Hello, Habits

by Fumio Sasaki

  Step 43: Gradually increase the level of difficulty

  Sometimes, you’ll get bored of a habit you keep practicing. For example, you get up early, do yoga, exercise … and the refreshing feeling and sense of achievement you got at the beginning can seem to gradually fade away.

  When your standards of difficulty are too high, your brain will acknowledge them simply as suffering, and you won’t be able to continue. But you also won’t be satisfied if your standards are too low, and again, you’ll get bored. When you give yourself stress, an adequate amount of cortisol, a stress hormone, will be released to give you a sense of satisfaction. There’s no joy where there’s no stress.

  I once asked an instructor at my gym when I should lift heavier weights, and the answer was: “when you’re able to lift them up with ease.” You also one day find that you can drive a car as you hum, without conscious thought. In running, with more practice, you’ll be able to think about something else while running at a speed that had previously exhausted you. The point at which something that used to be tough becomes easy is the point at which you should increase the level of difficulty.

  The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi came up with the idea of the state of flow, a state where people are so focused that they forget the passage of time and feel satisfaction. That happens when you’re taking on something that’s just the right level of difficulty, neither too strenuous nor too easy. As I write this manuscript, my concentration breaks when I hit logical disconnects or when I’m writing a specialized, complicated part. When I’m writing about something with just the right level of difficulty, a topic that I have experienced and understand well, I can focus and write while forgetting the passing of time.

  Finesse your habits so naturally that you won’t notice their level of difficulty

  Of course, you won’t be able to continue practicing a habit if you increase the level of difficulty too much at once. Rather, you should increase the level of difficulty gradually.

  If your goal is to eventually get up an hour earlier, first set your timer five minutes earlier. It’s tough to get up an hour earlier than you did yesterday, but it isn’t so hard if it’s five minutes. Get up five minutes earlier every morning for twelve days, and you’ll be able to get up an hour early.

  When I run on the treadmill, I extend my time by a minute since the last time I did it, and sometimes increase my speed by 0.1 kilometers each minute that I run. Increase the level of difficulty bit by bit, and you’ll improve without failing.

  “Intentional practices” are necessary for development

  Ichiro is said to have given himself a different challenge for each pitched ball when he was at bat. Even if he made a hit, he wouldn’t be satisfied if he didn’t achieve his target.

  The professional video game player Daigo Umehara also says, “You don’t get skilled at all regardless of the long hours you play without thinking.” It seems that simply being hell-bent on prolonging the time spent practicing isn’t going to produce results. Take making shots in basketball. Improving your shots isn’t a matter of simply throwing a lot of shots, but instead fine-tuning each shot in regard to distance, the ball’s trajectory, your wrist movement in the follow-through, etc. You hypothesize and continue to make corrections. These methods are called “intentional practices.”

  When something becomes a habit and becomes easy, you might continue to practice it aimlessly at the same difficulty level. Dopamine is released when you feel novelty, and neural binding occurs when you leave your comfort zone.

  So even if you’re consistently practicing the same habits, you might not obtain the necessary stimulation for development. Stretch your legs wider than usual in yoga. Try hustling anew at your job at times you would normally want to quit. There’s room for growth when you take just one step further to move forward even when you think you’ve worked hard enough.

  Step 44: Overcome each challenge along the way

  No matter how well you think you’ve acquired a habit, there will be moments when you just can’t get in the mood. The countermeasure is to maintain the minimum.

  Stephen Guise, author of Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results, suggests that even if something has become a habit, you should never aim too high when you set your goals. A goal for doing pushups can remain one push-up, even if you can now do a hundred. Even if it has become a habit to write in a diary or a blog, and you’re able to write a thousand words a day, your objective can remain unchanged from when you first started at one hundred words a day. You can achieve that one push-up or hundred words when you just can’t get in the mood to do more.

  As I’ve said many times, what reduces your willpower is a sense of self-doubt. That negative feeling of not being able to work on something today or not being able to achieve your objective will make it tough to proceed to your next habit. It’s important, then, to maintain a baseline for your habits, to avoid denying yourself the satisfaction of completion. Even if you weren’t able to do much today, you can make up for it tomorrow.

  Your development will not serve as motivation

  The biggest reward for a thing well done is to have done it.

  —Voltaire

  Even if you continue to practice your habits, you’ll only feel a sense of development every now and then; it won’t be possible to keep the habit up if you consider that your sole reward, or use it as your motivation.

  Take yoga, for example. My body became more flexible right away, about two weeks after I started, and I was happy and eager to continue. But, eventually, my flexibility stopped improving, even when I continued to practice yoga every day. Even with a sense of your development, questions like “Will my hamstrings be more flexible today than usual?” will sneak up very, very quietly. I’ve been following a guide for doing the splits in a month for more than six months, but I still can’t do it at all.

