Sunday Journal Post

Writing down a plan helps “craft self-discipline into a habit.”  

- Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit
 

In a Scottish study about willpower, scientists examined the recovery efforts of people who had hip or knee surgery. All the patients had been through rehabilitation at the hospital and were told about the importance of exercise for their recovery. However, the post-surgical patients who wrote down specific rehabilitation plans for the week started walking almost twice as fast as those who did not. The plan-writers got in and out of chairs, unassisted, almost three times as fast and achieved tasks like laundry, cooking and dressing more quickly, as reported in Charles Dughigg’s The Power of Habit. 

The patients who had not written a plan “never thought ahead about how to deal with painful inflection points. Even if they intended to walk around the block, their resolve abandoned them when they confronted the agony of the first few steps,” Duhigg shares. Putting a plan in writing—referred to as designing willpower habits—seemed to be a way for the patients to coach themselves through difficult stages of a goal.
 

What’s a habit would you like to build? Write down a specific plan about how you will accomplish it.