On a whim I decided to commit to three small changes for the remainder of Lent, not because I’m religious, but because I like the idea of temporarily renouncing things.

I kept the changes small because small is easy, and might still be worthwhile. First I renounced the scrolling of Twitter and Reddit, because I kind of got into that again over the winter. I just took five minutes to block them on my phone, and I don’t miss them. I also started drinking more water again. I’m not sure when I got away from actively drinking water, but now that I’m doing it again I feel more energetic. Lastly, I stopped pushing my bedtime past my old bedtime by 15 or 20 minutes. I forgot that I used to be more strict about that. Again, I’m not sure when that happened, but I was able to correct it in a day.

That’s it. There’s no attempt here to “reach my potential” or “turn the corner” or become a “new me,” I just decided to change these little things and keep them going at least until Easter.

My expectation was that such small changes would yield proportionately small benefits, maybe worthwhile enough to keep doing afterward. But I feel like I’m getting way more out of them than the small effort I’m putting in.

How I’ve felt since reminds me of how I felt when I was a bit younger. I’m sharper, more patient, more inclined to do things. The body moves more easily, the mind finds words more easily, intentions form more easily. It’s not quite an amazing change, but it really is significant.

Together my new habits take maybe 2% more effort — I have to fill up my water bottle a few more times, I have to turn off the TV and start flossing fifteen minutes earlier, and I have to choose something else to do when muscle memory has me pulling out my phone. Life has gotten much more than 2% better though. It’s more like 20%, at least. I have more time, and noticeably more energy. This is a really good deal.

Low-Hanging Fruit Isn’t Rare

It’s natural to assume that low-hanging fruit, anywhere it has real value, has already been picked through. By middle age or so, it might seem reasonable there wouldn’t still be any easy changes up for grabs that would make a large and immediate difference to your life. If there were, you would have grabbed them already. The worthwhile stuff you have left to do is all difficult, on the order of giving up junk food, becoming an early riser, or exercising daily.

I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that. We don’t track our lives like an accountant tracks a business’s every sale and expenditure. With personal habits, there’s no “efficient market effect” always scanning for easy wins and driving us over time towards optimal settings. Humans are complex, conflicted creatures, driven by ancient and irrational feelings of comfort and aversion. We’re always pursuing many different kinds of value and avoiding many different kinds of costs. We’re not exactly microchip-efficient in our use of time and inner resources.

Now, it could be that I’m a very unusual case, and I was making several glaring blunders few grownups would fall for: wanton underhydration, masochistic social media habits, and a childish disregard for bedtime. Only someone as silly and distracted as I am would leave such juicy lobes of low-hanging fruit unpicked for so long.

But I doubt that. I think we’re all like this. Because there are so many factors affecting our well-being, and because we’re so irrational and habit-driven, a given person is probably only an arm’s reach from many immediate and significant improvements. What would happen if you simply dropped your usual after-lunch coffee? Would you struggle to get anything done, or would you sleep well for the first time in years? What would happen if you took five minutes to stretch every morning? What if you tried reading a novel before bed instead of Reddit?

You don’t know, but you could find out for very little cost, and perhaps gain something significant.

My hypothesis is that most people are just a few such small changes away from a ~20 percent leap in day-to-day ease and quality of life. Such leaps might come in the realm productivity, sleep quality, connection with others, available time, or some other element of well-being, just by trying out, in earnest, a few low-cost changes.

It’s not much of a gamble—to test whether life would get immediately better after quitting some small thing you know is bad for you, or committing to some small thing you know is good for you. Give it even a week of really doing it, and see.

A Thousand Buttons to Push

Of course, what makes the difference depends on the person. Our individual habits and oversights vary immensely, so a given intervention might do nothing, or it might change everything. Also, something that requires little effort to one person might require a major effort for someone else. Some possibilities:

• Drinking water throughout the day
• Abstaining from reading online comments
• Trying to make your interactions with clerks and cashiers less rote
• No longer eating those Werther’s Originals from that bowl in the staff room
• Taking a daily vitamin D supplement
• Doing a two-minute body scan once a day
• Stretching while the kettle’s heating
• Clearing your desktop at the end of the day
• Reading a bit of a holy book or inspirational text every day
• Doing ten pushups each morning
• Giving visibly dirty household things a quick wipe when you notice them
• Cutting out one daily instance of a caffeinated or sugary beverage
• Going to bed fifteen minutes earlier
• Refraining from taking your phone out at the bus stop
• Restricting wine to weekend meals
• Applying a good moisturizer after washing your face
• Waiting till 10am to check email
• Cleaning as you go when you cook, instead of afterward
• Deleting an app you spend too much time on
• Abstaining from swearing
• Eating a raw vegetable once a day
• Making a game of being a better listener than usual
• Shining the sink at before going to bed
• Putting away, every day, the random objects that end up on the kitchen table

Small stuff, but you don’t know the difference until you try it. Imagining what will “probably” happen isn’t a good way of testing it. Some things might not prove to be worthwhile, but many will, and the odd one will significantly improve day-to-day life in ways you’d never guess.

There are two main sources of ideas for this. One is noticing what other people make a point of doing, or not doing. There might be a good reason your friend’s stovetop is always wiped clean, or why some people make a big deal about getting outside early in the day.

The other source is returning to things you used to do, perhaps when you were a lot younger. Maybe some part of your perception of “being older” isn’t tied to the advance of time but simply that you no longer go for walks, or do the crossword, or carry a water bottle around with you. You can get these things back in a day.

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Photos by Philippe Gauthier, Fumiaki Hayashi, Brendan Church, and Patrick Fore