Meet Clocky, the mobile alarm clock. At the appointed hour, it rolls off your nightstand and tears around the room, forcing you out of bed to shut it off. Invented by MIT student Guari Nanda, it sold 35,000 units in the first two years on the market, at $50 a pop, with minimal advertising. Who on earth would buy such a thing? Anyone who can’t exercise mind over mattress, apparently. And that would be all of us at one point or another.
Clocky’s antics are described in vivid detail in Chip and Dan Heath’s book “Switch” in which they give us a practical framework for dealing with the endless and baffling duality of human nature: we want one thing yet do another. Borrowing an analogy from Jonathan Haidt’s “The Happiness Hypothesis”, they liken our inner conflict to the relationship between a headstrong Elephant (our emotional self and its habits) and the Rider (our logical brain and its long-term plans). As long as the Elephant is cooperative the Rider has control, but when push comes to shove, we know who’s going to win and it ain’t the bitty Rider. So we must stack the odds in the favour of the Rider by managing the environment, or Path.
When trying to implement change in, say, improving our health, many of us are convinced that iron self-control is the ticket to success. All we have to do is put our minds to it. Our minds, or Riders, excel at weighing the pros and cons of change, describing all the obstacles and determining the best course of action. The hitch comes in taking action, or actually behaving differently. Our Riders have one tremendous flaw – analysis paralysis. They harvest mountains of data of the kind the brothers Heath call TBU – true but useless.
The Elephant is the action figure in this drama, but he greatly prefers action that is already well-honed. The route he took yesterday is the one he’ll head straight for today, thank you. And this brings us to the crucial aspect of any behavioural change, Shape the Path. What we often describe as a character issue (he’s clearly lazy and doesn’t want to change), is more often than not a Path issue.
Willpower, as proven in a number of studies of both humans and dogs, is an exhaustible resource. Once we’ve used up our quota, and it’s a LOT smaller than we might think, it’s gone for the time being. It can be replenished, but usually not in time for the Rider to haul the Elephant back on the path toward the celery and away from the brownies.
We need to make change easy for both Rider and Elephant. It’s no secret that we are creatures of habit, so we need to make it difficult to employ behaviours we want to ditch and make it easy to form the habits we want to develop. In his hilarious book, “The Happiness Advantage”, Shawn Achor describes how by removing the batteries from his TV remote, he recouped three hours a day for endeavours he and his Rider had decided were worthwhile. Like many of us, he had resolved to use his evenings productively, but coming home from work tired and cranky, he often plopped down in front of the TV instead. Oh, that Elephant! Reaching for the remote, he would click it before remembering that the batteries were in his night side table, approximately 20 seconds’ walk from the couch. On the coffee table in front of him were his laptop and a novel he wanted to read. Beside the couch was his guitar. It seems that 20 seconds of effort is the tipping point where our brains decide it’s easier to stay put than get up, so Shawn found himself working on his thesis on his computer, reading his book or practicing his guitar.
Say we have decided we want to begin a morning exercise regime. We can employ the same principle by sleeping in our workout clothes (extreme, but effective), or by setting out our workout clothes and shoes the night before, then leaving them right by the bed (probably more appealing to our sleeping partners, yet still effective). In the same way as the TV remote example, our brain will think it’s harder to take off our running shoes than to actually exercise. To avoid giving the Rider any wiggle room, the night before we also need to decide what kind of exercise we’re going to do.
Hard to believe we can be so gullible, isn’t it? Whatever works, say the Elephant and the Rider.