I should make one healthy choice, and then stop choosing.
I often learn more from one person's highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal practices or cite up-to-date studies.
Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control.
Gertrude Stein remarked, Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.
Frankl observed, In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. *
For most of us, the real aim isn’t to enjoy a few pleasures right now, but to build habits that will make us happy over the long term. Sometimes, that means giving up something in the present, or dema...
For instance, in The Artist’s Way, her influential book about cultivating creativity, Julia Cameron suggests scheduling an artist’s date,
For instance, if it’s 9 a.m. and I have an appointment at 11 a.m., I’ll think ‘Oh, I have to go somewhere in two hours, so I can’t really start anything serious’ and then end up wasting my whole morni...
Finally, it became perfectly obvious. A finish line marks a stopping point. Once we stop, we must start over, and starting over is harder than continuing.
Feeling right is about living the life that’s right for you—in occupation, location, marital status, and so on. It’s also about virtue: doing your duty,
False Choice Loophole: This is the loophole-seeking strategy I most often invoke. I pose two activities in opposition, as though I have to make an either/or decision, when in fact, the two aren’t nece...
Drawing on intrinsic motivation makes us far more likely to stick to a behavior, and to find it satisfying.
Clarity of values also makes it possible to identify red-herring habits. A red-herring habit is a habit that we loudly claim to want to adopt, when we don’t actually intend to do so.
By helping us to feel energetic and happy, healthy treats can play a key role in fostering good habits, but we must guard against the temptations of unhealthy treats. The pleasure lasts a minute, but...
As I turned the key and pushed open the front door, as I crossed the threshold, I thought how breathtaking, how fleeting, how precious was my ordinary day Now is now. Here is my treasure.
Another study suggested that getting one extra hour of sleep each night would do more for a person's happiness than getting a $60,000 raise.
Although many people believe that habits form in twenty-one days, when researchers at University College London examined how long people took to adopt a daily habit, such as drinking water or doing si...
Also, there was a Princeton study that found that visual clutter reduces your ability to focus and process information.
Aaron Beck, founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, maintains that people find it easy to notice what their partners do wrong, but not what they do right, so he suggests keeping marriage diaries to t...
Arriving rarely makes you as happy as you anticipate.p 84