Studies suggest that relying on will power to break habits is hopeless (2019)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The article does however, in my opinion, commit a crime in bringing up the often misrepresented marshmellow experiment as some kind of fundament of psychology. The one where a child is promised a second marshmellow if they can resist eating the first one placed in front of them for a 15 minutes.
Children make do with the mental faculties and model of the world available to them. They live in a world shrouded in mystery in which adults regularly break promises to them for reasons they can't comprehend. Once the adult telling them what to do has left the room, I don't blame the kids for feeling an urge to take a bird in the hand over two in the bush. That's a perfectly good default instinct to have before you've acquired absolute trust towards friendly strangers in university buildings.
Imagine a real-world analogy to this kind of experiment. Adults choosing to go for the double reward would likely be labeled naive, bad with money, or gamblers. Extrapolating to the general population is ridiculous. Mischel's research wasn't about that at all.
From the article: In Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, only a quarter of the subjects were able to resist eating the marshmallow for fifteen minutes. This implies that a large majority of us lack the self-control required to succeed in life.
(disgruntled noises)
And looking at it that way, it's not surprising that a child who grows up in an environment where strangers are trustworthy will be more successful than a child who doesn't.
Perhaps the sad take-away should be that a large majority of us lack the supportive environment required to succeed in life.
For one thing, I lived in a household dominated by a raging drunk father who would mercilessly beat anyone who dared to question him, let alone disobey. So, sure, I could take adult orders just fine. But that left the question as to why. Apparently this creep expected to learn something from the exercise which made me sad. And I feared having to deal with his children as peers if he had any.
They also completely failed to ask or notice anything about my loathing for marshmallows. I thought they were completely awful non food and didn't want anything to do with them ever. Just smelling them and touching them was unpleasant. So I took my two marshmallows from the encounter and gave them to the first other kid I met who wanted them.
Say for example you want to give up smoking.
So don't give up. Instead, just stop that behavior for the present time - then your subconscious is not fighting you.
So you want a cigarette? Well sure OK you can have one, but defer that decision to have it for some period of time. Maybe start with 30 seconds. Build up the defer period. See if you can defer that cigarette for 1 minute, 2 etc etc. After the defer period has elapsed, if you still REALLY want the cigarette then have it - don't fight your subconscious mind.
Eventually, you'll have deferred that cigarette essentially indefinitely. You never "gave up smoking", so your subconscious hasn't been forced to get you back in line by reestablishing the cigarette smoking behavior that it likes.
Even with this strategy, it still took me hundreds of attempts to give up cigarettes. Those things are addictive.
Nicotine itself is very effective at causing the brain to form habits. So that makes quitting cigarettes extra hard!
But we may be able to use it as a tool for developing other habits.
Glad you managed to find a solution that worked for you. Your technique seems good to stop doing something. But how do you make yourself start doing something you don't want to do? :)
Like going to the gym?
Well, the same person who advised me on the deferral strategy also advised me on your question.
He said - specifically on the topic of going to the gym and exercising - (paraphrased):
"Stop looking for techniques and mind tricks, for some things in life you must simply take action. You cannot avoid taking action if you want the outcome. There is nothing more to it than taking action. You know what the action required is, do it."
On the topic of going to the gym a (very fit) friend of mine said:
"I do not give myself a choice. I do not negotiate it with myself daily. I do not discuss it with myself. I just go."
When you hear people say "I don't have time to do X/Y/Z" then translate that to "I do not prioritise X/Y/Z high enough to actually do it."
You currently set priorities for yourself every day, every minute, every hour.
If you do something, it is because you prioritised it higher then everything else.
>If you do something, it is because you prioritised it higher then everything else.
This is exactly the sort of non-actionable advice that the article says doesn't work, though. Saying that you just need to "prioritize" something is the same as saying you just need to focus more willpower - it doesn't work for most people.
What it sounds like your friend did is used a mind trick to create a habit so it was a required part of his routine, which made it easier.
You have to get off your arse and do it.
That's the actionable advice.
There's no substitute for action.
Whats the difference between a mind trick, willpower, decision, and dedication?
Deciding that you will do something and not internally debating it IS willpower.
