For a long time I have been annoying myself with a bad habit: procrastinating to start the day and stay in bed with my phone until I have to leave the bed because my bladder is about to explode. Then, when I'm finally up and around, I feel bad about myself for wasting that time and not getting out of bed immediately, and I swear to myself that I won't do it the next day.
I'm doing it again the next day. It's just too hard to leave the comfort of my bed, even when I have fun things planned.
I turn to one of my books, called Atomic Habits, by James Clear. This book introduces the "Habit Scorecard", in which you can capture all of your daily habits, and rate them on being a good, bad or neutral habit. On several, average days I paid close attention to my habits and listed them. For this experiment, my definition of ‘habit' is an action that I carry out subconsciously, on auto-pilot. This is the result:
I observe two interesting things:
My mornings and evenings are purely habitual. Once working hours hit, there is not a single habit in place.
My habits are mostly good (yay), except for grabbing my phone in the morning. Now, whether this is a bad habit truly depends on what you do with your phone. If you reach for your phone because it is your beeping alarm, and you merely aim to switch off the alarm then I don’t see any issues with that. Since I wrote down ‘grab my phone’ instead of ‘turn off alarm’, and since I marked it as a bad habit, you might deduce that I am not grabbing my phone to switch off the alarm. And you are right. I grab my phone to procrastinate getting out of bed.
Now that I filled out the Habit Scorecard, I cannot stay idle and leave the bad habit on the list. I must do something about it. Thankfully, Atomic Habits provides a method for starting good habits and breaking bad habits. Let’s start at the beginning.
A habit essentially consists of a feedback loop containing four steps: a cue, a craving, a reward, and a response. Because it is a loop, it sustains itself and that is what makes it hard to break.
Applying this loop to my bad habit of grabbing my phone in the morning, I see the following:
I realize for the first time that waking up is not associated with happily starting the day and getting things done, it is associated with staying under the covers feeling cosy and comfortable. But that’s not why I wake up! If remaining in bed is the goal, being asleep is a much better use of that time in bed, rather than staying under the blankets and mindlessly scrolling through my messages, social media, and the news. Even worse, when I finally decide to leave the bed I feel so much groggier than when I woke up.
Time for action. How do I break this cycle? The book prescribes four steps:
Make it invisible: reduce exposure by removing the cue from your environment
Make it unattractive: reframe your mindset by highlighting the benefits of avoiding your bad habit
Make it difficult: incrase friction by increasing the number of steps between you and your bad habit
Make it unsatisfying: make a contract and list the costs of your bad habit
OK. Well, step 1 would be hard, since my cue is waking up and I cannot really make that invisible. But I can make it difficult to grab my phone (step 3) by putting my phone in another room. That is quite literally increasing the number of steps I need to take to reach my phone. I am not dependent on my phone for my alarm clock, so there is really no use for it in the bedroom anyway.
I think steps 2 and 4 are related. By listing the costs of the bad habit (step 4), you automatically highlight the benefits of avoiding the habit (step 2). I see an opportunity for killing two birds with one stone here. I’ll have a go at it:
I believe the costs of my bad habit (= staying in bed doing useless things on my phone after waking up) are threefold. There is a cost in terms of time, since I spend 30-60 minutes scrolling through news that does not even interest me, or scrolling through social media that does not bring much value to my day. So by breaking this habit I could save 30-60 minutes and spend it on more meaningful activities.
Then there is a cost in energy. I have been tracking my energy for almost two weeks now and a pattern is starting to emerge. Apparantly I’m feeling best in the first 4 hours after I wake up. So why on earth would I waste up to 1/4th of my prime time lounging around in bed? Even worse, since I feel more groggy after having been on my phone, I am actually depleting myself of energy. So the cost in terms of energy is doubled.
Finally, and this cost weighs the most, this habit is going against one of my core values, which is to be intentional with my time, and keep a healthy balance between the various aspects of my life. Mindlessly being on my phone definitely does not count as being intentional, and robs from time spent on meaningful things.
Seeing the costs on paper makes me wish I quit this habit sooner. But it is never too late to change, and I am certain that future-me will be grateful that I am quitting this habit now, because it is better than not quitting it at all.
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