by Fumio Sasaki
For me, too, around ten minutes after I start running, I start to feel different; just moving my body starts to become a joy in itself. It should be more convenient for living organisms to conserve calories in order to survive, and we humans probably want to take it easy. But at a certain point after I’ve started to run, I have a sense that I’ve switched to a different mode.
My worries and concerns become distant, I start to feel energized, and I’m more full of enthusiasm and confidence than I am in my everyday life. It’s tough, of course, to be in a state where I’m out of breath, but appropriate physical stress prolongs my sense of satisfaction for a while after I’ve finished running.
We wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of physical exertion, like running, if we only needed to release dopamine to experience euphoria. That’s because there are plenty of other ways to release dopamine, like eating tasty foods. But when we’re talking about a truly powerful sense of satisfaction, what’s necessary is an appropriate amount of pain, not to mention stress.
The reasons why Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos work
Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos shouldn’t have to work—they have enough wealth to lie on the beach at a resort until they die, and yet they don’t choose to do that. Perhaps it’s because they can’t feel a powerful sense of satisfaction if they’re only doing fun things.
I was once jilted by a girlfriend who said, “Hey, we only seem to be doing things that are fun!” I thought I had been coming up with great date ideas so that she could enjoy herself when she was with me. So, when she said that to me, I thought, “Huh? I don’t know what you’re talking about!” But I think I can now see what she meant.
Our sense of satisfaction also probably becomes stronger in interpersonal relationships where we have stress. Dramas are interesting because they have ups and downs and climaxes. The script that I’d written was a bad one, where only fun things happened.
I’ve gotten sidetracked; there are more rewards to exercising. For example, everyone must have the experience of coming up with an idea not while sitting at their desk and thinking, but while taking a walk or exercising.
Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work is an introduction to the daily habits of creative people like authors and musicians, and a lot of them—you can almost say most of them—have a daily routine of taking walks.
In writing this very book, a lot of my ideas came to mind while I was running. Exercise enables us to tap into a type of creativity that’s different from what we experience when we’re sitting at a desk.
Aerobic exercises develop your neurons
In Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, John Ratey says frankly that exercise makes us feel refreshed because when we get our blood pumping, it makes the brain function at its best.
This is the rationale Ratey, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, gives for the exercises he describes as beneficial for the brain. Besides neurotransmitters, there’s a protein group in the brain called a factor. And this brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) increases with aerobic exercise. When BDNF is sprinkled on neurons, they sprout new branches; neurons are like trees that have these synapses at the ends of the branches in place of leaves. The synapses increase when new branches are formed, making the connections between them even stronger.
Ratey says BDNF is like fertilizer for the brain.
A school where performance improved with exercise
One traditional strategy to improve your grades is to increase the amount of study time with books and textbooks. But it isn’t that simple in real life—and sometimes physical exercise can help, instead.
In 2003, a high school in Naperville, Illinois, launched an initiative called “Zero Hour PE” for nineteen thousand students, who ran on the field or exercised on stationary bikes before their first class.
The results were tremendous. While students who only took regular PE classes improved by 10.7 percent in their reading and comprehension tests, those who took “Zero Hour PE” showed an improvement of 17 percent. The students in Naperville took global standard mathematics and science tests called TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), and ranked sixth in the world in math and first in the world in science (the average performance by American students was eighteenth in science and nineteenth in mathematics). Exercising before commencing their schoolwork enhanced the effects of their studying, and their performance improved.
In a 2007 study conducted by a German group of researchers, subjects were able to learn vocabulary 20 percent faster after, rather than before, they exercised, revealing the correlation between learning efficiency and BDNF values.
Rewards are necessary for habits. People who exercise a lot are often thought of as highly self-disciplined. But it isn’t as though people like that abstain from receiving rewards. They just receive rewards that are much greater than monetary compensation.
Habits are just like other addictions
But no matter how much I write about it, I think it’s probably hard for people who aren’t in the habit of exercising to imagine what makes it worth the effort.
A reward that you can understand only after acquiring a habit is like a beer for someone who’s never had it before. The refreshing taste of a cold beer on a hot day, and the good feeling of being tipsy, can’t be conveyed with words, no matter how you try to explain it.
I’ve never played a slot machine, so I don’t understand the gambler’s euphoria from getting a hit. For someone who doesn’t smoke, it’s hard to imagine what’s fun about paying a lot of money to inhale and exhale smoke that gives you a headache. Beer, gambling, cigarettes—even if you partake in all these things, you probably don’t have a good understanding of why a cocaine addict gets excited when they see white powder.
Actions like exercise that may appear ascetic and actions like seeking drugs aren’t actually much different in terms of structure. People will repeat the same actions in pursuit of rewards. That essential element will not falter, and I think the process works like an addiction.
