The Morning Is the Finish Line
“This is the Way.”
—The Mandalorian1
October.2 As you brush your teeth, the thought of the upcoming New Year crosses your mind. You look in the mirror, and there it is—the impact of your New Year’s resolution. You are disappointed. Your goal was to lose weight, and you haven't done that. You still have until the end of January, right? Is that your finish line?
Personal Temporal Landmarks. Using a New Year’s Resolution is like using a Monday. As in, I’ll start (dieting, exercising, spending more time with family, caring for the environment, etc.) on Monday. These are personal temporal landmarks.3
Integration is the process we use to combine the things we value to make us feel whole.4 If we lose that sense of wholeness, some of us like using a personal temporal landmark to help conjure a fresh break ahead on our timescape.5
The break represents an opportunity to restore our condition of being unified, unimpaired, or sound in construction.6 Studies show that personal temporal landmarks can produce a “fresh start effect” and help to kick-start change.7 However, considering that 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail, have only a minority of people understood the message?8
That’s No Finish Line. A fresh start is a start. We don’t keep our resolutions if we start, then we start, then we start. As everyone who has considered the COVID-19 pandemic a marathon with a constantly changing finish line knows, if we only know the start, we stop. As every experienced marathon runner can attest, the start is nothing without the finish.9
Personal temporal landmarks are attractive because they represent new beginnings. Choosing a specific day, such as Monday or New Year’s Day, has a clear start, but its duration can be problematic. It is risky to rely on sustained attention towards a goal for an entire day. Not many of us decide to stay strong for that long. One reason is that personal landmarks like these have an ingrained finish line—bedtime.
Bedtime is a horrible finish line. Any argument about this is settled in three words: revenge-bedtime-procrastination.10 We can do more damage to our goals in the final hours before bed than we do all day. Besides, research indicates we have options. For a fresh start, we can choose a naturally arising point in time, a personally relevant life event, a disruption to our routine, or even a reset to how we track success.11
The usefulness of temporal landmarks flows from their potential to structure and organize memory.12 We imagine the break before the outset of a week, month, year, birthday, or holiday as a turning point. The break marks promise. Change is hope.13
Imagination. We want to change. That’s why we use a personal temporal landmark. Do we want to do the work to bring change about? No! That’s why we use the personal temporal landmark. When we hit that fresh start in the future, that is when we will feel like working. That’s what we like to imagine.
If we imagine anything, a lack of imagination is a trademark of personal temporal landmarks. It’s easy to say that we will start our diet on the first day of the new year when all we imagine is wanting our goal.
We need to open our imaginations to the findings of studies that indicate we spend almost half of our waking hours wanting something. Moreover, roughly half of these desires conflict with our stated goals and values.14 This means that AND Moments - when we’re presented with a choice between our immediate wants and our long-term goals - can take up a significant portion of our week. Unfortunately, these studies suggest that if we don't actively resist our impulses, we'll choose our immediate wants over our goals around 70% of the time.15
Wanting is Personal. Let’s pause to state the obvious. Not everyone can relate to craving ice cream as much as wanting to lose weight. We may better understand the conflict between desires such as wanting to flirt with someone at the bar while being committed to our partner. Or we may struggle with wanting to improve our performance at work while resisting the urge to check social media or upcoming travel plans during business hours. Or a want to connect with our children while also wanting to watch the NBA playoffs. Each of us has our own unique thing. AND Moments are personal and occur in various aspects of our lives, such as food, drink, relationships, money, technology, and business. Their intensity and environments vary from person to person.
A “Before-Bed-Eating” AND Moment is specific and confined to eating before bed. To establish common ground, I often use this quick and easy example. One, we all eat. And berating ourselves for eating too much before bed is a proverb. And three, ice cream is popular. Just check the stats on the amount of money Americans spend on it annually. However, we are equally prone to experiencing other food-related AND Moments such as a “Breakfast,” “3 p.m.,” “Unexpected Work Invitation,” “Restaurant with Friends,” or “Special Day” (such as birthdays, holidays, or “I’m out of town” days).
