To Change Habits, Try Replacement Instead

Psych major here, every behaviorist (and psych major) knows this. Ironic that they feel the need to quote Carl Jung for a totally banal effect of learning: Doing nothing is harder than doing something else.

I've read that Carr's business expanded to several other vices. The two I know of are alcohol abuse, and overeating. What I've read about them makes me think of the story from WWII, placing armor on areas of planes that were _not_ getting shot, instead of the areas getting shot. It is only the planes that came back to be repaired that got shot in superficial locations. Others got shot where it counted, but couldn't report that information. It is the misuse of a heuristic long enough to reinforce that heuristic as "proper".

I've read reviews about the alcohol techniques and the dietary techniques as being nothing more than "just stop drinking" and "just become a vegetarian". But I've also read reviews of the very same books that the sound like the reader had the same experience I did with quitting smoking.

So maybe the bad reviews are just the people who the concepts didn't make sense to, and just like every other person who has ever come along to get them to stop this behavior, they shut down and clung to the addiction's false security, rather than be berated and belittled as a brainwashed zombie who has made an incredibly long chain of terrible mistakes to the point they have stockholm syndrome.

The good reviews are people the concepts did resonate with, as evidenced by their elation due to not paying for the opportunity to kill themselves any faster than absolutely necessary.

Thanks for the plug! In theory being poor just makes Beeminder all the more effective. :) You can cap the amount at risk at $5 and have it be plenty motivating to stay on track.

Actually the first derailment is $0 so if you're extra poor then you'll be very motivated to not derail even once, in order to prevent having to ever risk actual money.

And it can't hurt to try because if you do derail with the initial $0 at stake you'll have a chance to abort before there's any danger of losing your first $5.

> It took me about a year to recognize this pattern, but eventually I learned to catch myself whenever I was seeking this form of comfort

Most of the advice from self-help books can be condensed into this line - Recognizing a pattern and catching yourself. Only after this in place can a behavior/habit be replaced. Or improved. Or removed.

If there is no self-awareness, changing behavior/habit is infinitely more difficult.

Synopsis:

95% of U.S. soldiers addicted to heroin during the Vietnam War broke their addiction nearly overnight, when they returned home to the states. Only 5% relapsed back into addiction. Apparently, relapse rates for heroin clinics are normally around 90%.

When the soldiers changed environments to a place that contained none of the stimuli-triggers for heroin usage that they had overseas, they found it far easier to quit. In typical cases, people return home from a clinic to a place that contains all of the old, familiar triggers for usage, and thus have a very difficult time quitting.

These individuals return to their prior routines, like a hand fitting back into a glove. The soldiers, however, left their gloves overseas, and instead returned to the addiction-free routines they had before the war, or they developed new ones.

The environment directly plays a huge role in driving behavior.

By consciously changing our environment, we can reduce or eliminate factors linked to undesired behaviors, replacing with new environmental features that we can more easily associate with desired behaviors.