To Change Habits, Try Replacement Instead | Hacker News Reader

To Change Habits, Try Replacement Instead

nytimes.com

634 pointsALee174 comments

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and if you are suffering emotionally/mentally please seek professional help.

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My anecdote:

I used to frequently suffer from (undiagnosed) anxiety and depression.

For about a year, I would respond to sudden anxiety by seeking comfort in various forms of isolation/depressed behavior (watch TV as a distraction, try to take a "nap", etc.). The most insidious thing about this was how it seemed to happen so quickly that it was practically subconscious. Days would disappear.

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, and instead chose to do one session of push-ups, instead (when possible).

This worked really well for me for two reasons:

1. It caused me to stop myself short of falling into any kind of depressive spiral -- physical exertion is a great distraction!

2. Needless to say, I did a LOT of push ups, which are a great form of full-body exercise. The benefits are well known.

These days, I don't need the push-ups as a distraction; most of the "bad habits" I used to have don't appear nearly as much (although I still need to exercise regularly to avoid depression).

Me too, only with running. It's a great way to force yourself to take time for meditation, reflection and processing the days events. For me it's my time, time in which clients, other folks in my life are set aside and I can think for myself. Plus it's a way to progress, have something to be proud if even if client work, or other aspects of life aren't.

If you don’t mind me asking, how often do you feel you need to run?

I feel I need to run every week day at 8 in the morning at my local community college’s “life fitness center” - highly recommend anyone check out their local community college’s fitness centers if you aren’t keen on normal gyms, they are usually not crowded plus they are filled with students and elderly people. Some days I vary my running, either long distance with a steady space or high intesisty interval training. I then do some light weight lifting and jumping jacks, planks, push-ups, and sit-ups.

Extensively, if I stop exercising for a two week period (which I currently am in the middle of), I’m more prone to become melancholy, sleep in till the afternoon, compare myself to others to a greater extent, have no interest in dating, have no hope for the future, etc.

But other factors also play a role in my well-being plus exercising every morning in the weekday, i.e. sleeping well, making my bed, grooming, dressing nicely, eating fruits and vegetables, drinking only water and lots unless it’s a special occasion, being outdoors (in the sun if possible) as much as I can, having my things be clean and organized, etc.

I do the same, and I run 6 days a week, about 40 km total. Been doing this for 12 years, whatever the weather, cold, heat, rain, snow etc.

Not a big fan of running, prefer sports overall, but damn I enjoy running on cold weather. Cold air is so refreshing and it gives me some kind of a super-human feeling.

> 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.

I would maybe partially agree.

I personally mostly recognise the pattern, the problem is to find the strength to fight it, to want to change it at least. It's even more difficult if you are depressive.

For more than a year I struggled with a depression and sometimes couldn't get out of bed, even though I worked and studied, cycled at least 3 times per week and was mostly active. I would fall asleep everywhere and anywhere I could and wouldn't miss an opportunity to lie in bed and watch Netflix. At some point I thought I was just exhausted and it was normal to take a (5 hours) nap. But I was tired all the time, wanted to sleep at the lectures and pushed my limits at work. I realised what was the problem, I just got used to this routine where I worked, attended classes and slept, but somehow I didn't want to change anything, I thought I was too tired to do it, or I could do more harm by doing it. I needed a lot of time to realize that I was wasting my time and was not productive neither at work nor at college. So around two months ago I decided to change things. I used the winter break to travel a bit and looked for a new job. But most importantly, I tried to find a kind of a workout where I could relax by exercising; so I started to do some yoga, which helped me get back my concentration and relax.

My point is, that only recognising the pattern might not be enough. If there is not a desire to change it, it will not go away, so it kind of brings us back to the resistance part mentioned in the article. I think wanting to change the pattern is the resistance and "changing things and replacing the habits" is just another way of this same resistance.

That sounds like anemia or some other form of malnutrition or fatigue syndrome

I didn't think it was normal too, but my lab test results were saying I was perfectly healthy.

Been at this stage for a year or so. Finally been trying to change it since January. Been difficult, but happy to have loving, familial support.

There's a little thing that helps is the experience that correcting your self brings tangible benefits. When you felt it, the next time you will happily fix your problems. In a way I felt it was a worthy definition of being an adult. You suddenly strive for small but regular, organized, balanced .. instead of idle or intense (typical young adult maybe)

This is such an important point. I know some people who have made great efforts such as exercising more or quitting alcohol, but for whatever reason they claim to not perceive the purported benefit of their effort.

I don't know how to help them, because for me, if I need more exercise, I perceive the "benefit" (mood improvement, etc.) usually almost immediately, like 5 minutes into it. When I cut out alcohol, I perceive improvements within 24 hours. It unsettles me to imagine if this was not the case.

This is why culture/education is important. You can rediscover this on your own but it may mean hitting bottom to actually try other strategies. Or you can rely on experience of others. Or at least a system that let you fall a bit and then give you incentives to go the other way.

Regarding exercise, I may be able to provide some insight as I've gone through this transition over the past few years. Most likely, they're looking for the wrong benefits:

As a society, we tend to center our advice to overweight people around "losing weight." It's a useful long-term diagnostic, but terrible as a day-to-day guide. The maximum safe rate of weight loss is 1-2 lbs/week, but your weight can easily fluctuate by 5 lbs through the course of the day -- even when doing everything right, you still have to go back a month to reliably find higher scale readings.

As people chase scale readings, they tend to pass straight through the enjoyable activity range without noticing and into the range that requires burning willpower to continue. The trick is to focus on activities that are inherently enjoyable, and work on improving them. Lots of people that kill themselves running on the treadmill would be better served by a leisurely stroll outside. Eventually, they'll add in some jogging just because they feel like it, and they've started on an improvement path that's long-term sustainable.

Good point. It's an important factor. If I may add one pinch of advice though: it's also important not to run for pleasure only, that's the reason people are overweight in the first place; eating on a couch is 100% pleasure. Some times you have to overcome a pain barrier. And very often in life it is so. Not to turn people into masochists but it's important to know.

Well, yes and no. With me, as I started to get more active, I voluntarily pushed into those pain barriers because they weren't that bad, and made me feel amazing the next morning. Similarly, my eating habits improved primarily because eating junk makes me feel sluggish for a while, robbing later activity of its enjoyment. I sometimes still make that choice, but I usually pick activity instead.

Most importantly, through the whole process, I never had to force myself to do something I didn't want to. Instead, I put myself in positions where I want to do things that have a long-term benefit, for short-term reasons.

I had moments of deep mental resistance, anything is a damn burden. I believe lots of people feel the same and have a few very high psychological barriers.

True; I was lucky enough to be able to find a path through the maze that goes around most of my mental barriers. There’s no guarantee such a path will exist, and even if it does, it’ll be different for everyone.

IMO that's another thing you learn with time. There's no sure path.. you oughta crack through. Which is a bit paradoxical since you actually lack willpower but it's the only way.

It's like todolists.. I have thousands of them. Nothing happens. At times I just roll up my sleeves, in a very thin anger, and just go through chores and duties.

Now that I internalized that notion I'm much more willing to do things rather than procrastinate and day dream about how I would/should/could.

I'm not 100% proactive, far from that, but I know I'll be much happier if I do be (sic).

>eating on a couch is 100% pleasure

It's not that simple. For example, humans can indulge and feel guilty at the same time. We're complicated beasts.

True, it's amazing when you think no no no no but yet you do it.

If people want to lose weight, the worse advice you can give them is to "exercise to lose weight". Exercise has little to no effect on losing weight. You have to exercise at such a level of intensity and duration to make any meaningful difference that most people can't or won't do it. Losing weight is almost entirely about what you eat.

As I said in another post, I was a part time fitness instructor for 12 years and I would exercise intensely between teaching and my own personal workouts 10 hours a week. But it didn't take "willpower" because it was harder to get out of exercising (I had to find a sub), it was part of my social life and I was getting paid to stay in shape. How many people could handle that level of effort?

Even now, to see any effects from exercise on losing weight and keeping what I would consider a fairly normal caloric intake, I exercise 2 hours/four days a week and trending toward 3 hours/four days a week. How many people can actually do that?

