4 Steps to a New Habit
I have changed irrelevant details to protect my client’s anonymity.
My client is an epidemiologist who is part of a team that tried to assess whether COVID contact tracing is worth the taxpayer dollars. Alas, because there were so many uncontrollable factors, despite that high-powered team putting in 12-hour days for months, they couldn’t come up with a clear-enough result to publish. His boss invited the team to take a week off with pay to recover from that long, fruitless effort.
It was then that my client had his most recent session with me. I asked him what he wanted to talk about and he said something like,
I’m burned. I need to take care of myself. I’ve been bad about exercise, I'm eating too much, and would like to read more, not professional material but novels. In the past, I've tried to get into those habits and I was good for a day, maybe even a week, but soon I was back off the wagon.
Exercise
We started with exercise. After asking some questions, I said, “We tend to stay with an exercise routine if it’s at least pleasant and convenient. For you, does anything fit the bill? He described four and ended up concluding that he’d treat them like a menu of options:
When he can spare five hours, he’ll play 18 holes of golf, walking the course. He said that he’d like to meet new people in his age bracket, so I asked if he wanted to call the golf scheduler and see if he could get placed as the fourth member of an appropriate foursome. He liked that.
When he has only a couple of hours free, he wants to play tennis.
When his kid wants to play basketball with him, he’d do that, which he said happens once or twice a week.
On other days, he’ll fill in with his Peloton, perhaps with one of its video classes. He said that while he doesn’t hate the Peloton, it’s his least favorite of the four activities. So I suggested he link it to dinner: If it’s a day he should use the Peloton, he'd make himself do that before allowing himself to eat, Finally, I said, “Consider this plan as a pilot. If after a week, even a day, you feel should tweak or even reinvent it, fine. Think of it as like one of your experiments at work: Try it, if it works, great. If not, try another experiment.
Diet
Next we turned to diet. He said he wants to lose ten pounds. I said, okay, that doesn’t require massive changes. In fact, a good approach to sustaining weight loss is to make just small changes, those you are likely to maintain for life. For example, if you routinely “clean your plate,” make a rule to leave two bites. If you love having bread at a restaurant, instead of the usual three pieces, have two. Instead of the entrée you most love, have one you like almost as much but is less calorific, for example, linguini with clam sauce rather than linguini alfredo. He agreed that it was worth a try. I reminded him that it’s just an experiment and as he's trying it, to ask himself if and how the plan should be changed.
Reading
Finally, we turned to his desire to read novels. He said he had started many but usually stopped. I said, “Reading a novel is a major commitment. Unless it’s riveting, you’re right to stop and try something else. There are millions of novels available, easily searchable on Amazon or in a favorite bricks-and-mortar store."
I asked if he knows what novel he'd like to read or to reread. He said no, whereupon I mentioned that the most riveting novel I’ve read in the last few years is National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, All The Light We Cannot See. In a nutshell, it’s the well-told story of two very different children during World War II. He said he’ll try it.
I asked him how he could make reading a novel convenient? He said that he'll have it sitting on his pillow or listen to it as an audiobook on his phone so he has it whether he's walking, waiting, or in the car.
Again, I encouraged an experimental mindset: Even if it's just after the first few pages, if your gut says there’s probably a better-suited book out there.
The takeaway
Here are the four steps to a new habit:
1. Find a pleasant way. Is there an easy, even fun version of the new habit you’re trying to accomplish? For example, if you want to stop or cut down on substance use, could you substitute some enjoyable but less dangerous activity? Would you find additional pleasure in charting your progress, even giving yourself a reward for meeting little milestones, for example, having done your exercise that first day?
2. Make it convenient. If you’re trying to eat healthier, I have, for example, put a bag of pre-peeled baby carrots and my favorite salsa eye-level in my fridge. I've made my nemesis, cheese, harder to get to: in the produce bin behind the lettuce.
3. Routinize. Link the new habit to something you never skip. For example, if you want to use BrushPicks (better than floss) before you go to bed each night, make inviolate that after you’ve brushed your teeth, you can hop into bed only after you’ve used the BrushPicks. And you've made that convenient by storing it next to the toothpaste.
4. Pilot. The first version of your plan for developing a new habit may need tweaking if not reinvention. That’s just fine. It’s like software: The beta version, even version 1.0 or 2.0 may be buggy but a later version may well be a keeper, by which time your new habit may have become automatic.
It may be easier to remember the four steps if you remember it as an abbreviation: PCRP: Pleasant, Convenient, Routinize, Pilot—PCRP.