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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

This has literally never worked for me with any habits I've tried intentionally cultivating. I'll pick something and do it every day for several weeks. Then I stop.

Am I doing it wrong? Am I just weird that I can't seem to form good habits? I sincerely think I wouldn't remember to brush my teeth in the morning if my mouth didn't feel so gross, and I've been doing that every morning for over 30 years!

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i think if you truly hate doing something, it can almost never become a habit, unless you can somehow shove tiny things you really love into it to dilute your hatred for said thing. for instance, i love the act of going outside to buy a cup of coffee. little prep rituals like that can help.

but the main question is: if you truly hate something, why are you trying to make it a habit in the first place? listen to your mind/body. i HATE working out, specifically i despise HIIT workouts like those one hour classes of nonstop go go go go go. but turns out that i love strength training (i.e lifting weights). both sort of get the job done in terms of getting your body into healthier shape, so i just choose what actually brings me more joy. no need to force yourself to go through miserable situations just because society and everyone else says "you have to do this to be smart, or fit, or more productive, etc"

I will second this with my own "I hate working out" example.

In my case, I've figured out that what I actually "hate" about working out is the fact that I'm doing physical activity that seems to have no immediate purpose. I've often said you probably won't catch me running, unless I'm actually running away from something.

I didn't actively seek to accomplish this, but getting a dog is what's lead me to start enjoying a moderate amount of physical activity. She needs to go outside every day, rain or shine, about 3 times a day, and, ideally, needs some time to literally just run around. Walks take up the first need, and trips to the park take up the second. And, when I'm at the park, you can bet you'll see me running around with her, loving every minute of it. :-)

Sure if we are talking about doing the dishes or organizing my desk or whatever.

But I like running, yet do it infrequently. Those 30-60 minute HIIT workouts? A blast. My gym offers a 30 minute one every weekday during lunch and is a 5 minute walk from work.

There's a 3rd category of things I don't particularly like doing (but don't hate) and I'm always happy to have done them afterwards. Journaling would be one example. I'm actually worse at these than the necessary things that I hate (the sink eventually gets full of dishes, preventing me from avoiding it).

Depends what it is. If it's something creative, this can become pretty much like writer's block. Ie. you know there's something you want or need to write, but it's such a huge task, it's hard to get down to it. This can lead to overindulgence in research and distractions.

One solution is to set yourself a goal to just do this one thing, to get started, and do that thing. No matter how bad, just make that draft, POC, whatever. Start breaking up things into smaller pieces, and set yourself to accomplish one piece at the time, no matter the state of results. Iterate on this to improve quality and scope, and keep your focus on the smaller, managable things, while getting more clear about the whole over time. If something is too much, just break it up.

Another take is how to manage your expectations and associations. If every time you visit the dog is to give it medicine, it'll become suspicious of you. So every time you visit your projects, make sure to leave room for some cuddle time, while making sure it's also supporting progress on that same thing. For very difficult goals, transform it into a spike and celebrate it no matter what the results. No matter what, you learned something new. You want to associate with progress.

Another thing is to expect a mess. A weeklong streak feels good but then pressure builds up to not miss and inevitably we miss and it makes us feel terrible and we throw it all out. The streaks thing seems really popular but it amounts to negative pressure for me and it’s not sustainable.

So expect a mess. It’s ok if you go off the deep end for a week so long as you try again eventually. I wouldn’t say “daily” habits so much as I’d say consistent habits. over a bigger time span, the idea is to feel better and better about more and more frequency.

Virtuous cycle vs stress cycle imo

For me, doing something literally every day (often) doesn't seem necessary. Rather, for something like various work-related writing I do, it's more about keeping some sort of cadence so that I don't wake up some morning, realize it's been a month, and go "well, one more day won't make a difference."

Meh I don't think you're doing anything wrong unless you suffer some kind of condition or attention deficit.

