Yesterday we learned about The Diderot Effect: how to use it positively to create new habits and to make sure they stick via habit stacking.
But I told you there was more to this, and this is what I want to share today. The concept is simple: if habit stacking increases the likelihood that your new habits will stick, then you can actually create a chain of new habits by stacking them all together, using one habit to cue the next one for the whole routine you want to implement.
The author offers the following routines as examples.
Morning routine:
After I pour my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for sixty seconds.
After I meditate for sixty seconds, I will write my to-do list for the day.
After I write my to-do list for the day, I will immediately begin my first task.
Evening routine:
After I finish eating dinner, I will put my plate directly into the dishwasher.
After I put my dishes away, I will immediately wipe down the counter.
After I wipe down the counter, I will set out my coffee mug for tomorrow morning.
You get the idea. Very simple but immensely powerful.
There are also a few iterations of this basic stacking principle to further help you achieve a particular goal. One of those iterations, says Clear, is to “insert new behaviors into the middle of your current routines.”
For instance, he points out to a routine like this:
Wake up > Make my bed > Take a shower.
What if you wanted to instill in you the habit of reading every night? You could modify your habit stack by adding the following:
Wake up > Make my bed > Place a book on my pillow > Take a shower.
That one change would mean you’d have a book waiting for you to enjoy in the evening before you go to bed.
Another tip that Clear shares is that of creating rules to guide your future behavior. “It’s like you always have a game plan for which action should come next.” And he gives the following examples to illustrate this point:
Exercise. When I see a set of stairs, I will take them instead of using the elevator.
Social skills. When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to someone I don’t know yet.
Finances. When I want to buy something over $100, I will wait twenty-four hours before purchasing.
Healthy eating. When I serve myself a meal, I will always put veggies on my plate first.
Minimalism. When I buy a new item, I will give something away. (“One in, one out.”)
Mood. When the phone rings, I will take one deep breath and smile before answering.
Forgetfulness. When I leave a public place, I will check the table and chairs to make sure I don’t leave anything behind.
The most important thing is picking the right cue to initiate the action. Over time and repetition, the habit will be built. And by virtue of having stacked it, it has no choice but to stick.
And just as I promised that there would be more info on new habits today, tomorrow this miniseries will continue with how to set the cues for best results. So, please come back to continue learning about creating new habits and creating the optimal conditions for them to stick.
ACTION
TODAY: Look at your routines and determine when would be the best step to stack that new habit.
FUTURE: Start a document with your own set of rules to guide your behavior. As you run into a situation where you’d like to stack a habit, make a note of it in your document, so that you can have one repository of all these rules. You’ll eventually have them in your mind, yet initially, having this document as a backup will come in very handy.
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As this year comes to an end, I’ve started thinking about the New Year, and the new habits that I want to establish for myself. With that in mind, I’ve taken a dive into books about habit formation.
I came across a new term, The Diderot Effect, via a story that James Clear, habit guru and author of Atomic Habits, tells in his book. In a nutshell, it goes like this: French philosopher, Denis Diderot, was the co-founder and writer of Encyclopédie, during the time of the Enlightenment. Despite this, he lived in poverty most of his life. His daughter was about to be married and, seeing that he could not pay for the wedding, he struck a deal with Russian Empress Catherine the Great, who bought his personal library for an enormous sum at the time and paid him a salary to act as her librarian.
Suddenly Diderot had money. He paid for his daughter’s wedding and bought himself a scarlet robe. His robe, apparently, was so beautiful, that it made every other one of his common possessions seem even more humble and out of place. Thus, he started replacing and upgrading his stuff: rugs, sculptures, furniture, etc.
“Diderot’s behavior is not uncommon. In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect… [and it] states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases. You can spot this pattern everywhere. You buy a dress and have to get new shoes and earrings to match. You buy a couch and suddenly question the layout of your entire living room. You buy a toy for your child and soon find yourself purchasing all of the accessories that go with it.”
