The Holy Sh*t Moment: How lasting change can happen in an instant

I struggled to develop the habit, and I almost quit. But when a staff member at the gym asked me if I’d had a good workout, and I realized that it had been pretty good, I had another epiphany: it was starting to not suck. And if it could not suck, then one day it could be enjoyable. In that moment, I promised myself I would keep exercising until I died. I met the poof partway, and over the next nine months, I lost fifty pounds of fat and gained twenty pounds of muscle. I’ve become a lifelong exerciser, going so far as to qualify for the Boston Marathon after seeing the horrific bombing in 2013, so I could run it the following year and be part of taking back the finish line from the terror of that day.

Time for another task.

Start thinking about what baby steps you can engage in to meet the poof partway. What is your desired outcome in terms of ultimate motivation? What is the peak of inspired Mount Everest in terms of what you could achieve for your life situation? Visualize that peak and what it would look like to be transported there, bypassing all intervening steps.

Now imagine the transporter device is broken and you need to hike a step at a time. Maybe not all the steps, but at least some. You can’t stand around and wait for someone to fix the transporter. You need to start climbing.

What does the hike look like?

What is the first step?

Visualize your primary wish of this new person you’d like to be, whether it involves changes in activity level, diet, attitude, career, budgeting, education, a combination of any of these things, or some other things. Now forget that the transporter device exists.

What is the logical slow-and-steady path to achieve the goal? What is the first baby step? What is the second? The third? Start to map it out. Create the beginnings of a plan to just get started. It’s okay to seek help from a professional or otherwise knowledgeable person in formulating this plan.

Because the reality is, you may need to walk that path for a time. You may need to hike a while. But if you’re attuned to the possibility of epiphany on that journey of many baby steps, the transporter may one day pick you up and materialize you at the peak. Or not quite at the peak, but a lot closer to the top, at least.

Sometimes the process is passive. It’s something that happens to you, arriving unbidden. Other times, you must act.

Lace up those boots, because the poof is worth climbing toward.

The sudden-leap formula, which Ingraham described both as “way easier” and “completely irresistible,” warrants further investigation so you can understand why it’s worth the striving. Forced marches of motivation have a high failure rate, with not many people achieving lasting behavior change via such methods. This raises the question: What is the success rate of the quantum leap?

To uncover that, it is first important to gain deeper understanding of the mechanics of quantum change.

A Void in Need of Filling

“It’s like a switch has been thrown and you’ve gone from where you used to be to somewhere else, and the intervening steps didn’t occur,” Rob Sawyer said. “That’s a quantum change.”

Sawyer’s own change causing dramatic weight loss was quantum in nature. He spoke of twenty years at his sedentary job of being a writer leading to gaining significant weight, but he stayed affixed to that office chair because he had a mission.

“It was only when I won the Hugo Award for best novel [for Hominids] in 2003 when I had a void in my ambition that needed to be filled,” he said. It was the top professional achievement he could attain in his field. Afterward, this other goal of losing weight that had been hovering in the background went through a quantum change. A return to discussing electrons explains how it happened.

“The lowest level of an atom holds two electrons, and the next highest level can hold eight,” Sawyer said, explaining that you cannot push one of those lower-level electrons up to a higher state if all of those spots are occupied. But if one spot is vacated, there is an opportunity for a lower-level electron to complete a quantum leap to that higher level. It is promoted instantaneously. This is what happened for Sawyer. When he achieved ultimate career success, space was made for something else to become a top priority.

“It’s no coincidence the year after winning the Hugo I lost a third of my body weight,” Sawyer said. And true to the descriptions of it being a digital process and not analog, this or that, on or off, Rob was committed. “There was no wavering,” he said. “It was going to happen.”

Sawyer has kept the weight off more than a decade.

Make Room for Change

I have a big task for you now. So big, in fact, it needs its own header and section.

Reflect on what Sawyer said about winning the Hugo. Recall the description of how an electron at a higher level must vacate the premises prior to a lower-level electron being able to make that quantum leap to the higher energy level.

This is all about achieving a higher energy level.

And if your higher level is full, something needs to vacate it and make room for your inspiration to be instantaneously promoted, the way Rob’s desire to lose weight was.

It’s a fancy way of describing prioritization.

If your highest energy level is maxed out with “life stuff,” you must reevaluate that stuff, because something needs to be deprioritized, perhaps even eliminated.

What takes up a lot of your energy?

Some things are critical. There are aspects of work and family that are challenging to deprioritize, but everyone wastes time, even those who think they don’t. You say you need your downtime to watch TV or surf the net, but how much time? A 2016 Nielsen report determined that the average adult American spends over 4.5 hours each day watching TV shows and movies. This doesn’t even consider surfing on your laptop or phone. Surely there is room to make room.

MAKE IT HAPPEN!