I have to do things I don't want to do all the time. Once I am in the mindset, it is trivial to just continue it. If I go to sleep, it is easily lost and takes hours to recover. Therefore, the easiest way to do it, is to simply not go to sleep and stay up for another two hours and ruin my sleep. It's very easy, zero willpower is needed. Willpower is completely overrated.
People who talk about willpower don't actually use it, they pretend that whatever they do requires a lot of willpower or demonstrates their willpower to make themselves look good.
I think physical power/ strength is an interesting analogy.
A weightlifter can pick up 20lbs with ease, my frail mother couldn't if her life depended on it.
What is the equivalent for mental strength?
No it's not. Willpower is a brute force decision to stop and then fighting the urge until you beat the urge.
Deferring a decision to do something for increasing periods of time is not fighting yourself. The key is that when the defer period is up, you either do the thing such as smoking a cigarette - unless you are OK to defer a little further. You're not in a fight with yourself. It's just that eventually the defer period becomes so long that its same as stopping entirely.
A strategy of deferring doing something is working with your subconscious mind, not against it.
Most people have to have that cigarette/drug/etc right away, present conditions be damned. Distancing one's mind from the strong craving requires immense self-control as it's very uncomfortable, perhaps even painful, to do so.
You need another tool. Often people use distraction, look over here at this shiny thing. Perhaps this is what you used, if you think back on your experience. Distraction is essentially a type of substitution.
Especially 1) and 2) are what this article is about: make it harder to do $bad_thing and don't be reminded of it.
I don't think I'd be able to quit if cigarettes were easily available to me.
The only way to fight back is keeping the mouth busy with gum, toothpicks, pens, whatevers.
https://www.today.com/health/how-stop-nail-biting-supplement...
If you have a poke on Google Scholar, you'll find the science is quite good on this one.
Once they've turned it from a compulsive behavior into an intentional one, they can stop. Their intentional behavior made the compulsive behavior shut up, so once they stop doing it intentionally, they don't feel the compulsion anymore either.
When done properly this is supposed to have a 100% success rate.
Sounds a lot like the No True Scotsman fallacy. I'm sure most smokers trying to quit think about how bad it is every single time, yet they can't.
How would one even know when you've "thought about it hard enough"?
No, this isn't it. It's trying to take control of the actual act of doing the thing. Being self-aware about its harm doesn't count.
So, you'd have to realize what you're doing before you get out the cigarette. The aim is to do it without relying on the compulsion so that the compulsion will eventually go away.
It's not just thinking about it really hard.
It is possible that there is a similar mechanism here. The choice to delay gratification is akin to procrastination; the urge itself becomes a conditioned stimulus reinforced by the strong reward of delaying gratification until the scheduled time.
Yeah, absolutely. I have severe ADHD and this is my experience. I usually can't do something until it's completely necessary, and doing it at the last second is the most exciting/rewarding.
In school I used to finish all my homework before I even went home, because forcing myself to do that was more exciting/rewarding than doing it any other way. But this same mechanism is responsible for a bunch of my procrastination, too :)
I also tend to hate my chores a lot, absolutely despise doing them, but I think that's on purpose to try to make the act of completing them more rewarding. Completing something I don't care about is meh, getting rid of something I absolutely hate is good.
I still see the irony, though. "it works 100% of the time, for 1% of people!" So it works 1% of the time then?
Knowing these things hasn't helped me at all in life, btw. It's just some trivia.
I smoked around a half a pack a day for about 20 years.
I decided to start getting in shape and started swimming every day.
All of my desire to smoke vanished overnight. I don't know why, or what the mechanism was. I never intentionally decided to "quit".
It just suddenly happened that I had zero desire to smoke, so I didn't anymore.
I still work out regularly, and it's been 10 years now since I've had a cigarette.
In your case, I would imagine there was something your body needed that it got from cigarettes / nicotine that it was also able to get via the exercise and smoking, so the need to smoke went away as that need was filled elsewhere. That need could have been a chemical deficiency, but also could have been a mental need (like say, time to stop and think, which maybe you got via smoke breaks, and now also get via being in the water)
Low nicotine cigarettes are just as bad for your health and in terms of addictiveness.
