The Fifth Alarm

It was not just one round. Over the following nights, he began opening the game after his roommate fell asleep. No one asked when he would close it. One round followed another until he saw light coming through the window. He began typing whatever came to mind immediately. A player made a wrong move, and Karim typed a hurtful sentence and sent it. He did not know the player’s name, and never pictured the player’s face as he read the message.

The next night, he joined a team where some of the players knew his real name. The team lost a round much like the first. He typed the same sentence, then deleted half of it. A message appeared from a teammate: “What did you write?” He left the cursor blinking.

Three weeks went by like this: Karim stayed up gaming until dawn, and a few hours later, two alarms rang on his phone. The first was called “Eight o’clock lecture,” and he got up for it immediately. He had not missed it once since classes began. The lecturer took attendance by name, and Karim arrived ten minutes before him. The second was called “Running.” He had set it two years earlier but stopped getting up for it after just two weeks. Every morning, he silenced it with his thumb without opening his eyes. His roommate heard it and said nothing.

On his way to the lecture, he opened the list called “This year” on his phone: running, a book every month, English. Underneath, he wrote: “After exams.” The phone kept both appointments. Karim kept only one.

Every one of us has an alarm we silence with our thumb.

It is a quarter to five. The alarm rings.

You reach out without opening your eyes and press the button: “Snooze.”

Just five minutes.

It rings again. Snooze. A third time. A fourth.

The fifth time, you get up. You have missed what you set the alarm for: a run before the streets get busy, an hour of study, or a promise you made yourself yesterday.

Now replay the scene with one change: this time, someone is waiting for you. An exam at eight, or a friend in his car outside your door.

How many times will you press “Snooze”?

Not once.

Same alarm. Same bed. Same tiredness. What changed?

Before you answer, remember last night. You planned your day while you were wide awake. An hour of study, half an hour’s walk, then the work you were late handing in. You meant it. In the morning, you missed the first appointment and kept putting off the rest until evening. Now you open the file late, cut corners on something that needed care, and apologize to the person waiting. Putting it off did not make the tiredness disappear. Now you were rushed and embarrassed, and the work fell short of what you could do. The same scene may happen tomorrow if all you do tonight is make a more enthusiastic promise and leave your morning exactly as it was.

Every promise you break teaches you not to trust the next one so easily. You say: this time is different. But you change nothing in your preparations. The phone stays beside you, the shoes in the closet, the appointment without a time. Then you wonder why you keep your promise to your friend and leave yourself waiting. Look at this clearly before searching for an explanation that lets you feel better: you are the one who did not show up, and you bore the cost of missing that appointment. Admitting it is not enough to fix it, but it stops you from dismissing the cost. Now put the two appointments side by side. What did your friend’s appointment have that you never gave your own?

What changed was not your willpower. What changed were the conditions.

Your commitment is there. It has support from outside you: someone who knows your promise, a place that helps you keep it, a definite time.

The First Condition: Someone Sees You

A small admission that may bother you: much of our discipline is not our own. We borrow it.

From the lecturer taking attendance, the friend waiting in the car, the looks we get when we walk in late.

This is an outside monitor. Its strength lies in three qualities:

• Immediate: You are late today; you pay the price today.
• Visible: Someone sees that you are late and records it.
• Nonnegotiable: There is no room for negotiation. The exam will start with or without you. The plane will take off with or without you.

A promise to yourself, though, has a price you pay later. No one sees it. And it is always open to negotiation: “Starting tomorrow.”

That is why our promises to ourselves die quietly. Not because we are liars, but because they were born without a witness. Or so we think.

Since he was little, Karim has followed his father’s rules and his mother’s schedules without argument. He says “Of course,” then does it. At university, he never misses a lecture where his name is called. But no one asks him about his promises to himself.

Karim is hardly a rare case. In her book The Four Tendencies, the writer Gretchen Rubin calls people like him “Obligers”: they readily meet other people’s expectations but struggle to meet their own¹.

In a survey she conducted with a sample of Americans, they were the largest group: 41%. Her categories are a simple, popular framework, not a proven theory. But who has never recognized themselves in that description?

Psychologists call this borrowed discipline “external regulation”: we follow through because someone is watching. What we lack, they call “internal regulation”: we follow through because the action has become part of us, because we believe in its value, rather than out of an inward fear of blame². How does a rule become your own? We will return to that in Part Two, in chapter 8.

