I did not decide to breathe

Last week I was in a meeting that was going badly, and partway through it I noticed that I was breathing out for longer than I was breathing in. I had not decided to do that. Nothing had reminded me. I was still following the conversation, still answering when it was my turn, and somewhere underneath that my body had started a practice on its own without consulting me.

The strange part is how long I have known about that breath. I have known about it for years. I have known about tapping for years, and about the butterfly hug on your chest to come back when you have gone somewhere far away. I read about all of it. I understood the mechanisms well enough to explain them to someone else over dinner. And in years of hard meetings I had never once used any of them. The information was in my head, and it was sitting there doing nothing.

What changed was not that I read something better. It was that for the last few months I have been turning the dial most days, answering which of the four states I am in, and then doing the one small thing it offered. Easy long exhale: in for four, out for six. Butterfly hug: arms crossed, tapping my own collarbones. Feet on the ground: press down, feel the chair hold you. One minute, sometimes five. And then, which I think is the part that actually mattered, I noticed what it did. Not whether it was supposed to work. Whether my shoulders had come down. Whether my jaw had let go. Whether the fizzing in my chest was still fizzing.

Two smaller things did more than I expected. When something worked I starred it, which moves it to the front of what I am offered next time, so the list slowly stopped being a general list and became mine. And when my therapist gave me something the app did not have, I typed it in myself. Three of the tools I reach for most often are ones I added. The toolkit I am using now is not the one I shipped.

When I went looking afterwards, the research said my years of knowing and not doing were entirely ordinary. In 2006, Thomas Webb and Paschal Sheeran pooled 47 experiments in which people were randomly assigned to something designed to make them intend to change a behaviour. A medium-to-large shift in what people intended, d = 0.66, produced only a small-to-medium shift in what they actually did, d = 0.36. (Webb and Sheeran, 2006, Psychological Bulletin) Being convinced moves you about half as far as the conviction feels like it should. And I had not even been convinced by an intervention designed by researchers. I had been convinced by a book.

What does close the gap is less interesting and much slower. In 2010, Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London asked 96 volunteers to pick one small eating, drinking, or activity behaviour and do it every day, in the same context, for 12 weeks. The volunteers rated how automatic it felt each day. Automaticity rose along a curve, and the time it took people to get within reach of their own ceiling ranged from 18 days to 254. The authors fitted their model to 62 of the volunteers and got a good fit for 39, so this is a small study making a modest claim, and the claim is the useful part: automaticity comes from repeating a behaviour in a consistent context. Missing a single day did not meaningfully set anyone back, but being inconsistent did. (Lally et al., 2010, European Journal of Social Psychology)

There is one more piece, and it is the one that explains the noticing. In 2017, Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach ran five studies on why people stay with long-term goals. People say they exercise or study for the delayed payoff, and the delayed payoff is what got them to set the goal. It was not what predicted whether they kept going. Immediate rewards, such as simply enjoying the thing while doing it, predicted persistence where delayed rewards did not, over a week and over three months. (Woolley and Fishbach, 2017, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin) Reading about a practice hands you the delayed reason to do it. Feeling your shoulders drop hands you the immediate one. For years I had the reason and never the reward.

James Clear tied this exceptionally well in his book Atomic Habits. His two-minute rule says that “when you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do,” which is almost exactly the shape of what I ended up doing, and the fourth of his four laws is to make a habit satisfying, on the argument that what gets rewarded immediately is what gets repeated. (Clear, How to Stop Procrastinating) He had also written up the Lally study years before I went looking for it, although he gives the median as “66 days to be exact”, and the paper is a good deal less certain than that. (Clear, How Long Does it Actually Take to Form a New Habit?) So the one-minute practice and the immediate reward had both been described to me, in plain English, in a bestseller, years ago. It changed nothing, because reading the book about why reading is not enough is still reading.

Here is what I believe now. Knowing a practice and having one are two different things, and the distance between them is not more information. It is a small number of minutes, done often, in a place your body comes to expect them, with your attention on what changed in your body afterwards rather than on whether it worked. I did not get these techniques from understanding them. I got them from doing them one minute at a time, for a few months, while paying attention.

I built this to find out whether it works for people who are not me, and I still do not know that. What I can report is that it worked on me, surprisingly well, and that it did not arrive as an insight. It arrived as something my body did in a meeting before I got there.

If you have a practice that eventually became automatic for you, I would like to know what the turning point was, because I no longer think mine was the moment I understood it.