What’s important to keep in mind is that we don’t get both wants in an AND Moment. And, in the nervous system, information travels.16 We learn how we feel about our AND Moment choices during The Moment After. Information is always about something.17
Measuring Time. Imagine your river of time. You can jump on a paddleboard if it makes it easier. You are paddling now on your river of time. You spot an island in the distance, but as you approach, you realize it impedes your way. The island is your AND Moment. Specifically, it’s when you want to lose weight, but you also want some ice cream before bed.
The important thing to note here is that your river of time will flow past the island. If it doesn’t, you are dead, and it’s doubtful AND Moments will be worth your bother if that’s the case. So again, you are on a river. There is an island. You will pass the island. Period.
There will be a moment when you will have passed your AND Moment. I call that moment The Moment After, which you can use as you pass the island. Not only can you resist ice cream, but research has demonstrated that with resistance, you can decrease that 70% to a mere 17.18 Resistance begins with listening to the feelings that arise during The Moment After and using them to form a mental bridge that connects AND Moments to The Moment After.19
You can use the way you want yourself to feel in The Moment After to pour energy into now.
And that’s not all…
The Ultimate Finish Line. Homeostatic Design is a visual workspace that supports homeostatic regulation and induces nourishing feelings over time. Its strength resides in mental imagery, specifically the guiding force of The Moment After’s felt image. Homeostatic Design limits AND Moments by any means possible to two hours or less. And this: Homeostatic Design respects a 24-hour cycle. Why? Because of my familiarity with this formative text…
there was an evening, and there was a morning: one day.
And, because in the natural course of a day, my thoughts of firm resolve gradually lose order, I was moved to learn that the Hebrew term “erev” (evening) is also used to connote disorder and chaos. And “boker” (morning) can mean order—and—the break of day.20
So, I re-imagined…
there was disorder, and there was order—the break: one day.
One Homeostatic Design cycle is 24 hours because there are 24 hours in one day. Every. Day. We have access to this massively underutilized21 finish line 100% associated with a new beginning.22 A fresh start. A clean break. Hope.
The morning is Homeostatic Design’s finish line. Our day is incomplete until the light shines again, breaking through the darkness. The chaos is there. The struggle is real. But it does not have the last word.23 When order is restored, and after a break, we complete a Homeostatic Design cycle. It doesn’t take a year. It gives the morning.
Because the morning is our finish line, we can move towards it today without the false loom of finality that night brings. When we intend to wake in the morning feeling refreshed and full of energy, we first consider when to wake up, then work our way back to now.
Clean breaks and new beginnings. This is the Way. Focusing on how we want to feel when we wake affords more accurate predictions of the morning we desire because we can decide how to move from now until then. Nothing rivals the supreme sense of accomplishment a fresh morning can bring. Finishing well requires knowing where the finish line is and training for how to cross over it. Separate, Limit, and Create to regain homeostasis during and after your AND Moment.
Separate your AND Moment from The Moment After.
Limit your AND Moment in time by planning now—before you have it.
Create a plan that includes a reasonable substitute for your immediate want but allows you to wake up to goals and values that remain intact in the morning.
Favreau, J. (Writer), & Filoni, D. (Director). (2019, November 12). Chapter 1 (Season 1, Episode 1) [TV series episode]. In J. Favreau, D. Filoni, K. Kennedy, & C. Wilson (Executive Producers), The Mandalorian. Lucasfilm; Golem Creations.
Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2015). Put your imperfections behind you: Temporal landmarks spur goal initiation when they signal new beginnings. Psychological science, 26(12), 1927-1936., hereafter cited as PYIBY | “We propose that temporal landmarks spur goal initiation when they signal new beginnings, or the start of new time periods. Temporal landmarks are days that “stand in marked contrast to the seemingly unending stream of trivial and ordinary occurrences” (Shum, 1998, p.423) in people’s lives. They include transition points on social timetables (e.g., holidays, the start of a new week/month/year/semester; Robinson, 1986) and personal life events, such as first experiences (e.g., a first date), developmental milestones (e.g., a wedding), and recurring significant occasions (e.g., birthdays; Shum, 1998). Some temporal landmarks stand out more starkly on socially shared calendars or personal life timelines.”