People find it hard to imagine that others have different types of rewards from those that they receive themselves. That’s why people who run appear, to people who don’t run, to be losing out.
Acquiring a habit is just like learning to like beer: it’s only bitter at the beginning. You endure that bitterness at first and keep trying it repeatedly, until one day, it becomes your favorite drink.
Acquiring a habit isn’t about bolstering your willpower so that you can overcome temptation. It’s rewriting the “rewards” and “punishments.” It’s causing a change in your brain, by taking action over and over again.
Tips for habits: How to divert your eyes from the marshmallows
In Chapter 1, I offered an introduction to the marshmallow test. What would happen if instead of taking the test just once, subjects were to take it repeatedly?
The first time around, a reward of two marshmallows in twenty minutes is too abstract to really wrap your head around. And resisting the marshmallow in front of you during that time is painful if you aren’t experienced.
But by succeeding a number of times, you would acquire the skill to think about fun things to divert your attention from the marshmallow, or to imagine that it’s not real. And if you get two marshmallows after waiting for twenty minutes a repeated number of times, you’ll start to gain a real sense of the reward.
Among the children who successfully obtained the two marshmallows were some who didn’t eat them right away. They wanted to take the two marshmallows home and receive praise from their mothers for the great feat that they had accomplished. The children wanted a reward that was greater than eating two marshmallows right away.
This is what it means to acquire a good habit. It is not as if the alluring things in front of you disappear. But when you keep obtaining big rewards in the future, the reward in front of you will start to look boring.
It’s true that willpower is needed when yo
u try to acquire a new habit. It isn’t easy, and there’s no magic way to do it. But once you do, you’re able to continue the habit, because there’s a big reward that surely awaits you.
In the next chapter, I divide up the method for making something into a habit into fifty steps, and go over each of them in detail.
You can’t overcome the marshmallows in front of you without a strategy. The trick to acquiring a habit is to divert your eyes from the marshmallows through every possible means, until you can gain a sense of the big reward.
Summary of Chapter 2
•45 percent of people’s actions are habits.
•Actions like brushing your teeth, buttoning your shirt, and tying your shoelaces, which were difficult when you were a child, become things that you can do unconsciously as you repeat them.
•Complicated actions like driving a car or cooking can also become automatic.
•Our conscious mind is only called up when a problem occurs, and our actions and lives usually go on as if on autopilot.
•Even when an issue arises that you should worry about, like having to get up at a certain time in the morning, your conscious mind doesn’t make a decision for you to follow—instead, a discussion is held in your unconscious mind, like at parliament. Rejections and approvals will occur, depending on the situation, and you can’t tell while your awareness is being called up which way a decision will be made.
•As shown in an experiment using rats, the brain gradually stops thinking when the same actions are taken repeatedly in pursuit of a reward.
•Habits are routines that are activated by triggers, and they take place as you seek rewards.
•Making something into a habit means you’re rewriting a reward. While there are big rewards, like a sense of satisfaction or even euphoria for an act like strenuous exercise, you can’t gain a sense of that big reward unless you experience it several times.
•Making something into a habit is like taking the marshmallow test over and over again. If you’ve obtained two marshmallows on several occasions, you’ll start to feel strongly that the future reward is so great that the easier option, the reward in the present, isn’t worth considering.
•The way to make something a habit is to use all means to continue to divert your eyes from the marshmallow in front of you.
CHAPTER 3
50 STEPS FOR ACQUIRING NEW HABITS
Step 1: Sever ties with vicious circles
To dye a dirty cloth, you must first wash it.
—A teaching of Ayurveda
As we saw in Chapter 1, your willpower will be lost if you give in to negative emotions like uncertainty or doubt. When that happens, the brain takes instinctive action, and tells you to try to grab the reward in front of you. As a result, you may eat or drink too much, or lose the motivation to do anything and end up playing with your smartphone. Then, later, you regret those actions, and feel more stress.
To make things worse, when you’re exposed to that type of stress over extended periods, the cognitive functions of your cooling system—which should control instinctive actions—will deteriorate. What you don’t use will deteriorate. And a deterioration in your cognitive function means you’ll no longer be able to see reality from a different perspective—for example, you won’t be able to imagine that the marshmallow in front of you isn’t real, or think of it as just a cloud. So you become further inclined to grab the reward in front of you.
Before long, you’ll start suffering from “learned helplessness.” A dog that continues to be struck by an unavoidable electric shock will continue to accept it, even after it becomes possible to jump and avoid the shock. This is because the dog tells itself that trying to avoid the shock is useless, whatever it does.
Unfortunately, there are such frameworks of vicious circles for humans, too. To acquire good habits, it’s necessary to cut ties with them.
