Slow Habits

Change without Force

I remember hearing the advice to focus on one habit a year and thinking it was incredibly dumb.

Allegedly it takes 30 days to build a new habit, so you could pick one each month and be a running meditating ice-bathing early-rising journaling duolingo-maxing überman by the end of the year.

But it never quite works like that, does it?

I first got into trying to improve my habits in college. "The Power of Habit" (Atomic Habits wasn't out yet) showed me that my lifestyle was more in my control than I thought. I could cultivate within myself the aspects of other people I envied.

So I started trying to pick up different habits. I tried working out regularly. I tried getting up every day at 5:30. I tried meditating every day. And the habit would often stick, for a while. Then it would get interrupted, break down, and I’d fall off for weeks or months or years.

At some point I mostly stopped these aggressive attempts to change my habits. They felt futile. A new routine would stick for a period, and then it would fade away to be replaced by some other new shiny object.

But along the way, something else started happening. Some of the habits started forming themselves.

Drinking less is the biggest example. I took a year off of drinking from June 2020 to 2021, but after that year, I decided to start again. At first it was fine, it was fun to have alcohol in my life again. But then the resentment started to build. I wanted to quit again.

But I didn’t, at least not as aggressively. There were a couple of times where I took a very deliberate week off or even a month off, but the periods of not drinking have just naturally been extending longer and longer. Something about continually reminding myself of the desire to stop, and then doing it and feeling good about it, has slowly pushed the habit in that direction without me having to force it.

On the one hand, it might feel like a failure to have wanted to develop this not-drinking-habit four years ago and to still be trying to develop it.

But on the other hand, there is something that feels more durable about letting it emerge slowly over time like this. It gives a certain strength to the habit that I don't think it would have if I tried to force it all the way right away. At this point I feel reasonably confident that based on the current trajectory I’ll be having alcohol fewer than 10-20 days a year within a year or two. I don’t have to force it. The desire just keeps decreasing.¹

Another example is writing. I decided to go all-in on writing two years ago now, but it’s taken me until the last few months to settle in to what feels like a strong habit around it. In the beginning I was more distractible, it wouldn't always be the top priority of the day. And after my intense two or three month sprints I would need a few weeks without any writing to recover. I was still forcing it.

But after two years of wanting to be a writer and focusing intently on it, I naturally want to do it every morning. I rarely have to force anymore. It just happens.

This idea of letting habits slowly emerge over time goes against the common rhetoric that you have to be consistent. You have to do it every day. You can’t break the chain.

But this is perhaps a golden rule with building anything. The faster you build it and more you rush it, the more fragile it is. The slower and more naturally you construct it, the more durable it will be.

Obviously it needs to be moderated. If you're too gentle with yourself then the change might never happen. You could end up being somebody who sits around saying "oh I want to quit drinking" for ten years.

But if you’re patient and keep nudging yourself in the right direction, the change you want might just naturally emerge. And it would be better to develop one habit over the course of a year than to fail to develop twelve.

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1. Especially after an alcohol-heavy wedding weekend after not drinking for most of the 6 weeks before.