Ask HN: What habits have you managed to change?
What habits have you managed to introduce or get rid of, particularly if you are over 30 years old?
Started: - lifting weights (sent on for two years before stopping due to covid gym closures) - running - reading recreationally (discovered I really enjoy sci fi), prior to that only read learning material like textbooks and documentation.
The list goes on. I am in a constant state of reinvention. Deep down I am also miserable and always have been, hence the self medication, the constant quitting, and being in a seemingly permanent exploratory phase. I'm in my 30's and thought things would have made more sense by now. I can only superficially relate to others, even conversations with my 'best friends' are basically just small talk. I thought I was depressed but despite repeated visits to mental health professionals, none have been able to help: sessions amount to them just nodding and go 'wow... Well guess we'll see how you feel next visit' untiI I eventually stop going.
Sorry if my post seems negative, the previous paragraph just sort of... emerged as I was reflecting on the things I've quit over the last few years.
I have 2 book recommendations for you. One is The Culture Series if you haven't run into it. Some of my favorite scifi. I used to be the same way where I would read almost entirely nonfiction and started reading a bunch of scifi. I'm actually more likely to read fiction in general now.
The other one is a book called "Feeling Great" by Dr. David Burns. It talks about some of the newer techniques he has developed. You may find the book itself to be helpful, or while reading it you might find it interesting to try to find a therapist who is using the TEAM-CBT technique he talks about in the book. There is also the Feeling Good podcast. I've only listened to a little bit of that so I can't recommend it or not.
In any case. I'm sorry you're feeling that way. Remember that just because you feel this way now, doesn't mean that you'll always feel this way. Life has a lot of seasons.
There are two sides of the coin: you as an individual, and society.
As an individual, you're doing the right things by focussing on playing your cards well. Running is much better in the long term than getting drunk or high, no question about that :)
In regards to society, the reality is that consumerism have intentionally promoted narcissism, 'use and throw away' mentality, disloyalty and other character traits that lead to anxiety, perpetual insatisfaction and disconnection with others. No wonder why a large part of the population suffers from stress, anxiety, loneliness, etc. Most people over 40 I know are on some sort of mood-control drugs.
We live in a world where companies are allowed to bombard people to a point where it's inevitable to live without seeing ads everywhere. It's not only the prevalence of ads which is problematic, it's the fact that those ads exploit brain weaknesses to make people unsatisfied with their life. Always desiring new things. Always thinking what they have is not enough, what they do is not enough because company ads and social media project images of people that are both false and unrealistic. All this for their own profit.
Technology just made things worse by blending ads with information, and making us lose focus on the important stuff by requiring attention all the time.
I find the ad-age repugnant and highly damaging to people. We're no longer able to connect with others at a deep level. We're no longer able to think with focus and perspective. We have 100 things in our mind that require urgent attention, so there's no time to be happy. People are now sitting in front of each other and not being able to really listen because their brain has other things in their mind. More than 90% of the people I know are unable to have a healthy level empathy and connect with others. Their noses are buried too deep in their belly buttons.
For the 10% who listens and care, this world is a very frustrating and sad place. So they stop listening and caring, thus perpetuating the toxic cycle.
The way I deal with this problem is by focussing on my own expectations. I no longer expect people to listen or care. I know humans are highly unloyal and unreliable these days, so I rather seek happiness elsewhere (philosophy, arts, knowledge, etc.). From a society's standpoint I became the misanthrope, anti-social hermit that no one wants to be around. And I couldn't be happier :) The moment I dropped desire and expectations to be 'normal', 'social', etc. my sadness and unhapiness went away.
I hope you also find your own path, my friend.
I read "Crucial Conversations" around the time I turned 35 and it changed how I manage conflict in my relationships. These days I always first try and understand why someone is upset (pro-tip: it's frequently not what they lead with).
> You can't win an argument. You can't because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it
I also love this more general one from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations:
> A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, "And why were such things made in the world?"
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
aka “Seek to understand before seeking to be understood”. I’m an atheist who happens to find great value in the St. Francis Prayer.
It just meant they expected even more, and being a cog in a giant machine meant my contributions were averaged out by those who did the bare minimum (or worse).
It was easy once I became disillusioned with my area of work...
I'm in some intermediate state right now.
If I could go back 20 years and talk to 20yo me this is one of the things I'd tell them.