“integration” | https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/integration | the act or process of combining two or more things so that they work together
Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior. Management Science, 60(10), 2563-2582., hereafter cited as TFSE | “This suggests a widely shared belief that we have opportunities throughout our lives to start fresh with a clean slate, with the well-known “New Year’s effect” representing just one example of a far broader phenomenon.” | “We hypothesize that this process of wiping the slate clean generates fresh start feelings and motivates people to tackle their goals.”
PYIBY | “First, feeling disconnected from past failures may boost people’s self-efficacy, or belief in one’s ability to carry out plans and reach goals (Bandura, 1997; Libby & Eibach, 2002).” | “Finally, after a temporal landmark creates a clean slate, deviating from a goal (e.g., cheating on a diet) may feel, in prospect-theory terms, like a large, initial loss relative to a reset reference point (where the utility curve for losses is steepest) rather than like another small loss added to many others (where the utility curve for losses has flattened; Colby & Chapman, 2013; Heath, Larrick, & Wu, 1999; Soman & Cheema, 2004).” || integrity” || https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=integrity+meaning&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#duf3= || the condition of being unified, unimpaired, or sound in construction
Milkman, K. (2021). How to Change: The Science of Getting from where You are to where You Want to be. Penguin., hereafter cited as HTC | p 22, “Our analyses produced a remarkably consistent picture of what Hengchen, Jason, and I have come to call the “fresh start effect.” || TFSE || “Also, birthdays (with the exception of 21st birthdays) increase gym attendance by 7.5% (p<0.001), indicating that personal temporal landmarks, like calendar landmarks, can produce a ‘fresh start effect.’” || “Importantly, we find that temporal landmarks motivate people to tackle a broad set of health-irrelevant goals (e.g., “study harder for GMATs”), suggesting that the fresh start effect is not merely the result of efforts to rebalance one’s health after over-indulging.” || “We theorize that salient temporal landmarks signaling new beginnings can open new ‘mental accounts’ and alter self-evaluations.”
Caprino, K. (2019, December 21). The Top 3 Reasons New Year’s Resolutions Fail And How Yours Can Succeed. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2019/12/21/the-top-3-reasons-new-years-resolutions-fail-and-how-yours-can-succeed/?sh=391c8a169929 | “Studies have shown that approximately 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail and many of people over the years (including myself) have written about new approaches needed to achieving our big goals and resolutions, including naming them differently, approaching them differently and viewing them differently.” || HTC || p 34, “But once we’ve talked for a bit about the power of fresh starts, many journalists bring up a well-known and dispiriting statistic from a 2007 survey: One third of Americans’ New Year’s resolutions bomb by the end of January, and four fifths fail overall.”
I’ve run 6, including Boston—my mom and I ran that one, and Disney, together.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201123-the-psychology-behind-revenge-bedtime-procrastination | “Rao was doing what the Chinese have called ‘bàofùxìng áoyè’ – or ‘revenge bedtime procrastination’. The phrase, which could also be translated as ‘retaliatory staying up late’, spread rapidly on Twitter in June after a post by journalist Daphne K Lee. She described the phenomenon as when ‘people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late-night hours’.”
HTC | p 24, “But the calendar had nothing to do with it; Bob owed his fresh start to a meaningful life event. For my former tennis coach, illness provided the impetus to start over. But research suggests it could just as easily have been a cross-country move, a promotion at work, or perhaps even something as mundane as a disruption to his commute.” | p 27, “Hengchen was excited about baseball because the ‘resets’ associated with cross-league trades represent a kind of fresh start for the players—a literal clean slate for their statistics.” | p 31, “But the research I’ve described proves only that fresh starts are moments when people naturally undertake change.”
