The 100% Rule - How I Kick Start Wellness Habits
Forming new habits & why making exception actually makes things way harder
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I have personally had more success with following rules 100% of the time vs. 98% of the time when starting new habits.
Anytime I want to start something - like working out, or eating more green stuff, or going on hikes more often, setting a hard rule that I ALWAYS follow is far easier than setting guidelines that I will sometimes follow and can make exceptions to.
What About This Is Important To Me
The reason I'm writing this out is to better understand why I think the 100% rule is an effective way to develop new habits.
How to effectively form new habits is something I've experimented with a bunch as I've picked up a variety of different habits over the years. This method has been the easiest and most effective for me, but I was not sure why until I wrote about it. Here it goes.
What To Do With Alcohol?
A good example of a new habit I’ve recently formed is not drinking. I decided to take a break from drinking a few months ago because I had not figured out how to set guidelines around drinking.
The reason I wanted to set guidelines is to better understand how drinking fits into my life. When you're in high school or college it’s sort of obvious how drinking fits - you drink when you're going out with friends and at parties. I know this is not true for everyone but it was for me and at the time it was a ton of fun.
Once you graduate college you can drink whenever you want. Before you turn twenty-one there is secrecy and covert operations involved in getting tipsy so the only time when it was really worth the effort was if you were going to get a group of friends together and have an awesome time.
Now that you're out in the world, it makes sense with dinner, when catching up with friends, date nights, before you go to a comedy club, watching football, etc. Pretty much any event can become a good reason to drink.
Don't get me wrong, I think that's awesome that we're extremely creative at celebrating, but I wanted to define where alcohol fit in my life personally and figure out if it did fit at all.
The 98% Method
The 98% method is an approach that is designed to constrain a habit without eliminating it entirely. I tried a few of these approaches with drinking (and other habits over the years) and I think it’s much harder to implement than just doing something 100% of the time. Below I dive into some examples of why I think that is true.
My First Attempt At The 98% Method - Categories of Activities
My first attempt at figuring out how alcohol fit into my life was defining the kinds of moments where I would drink. This included the following:
Weekends or outings with friends
Special dinners
Holidays
This list may seem small and benign but it is sneaky flexible and basically can extend to every part of my life except going to the gym and doing work. The short of what happened with this attempt is that everything could fit into those three buckets because the categories are extremely general and I found myself always justifying a new experience or event as fitting into one of these three categories.
This was a problem because this rule did not help clarify for me where alcohol fit in my life. If anything it just made things annoying and something I thought about more than I needed to.
Ultimately was not a helpful rule because it did not help me figure out how alcohol fit into my life.
Attempt #2 At The 98% Method - # of Days Drinking
This one was a weird one for me personally, but it made sense when I started. The idea here was I was going to limit myself to drinking one day per week.
What basically happened was I drank far more than I frankly even wanted to on the day I was drinking and it became this weird celebration moment - like "oh I made it", which did not feel healthy or make sense with the kind of fit I wanted in my life.
The stuff in my life should serve me in some way and this approach to drinking turned it into some strange reward that didn’t make me feel good leading up to it, during it, or after it.
Attempt #3 At The 98% Method - # of Drinks
I was convinced I had it on this one but did not anticipate how annoying this approach would be for me. In this attempt, I decided I would have up to 3 drinks per week and I would have them at any point in time that I wanted.
What I did not anticipate is how incredibly annoying this was for me. An example of what I mean is I'd be out at dinner with a friend and we would be drinking. Taking the three drink rule in mind I would reflect on what I had drunk that week.
Let’s say I had a glass of wine Monday, a glass of wine Thursday, and now we were having dinner Saturday night and I could only have one glass of wine if I was following my rule.
Not that having one glass of wine was a problem, but all of a sudden drinking became this weird math problem where I had to make sure I was hitting the right number each week which was not fun and it did not help me learn where alcohol fit into my life.
Attempt #4 - The 100% Method
So I decided I was going to stop drinking 100% of the time. I did this for a few reasons:
Much easier to follow
There are no exceptions to the rule at this point so it’s extremely easy to say no and not do the thing you have decided to limit.
I think this is key because I personally feel that willpower is tough to rely on when it comes to habits. When you’re used to doing something and you enjoy it - i.e. having a glass of wine at dinner, putting yourself in a position where you have to rely on willpower makes forming a new habit so much harder.
As a result, by simply deciding I am no longer doing the thing - i.e. drinking, I no longer need to rely on willpower.
