Years ago, I had a conversation with a friend who had a young child. This conversation illuminated the crucial role that our identity plays in making—or breaking—habits.
“My husband and I desperately need to go to bed earlier,” she told me. “We stay up too late, and we have to get up early because of the baby. We’re exhausted. We keep saying we’re going to go to bed earlier, and we never do.”
“What’s your routine?” I asked.
“We put our son to bed, we eat dinner, we each do some work, and around 11 pm, we go into the kitchen, have some nuts or cheese or something, and talk.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Yes,” she said. Then she added what sounded like the key to the issue: “We know we should be responsible parents and go to sleep. But we’re holding on to this last piece of our adult lives, before the baby. It just feels so . . . domesticated to go bed before midnight. Even though we really need the sleep.”
To go to sleep earlier, she and her husband would have to change their identities; they’d have to become domesticated.
The fact is, changing a habit sometimes means altering or even losing an aspect of ourselves.
In Better Than Before, my book about habits, I describe the twenty-one strategies we can use to make or break our habits. I’d been studying habits a long time before I began to appreciate the importance of the Strategy of Identity. Our idea of “this is the kind of person I am” is so bound up in our habits and actions that it’s hard to see. But eventually, I realized that our sense of identity often makes it easier or harder to change a habit, because identity exerts such a powerful force over our behavior.
Companies and institutions can change our habits—for better and for worse—by persuading us to link certain habits to identities to which we aspire. One of my favorite examples comes from the terrific book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath.
They describe how an anti-littering campaign successfully changed the littering habits of Texans. In the 1980s, Texas had a huge litter problem, and it was costing the state millions of dollars to deal with it. Many popular messages such as “Please Don’t Litter,” “Give a Hoot—Don’t Pollute,” and “Pitch In” had failed with the target demographic. The typical litterer, they determined, was a man, between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, drove a pickup, and liked sports and country music. “Please don’t litter” just didn’t resonate.
So, for the campaign, famous Texans such as George Foreman, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Willie Nelson, and various popular Texas sports figures made TV spots with the message “Don’t mess with Texas.” The campaign convinced viewers that a true Texan—a proud, loyal, tough, virile Texan—doesn’t litter. A true Texan protects and respects Texas! During the campaign’s first five years, visible roadside litter dropped 72 percent.
Our identity shapes our habits. So if you’re trying to change your habits, and you’re having trouble, consider your identity. Your identity may need to change first.
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned? There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to happiness. We must know ourselves and what’s right for us, because we can build a happy life only on the foundation of our own values, interests, strengths, and temperament.
Consider the question below. Perhaps it will illuminate a hidden or ignored aspect of your nature.
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