At some stage or another, we have all tried to cultivate a new good habit, and we’ve failed. Miserably. We’ve failed so atrociously that we’ve doubted our own ability to influence the soup of neurones we call our brain, and we might have even slipped into existential doubt about human agency (no, just me?).

In this short post, I’d like to explore a method I pulled out of that neuronal soup that I call FaRR, which will either take you far or leave you far out in the middle of nowhere, depending on how much of a clue I have about human nature (which is highly debatable).

As a bit of backstory, during the latter years of high school I had one of the most disciplined sleep cycles you could imagine: in bed by 9pm every night and up at 5:10am, without fail. If I had an event in the evening, I would still wake up at the same time and cop the grogginess. That worked pretty well, especially when I had to revise for the overbearing final exams (one essay a day keeps the sub-high-distinction gremlins away!), but, once they were done, it started to unravel a bit. For the first two months or so after high school, I was fine, still keeping the same sleep cycle and maintaining an excellent work ethic on my own projects, but, into the third month of doing whatever I wanted with my time, things went a bit haywire. If I had to point to one particular event that broke the camel’s back, I would say it was catching Covid: I had to sleep in to prevent a Sam.exe is not responding type of situation, and that was fine, and, thankfully, I recovered from Covid within a week (youth is very good to have on one’s side). The seed of discontent, however, had been laid within my mind: there was a universe in which I didn’t wake up at 5:10am every single day. And so it began.

Over the following months, as I started uni, my life became an experiment of chopping and changing routines, trying to figure out how on earth to balance work with learning with socialising with finding a moment to stare at a wall and think I should really start those maths problem sets from six weeks ago soon (don’t worry, I did), and my sleep cycle began to suffer a bit. Into the second term (my uni has a trimester system), I found things settled down, and I got into a good rhythm, and I had solved the problem of waking up and going straight back to bed, but the new problem of just sleeping right through my alarm had arisen. In Australia, we have winter in the middle of the year, so I’m writing this with a few layers on while reflecting on how, this morning, I slept through my alarm, although conscious is was going off, simply because my morning-brain decided there was a higher chance I would die of hypothermia if I got out of bed (you know how your brain doesn’t really make sense in the mornings?).

So, on a whim, I came up with a thing: FaRR, a method for building good habits that might just work. The F is for facilitate, which regards making sure you’re best-positioned to actually carry through on your habit. This is where most conventional wisdom about habits falls, talking about how you should link them to routines, research on what other people have had success with, etc. For waking up, because there isn’t really a routine that can be linked to (unless you have some 4am lucid dream routine…), so the main thing here for me is making sure my room is warm enough that the first thing I think in the morning is not I’m going to die in a pit of ice.

The first R is then for reprimand, which means giving yourself a compelling reason to do the habit by creating consequences for yourself if you don’t. This is tricky, because it’s often very easy to circumvent consequences we create for ourselves. I once had the bright idea of saying I could only take a warm shower in the morning if I did some exercise, otherwise I would “have” to have a cold one. How do you think that turned out?

The second R is for reward, which means making it very very nice when you do carry through on the habit. For example, maintain a little journal of when you’ve completed the habit, and, if you get it three times in a row, you get some chocolate! This is what I’m trialling at the moment for my wake-up issues.

As for the reprimanding, this one is tricky. The obvious thing would be to give a friend $50 and text them every morning to say I’ve woken up, and then they only give it back to me if I wake up at the right time every day for a week, or something like that. Or, I could be so ridiculously me as to over-engineer a solution that will publicly humiliate me if I fail to carry through on the habit. On this website, right now, you will be able to see either the normal header, or a red banner above the header that says I’ve failed to wake up! That is based on whether or not I’ve added a “commit” (programmer-speak for change) to the message of the day, which is an insightful quote or phrase I write for my blog each day. If I have by my wake-up time, then that’s great, and I can get on with my day without the whole world knowing I’m a dunce. If not, then I’ll be publicly humiliated to the tune of a big red banner telling everyone I failed to keep a basic sleep cycle.

For those worrying that I’m being too hard on myself, I’ve integrated a mechanism to allow me to pre-emptively say the night before that I want to sleep in the following morning, and I can switch the timezone for when I’m travelling, but otherwise I am deliberately being quite harsh on myself to make sure I actually get this right!

Whether or not the FaRR method will work is an entirely separate question, but I’ve enjoyed making a little thing on my blog, and I hope it’s useful for me in making sure I can stick to something I once found easy! I’ll add updates on how this goes in the shortform section of my blog, which will also force me to actually use that!

Overall, the point of this blog post has partly been to introduce a method of building good habits that might work quite nicely, while also acting as a single point of reference for all the people who see the atrocity that is this humiliating red banner. If you are looking at it right now, I’m very sorry, and it should be gone by tomorrow, I hope.

Also, as a final word, please don’t be like 16-year-old me and try to create 30 new habits at once, it’s a terrible idea. Do one or two at a time, for the sake of your sanity. With that, have a lovely day!