I talked to one company that had a really smart reward, which was that if you exercise 75 times in a year, you got the next year free. So the reward for exercise... was more exercise.
So that's a reward that's taking you deeper into the habit. It's not irrelevant to the habit or actually undermining the habit. It's just making it easier for you to do the habit and more pleasant. And that's good because the easier and more pleasant, more convenient it is to do a habit, the more likely you are to stick to it. That's my strategy of convenience.
But you don't want a reward that's not related to it or that actually pushes you in the opposite direction. So rewards are dangerous. They're tempting. It's a tempting solution, but I think it's often counterproductive when it comes to habits.
So how do I get myself to quickly change a habit?
I think we often think of habits as forming very gradually. And I was surprised when I really started looking at the pattern in my habits and how often habits change very quickly. People say to me all the time, like, I want to go through my day making healthy choices. And I'm like, no, you don't.
You don't want to spend your day making healthy choices because you'll probably choose wrong a lot of the time. You want to choose once, then no more choosing. Are you going to bring lunch today? Yes, you are. Are you going to eat fast food today? No, you're not. Are you choosing? No, you're not. That already happened. That happened months ago. You don't revisit that choice. There's no emotions.
There's no debate. There's none of that inner struggle. It's just so tiresome and boring. Today, tomorrow doesn't count. You know, it's done.
I love that. So there are some habits that are really simple, right? Like to use one of your examples is wearing a seatbelt. And then some are a little bit, they seem more involved or complex, like I'm trying to stop smoking or I'm trying to drink less or work out more. Do you feel like the same strategic plan works in both cases or is it different depending on the complexity of the habit?
Well, the easiest kind of habit is when it happens in exactly the same way every day. So like if you get up and the first thing you do is you brush your teeth, like that's what I would call a fixed habit. Like it happens exactly the same way. And so that's easier. You use the same strategies. So I have, I identify 21 strategies that people use to shape their habits.
You use the same strategies to make a habit or break a habit. It's the same strategies. And so with a simpler habit, it might take less to cement it in. But if there's a more complex habit, then there has to be more thought put into, like, how do you get this into your life and keep it in there? How do you safeguard it, too?
I feel like the idea of a habit is it's completely automatic, and that's really what we strive for. But I think for a lot of habits, they're never 100% automatic. Like, you know, if every day is a little bit different and you have to kind of think about your exercise every day, you might be in the habit of exercising, but it takes a little bit of work every time. Like, when am I going to go?
What am I, you know? Right. And so you need to, and one of the strategies is the strategy of safeguards, which is what are the things that you do to protect a habit once you've got it going? If you do this, then do that, which I would call the strategy of if-then planning, which is if this happens, then I do this. You go ahead and figure that out in advance.
So with the simple habit, it might take less, and then a more complex habit might take a little more thought to figure out how to get that into place. You know, I started a podcast myself. It's called Happier with Gretchen Rubin, and I talk about all this stuff. It's so much fun. And one of the first things that we talked about was the habit of making your bed.
Because whenever I talk to people about what habits do you feel like make you happier and more productive and feel healthier, and so often people mention it's the habit of making your bed. And as you say, it's a very simple habit. You can do it first thing in the morning, and then the rest of the day, you're like, oh, look, if I did nothing else, I made my bed.
And it's funny how much that resonates with people.
Well, the book is called Better Than Before, Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much. It was great. I feel like we could talk for hours.
On my website, which is just GretchenRubin.com, there's a bunch of blog posts about habits and also a lot of downloads, a habit change checklist, some one-pagers about working better than before, eating better than before, exercising better than before, like to get you started because those are some of the habits people most want to form.
A starter kit for people who want to start habits groups for people who are going to help each other change their habits. And I have this podcast called Happier with Gretchen Rubin where we talk about a lot of these kinds of issues about science from ancient wisdom and also around experiences.
Well, GretchenRubin.com. Gretchen, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.
If you enjoy this podcast, please make sure to subscribe. And to stay updated on everything that the Action Catalyst is up to, make sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Action Catalyst Podcast and on Twitter at Catalyst underscore Action. And thanks for listening.