Habit Sparking

As simple as it may sound on paper, consistently doing the things that are good for us and not doing the things that aren’t is more challenging than it should be.  We cannot always declare what we intend to do and then simply do it.  Just as a wrench gives us leverage on a stubborn nut, we need wise leverage to master our own behavior.  The good news is there are many ways to gain leverage on ourselves.  One such tool that can make completing our healthy habits much easier I call Habit Sparking.  Habit Sparking involves focusing our mind on the very first step of a desired habit, making it much easier to get started and increasing the chances of doing what is good for us.

It is remarkable how much harder it is to start a productive activity than it is to continue doing it once we've started. I wager that it is eight times more difficult to initiate a healthy habit than to continue doing it once we've started.  One of the reasons this is true is that once we’ve begun, it requires decision/action to stop, and human behavior has inertia. We can leverage this truth to our advantage by focusing on the beginning of our habits and making them easier to start. For example, I like to meditate for an hour in the morning. When I wake up, if I think about meditating for an hour, that's 3,600 moments, the task seems daunting and difficult. On the other hand, if I focus on simply getting out of bed and sitting down, it doesn't seem so hard. All I have to do is sit down and click my timer on my phone.  Sparking the habit is easy and accomplishable in one action, whereas completing the whole thing seems difficult in my mind and is impossible to do in one moment of action.

But you protest, “sitting down for a second is useless.  What you really want is to meditate for a whole hour.”  Good point.  The magic is that if I only commit to sparking my habit, simply getting out of bed and sitting down, I will finish my hour of meditation more than 90% of the time. Focusing on the spark does not compromise the flame.  In fact, focusing only on the spark makes the flame much more likely.  By focusing on the simple ignition of the habit, I make the task in my head easier, I'm much more likely to do it, and the real magic is that I'm extremely likely to do the whole thing anyway.  This is one way that we can hack the software of our brain and take advantage of the evolutionary tendency to do what is easier.  By imagining just the beginning of the habit, we leverage our brains’ tendency to prefer easier and get it to work for us rather than against us.

Another time we can leverage the power of habit sparking is when we're resisting our work. It’s 2 pm and the post lunch afternoon lull hits.  The last thing we want to do is crush the 4 hours of remaining work that is staring us down.  This situation is particularly difficult for entrepreneurs or people working on projects without external forces providing clear and powerful accountability. In this situation, we can use habit sparking to convince ourselves to simply sit down and write one paragraph or make one sales call. If we think about just sitting down and making a single call, what we're imagining in our mind is much easier than the full task.  For this reason, it’s far more likely that our tired after-lunch brain will commit.  One paragraph is hardly an afternoon’s work, but the magic is that most people we've studied will end up doing a lot more than their initial commitment.  Once you’ve broken the inertia and begun, it’s now easier to continue than to stop.  That is exactly why this is so effective. If instead of working for four hours, you write two paragraphs and then stop, this would be a very ineffective suggestion. But what we see from the research is that by sitting down to write a paragraph you're likely to write multiple pages. By thinking about and committing to doing only the first step, we greatly reduce our prediction of difficulty (calorie expenditure), increase our chances of starting, and in doing so, dramatically increase our chances of doing the entire task at hand.  To get to the gym when you’re tired, commit to doing one set of weights.  After that one set, watch what happens.  Our research says you’ll do a lot more.

Here's a simple practical example. My dentist has been trying to get me to floss for 20 years. Motivated by her scolding after an appointment, I've tried a few times but always quickly lose the habit and forget all about the advice. So, I employed habit sparking. I left a pile of flossers on my bathroom sink and committed to flossing just one tooth. For a few days, that's all I did, one tooth. It might seem pointless at first, but on day 3, I did two teeth. I started to like flossing because it was so easy. My other teeth started to feel like they were missing out. Two weeks later I was flossing all of my teeth and enjoying it! I've kept the habit. My secret, I never negotiate more than one tooth at a time.

An intimately connected principle is the principle of One More. To meditate for an hour, all you have to do is take one more breath. If you take just one more breath, one more breath, one more breath, you will very successfully meditate for an hour.  In fact the art of meditation is to focus on no more than one breath at a time. This law is perhaps best encapsulated in the movie Hacksaw Ridge. The movie tells a true story of the soldier Desmond Doss who saved 75 lives over the course of 12 grueling hours repelling bodies down a cliff while under shell bombardment. He accomplished this heroic feat by telling himself that he would save just one more man. After each soldier that he dragged through the siege of explosions and repelled down the ridge, he told himself, let me save just one more man. Eventually by applying this One More principle, he was able to save the lives of 75 men. If he had said from the beginning I need to save all the men on this ridge, his frightened mind and body probably would have refused. Instead Doss employed the principle of One More and will forever be remembered for it.

By focusing on the very first step of a habit, you can make the task appear much easier in your mind.  You are more likely to do what you perceive as less difficult.  The best part is, once you begin, you are very likely to finish.  Employ the tool of Habit Sparking to gain leverage on your ancient brain circuitry and get over the hardest part of any habit…starting.