Quotes about Habits

“If you plunge into really cold water, you’ll be shocked, and you’ll hate it.  But if you go into water that’s only a little colder than room temperature, it won’t seem too bad.  After awhile, it’ll feel pretty normal.  Then if the water’s temperature drops a little more, it won’t seem too bad, and soon that will become normal.  You adjust.  When it comes to changing your life, don’t plunge into the freezing water.  You’ll soon get out of the water and be afraid of going in again.  Instead, take a dip in slightly cool water.  Make a very small change.  Adapt to that, then make another.  Gradually, through a series of small changes, you’ll see amazing progress.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 126)

“What’s the typical feedback loop for someone who doesn’t exercise much? When she does the exercise, she gets discomfort, sweatiness, tiredness, maybe even soreness.  That’s negative feedback for doing the exercise.  Not doing the exercise is much more comfortable, because she’s on the Internet doing easy, mildly pleasurable tasks.  That’s positive feedback for not doing the exercise.  The combination of these two feedback loops is why—at first—it’s so hard to form the exercise habit.  People are up against much more than they realize, because no amount of willpower can overcome a setup of feedback loops that go against the behavior they’re trying to create.  And it works like that for every single habit: eating junk food and shopping and playing games are easy habits to create and hard to break, while exercise and mediation and eating vegetables and learning languages are much harder.  All because of the feedback loops.  So what are we to do?  Reverse the feedback loops to get the behavior we want.  We want positive feedback for the habit we’re creating: rewards, praise, physical pleasure, spending time with a friend, getting stars on a chart, continuing a streak, a feeling of accomplishment, enjoying the activity with a smile.  We want negative feedback for not doing the habit: embarrassment of people knowing you didn’t do it, losing a bet, enduring some embarrassing consequence, losing the streak you’ve created, experiencing some kind of difficulty or loss.  Grease the slope.  Create public accountability.  Set up rewards and consequences.  The smarter you’ve set up your feedback loops, the better you’ll be at doing the habit.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 42)

“Imagine yourself as a kid who wakes up after a night of heavy snowfall.  There’s a thick layer of snow on the ground, clean and without a path.  The first time you walk through this snow, you have a very wide array of choices for what path to take.  You can walk to the left, down the middle, to the right, zig zag, walk over that hill, and so on.  Not only do you have many choices of paths to take, but each one will be very difficult, because there’s a foot of snow everywhere.  Now picture walking to school the next day …the snow from the previous day is still there, but now there’s a bit of a path you created from yesterday’s walk.  You can still create a new path, but the one you created yesterday will be a bit easier.  So you take that one.  Each day, you decide to take the path already created.  This is a groove in the snow that gets easier over time, until you’re probably not going to take any other path.  Creating a new habit is a lot like that: you’re creating a groove in the snow.  At first, you can go anywhere, and it’s difficult going …but once you’ve created a groove, it’s much easier, and you don’t have to forget new paths anymore.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 28)

“Imagine that your life and your attention are a small room, and in this room you wanted to put a meditation cushion, a weight set for exercise, a kitchen for healthy eating, a couch for reading, a writing desk for creating a novel, a yoga mat for doing some yoga, and a tea table for mindfully drinking tea.  The tiny room would be cramped, and none of these things would have any space, and we’d not really be able to do any of them.  This is what happens when we try to do multiple habits at once: we overfill the small space of our lives and our attention so that we have no room for anything.  Instead, imagine that we only had one thing in that room—let’s say the writing desk.  That’s all that’s in the room for the moment.  This desk would have space, and the writing would get our full attention.  Create space for your habit change, by doing one habit at a time, and you’ll do your best job on that habit.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 16)