Free Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin Page B

his wallet, was constantly late for work, never had time to play the tennis that he loved, and who chewed gum constantly, and he told me, “I’ve got to make some changes. I’m going to give up gum.”
    I didn’t tell him, but his decision reminded me of an old joke. Late one night, a policeman sees a man weaving around under a streetlight.
    â€œSir, what are you doing?” the policeman asks.
    â€œI’m looking for my car keys,” answers the man, obviously drunk.
    â€œIs this where you lost them?”
    â€œNo, I lost them back there,” the man replies, as he points over his shoulder to a dark area of the sidewalk, “but the light is better here.”
    I’ve noticed that when many people decide to improve their habits, they don’t begin by looking where their keys are; they begin by looking in an easy spot. But then they don’t find their keys.
    So where should we start? It’s helpful to begin with habits that most directly strengthen self-control; these habits serve as the Foundation for forming other good habits. They protect us from getting so physically taxed or mentally frazzled that we can’t manage ourselves.
    From my observation, habits in four areas do most to boost feelings of self-control, and in this way strengthen the Foundation of all our habits. We do well to begin by tackling the habits that help us to:
    1.sleep
    2.move
    3.eat and drink right
    4.unclutter
    Foundation habits tend to reinforce each other—for instance, exercise helps people sleep, and sleep helps people do everything better—so they’re a good place to start for any kind of habit change. Furthermore, somewhat mysteriously, Foundation habits sometimes make profound change possible. A friend once told me, “I cleaned out my fridge, and now I feel like I can switch careers.” I knew exactly what she meant.
    For this reason, Foundation habits deserve special priority. It was no coincidence, I realized, that for my monitoring experiment, I’d chosen to monitor habits that fall into three of the four areas of Foundation. Even before I’d pinpointed the idea of the “Foundation,” I’d intuited the significance of these particular areas.
    Although my habits are pretty good, the Strategy of Monitoring had shown me that I could do a lot to improve my own Foundation.
    First: sleep. My bedtime was 10:30, but I felt a persistent tug to stay up later. Finally, I realized that although I’d always assumed that feeling tired pushed me toward sleep, feeling exhausted often made me stay up later . Going to bed demands a real burst of psychic and physical energy. When I’m too tired to switch gears, and I can’t face the thought of washing my face, I delay going to bed.
    I started to prepare for sleep earlier. Now I wash my face, brush my teeth, swap my contact lenses for glasses, and put on my pajamas well before 10:30. Clearing away these minor tasks makes it easier to go to bed when it’s time.
    I discovered an unexpected bonus to sticking to my bedtime. The last thirty minutes before bed is a danger zone; my self-control is depleted, so I struggle with my good habits. I often head to the kitchen for a last snack. ( Being mildly but chronically short of sleep makes people more susceptible to hunger and temptation—perhaps one reason that obesity is more common among those who get less than six hours of sleep.) I’m cranky, so I sometimes pick a fight with Jamie by wildly overreacting to his failure to change a lightbulb or answer an email. Going to sleep on time means that I spend less time awake in that depleted state.
    As I talked to other people about their sleep habits, however, something puzzled me. Repeatedly, people told me that they were painfully, chronically exhausted—yet when I made the unoriginal suggestion that they go to bed earlier, they became upset and resentful. Why?
    I began to understand. These folks schedule