Quantum Change

Have you tried to change tough habits? Why is it so hard sometimes, but at other times quite easy? How can some people drop addictions in an instant and never go back? How does that work?

I've read the habit books. Atomic Habits by James Clear. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Others too. They're good books, full of useful ideas: cues, routines, rewards, habit stacking, making the good habit easy and the bad one hard.

But they all seem to agree on one thing: changing a habit takes time. Some say 21 days, an idea that goes back to a 1960s self-help book. Others say 28 days. A well-known study from University College London found it took people an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic, and some took most of a year. Then there are 12-step programs, recovery meetings, apps, coaches, and endless lectures and materials. Those things help a lot of people, and I'm not knocking them.

But I changed a habit I'd had for years in about ten seconds, without the slightest desire or pull to go back. No months of retraining. No willpower. And I've since learned I'm not the only one.

What the researchers found

In the 1990s, psychologist William Miller, one of the most respected addiction researchers in the country, started collecting stories of what he called "quantum change": sudden, lasting transformations in people's lives. People who had struggled with something for years and then, in a moment, were simply different. Not for a week. For good. He and Janet C'de Baca wrote them up in a book called Quantum Change.

Neuroscientist Marc Lewis, himself a former addict, came at it from the brain side in The Biology of Desire. His argument is that addiction isn't really a disease. It's learning. The brain does what it does best: it wires itself around whatever we desire most. Which means the way out isn't fighting the old desire. It's the brain rewiring around a new desire. Change your desire, and you change the wiring.

Even Atomic Habits gets close to this. Clear argues that the deepest kind of change isn't changing what you do but changing who you are, what you value and identify with.

So, here's the common thread: habits follow desire. We become what we love. The fastest way to change a habit may not be more willpower. It may be a new love.

My quantum change

I had a habit for years. Nothing that wrecked my life, but it was a waste of time, and time is short. I wanted to change it.

One day I asked myself a simple question: Is Jesus enough? Is He enough to satisfy me?

I decided yes. And that was it.

No white-knuckling. No 66 days. No desire whatsoever to go back. I didn't defeat the old desire by force. I came to love something better, and the old love simply lost its grip. Prior to this I relied on sheer willpower, but it didn't work. That change in desire was instantaneous and permanent, because I found something better.

Note that this does not have to be a religious thing. You have probably experienced this yourself. You just decided, I'm done with that and found something better. That was a change of what you value. You moved your treasure.

I've since found that people have been describing this for thousands of years.

An old idea

Jesus said, "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Matt 6:21

Augustine called it ordo amoris, the right ordering of love. "My weight is my love," he wrote in the Confessions. "By it I am carried wherever I am carried." A stone falls by its weight. A person moves toward whatever he loves most. That's Marc Lewis's point but written in the fourth century.

For Augustine, our trouble usually isn't loving bad things. It's loving good things in the wrong order. Put the right thing at the top, and everything else falls into place. It is captured in an old word: repentance, or metanoia in the Greek. It is a change of heart, involving a change of desire, purpose, values and thoughts.

In 1814 the Scottish preacher Thomas Chalmers gave a sermon with a title that describes my experience exactly: The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. You can't empty the heart of a love by willpower alone, he argued, because the heart won't stay empty. The only lasting way to dislodge a lesser love is to be captured by a greater one.

As a software engineer, I think of it as a priority queue. You don't get rid of the top item by deleting it; it keeps coming back. You insert something with a higher priority, and the old one gets pushed down on its own.

We are far too easily pleased

In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis says,

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

That was me. Mud pies. Once I'd glimpsed the sea, there was nothing left to give up.

Instantaneous and permanent?

Not always. For some people the turn comes in a moment; for others it comes slowly, and the long road is real too. Augustine's own change came after years of struggle. But the principle holds either way: you don't conquer a lesser love by hating it. You outgrow it by loving something greater.

So maybe the better question isn't How do I break this habit? It is this:

What do I love more?

Further reading:

William Miller and Janet C'de Baca, Quantum Change
Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire
James Clear, Atomic Habits
Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit
Augustine, Confessions
Thomas Chalmers, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love
Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections
Jesus, The Bible