It is a decision that has been made and there is no other alternative. Conversely, if you set up guidelines like "only on these occasions" or "only this amount" since you’re keeping the door open to the habit you spend time thinking about whether or not you can make exceptions to the rule or whether this specific scenario fits under the rule.
As a result of that, it’s easy to bend or break rules because you’ll find ways to justify your decision-making. Additionally, you dedicate far more thought to the habit and feel more conflicted over what to do or not to do.
Alternatively, when you decide to stop entirely it’s easier because you have no other alternative, no options to consider, and what to do becomes extremely clear.
To decide is to "cut off"
I learned recently that the root of the word decide is the Latin “decidere". It is derived from two words - "de" = off and "cadere" = cut. Decide literally means to cut yourself off from other possibilities or other options.
Learning this definition sort of blew my mind because the act of truly deciding something is to make a choice to the exclusion of all other choices. To decide is to literally pick one thing and to not pick everything else at the same time.
Understanding the root of decide helped me clarify what about the 100% rule was easier for me to follow personally.
It's based on this idea that once I have "decided" I am not going to drink it makes it much easier for me to follow that rule because there are no longer any other options. There are no alternatives.
Another reason I like the 100% rule is it makes it easier to figure out where things do fit into your life.
I Think It Helps Make Where Habits Fit More Obvious
I did not drink anything for about 10 weeks and then I had one of my closest friends’ bachelor party coming up. I struggled a bit with this decision (to drink or not to drink), but then realized that the reason I would decide not to drink at the bachelor party was that I was attached to this "streak" I had of not drinking or this new personality trait of being a person who doesn't drink.
That felt like a silly reason to not do something and habits should serve me in a way that improves my life.
However, even after realizing that was a silly thought I still was not sure if I wanted to drink at the bachelor party because habits are tough to form and I was not clear yet on how drinking/not drinking fit in my life to open that activity back up.
A friend of mine shared a thought with me which was critically important to my decision. He said, when you feel like you have control over a particular habit, it's easier to play with it.
This felt 100% true. For example, it’s easy for me to eat cheeseburgers because I’ve got my nutrition pretty much locked in for myself personally. I know what makes me feel good and I have healthy habits so it’s easier to play with what I do and don’t do food-wise.
Another thing he said was - “I'll indulge in moments that I find are extremely unlikely to repeat. Moments that are non-habit forming.”
This was a fascinating insight because it helped me realize that moments that are not habit-forming, and where sticking to your current habit would be painful, are potentially good opportunities to make an exception to your 100% rule.
As a result, "special dinner" does not work because you can have infinite of those. However, "best friend's bachelor party" definitely works because that is highly unlikely to repeat. If there is overlap between wanting to do something, and its non-habit forming/repeatable, maybe that’s a good moment to break the rule.
After thinking about it I knew I would regret not drinking over that weekend. Not because I wouldn’t have fun. Just because it was a part of the experience of being there in that moment and with that particular group.
A huge realization throughout all of this is that deciding that I'm not drinking 100% of the time makes it more clear what moments I do actually want to drink in.
After that weekend it was extremely easy to go back to 100% not drinking and I think this path will make figuring out where drinking fits into my life more clear over time.
Keep 100% General and Make It Easy To Win
Drinking was an example of something I removed from my life, but if you're looking to add I have found making it easy to win is a key factor in solidifying any habit.
For example, let’s say the rule I will follow 100% of the time is working out three times per week. I find it helpful to keep my definition of workout extremely broad so it’s always easy to find "wins" even when I'm unmotivated. For example, I will count putting gym shorts on, going to the gym, and doing 5 squats as working out.
Now some people may call BS on that but I think establishing the habit of always following the rule and always hitting the "three per week" is more important than the quality of each individual workout session.
The lower the bar it is for me to win, the easier it is to get set in the habit, and then eventually raise the quality of the bar over time. Consistency + effort are key aspects of doing anything well, but I think consistency is the foundation to effort. Without it, effort is largely wasted.
Why I Think Knowing How To Form Habits Is Important to Well-Being
There are certain things involved in well-being that I believe are foundational.
Nutrition
Physical Activity
Mindfulness
Relationships
Engagement
Positive Emotion
Meaning & Purpose
Mindset
Deeply understanding how these different categories play a role in my life is a lifelong endeavor. However, I think certain habits can get you on the right path to establishing good life foundations in each of these areas.
The challenge is that cultivating new habits is just plain hard.
While this is not an all-encompassing write-up on habit formation, I hope the 100% rule can be helpful to you in starting some habits that you’re particularly interested in exploring.
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To Living Well,
Alvaro