  I won’t want to continue at times like this if I expect development as my reward. And my body will become stiff if I don’t practice yoga for a few days, and I’ll feel like a failure. English is the same. There are days when suddenly, I can understand what English speakers are saying, but generally, I’m at a place where I feel no development. Development is accompanied by periods of stagnation and breakthroughs. Rather than a straight line that continuously climbs upwards, it’s a zigzag, like going up and down a stairway. So if I value development as a reward, I’ll want to quit at periods of stagnation.

  In order to continue, it’s necessary to look for a reward in the actions themselves rather than your own development. You should set self-approval as your reward for being able to persevere with your habit again today. This is really important. At moments of stagnation, it might be good to imagine yourself as a chrysalis. The exterior appearance of a chrysalis will never change. But inside, preparations for the next stage are steadily under way. The joys of development are like bonuses received from a company that doesn’t seem to be doing too well. Consider yourself lucky to receive them every now and then.

  Step 45: Keep at it, and increase your self-efficacy

  All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

  —Mark Twain

  In Step 17, I introduced to you a way to overcome a fear of snakes by “chunking down,” or breaking the task down into smaller steps. There’s more to that example. Interestingly enough, people who were able to overcome their fear of snakes were also able to overcome other fears. After earnestly tackling one thing, they were no longer so easily dejected, even when faced with failure. Psychologist Albert Bandura called this “self-efficacy.”

  Put simply, to have a sense of self-efficacy is to believe, “I can do it!” It’s the belief that you can change, grow, learn, and overcome new challenges.

  I quit eating sweets after I quit drinking, and this is what I thought at the time: “I could quit liquor, so there’s no way I couldn’t quit sweets!”

  When you succeed at something, you feel that your next success is in reach
. Children who were able to wait for two marshmallows in the marshmallow test may have already had many experiences of overcoming challenges, and receiving praise for doing so, by the time they were four or five.

  On the other hand, if you think “I can’t do it” or “I fail at everything I try to do,” it would be a rational decision to give up as soon as possible when faced with a new challenge. If you think that you’ll fail again, anyway, you’d consider it a waste of time to deal with your conflicting emotions. Rather than trying to wait as long as you can to eat the marshmallow in front of you, in hopes that you’ll later be rewarded with two marshmallows, you’ll end up arriving at the decision that it would be best to eat one marshmallow now as soon as you receive it.

  This is what Walter Mischel says: Children who have bigger expectations for success will have more confidence when they’re given a new challenge, as if they have already succeeded. They don’t believe they’ll fail, and so they wish to face it head-on, and choose to take the risk of failure.

  When you’re starting something new, people advise that you should “just do it,” and I agree. But the people who are able to “just do it” are those who have many experiences of just doing it and things somehow working out.

  That means it’ll be easy for you to take on new challenges if you aren’t afraid of failure, and you’ll continue to succeed.

  A sense of self-efficacy that began with cleaning up

  Children who were able to wait in the marshmallow test were often “successful” by other measures too, like their test scores and their states of health.

  I think it’s a result of the sense of self-efficacy—“I can do it!”—that extended to various aspects of their lives.

  I can say that that applies to me, too. I began by cleaning my apartment, but it wasn’t enough; I developed a desire to improve my life in various other ways. I learned to get up early in the morning, and there was initially such a great sense of accomplishment when I made it to the gym that I felt satisfied even if I slacked off afterwards. When you become able to get up early and exercise with ease, you start to want more challenges.

  When you acquire one habit, you want to acquire other habits as well. Because your sense of self-efficacy has been boosted by developing that one habit, it becomes easy to form the next habit. And, in that way, the positive impact extends beyond that initial habit.

  Step 46: Create a chain reaction

  It took a while for exercise to become one of my habits. After I moved to the countryside, I either ran or drove a car. When I walked a long distance for the first time in a while, I was surprised to see how quickly and steadily I was able to walk. There was a sensation like my legs and hips were more compact. My body felt light, like when Goku, in Dragon Ball, takes off his weighted clothes.

  People who can only walk slowly are said to have various health risks, like depression and declining bodily and cognitive functions. Shouldn’t you be able to walk briskly when your body feels light and you feel motivated?

  You daily life becomes really easy when you start to condition your body. The fatigue from climbing stairs becomes practically zero, so there’s no need to choose the crowded escalator. You don’t get out of breath. And furthermore, your health doesn’t decline.

