Monthly Experiment Recap: March

Everyone has something that comes easier to them than most other people. You have your precocious artists, your preternatural whistlers, even that kid from elementary school who could scale the side of the swing set and seemed completely at ease at the top. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been really good at establishing new habits. The witches’ brew of a type-A personality, a borderline obsession with traditions, and a constitutional resistance to spontaneity has made it easy for me to ingrain routines into my daily life. Case in point, I’ve had the exact same breakfast and lunch Monday through Friday for at least the last five years. And I love it.  

It’s for this reason that when I surveyed my list of Monthly Experiments in late December 2018, I expected Complaint-Free March to be challenging but ultimately no match for my habit-forming prowess. Sure, it would take me a few days to get into the swing of things but breaking a bad habit is just starting a good habit in reverse, right?

Spoiler alert:

So it turns out that a month after trying 40 new foods, I welcomed March with a massive serving of humble pie. I didn’t make it a single day without complaining until the month was half over and I never made it two days in a row.

The only way I was able to make decent progress was to re-frame the task in my head. Rather than breaking the bad habit of complaining ad nauseam, I focused on starting a new habit of being someone who doesn’t complain. It sounds like semantics but it made a big difference. James Clear wrote a fantastic book called Atomic Habits that includes thoughtful insights into how best to establish new habits and I tried to apply them to the challenge of no-complaint March.

One of the best lessons in the book is that you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. I knew that I needed a visual or tactile cue to catch myself when I was complaining so I wore one of my daughter’s hair ties around my wrist and switched sides every time I moaned or groaned.

Early in the month, I would often forget to put one back on in the morning and then use that as a crutch to let myself off the hook for the day. Clear emphasizes the need to “reduce the friction associated with your good habits and increase the friction associated with your bad habits”. Make good habits as easy as possible and put some sort of roadblock, no matter how minor, in between yourself and your bad habits.

The simple solution in my case was to litter our house, my car, and my office with hair ties (apologies to Charlotte for the Great Ponytail Famine of March 2019).

To marshall enough discipline to resist the temptation of a bad habit like complaining, Clear shares that “people who appear to have tremendous self-control are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control – they spend less time in tempting situations.” He adds, “in the short run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long run, we become a product of the environment we live in.”

My solution here was to make conscious effort to spend less time around people who were naturally more negative or pessimistic and therefore more likely to complain.

Maybe it’s just my way of rationalizing my failure to go even 48 hours without uttering a critical comment but I actually think that certain complaints can be helpful, as long as you recognize that they often contain a nugget of opportunity.

“This _________ is such a piece of shit!” Design a new one.

If anyone knows how to obtain a patent, I have many other great ideas for product re-design.

“Why do we do it like this, it doesn’t make any sense!” Come up with a better process.

The upside of a bad mood is that it’s very easy to identify opportunities to make improvements and a surefire way to snap out of one is to do something productive.

Trying to go cold turkey also got me thinking about whether the commonplace advice we hear about the importance of being adaptable (“You’ve got to roll with the punches”, “If your approach isn’t working, change it”, “Trees that don’t bend with the wind won’t last the storm”) might be occasionally misguided.  

I concluded that sometimes, this advice is dead wrong. Every once in a while, you need to take Rolf Dobelli’s advice from his book The Art of the Good Life and practice “radical inflexibility”. Dobelli recognized that “when it comes to important issues, flexibility isn’t an advantage – it’s a trap”. You need to pick certain rules where you absolutely refuse to compromise for any reason.      

You’ll be surprised to find that for many things, 100% is easier than 99% because it’s so much simpler to implement. A 100 % solution requires a single decision rather than an unending stream of considerations, weighing of exceptions, and real-time determinations. For example, here are the two approaches taken in context of a decision about your diet:

99% solution: I only have desserts on one weekend day and only when it’s a really special dessert. Well, it doesn’t have to be really special if I did a great job avoiding snacks during the week. Buuuut I did have a second helping of pasta with dinner yesterday and passed on the vegetables so I think I’m going to be good. Wait, I did basically skip breakfast twice…Although maybe the caramel latte should have counted as a dessert? If I stay under 1,500 calories between now and the end of Sunday, then I will finish the weekend with the leftover pie. Or Oreos if the pie is gone.

100% solution: I don’t have dessert.

To be clear, I think this particular 100% solution is one that no one in their right mind should adopt. As a kid, I remember thinking “man, it’s going to be very weird when I eat dinner purely for the sake of eating dinner and not just so I can have dessert” and now as an adult I find myself thinking “man, it sure is handy to have a larger mouth than when I was a kid so I can finish dinner faster and get to the main event, D-to the-E-to the-double S-ERT.”

I shit you not, copying this picture from Google Images during No-Added-Sugar April put me in such a foul mood that I watched two episodes of Chappelle’s Show without cracking a smile. I had to resort to West Wing clips on YouTube to snap out of my funk.

Whether or not you are aware of it, decision fatigue is a fact of life – the more decisions you make, the more difficult they become and the worse your judgement becomes.  I can personally attest to this because unfortunately, this type of conversation often plays out at my house at the end of a decision-heavy work week:

Molly: Let’s watch a movie with the kids after dinner, what sounds good to eat?

Jesse: ….to eat?

Molly: Yes babe, I’ll fix a quick dinner and then we can watch a family movie.

Jesse: I mean…(sigh)…shouldn’t we pick the movie first and then decide what we are going to eat?

Molly: …I’ll make you a breakfast sandwich. Then we will watch A Wrinkle in Time.

Jesse: Sounds great.

Decision fatigue is well established in psychological research. The most interesting/alarming example is the famous Israeli judges study that demonstrated a precipitous decline in the proportion of favorable decisions by judges as the number of cases decided increased across the day.

Basically, if you are the final case to be heard before a meal break, you should hope you have that warm skin tone that looks fabulous in orange. There has been debate about whether hunger or decision fatigue was the primary factor but it’s likely a combination of both. (Protip: NEVER make an important decision when you’re hungry or running a big sleep deficit).

Convenience owns the day when you are suffering from decision fatigue. Consciously limiting the number of decisions you’re forced to make in a given day by adopting 100% solutions rather than 99% solutions will keep your decision-making reserve well-stocked for when you need to make a significant withdrawal for a difficult, critical choice.

The jury is still out.

There is a final, subtle point about why adopting a 100% solution is so much more powerful than a 99% solution. Back to Atomic Habits: “The real reason habits matter is because they can change your beliefs about yourself.” This is similar to the old truism that you act your way into a new way of thinking rather than think your way into a new way of acting. Once your new behaviors start to allow you to see yourself in a new light, an improved identity starts to form.

A bad habit lingers because you still identify with it. If you offer a smoker a cigarette and they reply “No thanks, I’m trying to quit”, just wait a week and they will take you up on it. But if they’ve allowed good habits to start to craft a new identity, they might instead say “No thanks, I’m not a smoker”, in which case you’re going to need to find a new buddy to freeze your ass off with outside while getting dirty looks from all the parents of young children who walk by.

April’s experiment is no added sugar. Unlike with March, there’s no chance of having my ego damaged this time around. I’m fully confident I will be in the fetal position by Easter.