Expect setbacks

When a child learns to walk, there’s this moment after their first inevitable fall when they look to their parents. The child wants to know how they should feel about this thing that happened. If their parents react with worry and concern, the child starts to cry. But if instead the parents smile encouragingly, the child may decide to laugh and stand up again.

As adults, we have to parent ourselves. When we fail we have to decide how to react.

I’m building a new habit so I’m going to hit setbacks. I can’t just accept setbacks, I have to expect them. They’re coming.

I might get an extinction burst where a bad habit comes back stronger just when you think you’ve got it licked. I might have an open loop stuck in my mind. I’m at work and hungry, but I push that thought aside and focus on my work. Once I clock out the hunger steps up to the front of the line and I end up overeating.

When those setbacks hit I can either react and see the setback as a wreck I’ll never recover from, or as evidence I can use to understand myself.

In Haruki Murakami’s first novel, the narrator and his friend get into a car wreck and nonchalantly climb on top of the car roof to smoke cigarettes. They talk about how lucky they are, buy some beers from a vending machine, and fall asleep on the beach. When they wake up they talk about how alive they feel.

They end up paying for the damage they caused over the next three years, but it’s a great example of dealing with setbacks. “Well, that happened. Now what?”