Chris Loper has been writing about self-improvement and helping busy adults with habit formation since 2017. He also writes an education blog for parents and students for Northwest Educational Services. Along with Greg Smith, Chris is the cocreator of Parenting for Academic Success, a series of transformative classes that create empowered parents, confident students, and harmonious families. His most recent endeavor combines his academic and habit-formation expertise to help students thrive in college. Visit SmartCollegeHabits.com to learn more. In 2021, Chris published a humorous memoir titled Wood Floats and Other Brilliant Observations, a book that blends crazy stories with practical life lessons. He lives in Issaquah, WA where he is the owner of South Cove Tutoring.
Willpower. Discipline. Grit. Self-control. Call it what you want to, but we can all agree on two things: it’s important, and we don’t have enough of it. So, like any critical but finite resource, we need to spend it wisely. To do that, we have to know what willpower is actually for. Willpower, when used appropriately, should be spent in just two ways: Investing in better habits when you have… Read More »What Willpower is For
“Life is composed of joys and miseries. They go hand in hand.” –Bhante Gunaratana1 On the ride of life, pain is the price of admission. We know pain right from birth. Pain is with us, in ways large and small, every day of our lives. Our discomforts range from the annoying to the agonizing. Embarrassments, mistakes, and failures are inevitable. We must all face unfairness, misfortune, and tragedy. This, I posit,… Read More »The Price of Admission
“Our brains have not evolved for this world of plenty. As Dr. Tom Finucane … said, ‘We are cacti in the rain forest.’ And like cacti adapted to an arid climate, we are drowning in dopamine.”1 I’ve killed more houseplants by overwatering than by underwatering. Many plants aren’t evolved to receive very much water: snake plants, succulents, cacti. Keep that in mind because you are one of those plants, and… Read More »Are You Overwatered?
We’ve already covered the strategic value of predicting how you could fail when you’re trying to establish a new habit or quit an old one: Imagining the situations that could lead you to slip up gives you a chance to mitigate them in advance. One thing we haven’t discussed that I’ve come to see as equally important is the emotional value of imagining failure. Here’s what that looks like: Think… Read More »Visualizing Failure