The power of taking microsteps, from the head of the Huffington Post.
But making changes in our lives and creating new habits isn’t easy, especially as we approach resolution season
By
Illustration by Sarah Mazzetti
Small habits can make a big change.
On April 6, 2007, I woke up in a pool of my own blood. I was two years into building The Huffington Post. A divorced mother of two teenage daughters, I had just returned from a week of taking my eldest daughter on a tour of prospective colleges, and, since she had insisted that I stayed off my Blackberry during the day, I would stay up each night working. And so, the morning after we returned home, I woke up burned out and exhausted — and collapsed. The result was a broken cheekbone, several stitches over my eye and the beginning of a long journey.
In the days that followed, I found myself in a lot of doctors’ waiting rooms, which, it turns out, are great places to think about life. And that’s what I did. I asked myself a lot of questions, like: Is this what success really looks like? Is this the life I want to lead?
The answer was no. And the diagnosis I got from all the doctors was that I had a severe case of burnout. So I got deep into the growing body of science on the connection between well-being and performance, and how we can actually be more productive when we prioritize our well-being and take time to unplug and recharge.
So I decided to make a lot of changes to my life. I wanted to start sleeping enough. I wanted to start meditating again, which I had learned to do as a child. I wanted to change the way I worked so I could be more productive, more focused, more energetic and less tired and stressed.
But making changes in our lives and creating new habits isn’t easy, especially as we approach resolution season: A study from the University of Scranton found that 92 percent of people fail to keep their New Year’s resolutions, and another found that 80 percent will have already failed by the second week of February.
That’s why at Thrive Global, the company I founded to help people improve both their well-being and performance, our behavior change system is built on the idea of microsteps. These are small, actionable and science-backed steps you can take to make immediate changes in your daily life. It’s the idea that if you make the steps small enough, they’ll become too-small-to-fail. And as research has shown, starting small makes new habits more likely to stick.
People are tired of being sick and tired. They want to work and live in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them. And making even very small changes in our trajectory can, over time, lead us to a very different destination. By making our microsteps too small to fail, we can make those first, small changes on which we can begin to build a new and healthier way of living and working. There’s nothing wrong with aiming big — but we can help ourselves by starting small.
Here are 10 of my favorite microsteps in a handful of areas of life. Each can serve as the foundation for continuing to make more changes in your life.
Pick a time at night when you turn off your devices — and gently escort them out of your bedroom.
Our phones are repositories of everything we need to put away to allow us to sleep — our to-do lists, our inboxes, multiple projects and problems. Disconnecting from the digital world will help you sleep better, recharge more deeply and reconnect to your wisdom and creativity.
