Self-improvement is driven by behavioral change: quitting bad habits, starting good habits, or simply doing more of what works (thank you James Clear). And if behavioral change is going to stick, then your new ways of acting will need to become ingrained deeply into your sense of self. You’ll need to change your identity.
But how do you change your sense of self?
The answer is spaced repetition.
Spaced repetition means engaging in a chosen behavior for small lengths of time on many separate occasions rather than engaging in the same behavior for one large chunk of time. It’s a pattern of action, inaction, action, inaction, and so on.
In the education blog I write, I’ve discussed the importance of spaced repetition for learning and studying. If you want to understand and remember difficult academic content, then you should engage with that content frequently and do small doses of focused work. This is much more effective than large doses of studying done infrequently. 30 minutes of daily study is better than several hours of last-minute cramming.1
Spaced repetition also applies to learning music and developing athletic skills. The best program to hone your skills and create long-term memories is many small doses of practice, spaced out over time. You’ll improve more by practicing basketball every day than you will by spending one weekend a year at an intensive basketball camp.
This is not to say that large doses of practice don’t have value; you might learn a great deal at that basketball camp and bump your game up to the next level. Rather, this is to say that the real, lasting change in your abilities comes from regular practice – you won’t stay at that higher level of play unless you follow up on your experience at camp with spaced repetition. And if you’re in pursuit of mastery, I don’t think you’ll be surprised to hear that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice can’t be done in one sitting.
Exercise and Movement
In her book, Designed to Move, Joan Vernikos reports on research that showed how to combat the negative effects of prolonged sitting. The answer, it turns out, isn’t to stand up for long periods of time, though this is better than sitting for long periods of time, but to stand up often:
“The results showed that the benefits came not from how long one stood up, but how many times one stood up … Standing up every 20 to 30 minutes throughout the day seemed to be the most effective solution.”2
Likewise, although serious workouts certainly have their benefits, finding ways to just move frequently and in a variety of ways may be more important for counteracting the harmful effects of the modern, sedentary lifestyle:
“If there is a word that defines the solution to our sitting woes, it is alternating—from sitting to standing, from standing to bending over to pick something off the floor, from squatting to jumping up, from stretching up to bending sideways, moving up every which way, kneeling down in prayer to touch your forehead on the ground and back upright again. Add frequent and variety to alternating and you have the keys to the solution.”2
Similarly, exercising a little bit nearly every day is almost certainly healthier than exercising for a few hours only once per week. Better still if you do a different sort of exercise each day. You also might experiment with breaking up long workouts into two or three shorter workouts, for example, by doing 15 minutes of exercise bike and 15 minutes of walking in the park, separated by an hour or so, rather than just 30 minutes of exercise bike or just 30 minutes of walking in the park, done all at once.
A New Identity
“Day by day, what you do is who you become.” –Heraclitus
Just as spaced repetition works for academics, music, sports, and fitness, so too does it work for self-improvement and behavioral change. Every time you engage in a behavior that’s good for you, you’re crafting a better version of yourself, and the frequency of positive action is more important than the intensity of any single action.
A better you is built, day by day, brick by brick. And if you want a stable structure, you’ll have to wait for the mortar to dry before adding the next layer of bricks. Some days we’re inspired to do it all, and most days we’re not, so the impulse to cram in the brick-laying on those rare days when you’re motivated is understandable. But that doesn’t make for lasting change. Really changing your identity requires showing up and doing the work, day after day, whether or not you feel like it.
Nutrition coach Natalie Joffe encourages us to “think of life as a series of daily elections, where every action is a vote for either the current you or the future you that you’d like to become.”3 Saying “no” to sugar and “yes” to salad once does almost nothing to shift your identity toward healthy eating. But make those choices every day for two months, and you’ll start to feel like a different person.
Each positive action you take is like a vote you cast in favor of a better life. Conversely, every time you choose inaction, it’s a vote against becoming better. And the principle of spaced repetition teaches us that it’s the number of votes that counts, not the amount of work that’s put into any single vote.
“Here’s the truth: it’s your daily actions that will change what you believe about yourself and the person you become. It’s about setting a schedule, showing up, and sticking to it. It’s about focusing on building the right identity rather than worrying about getting the right result.” –James Clear4
In other words, it’s best to keep your eyes on the process.
But why does it work this way?
Spaced Repetition Convinces Your Brain to Care
The status quo isn’t just easier for you, it’s also less costly for your brain. If you want your brain to rewire and grow in order to make some sort of change, you’ll have to convince it to devote resources to making the change. In other words, you have to convince your brain to care.
Spaced repetition works for academics because it effectively tells the brain that you really want to understand and remember what you’re trying to learn. It sends a message that says, “Hey brain! This is important! Why else would I keep working on it?” Studying the quadratic formula one time isn’t enough, but repeated study leads to understanding and memory.
Spaced repetition works for skills like playing the piano or hitting a baseball because regular practice sends a message that says, “Hey brain! I’m going to keep doing this, so we’d better get good at it!” Practicing hitting a curveball one time isn’t enough, but repeated practice can lead to mastery.
This is similar to the way we build muscle. If you lift weights once, your body won’t change because you’ve failed to convince your body that change is necessary. But if you lift weights on a regular basis, and you keep increasing the weight, your body will understand that it needs to adapt, and you’ll grow stronger.
