In my case, it was getting up on time. Lying in bed every night, I would make
promises to myself that tomorrow I would change:
Tomorrow, I will change. Tomorrow, I will wake up earlier. Tomorrow, I will have a better attitude and try a little harder.
I will go to the gym. I’ll be nice to my husband. I’ll eat healthy. I won’t drink so much. Tomorrow I will be the future me!And with that vision in mind and a heart full of hope, I’d set my alarm for 6
a.m. and close my eyes. And the cycle would begin the very next morning. As soon
as that alarm rang, I didn’t feel like the “future me.” I felt like the old me, and the
old me wanted to keep sleeping.
Yes, I thought about getting up, and then I would hesitate, roll toward the
alarm, and hit the snooze button. Five seconds was all it took for me to talk myself
out of it.
The reason that I didn’t get out of bed was simple: I just didn’t feel like it. I
would later learn that I was stuck in what researchers call a “habit loop.” I had hit
the snooze button so many mornings in a row the behavior was now a closed-loop
pattern encoded in my brain.
Then one night, everything changed.
I was about to turn off the TV and head to bed when a television commercial
caught my attention. There on the screen was the image of a rocket launching. I
could hear the famous final five-second countdown, 5- 4- 3- 2- 1, fire and smoke
filled the screen, and the shuttle launched.
I thought to myself, “That’s it, I’ll launch myself out of bed tomorrow...like a rocket. I’ll
move so fast I won’t have time to talk myself out of it.” It was just an instinct. One that I
could have easily dismissed. Luckily, I didn’t. I acted on it.
The fact is, I wanted to solve our problems. I didn’t want to destroy my
marriage or keep feeling like the world’s worst mom. I wanted to be financially
secure. I wanted to feel happy and proud of myself again.