Any level of work you put in over the minimum just becomes the new minimum.
Learning to say no and sticking to it would have dramatically improved my life (it did when I figured this out around 30).
Career has gone from strength to strength ever since.
It's worse when line managers or colleagues can see this and take advantage of it.
Boundaries are important...
Because I'd only say yes if I actually thought it was possible - the thing I realised is that the push back on estimations is only at the start of a project, all they remember at the end is you said X, it took X.
I started with a challenge of reading and summarizing one ML/CS paper per day, which requires a reasonable enough amount of energy and time that I have to make sure to allocate outside of work. It was a catalyst to help me get back into "reclaiming" a portion of my time and mental energy, and I started getting back into side projects.
Taking back my time has given me a lot more purpose and meaning, and brings me back to a sense of curiosity and optimism about technology that I haven't had in a while. It's amazing what feeling some ownership can do, and how much better I feel putting my time and effort into things outside of work.
Note: initially I tried to "bound my work-related energy" with non-technical goals, like running and mountaineering. It worked to distract me, but I feel like I needed an intellectual bound as well as a physical one.
Last year, the company I worked for laid off a few dozen people because of Covid. They simply turned off their logins one morning - no warning, not even a pretense of feeling bad. Some of those people had worked for the company for 10, 15 years. At least a handful of those were considered super important high performers. In the end, none of that mattered. It was all about profit and loss. I am not even bitter that they were laid off (it was a business after all), but it was the ugly and inhumane way it was done.
All this to say, it is enough to do a good job for what we are paid for. Nothing more, unless you're working on something super important that would benefit mankind, like developing Covid vaccine. Otherwise it is just plain stupid to do more than what is expected.
I started by learning how to do breath meditation. It is a basic attention exercise when I put all my attention into my breathing, in the belly or at the nostrils, the same way I pay attention to where paintbrush touches the paper.
I then committed myself to immediately start breath meditation whenever I found myself annoyed. I practiced primarily in three areas: loud and high-pitched noises, waiting for something, and work meetings. Anytime it happened, I would, internally, go into putting my attention to my breath.
After a while, I noticed that my "catch" would happen sooner. When I was first starting out, it would happen when I was already full-on feeling annoyed. But then I started catching myself when I was "beginning to get annoyed", and then when "about to begin getting annoyed".
Eventually, my emotional response to these annoying events, which I now believe to be largely learned, has become unwired, and I no longer experience that feeling, emotional state, and all the debilitating consequences.
Sure, it still happens now and then. And I'm still bothered by noises which are too loud-- I wear ear plugs often. But overall, this has been a huge deal in terms of changing my "quality of experience" day-to-day.
That being said, I will tell you what I did.
I started going to AA meetings. I went to 90 meetings in 90 days and I did my best to follow their advice. After two years or so of (at least) weekly meetings I cut back to more or less one meeting per month. Nowadays I only go to meetings if there is some kind of triggering event in my life.
I hope this helps.
Now when I exercise, it's to be healthy, not to chase some dream of "perfection" that my mind wouldn't be able to recognize even if I managed to reach it.
Now when I eat, it's because I enjoy the experience, not because I'm trying to cram 5,000 calories down my throat in a day.
Now when I look in the mirror, it's to make sure my clothes match, not because I'm focusing on all the "progress" I haven't made.
Might not sound like a big deal, and to most people it probably isn't, but it changed my life completely.
Let it be known that a truly good manager accepts when they were wrong and promotes despite differences, whereas a micromanager is insecure about something in their own job resulting in pushing their bad decisions down.
Sure, it will cause friction and will affect your career but your career is busted anyway because a micromanager will never acknowledge that they were wrong. Following their prescribed path only reinforces their large egos.
At least you can sleep well at night knowing that you did your job with integrity.
Age sneaks up on you, I am really not prepared for getting old. The upside is you naturally start to care less as you get older.
Took someone telling me to think of carbohydrates like heroin before I realized that the strong desire I have not to become painted as a drug addict could be reframed as a reason for me to give up carbohydrate consumption
After was amazing. Buying clothes in physical stores. All lipid planes and glucose panels normal. My whole medical world switched around.
Main staples: Eggs Carbohydrate free Bacon Butter Salt
Other foods Ground beef Steak Chicken thighs Green peppers, broccoli and cauliflower rarely
Congratulation on your journey, all the best
I am not a doctor but I would encourage any human being on earth to go through carbohydrate withdrawal and 6 months of abstinence
This year I started Meatless Mondays.