However, this does not necessarily have to be seen in a negative light. Clear writes, “Many human behaviors follow this cycle. You often decide what to do next based on what you have just finished doing. Going to the bathroom leads to washing and drying your hands, which reminds you that you need to put the dirty towels in the laundry, so you add laundry detergent to the shopping list, and so on. No behavior happens in isolation. Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior.”
Why is this important?
Because, “when it comes to building new habits, you can use the connectedness of behavior to your advantage. One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top.”
The author calls this habit stacking, and offers the following formula for it:
“After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
Here are a few examples from Clear that will make it clear (Ha! I couldn’t resist…):
Meditation. “After I pour my cup of coffee each morning, I will immediately meditate for one minute.”
Exercise. “After I take off my work shoes, I will immediately change into my workout clothes.”
Gratitude. “After I sit down to dinner, I will say one thing I’m grateful for that happened today.”
Marriage. “After I get into bed at night, I will give my partner a kiss.”
Safety. “After I put on my running shoes, I will text a friend or family member where I am running and how long it will take.”
“The key,” the author says, is to “tie your desired behavior into something you already do each day.” And this is how you ensure that the new habits you create will stick.
But there is more to this! Come back tomorrow for Part 2, as we will see the augmented, edited, and revised version of new-habit formation for even better results. You’ll love it!
In the meantime, what are some new habits that you’d like to establish in the New Year? Let me know in the comments here!
See you tomorrow. 🙂
ACTION
TODAY: Think about how The Diderot Effect can work in your favor. What new habits would you like to establish?
FUTURE: Whenever you want or need to establish a new habit, try habit stacking to ensure that it sticks. Come back for the next installments in this miniseries, as I will share some of Clear’s simple-yet-effective methods to make this happen.
Know someone who wants to make sure the new habits stick? Please share this post via email, Facebook or Twitter, thank you!
In parts 1, 2, and 3 of this miniseries we’ve been learning from A.J. Jacobs how to be more grateful and the importance of actively practicing gratitude towards our wellbeing. In today’s video (below), A.J. shares the importance of teamwork and seeing ourselves and what we do as part of something bigger, and he tells two great stories to illustrate this point. “We don’t do anything completely by ourselves,” he says. And that is true: we always have help and we can—and should—get it when we get stuck.
In the book, Jacobs mentions how we’re all interconnected and illustrates this point by mentioning the enormous efforts and logistics behind his cup of coffee:
“By the time I take a sip, the [coffee] bean has been on a nine-month-long journey of 2,500 miles across the equator. It has traveled by motorcycle, truck, boats, vans, pallets, shoulders, and forklifts. It’s been stored in buckets, bags, tubs and metal containers the size of a small apartment. It’s come down a tree, descended a mountain, docked in ports, navigated Customs, been loaded into a warehouse, rattled around in trucks.”
The author went on to thank virtually everybody in this supply chain. And when he realized that a lot of these efforts required steel, he decided to follow that trail and thank the people involved in making steel at the ArcelorMittal steel mill in Indiana.
“My coffee wouldn’t exist without steel. The ships and trains and trucks that carry the beans are made of steel, as are the stop signs and bridges and docks on their routes. Steel is in coffee scoopers and roasting machines, refrigerators and spoons […] brewing machines, and so much else necessary for my favorite drink.”
What struck Jacobs and made him realize that the loop was closing, was a conversation that he had during one of his final interviews with an engineer involved in forging steel. The engineer said, “Well, I’m grateful to coffee.” And then he went on to explain, “You have to thank the coffee itself. Because the steel workers drink a lot of coffee.”
Jacobs wrote that he loved the engineer’s point: “So meta, so recursive, and so true. You need coffee to make coffee. Coffee begets coffee.”
