Experiment for 3 Months
The 3-Month Experiment
We have found that a 3 month commitment to a new habit provides invaluable insights and experiences that make it all worth it, regardless of whether or not you continue the habit. The only way to fail is to not try. If you truly try, even if you are not perfect and regardless of the outcome, your experiment will add a ton of value to your life.
When people imagine their lives with a bunch of new, healthy habits, they tend to imagine a bunch of chores they have to do all day, every day. It sounds exhausting just writing that, so it’s easy to imagine the lack of appeal of implementing new, healthy habits. But, over time, habits become exactly the opposite of chores and work to make life easier, better, create more freedom, and make life more enjoyable...thinking about them just doesn’t always feel that way. Once a habit is routine, there is little to no willpower required to follow through and the benefits from that habit tend to compound on themselves and across many aspects of our life. Additionally, just like it’s hard to imagine our daily lives including certain habits, it’s equally hard to imagine our lives without habits that we currently do, even negative ones. This actually works in our favor! Once a habit that fits the life we want to live is in place, the thought of changing our lives and removing the habit is just as unappealing as the thought of adding it to our lives may have been before we integrated it. If we imagine the person we want to be and the life we want to have, we can then identify the daily habits of that person. Our habits, over time, will build that person.
For us, the experience of implementing a habit has always been different than what we imagined it was going to be like and most of the time, we had tremendously inflated what we thought the “bad” or “annoying” aspects would be like. The ironic thing is that most people, imagine that both adding a beneficial habit or removing a negative habit will somehow make their life worse. They tend to feel the beneficial habit will be boring or hard work making day to day life suck and they feel like they are going to miss out on enjoyment if they ditch any of their habits, even if they are unhealthy ones. “I could never live without [blank]” and “I just can’t imagine myself doing [blank] every day” are extremely common phrases we hear people say. For people with language like that, we can confidently estimate that they will be the ones who struggle to change anything. Remember, your current lifestyle has gotten you to where you currently are, so if you are seeking a different outcome, you need different inputs. Until we understand that the only way to gain insight into what our life will be like if [blank] is to actually do and experiment with [blank], we will be frozen on the sidelines based on bad estimations.
Ego and identity also play a major role in the lack of committing fully to a new habit. A fear of failure causes people to hold back effort. They hedge their bet and think that if they don’t put in high effort, then if things don’t work out, they won’t feel like they actually failed. They don’t want to know what they are capable of, they want to think of themselves a certain way. When we think about it, it is obvious that people are more likely to fail if they don’t try hard. We think differently. We want to accurately test out who we currently are, so we can find our weak points and grow. If we fail at something, then it’s simply an opportunity to find weaknesses in our current ability or process and make adjustments to get better. Testing and coming up short doesn’t say anything about what we are capable of in the future, just what we were capable of in that moment. This is actually why we get stronger and stronger and accomplish great things while others hold back and therefore stay stagnant. While others want to protect their imagined identity, we want a real view of our current status, so we can continue to build towards the identity we want. When was the last time you put in months or years of high quality effort and failed at something? Most people’s answer is never. Commit, put in high quality effort, learn, and grow…failure is not a negative, but actually a net positive for your life.
With new habits, people tend to say they are going to start doing [blank] every day, but as challenges arise, the thought of doing [blank] every day forever can get overwhelming and crushes so many habits before they are off the ground. Having a set end date can really help people hang in there to give a new habit a realistic chance to stick. Research suggests that habits, depending on how difficult they are to implement, take around 21-66 days to become ingrained into our routines. For us, we have decided that if the outcome we are looking for is truly important to us, then it is important enough to commit to a new habit that we think will push us in the right direction for 3 months and then evaluate whether it is a habit we want in our lives long-term. 3 months is a nice clean amount of time that provides 1) enough time to create a habit and make it routine, 2) tweak it within our daily lives to get it to a potentially sustainable point, and 3) provide us enough time living with it after it has become routine to truly evaluate its effectiveness and what our lives are like with it.
There are plenty of habits we have experimented with that we ultimately did not continue, but there has not been a single habit that we experimented with that we were upset about experimenting with. We have learned something valuable from every habit experiment we have done. So, when the lowest downside is 3 months of effort to learn something you’ll consider valuable and worth it and the highest upside is building the life you want to live, to us, it’s a no brainer - commit to a 3 month experiment.
Summary:
Humans are terrible at imagining what our life will be like with a new habit or without a current habit. That is also the power of habit we can use for us: once a habit is in place, you will resist change and therefore tend to stick with your current set of habits. Integrate a new healthy habit and you will resist removing it.
The only way to gain accurate insight into what life will be like with or without a habit is to spend time living that way. We don’t let what we think life will be like hold us back. When we feel a new outcome is important, we simply commit to 3-month experiments with habits that will push our lives in that direction.
After 3 months, at a moment when we are mentally strong (fed, happy, have slept, etc.), we will review our habit and decided if and how we want to continue it.
Whether we end up keeping the habit or not after a 3-month experiment, we understand that we will likely learn valuable things about ourselves and the life we want to live through the process. Committing to 3 months is worth it even if we don't continue with the habit.
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