Shum, M. S. (1998). The role of temporal landmarks in autobiographical memory processes. Psychological bulletin, 124(3), 423., hereafter cited as TLAM | “The overall goal of the article is to describe how such landmarks may drive the structure and organization of our memories.” | “These personal reference systems, as the name suggests, are distinct to an individual, represent personal knowledge and information, and serve as frameworks in which events are stored in autobiographical memory, much like schemata and scripts organize knowledge about stereotypical events and activities (i.e., Bartlett, 1932/1964; Schank & Abelson, 1977).” | “Despite conceding that the categorical approach was important, Robinson (1992) chose instead to focus his attention on personal histories, “primary forms of organization in autobiographical memory... (that) organize temporally distributed experience into thematically-related ‘streams.’” (p. 223)”
Storr, W. (2020). The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better. New York, NY: Abrams Press. | p 13, “Change is hope.”
Hofmann, W., Baumeister, R. F., Förster, G., & Vohs, K. D. (2012). Everyday temptations: an experience sampling study of desire, conflict, and self-control. Journal of personality and social psychology, 102(6), 1318., hereafter cited as ET | “Desire pervades everyday life. The most conservative estimate from our data indicates that people feel some desire about half the time they are awake. Almost half of those desires (47%) were described as conflicting at least somewhat with the person’s other goals, values, or motivations. Thus, inner conflict is a frequent feature of daily life.” | “Moreover, frequency of desire was remarkably consistent across persons: None of our personality or situational variables predicted higher or lower total frequency of desire.”
Ibid. | “Translating the logistic regression coefficient of resistance on enactment to probabilities indicated that when participants did not attempt to resist, the desire-related behavior was enacted 69.6% of the time on average. Presumably, the remainder failed because of external factors, such as lack of opportunity.”
Schoonover, C. E., & Lehrer, J. (2010). Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. (No Title). | p 19, “From this unadorned sketch, drawn in eleventh-century Cairo by Ibn al-Haytham, comes a premise that is so elementary as to seem almost trivial: In the nervous system, information travels … How information travels from one part to another inside the brain, and how it is processed at each step, is the business of neuroscience.”
Kåhre, J. (2002). The mathematical theory of information (Vol. 684). Springer Science & Business Media. | p 3, “A fundamental, but somehow forgotten fact, is that information is always about something. The Oxford dictionary {Oxford, 1974} defines information as: in·for·ma·tion ... on/about, ... 2 something told; news or knowledge given: ... Can you give me any information on/about this matter?
ET | “When participants attempted to resist, however, behavior enactment was reduced to 17.4% on average. Hence, self-control reduced the enactment of desire-related behavior from 70% to 17%.” | “It is also instructive to examine the strongest desires, defined as those receiving the maximum strength rating of 7 (which was labeled as “irresistible”). When not resisted, these were enacted at a 71% rate. With resistance, enactment dropped to an estimated 26% (Figure 3), indicating that not only did people often resist so-called irresistible desires, but they were surprisingly successful when they did.”
Damasio, A. R. (2010). Self Comes To Mind: Constructing the Conscious Mind. New York, NY: Vintage., hereafter cited as SCTM | p 56, “For the measurement to occur, the brain required a representation of (1) the current state of the living tissue, (2) the desirable state of the living tissue corresponding to the homeostatic goal, and (3) a simple comparison.”
