Practices

Put your small interruption right before the moment you already know is hard. If it is the drive home, do it as you get into the car.

Anger tends to be patterned rather than random: the same commute, the same meeting, the same hour of the evening, the same name coming up on the…

Your body gets up in the morning and your mind often does not. Half a day can go by in a sort of waking dream, and whatever meets you in it gets the sleepwalker's answer.

So make waking the moment you decide something, before the day has handed you anything to react to. Thirty seconds on the edge of the bed will do:…

If you are on autopilot, the part of you that would notice is asleep as well. So do not count on waking yourself in the moment, arrange for something outside you to do the waking.

That might be a practice kept at fixed times, a phrase agreed with someone at home, a note left where you will genuinely see it, or a plain if this…

Hardly any of us were taught how to acquire a habit. You can know which one you want, agree it is a good idea, and still have no procedure, which is a different problem from not caring.

A procedure is boring and specific: one behaviour, one cue that sets it off, one time of day, and some way of noticing whether it happened. If you…

Change seems to need three things at once: a reason, a method, and enough freedom in the moment to use the method. When you stall, work out which one is missing before trying harder at all of them.

A reason on its own leaves you with a wish. A method on its own leaves you with something you never reach for. Freedom is the one that gets skipped,…

Draw a small circle on three separate scraps of paper without thinking about it. Then look: same size, same spot on the page, same direction of stroke, same starting point, nearly every time.

It is worth actually doing rather than reading about, because the evidence is yours and it is hard to argue with. Nobody chose those four things,…

Choosing has two halves: seeing that there is more than one thing you could do, and then actually taking one. Failing at either looks identical from outside and needs quite different work.

Some people genuinely cannot picture a second option in the moment, and the job there is building a menu in calmer hours. Others can list four…

If you are helping someone set up a practice like this, ask them for ideas before you offer yours. Keep a few in your back pocket for when they run dry.

What people invent for themselves fits their actual life, and they are far more likely to do it. Have suggestions ready anyway, because a brainstorm…

Offer a practice as a question rather than an instruction. What do you think it would be like to wake yourself up once a day? That is a very different sentence from you should.

People argue with instructions, particularly people who were sent rather than came. A question leaves them to make the case, and the case they make…

You are not stuck with the temper you have had so far. Reactions are learnt, which is unglamorous news and also the hopeful kind.

People say things like "I have always been this way" as though it settles the matter, when what it usually describes is a lot of practice. Look for…

Changing how you react is two jobs, not one: loosening the old response and building the new one. Most people only do the second and then wonder why the old one keeps winning.

The new response is usually fine in calm conditions and then vanishes the moment your pulse is up, because the old one is still there, faster and far…