When we change our habits, we change our lives.

GRETCHEN RUBIN, Author, The Happiness Project and Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

ANGIE COIRO, Talk Show Host, “In Deep with Angie Coiro” — Moderator

ANGIE COIRO: Can you explain for us; you’re known for your work on happiness and now you’re on habits. What’s the link from A to B?

GRETCHEN RUBIN: Well, for years, I was reading and researching and writing and talking to people about happiness. I began to notice this pattern, which was, often when people would talk about either a big boost in happiness that they had achieved, or more often, a big challenge that they were struggling with in their happiness, they would point to something that really at its core was a habit that they couldn’t make or break. So, for instance, somebody would say, “I’m just exhausted all the time. I’m so stressed out. I’m so drained. I can never go to sleep on time.” Really that is the habit of getting enough sleep. But for some reason, that habit wasn’t forming in the right way. Or people would say, “Oh, I know I’d be happier if I’d exercise. Why can’t I get myself to exercise?” Well, why can’t you? I don’t know. So I began to really focus in on it. Then a friend – because I get most of my ideas from just a casual conversation – a friend of mine said, “Well, here’s the weird thing. When I was in high school, I was on the track team and I never missed track practice, but I can’t go running now. Why?” And I thought, “Well, why?” Same person, same behavior. What was different? What had changed? Why, at one time was it effortless, and now she can’t do it? So then I was like, “I’m determined to figure this out because habits are 40 percent of our daily life, research suggests, and so if you have habits that work for you, you’re much more likely to be happier, healthier, more productive. And if they’re not working for you, it’s going to be a lot tougher. So habits are almost like a prequel to happiness.

COIRO: Let’s get those four tendencies out of the way first.

RUBIN: OK. So of everything in the book, I think this is the most original, definitely the most intellectually challenging, but I have to warn you, it sounds a little bit boring when I start. So bear with me, hang in there. It gets interesting, I promise. This has to do with how you deal with expectation. An outer expectation, like a work deadline or request from a boss or a spouse, and an inner expectation, like your own desire to keep a New Year’s resolution or your own desire to get back into meditation. Upholders respond readily to outer and inner expectations alike. They easily meet a work deadline and they pretty easily keep a New Year’s resolution. They want to meet the expectations that are put on them, but they also want to meet their expectations for themselves. Next are questioners. Questioners question all expectations. They’ll do it if they think it makes sense. They hate anything arbitrary or irrational. They always want to have justification. So, in a way, they make everything an inner expectation because they only will uphold something, an expectation, if they think that it makes sense. Next, obligers, that’s my friend on the track team. Readily meets outer, but has a lot of trouble meeting inner [expectations]. This is like a friend of mine who is a journalist who had no trouble working at a newspaper and he wrote constantly, was very prolific, had no trouble working, but then when he took a year off to try to write a novel on his own, he stalled out – obliger. Finally, rebel. Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike. They want to do what they want to do when they want to do it. If [someone] asks or tells them to do something, they’re likely to do the opposite and they tend to get frustrated with themselves because they don’t want to tell themselves what to do. The rebel category is the smallest. The upholder category is also  very small, which was a big surprise to me when I was writing this book. I went into it thinking I was very typical. And it turns out I’m one of the freaks. I remember saying to my husband, “You know, I’ve learned that I have this extreme personality.” He was just like, “You think?” I’m like, “How did you know?” He said, “I’m married to you.” Most people are questioners or obligers. Those are overwhelmingly the biggest tendencies and it has a lot of implications for how you form habits because how you respond to an expectation is very much influenced by what your tendency is.

COIRO: What about the issue of assessing the habit and knowing whether the habit that you are striving to have is realistic, either according to your tendency or just according to the type of person you are? Like, I really want to form the habit of doing ballet every day. I’m not going to do ballet every day. That’s not going to happen. So how do you get a reality check on the habits you’re trying to look at?

RUBIN: Well, that’s a very good point. I call them “red herring habits” and this is something that you’ll see when somebody voices the desire to have a habit, but you can tell they don’t really want to. And often it’s because the people around them are telling them they should. “Yes, I really am going to start exercising. I really need to do that. You know, my family’s telling me I need to exercise. I’m definitely going to start to exercise.” No, you’re not.