Schroeder, G. L. (1997). The science of God: The convergence of scientific and biblical wisdom. Free Press. | p 102, “The Hebrew word for evening is erev. The root of erev is disorder, mixture, chaos. The Hebrew word for morning is boker, its root being orderly, able to be discerned. In the subtle language of evening and morning, centuries before the Greek words of chaos and cosmos were ever written (Hebrew writing predates the Greek), the Bible described a step-by-step flow from disorder (erev) to order (boker); from the plasma of the big bang to the harmony of life.” || Biblical Hermeneutics, Question with regard to dual meanings in the Hebrew words “Erev” and “Boker” in Genesis 1. Retrieved from https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/25597/question-with-regard-to-dual-meanings-in-the-hebrew-words-erev-and-boker-in || “I was initially interested in the word ‘boker’ and why it has the same root as ‘bakar’ or cattle. This led to me discovering that ‘boker’ fundamentally means ‘splitting’ or ‘cleaving’. I was excited but not surprised to find that upon researching the word ‘Erev’ that it held the opposite connotations, ideas of mixture or gathering. Leaving aside discussion over the word ‘Yom’, literally meaning day for the moment (I have other theories about that), it is highly interesting to then read the verses in this new light (if you'll pardon the pun). ‘And it was unified, and it was split, day one’ obviously makes perfect sense with regard to day one and holds interesting implications for the subsequent days.” || “I have recently found an independent version of a similar theory in the book ‘The Science of God’ by Dr. Gerald Schroeder. He describes the same ideas (which he attributes to Nachmanides), but instead relates 'erev' to mixture as in disorder or chaos. And to 'boker' he ascribes the idea of order (from bikoret-orderly, able to be observed).” ||| Hebrewversity, The Deeper Hebrew Meaning of the First Day of Creation, Retrieved from https://www.hebrewversity.com/deeper-hebrew-meaning-first-day-creation/#:~:text=The%20Hebrew%20word%20for%20%27morning,the%20darkness%20of%20the%20night. ||| The Hebrew word for ‘morning’ is ‘Boker’ {בוקר} and it derives from the old Hebrew root B-K-R {ב-ק-ר} which means ‘to break through’, ‘ to penetrate’, ‘to crack’ and refers to the special time of the day in which the light is ‘breaking through’ the darkness of the night. ||| “This is why the original Hebrew does not talk about ‘the first day’ but rather the period of time from one evening to the next evening and that is called ONE DAY (‘Yom Echad’). |||| deeperChristian, Evening and Morning (Genesis 1), Retrieved from https://deeperchristian.com/evening-and-morning-genesis-1/ |||| “The word in Hebrew for ‘evening’ is erev (or ereb). It does mean darkness, dusk, evening, and sunset, but it came out of the understanding of obscurity, mixture, chaos, increasing entropy. When the day approaches evening, things increasingly get obscured, it becomes hard to see, darkness (chaos) encroaches, and there is seeming movement toward disorder (entropy). The word came to mean ‘evening’ because of this.” ||||| Jewish Link, What Is the Origin of the Words ‘Erev’ and ‘Boker’?, Retrieved from https://jewishlink.news/what-is-the-origin-of-the-words-erev-and-boker-2/ ||||| “However, two other approaches to the origin of ‘boker’ deserve mention. One is the approach of S.D. Luzzatto (commentary to Genesis 1:5) who notes that B-K-Ayin means ‘split’ or ‘break.’ Luzzatto then suggests that ‘boker’ is simply a contraction of ‘baka or’ (=the light broke through). To support his position, he cites Isaiah 58:8: az yibaka ka-shachar orecha.’”
HTC | p 26, “The more I’ve thought about this research, the clearer it’s become to me that the potential to harness fresh starts is underutilized.”
Lamentations 3:22-24, The Message (MSG) | God’s loyal love couldn’t have run out, his merciful love couldn’t have dried up. They’re created new every morning.
Peterson, E. H. (2018). Every step an arrival: A 90-day devotional for exploring God’s word. WaterBrook. | p 3, “Evening has the sense, in Hebrew, of termination, bringing to a conclusion. A day is described first as the conclusion of the creative work of God, then night, a time of sleep, the incursion of darkness, a threat to the order of creation, a sign of chaos to come. Does night or light have the last word? The answer is in the phrase ‘and there was morning, one day.’ Morning in Hebrew has the meaning of ‘penetration.’ God’s day is not complete until light shines again, penetrating the darkness and dispersing the shadows. The creative action of God is light, which encloses and limits a temporary darkness. All that we see as a threat to God’s creative action is held in check and controlled by his light. The shadows are there—night descends upon life—and there is that which seems to defy God, to disturb his order and his purpose: sickness, death, trouble, and sorrow. But it does not have the last word: ‘And there was morning, one day.’”
Also: Citation #2 is so 🍂
Bravo. Thought-provoking.