Why Is It So Hard to Do What's Good for You?

Learning how to trick my brain for a happier self and a better life.

An incomplete list of things I know I should be doing every day:

• Getting at least 7-8 hours of sleep

• Meditating

• Doing yoga

• Avoiding my phone for at least an hour after waking up

• Avoiding my phone after 8 p.m. (and definitely never lying in bed for hours each night trying to find the end of Instagram before putting an old Seinfeld episode on Netflix and listening to it in my earbuds to fall asleep)

• Exercising for at least 30 minutes

• Eating 47 grams of protein

• Eating 5-10 servings of fruits and vegetables

• Drinking water

• Drinking more water

• However much water I’m drinking, just still more somehow

• Spending time outside

The list goes on indefinitely — all of these shoulds clutter my brain from the moment I wake up (at which point, I usually realize that I’ve already failed at #1). This list weighs on me: all of these wonderful things I know would be good for me if I did them, yet I’m not doing them, and why?

This situation is called a value-action gap — a phenomenon in which your values don’t align with your actions. You know precisely what you should do and want to do (and why), yet you just…don’t.

It’s endlessly curious to me how so much of adult life is just having these little wars within yourself (or, more accurately, between your various selves):

The self that wants to stay up late versus the self that wants to wake up feeling rested. The self that wants to be healthy with a butt you could bounce a quarter off versus the self that hates squats, is convinced it’s probably not that bad to get under 5000 steps a day, and thinks it’s entirely possible to thrive on a diet of chips and queso.

I once read about watched an Instagram reel about an interesting way to get around this kind of mental roadblock. You imagine that someone you love dearly has loaned you their body for a year and you are tasked with taking care of it.

The thinking is that while you’re OK with abusing your own body, you would feel much more reluctant to return your loved ones’ body in poor condition twelve months from now, and have to explain why you’ve run up such a massive sleep debt and treated Diet Coke like a whole food group.

But how bizarre is it that we’re more willing to take care of our body when we pretend it’s not ours?

How disheartening is it to know that we have to trick ourselves into habits that will benefit us so immensely?

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I’ve been trying to write more, but I keep coming up against the same roadblock every time. I think it’s another value-action gap.

I love writing. Or, perhaps more accurately, I love having written something. The process itself is always messy and painful, so I spend a lot of time avoiding it and feeling guilty for avoiding it, but I know I want to write more. Write in different spaces. Be published more.

I also know that if I had an editor sitting on the other side of a computer somewhere, waiting for my words, those words would come — on time and solid. They’d have to. I’d make damn sure of it.

Yet, absent that editor, I flounder. Without someone to disappoint, I’m alarmingly OK with perpetually disappointing myself.

I was thinking about this the other day.

I thought about my painting challenge and how I painted every day for 30 days because I made the challenge public and posted the paintings daily. I felt accountable to people — even if no one cared whether I posted a painting each day, I felt like they did. And the threat of disappointing those people was enough.

I thought about why I started this Substack — I missed writing about my life, but I was terrified to start doing it again. When you spend a decade pulling words directly from your heart, and then your heart explodes and takes your whole life down with it, it feels incredibly dangerous to do it again.

I knew that as much as I wanted to get back to this kind of writing — the kind I love best — I’d never do it if I didn’t feel beholden to someone. It would never happen if I didn’t know there were people on the other side of the screen; I needed to imagine they were waiting impatiently for my words.

The subscription-style model of Substack was new to me, but it serves this purpose perfectly. Having subscribers means I have to write. There’s a sense of reciprocity — you’re investing your time and money in me (both immensely valuable). I owe you.

Having some posts locked behind a paywall also brings a small sense of safety — by being able to control who’s reading, I feel safer writing.

(By the way — I can’t express how grateful I am that you have followed me in this; how much it helps to imagine you sitting there on the other side of the screen somewhere, reading and responding and making it feel like we’re in this together. Following these threads of thought until they make sense—untangling our experiences and comparing notes. Holding up mirrors and seeing ourselves infinitely reflected in the lives of others — wait, you too?

Me too.)

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I was thinking about all of this yesterday and feeling frustrated about my lack of internal motivation, exasperated by how I need a faceless someone to report to.

How bizarre it is that I’d be more willing to take care of my body if I pretended it wasn’t mine.

How disheartening it is to know that I have to trick myself into habits that will benefit me so immensely.

After dinner, it was time for my run with Olive. (We signed up for a 6k race in March, and we’ve been running three times a week to train for it.) It was cold and snowy outside, so she planned to run laps inside the garage. I was sitting this run out because I was recovering from a migraine, but Olive asked me to watch.

I watched as she started running and got bored pretty quickly. (The garage is relatively big, but you can only run in circles so many times before it loses appeal.)

Then I watched as she grabbed one of Mike’s work boots, balanced it on its end, and jumped over it each lap like a hurdle. This made her happy, so she added three more hurdles — the kitty litter box, an overturned bucket, and the other boot.

She asked me to play music on my phone, then asked if I would get the portable speaker from my office so it was louder.

As I walked back into the garage with the speaker, I realized I was watching in real-time as my 11-year-old devised a solution to the value-action gap.

She knew she should do the training run (it was on our schedule). She even knew she wanted to run in an abstract sense (training runs help build endurance and prepare for the race.) But the run was boring. She was losing interest. The urge to quit was growing.

But instead of quitting, she made it more challenging and enjoyable by adding hurdles. She made it more fun by having me DJ her favourite songs.

I realized later that night that she’d added external accountability, too. The very first thing she’d done was ask me to watch her. She wanted me there to yell encouragement, marvel over her hurdles, and cheer her on. Count down with her— dance in the corner.

Be in her corner.

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This is the little war I fight most often: The self that thinks I should be able to do everything by myself versus the self that knows that human beings were never meant to go it alone.

I could justify my ruthless independence with a dozen questionable reasons — being the eldest daughter, my years of single parenting, the fact that I’m a Capricorn. Whatever the explanation, asking for help almost always feels like failure.

But every time I’ve brought other people in, it’s meant success.

I need to stop fighting against my need for external accountability and lean into it instead.

If it works, does it matter how?

Does it matter if you’re exercising because you’re pretending your body belongs to your best friend and want to take good care of it for her? Your workout’s still getting done.

Is my writing worthy only if I do it alone, motivated only by my own expectations?

Or is it worth more when I actually write?

Tricking your brain into doing what you want to do is like adding interesting hurdles and turning up the music. It’s not cheating; it’s playing the system by its own rules. And, of course, it makes sense that you’re more likely to succeed in doing hard things if someone is standing firmly in your corner, cheering you on.

Thank you so much for being in mine.