Meanwhile if you go the other way and possibly even crank up the nicotine with vaping, you end up with less chemical dependence. There is a significant difference between inhaling vapor and inhaling smoke that drives addictiveness.
Yes, vaping is still bad, but it takes less willpower to quit vaping than to quit smoking.
Almost every successful addiction therapy relies on slowly weaning the patient off the drugs, which then gets misrepresented as "making drug addicts high using tax money".
Common advice for at least a millenium has been that a consistent good habit, even if small, is better than a large gesture that's not long maintained. Andreas Kling (author of SerenityOS) can relate to this. https://awesomekling.github.io/Excellence-is-a-habit-but-so-...
The problem I had with what they were describing was that they basically defined away willpower. That is, it felt like they basically said "once you control for all the downstream effects of willpower, willpower no longer has an effect." If you think about it, what's really the difference between saying "I'm not going buy cigarettes anymore or have them in my house" and willpower and environmental control?
There was more to it than that but that was the gist of the thing. They defined willpower so extremely narrowly that it didn't have the same meaning anymore, and it wasn't clear what would be left.
But it was several years ago and I haven't followed the literature closely.
I can see how just willing yourself to not do something, in itself, is probably not enough, but I'm also not sure how you can do that without it resulting in a whole set of things that collectively probably define the consequences of willing yourself not to do that thing. That is, removing something from your environment, or removing yourself from the environment, changing your attentional focus, finding something else to occupy your motivations, and so forth.
You could phrase it like this: the willpower to resist going out and getting cigarettes is much easier to perform than the willpower to not grab a cigarette that's in front of you.
However "will power to resist going to the store" isn't really utilizing will power to stop smoking, it's having an effective strategy that relies on knowing how hard it will be for your future self to actually employ that will power if the cigarettes do reach your desk.
In learning about people with ADHD I learned that it is actually a constellation of possible executive function disorders. There are many different aspects or subtypes of executive function, such as time management, working memory, impulse control, etc.
Then you realize that "willpower" isn't a real thing; it's just a vernacular term that ambiguously refers to some aspects of executive function.
And people with lots of innate executive function have a very hard time understanding what life is like for people who have less of it -- which seems to be what you observed and made you feel skeptical.
There is something to be said for "use the types of executive function you do have to compensate for the ones you don't". These become the strategies that neurodiverse people use to function where necessary. But it requires very deliberate analysis and practice; it's not as easy a simple how-to article or list of tricks.
I think many people are actually good at delaying gratification: suffer unbearably for a few minutes, intensely for a few days, or mildly for a few months. But everyone who suffers long-term eventually burns out, and people who are forced to suffer long-term past burnout (e.g. forced to work intensely to survive, or experiencing chronic unbearable pain) experience so much stress it changes them physically.
Furthermore, food addiction is unique because, unlike drugs, you can't "quit" food entirely. I imagine it becomes easier to avoid smoking or heroin if you haven't done so for years (though maybe I'm wrong on this point), but food is constant, so unless you form "healthy habits" (AKA eat food which both satiates you and maintains your weight) the suffering never goes away. I'm fortunate to not have weight issues myself, but as a long-distance runner, I know hunger, and it's not something you can live your entire life with. I also know that it's not always as easy as "have a cheat day every once in a while", because if you're really lacking nutrients, you'll feel hungry no matter how much you eat, that hunger only goes away after time (and presumably for some people with serious metabolic issues, it never goes away).
The good news with weight-loss is that we've done so much research, we have a lot of tools and techniques so that even people with metabolic issues can be satiated. Not even pills (which are probably only required for a minority which truly have metabolic issues), many people can probably maintain long-term weight loss with diet alone. The key is, these people maintain the weight by sticking to a diet which isn't suffering to them, like one with whole foods (which are known to be more satiating). Even then, you're maintaining constant willpower by not choosing the less-satiating but addictive processed foods, but it's not a willpower which makes you "suffer".
Instead, carefully curate your identity . This is described well in Atomic Habits. Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”
Identity change is the best, most lasting way.
Making informed decisions takes conscious thought, much less keeping the decisions equally informed. There's only so much of that you can do and humans are particularly bad at recognizing the subtle decline in quality of thought.
