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

get my balance, I sat up straight, lowered my shoulders, relaxed my jaw, deliberately composed my mind, and began to focus on my breath flowing in and out, smoothly and deeply.
    After about ten seconds, my mind wandered. I tried to notice this shift without judgment and returned to the focus on my breath. Thinking about breathing reminded me of that scene from the Woody Allen movie Husbands and Wives where the character Sally lies in bed next to a man, and while he’s kissing her, she thinks about the fact that he’s a “hedgehog,” and she starts sorting her friends into hedgehogs or foxes. That got me thinking about the Archilochus fragment “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” and that got me thinking about the Isaiah Berlin essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” and that got me thinking about my mixed feelings about Tolstoy … now back to my breath . I thought about breath for a few seconds, then thought about the fact that I’d have to remember to write about having been distracted from my breath by a scene from a Woody Allen movie.
    I observed myself thinking. I observed myself thinking about the fact that I was thinking. I observed myself thinking about the fact that I was thinking about the fact that I was thinking. All this meta-cognition was dizzying.
    Breath.
    I wondered how much time had gone by.
    Breath.
    I sure wouldn’t want to do this for twenty minutes. Or even ten minutes.
    Breath.
    I tried to observe these distractions without frustration or judgment. They were just floating by. At last! I heard the sound of crickets.
    Over the next few days of meditation, I noticed a few things. First, as soon as I started to focus on breathing, my breath felt constricted and artificial . I thought I’d mastered breathing by now .
    Also, I kept teetering off my pillows. Thoreau warned, “ Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” and I wanted to beware of all meditation practices that required new stuff; on the other hand, if I was going to meditate every day, a better sitting pillow seemed like a worthwhile investment (even for an underbuyer like me). I looked online and was amazed by the assortment of meditation paraphernalia on offer. I’d never heard of a “zabuton zafu set,” but when I saw a picture, it looked like exactly what I needed. I hit “Buy now.”
    To apply the Strategy of Scheduling, we must decide when, and how often, a habit should occur. Generally, advice about habit formation focuses on fixed habits , that is, habits that always happen in the same way, without conscious thought. Every day I’m up and brushing my teeth before I know it; I put on my seat belt; I meditate after I get dressed.
    However, I’ve noticed that I have both fixed habits and unfixed habits . An unfixed habit requires more decision making and adjustment: I’m in the habit of going to the gym on Mondays, and I write every day, but every Monday I must decide when to go to the gym, and I must decide when and where I’ll do my daily writing. I try to make my good habits as fixed as possible, because the more consistently I perform an action, the more automatic it becomes, and the fewer decisions it requires; but given the complexities of life, many habits can’t be made completely automatic.
    I’d given up the idea that I can create a habit simply by scheduling an action a certain number of times. Although many people believe that habits form in twenty-one days, when researchers at University College London examined how long people took to adopt a daily habit, such as drinking water or doing sit-ups, they found that on average, a habit took sixty-six days to form. An average number isn’t very useful, however, because—as we all know from experience—some people adopt habits more easily than others (say, habit-embracing Upholders vs. habit-resisting Rebels), and some habits form more