A Few Big Ideas That Made My Life Better

Topics covered: body budget, tiny habits, cognitive control, desirable difficulty

A few heuristics keep me relatively functional. Taken together, these disparate ideas support each other as a system, and have been liberating in different ways. That is, they give me levers to pull that have changed my life.

Changing Your Body’s State

First is the idea that your thoughts and mood are usually symptomatic of how your body is doing. That is, if you want to fix your thoughts and mood, the first thing you should do is fix your body. You can alter your body's state immediately through actions like breathwork or jumping jacks, and you can alter it long-term by adopting new routines and habits.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls your body's energetic state a "body budget"; that is, the amount of energy you perceive in yourself affects the way you judge what's happening to you, because you are filtering events based on how much energy they will cost you to handle. You are classifying new events as "too much for me right now" or "no big deal, I can solve this." And those classifications change depending on your perceived energy—what you think you need to preserve in order to keep ticking.

For example, if you haven't slept or eaten, you may regard any new request for your attention and effort (a phone call, an approaching colleague, a child calling your name) with annoyance, or even as a minor crisis. You just can't handle much more. You might then feel depressed that this is the case and spiral further downward in your appraisal of yourself and the day. Those same events, if you are well-rested, energized, and feeling healthy, might pique your interest; you might handle them calmly or even see some fun in them. Most parents know that the mood with which they respond to their children's bids for attention can turn an interaction toward bonding or conflict, fun or dispute.

Upshot: You should do things to increase your body budget, tend it throughout the day, and spend it on what you care about (in a moment of crisis, Lisa recommended her daughter take an Advil and a nap — sometimes it’s that simple). If you manage to do this, you will see your life differently. You will rewrite the story you tell yourself about what's happening now and how you got to where you are. The stories we tell ourselves about life are mostly reflections of how we feel now, not what actually happened or what's really in front of us.

In other words, each moment of your life is a biochemical moment, and you can perform biochemical experiments on yourself in small, safe, legal ways to see if that changes how you feel. What are the things you can do to increase your body budget? Mostly common wisdom: find ways to sleep well, exercise several times a week, eat healthily, hydrate, breath, etc. As written, those are just vague notions; you’ll have a hard time translating them into concrete actions. Most people will read them and ignore them because they have read them many times before, tried to change their lives, and failed.

Behavior Design: How to Change Your Routines

Recognizing that most people don't manage to enact common wisdom in their daily lives brings us to the next big idea, which is Stanford professor BJ Fogg's “Tiny Habits.” Lots of people want to change their lives, few people do. It's not because they're weak or bad; it's because they take the wrong approach. We adopt New Year's resolutions boldly and drop them a few weeks later when our over-ambitious, poorly constructed routines fall apart.

Each new thing you want to do is a behavior, and Fogg specializes in behavior design. That is, he can guide you to find ways to alter your life that you can stick to. His big idea, which seems obvious in retrospect, is that you should make new habits easy. Start small, really small, and don't get carried away. Whatever you think you want to do and can't quite manage to do is probably too big! Fogg gives great examples like "floss one tooth" or "do two pushups every time you go pee." If you can't handle a 7-minute workout in the kitchen, do a 1-minute workout. By making habits small, you free them from what he calls the Motivation Monkey.

Moments of high motivation can be used to restructure your environment to make smaller habits easy in the long term. For example, in a moment of high motivation, you might buy an alarm clock so that you can charge your phone outside your bedroom at night, making it easier to avoid the blue screen light that can disrupt your sleep patterns.

“Tiny Habits” has a lot of hugely impactful ideas written in simple language and designed for people who have stumbled at previous attempts to change their lives. The biggest ideas are that you can actually find actions that will make your life better (Fogg's techniques will guide you—they're not hard), and that those small actions can have very large impacts over the long term. By setting yourself up for quick wins, you can use emotion to wire in new behavior, essentially creating healthy addictions for yourself. His method is a meta-technique to achieve anything else you set your sights on: both increasing your body budget per Lisa Feldman Barrett and achieving cognitive control.

Thought-Flow & (Very Local) Mind Control

Cognitive control may be an unfamiliar term (I wrote about it in more depth here). It's also called executive function and metacognition. You can think of cognitive control as the ability to direct your attention where you think it should go in order to achieve the goals you have set for yourself. The enemies of cognitive control are distraction, interruption, and fatigue.