There's no question at all.
Link to actual debunk study is dead, but "it now appears that ego depletion could be completely bogus" seems too strong. Certainly in my own experience something like ego depletion is very real – maybe not exactly as described, but you do run out of bandwidth at some point, so to speak. One of the reasons this is hard to verify experimentally is that, in my personal experience, everything is fine up to a point, after which it all breaks down. You can't easily re-create that in an experiment.
The Wikipedia page has a pretty good rundown on the criticism and existing studies. From my understanding, it isn’t clear that the studies that have been done indicate any depletion effect at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...
Is this just basically willpower?
Or perhaps I should read the book to find out.
Read the book. It goes into some detail.
I’ve worked with thousands of people personally over the years to help them with supposedly difficult to treat addictions for instance. Willpower is fine to start, but completely fails in the long term. Identity change is the only thing I’ve found that works long term.
I'd like other traits too.
I ask because when this subject has come up I realize I don't seem to be able to think up theories about myself so easily
People who are mountain bikers don't ride to keep in shape, they look forward to getting on their bike.
Thus, I've always felt it's better to change your environment than trying to improve your willpower. For example, I got a ton of exercise when I lived in a city when the most convenient thing to do was walk everywhere or take public transportation. When I moved out to the suburbs, I tried to force myself to walk more, but it never really worked. Driving was just by far the easier "default" way of getting places in the 'burbs.
The way I think of it is to try to set things up so you don't have to use willpower in the first place.
I wonder if shopping online for delivery helps curb impulse buying
The head of UI at Homegrocer was a friend of a friend when they were at their peak, and I was in the middle of my second affair with UX, so we occasionally talked.
He told me he was getting pressure to incorporate dark patterns (though that phrase hadn’t made the rounds at the time) into the site design to get people to do more impulse buying.
Sadly if he had they might still be around.
You also can’t actually see what you’re buying (or feel/touch the actual box), which greatly increases the odds of catching shenanigans.
Dark patterns is when the actual long (or short) term benefit of the ‘target’ is not a meaningful part of the goal, and the only consideration given is just a given result for the person with the power. Aka manipulation.
Helping someone looking for an off-road vehicle (because they actually need it), your off-road vehicle which is a pretty good one, is behavioral economics.
Using the same tactics to get the exact same someone to buy your luxury car is dark patterns.
Notably, a con artist/fraud is the criminal face of it - since they never even give the target a car at all, but take their money.
The difference between influence and manipulation is the consideration of the actual well being of the target, and the degree of autonomy allowed the target.
Needless to say, this is also the first thing miscreants start deluding themselves and others on when they start getting predatory.
So it’s a very dangerous area to be in for anyone who actually values ethics/morals.
Plenty of people also criticize behavioral economics for being manipulative, especially if they don’t agree with the behavior to be “corrected”
Hard to disagree with them at some level, but putting toothpaste next to the sweets (or advertising how great your toothpaste in general is) feels pretty different from random online ads calling people’s dicks small to sell enlargement pills or making fun of someone’s makeup to sell a glow up (yes, very much a thing).
Interesting but orthogonal to the article.
The article: "I am the kind of person who has changed my environment such that doing x is inconvenient enough that I can avoid it most of the time without having to use much willpower."
We are rarely who we really want to be. Yet, here we are. I’ve been trained, literally since infancy, to obey bedtime, but I’m writing this response an hour past my bedtime.
You: I’ve been trained to obey bedtime
Proposed: I'm a person that obeys bedtime
What I'm getting at here is that while you seem to think you _should do_ it, you don't actually think about yourself as someone that does do it. Which makes sense because it's true, but I think the suggestion is to lie to yourself, just a little.
It's not a crime if you both consent.
https://www.theonion.com/new-anti-smoking-ads-warn-teens-its...
You can't therapy your way out of a terrible living situation. That's why it's important for people struggling mentally or otherwise to just simply hang on if they're unable to work on a solution.
Perhaps the wind of the storm will push you to safer waters some day.
Going for that cookie? Go for some pushups instead when you crave. Usually your mind is just bored.
