Ever since I stopped building good habits, I feel much better.
I know, I know — it’s a controversial statement in a culture where habit-building is prized as the silver bullet of self-improvement. And, to be fair, I myself used to be a poster child for better habits. Back in the day, James Clear’s Atomic Habits sat enthroned on my nightstand. I was also the proud owner of a habit tracker, where I religiously logged my daily habits — sleep, yoga, reading, etc. And as if that wasn’t enough, the first article I ever published was about habits.
Today, though, I consider the habit-building lifestyle a nightmare. It’s not exactly that habit-building has ruined my life, but it has definitely done me more harm than good.
Here’s what I mean.
Problem 1: The Boiling Frog
Last summer, I created “the perfect morning routine” — well, at least that’s how I thought of it before things went sideways.
My routine would always start around 6 am, when the first sunrays cast squares of light into my room. Then, I would hop on my bike, ride to my local park, and do some bodyweight exercises. Back home, I would make breakfast and coffee before sitting down at my desk to write until noon. Each action clicked into the next as smoothly as the gears of delicate clockwork —
And then, life happened.
One morning, there was this strange resistance. It felt as if grains of sand got into my clockwork of habits, creating all sorts of friction, smoke, and crunchy sounds. Getting up early suddenly felt overpowering. While riding my bike, I felt a lump in my throat. And by the time I reached the park, all of my body’s cells were shouting at me in unison, “Don’t do this, please!”
I didn’t listen.
I didn’t listen because I learned that resistance is a natural obstacle on the path to betterment. In fact, at that moment, I recalled a quote from Atomic Habits: “Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.” Well, I certainly wouldn’t let life get in the way, like a bloody amateur.
No, I would be a professional.
A few days later, I woke up with a high fever. I had listened to my schedule rather than my body, and for that, I paid the ultimate price: my health. Which was ironic, really, because one reason I had built those habits was to improve my health. But somehow, I got so stuck in my self-imposed structure of habits that I’d achieved the exact opposite. Worse, I started feeling guilty, because I suddenly qualified as the dreaded A-word.
I had become an amateur.
Of course, this may seem like a cherry-picked example. Everyone gets sick sometimes. And, of course, I simply could’ve pressed the pause button on my habit routine and resumed it later. Silly me. But even when I leave aside the illiteracy to read my body’s needs — even then, habits tended to complicate my life.
Am I the frog?
Building good habits is kind of like boiling a frog alive. Except you’re the frog. At first, the water feels nice and comfy. It’s your natural habitat. But then, the circumstances keep changing without you noticing, and suddenly you’re stuck in a situation you may not want to be in. In fact, I found that the more I’m immersed in a habit and the better it sounds on paper, the less likely I notice the rising heat.
For example, I once built a very strict writing habit. Each day, I started working at the same time, went to the same coffee shop, listened to the same music, the whole shebang. It was prolific, sure. But when I went on vacation one day, I felt this compulsion to keep the habit alive — to keep writing — even though I really needed a break. As long as I didn’t write, I got itchy and distracted.
The problem with good habits, in other words, is that they sacrifice intentionality for efficiency.
What adds to this boiling-frog problem is the plethora of platitudes preached by habit gurus — “Keep going”, “Winners don’t quit”, “Never miss two days in a row.” Glamorous and tough words. But the words I really needed to hear back then were drowned by the noise of the boiling water:
“Is this still serving me?”
Problem 2: The Habit-ification of Everything
When I first waded through the self-help literature on habits, I stumbled upon an extraordinary finding: Our habits account for 40% of our actions in life. The logical conclusion is that if you want a good life, you must build good habits.
I was convinced. So convinced, in fact, that — much to my demise — I felt a gravitational pull to make a habit out of everything.
For instance, I once noticed that I had been neglecting my emails and text messages. Rather than responding, I would half-heartedly read through them and forget to respond.
I decided to make it a habit. My plan was to respond to all my unanswered text messages daily before going to bed. After doing so, I would tick off the task in my habit planner.
Spoiler: It didn’t work.
What happened was that I lost myself in optimizing my texting habit. “Maybe,” I thought, “I should send the texts while brewing a nighttime tea. Or maybe I should text in the afternoon instead because the blue light will impair my sleep. Or maybe…”
The irony didn’t escape me.
During all the time I spent strategizing and protocolling my texting habit, I could’ve simply typed the damn texts — and on top of it, I could’ve written a novel. But instead, I had burdened myself with the recurring task of doing something I didn’t enjoy: punching empty letters into a glowing plastic screen.
How could that be?
From habit-ification to procrastination
Eventually, I realized that my texting aversion wasn’t a problem to be solved; it was a worry to be examined.
Today, I know that texting makes me anxious, partly because I don’t see the other person’s reactions to what I say, and that scares me. But make no mistake, this is a problem for a therapist, not a habit coach. See, when I tried to fix my worries with habit-building, I just felt guilty for not being a good texter. I felt as if there was something wrong with me.
Building habits around the wrong actions doesn’t solve problems, then — it multiplies them.
