A few years ago I was doing everything right, by the standard definition of everything right. I had a morning routine. I had books stacked on the nightstand. I had a habit tracker, a meditation app, a note-taking system, and a list of goals that I reviewed every Sunday like some kind of productivity churchgoer who had confused motion for progress.
And I was not getting better. Not in any meaningful way. I was getting more organized about staying the same.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand why.
Adding more is almost never the answer
When something in our lives is not working, the instinct is to add something. A new system. A new framework. A better book on the problem. Research published in Nature by Gabrielle Adams, Benjamin Converse, Andrew Hales, and Leidy Klotz documented this pattern across dozens of experiments. When people were asked to improve something, whether an essay, a design, a recipe, or a plan, they defaulted to adding new elements. The subtractive option, removing something that was already there, barely registered. It took deliberate effort and extra thinking time before people even considered it.
The researchers called this subtraction neglect. And it explains a lot about why so many people who are genuinely trying to improve their lives end up carrying more and more weight while wondering why they are not moving faster.
We pile on to-dos instead of identifying stop-doings. We track new habits instead of auditing which existing ones are quietly costing us. We read books about the thing we want to fix and then layer the advice on top of the behavior that caused the problem in the first place, and somehow expect a different result from the same basic operating system.
The thing costing you is usually obvious if you look
I do not think most people are confused about what is holding them back. I think they know, and the knowing is uncomfortable, so they go looking for a system to manage around it instead of just stopping it.
I had a version of this with how I was spending my evenings. Nothing dramatic. Just scrolling, ambient noise, the low-grade fog of not quite resting and not quite doing anything. I kept trying to add a better evening routine on top of it. The better evening routine kept sliding off, because you cannot build something solid on a foundation that is actively draining you.
The thing I actually needed to do was stop the scrolling. Not replace it with something improving. Not install a new app to track my screen time. Just stop, and sit with however uncomfortable that felt for a while, which turned out to be more uncomfortable than I expected.
This is where most self-improvement attempts fail. Not at the identification stage. At the discomfort stage.
Why sitting with the empty space is so hard
Every act of self-regulation draws on the same finite pool of capacity. Resisting an established habit, even a bad one, is cognitively expensive. The brain’s default mode is the path it already knows. Sitting in the discomfort of not doing the familiar thing requires active effort, and that effort is real and depleting in the short term.
This is why the common advice to just replace a bad habit with a good one exists. It works, up to a point. But the replacement strategy sometimes just moves the problem sideways. You stop drinking and start overworking. You stop overworking and start doom-scrolling. You stop doom-scrolling and start listening to four podcasts a day about how to be more present. At some point the pattern is not the specific behavior. The pattern is the avoidance of empty space itself.
The empty space is where the actual update happens. But it has to be allowed to exist first.
Habits that aren’t replaced don’t disappear overnight
Research by USC psychologist Wendy Wood, who has spent her career studying the science of habit, makes clear that habits are not just behaviors but memory structures tied to context cues. When you stop a habit, the underlying memory does not vanish immediately. The cue still fires. The craving still surfaces. The pull back toward the old pattern is not weakness. It is the brain doing exactly what it was trained to do.
What this means practically is that sitting with the discomfort of an absent habit is not a sign that you are failing. It is the sign that the change is real. The discomfort is the old pattern looking for a door that is no longer there. You have to let it knock for a while.
Buddhism has always understood this. The concept of upadana, which I write about in my book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism, describes the clinging we do to patterns that feel familiar even when they are hurting us. We grasp because we are afraid of what the open space might contain. Or might not contain. The emptiness feels like a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be passed through.
But it passes. And what comes after it is usually something quieter and more genuinely useful than whatever you would have installed in a hurry to avoid feeling it.
What it actually looks like when people get better
The people I have watched genuinely change for the better, in my own life and across years of writing about psychology and human behavior, do not tend to describe some elaborate new system they built. They tend to describe something they stopped.
They stopped agreeing to things they did not want to do. They stopped drinking. They stopped a friendship that was quietly making them worse. They stopped checking the news every morning before their brain had a chance to exist independently for five minutes. They stopped performing a version of themselves that no one had actually asked for.
And then they describe the strange, slightly unsteady period that followed. The boredom. The low-level anxiety. The itch to fill the gap back up with anything. And then, after that passed, something different arriving. Not all at once. Not with the dramatic clarity that self-improvement content promises. But gradually and genuinely, a better version of themselves showing up in the space that the old habit used to occupy.
This morning I ran along the Saigon River before the city got loud. No podcast, no agenda, just the water and the early heat. It is one of the few parts of my day I protect without negotiation. But it only exists because I stopped treating my mornings like a productivity window to be optimized. I had to subtract before I could find it.
The next thing you want to add to your life is probably not the problem. The thing you already know you should stop is.
