Two Ways to Change Your Momentum

This is hardly a brilliant insight, but I’ve noticed that making small, “good” decisions early in the day makes the whole day work better. If I wake up and avoid screen time and loafing around, I get more and better work done, I make more sensible meal choices, I’m less needy and thought-addled, I don’t get as tired in the afternoon, and so on.

The exact causal paths here aren’t necessarily traceable. Maybe my procrastination neurons miss their usual early-morning workout, so I become less inclined to unlock my phone reflexively, which means I get more done and feel better about myself, so the future feels brighter and more within my control, so I don’t hit a wall of motivation loss at 2:30.

There countless variables involved, but the clear pattern is that good begets more good. This seems like a general principle that affects everyone.

It works the other way too, of course. Bad choices beget bad choices. In a moment of weakness you order cheesecake on DoorDash at 9:40 pm. You proceed to sleep poorly, and wake up distracted and screen-hungry. You start late, get annoyed at the first setback at work, compromise your afternoon plans, and feel bad about it, perhaps leading eventually to some evening ennui and more cake delivery.

Everything we do has echoes, in other words. Our choices affect our moods, attitude, and well-being, which in turn affect our choices.

This internal looping mechanism allows behavioral “snowballs” to form. Poor choices gather more poor choices as they barrel downhill. Midnight cake leads to cranky mornings leads to coffee abuse leads to irritability leads to workplace stress leads to more midnight cake, with many incidental collisions setting off new snowballs the whole way.

There are good snowballs too. Filling half your plate with vegetables for a week leads to more energy leads to more patient interactions leads to better work performance leads to a confidence boost leads to an actually viable exercise routine leads to yet more layers of ease and agency.

Because these two types of snowball counteract each other in many ways, either the good or bad type of snowballing tends to dominate at any given time. A strong meditation practice can’t abide depraved amounts of screen time, and vice-versa. You might flipflop between slumps and winning streaks, as opposing snowballing patterns cycle through your life. Sometimes it takes a while even to become aware of which way you’ve been snowballing.

Perhaps some people (normal people?) have a different sort of mechanism than I do, a counter-snowballing feature which prevents either type from getting too big. Maybe when some people start to feel too bad, the bad feeling inclines them towards healthier behaviors, rather than towards reinforcing the bad ones.

That’s hard for me to imagine. At any given time, I’m caught up some variation of one of these two currents. The difference is very distinct. It’s either the happy-side cascade, with its prudent dietary choices, reasonable bedtimes, and general productivity, or the self-sabotage-side cascade, with its outrageous procrastination, excessive screen time, and overconsumption.

The dark cascade can get pretty entrenched for me. Gravity is way stronger on that side. When I start to snowball that way, I stay up later, I eat worse food, and I say yes to alcohol more often. Procrastination becomes pathological. Meditation feels less intuitive, and I skip it or half-ass it. I become less focused, less organized, and dramatically less productive. I become more needy for stimulation, glued to screens, discombobulated, slow to begin and finish anything. I feel bad about myself, and seek comfort from more bad snowball stuff. This can last weeks or months.

As usual, I have no idea whether or how much my experience resonates with you, reader. I know I am an extreme case in many ways. But if this snowball phenomenon does sound familiar to you, I’ve identified two general approaches for getting back to the good side. One is more intuitive than the other, but I believe it’s the less effective one.

Two Philosophies for Righting the Ship

The natural temptation, once the bad snowball has become big and awful enough, is to try to steer it into a brick wall. You don’t want steady improvement; you want total and utter regime change. All the shenanigans will stop as of this Monday morning, you decree. App blockers on all my stupid apps! My alarm will go off at 6:00 sharp, from outside of the bedroom! A single boiled egg for breakfast! Two-cup daily coffee ration, then herbal tea only!

This can sort of work. Past self-destruction begets future self-destruction, and if you can disrupt even some of the bad momentum, and force some good momentum, many bad choices will no longer follow naturally. After two consecutive weeks of evening junk food, a one-day break can give you the best sleep you’ve had in a while, which might set you up for the best morning you’ve had in a while.

To make sure the change takes, you do this in every area of life at once – fitness, diet, relationships, hobbies, workflow — sending bold new habits rippling across your inner world, revolutionizing the status quo for good. Finally and forever there will be no snowballs but happy snowballs, which is your birthright and true nature.

Aside from the reckless idealism here, the main problem, as with all violent regime changes, is instability. Everything gets disrupted, because all the old systems have to break at once. Suddenly every office is manned by someone new, and they don’t know what they’re doing. Nothing that needs to happen has any momentum or tradition behind it. You’re trying to a create a new, functioning (inner) state with nothing but utopian slogans and a high-minded five-year plan. Opportunists slip into the abundant cracks, and start serving their own interests. Soon the transportation commission is controlled by railroad tycoons, the army has become a religious cult, and you’re eating Froot Loops because you ran out of eggs one morning. Soon you’re planning another revolution.

The better method, I think, is to avoid the regime-change approach and instead focus on controlling certain vital institutions. You identify one or two key elements of the bad snowball, and set a new, uncompromising standard around them. Your midnight cheesecake program, despite its popularity, is probably an ideal candidate for abrupt defunding. Same with the now customary after-work cocktail, which, studies say, correlates with imprudent DoorDash initiatives.

These two interventions alone could create lots of positive knock-on effects, if applied consistently. You can also pick one or two “good snowball” elements and commit to making them happen. Re-implementing the old lunch-hour walk policy, if that has worked for you before, might serve as a strong lynchpin for good days; it reliably yields better afternoons, which lead to better evenings, which lead to better sleep, and so on. It’s hard for any of those things to improve without seeing improvements elsewhere. The snowball effect can be a great ally, if its potency is respected.

The lynchpin approach also helps you avoid perhaps the greatest downside of the regime-change approach. Aside from the idealism and instability, there’s a tendency to wait for the right moment for your coup. So much has to happen for it to go right, so you can’t feasibly do it now — you’ll begin the revolution on Monday, or after this current project is over. The New Year would be the best time, really. You have every reason to put off your inflection moment, when you know it’s going to be painful, and when your consolation for waiting is another piece of cheesecake.

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Snowball photo by Marty Harrington