How To Change Your Life In 30 Days
There was an article in the New York Times this week about something called “75 Hard” — a workout and lifestyle challenge set over a rigid two and a half months. It wasn’t one of the many fitness challenges I was drawn to in my gym-rat days, but it brought back memories nonetheless: protein powder, pre workout, the smell of shared showers and industrial cleaning products, the smug exhaustion of a 5 am workout. The way all of my executive functioning revolved around Tupperware, laundry, macro counts, rest cycles, Instagram comparisons, and on and on and on.
In the way of the internet, I had no sooner skimmed the article than YouTube suggested a video titled “How To Change — 75 Soft Challenge.” In the video, a woman describes an altered 75 Hard, and how her alternations made it more meaningful for her. At its core, though, she held true to the rigidity of 75 Hard: if you “break” or “cheat,” you have the start the challenge all over.
I’m not trying to pick on 75 Hard. I could as easily be talking about the Whole 30, or any number of time-bound challenges: containers in which you are asked to push yourself beyond your comfort zone for the sake of an extraordinary goal. A transformation. Transformation, we have come to understand, is a result of a finite struggle or effort, a single great push that transports us as it transforms. On the other side of those 30 or 75 or 90 or 100 days, we will be a new, better self.
There is a narrative satisfaction to this, a tidiness. It’s a desire to arrive, I think: we want to reach a place of sureness, of completion, a kind of bulwark against the messiness of lived reality, against the fact that we keep on dirtying dishes and washing them and dirtying them again, keep on having to choose between Netflix and a book each night, keep on living out a thousand everyday choices, over and over and over, until we die.
In my journey to learn how to sew (and in conjunction, learn how to dress with more joy and less exhaustion), I have wandered among the many online forums for body typing and style development and color analysis. Over and over, people (myself included!) post near-desperate pleas for help: what is my Kibbe type? Is this dress ok for a flamboyant gamine? What essences do you see? Am I a true summer or a soft summer? We want something sure, something definite, something that will guarantee we get it right, whatever “right” means.
This desire, too, is for a kind of arrival, an ending of uncertainty. It’s a desire that positions revelation as the end point. Another narratively tidy move.
I’m really not trying to pick on 75 Hard, and the woman in the video made some thoughtful remarks about self respect (and she promoted public libraries!), but she also said one of my least favorite fitness mantras: “How you do anything is how you do everything.” Too often, I think this saying is trotted out to imply that if someone gives less than their full effort in a workout, it is from a lack of integrity.1
A better mantra, I think, is that terrifying phrase from Annie Dillard:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”2
What I have found for myself is that time-bound challenges do not make for lasting change. At least, not the kind of all-consuming challenges that demand a radical uprooting of life. Yes, I can give up sugar or Netflix or my morning free time for a month or two, but nothing will stop me from yo-yoing right back when the 30 or 75 days is done.3 4
Instead, I have been thinking of change and habits against the metric of internal sustainability. Can I maintain this habit more days than not over the next six months, a year, five years? What is the minimum viable change that I can make, to test if this is the right direction? The course of a life is long, and over that distance, the shift of only a few degrees can lead us somewhere wildly different.
All this sounds very analytical and deliberate, but I find it almost happening by itself:
Not an instantly perfect wardrobe, but a new pair of boots to test a style direction, a willingness to try new necklines or colors.
Not a 30-day challenge, but simply a goal to exercise more days than I did last month.
Not an aspiration to suddenly be a tidy person, but the accumulation of many decisions to put something away, rather than just putting it down.
I think I have finally grown tired of my own desire for certainty, for arrival. I have latched onto too many quick, “guaranteed” solutions, too many promises of definite answers, and discovered them to be hollow.
We can change our lives in thirty days, perhaps, but then we have to keep on changing them for the thirty days after, again and again.
“The only lasting truth is change,” Octavia Butler wrote. Our transformation is ongoing, made up of our minutes, our hours, our days. No one has the answers but us, and we must make them up over and over again. We can change our lives in thirty days, perhaps, but then we have to keep on changing them for the thirty days after, again and again.
Sometimes this is exhausting, but mostly I find it comforting: it is never too late to change; and the work of today is never more than making today’s choices the best we can. In Refuse To Be Done, Matt Bell talks about how the work of a writing day is never “to write a novel,” and yet it is through the amassing of days (months! Years!) that novels are written.
Like pearls, built in layers of nacre. Like trees, composed of their rings.
The gradual accumulation of our truest, most definite selves, revealed only in the fullness of time.
I dislike the moral weight this puts on physical movement — an action already overlaid with any number of cultural and physical meanings and challenges that must be navigated. Most days, I count it “enough” to climb on the stationary bike and pedal half-heartedly while reading or watching YouTube. That desultory pedaling is infinitely better than laying on the couch for those twenty or thirty minutes, and says nothing about my integrity.
The full, extraordinary quote, which comes from The Writing Life: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”
Perhaps for some, doing a time-bound challenge that radically shakes up their lives leads to deep and important insights — lessons they then take out of the challenge and into their “normal” life. I think I’m more disposed to fail at time-bound, rigid challenges, and instead emerged freighted with a sense failure. I’m also deeply suspicious of epiphany, and more likely to put my trust into pattern, habit, and consistency.
And perhaps, too, it’s a matter of degree: in the era of clickbait videos, it can be easy to think that a 30-day challenge must be so big and radical that it requires a total reconfiguration of a life. But there are simpler “challenges,” I’m sure! They just aren’t the ones getting thousands of clicks.