The problem with saying things like that is that you begin to believe it, and then people get discouraged about the fact that they have tried and failed to form a habit, when in fact they haven’t really tried. So part of it is being honest with yourself about what you really want. Do you really want to give up coffee? I’m sort of a habits pusher. But I often find myself in the position of challenging people whether they even should or want to change a habit because they’ll say things like, “I should quit chewing so much gum.” I’m like, “Why should you quit chewing gum?” I’m not saying you shouldn’t quit chewing gum, but why would you? Because if you don’t have a reason to do it, first of all, you probably won’t be as successful because you don’t really care. Also, why waste your energy doing it? Part of it is to be honest with yourself about what you really want, because the fact is if you did want to do ballet, you could do ballet.

COIRO: What is one big habit you were able to break or change?

RUBIN: Oh! Well, I have a habit that I made that I really don’t like. Sitting is the new smoking. I am a writer, so basically my job is to sit in a chair. I bought my sister, who’s also a writer, a treadmill desk. She walks like five, seven miles a day on her treadmill desk. But I live in New York City; my office is so small that if I had a treadmill desk, I wouldn’t be able to open the door of the office. Sort of a drawback. So now I stand up whenever I’m on the phone. I’m not on the phone all that much, but it gets me up and it also gets me in the habit of thinking, “Oh, I should get up on my feet.” That was a small habit that actually I feel is very energizing. It’s energizing to be on my feet more because I can go for many, many hours sitting, so that’s one.

COIRO: Should you marry a person in your same category?

RUBIN: Oh interesting!  Well, there’s definitely patterns with how people pair up. And here is the most interesting one. Every rebel that I have spoken to who has a long-term partner, it is with an obliger. And obligers sometimes think they’re upholders. I just got an e-mail today from somebody being like “I’m this crazy thing that you said didn’t exist. I’m an upholder married to a rebel,” and I’m like “No, I bet you’re an obliger.” Because that’s a pairing that works.

Could you have two rebels married? It would be tough because no one would pay the bills. That seems to be a thing. Rebels really don’t like to pay bills. They don’t like the idea that they have to do something at a certain time. You know, I think it could work.

Also, this is just one tiny slice of a person’s personality. You can be a very, very considerate rebel or you could be an inconsiderate rebel or you can be a very compassionate questioner or a very smart questioner or you can be a not-so-smart questioner.

You’re still a questioner. It doesn’t have to go with your intelligence. Or you can be a fun-loving upholder or a not fun-loving upholder. The tendencies look very different depending on how ambitious you are. All those things come into play in a good romantic relationship. But I think the tendencies are part of it. Two obligers might stall out, you know, with certain kinds of things, if there was no one to put that outer expectation on them. I don’t know. It’s an interesting question.

COIRO: How do you tell the difference between a habit and a character trait – for example, being a morning person?

RUBIN: The thing about morning people and night people is very interesting. There’s this fascinating book – I think the title of it is Chronotypes. It’s about chronotypes: morning people and night people and people in between, and it’s fascinating. I used to think that morning people could be night people if they would just go to sleep earlier. No. That is not true. A lot of people are in between, but there really are truly morning people and night people, and this is genetic, this is a hardwired thing, so it’s a trait. Teenagers tend to be owls. Older people tend to be larks. Little kids are larks.

Interestingly, larks tend to be happier. It’s thought that it’s because society basically is set up for larks. So if you’re an owl, it’s much harder. You’re much more likely to be sleep-deprived because you can’t go to sleep early, like your whole body is trying to keep you up. That’s when you’re productive and creative and you can’t go to sleep, and then you have to wake up anyway.

Some habits, I think, usually we can kind of tell the difference, and I try to point out a lot of things where it might just be the kind of person that you are that then you should build your habits around.

So, for instance, I guess this is a character trait: some people are simplicity lovers and some people are abundance lovers. So some people love quiet and few choices and clean, cleared-out spaces; they like simplicity and calm. Then other people like abundance. They like some bustle [and] choice.

You can imagine if you were trying to run the habit of exercising or you were going to a co-working space to form the habit of working on your Ph.D. thesis every day, you want to think about what environment is going to be the most appealing to you and what’s going to be the environment that will help you stick to your habits because it’s going to be suitable for you. All of this is about how you suit your habits to yourselves. It’s a fine line and it’s a very important thing to think about.