Hi friends,

A friend of mine is a doctor who smokes. That kind of thing used to surprise me, but it doesn’t even register as a blip anymore.

We’re all just humans! And we humans, of course, are full of contradictions.

I’ll confess I’m personally a mess of contradictions. (Although, I like to think a bit less that way than I used to be!)

I’m not too worried about it, honestly. But I do try to change someof my contradictory habits.

Like how I used to religiously snack at night after the kids went down. This completely undid one of my good habits, regularly working out.

Late night snacking is a sticky habit I tried to break more than a few times. But the sleep deprivation and irregular life schedule of having a few kiddos made it a really tough one to kick. Who doesn’t love a bowl of cereal once the house goes quiet?

So after 4 years of failures, thanks to insights from a Huberman Lab episode, I’ve succeeded in finally breaking the habit and replacing it with a new one!

Here is what I learned that helped me breakthrough:

• Write out what you will do immediately before and afteryour new habit, and rehearse it in your head.
• Example: new gym habit? Write out: getting out of bed, putting on your pants and shirt, putting on your socks, putting on your shoes, grabbing the car keys, starting the car, driving to the gym, walking in the door, picking up a weight.
• Then visualize, in great detail and without fast forwarding in the mind, going through each of those steps.
• The better visualized and written out all the many actions that have to happen before the actual habit, the more likely you can follow through.
• Keep visualizing every day, as part of habit formation.
• Choosing when you’ll work on new habits has a massive impact on your ability to follow through. Divide the day into three 8-hour blocks:
• First phase is for all the tough stuff that requires precision and motivation.
• Next phase is for stuff that doesn’t require as much.
• Last phase (evening): don’t try to make habits here! Focus on rest. It’ll make your phase 1 of the next day that much better. (Being ambitious in the evening is a fool’s errand.)
• Don’t over compensate. Ever.
• Failed one day? All good. Just get back to it the next day, without any adjustments. Over compensating for errors will not help you succeed in habit formation.

There’s a great deal more in there if you want to dive deep (whole episode + the show notes), including a granular look at what it takes to break bad habits. But executing actions based on those 3 insights alone were enough to help me kick a number of bad habits, including late night snacking.

I hope this is helpful to you if you’re working on forming or breaking habits!

Have a wonderful week!

Edward

♥️ My Favorite Things This Week

• 🤩 Strong.app
  This is my preferred app for workout logging, by miles, after trying about a dozen. I bought the “Forever” version of it over 5 years ago, and still use it daily. No BS, useful, intuitive.
• 📜 The Mowing That Woke My Daughter by Andrew Calis ​
  My old friend, a Palestinian American poet, wrote an arresting poem, that was just published in The Atlantic.

👨‍💻 My New Blog Posts

• ​I want YouTube, the news cycle, and work emails to dictate my life
  ​I feel dumb even writing the following sentences but here we go…

✍️ Quote of the Week

Some people just can’t seem to deal with any uncertainty in their lives, and time and time again they find themselves imprisoned in situations that kill their happiness, push them towards despair and gradually disintegrate their self-esteem. They don’t realise that in their attempt to avoid uncertainty and the short-term discomfort it might bring, they’re actually inadvertently opting for long-term misery. I believe that the happiness you’ll find across all areas of your life – your work, your relationships and everything in between – will positively correlate to your ability to deal with uncertainty.

Steven Bartlett

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