Habits

Amy and I decided to make this month’s Attention Collective theme slow living and stillness, and that choice might seem a bit odd at first. “Anthony,” I hear you say. “Haven’t we just gone through the longest involuntary slow down in recent history?” You’d be making a valid point.

The last year has been vastly different for everyone, but it undoubtedly has impacted us all. For many; it brought a lot of isolation and boredom. Parents with school-aged kids I’ve spoken with actually got busier too, managing homeschooling, daycare, and more on top of everything else.

For me and Amy, the year has been one of intense introspection and personal therapy work. It’s been the first time I’ve done therapy since a stint during my initial ADHD diagnosis at eleven years old. While it was a choice to dive into that, it made for a pretty rough year. Toss in the isolation of the pandemic and that we had just moved to a new state toward the end of 2019, and more often than not, I felt like a mess trying to keep it all together.

Here’s the thing, the only reason we’ve been able to dive into this incredibly life-changing-but-painful work is because we slowed down. After deciding to take a break from video production work early in 2020 and then the pandemic sealing the deal, it was inevitable. Between that work and speaking gigs, we’d been on 17 round-trip flights that year, and it wasn’t going well.  Even then, I knew we were running ourselves into the ground and something had to change.

If anyone can understand having resistance to slowing things down, I can assure you, it’s me. My brain works at 300 miles per hour, and sometimes goes that fast in seven different directions simultaneously.

When you add a constant (yet unconscious) feeling of needing to prove myself, do things the hard way, and a healthy dose of crippling perfectionism, things get… not slow.

So if you’re skeptical, I understand. I hope you’ll consider the following lessons and observations from my own journey into slowing down. Doing so is difficult work in itself, taking small changes over time, but the benefits do begin to outweigh the challenges as you go.

Slowing down increases awareness

The deeper I look, the more I find that the seemingly spontaneous actions in my life have an underlying motivator. Our attention speaks to us. A river of emotion carries us through life, and slowing down allows us to feel where we’re headed. Sitting with difficult emotions in the moment gives us the bandwidth to navigate them in mindful ways.

The faster I move, the less attention I pay to the nuances of what I’m feeling in a given moment. Without that awareness, my needs go unseen and tend to escalate, often with results that look a lot like the Twitch.

Slow living doesn’t necessarily mean doing less

An essential part of the ongoing effort to break my own twitches is to be more present in any given moment. The less present I am, the more frequently I get to a place where I need to cope with those built-up, ignored emotions. The Twitch provides a quick numbing and temporary escape from those feelings when it becomes an emergency.

It’s a desperate act from my attention to get the relief it needs once I’ve passed the “manage this in a healthy way” threshold.

For me, presence simply means feeling what I’m feeling, checking in with myself, and addressing what I need in a given moment without dismissing it. As you might imagine, the slower I move, the easier it is to do.

This presents a challenge, as there are only 24 hours in a given day. When our obligations demand more time and attention than we have available to fulfill them, going slow really isn’t an option.

I visualize this predicament as juggling balls being thrown into the air. With just one, you can toss it up and catch it consistently. You can even hold the ball for a while and take a break between throws. Add another, and the difficulty increases, but it’s still doable. At three, we’ve reached the reasonable, “most people can learn to do this” level where it still feels pretty natural. After that, things get tricky.

The more balls you add into the mix, the higher and harder you need to throw each ball to give yourself time to catch the others. The higher the throw, the higher the propensity for a small error to become a big one, making the ball harder to catch on its way back down. This follows the concept of Essentialism and its philosophy of creating margin in your life.

Slowing down doesn’t always require doing less, but it’s hard to imagine that doing so wouldn’t naturally lead to it. If slowing down allows fewer mistakes and more time to adjust to them when they do happen, why wouldn’t that be the most appealing option? Especially after trying the alternative for 20-some years, it really starts making sense.

Stillness isn’t all-or-nothing

We humans have a knack for taking things to extremes, don’t we? With our 30-day detoxes and meditation challenges, we live win or lose, pass or fail lives. Much of it is brought on by cultural norms of success, but we participate in it, too. I’m guilty of these types of initiatives myself; they’re not necessarily a bad thing.

I deeply understand the appeal; these types of lifestyle experiments can help guide us towards more intentional lives. They give us a chance to try out new things and see what works by making a commitment to sticking with it for a while. The problem arrives when this all-or-nothing mentality gets in the way of implementing important changes long term.

Stillness doesn’t need to happen on a meditation cushion, on a beach, or in a hammock. It doesn’t need weeks of planning nor a plane ticket, either. A moment of stillness can be a deep breath in and out while sitting in your car after pulling into your driveway. It can be a hug held ever-so-slightly longer than usual. Stillness can last for a single moment if it means waiting just one second longer before acting on an impulse you feel.