Having no witness can do more than weaken our promises. It can change our words too. John Suler discussed how people may become less inhibited online when their identity is hidden or their face unseen. This can make room for opening up and helping others, or for hurtful words. Not everything we say there reveals a truer self³. In specific experiments, cheating increased in dim light, and selfish behavior increased when participants wore sunglasses. The latter was linked to their sense of being hidden⁴. Long before that, Glaucon, in Plato’s dialogue, used the Ring of Gyges, which makes its wearer invisible, to ask how we behave when no one can see us. A thought experiment, not a study⁵.

In the gaming session after “What did you write?”, a player made a wrong move. Karim typed a hurtful reply, then stopped. His teammate got in first and wrote to the player: “Do the move again. Let’s give it another try.” Karim deleted his reply and made himself a short rule: I write to a stranger as I would to someone who knows my name.

The Second Condition: Being in the Right Place

At Karim’s family home, the phone charged in the kitchen, and at ten his mother would ask, “Aren’t you going to bed?” In student housing, ten o’clock came while he was at the café with the other students. No one got up.

“Another half hour,” he told himself. He returned at one, tired, and hit “Snooze” five times in the morning.

A habit does not live in us alone. It lives in the place too: the room, the light being turned off, the phone away from the bed, a mother’s question. In a study following students who moved to a new university, old habits held when their surroundings still resembled what they were used to, and broke down when those surroundings changed⁶.

Outside the home, something else watches us: other people’s eyes. But how many of them really notice us?

In an amusing experiment, students wore an embarrassing T-shirt into a room with their peers⁷. They expected about half the people there to have noticed the shirt. In fact, only about a quarter had.

We overestimate how many people are watching us. Fear of a look that may never come can be enough to make us put things off. The witness you choose helps you. The eyes you imagine hold you back.

The person who leaves the café at ten has already made the decision before going out: when to get up, and what to say. There is no need to renegotiate at every table.

The Third Condition: An Approaching Deadline

Karim submitted his lecture assignment one minute before midnight. Then he saw running on the “This year” list, without a day or a time, and closed it.

What is the problem, as long as everything gets done in the end?

First, notice what made him finish: the deadline. Without midnight, the assignment would still be unfinished. A deadline is another kind of witness. It has no face, but it does not negotiate. That is why you get things done for others that you do not get done for yourself. Your promise to yourself has no midnight.

In a study following university students over a semester, procrastinators were less stressed at the beginning. By the end, they had more stress and illness than the others, and their grades were lower⁸.

A task you put off does not disappear. It stays open in your mind, tapping at you all day. Researchers have found that unfinished goals intrude on your thoughts while you are doing something else, and that a definite plan, specifying when and where, can be enough to quiet them⁹.

When You Stop Believing Yourself

A broken promise does not go away alone. It takes a little of your trust in your own word with it.

For the tenth time, you say, “I’ll start on Saturday.” Inside you is a voice that knows the outcome before Saturday comes, because it has heard you say that nine times before.

The psychologist Albert Bandura called this confidence “self-efficacy”: your belief that you can do what you intend to do¹⁰. He considered its strongest source to be neither words of encouragement nor successful people’s stories, but your own experiences: the times you said “I will,” then did.

That is why we begin with one small promise. Keeping it helps you believe yourself again.

A Deal with Yourself

Most of our promises are open-ended intentions: “I’ll run.” “I’ll study.” “I’ll go to bed early.” With an open-ended intention, you have to decide all over again every day, wherever you are, whatever pressure you face.

What is the alternative? Settle the decision once, before you need it. Psychologists call this an “implementation intention”: an “If… then…” sentence tying an action to a time and place¹¹.

In one experiment, students were asked to write a report within two days during a holiday. About three-quarters of those who had decided in advance when and where to write it finished, compared with roughly a third of those who had not¹².

Two Mirrors

Just two questions, no list:

1. What promise do you never break to other people, and what promise to yourself have you broken most often? Put them side by side. What condition does the first have that the second lacks?
2. After a week with a set time and a witness, did the second promise hold? If it fell through, which condition was missing this time?

On the night before the first of the month, Lina opened the “Challenges” folder on her phone and typed a new heading: “Thirty-Day Challenge.” She entered the date in the first box, as she had in previous months.