10.00 pm: You promise to sleep within the next ten minutes, having promised yourself that tomorrow morning you will wake up at 6:30 am and go for a walk. You tell yourself, “I will check my social media account just one last time before sleeping.” The book that you promised to read is lying next to you.
11.30 pm: You have checked reels for over 1.5 hours. Now you’re wide awake, and you are no longer interested in the book that you had promised to read. “It’s 500 pages, I’ll read it later,” you tell yourself, proceeding to play some video games.
It’s 1:00 am now and you’re restless, hyper, and – most tragically but obviously – guilty.
The next morning, you wake up groggy at 10 am, the guilt growing like a giant monster inside of you, a little voice now telling you, “you’re useless, you’ll never do anything, no point promising myself anything”.
The saga repeats at night and the next morning, it’s the same story. The book lies unattended, having shifted into a corner of a bookshelf carelessly.
So, how do you make the shift towards seeing the sunlight instead of drowning yourself in a sea of shame and constant remorse? Look closely: doomscrolling, playing video games, and watching reels after reels... this is also routine. It’s just not fitting in with your value system of who you want to be.
James Clear, author of the bestselling book Atomic Habits explains in his book how many of us want to build better habits but fall into the classic trap of overcommitting and under-delivering. According to him, the first step to habit building is seeing just how integral it’ll be to you as a person: Consider this. Two people want to get healthy. One is a professional athlete, the other, is a corporate, office-going person. The professional athlete would require extra heavy weights, a different diet, extra gym hours compared to the other person who would require an overall healthy workout but not to the extent of the professional athlete. So, while the value system of the two individuals is common (good health), the requirements are different. Clear’s message is simple: Getting 1% done is more important than not getting anything done at all. So, one page of reading a book means you are committed to becoming a good reader. One line of writing is an assurance to the commitment that you want to be a writer. Five minutes of guitar practice of a complex melody is a commitment to your musicianship. The trick lies in shifting the mindset of who you want to be. It’s daily practice, and this 1% effort is a commitment towards habit-building. Clear’s message is simple: to think of the end goal, you first need to look at the beginning. Want a yoga routine? Well, bring out the yoga mat.
Noted habit expert Nir Eyal, author of two bestsellers, Hooked and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, refuses to blame social media and technology for our shortcomings and lack of discipline. Instead, he urges, tap into the feeling of why you do what you do. Chances are you will find loneliness, mental fatigue, self-sabotage, underconfidence, fear of failure, etc, at the root of your addiction. “You scroll because you are lonely or sad or just bored,” Eyal mentions in several of his interviews. He urges us to look deeper, asking us to question even the feeling of where the loneliness, sadness, and boredom stem from before tackling it.
Going to the root of the issue and developing a value system for ourselves (how we see ourselves as opposed to where we see ourselves) is the stepping stone to developing healthy habits. To this, we add the tools – while most of us make our to-do list, others like Eyal prefer to create “time boxing” or a daily calendar of important tasks that help us grow. Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, authors of Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day, define this as a “highlight”. You have to highlight the one significant task of the day, make that an axis, and then work everything around it. Add to that is the concept of “blocking time”. Here's an example: 7-8 am (wake up, freshen up, 5-minute stretch, coffee); 8:00-10 am (deep dive work schedule: this could be the Highlight for the day for your pending assignment); 10:00-10:20 am (break time with music and just walking around or talking to a friend while walking); 10:20-11:50 am (deep dive: Highlight continues just in case the work didn’t finish)… you get the drift. S. J. Scott in his book Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less coined “habit stacking” with the idea to build small, winning routines within existing ones. Making yourself coffee? Now stack the habit of a 10-minute stretching routine in it. Drinking coffee? Stack the habit of journaling while drinking it or reading three pages of a book. As Scott says in the book: “build routines around habits that don't require effort… small wins build momentum because they're easy to remember and complete."
Conversations with self, affirmations, daily habit tracking, and visualisation techniques help. Just when your morning walk is about to end, visualising yourself sitting at your desk, switching on the laptop, working on the pending assignment is a helpful technique. PS: Eyal advises scrolling social media in the calendar too – once it’s scheduled, it’s no longer a distraction. The Pomodoro technique typically works on the principle of 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of break. You can schedule it to 90 minutes of deep dive followed by 20 minutes of break (this should ideally fit in stretches or eating a meal thus saving time).
Eventually, it’s time that we need to optimise through our daily routine. If the goal is to win a marathon, the first step is to put on your walking shoes. If the goal is to save a certain amount of money, by the end of 20 years, the starting point is to save a small amount diligently from when you get your first pay cheque. To be the best version of yourself, start now with a promise of starting again tomorrow if you falter today. “Don’t miss twice,” as Clear explains. Start small, sure, but start now.
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