And he closes with a beautiful quote (both in the book as well as in the video) that recognizes how we are all interconnected. Our paths overlap and intersect everywhere. If we take the theory of the six degrees of separation—or the six degrees of gratitude that A.J. applied—we will see that it is, indeed, a very small world and that we need each other’s help all over the map to produce something as simple as a cup of coffee.
Today’s video (4:21 min) is the last in this miniseries on gratitude. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did! Let me know which was your favorite part in the comments here.
And if you are in New York, please join me on December 4 at the Business Library for a fireside chat on gratitude and business with the wonderful A.J. Jacobs. Here are the details.
ACTION
TODAY: Something fun to do: As part of the recent launch of his Thanks a Thousand book, A.J. decided to send 1,000 handwritten thank you notes to his readers. If you’d like him to send you one, simply go to ajjacobs.com/thanks.
FUTURE: Pick something that you really like and go on a gratitude trail. It doesn’t have to be as extensive as A.J.’s, yet you can make it as interactive and fun as you wish. Involve your loved ones, friends or colleagues. They’ll have fun too and you’ll build beautiful memories together. Spread gratitude and it’ll come back to you many times over.
As part of the research A.J. Jacobs did when he was working on his gratitude project, he got in touch with author and researcher Scott Barry Kaufman at the University of Pennsylvania. Kaufman taught a course on positive psychology and gratitude, and told Jacobs the following:
Gratitude has a lot to do with holding onto a moment as strongly as possible… It’s closely related to mindfulness and savoring. Gratitude can shift our perception of time and slow it down. It can make our life’s petty annoyances dissolve away, at least for a moment.
Jacobs then, aptly says, “It’s hard to be grateful if we’re speeding through life, focusing on what’s next.”
While life tends to be a whirlwind for most of us, we should really give a second thought to slowing down and taking in both the small and big moments. In today’s video (below), A.J. shares that the very act of stopping to smell the proverbial roses is what seems to be one of the keys to gratitude.
However, as much as we’d like to change our crazy, fast-paced present for what sometimes seems to be a much more peaceful past, A. J. warns us not to long for a false illusion of a better time. “The good old days were not good at all,” he says.
And in the book he backs this up by emphasizing, “I firmly believe most nostalgia for the glorious past is delusional thinking.” He mentions that he used to write a monthly magazine column in which he would research “just how horrible the previous centuries were… disease-ridden, dangerous, cruel, racist, sexist, smelly, superstitious, and poisonous.”
He goes on to explain that he focused on food, but he also wrote about “childrearing (opium lozenges to calm kids), clothes (iron corsets to shape women’s waists, and jobs (nightmen, the eighteenth-century workers who would haul manure from houses).” And, both in the book as well as in the video, he shares a mantra that will make you cringe and be happy that we live in this day and age.
While there are indeed enormous challenges today that we must overcome, “the solution doesn’t lie in a return to yesteryear.” Nor does it lie in pinning our happiness to the other side of the spectrum—the future—via the so-called hedonic treadmill that he explains in the video.
Check out the 3rd video (4:03 min) in this miniseries to learn more about cultivating gratitude from A.J. Jacobs (here are videos 1 and 2 in case you haven’t seen them).
Which is your favorite way of practicing gratitude so far? Let me know in the comments here.
ACTION
TODAY: As you are still enjoying Thanksgiving leftovers with your family—or simply during a family meal—do what A.J. did last year: “We held a family competition to see who could come up with the most obscure person on our dinner’s supply chain. My 12-year-old son thanked the farmer who grew the cranberries for the sauce (Not bad). Another relative thanked the trucker who drove the cranberries to the factory (Decent). Someone thanked the designer of the logo on the stop sign so the truck didn’t get in an accident (Getting there). My nephew thanked the miner in South America who got the copper for the wiring in the traffic lights. (Pretty good).” How fun is that?!
FUTURE: Whenever you feel overwhelmed by all the negativity in the news, take one minute to recognize something that goes very well in your life and truly savor the gratitude for such a wonderful thing.