I also have a separate room in our house reserved for exercise equipment so I don't have to find time to go the gym - a treadmill, elliptical, and soon a magnetic rower and adjustable weights. When all is said and done, I'll have about $5000 worth of equipment in my house. I would never recommend most people spend money on exercise equipment at home unless they are already an avid exerciser.

There are a lot of good reasons to exercise that should be emphasized but so wouldn't even mention "weight loss" as one of them.

I would disagree on this point.

Although I am not very experienced in exercising, from time to time I start to jog or go to the gym for a couple of months and the only reason I do this is to get into shape; losing the weight was always a part of it. After all, there is a reason why thousands and thousands of people go to the gym only to lose weight. I'm not saying that exercising is only for this and of course it brings lots of health benefits, but I cannot neglect the fact that after 3-4 months of gym I get in a perfect shape and lose 8 lbs minimum.

Getting in shape is an excellent reason to go to the gym, but it has surprisingly little to do with losing weight. The two are correlated, and weight is easy to measure, but your fitness can improve much faster than your weight can come down.

In my case, I was better off paying attention to how my tennis game was progressing than anything else — winning a point I wouldn’t have been able to touch a month ago is much more motivating than the 1% weight change over the same period.

I understand and respect your attitude towards fitness, I think that's even better, because this way you are not concentrated on and irritated by the fact that it takes so long to get in shape. Everyone have their own goals when they start doing sports. For some it is improving the performance for others to lose the weight.

Doing hundreds of different diets can be much more challenging then breaking into sweat and for some (imho: very reasonable) people, it's better to lose 2-4 lbs a month than 10 in a week. Most of people are generally aware, that it takes time to lose weight by doing sports, but it is the fact that you do lose it eventually.

To lose 4 pounds a month just by exercising and if you keep your calorie intake the same, you would have to burn an extra 500 calories a day through exercise. That's about a 3 mile run. Assuming most people won't me able to run and will be doing a brisk walk, they can expect to burn about 280 calories an hour - almost 2 hours, 7 days a week.

https://www.livestrong.com/article/300443-how-many-calories-...

How many people exercise and don't eat at least a little bit more?

Between walking at decent pace, at a 12% incline, I can burn 500 calories in an hour. I add on another hour on an elliptical at the highest resistance and that is another 900 calories (yes I know they are usually off by up to 15% either way). But how many people just getting into shape can do either with good form? Let alone both 4 days a week?

Well, isn't it individual for every person? Firstly, someone who weighs 141 lbs does not lose weight with the same intensity as someone with 220 lbs. Secondly, if one wants to lose weight by doing sports, he should be reasonable about this and not eat a bar of a chocolate after a 50 min run.

As I already said, I'm not a professional and I do speak from my personal experience. I don't have exact statistics either, I'd like to try and search for it though and post it here. I've found an interesting series of articles which I read just now, if you have interest or time you might want to skim through it, too:

http://sportsscientists.com/2010/01/exercise-and-weight-loss...

> Well, isn't it individual for every person?

Statistically speaking, no. Most people's physical response to food and exercise is almost exactly the same given the same inputs. There may be minor variations from person to person, but the variations aren't large enough to change the general advice. There are extreme exceptions, but those are natually extremely rare, and shouldn't be used to muddy the water.

> Secondly, if one wants to lose weight by doing sports, he should be reasonable about this and not eat a bar of chocolate after a 50 min run.

While that's exactly the point, the way you said it is too dismissive, IMO. This is exactly what happens to almost everyone. You don't need to exaggerate with chocolate bars. Unless you're counting your calories or consciously going hungrier, most people will naturally just eat a bit more at meal time because they're hungrier, because they worked harder. If that's not being reasonable, then you need to understand that millions and millions of people are not reasonable.

If one only wants to lose weight, he could reasonably skip his normal 2nd morning bagel, and just skip the run too. Save $5, save an hour, it costs less to eat less, in every way. One way to look at this is there's no such thing as losing weight by doing sports. There's only gaining weight by eating too much, and losing weight by eating less than you burn. Whether you exercise is perhaps irrelevant to your weight. (That's exaggerating, but is more true than the other way around.)

> I've found an interesting series of articles

These articles are from a sports magazine and are selling sports as the solution. In the (second) article, he admits that you have to keep diet under control, but he is dramatically over-emphasizing the importance of exercise on weight loss, and he's painting a picture of calorie counting being too difficult and too inaccurate to be effective. Speaking from personal experience, this is quite misleading bullshit. You don't need accuracy for it to work, and you don't have to account for secondary effects of exercise either, which the author claims at length. Compare these articles to the Vox article @scarface74 posted, you will see some striking differences.

I love going to the gym, I advocate exercise 100%. I think exercise keeps me happier and healthier. But the gym isn't a weight loss tool. If anything at all, I now use the gym so that I can eat more than I would be able to otherwise. I can burn 500 calories working out, and then feel okay adding an extra 400 calorie treat during my day.

I didn't exaggerate with a bar of chocolate, I've done that, not proud, but a huge fan of chocolate.

I understand what you mean and most people might do exactly as you say, I don't argue with that. My argument is that it is possible to lose weight if you do sports, even if you lose a very small amount of weight, it is still losing the weight. I'm not trying to stubbornly prove my point here, I just feel that I've been misunderstood. I don't advice anybody to leave doing what they are doing and start doing some sports because it is the only way to lose the weight, no it isn't. There are lots of other options and maybe more effective even. I just don't understand why we should deny the fact that sports also is one of the options, if, and I have to agree here, combined with a good diet (and by diet I don't mean starving yourself, but eating consciously).

I appreciate your answer, there is more for me to read and learn about the subject indeed.

I hear you, and I understand your point. And you're right too. Exercise is a way to burn calories faster, there's no denying that. I've been coming down extra hard to emphasize my point. ;)

But just to be clear, because I'm not sure I've been completely understood either, and to answer your question "why we should deny the fact that sports also is one of the options"... I never lost weight at the gym in 20 years of going to the gym until I realized that sports is not a weight loss option for me personally. The reason is that our physiology compensates for excess calorie burn by making us hungrier, which is true for almost all humans & animals. If I don't track what I eat, then I will accidentally eat too much after I work out, just like I accidentally eat too much when I don't work out. I know that many, many people have the same problem. Once you see this, you realize that for many people, going the gym actually has nothing to do with the weight loss, even if they think is does. It's either a way to continue to eat 2k+ calories, or a way to get stronger, but only the intake control is what leads to weight loss. Without the intake control, the gym just leads to more intake and no weight for me, and for a lot of people.

I'd really like to read some unbiased statistics, which wouldn't be some sports propaganda or anything I've unknowingly posted above. Could you advice me any sources that I could read up on? I've looked through the article that scarface74 posted, but I'd like to have some more read.

For most people, weight loss is simply the wrong goal. Increasing activity levels and functional ability provides a much better return in quality of life and long-term health than weight loss.

As activity levels rise, weight loss starts to change from an extrinsic to an intrinsic goal, as it now directly impacts performance. It still requires diet change, but each incremental reduction produces more tangible effects than just a number on a dial.

When I was teaching and training for runs regularly, I would often purposefully eat more on my heavy work out days before a two or three hour work out session just so I could make it through the session. But I was in weight maintenance mode. I wanted my weight to stay in a certain range. If I were over a certain weight, I wouldn't look as toned and under a certain weight, I just felt "little".

I was in weight maintenance mode. But like you said, whT about all of those people who weren't purposefully trying to maintain and were compensating by eating more? I know people who actually gained weight by over compensating.

Heck if I hadn't known about the density difference in fat versus muscle, I would have felt really bad seeing my weight go down by only 15 pounds a long time ago after working out hard, with cardio and weights - even though my body fat percentage went down 12% and I lost 4-6 inches in my waist.

Unless you're losing mostly lean mass, that 10 lbs/week represents a 5000 kcal energy deficit every day. With base energy needs around 2500 kcal/day for most people, no diet will get you there.

Losing 8 pounds in 3 months would demotivate most people who have 40 or 50 pounds to lose. That kind of proves my point.

But for a scientific backing.

https://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11518804/weight-loss-exercise-...

