Creeping Habits: a Gradual and Smart Way to Improve Yourself
In the world of personal finance, there is a common phenomenon called lifestyle crawl. It describes our tendency to buy more, better, and more enjoyable as our income rises. What if we could usefully apply this concept to the rest of our lives?
This post originally appeared on James Clear’s blog .
For example, suppose you get a promotion at work, and suddenly your income increases by $ 10,000 annually. Rather than hoarding extra money and continuing to live as usual, you’re more likely to upgrade to a larger TV, stay in the best hotels, or buy designer clothes. Your normal lifestyle will gradually grow, and goods that were once considered a luxury will gradually become a necessity. What was previously unavailable will become your new norm.
Changing human behavior is often considered one of the most difficult things in business and in life. However, lifestyle change describes a very reliable way in which human behavior changes over the long term. Maybe there is a way to adapt this concept to the rest of our lives.
Change your normal lifestyle
Here are some typical financial goals.
- I want to have designer jeans.
- I want to have a bigger house.
- I want to drive a faster car.
Here’s what’s interesting: These big goals naturally arise as a side effect when we have the means to achieve them. When our purchasing power rises, our purchases rise as well. It’s a lame lifestyle. What if similar side effects could occur in other areas of your life?
Consider these goals:
- I want to build 10 pounds of muscle.
- I want to find a partner and get married.
- I want to make six figures a year.
- I want to get a higher score on my test.
- I want to have a successful business.
What if we believed that gaining muscle mass, increasing income, or improving academic performance were a natural side effect of improving our daily routines? In other words, as our usual habits improved, so did our results. The idea of adjusting your habits a bit until behaviors and results that were previously unattainable become your new norm is a concept I call habit crawl.
How to practice the habit of crawling
If you buy more things than your bank account can handle, it won’t interfere with your lifestyle. This is called debt. Likewise, if you adopt a bunch of new behaviors that you can’t handle, it’s not a creeping habit. In other words, the key is not to fall into the trap of growing too fast. The spread of the lifestyle is so slow that it is almost imperceptible. Creeping habits should be exactly the same. Your goal is to nudge your behavior very slightly.
In my experience, there are two main ways to change long-term behavior and improve performance permanently.
- Increase your productivity a little bit every day. (Most people take this to the extreme.)
- Change your surroundings to remove minor distractions and obstacles. (Most people never think about it.)
Here are some thoughts on each:
Improving your productivity. You have a normal lifestyle. For example, your current fitness level usually reflects your activity on a typical day. Let’s say you have to walk 8,000 steps on your typical day. If you want to get in better shape, the standard approach would be to start training before the race or train more. But the habit-forming approach is to add a very small fraction to your standard behavior. Let’s say 8100 steps per day, not 8000 steps. You can apply this logic to almost any area of your life. You have the normal number of sales calls you make at work every day, the normal number of thank you letters you write each year, the normal number of books you read each month. If you want to be more successful, more grateful, or smarter, you can use the idea of habit creep to gradually improve these areas by simply improving your lifestyle over the course of a typical day.
Changing your environment. There are many things we do every day that are reactions to the environment we live in. We eat cookies because they are on the counter. We take our phones because someone is sending us a message. We turn on the TV because that’s the first thing we look at when we sit down on the couch. If you change your surroundings a little (hide the cookies in the closet, leave the phone in another room while you work, put the TV in the closet), then your actions will also change. Imagine making one positive change to the environment every week. Where would your life sneak up by the end of the year?
The results you enjoy on your best day usually reflect how you spend your typical day.
Everyone is obsessed with the idea of getting their best day at work – getting the highest test score, running the fastest race ever, making the most sales in a department.
I say: forget about it. Just improve your usual day and the results will take care of themselves. We naturally make long-term changes in our lives by slowly and slightly altering our usual daily habits and behaviors.
Habit Creep: The tried-and-true, sane, and downright unattractive way to do better | James Clear