How to make rules work for you
Rules suck, right?
We’re basically taught to hate them as kids.
“You can’t do this. You can’t do that. Don’t touch that other thing. No noise after 8pm.”
We’re indoctrinated into thinking that they’re the fun-sponges of life. They can feel like these hurdles designed to stop us from having the things we want most.
But what if, as adults, we could turn rules into one of the most powerful tools at our disposal for getting what we want?
Daniel Kahneman is a well-known author, psychologist and economist, focusing on decision-making.
Most notably, he won a Nobel Prize over 20 years ago for his work in behavioural economics. You might know him from his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast & Slow.
I’ll be honest, Kahneman looks like the sort of guy who loves a rule. But, in fact, his driving force in life has been to study our behaviours, and all too often that involves looking at the ways in which we constantly break rules, consciously and sub-consciously.
Recently, he explored the power that we can create in our own lives through rule-making, not breaking.
One of the rules in his own life is the following:
“My rule is: I never say yes on the phone. I’ll email you later after I think about it more.”
Kahneman is a self-described people-pleaser. He’s done enough reflection and introspection in his life to realise that he has a tendency to say what others might want to hear, sometimes at his own expense, because of the experiences of his own life. Through this reflection, he’s realised that this inclination of his can get him into situations that he doesn’t want to be in later on. Whether that’s being committed to a work meeting that he didn’t want to be at, or a trip that he didn’t want to take, or accepting a deadline that he’s not comfortable with, he kept finding that his habit of saying ‘yes’ too readily was leading him to suboptimal outcomes for himself.
But for someone who is a self-prescribed people-pleaser, saying ‘no’ or feeling like he’s in a position to make a fully rational decision in the moment is really difficult for him. It would make him feel awkward, as if he was being rude, and therefore letting someone down. Which goes strongly against his embedded desire to please people.
So instead of forcing himself into situations where he would have to constantly fight against these emotions within, he removed them by implementing a rule.
Rules grant you the power to hold greater sway over your emotions.
What Kahneman found was fascinating. In general, people respect rules. When he started saying to people “as a rule, I don’t say yes on the phone” they understood that it was his rule. They might not have agreed with it, but they didn’t argue with it. Because it didn’t come from a position of feeling. They didn’t feel slighted because they hadn’t been rejected or shot down by a human’s emotions in that moment, they had simply come up against a rule. It makes it easier to take the emotions out of the whole situation. And when we do that, we generally see things a bit more clearly.
Creating rules for yourself in this way can downplay the role of choice, which can be helpful when we’re confronted with situations that we know spark emotional reactions within us. His compulsion to people-please through saying ‘yes’ is removed as a choice, because he’s decided to respect his rule in these scenarios.
Let’s look at a different example.
When it comes to brushing your teeth; do you only do this as and when you feel like it? Do you wait a week or more for the magic moment of inspiration to strike in which you feel like cleaning your teeth? We all know the terrible outcomes we’re likely to experience if we neglect our dental hygiene for extended periods of time. In the long term we want to have healthy teeth that aren’t stained and that don’t smell.
In this case, if you’re like most people, you brush your teeth every day, and hopefully night. Because you’re operating under a rule; every morning and evening I brush my teeth because I don’t want horrific teeth in the future. This rule negates the choice component, and it removes the space for emotions to over-ride what we know is best for us in the long-term.
Making it real: a rule to break my night-time phone habit
Over the past year or so, I’ve read a swathe of articles persuasively stating the case for how bad it is for your sleep (and mental health) to look at your phone before you turn in for the night.
I know the fact, and I accept it. The blue-light presence and the over-stimulating effects of what I’m looking at are going to set my mind whiring and make it harder for me to settle into the rhythms of good sleep. But here’s the thing; more often than not I couldn’t not look at my phone if it was right next to me or even just in the room.
I’ll just glance at my messages for the final time.
Let me see the weather for tomorrow.
Maybe I should double-check the commute for tomorrow’s meeting.
And then the powers of my phone have a chance to take hold of me. I’m forcing myself into a choice in this moment to fight against my emotions. The powerful hormone, dopamine, in my brain is now saying “Just look at one more thing! One glance at Twitter won’t hurt! A final Instagram story won’t make a difference!”.
And I’ve learned that when I put myself in these choice situations every night, I lose more than I win.
So I created a rule.
I don’t take my phone into the bedroom at night.
And now I don’t have a choice. I have a rule. And I simply can’t check my phone for anything, because it isn’t there.
Now, I take time before I go to my room to check all those final bits I might worry about. I use a traditional alarm clock instead of relying on my phone. I ensure I always have a book lined up before heading to bed.
All because my rule has forced me into new behaviours that I know will benefit me in the long term.
And that’s a choice I am very happy to make.