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This Simple Rule of Nature Might Be Killing Your Progress
Just when you think you’re making strides, there’s a reason you come back down to Earth
So, you’ve tried something new to make your life better, and it worked. You’re happy. Maybe even on Cloud 9. You’re nailing this.
And then three weeks later, you’re disappointed and confused about why your success didn’t last and why it’s not working again. It was so good, and now you’re right back where you were. Why does this happen?
The problem is there’s a rule of nature that works in life as well as it does in statistics, and it feels like it’s holding you back. In statistics, it’s called regression to the mean, but in life where personal change is concerned, we can think of it as regression to the norm.
Basically, it’s this: we do something new and it looks like we’ve made real change. But actually, it’s just an outlier moment that feels like true change in that moment, and then before we know it, we’ve regressed to our norm. Our normal thinking patterns, behaviour patterns and levels of happiness. It’s as if how we’ve always been has a magnetic pull, pulling us back to the old, normal us, even after we think we’ve made a breakthrough.
Life always has ups and downs. We have natural variations in how we are as humans, just like statistics do. Some days will just be good days. We can’t let ourselves feel beaten just because all days aren’t like that. If we have a good day, that’s just one of those good days—but attribute it to something we’ve done—we can get down about it not working again.
You can see it clearly at work in the hedonic treadmill—the idea that when we buy something shiny and fun and new, we get happy about it but before we know it we’ve regressed to the norm and need to seek something bigger or shinier or more fun to feel that happiness again.
So what about if we’re not chasing shiny objects for happiness, but something deeper. Let’s take, for example, confidence work. Common (and good) advice for improving confidence is comfort-zone stretching. Repeatedly doing something that makes us uncomfortable eventually makes that thing comfortable, and we’re more confident at the end of it. But the line on the confidence…
