HELLO, HABITS

A minimalist guru delivers a tepid discussion of remaking one’s rotten behavior.

“I think this is going to be the last ‘self-help’ book for me,” writes Sasaki, who, some 270 winding pages later, announces that his next book is tentatively titled Quit Alcohol in a Fun Way. Much of the reform he urges in this book about forming better habits involves just that, though it’s rarely much fun. “I didn’t decide to quit drinking because I understood the disadvantages of drinking,” he writes, “it was because I had personally accumulated a lot of experiences of regret.” One of those regrets, it seems, is one that the author, who is unmarried and lives alone in a tiny apartment, does not share—namely, the daily grind of paying for a child’s education or a car bought on installments, which he considers an exercise in poor prioritization. “We then have to sacrifice our precious sleep,” he sighs, “and work to earn money to pay those costs.” Sasaki blends jargon (rational thought is a “cool system,” emotion a hot one) with a few observations from science, as when he notes that remaking habitual behavior is largely unconscious activity: We do what we do in order to receive the psychic reward of dopamine. We also throw up roadblocks to reforming ourselves by pretending something untoward never happened or “thinking that it’s too late to start.” The best parts of the book are glosses on others’ thoughts, notably those of a certain renowned novelist: “As mentioned before, when working on long novels, Haruki Murakami writes ten pages every day and never misses his hour of running or swimming”; he “says that although he runs for an hour each day, he runs for a little bit longer when he receives unwarranted criticism or a rejection from someone.” Pass on this one and turn to Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit or Wendy Wood’s Good Habits, Bad Habits instead.

Of minimal interest considering the many better books on the subject already on the market.