Our habits, good and bad, run our lives.
And we’ve all tried to change the bad ones. Sometimes we’ve been successful, but most of the time it’s been a struggle.
Why is this?
For a couple years now, I’ve been teaching out of Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit in my college study skills class. The book explains, better than anything else I’ve found, how habits work and how to change bad habits into good ones.
In ancient Greece and Rome, many prominent thinkers subscribed to a philosophy called Stoicism.1 We’ll talk generally about borrowing ideas from Stoicism in an upcoming post, but today, I’d like to share a simple Stoic thought exercise that can make it a little easier to bounce back from hardship.
I first encountered this thought exercise a few years ago in the writings of the Roman philosopher Seneca, and it’s become a favorite of mine. It’s simple, easy to do, and as timely today as it was 2,000 years ago.
A coffee shop at my university has a poster on display next to the cream and sugar.
“Find your bliss,” it reads in tall, red letters. Then, a quote from literary megastar J.K. Rowling: “And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.”
Something about this poster rubs me the wrong way.
I just finished an inspiring and challenging article by Harvard computer scientist Radhika Nagpal on the challenge of leading a balanced life as an academic. It’s one of the most useful articles I’ve read in months, and in it, Nagpal highlights seven unconventional things she did to maintain her sanity during her pre-tenure days at Harvard. Among these was making a decision to work no more than 50 hours a week (in a profession where many of her colleagues regularly crank out 80-hour weeks).
Email is kind of a problem.
It is so, so easy to let our email inbox run our day. We arrive at work and check our email, taking an hour to respond to the buildup. More emails arrive in the meantime, of course, so we answer these next. We spend the rest of the morning completing tasks contained in those emails.
It can even get worse: some of us spend every waking moment “on the clock,” so to speak, checking and answering work email in the evening and on weekends. We never disconnect, and we feel like we have no choice. This is just the way the world works now.