> After all, there is a reason why thousands and thousands of people go to the gym only to lose weight.

There are multiple reasons for that, but none of them are because it's the best way to lose weight. I used to think it was, and I've been going to the gym religiously for a couple of decades. I was always fit, but never lost the weight I wanted until recently when I discovered that eating less is the best way to lose weight. When I would go to the gym, I would compensate by eating more, which is why I never lost weight.

The high level bit, the primary action is exercise makes you stronger. Not exercising makes you weaker. Eating adds mass, not eating removes mass. It's so simple and symmetric, it just astounds me how long I believed that the primary way to get skinnier was to exercise.

I was afraid to eat less, and extremely resistant to counting calories (and I believe many many people are in the same boat). How many diets advertise being able to eat as much as you want of certain kinds of food and still lose weight? How many gym commericials advertise gyms for weight loss? Most gym ads sell gyms as a way to lose weight, most of society talks about gyms as a way to lose weight, it's no surprise that people think of the gym as a weight loss tool and as a way to avoid counting calories, or worse: being hungry.

The replacement technique in the article is exactly what I had to use to get over the fear of hunger. I had to figure out a way to mentally realize that my hunger meter was mis-calibrated, and that if I didn't feel a little bit hungry, then I was eating too much. I had to re-adjust to realize that not being hungry was a bad thing. This is opposite of feeling like I need willpower to overcome hunger.

> I cannot neglect the fact that after 3-4 months of gym I get in a perfect shape and lose 8 lbs minimum.

You're lucky; your eating is under control and you don't over-compensate when you work out. But many people do if they're not careful, which is why advising gym use for weight loss is usually ineffective (and can even damage some people's will and/or self image). Advising gym for getting stronger is great.

I very much agree with many points you've mentioned. I've never said it is the best way to lose weight and I'm sorry if I misled you.

My response was to the comment above; I will just quote the last part of it :"There are a lot of good reasons to exercise that should be emphasized but so wouldn't even mention "weight loss" as one of them." My point was to say, that exercising can help you lose weight. I'm not saying a lot, or easily, nothing is easy when it comes losing the weight, I struggle all the time, but sports is one of the ways to do this if you do it reasonably, trying not to overeat, etc.

I'm not saying it can't work. I was in a position as a part time fitness instructor and a very occasional personal trainer, that people would ask me for advice. The safest most general advice that would work for "90% of the people 90% of the time", would be to focus on their diet (not "a" diet) for weight loss and to recommend a dietician for help in eating a well balance meal.

My goal was to help them get stronger and in better cardiovascular shape - not to help them lose weight. I would actively discourage them from thinking of exercise as a weight loss tool. Anyone who was active enough and already in shape enough to work out to the point where they were losing weight wasn't coming to me for advice.

You must be under 30.

I don't know if your comment is in response to my post. But I'm 43. When I was teaching fitness and working out 10 hours a week, I was between 25 and 35. These days, between problems with my ankles (not related to working out too much) and exercise induced asthma, I can't do high impact cardio, but I do still have my strength - hence high resistance low impact exercises.

Agreed, but there's an exception in my personal experience. If you start commuting by riding a bicycle, you can easily get 5-10 hours a week at around 70% max heart rate (average).

Of course it's difficult to motivate yourself to start and to keep at it. If the distance is long, you probably can't completely change to riding in one go due to excess fatigue, and if it's short it won't be effective. And of course it will take months to lose any significant amount of weight, just like any other way.

When I started this on a 22km commute I didn't want to lose weight, but I literally ate as much as I could and still lost some.

I'm not arguing that it can't be done, just that someone who is over weight and deconditioned is not going to have the stamina to work out enough to make a significant difference in their weight.

How long did it take you to get in the kind of shape to do that?

Yes, you're absolutely correct, but stamina comes with practice. The biggest issue IMHO is motivation: if you don't have it, you're not going to keep exercising for long enough.

Riding 22km once was no problem, and shouldn't be for most healthy people given plenty of time and a working bicycle.

Riding it both ways on the same day took me a couple of weeks. This was coincidentally the point where I noticed weight loss.

Riding both ways three days a week took 2-3 months. (I did it before that, but then was too tired next week.) Note that this was about 7-8 hours a week of exercise, ie. a lot.

Now, about two years later I might be able to ride that kind of a commute five days a week. But my commute is only 15km now (which is a lot easier) so I haven't tried.

I have no doubt that the issue you describe happens, but people have also had the experience that there simply isn't any "enjoyable activity range" to begin with. This could be some abnormality in interoception, which researchers are finding is much more common than previously thought (it was previously regarded primarily as an ASD symptom, but as much as 15% of the general population might be affected depending on how abnormality is defined and assessed).

> but as much as 15% of the general population might be affected depending on how abnormality is defined and assessed

Do you have any links to research on this topic?

I should probably start bookmarking this stuff. To be clear, the connection to exercise resistance/intolerance is my own speculation. Most of the actual research so far is focused on the relationship between abnormal interoception and aspects of mental illness. A lot of this is also pretty preliminary; as far as I can tell, there's not yet much consensus on even a rigorous definition of which sensory functions qualify as "interoceptive", let alone validation of methods to measure it. That being said, interesting articles include:

Alexithymia, not autism, is associated with impaired interoception [1]

“Lacking warmth”: Alexithymia trait is related to warm-specific thermal somatosensory processing [2]

Alexithymia: a general deficit of interoception [3]

Alexithymia Is Associated With a Multidomain, Multidimensional Failure of Interoception: Evidence From Novel Tests [4]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4962768/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5595273/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5098957/

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5824617/

_The Power of Habit_ helped me understand it isn't just catching yourself, but catching yourself in the right place. The book calls discusses keystone habits. ([0] has some digital overview a the beginning)

I think finding those keystone habits is difficult. GP figured it out, great!

If you haven't figured yours out, I recommend continuing to observe and try different reactions to triggers, thoughts, feelings, etc.

[0]: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rl-adams/6-keystone-habits-to...

Seems you discovered mindfulness :). "eventually I learned to catch myself whenever I was seeking this form of comfort" is the hard part that a lot of people don't figure out on their own. go you!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness-based_cognitive_th...

Yes. As a recovering sysadmin, I think of mindfulness as creating monitoring/observability for my own self. It was weird to realize that I had a better idea what was going on with servers half-way across the world than with my own emotions [1]. Meditation and other mindfulness practices have been hugely beneficial.

[1] If that rings a bell, consider taking this self-test: http://www.alexithymia.us/test.html

I used to deviate into physical exercice. It does give you a lot. I often mention it but I reached bottom heart wise, which forbidded me to do so, delaying everything a lot since I can't take care of my body and enjoy the calming and motivational hormonal benefits.

Physical activity is immensely valuable. Just yesterday some documentary linked here mentioned that cardiac exams and statins are not even as useful as proper active lifestyle.

I did this as well, and it does work well.

At work, when I ever found myself thinking about checking reddit, facebook, etc, I would instead step aside and do pushups. It improves my productivity.

Until I started getting criticism from others about doing push ups, it had worked well. I realized my depression/anxiety was external.

Even when I moved, one of the bizarre things I encountered were people criticizing me for doing pushups, even though I stopped doing them. It was either one of several freak chance things, or there really was/is negativity coming from external sources in my life.

Well, sorry for a bit of a personal rant, but if you need help, might as well put yourself out there a bit, I suppose.

People feel guilty when they see other people doing stuff to improve themselves. Crabs in a Bucket.

I have a very similar experience.

I found that developing a routine of exercise is the only thing that has helped me with anxiety and depression. As a side effect, when you have a busy schedule, and you commit to working out in the morning (for instance) it leaves you little time for your bad habits (drinking at night or whatever).

> seeking comfort in various forms of isolation/depressed behavior (watch TV as a distraction, try to take a "nap", etc.). The most insidious thing about this was how it seemed to happen so quickly that it was practically subconscious. Days would disappear.

This hits too close to home. I can second the physical exertion as at least palliative. Something about it just snaps me out of complacency. My example is that I purchased a used set of free weight barbell equipment and doing strength training not only disrupts the downward spiral, it makes me feel strong. Extra extra bonus: having the lifting setup at home means I can get a lot of chores done during rests between sets.

