131–140 of 241 posts
Quitting things for me personally requires tricking my base lizard brain. I recall an Onion News video with a parody PSA: "Smoking is Gay". You have to use the smart guy you to outsmart the dumb guy you. Set traps for him. Anticipate his moves and crush him.
One of my friends who's a marathon runner told me once something rather powerful. We have all these ways of losing weight: you can poop it, sweat it, band it off, run it off, lift it off, swim it off, dance it off, on and on. And yet there is only one way to put it on (pointed to his mouth) with these things (showed his hands) Made me think for a while and he made an impact on me. We control our hands. We control wha…
That said, these habits don't usually develop as a choice, they're a sort of shield protecting us from deeper issues, formed during difficult times in our lives.
For example, there's girls who gain a lot of weight after being sexually abused, because being seen as less attractive makes them feel safer.
This is why it's so difficult to quit, they're complicated and contradictory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what a bizarre comment. the conclusion is hardly defeatist. the TLDR of the article is that if you (for example) are struggling with focus, a strategy that is basically telling yourself to focus (while loud music is playing around you) will not yield as much success as removing distractions (turning off the music) in your environment, then trying to focus again. the efficacy of the two strategies is dependent not ent…
The conclusion may not be defeatist, but the conclusion is different from the subtitle of the article (and the title of the submission): > Studies suggest that relying on will power is hopeless Which would indeed be extremely defeatist. Willpower and better strategies can both work in conjunction. Willpower is not entirely hopeless as a strategy.
That may well be true. But will power is extremely important in resisting peer pressure and the start of the creation of (some) bad habits.
These threads always bring out a whole bunch of people who confuse confirmation bias with population-level statistics. If you kicked a heroin habit, good for you! Societally we still can’t use “suck it up you pansies” as a drug rehab strategy just on your say-so.
If you want to form a habit of doing sports for example, it certainly makes a difference whether you see yourself as a unsporty lazy-ass that will never achieve anything, or whether you see yourself as a unsporty person still looking for a way to get into this and make it part of your life.
What I think is important is to break habits out of band. If you are eating unhealthy or too much a good starting point is to limit your food ordering, cook yourself more. And then you can control what you can cook by buying the right things in the right amount. Ideally you don't go grocery shopping hungry then.
So make following your habit the thing that requires extra steps and is complicated, while the better alternative should be easy, available and fill you with some sort of joy. For me jogging became about listening to new music albums or my favourite podcast while exploring new parts of town. So instead of just moving my body, the sports part was actually just a nice side effect to an activity I actively enjoyed.
Sure, depending on your condition, such simple tricks might not work for everybody, but my point is: The mind is powerful. It tricks you into many bad habits, it can also trick you into the good ones if you wield it the right way.
Raw willpower alone will not help you, you also need to identify patterns and avoid creating situations where you fall back, depending on your situation this might mean even things like totally restructuring your life, cutting off contact, moving somewhere else, etc.
It’s just like decision fatigue: your capacity for it diminishes the more you use it (within a given time range). Instead, carefully curate your identity . This is described well in Atomic Habits. Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”
Whether decision fatigue is a real thing has been called in to question: https://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_stor...
Link to actual debunk study is dead, but "it now appears that ego depletion could be completely bogus" seems too strong. Certainly in my own experience something like ego depletion is very real – maybe not exactly as described, but you do run out of bandwidth at some point, so to speak. One of the reasons this is hard to verify experimentally is that, in my personal experience, everything is fine up to a point, after which it all breaks down. You can't easily re-create that in an experiment.
Someone explained to me that the subconscious mind does not like giving up something that it likes in exchange for nothing. Say for example you want to give up smoking. So don't give up. Instead, just stop that behavior for the present time - then your subconscious is not fighting you. So you want a cigarette? Well sure OK you can have one, but defer that decision to have it for some period of time. Maybe start with…
Nicotine itself is very effective at causing the brain to form habits. So that makes quitting cigarettes extra hard!
But we may be able to use it as a tool for developing other habits.
Glad you managed to find a solution that worked for you. Your technique seems good to stop doing something. But how do you make yourself start doing something you don't want to do? :)
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If I didn’t keep a bowl of fresh fruit and fancy teas in the house I’d be having some very uncomfortable conversations about diabetes with my doctor right about now.
What kinds of teas do you like? I dropped my soda habit a long time ago, but I seem to have replaced it with a habit for those dragonfruit juice drinks from Starbucks. I’m trying to get away from that and just make tea at home.
You want something that's 3/4 of the way there. I've started making my own sugar syrups with cinnamon in them for my decaf coffee because it gives me a lot of the same "sweet + spicy" flavor I like without as much sugar. Stuff like that helps a lot, but it'll depend on what you like for it. Maybe you really want cold drinks, and hot drinks substitute poorly? Have you considered better/nicer seltzer waters for that?
Someone explained to me that the subconscious mind does not like giving up something that it likes in exchange for nothing. Say for example you want to give up smoking. So don't give up. Instead, just stop that behavior for the present time - then your subconscious is not fighting you. So you want a cigarette? Well sure OK you can have one, but defer that decision to have it for some period of time. Maybe start with…
I was at a research colloquium once and this came up in the context of dieting. The author of that research was making similar statements, although the focus of the research was different. The problem I had with what they were describing was that they basically defined away willpower. That is, it felt like they basically said "once you control for all the downstream effects of willpower, willpower no longer has an ef…
In learning about people with ADHD I learned that it is actually a constellation of possible executive function disorders. There are many different aspects or subtypes of executive function, such as time management, working memory, impulse control, etc.
Then you realize that "willpower" isn't a real thing; it's just a vernacular term that ambiguously refers to some aspects of executive function.
And people with lots of innate executive function have a very hard time understanding what life is like for people who have less of it -- which seems to be what you observed and made you feel skeptical.
There is something to be said for "use the types of executive function you do have to compensate for the ones you don't". These become the strategies that neurodiverse people use to function where necessary. But it requires very deliberate analysis and practice; it's not as easy a simple how-to article or list of tricks.