How Smart People Maintain Discipline Without Rigidity
Consistency can be built through flexibility.
For months, Bec has been in a wonderful routine of making creative salads for her work lunches. The routine has been amazing, life-changing even. She's discovered so many new options, looks forward to eating, and it's made her feel capable and in control.
Then, she gets a respiratory virus and loses her sense of taste. There isn't any point in making fancy salads she can't enjoy, so she decides to take cans of soup for lunch until she's better.
By the time her taste and energy come back, her familiar salad-making habit feels weirdly intimidating. She's struggling to get back into the swing of it. She can't understand it.
Why We Need Reentry Points for Good Habits
Bec's experience isn't unusual. We're in the groove with a habit, something disrupts it, and then getting back into it feels hard. This happens even when the disruption was out of our control, not due to waning interest or motivation.
Because this pattern is the rule more than the exception, we need to prepare for it by designing reentry points.
Your reentry point should be the most non-intimidating, non-fatiguing version of the habit you want to get back on track with.
Bec decides that to ease her way back into making salads, she'll make her favorite one every day for a week. She hasn't made it in months, and she knows she will want to eat it daily for a while because she loves it. That seems much easier than making several new salads.
Examples of Reentry Points
Your reentry points will be personal. They're about what lowers the barrier for you. Here are some possibilities to illustrate:
- You've lost the habit of cleaning your kitchen before you go to bed. Your reentry point is setting a timer to clean for 10 minutes and accepting the level of clean you achieve.
- You've broken your streak with a language learning app. Your reentry point is to learn one new word from a favorite category (say, foods) each day for a week and put it in a sentence.
- You've broken your habit of laying out your work clothes each evening. For the next week, you decide just to lay out your shoes each evening.
- You've broken your habit of reading a chapter of a book before going to sleep, and now you're playing solitaire on your phone instead. Your reentry point is grabbing a cookbook from your shelf and flicking through it in bed for a few minutes, something you can browse without actually reading.
- You've been planning your dinners before you go grocery shopping to minimize waste, but you skipped it last time. Your reentry point is a default menu plan and associated shopping list you created for any week you don't have the energy for a bespoke one.
- You know it's important to read to your toddler, but you've skipped it for a week. Your reentry point is a book you both like that's mostly a counting-and-pointing book and doesn't require much actual reading from you.
The Bigger Idea
This specific strategy we've covered here is fairly simple, but it speaks to a couple of bigger ideas.
First, a big myth is that when we're consistent with something, we just keep getting better at it, and keeping it up gets easier and easier. In reality, we rebuild habits repeatedly. They're not built once and done.
Second, many people regulate themselves through rigidity. We stay disciplined by being rigid: maintaining habits, setting boundaries, abstaining from indulgences we find hard to moderate, etc.
This approach has a lot of positives. It usually makes discipline easier.
However, we can't only have this way of regulating ourselves. We need more strings to our bow. You don't want to be the person who can only keep up an exercise routine if they never take a break from it, even when they're sick.
It's a problem if the only thing keeping you consistent with a behavior is the habit element. That doesn't make for a resilient habit. Situations like Bec's, and all the examples given, are an opportunity to make your habits richer and more resilient.
Tips and Pitfalls
- As you've been reading, you might've realized you already have reentry points for some of your habits, even if you've never thought of them like that. Identify those now.
- A break may make you want to evolve a habit. This isn't a failure. Ask yourself: "Do I want to keep up this habit in its exact form till I'm 90?" If the answer is no, then you'll need to evolve the habit at some point, and maybe that point is now. So that you don't abandon the habit on a whim, try committing to the evolved version of your habit for a period of time (maybe two to three months), at which point you'll reevaluate.
- Pay attention to when your urge to follow a routine fades after skipping a few days. For example, you might notice that if you usually go to the gym three times a week and skip one session, you miss it and feel a building urge to go. But if you miss going for a full week, the urge to go fades. When you recognize your pattern, you can plan for potentially needing to restoke the urge to do your routine.
Rebuilding Creates Resilience
Sometimes when we think we need greater discipline, what we actually need is greater flexibility. Creating reentry points for your habits isn't about beginning again or merely doing any smaller version of the habit. It's about knowing yourself well enough that you can identify the non-intimidating on-ramp you personally need to get back into your habit groove.
Successful self-improvement is built on one of the most important forms of knowledge: self-knowledge. It requires moving beyond knowing the theoretical principles of successful habits to creating clever, flexible, personalized applications that work in the real world.
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