I visited two speech therapists about this, but both told me it's not their area of expertise (and subtly hinted that it's not a real problem that needs fixing).
I kept a journal for my _broken_ language habits over about 2 years. I'd then pick one to attack per month. Being conscious about it is hard, but it's doable if you actually make it a goal and track your progress.
Some of the ones I "successfully" killed:
- Stopped using me when my is correct.
- Stopped ending sentences in but (apparently, this is a super specific speech pattern local to my childhood suburb).
- Stopped defaulting to bought and learned to use brought (weirdly, I always knew they were different words when writing, but I would pronounce both as bought).
The one that alludes me:
- Pronouncing 'th' in certain words as 'ef'. Two examples of this are three and north. I've been trying to master this for over a year now (I'm fine with 'three' in most cases, but 'th' at the end of a word still kills me).
Goodluck!
It's interesting that there's an overlap!
Four or five years ago, I was listing to NPR / Fresh Air and the topic I believe was about speech patterns. (I can’t find the episodes, please let me know if you have any luck.) They used President George W. Bush as an example. He had a tendency to use the word “awesome” with a high frequency. If he saw the Pope, he would describe it as awesome, if he went to a Nascar race, he would describe it as awesome. I honestly can’t remember, but something triggered me and I said to myself that I choose better words to describe events and or circumstances. (This is not a political commentary.)
Basically, I channeled myself to not use swear words. I don’t type swear words on the internet and do my best not to say them in public. I allow myself 10 swear words a year and generally only swear about 5 times a year. I swear to myself sometimes, but I don’t think that counts? It also helps cause my son was born, so he is not growing up in hearing me swear.
Generally, I feel that I can use better adjectives and adverbs to describe something to a person than falling back on a swear word. I also find that when I’m reading books, my vocabulary increases a little bit for the better. When I put a book down, my language seems to deteriorate just a little bit. At the end of the day great leaders, presidents, CEO are great communicators, and swearing in public isn’t a method they use to communicate.
It took a lot of small changes, but a key for me was careful regulation of light. I started with a light-based alarm clock, which was useful. These days I have automated lights that dim in the evening and come up in the morning. It turns out I'm just not a responsible lightswitch user; if I leave manual lights on I'll stay up way later and then feel bad the next day. In retrospect, I felt bad a lot, but it was my baseline so I just rolled with it.
These days I'm more even-tempered, more energetic, more productive. I'll still enjoy an occasional very late night, but I'm always careful to return to my usual sleep schedule as soon as possible.
Out of curiosity, do you ever read books/magazines before bedtime? If so, at what time do you lay down the book?
If you're starting from scratch, I'd say start with the lighting. I put multiple Hue bulbs in my main rooms and then wrote some software to control them: https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise
I don't recommend using this software, but it's easy enough to write something similar. Basically make sure the amount of light around you is as if you were camping: bright mornings and days, dim evenings, dark nights.
Also helpful to me was looking at other things that might mess with sleep. E.g., gradually weaning off caffeine and other stimulants. Avoiding exciting things (video games, action movies) after 8 pm or so.
If at that point you're still struggling, I'd look at why. Look in the same way you'd debug an obscure software problem.
Is that helpful?
I get up and start work immediately (work from home) and get in 3-4 hours of focus time before meetings start and it's made me a lot more productive. The morning momentum also carries over to the rest of the day and I get more done then too. I would recommend such a window to everyone although unfortunately it's not possible for most. When the winter comes I'm afraid the sun coming up later will make me get up later and may invest in some sort of timed light in my room to slowly turn on at the time I want to get up.
It worked. I haven’t touched Red Bull for over a month. I drink coffee again, but with more moderation.
I think it’s made me more pragmatic.
- cigarettes - cocaine - caffeine
Each of these was a particularly nasty habit to get rid of, but they're gone and its been years since I've been near any of them. I'm better for it.
I'm actively trying to cultivate a walking habit, but it's hard to make it stick.
For coffee and wine I'm certainly on the "addicted" spectrum if you were to measure. From time to time I test staying without one or the other for a month or so (for coffee for example I used the "excuse" of whitening my teeth), but tbh I've never seen any of the acclaimed benefits of reducing consumption. So I enjoy them.