If you allow yourself to let go of the expectation of what slow living and stillness needs to be, you give yourself freedom to practice it in creative and helpful ways.

Moving quickly can be a way to avoid discomfort

If it has been difficult to let yourself rest, I understand. Much of my own drive to do, do, do has derived from a feeling of never being enough unless I was doing something. Even if that something wasn’t productive at all, I’d do anything to distract myself from bathing in the scalding waters of my own perceived shortcomings.

In this way, making efforts to slow down must be paired with self-compassion; it is essential to foster a non-judgmental attitude to cope with the discomfort that comes along with it. This isn’t personal development as much as it’s healing emotional trauma. It’s a long road with lots of bumps along the way, but small acts of self-compassion make these feelings more manageable as you go.

Stillness is never completely still

Another note for the “impossible expectations” category: there is no perfect level of stillness. We’re always breathing, ebbing, and flowing along with the currents of life. Our cells are constantly dying while new ones are created, with our bodies and minds in perpetual chaos at the atomic level. We are in constant motion.

Stillness can simply be something that looks like mindfulness. Focus on our breath while walking, doing chores, or choosing to do an activity in a way that decreases the pace of our lives. Stillness can be a simple decision to leave space in between meetings and activities when scheduling our day.  Give your future-self some compassion and room to breathe.

Make slow living your own

No matter what, there’s no one “right” way to slow down and practice stillness in your life. Everyone is different, and how I do it might look a lot different from you. Do what you can to ask yourself, “Is this working for me?” And “How would I do this if I could work in a way that is best for me?” When life presents an option A and option B, look for your own option C.

In an upcoming article, I’ll share more ideas on how I’ve been practicing this and include some thoughts for implementing them in your own life if you’d like to explore this further. Make sure to sign up for email updates below if you haven’t already.

As you walk out the front door, you do a mental check to make sure you’re not forgetting anything. “Keys, wallet, phone. Check.”

The classic three-tap check hasn’t failed you. The smell of fresh pinewood brushes your nose as you step down the stairs of your wooden porch. On the second step, it happens — again.

Your foot breaks through the wooden stair, sending you tumbling. It’s not like you stomped on it with all your strength; you expected more from the high-quality lumber you installed recently. It was more like stepping through a soggy saltine cracker, the board crumbling to pieces.

“What the hell!” You proclaim, frustrated. “I just replaced that step a few weeks ago. How can this be happening again?”

On your way back from work that day, you swing by the hardware store to pick up yet another board, this time even stronger wood than the last one. After dusting away the splinters, the new board and a couple of nails secure the step back in place. At least you’re getting better at replacing steps now, you figure. Good as new — but you’re frustrated. You’re tired of bruising your shin, twisting your ankle, and taking a spill every time this stupid thing breaks.

It’s not just the physical injuries, either.

There are all kinds of consequences when this happens. You end up late to wherever you were headed, you feel flustered and disheveled. You assume that your poor craftsmanship is to blame for why the step keeps breaking. Not only that, but you must be a pretty terrible carpenter for something so simple to break this many times. This shouldn’t be that hard.

[Read more…] about Seeing The Problem Beneath The Problems

We’ve all done it. We start off with the best of intentions to work out regularly or to write daily. The first couple of weeks go great. At some inevitable point, we have a busy day or something comes up—and we fall off. Keeping up a new habit can be hard, but we can significantly improve our chances when we set ourselves up the best we can with intentional readiness.

With intentional readiness, we can reduce the friction and increase the ease in which we do the thing we’ve set out to do. That way, it’s easier to do the thing as planned—even when the unexpected happens or when we’re grumpy or tired. This concept is the opposite of intentional friction—what Anthony has shared—a Break the Twitch concept of adding more difficulty around an action you want to do less of.

A Tool For Change

Back in 2014, I was working full-time in a career that wasn’t right for me. In general, things were fine. I got along with my manager and team members in the office and across the world. I had set boundaries and implemented a work-life balance that was working okay. Even though I told myself that I had a lot to be grateful for, I felt hopelessly stuck and exhausted. Knowing that I was on the wrong career track took a heavy emotional toll on me. I had listlessly looked for other jobs in different fields, but nothing really stood out to me. In the absence of knowing what to do next, I didn’t want to keep on doing the same thing.

To help with the stagnancy I felt, I decided to meditate for an hour every day for three months. Ambitious, I know—not quite what I’d recommend for building a new habit. But I thought meditating for a long period each day would help with the stress; I also hoped some additional clarity would come out of it. I was determined to take on the challenge.

So, I cleared out a spot in the spare bedroom and laid out a yoga mat. I decided that since I was new to meditation, I’d allow myself different variations—listening to guided tracks, meditating with music and without music, going through book exercises, simply breathing, staring at the wall, and even journaling. I had everything for these variations readily accessible for whenever I sat down on the mat. Every night, I sat down on the mat, and the practice began. As long as I did one of the options on the mat for 60 minutes, it counted.

