Recently, I dug into the data on exercise [1] and showed that, even if you really hate exercise, you would probably still be better off doing more than you do right now.
But, of course, we already know we should exercise. We just don’t always do it.
This is problem goes far beyond exercise. Life is full of low-hanging fruit, things that would make our lives far better than the amount of time and energy they cost us—if we did them consistently.
Seeing this gap, many of us are quick to blame willpower or laziness. We chastise those who don’t do what’s in their own best interest.
Yet we also struggle to stick with them.
Even so, we rarely apply that same scrutiny to ourselves. We’re quick to rationalize our behavior. We don’t have time. We’re too busy. We only live once! Gotta enjoy life, it’s not just about living virtuously all the time, you know?
In other words, willpower is a problem for other people. We, of course, are always making the best choices we can, given our constraints and what we want out of life.
The Problem Isn’t Willpower
The problem, as I see it, is that this framing is essentially negative. It argues “you’re a lazy person if you don’t follow a particular behavior that you admit would be good for you.” It frames problems of behavior as problems of character, and since we’re loath to admit personal weaknesses, it leads us to rationalize away our own obviously imperfect behavior.
A more useful framing, I think, would consider the problem this way:
- There are large opportunities to make life substantially better. Instead of a negative framing, we should adopt a positive one. If you improve your health, you can enjoy extra years of illness-free life with minimal cost. If you improve your savings, you can live with less stress about money and look forward to a comfortable retirement. If you improve your relationships, you’ll experience more connection and joy, as well as better health and well-being. These are opportunities, not chores.
- Taking advantage of those opportunities is an engineering problem, not a character problem. To take advantage of all the things researchers have learned that make for better health, wealth, relationships and happiness doesn’t require you to suddenly become a totally different person. It requires solving a behavioral engineering puzzle. Whether you exercise every day or not says much less about your character and much more about whether you’ve solved this particular design challenge in your life, as it looks now.
It is, of course, always possible that certain beneficial behaviors are oversold. Indeed, the advice space is full of hyped-up recommendations that don’t actually have much (if any) empirical backing.
It is also, of course, possible that you’ve managed to find the exact optimal point for all these sorts of habits in your current life. Perhaps the constraints you face really don’t allow for any further improvement.
But I think for the majority of people (myself included), there are clear behavioral changes that pass a sensible cost-benefit test. Most of us could reap more of those benefits by making changes to the systems that support them in our lives.
Good Habits are Like Bridges, not Virtues
Building good habits is much more like engineering a bridge than it is an act of improving your character.
Think of what has to go in place to build a bridge that won’t fall down:
- You need to make the bridge out of a material that won’t collapse under the weight it needs to bear—including its own.
- You need to ensure the supports the bridge rests on won’t sink into the mud.
- You need to ensure a certain amount of flexibility, so that the forces of wind or earthquakes won’t cause the bridge to collapse.
- And so on …
Sustaining behaviors like regular exercise, healthy eating, building savings or deepening relationships depends on similar engineering principles:
- You need to make the behavior lightweight enough that it won’t collapse under the real pressures of your schedule and other commitments.
- You need to ensure the environment reliably supports your behavior, making it as easy as possible to sustain.
- You need to ensure some flexibility, so that when your life gets interrupted in various inevitable ways, you can keep it up.
- And so on …
Adopting the design metaphor helps change the discussion around our behaviors. Instead of viewing adherence to good habits as a source of pride or shame, we can instead look at it as a design problem. Each one may pose challenging constraints, unique to your situation, but each is fundamentally solvable.
And, just as you wouldn’t salvage a defective bridge by standing under it and trying to hold it up with your arms, you wouldn’t try to salvage an unworkable habit simply by applying more willpower.
Good habits, in this sense, are important precisely because they are not a function of our character. They work because they are stable with minimal effort. We sustain any good practice because it fits into our lives without much fuss, not because we have heroic discipline and self-control.
Since we’re discussing engineering, it would help to actually discuss what the principles are, not just gesture vaguely at them. A good engineer doesn’t simply believe in science, but has actual guidelines involving forces, material strengths and so on.
In the next essay, I’ll try to summarize some of the main takeaways from years of behavioral research, showing exactly what sorts of design principles help us create sustaining—and sustainable—systems in the long-term, and what sorts of mistakes people commonly make.