Working on my communication style. If/when I crack the code, I'll be happy to share.
No shit on people that play video games. It was consuming my life, so I cut it out.
The trick to it, for me, was to accept with humility the fact that even a little was more than I was capable of handling. Recognizing that five minutes of a mobile game could spiral out into weeks of gaming and that there was nothing I could do to change that.
I can drink up to 4-5 mugs of ground coffee a day. The mug is exactly the size of SBUX's venti size. It's not regular, I can handle a day with only 1 mug or none at all on very rare occasion. Lucky me, my SO and friends help me with reminding to drink a lot of water.
- high blood pressure
- high heart rate
With no other health issues (i.e., no underlying heart issues or cardiovascular issues in general) those may not be problematic (in the sense that they'll cause you long term or immediate harm). However, if you already have HBP or cardiac issues, cutting out or reducing caffeine can be a critical step towards better health or at least not worsening the condition.
I was drinking the equivalant of 4 shots of expresso a day on average, would always have a strict cut off of 2pm and then switch to drinking shit loads of tea. I see lots of people who drink an insane amount of coffee and I mean it's not great but for most people not a big existental threat to worry about.
At 31 I'd gotten to 220lbs which, on my frame and at my activity level, meant obese. So I started walking a 5k trail near the office 3x a week. After a couple months I started jogging it (C25k style but not the actual C25k plan). By that point being out there was just routine, so why not run it? That was 8 years ago, and other than some stretches of time where I was recovering from an injury (so far only one caused by exercising, an impinged shoulder, the rest were caused by other things like car accidents) I've been a reliable exerciser and runner since.
A habit I broke was video games. I'd play games until 2-4am and then be exhausted the next day. In retrospect, they were a way of keeping my mind occupied while I was suffering from severe depression so I wasn't really alone with my thoughts. Then they became a routine or habit even after I'd recovered from depression, but were still negatively impacting my life because I was still putting in the crazy long hours. Mostly I substituted other activities like running or exercising generally, reading, spending time with friends socially, or more productive uses of the computer like programming. Exercising actually helped a lot because I was simply too tired most days to even consider staying up late playing a video game, even if I was enjoying it I had to turn it off and sleep because I was dozing off.
In this case, it was mostly the realization and acknowledgement that the video games were consuming too much of my time (and health) that led to a rather rapid change in habit. The various time fillers changed over the years, but I dropped video games practically overnight.
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EDIT to add
Journaling. I've tried a few times, and largely failed. I've found it helpful especially for dealing with stressful periods or depressive episodes. Just expressing my thoughts on paper gets them out of my head and the "dwelling" stops or is reduced which reduces my overall anxiety level or elevates my depressed mood a bit. But, like many people's efforts at dieting, I only did this for a period when I needed it and then stopped. When my mood worsened it "snuck up on me" and I'd have to rebuild these helpful routines.
I, recently, started journaling with a 5-year journal that only offers 5 or 6 lines per day. It's more of a log, but this also makes it easier to keep up with. I don't want a blank entry (at worst I fill it in a day late). This makes keeping a long form journal somewhat easier to maintain since it doesn't need to be daily or some other regular period, it can be weekly or even monthly, or following a major event (something deeply impactful to my life or my friends or family for instance).
2. I used to brush my teeth once a day. Now I brush my teeth after every meal.
3. Exercising everyday. I now spend anywhere between 10 minutes to 90 every day for exercising.
4. Social media. I was a victim of doomscroll. And I identified that it was more of a symptom than a cause, but it is also a cause in itself. If you want to avoid doing something, if you go for a walk, or read something, sooner or later you'd get back to it. Here's where peer-to-peer media is exceptional. There is no end of content. And procrastination takes up most of your day. I limited social media use to 30 inutes a day. The same time everyday. I don't pull up my phone even wjen standing in queue, or while cooking. Much better time management and concentration.
5. For five hours or so have been drinking water immediately after I wake up.
6. Made myself able to think objectively, see nuance and be empathetic. I was very jidgemental before.
Point 4 credit goes to Cal Newport. He is the only self-help writer I can marginally tolerate. I did not read Atomic Habits or Power of Habits.
I realized that one of the best ways to form new habits ws was to hook new habits to already existing habits. This is nowadays called "habit association".
Make no mistake that I am only partially successful. I have failed in forming a lot of habits. I sm only sharing the good parts.