While fatigue can be addressed through the body budget, distraction and interruption come from many directions, each of which needs to be managed. Screens are a major source of distraction and interruption. I wrote about how to deal with them here. More broadly, our environment can expose us to distraction and interruption: noise, clutter, colleagues with an urgent need.

Distraction and interruption also arise inside of us; that is, our minds find ways to think about something else that's not aligned with our stated goal. Various wisdom traditions, notably Buddhism, have a lot to say about how to handle a distracted mind. Teachers like James Low, Stephen Bodian, Adyashanti, and Jayasara have given many talks about how to sit with the mind and witness its thought-flow. By making us more aware of errant thoughts and feelings, those mindfulness practices can give people basic tools to realize what their mind is doing at any given moment and bring it back to the task at hand, whatever that may be.

Once you have the bodily energy, the ability to focus, and tools for behavior design, the sky's the limit. What can you hope to do with those things? What could you achieve, give to the world, become?

The Path to Doing Something Big Is Wide Open

Here, it's probably worth mentioning Kevin Ashton's excellent book “How to Fly a Horse,” which explores the workings of what we call creativity. I think many people would end up building and creating more useful and meaningful things for themselves and others if they framed creativity as Kevin does: a normal process of problem-solving that succeeds when you put in the time, expose yourself to the materials of creation, play with them, and partner with someone generative and committed.

The activities that Kevin describes — putting the time in, assembling the ingredients of creation, finding a teacher or work partner — are all things that “Tiny Habits” can help you achieve. Every great thing is just an assemblage of parts. The path to that assemblage was often banal. This applies to invention, engineering, coding, literature and art, all methods of recombination. Somebody put stuff together in a new way. You could do it, too.

One ingredient in complex creative tasks is mastery of a skill, which requires learning. While there are many aspects of effective learning, including spaced repetition and active learning etc, the crucial idea for me is the “desirable difficulty” that comes with deliberate practice; that is, you do things that are just hard enough. Kind of Goldilocks hard — not so ambitious that you sabotage yourself; not so easy that you make zero progress. Like everything, deliberate practice is a behavior you can design via Tiny Habits, which simply functions as a catalyst for any reaction you seek to ignite.

Pragmatic, Personal Liberation

There's a lot of noise in the self-help section of the bookstore. Lots of so-called teachers lead people down paths to nowhere, which doom their best-laid plans to failure. But in the end, the most consistent help is bound to be self-help, and you need to get it right. The authors I mentioned here have helped me construct a liberatory worldview and collect a set of pragmatic tools that help me get it right.

In a sense, each of these authors helps you rewrite part of your life. Feldman-Barrett’s methods help you deconstruct and rewrite perception and mood. Fogg’s methods help you rewrite your daily routines. Ashton’s methods help you rewrite your constructive ambitions. The methods of cognitive control rewrite your exocortex, the devices and apps you use. The methods of mindfulness rewrite your endocortex, the gray matter in your skull. And they all combine to create something greater, rewriting your life narrative in a way that gives you agency. By lowering the bar on your habits, you raise the ceiling on your dreams. As Thiel says, people overestimate the impact of change in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term. Small changes combine and also compound over time.

And all these things are totally doable. Start with Tiny Habits. Read about new habit formation. Go tiny. Apply it to your body budget. Apply it to your screen hygiene and information diet. Then you'll start to get on a positive feedback loop that generates more energy and attention, which you can use to do more healthy things, and dream bigger dreams.

I’m just a few years into to putting it all together, after a long period of startup burnout when my health fell apart. Compared to that dark time, which overlapped with the years of intense Covid lockdowns in the Bay, I feel younger, healthier, more able to focus, work and connect with the people I love. I don’t know if these techniques are universal, but I think most people can do something like this, cobbling together their own system and using some of the tools described above.

Further Reading:

• “How Emotions Are Made”, Lisa Feldman-Barrett

• “Tiny Habits”, B.J. Fogg

• “How to Fly a Horse”, Kevin Ashton

• “The Distracted Mind”, Adam Gazzaley

All these people have gone on the book circuit. If buying and reading a book is too much, find an interview they gave and listen to it on the way to work. Start tiny.