You want something that's 3/4 of the way there. I've started making my own sugar syrups with cinnamon in them for my decaf coffee because it gives me a lot of the same "sweet + spicy" flavor I like without as much sugar. Stuff like that helps a lot, but it'll depend on what you like for it. Maybe you really want cold drinks, and hot drinks substitute poorly? Have you considered better/nicer seltzer waters for that?
Peach and black tea is quite interesting, because it smells entirely of peaches, but scarcely tastes of them. It’s very much like coffee in that way. Amazing aroma, boring delivery.
while i was never a big soda drinker, one summer i was drinking a lot of it because it was hot and the soda was refreshing, until i realized that the refreshment came from the carbonation, and i could have plain carbonated water to the same effect.
i still liked a sugar soda once in a while, but i avoided developing a habit.
later while i was in austria, i discovered that they had fruit-sodas with half the sugar content compared to regular soda (only 4% instead of the usual 8%)
after getting used to that the regular sodas suddenly tasted way to sweet and now i can't even look at that stuff anymore.
That still requires will power. It could probably be reduced to intention, and not so much the discipline to stick to some habit and avoid others. Even if you need to change your environment, the decision to do so comes from the intention and awareness to want change. I think it's dangerous to dismiss this and think will power is not a factor because it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think you don't have will power you will reduce the chances of having it.
This is largely why the "war on drugs" has failed to make any meaningful headway into stopping drug problems (and how despite more money than ever being poured into the war on drugs, the "opioid epidemic" still happened). This is why the "calories in < calories out" approach to weight loss while a simple and effective measure fails most people, because it doesn't address the root causes of the behavior. Likewise diets don't work because they implicitly are "temporary changes" rather than a permanent change to your entire approach to food. It's also why something like a safe and effective appetite suppressing drug will be so important to weight loss, because when you're not constantly hungry, it's a lot easier to have the "will power" to not eat that whole bag of chips after dinner.
Incentives matter a lot, and immediate incentives matter much more than long term incentives. Finding things that change the immediate incentives and changing those will go a lot further than just "willing" your way into change.
What I've observed in people is the disconnect on the last part of that pathway. They understand their deficiencies but they either believe the costs are too great versus what they might be able to achieve otherwise, or they are not able to truly appreciate the scale of change that is possible in their life by starting on the smallest part of their problem. There's also people who were just raised poorly and reliably self defeat at this point as well.
Anyways.. to me, it's like anything else, it's much easier to do if you practice it, and most people just aren't truly given the opportunities to practice it successfully in their formative years.
That may be how you describe it, but just hop into any discussion on Wegovy here on HN (or anywhere else) and observe the number of people who "don't get why it's so hard to just eat less". Or again, look at the entire war on drugs.
Willpower defined as a deep interrogation of your incentives and psychological state and making fundamental changes not (just or even mostly) to your behavior but to the environment around you and the incentives you are responding to, possibly and including accepting that your are unable to change your current environment and incentives and are therefore also unlikely to make the change in behavior you are attempting, is definitely not the norm.
Or to put it in a way that might make more sense to the HN crowd here, not deleting the prod database is as easy as making sure your not on prod when you do destructive things. But putting your prod stuff behind a VPN, having different logins, sanity checks and non-destructive capable default access to prod are all things that will make the chances of you never deleting prod a lot higher than just "be more careful". Yes, putting those systems and blocks in place is being careful in a sense, but it's not the same sense people mean when they say "just be careful and you won't delete prod".
My spouse obsesses about it, to the point of badgering me to check out some notification that I'm ignoring. Can't rest until I've looked at it. If I ask her to stop, she gets upset, I'm picking on her. Gotta be addiction.
It is an important distinction. Let me paint an example:
You need to move a huge boulder, but someone tells you that boulder is too big, you're not strong enough to push it. And they're right. But you go and you grab a lever, you use a tool, and you move the boulder.
You did technically utilize your strength, but the take away of the deed, the key component, isn't how much strength you utilized, rather that you admitted that your body's strength isn't enough and utilized a tool.
The tl;dr is that it's much harder to quit an addiction with the mindset, "This thing is great, but I'm going to deprive myself of it." Instead, you need to realize that you've been deceived and maybe even brainwashed into thinking that this vice has any redeeming value. Lots of people who've never become addicted are walking around enjoying life without it. So you kind of have to do your own reverse brainwashing to get your brain back to that state.