It's amazing that you mention this as this was a similar method that I used to quit smoking. When I had the craving to smoke a cigarette, I took off for a sprint (I was younger with an outdoor job at the time!). It both interrupted the pattern, and associated the behavior with the pain of sprinting.

I hope this doesn't come across as a personal attack. This is meant to be a message for people reading your comment.

If push-ups can treat your (undiagnosed) depression, then you do not have depression. Full stop.

This is not to say that you did not have a mental illness, or that you did not experience real suffering. However, doing a session of push-ups will not treat depression or significantly alleviate its symptoms. For anyone reading this, if you think you may have depression, you absolutely, urgently need professional treatment. Push-ups, running, or meditation will not fix it.

Thank you for emphasizing this (definitely not taken as a personal attack).

This is basically what I meant with that disclaimer. Also, I hope I didn't trivialize anyone's suffering, and if I did I am truly sorry -- I'll avoid using these words in the future.

I was diagnosed with ocd and depression. You said it took a year to catch youself doing the pattern. Please tell me how you learnt to catch yourself. I need that skill desperately.

When training animals, particularly dogs, it's (I think) pretty well-known that redirecting to positive behaviors is much more effective than punishing unwanted behaviors (so much so that one could say "punishment does not work at all compared to redirecting to desired behaviors" without much exaggeration). i.e. when a dog chews on a sofa cushion, put a dog chew in their mouth or direct them to go get their toy or chew or whatever. When they jump up on people, put them in a sit-stay, then you can praise them for doing a good thing. This is just a human, self-directed, version of that, I think.

I'm not saying people are like dogs, but...people are kinda like dogs.

We sort of have dogs within. We are super sets of dogs.

Edit: it must follow we are rather cute within. Dogs are cute!

I do agree with your statement, but it's the idealistic approach and sometimes not effective at all.

A big problem with the dogs (as observed in humans, too) is that if they don't see a leader in you, they are going to take this position over. I've had 4 dogs in my lifetime and I've tried different approaches with all of them, because they all had different characters, but one thing I did with all of them: I was strict and I punished them at times. They are like babies, I don't think you can raise a child without punishing him from time to time; if you don't do so, there can be much more complications which maybe harmful for both parties.

How do you define "punishment" for dog training? In the psychological sense, punishment is going to mean either denial of a positive thing (treats, toys, etc) or use of a negative thing (scolding, physical methods like spraying water or citronella, poking (dog whisperer's method) or straight up violence).

To me, this is not the way to train a dog. You can still be a leader by providing their food at set times, by giving them play time and ample walks, and by truly mastering yourself so you do not unnecessarily use physical or verbal abuse on them. To me, I've never had to punish my dogs, all I'll do is say "No" in a particular tone of voice. Other than that, I just reinforce the good behaviors, allow them wiggle-room for breed-specific behaviors, and make sure they have plenty of exercise and a good diet.

Well, even saying no in a particular tone of voice can be accepted as a scolding, especially if the tone is in higher notes. What is a particular tone of voice, which will not effect them in a way that scolding does? They are not human and cannot express their minds, which makes it more complicated to understand whether you crossed the line or not. I remember talking to the kid the other day and saying no to something in a very calm but firm way, she said I was scolding her and didn't understand why I would do that. I hope it does complement my point.

I didn't disagree with the fact that it is the ideal way of raising them, but sometimes being strict wouldn't hurt if the other methods don't work. And by being strict I don't mean being violent and beating them, since I am not a violent person by nature.

I think this is a result of not having suitable substitutes TBH (from my personal experience).

I strongly disagree, and stand by my assertion. I've owned dogs all my life (and I've been both very bad and very good at training dogs, depending on which point in my life we're talking about).

I'm absolutely confident that redirection and positive reinforcement is better than punishment...again, so much better that you can accurately say "punishment does not work" without much exaggeration.

Being the leader and punishment are not at all the same thing. Punishment can actually have unintended consequences. If your dog is behaving badly to illicit attention, punishment is still attention. So, the punishment kinda becomes a reward, but it's mixed up with a bunch of fear and confusion in the dog. Now they have anxiety about you, and uncertainty about what the right behaviors are to get the response they desire (attention, affection, food, play, walk, whatever). I've seen so many neurotic dogs who've been made that way by punishment from their owners.

That said, there are ways to not reinforce behaviors (which also work for little humans). When a dog is acting out to illicit a response, the right action is not punishment, but nothing: Withdraw attention. Silently turn away from them, leave the room, stand up if you're sitting with them and they're trying to climb into your lap. This is the same principle as a time out for a child. It isn't "punishment" in the sense most people mean, but it is an effective deterrent to unwanted behavior.

But again, redirection to a behavior that can be rewarded is best. You can't do that until you've trained the dog with a few behaviors that they can be redirected to. Once a dog knows "look at me", "sit", "stay", "down", and "heel", you can solve just about any behavior problem quickly, and your relationship with the dog can always be one that is gentle and free of anxiety for the dog. Dogs desperately want to be good dogs; it's instinctual from tens of thousands of years living with humans. The only problem is they don't understand what "good" means to humans until you teach them, and most behavior problems are communication problems, not lack of punishment.

The notion of "alpha" among canines is so misunderstood by most people that it is kind of pointless to use it as a guiding principle in dog training. Your dogs are part of your pack, not your slaves; they'll do what is good for the pack willingly and happily, as long as they understand what that means.

Perhaps we're just using different terminology here, but when people say "punishment", I assume they mean loudly yelling "no!" at the least and at the worst a rolled up newspaper, or rubbing their nose in poop, a shock or choke collar, or throwing them out of the house, or whatever. I sometimes catch myself becoming frustrated and yelling...but, I have also observed that it does not achieve my goal with the dog, and I can see their confusion and discomfort. In those instances, I should think about how to better communicate with the dog, not double down and become more "strict".

I accidentally adopted a dog recently (long story, but he was an RV park dog whose primary caregiver went to the hospital for over a week during a snowstorm), and he had tons of bad habits from being basically feral. Never walked on a leash, wasn't house trained, etc. It took literally a few days before the neighbors who knew him before I adopted him started expressing shock about how well he was behaving. If you'd told me 20 years ago that a dog could learn to walk well on a leash, come on command, sit/stay on command, be house-trained, and all around be a pretty good dog, in about a week, I would have been incredulous. He may be smarter than average, but really, I've helped tons of friends fix their dog's neurosis. (I am beginning to sound like I'm pitching a dog training program on late-night TV, so I'll stop, but I'm serious. Nearly every dog owner I've ever known is doing it so wrong, and I wish I could fix all of their broken ideas because dogs deserve a good relationship with their people.)

*elicit

I hear you and I agree with most of what you've written. That's why I said above that I agree with you but I still find the approach very idealistic and sometimes very difficult to accomplish.

> The notion of "alpha" among canines is so misunderstood by most people that it is kind of pointless to use it as a guiding principle in dog training.

I come from the place where stray dogs are a very common phenomenon, they almost always move in packs and the behavior of alpha dog can be at times very brutal towards the pack members, if they don't follow the lead. I once even had two dogs at the same time, both males and they would fight for leadership badly unless one of them established himself as a leader. So I wouldn't say that most peoples'approach is necessarily pointless.

> Perhaps we're just using different terminology here, but when people say "punishment", I assume they mean loudly yelling "no!" at the least and at the worst a rolled up newspaper, or rubbing their nose in poop, a shock or choke collar, or throwing them out of the house, or whatever.

all the examples of the punishments you've mentioned are very violent and brutal and are mostly observed by unexperienced caregivers or by people who are violent by nature. I frequently caught myself yelling, too, and it might be normal at some point, because you are a human and sometimes things happen and you say or do something in a way you didn't mean to. Important here is to realize it was too much and not to do this again. So you learn.

> I sometimes catch myself becoming frustrated and yelling...but, I have also observed that it does not achieve my goal with the dog, and I can see their confusion and discomfort.

The confusion comes into play when the dog is used to a distinct pattern of your behavior and you suddenly change it. If your dog has never seen you strict and you've been always gentle with him, of course he will be baffled, that's very natural.

