Oliver Burkeman: You have to do the living yourself
I don’t mean to suggest … that environmental or pharmacological tools have no role to play in behaviour change. … Willpower has severe limits; you can’t reliably use it to power through problems that are emotional at their core. … And yet … There seems to be something crucial about … actively committing and recommitting, again and again, to going in the direction you want to travel, instead of acting as a spectator to your life, watching to see whether the systems you’ve put in place perform as you’d hoped they would or not.