Hey friend,
I wrote the following paragraph two years ago in the first Mektup.
Putting myself in front of many people is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Even though I’m a bit of an extrovert, it still frightens and excites me every time I start a live session, send a tweet, or publish a blog post. However, I want to keep going. This newsletter is my latest effort to share what I’ve learned, read, watched, and liked.
And I’ve kept going. This is the 50th issue, and I thought it would be good to talk about habits and how I kept my writing habit to bring Mektup to you every second week.
When Kahneman explained the two different systems our brains have in his ground-breaking research on how we think and make decisions, he was focused on breaking our automatic thinking to prevent mistakes and biases to make better decisions. Our brains’ conscious side (system one) and automatic side (system two) impact our lives more than we expect. Think about learning how to ride a bike or swim. At first, we focus on getting it right; our actions are in system one, requiring focus and continuous attention. When we learn, though, these actions become automatic because they move to system two; we can perform these activities without thinking. That aligns with our bodies’ physiological goal: preserve energy. The brain moves repeated activities to system two because system one is expensive—it demands constant attention and consumes a lot of energy. Then, why do we have such a hard time building habits if the brain is inclined to build automatic actions?
Because of the delayed feedback. If we’re learning how to ride a bike, we fall when we make a mistake. That’s immediate feedback: the pain in our knees or hands shows what we did wrong. If we cycle for hundred meters, we understand what we make right. However, while building a reading, writing, or exercising habit, there is no instant feedback. If we don’t read or exercise, nothing hurts at that moment. Moreover, when we consider our bodies’ goal of saving energy, we’re already inclined to do nothing. To break this physiological need, we need to trick our brains by either getting rewards for the energy spent or reducing the energy we spend on habits.
The good thing about these tricks is that they don’t need to be substantial. Our brain only needs something. That’s why Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break The Chain” method works: putting a big red X on a calendar on the wall for every day completing the habit. Seinfeld moves the emphasis from performance and achievement to process. As long as he keeps putting marks, the chain continues. The longer the chain, the bigger the reward. As long as the process keeps going, the resistance to doing nothing shrinks.
I broke my body’s resistance by following Seinfeld—I have been using a dot-on calendar for the last three years to mark my habits. Every day, I have two dots (one for writing, one for exercising) to put on the calendar on the wall. Although I might have skipped some exercise days, I have successfully kept my writing habit since 2020. My goal is to put a dot on my calendar every day, not writing 750 words a day for a year or writing three days per week. I sit down, grab the pen, write as long as I can, and put that dot sticker on my calendar. Albeit having a writing habit for years now, I struggled a lot at first. My most significant struggle was finding an answer to the question, “When?”
Whoever I talk to mentions that they have no energy in the evening to do anything. After hours of work, all of us want a nice dinner, relax and recover our drained energy for the next day. In busy schedules, creating time for habits is challenging. I first tried to start working at 7-8 am to leave work early, so I have more time for habits in the evening. But it didn’t work. The only solution I could find was moving all my habits to morning.
Once I realized I was really productive in the morning, I decided to use this time for myself. These days, I do my writing and exercise in the morning. Once they are done, I’m ready for the remaining part of the day; I don’t need to think about them anymore. This strategy helped me a lot to keep these habits consistent over time. You might not be a morning person to wake up early for habits. In this case, try attaching the habit to something you already do every day. For example, start by doing ten jumping jacks right after you close the working computer at home or directly go to the gym right after leaving the office. Attaching to existing habits work magically.
The last thing I tried was never missing a habit for two days in a row. If I can’t write one day, it’s not a big deal. But I will make sure to write the next day. If I break the habit chain, I start a new one. In the beginning, my chains were shorter: three days of writing and one day of break. Later, these days increased to five, six, and seven and ten and fifteen days, and became a month, and three months, and… You got it. The goal is transformed: it’s not writing every day anymore; it’s keeping the chain longer.
Once I learned that having shorter chains was completely normal in the habit-building process, I began to appreciate what I had achieved. The whole process boosted my motivation. Later I realized that when we change our behavior, we need time to adjust. At first, our well-being (happiness, energy levels, comfort, etc.) will plummet because of adapting to a change. Yet, after a while, it will start increasing faster and faster: it’s a J-curve. That’s why we need to give our habits a bit of time.
When you start building a new habit, think about experimenting. Can you experiment for a few days, weeks, or months and see how it goes? You can define the time according to your habit and lifestyle. But keep the J-curve in mind and stay until the end of an experiment. If the experiment doesn’t work, you can always return to the previous state and try another experiment. Use the techniques I shared above if you’re starting from scratch, and let me know how the experiments go.
That’s it. I don’t want to make this letter longer as it’s already quite long. One more technique helped me a lot on my most unmotivated days. I will talk about that in another Mektup in the future.
Talk soon.
Don’t forget to send this Mektup to one of your (work) friends.
Candost
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