Strictness is not bad by definition. If you can balance, and it is very important to do this, it is alright to be strict from time to time IMO. Raising a dog is the same for me as raising the kids, they are part of the family deeply loved and cared for. As I mentioned before, I'm not a violent person but I am strict because I have my limits.

> Nearly every dog owner I've ever known is doing it so wrong, and I wish I could fix all of their broken ideas because dogs deserve a good relationship with their people.

I hear you. i want to live in a better world, too and I hate seeing people mishandling animals. There are millions of people who are brutal to their own children and who are very sure in the rightness of their raising methods. That's very sad and unfair, but will stay the way it is unless the awareness will be raised. Only this way will all creatures have a chance to be treated fairly. So I thank you for your kind attitude very much.

A great book about this is Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor. Even if you don't own a dog (I don't), it's a great guide to how animals--including humans--learn behaviors and can be trained best with positive reinforcement.

Fantastic book. When I was a kid I trained my cats to come when I called their names using the techniques in this book.

Thanks for the recommendation.

What’s the positive analogue to barking?

The linked article seems to suggest that you can replace bad habits with arbitrary other habits. Maybe that's true, but I think it's best to change your situation so that the right choice is the easiest to make.

I've discussed this in the context of transportation cycling at HN in the past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515129

> As a transportation cyclist, some people I know think I must have superhuman willpower. But the reality is that I don't own a car, don't like the bus, and live too far away for walking regularly to be practical. I structured my life so that cycling is the most convenient option.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16450267

> No excuses are valid. Don't feel like it? Doesn't matter. I don't want to ride most mornings. Cold weather or rain? Too bad, no choice still. Sick? Take a day off for your health.

> I am no more successful at maintaining other exercise in my life. I used to run more regularly, but I haven't had the time for a while. So I understand how difficult maintaining an exercise habit is. That's why I leave nothing to chance.

Well you do have a choice when it’s raining. You could take the bus. I guess you don’t like the bus, but you do have a choice!

You're correct, I didn't choose the right word. I usually will wait for the rain to stop, but I also do ride in the rain. I prefer most rain to the bus. I have chosen the bus a few times over cycling over the past 5 years, but only when the rain was particularly bad.

In my case, taking the bus is a good 15-20 minutes slower than biking, so by the time I'm looking at rain and having second thoughts, I'm usually too late to catch a bus and be at work on time. Very effective!

> I think it's best to change your situation so that the right choice is the easiest to make.

Lowering the activation energy required to do cardio by getting my own treadmill in the living room really helped me get into the habit of doing cardio more regularly.

Now instead of paying every month for a gym membership I rarely used, I end up doing a good 3-4 hours of light cardio every week, opportunistically, because it's so easy to get started, and I can play music and watch shows while exercising without worrying about disturbing others, making it a much more enjoyable experience overall.

Glad to hear getting a treadmill worked for you. "Activation energy" is a great phrase to use here. I'll adopt it in my own conversations.

Glad to hear a treadmill worked for anyone, I've only seen them used in homes as clothes drying racks.

> Lowering the activation energy required

This is exactly the reason why I like working out at home instead of dressing up and taking the time to travel to the nearest gym. And well, coming back from it too. In the process, I've even worked on improving my form while only been using my body-weight and a stress rope, instead of ego lifting at the gym.

Maybe that's true, but I think it's best to change your situation so that the right choice is the easiest to make.

Absolutely. I basically stopped working out when I turned a section of my basement into a gym. I thought it would be nice to have the extra room, and ability to leave the equipment set up. In practice, it was out of sight out of mind. A month ago I moved some of my gear into my office, and have worked out every day since.

You write this as if they are contradictory, but I'm not sure why.

They're not contradictory. My issue is that you can do better than arbitrary replacements.

Thank you for staying this. (again)

I've always really hated exercise, and I still do. I've never been able to get into the 'exercise zen' that some people talk about. No matter what approach I take, even going back to when I was young, exercise was unpleasant.

Not surprisingly, nothing I tried over the years for exercise stuck very long.

Until I arranged my life that I had to ride my bicycle to get to work.

I absolutely do not look forward to riding each day. I will subconsciously look for excuses to not ride. (We do have a car, but my wife is the primary user of it. So sometimes if I know she won't need the car that day, I'll cheat and drive that to work.)

But overall, it's been a pretty revolutionary change. I'm getting a reasonable amount of cardio nearly every work day.

Your experience is similar to mine.

Some of my friends have tried to make exercise inherently enjoyable, but I see this as usually a lost cause. Using myself as an example, there are very few exercises I would enjoy. And would I even do an exercise I enjoy regularly anyway? Basketball can be fun, but I never felt motivated enough to play unprompted, so it's not enough. Plus, basketball is nowhere near as good cardio as cycling.

Given that excuses are easy and that you probably can't make exercise enjoyable enough, the best option I can see is to make exercise unavoidable. Active transportation is my favorite here. Reducing friction helps a lot too, and might be enough for any particular person reading this, but I prefer to leave as little to chance as possible.

I’ve been able to reduce my time on news websites dramatically by developing the habit of opening the kindle app instead. Now I (mostly) continue to read my books instead of reading nonsense.

I do the same thing (with physical copies, I don't have a kindle). It's amazing how much more knowledge you can gather by just doing that one thing. Plus the delayed gratification when you look at a pile of books and think to yourself: "Wow, I read all that?"

For the gratification with raaded ebooks I use www.goodreads.com

I even put there audiobooks there, which really go well with treadmill exercising. I love listening to books at 135BPM (walking fast with 5% gradient)

I'm with you on Goodreads. I absolutely love the yearly challenges and how easy they make it to track.

Thought suppression is a one-way ticket to training your brain that the thoughts you are trying to avoid are the only things you should be thinking about.

Over a long enough timeline, it wires your brain, the giant "what if" machine, that it should be worried about whatever it is that's popping into your head and making you feel so resistant.

Which can lead to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Here is a much more powerful proof that changing environment can help you change yourself.

https://jamesclear.com/heroin-habits

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.

There was also a study done on rats that showed they would not seek out drugs when in an a nurturing and stimulating environment. Kurzgesagt have made a great video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg

I wonder if tourists who get addicted carry the habit back at a different rate? Part of the reason to explain the GIs drug usage was, well, they were in a nasty war and probably knew some people who were KIA and wanted an escape.

Yeah, that makes sense.I think this affect was taken to the extreme with the environment of the Vietnam war vs. civilian life in America.

I imagine it would apply to tourists, just not nearly as strongly. It would be interesting to see numbers.

A very good book on this is Biology of Desire by Marc Lewis. Cites the Vietnam heroin example, and gets into the neurobiology of bad habits.

Key points are that addiction is neither a choice nor a disease, and self-control is a depletable resource (so being overly suppressive can lead to binges). Recovery benefits from emotional events that reframe one's relationship with the bad habit and exploring the traumatic roots of it.

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.

Doing nothing is harder than doing something else.

Interesting concept, do you have any links or cites for more info?

Have you tried doing nothing?

I think attacking one problem at a time is the best way to go about (at least for me). I noticed that many people try to make drastic changes all at once and then fail at all of them. I'd recommend trying one thing and just doing that one thing above all else. IE, don't try to exercise and diet at the same time. Pick one and when you've firmly established the habit, start the next change.

I agree completely. I spent years as a fitness instructor and worked out regularly. Life happened, I stopped teaching and working out consistently for five years and everything went south, weight, blood pressure, strength, cardio, cholesterol, etc.

I tried to "turn things around" and failed.

First step first 6 months - I cut back on fried foods, salty foods, burgers, and sweets and kept a sane calorie budget. Along with medication that brought my high blood pressure down from a walking heart attack level to elevated but still didn't do much for my cholesterol or weight (5 pound weight loss).

Second Step 3 months and counting - It was a simple matter of increasing my exercise regimen from non existent to a relative intense resistance based regimen that's now up to around 2 hours four times a week. I've lost about 10 pounds but I've probably platued.

The third step is going to be the hardest for me, cut back on meat and start eating more vegetables and fruit and cut out non diet sodas (yeah I know about the studies with diet sodas.) Goal is about another 10 pounds of weight loss.