Because of neuroplasticity and neurogenesis, the brain is like a bunch of muscles: it grows stronger when it is consistently challenged. New behaviors trigger the growth of new neural connections, and those neural connections will grow thicker if they get used repeatedly.5 When a particular area of the brain is frequently put to use, it will grow new neurons.6 Willpower, for example, resides primarily in the prefrontal cortex,7 and frequent use of willpower – such as through daily meditation – can thicken the grey matter in the prefrontal cortex.8
In other words, spaced repetition does a more effective job of creating actual changes in the brain than large doses of infrequent action.
If you want to start a reading habit, you’ll be much more successful reading a little bit every day rather than reading for two hours on Sunday. If you want to instill self-help wisdom deeply into your mind, you’ll be better off consuming a few good ideas every day rather than attending a Tony Robbins event. If you want to shift your identity from that of a non-meditator to someone who sees herself as a meditator, you’ll make that change more effectively if you commit to five minutes of daily meditation rather than attending a weekend retreat.
Again, it’s not that you shouldn’t do the big things, it’s that the little things done consistently have a bigger impact on your self-image. Plus, the big things will come more easily after you’ve shifted your identity through small, regular actions because all the little things add to your positive momentum.
Recently, I encouraged you to find more OTMs: opportunities to move, meditate, and microbreak. Capitalizing on OTMs is a great way to get in more exercise, mindfulness, or rest than you otherwise would. Spaced repetition is another reason to seek out OTMs. Frequent engagement in these healthy behaviors sends a strong signal to your brain that you’re committed to a healthy lifestyle.
Our future selves will tend to align with our past selves, and the more past selves there are who’ve made good choices, the better. For this reason, the longer I do my morning routine, the easier it gets. Also, this helps explain why the calendar chain is such an effective tool for creating lasting change: It creates a record of good decisions you’ve made, a record of your dedication to self-improvement.
Finally, because of self-perception, regularly performing self-care activities demonstrates to your brain, over and over again, that you care about yourself. From this, your brain naturally concludes that you care about yourself because you love yourself, and that you love yourself because you are worthy of being loved. Not only does this make future self-improvement efforts easier, but it’s also a powerful way to create healthy self-esteem.
Happiness
One of the main aims of self-improvement and behavioral change is, of course, greater happiness. Spaced repetition helps here as well. Positive psychology researcher and author Sonja Lyubomirsky wrote in The Myths of Happiness:
“I recommended that we spend our money on many small pleasures rather than a few big ones. This is because the results of research favor the ordinary over the intense. It turns out that the key to happiness … is not how intensely happy we feel, but how often we feel positive or happy.” 9
And, of course, you don’t have to spend money to create moments of ordinary happiness. Go out of your way to bring fun into your daily life. Make time to connect, make time for yourself, make time to laugh, and make time to create. Sing, dance, play, and be silly.
There are myriad ways to find bits of joy in our daily lives, and there are countless things to be grateful for. We should pause to appreciate something beautiful whenever the opportunity arises. We should strive to remember how lucky we are just to be alive. The old adage to “stop and smell the roses” is actually profoundly good advice. But you can’t stop for the roses if you don’t notice them, so happiness really starts with what you choose to focus on.
Another positive psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson, recommends that we actively create “micromoments” of kindness and loving connection with everyone we interact with, rather than only offering grand gestures of love to the people we’re closest with.10 This can be done by holding doors and offering helping hands, saying “thank you,” saying “hello,” or just smiling when you see people.
Walking Slowly
Becoming better is a lifelong journey. You don’t have to sprint. In fact, you shouldn’t sprint. Take small steps every day, and you’ll make progress without getting burned out. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but that first step must be followed by a million more. Pace yourself.
You’re not too busy to take one step forward today. And you’re not too weak to resist the urge to take three steps backward. There are countless opportunities to do a little bit of work on yourself, and everything counts.
If you want to make a lasting change in your life, you’ll need to change your very identity, and, as James Clear says, “the only way I know to change the type of person that you believe that you are — to build a new and better identity for yourself — is to do so with small, repeated actions.”4
Decide to become someone who consistently does the work, put in your spaced repetition, and you’ll start to think and feel like that kind of person. Eventually, you’ll be that person.
1 Oakley, Barbara. A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even if you Flunked Algebra). Penguin, 2014.
2 Vernikos, Joan. Designed to Move: The Science-Backed Program to Fight Sitting Disease and Enjoy Lifelong Health. Quill Driver Books, 2016.
3 Joffe, Natalie. “Create Lasting Change By Redefining Success.” Northwest Educational Services. January 17, 2017.
4 Clear, James. “How Your Beliefs Can Sabotage Your Behavior.”
5 Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself. Penguin Books, 2006.
6 Jabr, Ferris. “Cache Cab: Taxi Drivers’ Brains Grow to Navigate London’s Streets.” Scientific American. December 8, 2011.
7 MacDonald, Matthew. Your Brain: The Missing Manual. O’Reilly Media, 2008.
8 Lazar, Sara W., et al. “Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness.” NIH Public Access. US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. February 6, 2006.
9 Lyubomirsky, Sonja. The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does. Penguin Books, 2014.
10 Fredrickson, Barbara. Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection. Avery, 2013.