Although I think that motivation is incredibly overrated as
a methodology for getting things done, I do spend about half an hour a day
reading or, if I absolutely must, listening to motivational literature.
One of the more powerful things I’ve heard in the last 2 or
3 years was a TedX
talk by Al Switzler (this is really worth watching; I’ve pulled one concept
from a 20 minute video, and it’s ALL good stuff) on behavior change.
He and his colleagues
study personal change, and one of the important things they’ve discovered is
that willpower is not a good predictor of whether an individual will be able to
make a major life change. You know what is, though? Whether that individual has
set up their physical environment to make doing the right thing easy, and doing
the wrong thing hard.
Something that I did early on in #100DaysofHealth was to
empty the larder, as it were (I’m not sure I have a larder, but what a great,
underused word) of anything and everything that wasn’t “real food” (as in, Eat
Real Food, Not Much, Mostly Plants). Out went the candy, booze, white bread,
chips, pasta…everything that might later become a temptation.
And good thing, too, because had those things been here
yesterday, I would have eaten ALL of them.
Yep, after 17 days of barely being tempted by anything that
wasn’t in my plan, I had 2 days in a row during which I had to meet with
multiple strangers for multiple hours. As a dyed-in-the-wool introvert, those
are about as hard and exhausting as days get, and as we know from the book Willpower,
drained energy + lack of glucose = total collapse of same.
That’s why, by the end of day 2, my brain was DEMANDING
sugar, alcohol, refined carbs, anything (and lots of it) to make it “feel
better”. There was no reasoning with it. There was no satisfying it with kale.
There was no energy left to make “good” decisions.
At other times (when I wouldn’t have felt obligated to
report the total failure of my project to 1,000 blog readers), I’d have headed home
and had a double pasta with anything sauce and a side of martinis and been done
with it. But this time, all I had to do was get home and not leave.
Because there was nothing here to binge on that could derail
me. Yes, I stuffed my face—with leftover braised brussels sprouts and Kimchi. And
then I went back and ate even more—smoked salmon this time. There was literally
nothing in refrigerator or pantry that could serve as a setback.
Trust me, I searched.
So instead of the night ending in partying and regret, it
ended in what my body probably REALLY needed: an early bedtime.
When our willpower to do anything (or avoid anything) is
strong, we believe that there won’t be a moment when it’s important to have set
up our environment to make doing the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard.
But there always comes a time when we can’t resist…whether what we’re resisting
is over eating, smoking, snapping at our smartboy or smartgirl, flipping on
Facebook or that video game or the boob tube, whatever. And at that moment, it will be important whether our more
reasonable, more motivated self (who is, at that moment, completely MIA) failure-proofed
our environment for us.
Thanks God mine did, or this would be ending with “But I’ll
do better tomorrow” instead of “I had a win yesterday”.
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