Would you know the truth if it sat on your face? – Barker Ajax
You’re not ready to hear about my second marriage – sixty months of unhappiness squeezed into five years – busy as you are with this pandemic. But…
Sunday mornings, we’d pretend to be religious by watching Joel Osteen ministering to a well-dressed crowd in a basketball arena. Thought of him as Cartoon Preacher and could always harvest some entertainment, maybe even wisdom.
We stopped watching Joel and his hot wife after one particularly excellent sermon, about how not to be a conniving crazy bitch – that’s how I heard it – where he did everything but mention my second wife by name. “This is a bunch of holy shit,” she said and turned on a Everybody Loves Raymond re-run.
Anyway, there’s a virus out there with my name on it, so I have gone to the mattresses. Can’t go anywhere. Got all this time on my hands, funny for an old guy to say, and then this comes.
***
I just finished reading Willpower Doesn’t Work by Benjamin Hardy. Though you can probably guess what it’s about, the title only tells half the story. The true takeaway isn’t that your willpower is weak—just that it’s no match for the strength of your environment. We don’t do the things we want so much as we do the things triggered by our context. “The reason mental techniques and strategies focused directly on goal-setting are generally unsuccessful is because nearly all of your behaviors are outsourced by your environment,” writes Hardy. “When you do something enough and in the same places, it becomes subconscious.” (This is why, for instance, New Year’s resolutions so often fail.)
This is something I’ve heard time and time again. In a recent piece about trying to disconnect when working from home, James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, told me that physical spaces have behavioral biases: a space can psychologically pull you into certain behaviors. (Do you get hungry when you sit at your kitchen table, or feel the itch to watch Netflix when you park yourself on your couch?) And GQ’s wellness columnist Joe Holder got at this same idea in his very first column: “Achievement is about structure. Most people think they can will their way to good decisions. But you’re never going to get anything done if you depend exclusively on the power of sheer will.”
Knowing this has helped clarify two things in my mind. One, if you’re kicking yourself for a project you’ve really been meaning to start in recent weeks but still haven’t, forgive yourself. Isolating at home means being trapped in an environment and in contexts where you already have very well-established behaviors (especially if you’re in a smaller space, like an apartment). As we just learned, willing yourself to do something different in those spaces is going to be an uphill battle. Two, ask if there’s one small change you can make that will make that uphill battle slightly easier. If you’ve been trying to spend less time on Instagram, can you put your phone somewhere out of reach from your bed, so you can’t use it last thing at night or first thing in the morning? If you’ve been meaning to do more yoga in the morning, can you lay out your mat and change into athletic clothes before you go to sleep? If you want to read more and binge-watch less, can you hide your remotes in a drawer and put a book or magazine in their place?
Though I was originally disappointed that my will wasn’t as powerful as I’d hoped, it’s reassuring to know that my environment is way more influential than I’d thought. That provides leverage: small tweaks can lead to huge changes. Holder, who tries to move just a little bit every morning (even if it’s just some light stretching), puts it this way: “If you can figure out how to use each hour just a little bit more effectively, you’ve won. Only have 15 minutes free for a workout? Great, knock out some push-ups and do some stretching. Do that three times in a week, and that’s 45 more minutes you banked. It’s finding minimum effective dosages for maximum results.”
—Clay Skipper, staff writer
Did a friend forward this to you? Sign up to get it here!
https://www.gq.com/story/tom-sachs-rules-for-creating