“Now, here’s the deal … we don’t want to be like that moron at the gym who thinks he’s going to turn around seven years of sitting on the couch in one afternoon. Pick one area and just focus there. Start small. Go slow. Stretching and pushing ourselves too much and too quickly is a recipe for misery and anxiety.” –Tripp Lanier1
There’s a strange, old idea about how to boil a frog that you’re probably familiar with: Put the frog in a pot of boiling water, and he’ll jump out. Put him in tepid water, heat it slowly, and he’ll stay and be cooked to death.
Why anyone would want to boil a frog alive is a mystery to me, but that’s never been the point of the boiling frog story. Usually, it’s used in political speeches to warn about some growing danger that we’re blissfully unaware of, like communism or climate change. And the lesson is clear: Don’t be like the frog.
But I have a different take on this, one in which we actually do want to be like the frog. See, if you want to change your lifestyle or develop healthy habits, you should start small and gradually turn up the heat. When it comes to behavioral change, slowly boiling yourself is exactly what you want to do.
If you force too radical of a change on yourself, your mind and body will rebel against it. Like the frog being dropped into a pot of boiling water, you’ll quickly bail. It’s tempting to be a hero in the beginning and set lofty goals for your new routine, but that that almost never works.
If you really want change to stick, you’ll need to ease into it, focus on consistency, and build up slowly. Gradually, with many repetitions of the new behavior, your brain will rewire and your identity will shift. That’s what makes healthy habits stick.
For example, I’ve been slowly shifting toward veganism over the past two years because I’ve come to understand that it would be better for me, for the animals, and for the planet if I ate less meat, eggs, and dairy. At no point have I ever resolved to be vegan, and I might never go that far, but I am committed to moving in that direction.
I began by swapping out turkey for tempeh in most of my cooking. That was easy enough. Then, instead of having two eggs at breakfast, I just have one. My next step is to stop eating mammals. (Special thanks to Yuval Noah Harari, whose book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
helped convince me to do that.) These steps are all small enough that the change feels minor and manageable.
If I had tried to switch to full vegan all at once, I probably would have found it to be too difficult and given up completely. The gradual approach protects me from this pitfall.
Maybe your current goal is to stop checking the news all the time. Start with something simple: Just stop checking before breakfast. Then, after this becomes normal, stop checking after dinner. Gradually, you can narrow down the range of times you’re allowed to check the news to a point where you’re only checking the news once a day, which is plenty. You can use the same approach for social media.
Or take exercise. If you haven’t been working out regularly, and you do too much at once when you’re first starting out, your body will react against it. One way this could happen is your muscles will get very sore. Since you probably don’t like pain, this will make you more likely to quit. Another way your body can react against too much exercise is by getting injured. Injuries not only hurt but also prevent you from working out.
The alternative is to ease into it. Start small and build up slowly. If you want to exercise consistently for the rest of your life, this is the right approach.
Another place this principle shows up is dieting. Oversimplifying a great deal, to lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you consume. But most diets have you cut out a lot of calories all at once, which your body will react against. How? By reducing your metabolism. If you suddenly cut your caloric intake by 25%, your body is liable to freak out and start conserving energy, lowering your metabolism, and thereby making it harder to lose weight.
And your mind might freak out too. Feeling hungry is uncomfortable, and this makes it more likely that you’ll quit your diet and even overcorrect by binging. (These are just two of the reasons conventional dieting doesn’t work. For a deeper look at that topic, check out this post from nutrition coach Natalie Joffe.)
A more sustainable approach to weight loss is cutting out a much smaller percentage of your daily calories – small enough that your body doesn’t rebel against it. And this is not a behavior where you want to keep upping the ante on a regular basis. In other words, the end-goal is not to become comfortable with starving yourself. The goal is easing your way into a healthier weight.
Speaking of which, don’t try to become healthy. You’ll never “get there” anyway. Instead, try to become healthier. Make one small shift today, and for the rest of this week that will move you in the right direction. Maybe that’s getting in a bit more exercise. Maybe that’s eating one more serving of veggies or one less serving of sugar. Maybe that’s just going for a quick walk after dinner.
If you’re not accustomed to such behaviors, don’t overdo it. Give yourself permission to just pick one area and commit to an easy, minor improvement.
This might sound counter to my full-court press (a.k.a. my “do everything” program), but I didn’t go from zero to hero on that. I built up my full-court press one behavior at a time, and I increased the intensity of various behaviors gradually. Today, I’m meditating for 30 minutes each morning. Please don’t start there. It won’t stick. Five years ago, I started with three minutes a day, and I added a minute or two every few months.
There is one exception to this rule: quitting an addiction. If you’re truly addicted to something – a drug, a video game, Facebook – the only reliable approach is to quit fully and completely, all at once. If you don’t go forth with 100% commitment, then the river of your old habit will sweep you away. You can’t ease into sobriety. Hop into that pot of boiling water and close the lid behind you.
For everything else, take it slow. We all wish we could make major changes instantly, but that’s not how change works. Patience is required. We all want to reach our goals right away, but we’d be wise to keep our eyes on the process. And the process for making change stick is to start small and build up slowly.
1 Lanier, Tripp. This Book Will Make You Dangerous: The Irreverent Guide For Men Who Refuse to Settle
. Lanier Creative Services, Inc., 2020.