Cutting out meat is not significantly associated with weight loss. Cutting out simple carbohydrates, especially sugar, is.

True. Cutting out meat was a red herring. I need to eat more vegetables and fruits.

Honestly, my biggest concern is not losing weight at this point just being healthier.

I would replace this with cutting out processed meat or even just cooking more - ever tried to eat roast chicken without any greens on the side?

> I cut back on fried foods

That's the only 100% banned item in my diet because fried stuff makes my skin look ashen and ugly. Whenever fried foods come up in conversations everyone immediately assumes I am talking about fats vs carbs and proteins. Google does too. I can eat most any fats, even butter sticks, no problem. I was wondering if anyone knows why fried foods are so bad.

It sounds like you might just be allergic to certain types of oil. No need for wooey explanations.

Also but not likely to be the reason for your symptoms - cooking with vegetable oils releases toxic chemicals linked to cancer and other diseases,

Meat is ok (if you like it).

But cut out all sodas ASAP (even diet sodas). Imagine that all sodas are addictive mild poisons. That would help you to replace sodas with water.

Stopping soda intake would probably allow you to lose another 10 pounds without extra effort.

> Imagine that all sodas are addictive mild poisons.

I feel like this just doesn't work, like, at all. "Poison" is a strong term, and as bad as soda can be, it just isn't a poison; the contrast is too strong to properly work, in my mind.

I drank probably 1L of diet soda a day while loosing 90 lbs over 6 months, necessary evil I say!

I can ditto this completely. I don't know what's up with those studies but calories in calories out worked for me while drinking tons of diet soft drink. Some of the time I was doing low carb.

It should be noted however that even sugar free carbonated drinks are bad for your teeth.

Yeah thats what is keeping me off them now (plus I've been caffeine free for a month!)

I'm currently losing weight. 40lbs since Thanksgiving. I drink about 2L per day of diet soda, which is my only fluid intake.

As far as cutting back on meat goes: I'd suggest simply focusing on eating enough vegetables. Most folks don't come near eating enough fruit and vegetables (most of which should be vegetables). You might find that simply getting enough vegetables forces you to cut back on meat. You might replace part of the meat in a meal with vegetables. Maybe switch your breakfast so you eat fruit or vegetables. Same for lunch. Finish your veggies at dinner. This doesn't feel restrictive in the way "less meat" does. You are only on one goal, after all, and the other might be a natural side effect.

And about soda: I'd suggest simply cutting down on soda altogether. Once they are out of the normal loop, it isn't so bad to have a soda once a month or something. I eventually just quit: nearly all soda tastes like syrup. The main exception is one they sell here that is basically watered down, carbonated fruit juice. As a bonus, you can still have the thing you enjoy from time to time.

(not who you responded to, fyi)

I've noticed that veggies are hugely important to making me feel good, probably because of the fiber and the fact that I'm eating them instead of processed crap.

It drive me crazy, though, trying to find recipes that have lots of veggies, but still a little bit of meat. I like meat, and no desire to become a vegetarian of any sort, I just want to have 90% veggies, 10% meat, or something around that. It is really hard to find that balance in recipes. I usually just take a recipe and add a ton of veggies. That works, kinda, but I really wish it was easier to find recipes that already figured that stuff out.

I got an Instant Pot for xmas, and while it isn't worth the hype, I've found some good recipes for it. One is Chicken and Dumplings. Really tasty, but I added red pepper, green pepper, celery, carrots, and onions to the recipe, and greatly reduced the dumplings. It took about 4-5 tries before I found a new version of the recipe that we liked. I'd like it if I could find that recipe straight up. "High Veggie" recipes, or something.

various stir fries are great for that

Yeah, I'd probably have stir fry a good 6 out of 7 days a week if it were up to me. My wife likes them, but not as much as I do. She loves cheese too much ;) I agree, though, they rock for veggies.

It can be really difficult to find recipes that are balanced. You might try looking at recipes for diabetics. I'd start a blog to make these high-veg meals if I had the inclination to keep it up.

I'm mostly vegetarian - I eat fish once or twice a week. but I use meat replacements. it makes it slightly easier, but not completely. Before this, I cut down on meat greatly - I had gallbladder problems and later got that organ removed, so digesting meat is weird for me. My digestive system is happier this way.

Stir-fries are good. In many recipes that you have small bits of meat (diced chicken, ground beef, and the like) you can replace part of the meat with veggies. It doesn't take a lot of meat to add flavor or get your protein. Soups are generally flexible. Pasta sauces can take a lot of veggies in them (a stick blender will make the texture smoother). Simple dishes of meat with sides are a great way to add veggies since you can easily adjust your portions. Grilled cheese - or toasted cheese made in the oven, especially open-faced - gives some veggies.

Another great way to make sure you get veggies is to limit meat to one meal a day. Or simply make sure you look at other meals and snacks to fit them in. Eat fruit instead of drinking fruit juice in the morning. Snack on bell pepper or carrots. If you look at intake through the day instead of individual meals, it might be easier to achieve. You can average through the week as well so you have more flexibility. That might mean you have some nights with fewer vegetables and others that have little to no meat.

I’ve found committing a large chunk of money, in front of friends, to causes I detest it I don’t hit my goals, to be like a magic wand for this stuff.

UKIP haven’t yet received £1,500 from me, and each week I’ve been tremendously productive and done everything I set out to with that as a threat

Beeminder comes to mind when thinking about losing money when you don't hit your goals (goes to the company). I've been too afraid to try since I'm a student with loans, but maybe it's time.

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.

That’s cool and all, but doesn’t really work if you’re trying to, say, stop being anxious on public transit.

It's arguably impossible to "stop being anxious". I mean, the harder one tries, the more anxiety. But it is possible to redirect, even in public. Perhaps adopt a centered stance. Or do something else that's unobtrusive and nonthreatening. Maybe even smile.

It is possible via behavioral therapy. Most social anxiety stems from a lack of previous success in social situations. Once you realize that people don't bite, you stop giving a shit. The public is mostly oblivious and distracted. If you think you are getting attention its far more likely that no one cares.

Source: introvert who isn't scared of the mopey public anymore

Fair enough. Both are useful.

There's a difference between being an introvert and having (clinical) social anxiety. It's an irrational fear and no amount of "realizing" will help with that. Cognitive behavioral therapy however will teach you to recognize thought patterns and channel them elsewhere, but that's something entirely different from "stopping giving a shit".

Source: extrovert with lots of anxiety who loves the public but still gets irrationally scared of it at times

Exposure therapy alongside CBT has been proven to eliminate social anxiety, which is what he is saying.

I would _highly_ recommend “Freedom from Nervous Suffering” if that’s your issue. Claims to be a book about agoraphobia, but properly fixed once and for all my fear of flying.

That's really just basic habit loop -- trigger-action-reward -- that one needs to break by replacing action part with something different more useful. Pretty quickly one gets used to a new habit loop structure and the same old trigger now ignites some healthy action to receive the same old reward.

E.g. teeth-brushing habit: trigger - wake up, action - brush teeth, reward - freshness mint (or other) taste in your mouth. That's basically why a taste was added at all to a toothpaste -- to create a habit loop. Before that teeth-brushing powder/paste was tasteless and resulted in bad sales.

The same habit loop structure is used a lot to change bad habits or to integrate new habits in sports, military, etc. There is a very good book about it by Charles Duhigg:

"The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business"

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business/dp/081...

I bit my nails unconsciously for 15 years. Constantly bleeding and got to the point where my thumbnails were gone and I thought they wouldn’t ever grow back.

I got braces for my teeth, the biting immediately stopped, and my nails grew back to perfect condition in a few months. In dealing with the discomfort of braces, I developed a habit of pushing my tongue against my teeth which completely replaced my nail biting habit. (To be clear, the braces per se didn’t deter me from biting.)

I do this all the time now unconsciously. Fortunately it’s imperceptible and doesn’t do any harm.

I bit my nails for about 18 years, was not until I saw someone with horrible nails that I decided I needed to stop.

I replaced it with taking care of my nails and now I file them more than most people to keep them in great shape and to avoid biting.

