Ask HN: Hacks to get rid of bad habits? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Hacks to get rid of bad habits?

10 pointsCrazyontap5 comments

I've often admired the suggestions I get on Hacker news. Like the comment about the book on TMS by John Sarno that healed my 10 year long back miserable pain in 2 weeks.

Anyway, so I seek your wisdom or hacks on how to rid yourself of bad habits (like nail biting, etc).

What do you guys do?

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While I wouldn't exactly recommend the book "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg (Gladwellian pop-psych productivity genre), I have several times remembered and successfully applied my one takeaway from reading it:

It's extremely difficult to break a habit, but a lot less difficult to replace a habit.

Meaning if I'm able to examine the habit (usually a compulsion or mindless ritual to pass time or ease some anxiety) and understand the role it plays for me or benefit I think I get by continuing it, even if I could never imagine just stopping it completely, it's surprisingly easy to just do something else [intentionally do a specific different thing] upon the moment of urge to doing the bad thing. Eventually I just forget about the thing I did before, and my life becomes easier and simpler.

Because you mentioned books, if you happen to have one of the classic bad habits of modern life (smoking, drinking, eating), I'm always amazed how often people cite reading Allen Carr's "The Easy Way"series as the absolute only thing that somehow, magically, against all odds, worked for them. https://www.amazon.com/Allen-Carrs-Easy-Stop-Smoking/dp/0615...

I am also struggling with bad habits. I guess it really depends on the habit, but the closest thing I've found to a 'hack' is not really a hack - it's the same concept that drug rehab centers use to get people off of addictive substances. That concept is complete removal or isolation from the bad habit, and surrounding yourself with people, so that you would feel shame if you continued the bad habit around those people. During this 'social' confinement period, you realize that you didn't need to do that bad habit in the first place.

Obviously it would be sort of difficult to apply this concept with nail biting, but to give you an example, I really struggle with eating food in the middle of the night. So what I noticed was, after I took a week-long vacation to another country with family, and due to hotel circumstances, had to share the same hotel room, I stopped eating in the middle of the night (wouldn't want family to see me gorging on shit while they are trying to sleep at 1:00 AM and suffer the shame of that). For 7 days I did that, and it was just long enough to come back home and continue that momentum, because after day 5 I started wondering why it was so hard to stop doing that in the first place.

It's difficult to break habits but not impossible. But to cure all bad habits with one over-all solution will not work in my opinion. But for everything you need the will to change something and the power of endurance. To stop biting nails you can use chewing gum or just add an oil onto the nails (there are some made for this concerns). It's bitter and tastes bad and you won't want to bite your nails again. To stop procrastination I would recommend using the method "getting things done".

Mindfulness: Whenever you catch yourself performing the undiesrable habit, watch your thought patterns. If you think "Ugh, there I go again, failing to remove my bad habit", you'll have a rougher time than if you think "It's okay, I forgive myself for this slight lapse."

Beyond that mindfulness, if it's hands specifically, I do pen tricks, tap along to my music, plant my hands on my sides/thighs, and generally keep my hands away from the problematic habit.

I suggest understanding that there's no short cut and it'll be a lot of work to change a bad habit. It took a while to get there and it'll take a while to get out.

There's the Japanese idea of "kaizen", where you take on big work in small steps, teeny tiny steps to start with.

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