Know someone who would like A.J.’s tips? Please share this post! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
In yesterday’s post and video, A.J. Jacobs told us how his gratitude journey had started and he shared some of the most important findings on the science behind gratitude. Expanding a bit on that, in Thanks a Thousand, he mentions, “gratitude is the single best predictor of well-being, and good relationships, beating out twenty-four other impressive traits such as hope, love, and creativity.”
Seeing this, it behooves us to learn how we can be more grateful to reap all these benefits.
Where should we start? Check out today’s video below (3:48 min) to see A.J.’s suggestions and tips on how to be grateful.
First, he points out the importance of being aware and noticing. The background for this tip comes from the book, where he explains that according to evolutionary psychologists, “All humans are genetically programmed to pay attention to what goes wrong [because] in Paleolithic times, it had survival value.” A.J. says, “Your one-thousandth great-grandparents needed to be damn sure they remembered which mushroom was poisonous.”
The result of this negative bias, nowadays, is that, “we are awash in modern-day anxiety. We often see our lives as problem after problem, crisis after crisis [and] many of us live in what some psychologists call the ‘deficit’ mind-set, not the ‘surplus’ mind-set.” As a consequence, “we spend far too much time fretting about what we’re missing instead of focusing on what we have.”
How to revert this? It’s simple. Notice the things around you. A.J. explains this on the video. He also shares a life hack for falling asleep in gratitude, and finally explains the transformative power of being grateful for all those things that we take for granted.
Enjoy!
ACTION
TODAY: When you go to bed tonight, don’t count sheep. Do the exercise that A.J. shares and you’ll fall asleep with a smile!
FUTURE: Start a new gratitude ritual: on a daily basis, make a point of noticing one thing that you would otherwise take for granted. Think of the many benefits you receive from it. You’ll be grateful instantly!
Know someone who would love any of these tips? Please share this post! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
A prolific writer and human guinea pig of sorts, A.J. Jacobs likes to immerse himself fully into whichever topic piques his interest. He thoroughly researches, tests, and experiences said topic, and then delivers a book filled with interesting information along with much wit and humor.
His latest book, Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey tells the story of why and how he chose to thank everybody involved in producing his morning cup of coffee. He embarked on agratitude trail, spanning six degrees of gratitude—no holds barred—and the resulting project was so big that he ended having to put a limit of a thousand people to thank (!). Thus, the title of the book.
Why did it turn out to be so big an endeavor? Because, as Jacobs learned and witnessed first hand in his lovely gratitude project, we’re all interconnected and no one ever does anything by him/herself—there’s always someone (else) that lends a hand.
I had the good fortune of sitting down to have (what else?) coffee and chat with A.J. about his book and his adventures on gratitude. Since we’re celebrating Thanksgiving in the U.S., I thought of no better day than today to talk about gratitude and learn about the research behind it.
“Happiness does not lead to gratitude. Gratitude leads to happiness.” – David Steindl-Rast
Below is the first video (3:34 min). Over the next few days, I’ll be sharing with you other videos of our conversation as a way of extending the wonderful feeling of gratitude throughout the holiday weekend. I hope you enjoy the videos as much as I enjoyed the conversation with A.J.
I am grateful for you! Have a wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving with your loved ones.
ACTION
TODAY: Enjoy Thanksgiving if you celebrate it. If not, make a point of being grateful for 3 persons or things that happened today in your life. But don’t just run by this list, instead stop and savor the moment and the memory.
FUTURE: Create a gratitude ritual that you can do on a daily basis. It doesn’t have to be complicated at all: it could be thinking about what you’re thankful for as you drink your morning cup of coffee, doing the three-thing/person practice right before you go to sleep, keeping a gratitude journal, or anything that works for you.
Are you grateful for someone’s presence in your life? Please share this post with them! Email, Facebook or Twitter.
TODAY’S IDEA: New Habits: How to Ensure They Stick – Part 2
