Rules and Rulelessness

Before setting yourself new rules, ask whether you are kind of person who follows rules

Auld Lang Syne

It’s that time of the year when people think they will change themselves by making up a bunch of new rules they will stick to, only to find themselves battling with a waning resolve a few weeks into January. I don’t want to repeat the usual critique concerning the fate of New Year’s Resolutions, but instead share a few thoughts around the idea of rules - whether self-imposed or externally-imposed.

One of my personal characteristics is that I’m really good at following rules - but only rules I have set myself. If someone else tries to impose their rules onto me there is something in my nature that feels a visceral sense of being coerced and crushed whenever I’ve been told what to do. Even when the other person’s rules are perfectly aligned with my own I’ll feel the urge to resist compliance. As a consequence, fitting in with the arbitrary rules, rituals, and conventions of society has always felt like being straitjacketed.

Yet my compliance with my own self-determined rules is very strict. And, I continually push these self-imposed rules to the extreme, especially in the one area of life I can confidently assert an attitude of mastery, which is in the routines and patterns I follow for the benefit of my personal health and fitness. I don’t need fancy apps, habit trackers or wearable tech. I don’t need gym memberships or expensive equipment. I ‘just do it’ - to reclaim a wise phrase misappropriated to market overpriced footwear.

But this ‘just doing it’ is sensed within as a kind of rulelessness. It doesn’t feel like I’m setting strict rules for myself. They are more like enabling constraints that improve my experience of life. I push myself hard, but it feels like fun. I have very little limbic friction towards training and eating well. Limbic friction is a term coined by neuroscientist Andrew Huberman to describe our emotional resistance to self-imposed rules. My path of health and fitness is not context-dependent - I’ll ‘just do it’ regardless of location, circumstances, time of day, mood or state of mind. It just happens. There is rarely any limbic friction to overcome. ‘Just doing it’ is part of my identity, aligned with my values and aspirations and supported by my family. There’s neither force nor friction. It is automatic and effortless, the essence of mastery.

Instead of blindly setting new rules for ourselves at this time of year, we might be better served by reflection and self-inquiry. Perhaps it’s worth asking whether you are the kind of person who will comply with your own rules, or whether you actually might benefit more from deep introspection, perhaps through conversation with others, to really question your character, your values, and your true aspirations in life. You won’t stick to new rules unless you have a flexible sense of identity which can adapt to accommodate the lifestyle of someone who follows such rules. If you are not willing to shed your skin and let go of attachments to the ‘old you’, you will never become the ‘new you’. Perhaps it’s not new rules that you should be setting yourself, but a new identity - an identity you can embody so that the rules feel like ruthlessness, a natural part of who you are. I will be exploring this idea of identity further in a follow-up article.

Despite my skepticism of New Year’s Resolutions I’ve used this holiday period to come up with a few tiny habits we’ve agreed to follow as a family. For the children, it is really simple things like 5 minutes of room tidying in the morning, reflecting on screen time at the end of each week, and doing a 10-minute run a couple of times a week after school. One of mine is to spend 5 minutes tidying my office every morning. Tiny cue-dependent habits, and behavioural nudges to ingrain beneficial patterns of behaviour. I’m aware that my little commitments are self-imposed, whereas those agreed to by our children came with an element of imposition from us, their parents. Our daughter, however, really entered into the spirit of it - she actually gave herself a longer list and enthusiastically volunteered to keep the rest of us accountable. My son was a little more reluctant and restless with the whole process - like his father, he hates being told what to do.

The real benefit of reviewing our habits as a family is the conversation and reflection. Knowing ourselves better, being more aware of our characters, our tendency towards self-discipline and otherwise. The real habit I’m trying to create is one of working out what we’re like as a unit, being comfortable sharing how we feel about rules and the challenges of life in general, and working out how to thrive as a family and as individuals by talking and reflecting. The real value is in finding out who we are, how we react to things, and how to shape our lives accordingly.

It will be interesting to see whether these tiny new habits last, I have my doubts, but it’s interesting to explore this ongoing negotiation around the tension between rules and rulessness, order and chaos.

Wishing readers a masterful new year for 2024.