  The habits you’ve already acquired become your reward

  Because you’ll have started different habits at different times, there will be habits you’ve already acquired that now have a low rate of difficulty and are fun. For me, one example would be writing in my diary. I no longer have any trouble writing in my diary. I can write about negative feelings, and things will start to brighten up right away. For me, writing in my diary is a way to refresh myself, and it’s also a reward.

  Running is the same. I used to think, “I’ll eat something good if I can accomplish this run,” but I’ve realized that somewhere along the way, I started thinking, “I’ll go running when I finish this work.” A habit that used to be a challenge has now become a reward, and a practice that’s indispensable for me.

  You’ll no longer need bad habits

  Even if I’m plagued with some type of stress, I’ll feel better when I write it down in my diary. Even when I’m feeling bad, my mood will definitely improve if I go for a run. There’s no more need for me to eat or drink too much, or to go shopping on a whim, which I previously believed were ways to relieve stress. In these ways, positive actions reinforce one another. “He’s stoic,” “He has strong willpower”—it only looks that way when other people see me doing these things.

  Step 47: Adapt your habits as needed

  All our life … is but a mass of habits.

  —William James

  The ways to approach habits that we’ve covered in this book can be applied to various aspects of our lives. For example, I have a habit of eating very quickly, and although I wanted to correct that, it wasn’t easy to do. When I’m having a meal with a woman, there is a considerable difference in our eating speeds if I’m not careful.

  It’s important to eat slowly in order to control our appetite, and it’s also good for digestion. I know I should slow down, but it’s hard. What I need in order to develop a habit are penalties and rewards. So I applied that principle. I set up a rule where I allowed myself to only take a break while I ate my lunch. In other words, if I finished my lunch quickly, the penalty was that I had that much less time to rest, and if I ate slowly, there was the reward of taking a longer, relaxing break. The results weren’t tremendous, but I think there was some improvement.

  Many people don’t take their prescribed medication, even though the reward for doing so is that it improves your health, because often it’s hard to see a positive effect right away. So it’s hard to make it into a habit, and it’s easy to forget to do. To remember to take your medication, it’s good to use something that you do every day as a trigger, as I’ve mentioned before. It’s effective to leave the medication by your hair dryer if you use that every day, or close to your toothbrush.

  Meal habits, money habits

  For me, meals are also a habit. I cook three meals a day, and the menu lineup is the same. My routine is to go to the supermarket once every three or four days, buy the same items, and cook in the same way. This way, I eat basically the same quantity every day, so I don’t overeat with “I’ve made too much and I’m going to waste the food” as an excuse. Eating out and enjoying tasty dishes is fun, of course, but a stable diet also has the advantage that you can’t gain weight.

  Habits can also be used to govern big issues, such as money. From the standpoint of the Japanese inclination to save money, Americans seem to have very small savings. According to a 2016 study of seven thousand American adults, 69 percent had less than a thousand dollars in savings.

  Many Americans are shocked at how little they have in savings when they reach the age of sixty-five. For some, that may have been because spending in the present outweighed concern over financial security in their senior years.

  But we can remind ourselves that our actions can be controlled. At one large company, the rate of people who participated in 401(k) retirement savings plans was 40 percent when enrollment was optional, and opt in, whereas enrollment rates went up to 90 percent when the company changed to automatic enrollment, and made it necessary to take certain steps to opt out. It means that it’s possible to improve major issues like retirement funds simply by lowering the hurdle for enrollment and raising the hurdle for withdrawal.

  Applying habits to interpersonal relationships

  Habits can also be employed to improve interpersonal relationships. If you see that you’re about to run out of toilet paper (a trigger), you can replace it without waiting for the next person (routine), and you can feel that you’re promptly handling housework (reward).

  Acquire a habit like that, and you won’t have useless arguments with your roommate.

  One tip for acquiring habits, to set a date, is particularly effective in various social situations. We’ve been having c
lass reunions at my junior high school for more than fifteen years, which I think is possible because the date is always set for December 30. Because we know that it’s being held on this day every year, we’re aware of it ahead of time and make the necessary plans and adjustments, and the participation rate is high.

  It’s also an effective strategy for friendships. Two close friends and I would usually only get together on each of our birthdays. It was easy to work out because the dates were set, and the habit of getting together went on for many years.

  Strategies for acquiring habits can also be applied to romantic relationships. It’s often said that detail-oriented guys are popular with women. Women might appreciate—and start to expect—being frequently praised and told that their man loves them. Do take note, though, that there may be cases where a woman gets seriously annoyed.

  It’s also possible to use your knowledge of habits to deal with annoying people. Although you may be annoyed, you might also feel sympathy towards the person, and continue to respond when they contact you. But by doing that, the person will continue to expect the reward, and make it a habit to keep talking to you. It’s sometimes effective to clearly set boundaries.

  Step 48: Create habits that are unique to you