To put this point more precisely, the tendency to turn everything into a habit leads to procrastination. The trouble is, planning a habit feels far more rewarding than executing a habit. I found that this particularly applies to things I don’t enjoy doing — like texting. Or take flossing. Telling myself I’m going to floss every day for the next 30 days feels much sexier than actually doing the damn thing: picking up the floss, strangulating my fingers, and grinding my dental gaps.
In other words, many to-dos might benefit from a messy heads-on approach rather than a well-thought out habit plan. Whether it’s writing a novel, calling a loved one, or going for a walk — in all these cases, a habit schedule might just lead to further resistance and procrastination.
So, sometimes, when we build habits, what we actually build is an invisible brick wall that blocks us from connecting with the immediacy of life.
If 40% of our daily actions are habitual, shouldn’t we try to lower that number rather than raise it?
Problem 3: Building Habits Complicates Simple Actions
Earlier this year, I gave habit-building one last chance. This time, my objective was as simple as it could get: I wanted to meditate every morning for at least ten minutes. My hope was that I could use the momentum from meditation to fan the flames of my other habits — exercise, diet, sleep, etc.
The first month went smoothly. No hiccups. My motivation to meditate was so high, I thought I could finally crack the code of habit-building.
And yet, after three months, meditation became something I just wanted to get through. Particularly on the mornings I had to work early or attend lectures, I was desperate to start my day without needing to adhere to a habit. But honestly, I could deal with that. What I couldn’t deal with was another treacherous thought:
“You need to do this daily for the rest of your life.”
It’s funny. I used to think that meditation had the strongest superpowers of all habits. But the thought of turning meditation into a steel-hardened discipline — that is, doing it daily for the rest of my life — pulverized those superpowers. That thought was kryptonite, and ironically, it had been forged in the scorching flames of the habit-building industry.
The result was that I started hyper-fixating not on the present moment but on the infinite future. Soon, I hated meditating — something I had originally declared as a vital part of my life.
Ultimately, my ambitious attempt to build a meditation habit needlessly complicated a once simple action. Observing one breath turned into meditating for ten minutes, which turned into meditating daily, which turned into meditating forever.
This infinity loop of doom was the final straw for my habit-building projects. But luckily, it forced me to grapple with a scary yet rewarding alternative.
The Scary Alternative: One Day at a Time
I was pretty desperate when I quit building habits. And yet, I couldn’t have felt more vindicated when I stumbled upon the wise words of a habit-building OG. I’m talking about Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and one of their guiding mottos for recovery:
Taking it one day at a time.
What this motto shows is that the human mind crumbles under the weight of long-term commitments like “You must stay sober for the rest of your life” — and really, any other new habit. Shifting the perspective to the present, however, lifts that weight off your shoulders.
As AA puts it in their Living Sober guidebook:
…our experience has taught us to make no long-term promises about staying sober. We have found it more realistic — and more successful — to say, “I am not taking a drink just for today.”
Similarly, my experience has taught me to make no long-term promises about building habits. Instead, I’ve found it far more fruitful to tell myself that I’m just going to meditate right now, today. Even more so, I’m just going to focus on my next inhale. Tomorrow, I might discard all my good intentions — who knows? But today, right now, I’m giving this one action my full attention without contemplating the future.
AA says it best:
Life is daily; today is all we have; and anybody can go one day without drinking. First, we try living in the now just in order to stay sober — and it works. Once the idea has become a part of our thinking, we find that living life in 24-hour segments is an effective and satisfying way to handle many other matters as well.
Looking back, the only times I effortlessly sustained good habits were when I didn’t obsess over habit-building to begin with. Healthy habits emerged as a byproduct of whatever mattered to me most at the time — and then, eventually, my habits collapsed again because life got messy. As it should. But here’s the thing:
If I ever stuck with a habit, it was not because I owned a habit tracker. Much rather, it was because — right there and then — I actually gave a shit about whatever I was doing.
Habits are Death Deniers
“Life is daily; today is all we have” — when I truly think about the implications of that insight, I get scared. I suppose that’s precisely the reason why an entire industry has been built around habit-building. Building good habits gives us the impression that life is not, in fact, messy, that we don’t need to die soon, and that we are perfectly in control and on top of things. Habits promise control, stability, consistency.
Alas, this is an illusion.
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realized that habits are nothing but death deniers, faint quests for immortalization. Ultimately, life is daily, and how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.
The reason I feel much better since I stopped building habits is that I get around to doing far more of the things that matter to me. I also do these things more intentionally. Rather than following a schedule like an algorithm-executing machine, I try to take stock and sincerely ask what I need to do. Sometimes, that means writing. Other times, that means meditating. And other times still, that means spending the whole day in bed, watching people with gravity-defying hair talk about coffee.
If you’ve successfully built healthy habits in your life and plan to build more, don’t let me steer your ship off course. But if, like me, you’ve ever struggled to build or stick to a habit, here’s a question that helps me silence my inner habit dictator:
“What’s one thing you can fully commit to — right here and now — when there’s no guarantee or obligation to do it tomorrow?”