I'm the same way, if they get past a certain length, I start biting because they compulsively annoy me.

I put a little swiss army knife on my keys and having the scissors on me at all times fixed that for me.

Thoughts and habits are related, but they aren't the same. Interesting counterpoint to the replacement theory of kicking bad habits: https://www.nirandfar.com/2015/04/bad-habits.html

I can profoundly relate to it myself as by moving alone for studies to a university in a completely different country, a lot of things changed in my life. It is not only that you replace many of the troublesome habits, but also you are making yourself busy familiarising with a new environment. It is like with every other change, which causes us to go out from the comfort zone, however, in the end, we are satisfied with the changes we agreed to.

That was a lot shorter than I expected for a self-help piece. There are so many such pieces, books, videos, groups and online courses on forming new habits and motivation, but there’s still a huge market to be developing content in this space.

We humans seem to be fundamentally built for laziness and habits, which could many a times be to our own detriment.

I would swap 'laziness' to rest. We think we need to do a lot of things purely because we tell ourselves that, or we put ourselves in expensive environments.

About 6 years ago I read this terrific book, "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business" [1]... Highly recommended!

[1] https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0055PGUYU/

I just finished reading this last week. I highly recommend as well. Key take away, understand the habit loop, (cue, response, reward). To change your habit you need to know what the cue is, and watch out for it. When it happens, you need to replace the habit with a difference response that gives the reward. Part of figuring out your cue is looking at People around you, Emotional State, Location, Time, Immediately Preceding Action.

If anyone finds this train of thought interesting, look at literature around Neuro-linguistic programming [0]. As pointed out in the Wikipedia article, this body of work is heavily criticized, and I'll address that, because I think that NLP shouldn't be discarded. The methodicality of the approach outlined in the above comment is somewhat of a central theme in most of NLP, that's what reminded me of NLP. For the purpose of this discussion, I'd sum up NLP as a deep, broad and interesting exploration of the key-take-away from the above comment, that is the trigger-response-reward loop.

It's true that there's a lot to criticize in NLP. What stuck out to me especially was the monetization by R. Bandler and his manner of conversing that is somewhere between being excessively boastful and compulsively lying. However, the Wikipedia article says that the body of work that is NLP was discredited scientifically, which I find preposterous.

I can easily see some practice advocated by a notable NLP practicioner being discredited, but not the whole, because it is too far-reaching. The area covered by NLP makes it pretty much an umbrella keyword for many, many areas of activity of a handful of people. The most controversial of which is probably their revival, reinterpretation and I'd dare say furthering of our understanding of hypnosis, but that's just one thing, and one that I don't find to be their most important contribution.

The basic NLP keywords relevant to this discussion are triggers, mental mapping, anchoring, Meta Model, and then a small host of more advanced concepts that use these building blocks. Their work on the vaguelly named "meta model" alone should be deemed an important contribution, while being minor compared to their work on behavioral therapy.

I can't recommend individual books, since I've sprinted through a bunch of them some years back, their quality somewhat varied, and I had to read some of them to find out that they are repackaged older material, but there are definitely gems out there. The principal authors in the field are John Grinder and Richard Bandler. I would stay away from post-2000 books by Bandler, if I recall correctly. I seem to have found them over-monetizing and a bit distasteful. Bandler also has a lot of video content out there, which again is often distasteful in my opinion.

To sum up on a positive note, I find the literature and work around NLP to be a diamond in the rough, emphasis on diamond.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

Somehow these "try not to think of" memes don't work on me.

I'm a slow reader and the "white bear" is still "words" in my mind when I'm finished, I have no image in my head till I try to get one actively.

Has anyone got any tips for how to stop biting nails? This technique sounds like it would work for some habits, but I do this subconciously without realising - usually when I’m deep in though on something else (not when I’m streased).

Someone I know switched to only biting one nail. I switched to biting more gently, not actually biting through the nails. Keeping your nails clean and trimmed may help.

There is a thing you can buy at the pharmacy that looks like transparent nail polish but tastes extremely bitter. Basically makes it disgusting to bite your nails, but is invisible to others. Hard to get off too, so you’ll get a few days bite-free from one application.

If anyone could help me stop scratching my face, scalp, and arms until I bleed I would be forever grateful. The effect on my life is profound.

Scratch something is else till it "bleeds"? Get something scratch-y. Or as the other here suggested, decide you can scratch only your arms and scalp but not the face and go from there.

I think that NLP sucks overall, it's mostly a marketing tool and sometimes worse, but there are things supported by science and some techniques for quick interventions are integrated into psychotherapy ("NLPt psychotherapy" if you want to check it). The most down to earth book which you can use to help yourself in this case is "Change Your Mind and Keep The Change" by Steve Andreas. Good luck!

I stopped a bad nail biting habit.

Started by having a single nail that I wouldn't bite - all the others were fair game. You start becoming quite obsessed with that one, noticing how much better it looks than the others etc, and being proud of how that one is unbitten.

Then simply extend that to 2 nails etc

I did the opposite -- I chose a sacrificial nail, and that one took the brunt. Once my other nails had recovered and I saw the difference, the habit basically disappeared on its own.

That nail has never completely recovered; it still looks stubby compared to the others even though I no longer bite it.

I was an inveterate biter, and I had to use small pieces of tape (Micropore[ is almost invisible) over the "ends" or edges (such as they were) of my nails, just about 5mm x 10mm pieces. This was effective to put something between my teeth and my nails to cause me to think twice (i.e. drag it out of my subconscious) and decide not to. I've gone from nubs to nail files for 8 fingers and I'm about to finish the remaining two off over the next month or so.

1. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B012TD02PS/

The problem with nail-biting is that it is mostly unconscious. To stop doing it you need to train yourself to be aware of the behaviour. I used this technique to stop nail-biting after 35 years...

Put one finger in your mouth. Bite down. Take the finger out, look at it and say out loud "I will not bite my nails". Repeat for each finger on both hands.

Repeat this process 2-3 times a day. After a day or so you will start to "catch yourself" when you start nail-biting. After a few more days you should find the nail-biting habit diminishes and then disappears altogether. If the habit starts to return after a few months (as can happen) then simply repeat the technique.

Replacement can also become a compulsion however. If you get a negative thought you want to stop having, replacing it with another will only make that negative thought more important to your mind, as it will be considered something to be avoided. I recommend doing CBT instead of following the advice of NYT articles.

Reminds we of https://www.npr.org/2012/02/27/147296743/how-you-can-harness...

The old switcheroo. When I have one song stuck in my head and I want it out, I just start listening to another song.

I read quickly and didn't think of a white bear.

Probably because my focus was to quickly read the article.

Very nice article. So, how do I stop procrastinating?

There was an author named Allen Carr, an Englishman, I believe, who wrote a book called The EasyWay to Quit Smoking.

I can attest to the relative ease his method provides, over quitting cold turkey. Essentially, he uses tools of psychology to reinforce his points, such as spaced repetition, but he also dissects the psychology at play inside the smoker's mind.

He frames nicotene addiction as a state of brainwashing, and enumerates all sorts of behavior as examples.

When smokers begin, usually as teenagers, there is a lot wrapped up in, or at least was 20 years ago, the coolness of it. This is precisely why you see actors and actresses smoking cigarettes with exotic technique of holding the cigarette, or generally looking intriguing, it is an extremely effective heuristic. Everyone who smokes their first cigarette obviously has immediate negative physical effects. They cough, it burns the throat, they get nauseous, or just a plain nicotene buzz, etc. Yet since they know that cigarettes are so cool, or otherwise lent social proof, all of this is rationalized and minimized, in the goal of validation of your peers.

A lot of the other information contrasts nonsmokers behavior to also shatter these illusions. Smokers lie to themselves that the cigarettes are what is keeping them together. But nonsmokers don't seem in the aggregate less confident, or less healthy, or less mentally stable, or any of these lies we tell ourselves. That means that controlling for the cigarettes reveals them to be the causal factor.

One of the low level rationalizations daily smokers make on an hourly basis or so, is that they are ready for that next cigarette. It is time. To the extent that they can't close that loop, this is where the _true_ stress from nicotene addiction happens. They've essentially built up experience of a heuristic for long enough, of the feeling coming, the smoking, and the feeling going away. In the smokers mind, actually smoking the cigarette is what curbs the craving, thus, the smoking is necessary.