Sticky Status Quo

Unsurprisingly, it was quite difficult to meditate for an hour every day. It would’ve been much easier to turn on the TV or browse the internet like I was accustomed to doing most evenings.

I ended up meditating for an hour a day successfully for a little over two months before I decided to stop. While I didn’t do the full three months, the length of time I did was still an accomplishment. Meditating regularly was easier with a clear intention, with everything ready to go, and with a specific time slot to do it. Even better, doing this helped me gain more clarity. Through all those hours of reflection, I gathered the courage to make a plan to leave my job in the next six months.

The reality is, it’s often the easiest to stick to what we’re accustomed to doing. Meaning that without greater intention and preparation, it’s much harder to build and sustain new habits—especially with life’s distractions and curveballs.

Both Anthony and I have used intentional readiness and intentional friction to significantly change our lives over the years. We use readiness to make it easier to do the things we want to prioritize. Alternatively, we use friction to make it harder to do the things we want to deprioritize.

Intentional Readiness, Defined

Intentional readiness is the practice of preparing and setting up for the action you want to do more of, so it’s easier to do the action when the time comes.

There are three components to intentional readiness—setting your intention, planning and preparing, and scheduling.

1 / Set your intention

It starts with setting the intention. When setting your intention, the more specific you make it, the better. As an example, this could be wanting to eat more vegetables during the week. Even better would be eating one serving of vegetables Monday through Friday.

2 / Plan and prepare

The preparation part is gathering and preparing all the things you need for eating more healthy vegetables. This would include making a list of the vegetables you want to eat, shopping for the vegetables at the grocery store, and then washing, cutting, and storing them in ready-to-go containers in the fridge.

This is the most time-consuming part that many of us skip altogether or scramble to do when we think about taking action. Not having certain things prepared and set out beforehand only adds to the resistance of starting on the task or in this case, eating healthy vegetables. It increases the chances you’ll abandon the effort or postpone it until later.

3 / Schedule it

The final part is scheduling a specific time on the days of the week when you will plan on eating the vegetables. Let’s say you determine the best time would be lunchtime. That means at the designated time when you are about to eat lunch, you have the healthy vegetables ready to go.

Let’s take another example. You start with a general desire of wanting to be more active and exercise regularly. After some thought, you set your intention to go for a 20-minute walk every day. The preparation part would be setting your exercise shoes right by the door and laying out your workout clothes in advance. The scheduling part is deciding when you will go for the walk, ensuring that anyone who needs to know is aware you’ll be busy during that time, and putting it on the calendar.

Intentional readiness combines aspects of preparation and design so that when the moment comes, there is less work and less resistance around whatever your intended action is.

Why Intentional Readiness Is Important

With all the distractions enabled by technology and by our devices, it’s easy for us to be pulled away from what it is we want to do more of—especially if the required steps or components are not set up in advance.

Instant gratification is available at the press of the button across many devices and appliances in our lives. While this is beneficial, this also means that we are getting more accustomed to results and outcomes coming automatically and easily. With the click of a button, we are able to order whatever food or product to our doorstep. We can even have another human complete a task that you don’t want to do—like doing your laundry or running an errand through an app service like TaskRabbit.

This instant gratification doesn’t translate well when it comes to the things that no one else nor a device can do for you. This is why intentional readiness is important. When we practice intentional readiness, we are setting ourselves up with the greatest chance of success. With intentional readiness, even when something unexpected inevitably happens, we’re better prepared to still do that thing.

Focusing On What You Can Control

While it makes sense to just focus on what you can control, this can be easier said than done. Sometimes, because life can be so unpredictable at times, we try to control as much as we can to mitigate the unknown.

We may inadvertently end up trying to control things that we can’t possibly prevent. Things such as emergency situations, traffic, mix-ups, or technical difficulties, to name a few. We try to prevent these by worrying, catastrophizing, or putting off the decision or action. Even within ourselves, there are often seemingly mysterious forces at work (oh, well hello, Twitch). So we blame ourselves for not being able to do better or control ourselves better.

Yet, there is a fair amount we actually can control that we overlook. I smile now when I think back on ways I overly worried about things I couldn’t control, and at the same time, completely missed the things I could control. We can reduce a great deal of suffering for ourselves if we minimize the over-thinking and lessen the under-acting in our lives.

Intentional Readiness and Intentional Friction Combined

You can combine intentional readiness and intentional friction to help with what you’d like to do more of and discourage what you’d like to do less of. Through forethought and customized design when it comes to your goals, you’re focusing on what you can control. While you may have days when you don’t do the thing even with intentional readiness, you’ll have a better track record when you’ve put in the work of setting your intention, preparing, and scheduling.

