This is a straight transcription of Oliver Burkeman’s You Are Here series on the Waking Up app. Episode: Against Good Habits.

I know this is going to sound like one of those annoyingly contrarian arguments where I try to convince you of something simply because it sounds like the opposite of good common sense. And in this case it’s an argument that’s going to sound especially perverse in the context of the Waking Up app with it focus on developing a consistent meditation practice. Even though, I’d like you to bear with me for a few minutes while I try to persuade you that cultivating good habits can sometimes be bad for you.

A little more precisely I think that one of the psychological obstacles we encounter when it comes to constructing fulfilling lives, that is when it comes to actually getting around to doing the things we most want to do with our time, it’s this idea that first we need to become the kind of person who does the activity in question all the time. So if you want to become the kind of person who meditate regularly or who makes videos or podcasts on a regular basis or the kind of person who always has plenty of time for your kids and so you conclude understandably enough that what’s required is for you to develop certain good habits in these areas. The trouble is this quest to develop good habits to change your identity from being the kind of person who doesn’t do those things to the kind of person who does do those things, that whole quest can all too easily get in the way of just doing the damn things now. I’ll give you a couple of examples from my own life. A while back I was feeling sad about the fact that I wasn’t in closer touch with a few specific friends who live a long distance from me, but instead of reaching out to one of those friends that very day I had already raced head on mentally to how I was going to build a whole new habit of reaching out to at least one such friend every single week. That was something much more time-consuming and intimidating and it actually felt a lot easier to put that aside until it felt like I had more time. Around the same period I thought of the new project that I could launch for my website. One that I would enjoy doing that might benefit others and that could generate some income. So did I just take a few steps to get started like a sensible person? No I didn’t instead I decided that I needed to come up with a whole plan a whole system and a set of goals for how I was regularly going to make time in my schedule for that sort of thing. So I’d taken an easy change and made it much more daunting and difficult.

Obviously I’m not saying that there is zero value in building good habits. If you can point to a real track record of success that you’ve already experienced when it comes to following plans to develop new habits then absolutely please stick with their systems and don’t let me not push you off the wagon because if you already making those tiny changes to your life on a regular basis they certainly can snowball into major life transformations with speed. Even though, it’s surprising how frequently you find yourself or someone else, someone you know, either just at the point of them barking on that sort of habit change and then a few weeks later just at the point of him barking on a new set of habit changes and on and on. It’s like we’re in love with the idea of having developed good habits and we love launching on that new project of developing good habits but we run into trouble at some point before they are actually inculcated as good habits. I think that’s because the idea of building a new, even a tiny one, can seem rather daunting so it’s easy to conclude, as I suggested in the case of me contacting my friends, that it’s something to hold off until you have more time later this month or this year or whatever. I don’t necessarily always feel like I do have enough time every week to sit down and write a lengthy catch-up email to an old friend and because I can’t guarantee having enough time every week, I’m liable to not even do it this week when in fact I do have the time. Someone else once told me that he’d come up with the whole plan to send three notes of praise or appreciation every week to people he worked with and other people in his life. But then that seemed like such a big deal and demanded so much attention it actually caused him to refrain from sending one or two such notes when he did have the time and attention; just because he couldn’t be confident that it was going to turn into a regular practice on other occasions.

I think that the reason that habit building gets in our way is because the change we’re contemplating is actually rather scary or uncomfortable and treating it as a long-term incremental project of habit building is a convenient way to push the difficult stuff to another time. So for example, perhaps you just need to spend a day really getting to grips with your personal finances rather than spending 15 minutes every day reading books about budgeting or trying to record your daily expenses for a month or something in order to get yourself ready for that difficult moment of actually grappling with the situation. Of course constantly tracking your finances or reading books can be very wise actions but it might also sometimes be the case where what you’re describing as habit building is actually a way of holding the intimidating change that is required at arms length.

I think we’re craving, whenever we use habit formation in one of these avoidant ways, that is in a way that results in us not doing the things in question, is our old friend the feeling of control. We want above all feeling in control of our lives. We want to see ourselves as the captain of the super yacht of our lives standing confidently on the bridge steering our life towards the future pointer which we will finally feel adequate and on top of things. Devising schemes for self improvement can really feed into that fantasy because you get to mentally project into the future all details all the nuts and bolts of how you’re going to get to that perfect future place. Where by contrast when you just do something today as a one off with no promises about the future when you just write a few paragraphs of your novel or sit and meditate for one session or suggest one meet up with a friend or go for one run, that requires the surrender of control because that’s not about sterring a super yacht that’s about launching your little canoe directly onto the rapids of reality and letting life take you wherever it’s going to take you. It means risking that you might do the thing badly and certainly that you’ll do it imperfectly. It means being OK with the possibility that you might sit down and meditate today or go for a run today or reach out to a friend today and then not come back to doing it again tomorrow.

So the challenge I offer to you is something like this what’s one thing that you could do actually actually do it. Do it. So I’m precisely not talking about something like re-launch your meditation practice but instead about actually sitting down to meditate once today and likewise I’m precisely not talking about say write for 30 minutes every day but just writing for one pair of 30 minutes today just doing it once, but actually doing it rather than devising a whole plan for how you’re going to be doing it regularly in the future. Because the irony here of course is that just doing it once today is ultimately the only path to becoming the kind of person who does it on a regular basis anyway. The career coach Barbara once pointed out “that you can have a whole plan to become a screenwriter by saving some money quitting your job moving to Hollywood next year and all the rest of it, but if you sit down and work for half an hour on a screenplay today then you already are a screenwriter. You’re doing the thing. But if, and believe me I’ve been there, you’re the kind of person who spends your life drawing up schemes for how you’re going to become a different kind of person at some point in the future which never quite seems to arrive [then you’re in discomfort avoidance].

That really is I think the point I’m trying to make here, that the grandest life changes are worth absolutely nothing if they continue to exist only on the level of fantasy. Whereas a single meaningful action however small if you actually take it in reality even if you never do anything like it again, which is unlikely, but even if that’s what happens well that action just on its own was a real instance of showing up fully for your life