There are a myriad other rationalizations made, all in the name of not having to go through what we assume will be a hellacious withdrawal, because we wont be able to stop thinking about it. But thats only because we trust this faulty heuristic that says stress -> smoke -> no stress.

The book simply goes through all of these rationalized fallacies, as the author smoked for 33 years, and used them all himself. The process of reading all of this information in short succession, in addition to some of the coping mechanisms that are essentially more tricks of the mind, or ways to frame the thoughts that inevitably arise when a smoker quits, I believe has sort of a triggering effect, not unlike juicy gossip and the 24 hour news cycle. However, the reader is triggered to parry each nagging thought with the context in which it is a fallacy. If this can be successfully done, the normal feelings of dreading the withdrawal can be replaced with almost a sadism for the part of your mind that is receding in its influence, abstracting the sum of this brainwashing to a monster in your mind. He is the one who wants the nicotene, he is the one freaking out, not me. I'm breathing deeply, and smelling food again.

I think I understand a lot of the general underpinnings, but I have yet to find the EasyWay to do anything else. I still contend at least part of the answer lies in this psychological realm, if not almost all of it.

> I think I understand a lot of the general underpinnings, but I have yet to find the EasyWay to do anything else

It's funny that the Easy Way to quit smoking actually discourages any kind of replacement for smoking. I tried to do it "right" and follow that direction, but eventually I started chewing gum. It felt like a failure at first, but it worked so no regrets.

My realization there was, life is a series of habits, or addictions. Some positive and some negative. Accept that, and treat them all as something outside the self. Suddenly, working out, studying, flossing, all of these simple things that seemed difficult before were now easy.

I'm sure I'm not explaining well. It's probably not something that can be explained. Just know that quitting smoking grants you a superpower, the power of not giving a fuck. And that's the greatest power there is.

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.

Ya for me that book didn't resonate at all. I thought it was a piece of trash and don't understand how anyone could actually go in without some skepticism about the shit he's feeding you. I still vape, have to wear a nicotine patch at work to focus, etc, so obviously my attitude toward that book was the problem. IMO it's just a bunch of drivel but if people read it and believe it they swear it to be true. To be clear, I'm not knocking the book but just highlighting how my attitude differs and accentuating that to state that attitude and willingness are probably a big part of the success. vapes with cynical expression

Carr specifically addresses this point in the book. He said that he was hurt to find out that after he'd published his book, and gave signed copies to friends, in the hope they would quit, many of his friends never even started the book. One of them finally admitted to him that they knew if they finished the book, they'd have to quit. So to prevent that, they just never started the book.

He also approaches the subject from the angle of timing, and that stressful periods may be more difficult, because stress is one of the triggers. Or at least we convince our selves it removes stress.

So I 100% agree that just like learning anything else you have to be willing to hear the information and process it without just dismissing it out of hand. Somewhat related is the Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.

I totally went in with tons of skepticism. Here's some huckster telling me theres a secret way. Yeah, ok. But I guess after reading enough of it, I started to realize that I had become really good at coming up with excuses, and that skill was being used against me to keep smoking. In my view, he made a persuasive argument, and wasn't trying to sell me more shit. By the time I finished the book, I was completely convinced that he was correct, even though I had not yet had my last cigarette.

I also read the book over two days, so I really got the whole message in a short amount of time, as opposed to reading a page or two a day for six months.

The super concise summary: quitting is hard MOSTLY because you think it is hard. The rest of the book is just examples of that fact. This may not be true for everyone, but it certainly turned out to be true for me. But it's not something easily conveyed through words. I suspect this book is effective only for people who are ready to quit, but needed that external trigger prompting them to do so.

Hope you quit soon. Life isn't all rosy on the other side, but it feels a hell of a lot more real.

> It's funny that the Easy Way to quit smoking actually discourages any kind of replacement for smoking.

Which seems odd to me.

I quit smoking after after (something like) 25 years by replacing it with vaping. Probably isn't all that healthy but also probably isn't going to kill me either and, meh, I like my nicotine. I've had exactly 2 cigarettes since I switched and that was in the first month or so, have no desire to smoke a cigarette even when I'm in the middle of a pack of smokers puffing away.

The main issue I've had is I turned it into a hobby so was buying a bunch of vape gear from China to try out different stuff so it was costing me a lot more than I was spending on cigarettes but I reigned that in so now I spend something like $25 every 3 weeks on e-juice. Could get that down but I really like my clouds -- actually get smokers asking me about that because they tried out vaping but weren't satisfied then see me chucking a big cloud and are like "that's what I want".

So, yeah, replacement totally worked in my case...still addicted but they'll have to pry my caffeine and nicotine from my cold, dead hands because I actually like them.

When you say that you like nicotene, can you at least agree with the general idea that you like the ability to end the general stress that comes from not being able to smoke when its on your mind?

Here's another thought experiment from the book: The author says that when he meets people for the purposes of doing seminars and speaking events, He asks smokers if they would pay $1000 up front, for a lifetime supply of cigarettes. He said that he has never once gotten anyone to take him up on the offer, and he did this for over 25 years before he died.

But if you offered a smoker that deal for things like food, or gasoline, or anything else they see themselves using forever, and $1000 is significantly less than the a la carte price for the lifetime supply, of course they would take the deal, assuming they could be sure it was legitimate, and assuming the $1000 could be secured.

The author uses this thought experiment to show that all addicted smokers wish they could quit, even if they can't admit it to themselves. Hes saying that the very fact you are unwilling to pay ahead of time is proof that you're making a calculation in your head that you envision your self quitting before you spend another $1000 on tobacco, or whatever the vice.

> He is the one who wants the nicotene, he is the one freaking out, not me. I'm breathing deeply, and smelling food again.

That almost sounds like a Buddhist approach.

There are certainly common aspects, such as mantras, and the general motivation for meditating, vs seizing control of your mind, to not let it be lead by the cigarette.

The way I stopped smoking after 20 years of 30 a day, was to consciously imagine negative things each time I smoked one (and remembered to do it).

I would think of how bad they could taste first thing in the morning sometimes, a mental image of a stale full ashtray close up together with the bad smell of it, and a slight feeling of gagging and throwing up one sometimes experienced. All while continuing to puff away without restraint.

Over time, I noticed I was not finishing an increasing number of cigarettes entirely, and that I was feeling a bit sick. I reinforced that negative feeling when I noticed it.

Eventually I just... stopped. When I thought of a cigarette I felt bad and the negative feelings would overtake me. I would call it stopping without trying. I wonder if this is a form of thought "replacement".

Sounds like you clockwork orange'd yourself.

I don't remember where I read it but I said something like "90% of all smokers stop smoking at some point in their life" and all I could think of was no way I'm in the 10% loser group who can't stop. If 90% can do it, I can do it too.

That is how I managed to stop smoking.

Interesting. I started smoking despite knowing what was wrong with it (my grandfather died of lung cancer). At the time, I was battling depression and a drug habit. I made many changes in my life to get out of that pit; unfortunately cigarettes were one of them. So it struck me that smoking can't be all that bad, since it helped me pick my life back together.

Now, I'm clean of smoking too - by slowly cutting down the habit to 2/day and then drinking a glass of water whenever I crave a cigarette. I haven't had any nicotine in 4 months or so.

To whoever's reading this - if you have any addictions taking over you, remember that all is not lost. You can still get out of it. There isn't a one-size-fits-all technique, but there is always a technique. Find it and achieve it.

This book was a revelation to me. I remember my last cigarette like it was yesterday, and I truly enjoyed it. I haven't smoked in 11 years, and it's thanks to this book. It took me three years to stop dreaming about smoking though, and I know I'm not an "ex-smoker". Being aware of that is the strongest part of the deal. I know that I could smoke again with so much ease that I refuse to even touch a cigarette. In the end, it's the best thing I've ever done in my life, and that book helped me so much.

Please replace this link to the New York Times with something without a Paywall.

On iOS, I just have any NYT site to default to reader view.

Just open it in private/incognito browser, free and less tracking!

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