Unhealthy Habits

Questions and model answers

1. Is there an unhealthy habit you would like to get rid of?

   Checking my phone before I've properly woken up. Not scrolling for an hour, it's more that I reach for it before my eyes are open, and whatever is in there sets the tone for the next two hours. If it's a work email I'm already tense at seven in the morning about something I can't act on until nine, and by the time nine comes I've rehearsed it four times. I've tried leaving it in the kitchen and I just go to the kitchen. What's actually worked, a bit, is putting it face down under a book, because that adds about four seconds of friction and four seconds is apparently enough to notice I'm doing it. Not enough to stop. Enough to notice.

2. Which is harder to change, a habit you enjoy or one you do not even notice?

   The one you don't notice, easily. A habit you enjoy at least presents itself as a decision. There is a moment where you could say no, and you can put something in the way of that moment. The unnoticed ones have no moment at all. I bite the skin around my thumbnail and I have never once caught myself starting. I only ever find out afterwards, from the evidence. You cannot intervene in a decision you are not making. What that means in practice is that the enjoyable habits respond to willpower and the invisible ones respond only to changing something in the room, and almost all the advice is written as though everything were the first kind.

3. Tell me about a time you tried to cut down on something.

   I tried to cut coffee down to one a day. I'd been at five, which I only found out by counting for a week, and the counting changed more than anything else. Going cold turkey lasted two days and gave me a headache I could feel in my teeth. What worked was swapping the second one for tea and leaving the rest alone for a month. Then the third. It took about four months to get to two a day, which sounds slow and is the only version that ever stuck. The bit I got wrong at the start was treating it as a test of character. It was a scheduling problem. I drank the fourth one at four because that is when the office went quiet.

4. Do you think people will really make an effort to limit their screen time?

   A few will, and I do not think it will be most, because the thing being asked for is unusually hard. Limiting screen time is not one decision but several hundred small ones a day, and every one of them is made against a system designed by people whose actual job is to win that exact argument. Willpower against a team of engineers is not a fair contest. What I expect instead is that it goes the way seatbelts and smoking went, which is to say slowly, unevenly, and mostly by changing what is permitted rather than what is intended. My own effort so far amounts to a weekly screen time report that I have opened twice and closed quickly.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.