I have a few of these special exercises in the book. Call them “Act Now!” on steroids. I save them to call attention to more critical tasks. This one qualifies, because if a quantum leap of motivation is going to take place, your highest energy level needs an open slot. This is the detailed analysis, rather than sudden insight, for which writing things down may help. Examine your schedule and where your focus lies. Make a list of the stuff you do that sucks up a lot of energy and time. Consider where room can be made. You need this hole, this vacated spot, because then there will be a yearning to fill it. Give this task of making room the extra attention it deserves.

What may happen as a result of completing this first “Make It Happen!” exercise is that, through careful analysis, you determine, “Of course staring at a screen sucks up a lot of my time, so I’ll just cut way back on that.” But you don’t. You keep staring, because it’s paying off for you in some way.

But now you know this is part of the solution, and it sticks and gets unconsciously turned over, and then perhaps the epiphany comes through that uncovers why you have that behavior, how meaningless it is to continue the way you do, and how much more meaningful it would be to your life to spend that time on a passionate pursuit.

One day, you could be watching The Big Bang Theory and say, “Wow, this show has strapped a couple of hydrodynamic boards to its feet and achieved altitude overtop a carnivorous fish,” and you start walking each evening instead.

The Ground Shifts

“This is about exponential change.”

Ken Resnicow is a professor of health behavior at the University of Michigan and has published several papers on the phenomenon of quantum behavior change. He explained how the stages of change—the transtheoretical model discussed in chapter 1 (#ulink_432c42ac-62e6-5b08-b240-728394934c71)—“is a very linear progression that is also quite proportional. They even talk about standard deviations of change.” This means studies of TTM show groups of people based along a bell curve changing a specific amount at a specific rate.

Conversely, Rob Sawyer explained that quantum leaps of change are not linear, not proportional, and not in stages. “Exponential” means going from baby steps to Olympic-caliber long jump in a single stride.

“Using their terms [from Prochaska’s TTM],” Resnicow said, “one can jump from precontemplator into action at a moment’s notice.” And this is not just action but dedicated action, aka “maintenance.” In TTM, the “action” stage is tenuous. One is struggling to adopt the new behavior to achieve maintenance. But with a powerful epiphany there is no struggle; it is not a half-assed adoption. It’s full-assed.

Lee Holland did not slowly slide over into laborious action because of her epiphany. Rather, she became dedicated to taking “action” regarding her career and into “maintenance” in an instant after the realization in the parking lot that she was destined to do much more with her life.

“Epiphany can be primed for,” Resnicow said. “The raw materials for the perfect storm are something that can be provided.” Priming can give people the information and skills that make it happen.

“Don’t pressure yourself worrying that your light bulb hasn’t gone off yet,” Resnicow said. Doing so creates a state of anxiety. As we’ll examine further, it’s positive mood states that set the stage for sudden insight. Besides, “Sometimes things have to marinate for a while before epiphany happens.”

It’s a struggle to escape struggle.

Post-epiphany, the changes in behavior won’t feel like work. It doesn’t mean you don’t have work to do first. I’m going to kick your ass a bit in coming chapters, and then, suddenly, perhaps …

“It isn’t about struggling,” said Professor Miller, who has been treating addictions for forty years. “With overcoming addiction, some people are often white-knuckle holding on to not go back to their previous situation.” But he explained it is different for others, the ones who experience an epiphany, because they suddenly realize they’ve had enough.

“The typical epiphanies are, ‘Oh, shit! I don’t want to be this person anymore!’” said Resnicow. “If you’re religious, it can be, ‘This is not what God put me on Earth for.’ It’s an overwhelming sense the ground has shifted beneath you.” Resnicow explained quantum change as a tectonic-plate movement in how you view your identity and your behavior, and how the two no longer are compatible.

An example of how well sudden change in behavior works comes from a 2009 study of seventeen hundred smokers and ex-smokers published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research. The authors found that those who spontaneously quit smoking are almost twice as likely to still not be smoking after six months than those who chose a carefully planned quitting attempt. It’s also interesting that spontaneous quitters were less reliant upon pharmacotherapy to quit. They didn’t need that nicotine patch. They were just done.

My best friend Craig woke up one day and promptly decided to quit when he realized how much money he’d wasted over the years. This cessation of smelling like an ashtray was done much to my and my wife’s approval. After more than a quarter century, he’s never wavered.

Battling addiction or weight or finding purpose are not the only things a quantum leap can assist with. A 2005 study published in Behaviour Research and Therapy looked at “sudden gains” in cognitive-behavioral treatment for depression. The research found not only did 42 percent of patients experience a great leap of improvement in a short time, but those who did were more likely to sustain such gains and had a higher rate of recovery.

I want to repeat something regarding epiphanies: It’s not calculated. Professor Resnicow refers to it as a “metacognitive event.” This means the solution to the problem often arrives while you’re not actively trying to solve the problem.