In March I published a post explaining—and diagramming with stick figures—how I’d become enamored with Stoicism.

The ideas resonated with others too. The post made the front page of Reddit, and whenever someone in real life tells me they read this blog, that’s the article they mention.

The title was “The Only Thing You Need to Get Good At”, referring to the Stoic skill of continually returning your attention to the small number of things you can control, and leaving the rest of your worries to fate.

Six months later, I can report that I did not get good at it. I am still constantly becoming fixated on what I can’t control and overlooking what I can, and I don’t believe I could “march to the gallows in good cheer.”

Not only do I forget to respond Stoically to emerging dilemmas in life, it’s hard to locate even a whiff of that fate-loving sense of empowerment I seemed to embody so easily for those few weeks.

I’m not worried about this, however, for reasons I’ll explain. I know what ingredient was missing.

This is a pretty common human pattern, especially for self-improvement hobbyists. You read about a new perspective that immediately clicks with your intuitions, triggering a so-called “Aha!” moment. Armed with this insight, you enjoy a few weeks of newfound enthusiasm and ease. Then, when you’re not looking, this “New You” disappears into your old patterns.

The “Aha” moment is it’s own unique emotion: a feeling of “Ah! That makes so much sense!” It feels like you’ve gained possession of a new lens, through which everything in your life looks tidier and more manageable: your work, your relationships, your health, your finances, and yourself.

The lens might be Stoicism, emotional literacy, frugality, non-procrastination, living in the present moment, reframing criticism, or some other perspective. We get really excited about our new perspective, see its potential everywhere, and maybe do some light proselytizing.

Then the epiphany’s afterglow fades. Soon you feel like you’ve forgotten how to look at the world that way. You might even reread the material that gave you the insight in the first place, and maybe a hint of the feeling returns. But over time it starts to seem irretrievable.

Occasionally, after an “Aha” moment, we really do turn over a new leaf, but much more often we return to old patterns without ever deciding to. So when they do stick, what makes them stick?

The missing ingredient

Since most of my day job is to offer exactly these sorts of epiphany-inducing perspectives, I receive a lot of emails from people in the middle of epiphanies. I often wonder how many of them become lasting changes, and how many fizzle after a short burst of enthusiasm.

I received a number of these excited messages in July, after I published “The Alternative to Thinking All the Time.” The post argued that when we’re not attending to our present-moment sensory world, we’re probably just ruminating uselessly. Therefore we should invest in a habit of frequently returning to our sensory experience.

Readers reported that after reading the article, they went for blissful walks, basked in gentle breezes, ate transcendent sandwiches, marveled at the steam swirling up from their coffee, and otherwise lived in the present moment in a way they usually don’t. They expressed excitement at more days like this, presumably to come.

But I wondered how many people took to heart the bottom half of the article, which argues explicitly that we don’t have a hope of living that way, at least with any consistency, unless we have some kind of regular practice. We are so strongly conditioned to live in our heads that we simply will not remember to live in our sensory experience when we haven’t just read an article about it.

The absence of a daily practice is why my Stoicism kick didn’t change me for long. Since I have decades of experience fixating on what I can’t control, after that first few weeks of enthusiasm I barely noticed the possibility of responding Stoically during setbacks. I acted out my old ways so reflexively that I never gained any appreciable experience with the new way, and no momentum could build.

You Need a Practice

To start living in a new way, we need a practice—some way to gain experience noticing the moments when we’re about to do thing A, and then do thing B instead, even while it’s still exceedingly easy and comfortable to do thing A. Just a few “reps” every day is enough to get a foothold, and start to dissolve the reflexive nature of the old behavior.

In the case of Stoicism, a simple practice might have been this: every morning I list everything I’m worried about that day. Then, from that, I make a (much smaller) list of the things I can actually control. Doing this practice, and checking the second list while I work, would give me a small but regular bit of training at focusing on what I can control (B) when I normally would be focusing on what I can’t (A).

That’s the skeleton of any effective practice: recognizing moments where you can change an A to B, on a regular basis, over time.

In the case of living in the present, I already have a practice. Twice a day, I sit and observe my present moment experience: sounds, bodily feelings and emotions. When I notice I’ve become preoccupied (A) I come back to noticing the unfolding of the present moment (B). That’s meditation. Over time, this practice has completely transformed my life.

Doing even a little bit of B starts to break down the automaticity of doing A. The new way occurs to you more often. Each of these moments creates another chance to practice. Gradually the new way becomes natural.

Epiphanies, or “Aha!” moments, awaken us to the possibility of living differently, but they don’t illuminate those crucial moments when we need to remember that possibility, and they don’t make the new way feel easy or natural.

We tend to think that big changes happen in life when we discover a better way to live. But that discovery is not the moment of change. You really change when this new way of living starts to feel natural, and for that to happen, you need a practice.

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A few times a year I offer a simple, 30-day mindfulness course called Camp Calm. The idea is to develop a modest but consistent meditation practice and a few mindful living habits, at a gentle pace of about ten minutes a day. You should check it out. Registration is opening this week. [More info here]

Photo by Quentin Dr

Since I started experimenting with short stretches of idleness throughout my otherwise very busy summer days, I’ve become convinced that we’d probably get more done, and enjoy our lives more, if we encountered fewer clocks.

Even without clocks, we know what part of the day we’re in—early morning, late morning, mid-afternoon—and that’s usually enough to know what we ought to be doing right now. We can set alarms for appointments easily. So why do we need the time displayed on every electronic device, at all times?

That much clockage might be more than just unnecessary. Maybe there’s such thing as being too aware of the exact hour and minute. If there is, we must be well past that point.

As I’ve hidden and disabled the clocks around me, the days seem to flow better. Without question, I’m more efficient with my time, even though I’m unsure of exactly how much of it goes where. It simply feels healthier to operate with the vague sense that it’s mid-morning than to know it’s 10:24.

Almost everyone reading this remembers living in an era where you had to make some effort to check the time. You had to look around to see which room had a clock. If you were out on the street, you had to ask someone. I can’t help but feel like back then we had a healthier relationship to time. Read More