Do you have things you want to do more of that could benefit from intentional readiness in your life? Give it a try, and remember, what’s more important than good habits is to restart and keep on going.

Writing things down on a to-do list is what many of us do, myself included. Not only do lists help me remember what tasks or projects I need to tackle, but they also keep me accountable. Having a way to keep track of things helps me to prioritize and stay organized and productive. But you know that one thing on your list that sits for days without getting done? It’s the one thing that moves from one day’s list to the next day’s and the next day… If you experience this too, you’re not alone. A couple of years back, Anthony came up with a procrastination hack called the Habit Rule of Half. This simple rule has helped us to overcome procrastination and get those hanging tasks done.

Why We Can’t Finish Our To-Do Lists

Some tasks are straightforward and easy. We simply complete the task and move on.

Others aren’t like that. Resistance is what we feel when we encounter certain tasks on the to-do list. Perhaps we’re not entirely sure how to go about the task, and the lack of clarity adds to the resistance. Maybe it’s the fear of failure, of judgment, or of making a mistake. We end up procrastinating and avoiding those things we can’t bring ourselves to get started on.

If there’s any aspirational clutter in the mix, the combination makes it even worse. We feel torn between all the things we want to do and all the things that we need to get done. When we feel the resulting internal tension, there’s an impact on our ability to focus and get started.

It’s common to experience angst when the tasks remain uncompleted and no progress is made—which increases the pressure we feel. The greater the pressure, the greater resistance we often feel. This increased resistance leaves us feeling worse, and gets in the way of completing the task, finishing the project, or reaching the goal.

Applying the Habit Rule of Half

Anthony was determined to find a solution, a procrastination hack, that could help. At the time, we were working hard to build new habits and make progress on the things that were important to us.

He created a simple rule called the Habit Rule of Half, that’s worked well for us over the years.

Here’s how it works. If a task is left uncompleted at the end of the day, cut it in half and add it to the next day’s list. If it doesn’t get done by the end of that day, cut it in half again and add it to the next day’s list. Keep doing this until the task becomes small enough to tackle.

You can apply the Habit Rule of Half to whatever it is you keep on postponing or pushing off. Household projects, work assignments, taxes, budgeting, or researching something. Writing a blog post or making a YouTube video. Even things like walking, exercising, jogging, or bicycling.

For example, you have a goal to jog four miles, but you haven’t managed to break out your sneakers. In this case, you’d cut this in half and write, “jog two miles” on the next day’s to-do list. If you still don’t do it, write down “jog one mile” for the following day. Keep cutting the distance (or the time or the amount) until you make it out the door. Keep on cutting it in half until it gets to a small, bite-sized chunk that seems easy to do.

A More Compassionate Approach

While the Habit Rule of Half is a simple concept, it’s often much harder in practice. The concept goes against what our inner critic usually thinks would be the best way forward. We think, “Well, I’m now behind, so I need to do more to make it up.” So we put more pressure on or add more to the task in an effort to catch up. This may work for some people—but from my experience, this leads to less motivation and greater stress and resistance over time.

Adding more pressure was how I “motivated” myself for two decades—and it worked at best, okay—until it no longer did. Eventually, I burned out. We can also end up getting more overwhelmed or find ways to avoid or make excuses for the things we need to do altogether.

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There are usually reasons why we don’t do the things we want or need to do. As humans, our natural state is to want to do things, to make progress, and to contribute. So if we’re struggling with something, it’s not that we’re lazy or that we’re not good enough. There are usually underlying reasons of fear, insecurity, or self-sabotage happening under the surface. At least that’s what Anthony and I have found.

The Habit Rule of Half can be a more compassionate approach to making progress on the things we feel resistant towards. If a to-do item isn’t getting done day after day, it doesn’t matter how many times you put it on the list. Any small amount of progress is better than the to-do item dragging on unaddressed. In a way, you’re practicing compassion for your tomorrow self by cutting the to-do item in half and seeing how it goes the next day.

The Hardest Part

It can be tempting to think you’re simply lazy if you’re not getting something done—that if you go easier on yourself, you will just continue putting it off. Therefore, as the distance, time, or amount of your task halves, it might not seem like this will help you make any progress at all. And so you continue to put the pressure on. However, this becomes a catch-22, a sort of convoluted avoidance tactic our brains use to keep us “safe” from dealing with what’s under the resistance.

The hardest part is often getting started. Once you are out there walking, you are more likely to actually tackle the original distance or time you wanted to do. This is why the Habit Rule of Half is effective. If we cut what might feel like an overwhelming task in half, starting then seems more manageable. While it’s no magic bullet, it can help in reducing the resistance and making progress. And once we get the ball rolling, it’s much easier to continue the momentum and get into the flow.

So the next time you notice a task moving from one day to the next, try a more compassionate approach with the Habit Rule of Half and see what happens.