Every book I own tells me to add

There are four self-improvement books on the shelf I can see from here, and a few hundred more in my Audible library. I’ve read them and done what they say, and a lot of it works. Break the big thing into small pieces. Get one thing right in the morning and let it stack. That is more or less what this whole thing is named after.

And yet. Two things I have never got right. Eating properly, and going to bed at a sensible hour. Not a diet, not a number on a scale. Long-term health, that’s all.

I noticed it on holiday, in front of a shelf of somebody else’s books. Every one of them asks you to add. And the moment I add something, I’ve set myself a test. It holds or it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it’s a fail with my name on it.

Adding works right up until I stop. Then it goes. That’s a fact about pushing, not about the person doing it. It’s a car with the handbrake still on, and you’re spending a lot of effort to move it along.

Taking something away isn’t like that. I take one thing off, and if nothing changes I take off another. There’s no pass or fail in it. I can just try again.

Running is where I got it, years late. I added the whole time. Pace, cadence, distance, technique videos, injury prevention, all of it pointed at going faster. Then I started looking at ultras, where the distance is long enough that the time stops meaning much and it’s impressive if you just do it. The only way to run that far is to slow right down.

So the pace was the handbrake. I’d never once thought of it as one. Off it came, and there was the thing I actually liked: standing in places I’d have whizzed past in a car.

Running I got, in the end. Bed I have not.

I’ve been adding at it for years. My phone shuts itself off at a set hour, so after that it’s a clock and a torch and nothing else. An alarm goes off to tell me it’s bedtime. The bulbs dim on a timer. There’s a tracker on my wrist counting the hours.

None of that is a bad idea. But every one of them is another push, and every one of them needs me to go along with it. Willpower is the same thing wearing different clothes. It’s something I have to keep putting in.

Here’s the question I never asked. Once you’ve done the thing, does it ask anything of you tomorrow? Taking the pace off my running has never asked me for anything since. All four of those bedtime habits ask me again tonight.

And I do know what those hours are worth. Once the kids are asleep and the house is quiet, they’re the only hours in the day nobody has a claim on. They’re also when I feel most awake, and when I do my best work.

Three days is about how long any of the adding lasts. And what that used to mean was one of two things. Add something else. Or accept I hadn’t kept it up, which meant I must have been doing something wrong.

That isn’t what I think is happening now. I’m choosing to stay up. I know going to bed is the right thing to do, and I’m choosing the other thing, because I like these hours and that makes them hard to give up.

And a lot of the time that is how it goes. We know what the right thing is and we don’t do it, for a whole pile of reasons we are not well equipped to understand, or write down, or even show ourselves.

So the three days were never the verdict I read them as. That’s just what adding does. It hands me a test and then marks it.

What I still haven’t found is the handbrake. It isn’t the lamp or the alarm, and it isn’t wanting it more. Something is keeping those hours where they are, and working out what is a different job from trying harder.

One thing to try this week. Take something you’ve been meaning to do more of, and don’t add to it. Write down what’s in the way. Then take away the smallest thing on that list. Not the most important one, the smallest one. Leave the rest alone.

Then just watch what it does.

Your turn.

If the thing that’s stopping you disappeared tonight, what would you have to do tomorrow?

And if that turns over something heavier than a line will hold, it needs someone better qualified than me. That’s not me ducking it. Samaritans are on 116 123, free, any hour. CALM’s 0800 58 58 58 is set up for men, evenings. Neither needs your name.