One thing about these motivational speeches or techniques is that sometimes we just think we'd like doing something new, but deep inside our mind we really do not want to have that new habit. In those cases what we typically really want instead is to be the person who had already cultivated the habit for a long time. Thus if you think about your objectives and realize this description matches how you feel, that's a signal that you don't really want to do that, it maybe just feels cool to imagine yourself doing it.

A practical example. Not sure if here on HN or where, but I heard once this principle applied to playing the guitar, which I've always wanted to do. After asking myself I realized that I don't want to learn how to play the guitar... what I really want is to be the guy who already knows!! :-) And that explains why I tried learning guitar... like 5 times already in my life. And always ended up stopping practice after some time. I was just misguided by the cool imagination of me taking out a guitar and playing a song, but in the real world that takes practicing regularly, which I'm not willing to do (even though when I'm at it, it feels fun, but clearly not enough to keep me persevering).

I know exactly what this feels like. I have been making digital mini-magazines about music subgenres for years. I have never finished a single one. Shoegaze, Garage Rock, Post-Punk ... I always move on to a new issue before I'm even done with the first.

I want to already be the guy with a boring 9-5 by day, and a 'cool' punk historian by night. But I'm not, and the older I get the more I'm sure I won't ever be.

And yet I've been doing this for several years. Maybe I never finish them because I'm scared I'll feel the exact same way I did before I embarked on this hobby.

I know nothing about music genres... but such organized "mini-magazines" in PDFs that cover the outlines and basics seems quite appealing and interesting.

Appreciate that, I actually did not know if there would be any appetite for what I was talking about. Certainly not among my social circle!

I can't form habits of any kind either. There are days when "brush teeth" has to be a checklist item as I can easily go to bed without doing it. Same with eating even.

+1 from me, but also add on "go to bed at a reasonable hour."

I recommend checking out Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. He runs the Stanford Behavior Design Lab (previously known as persuasive tech lab). One takeaway from that book that might be relevant to you is that we tend to repeat actions that are rewarding in some way, so if you can think of ways to engineer reward into whatever activities you want to repeat, you have a higher likelihood of doing them.

I think that just means that your subconscious cost benefit analysis concluded that it wasn't worth it. I think that's normal. You'll probably try out a bunch of hobbies/habits in a lifetime, and only choose to stick with a couple.

Have you considered you might have some disorder that affects your executive function capacity like ADHD and therefore requires alternative strategies to organize and cultivate habits?

I am, in fact, diagnosed with ADHD, and my previous therapist says I'm a fairly extreme case. I do have alternative strategies for organization, but have not heard anything about problems with cultivating habits (indeed, many people have recommend cultivating habits as a coping mechanism).

A lot of advice I hear is that it takes about 30 days of doing something daily to form a habit. Perhaps you are stopping just short of the necessary number of days?

Also, given that you have been diagnosed with ADHD, maybe it would take you longer than others to form the habit. I don't have any outside info to support that -- it's just a possibility that came to mind.

It may be difficult to cultivate habits with ADHD because of the need to do it consistently, and the struggle to perform something consistently while getting consistent necessary associative dopamine if I understand it.

try something like ticking off/writing down your successfull tries eg in a calendar or a (bullet) journal. helps to keep yourself committed to it, as you probably do not want to break your already created streak.

I use a giant sheet of graph paper on my desk with days of the month marked off horizontally at the top and a column of daily habits on the left. I put a big fat X in the grid for each day I accomplish a given task. It's incredibly satisfying and very obvious when I've missed a few days. Also the paper acts as a nice desk protector.

I think often it takes longer than a few weeks for it to really become automatic.

I've gone 6-8 weeks without missing a day. People have said "don't beat yourself up if you miss one day here or there" and I've gone up to 6 months without missing 2 days in a row. It has never become automatic.

The only thing that works for me, at all, is putting things directly in my way so they're practically unavoidable, and physically removing distractions in advance. Modifying my environment to make the things I want to do extremely easy to do, and the things I don't want to impossible or difficult, is the only thing that works.

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