Why Your Keystone Habit Is More Important than Ever Right Now

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg says that a keystone habit is like the keystone of an arch. When it is in place, all the other good habits fall into place. When it’s not in place, the other habits you want in your life are a constant struggle and eventually collapse.

For some people it’s exercise. For some people it’s a virtuous morning routine. I hate it, but for me it’s not drinking. Here’s the chain of bad habits that happens in my life when I drink:

• I have a drink, or probably two or three, at the end of the day.
• I forget about my nutrition plan and I eat whatever I want before I go to bed.
• I don’t get great sleep and feel groggy for the first couple hours of the day.
• I use all my willpower trying to focus on what I do have to do.
• I don’t get great work done or my best training, and I cheat on my diet by late afternoon.
• I don’t feel great about what I have to show for my day, so I want to not think about that.
• I grab a beer.

When I don’t drink, I sleep better, wake up happy, and all of the other good habits I want to implement in my life are so much less of a struggle.

In my quarantine life, where every day pretty much feels like a Sunday and every night feels like a Saturday, it’s been really easy to fall into a pattern of drinking every night, and the consequences of that for me have been weight gain, bad training sessions, lower productivity, and generally not enjoying life as much as I do when all of my good habits are in place.

There have certainly been times in my life (when there were things like deadlines, upcoming competitions, and scheduled events) where my whole arch of good habits wouldn’t have collapsed without the keystone, but the anxiety and weirdness of these days have meant that my good habits are much more precarious. I’m certainly not committing to giving up booze forever, but I know that booze cannot be part of everyday life right now if I want to be productive and happy. And I do.

So that’s my keystone habit. What’s yours? What is the one good habit or absence of habit in your life that keeps you grounded and makes other good habits easier? Whatever it is, protect it like it were your last roll of toilet paper right now.