GOOD HABIT INHIBITOR: Believing that a bad habit is necessary to relieve stress
It is often easy to convince yourself that some poor habits, like eating or drinking excessively, are necessary for relieving stress. Remember, you’re more likely to choose the reward in front of you if you’re feeling down or stressed. Stress from work or family life is inevitable; the key thing is to differentiate between the stress itself, and the additional stress that you feel from the actions that you take to resolve that stress.
There’s a quote from The Little Prince that goes something like this: “I drink to forget that I am ashamed of drinking.” Similarly, when people feel a sense of uncertainty about their finances, they will often run off shopping in a bid to escape from that uncertainty. When they are uncertain, they take an action that creates more uncertainty. But, as the author Gretchen Rubin says, we can’t do something that will make us feel worse simply to cope.
The tips for making or kicking habits are complete opposites
Whether habits are good or bad, they are made up of the same structures. So, to kick a habit that you now have, you can do the exact opposite of these tips for acquiring habits. For example, Step 13 is to lower the hurdle, in which case a tip for quitting a habit would be to raise the hurdle. I will follow this up with some points to consider when deciding whether you want to quit a habit. Then I’ll explain the tips for quitting bad habits, along with the tips for acquiring good habits.
Step 2: First, decide that you’re going to quit
It is well to yield up pleasure, if pain will also leave with it.
—Publius Syrus
Everyone finds a way to fill their day somehow, whether with a busy schedule, or a lot of time spent slacking off. Whether good or bad, a day in the life of any given person is filled with habits.
So, if you want to add new habits, your old habits must make an exit. The first thing to do is decide to quit. But which habits should you quit? It’s a difficult question; like I said, it’s easy to believe something is necessary to relieve stress.
Do you want your child to have that habit?
A question that’s worth asking yourself on such an occasion is whether it’s a habit that you would like your kid to have. This question works even if you don’t actually have a child.
Something that’s become indispensable for you, but that you would actually want to quit if you could; something that teaches you so little that you couldn’t agree to your child starting to do it, too; something that leaves you with a sense of regret, rather than a sense of achievement or satisfaction.
We can come up with various excuses for not being able to quit these kinds of habits. It’s also possible to concoct any number of advantages to keeping them.
But it’s different when we consider whether we would like our children to have that something as a habit. I don’t think there are many people who would like their children to become addicted to alcohol or nicotine, glued to their smartphone or social media, or absorbed in gambling.
It’s strange that we find ourselves allowed to act as we wish when we grow up. If you think there’s a need to set an hour as a time limit for your children to watch TV or play video games, then that’s also necessary for an adult. We all need to continue learning until the moment that we die.
The problem isn’t the category itself
The problem is that that “something” that we should quit doing can’t be dismissed simply because of its category. For example, the only memories that I have of my childhood are of playing video games, which I stopped doing when I was around thirty. I certainly must have enjoyed playing video games, yet I think once I quit, I began to look coldly at people who were absorbed in gaming.
But I changed my way of thinking when I discovered how professional gamer Daigo Umehara approaches gaming.
He, too, says that he’s long been bored of the games themselves. But when winning at a gaming competition is treated as a method, the ultimate objective becomes a kind of personal growth. To gain top ranking in the world, you have to play video games seriously for hours, take notes on the issues you encoun
ter, and make repeated improvements. The process of trial and error is no different than that undertaken by an athlete.
In short, what this means is that there is value to anything if you take it seriously. If you’re able to feel that you have learned all about life from video games, then there’s no need to stop playing them. I quit drinking alcohol, but I respect sommeliers and master brewers of sake who take their work seriously. There are probably people who have learned everything from liquor.
But when I look back and think about my own experience with liquor, I can’t say that I gained great joy from it. Opportunities to drink are certainly fun, but there were often times that I felt regret the next day. So, I quit cold turkey.
•The things that you don’t want your children to acquire
•Things that do not leave you with a sense that you have learned a lot when you reflect on it later on
•The things that leave you with regret rather than a sense of achievement
Keep these things in mind, and think about what you should quit doing.
All actions are addictive
Stimulation in reasonable doses is necessary in life. The problem is when you want to quit but you can’t. Things that you can’t quit on your own are addictions. It isn’t just alcohol and nicotine—there are many substances that are addictive. Sugar is one example.
In an experiment conducted by neuroscientist Nicole Avena, rats were given sugar. Over time, the rats began to show a strong desire for the sugar, built up a level of tolerance for it, as we see with drugs like cocaine, and even experienced withdrawal symptoms. When researchers at the University of Michigan conducted a survey of 384 adults, 92 percent responded that they had strong urges for certain foods, and that they failed to stop eating them despite numerous attempts.