I used these techniques to break a bad habit. Every time my mind so much as wanders in that direction, I have a mini speech I give myself. "Boy, I am so glad that I have escaped the slavery of that dopamine cycle, where I wasn't getting joy from the habit itself, but just satisfying the craving of the addiction. I'm in such a better place now."
In the moment, I might not always fully believe the words I'm saying, but it does help.
Give yourself less time to be bad. Do something instead to sublimate some of that energy.
When they started to ban the stronger vapes, my options were to go back to cigarettes, suffer withdrawal from a less potent nicotine concentration, buy one of those contraptions and start a hobby, or quit entirely.
I quit entirely, and it sucked. Luckily, there was a pandemic going on, so I could contain the 'blast radius', but it was very much a self-hate process to get through it - hating myself for smoking in the first place as a teenager, hating that I was controlled by something like that, and hating that I didn't have agency over my own cravings, and just hating because Nicotine withdrawal sucks.
I don't think I could have done it with a positive attitude and inner strength. I still miss nicotine, and if they brought back the stronger Juul's, I'd probably start again.
This has been 50% of my approach to trying to (almost entirely) give up drinking. I realized that (a) I rarely, if ever, get the happy buzz any more (b) it doesn't get me the sex that it once did (c) it doesn't actually assist with being emotionally open with my wife the way it once did (d) it contributes to weight gain (e) it probably has other negative health effects (f) it costs quite a bit of money.
All that's left of the positives is that I really, really enjoy the actual taste of the wines I love.
The other 50% was being told I had high blood pressure, and realizing the alcohol can play a role in that too.
Sounds a lot like will power.
Essentially ego depletion says you only have a finite capacity to act against your impulse.
For example, the author probably had a bunch of old habits that got superseded once they got a smartphone.
Need to find something else that can dominate over smartphone usage. For example reading a book, listening to music, watching a movie, or doing sports.
https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/dark-side-of-stress-le...
fill your fridge with healthy food, and force yourself to leave the house if you want junk food
The way I see it, that's kinda the whole advantage of something like soylent.
https://basicallyfood.com/products/boost?selling_plan=606050...
Someday, it's a smoke right in the morning day. Shit happens and I wouldn't feel bad for smoking when I needed it.
But after a couple of months, I started getting later and later in the day.
Rolling my own and buying the worst tobacco in the world helped to. Have as much as you like! But it's shit.
Of course if I buy delicious smokes i was not going to quit! But a all you can smoke buffet of the worst smokes? Yeah I'll pass.
They were so bad people didn't want to bum smokes from me. 50 cents a pack back in the day, help yourselves!
I wrote and deleted mine a few times. Will power is weird and I've found weird ways of enabling some in myself. And then some I can't explain. I've been destroying my fingers for literally 30 years and about a month ago I decided I wanted healthy fingers. If you know, you know, that sounds absurd. And yet, my fingers look better than they have in literally 22 years. I don't get it, I actually have imposter syndrome. I've never, ever made it even 1/5th this far. It's something I'm embarrassed of and also secretly proud of myself.
This spring I cycled from Santa Fe to Seattle (18 days). Pretty hard to chew your nails while they are down the handlebars all day. It was the first time in 20 years, and only the 2nd time in my life, that I had fingernails.
It's now nearly 7 months later, and somehow I still have them. It's pretty awesome having actual fingernails, although it's a ton of work to keep them in shape (which is what prevents me from chewing - I would never chew a perfectly good nail, only a damaged one). Scratching my own head (previously something I would have to rely on intimate partners to do) is so awesome, and this keeps me going.
yes, this 100%. Often when I notice myself picking, and then notice myself doing it again 30 seconds later, I just take a moment to admire them. Find a spot I can file a bit. Put cuticle lotion oil, put lotion on, pat myself on the back. And then it usually passes and is fine.
A friend and I were also discussing skin picking, related to finger picking, and related to OCD. And it's a similar thing. Something is off and needs correcting. Something is crusty or flakey or hard, and it's satisfying to scratch the itch. That's actually another, I've stopped tearing a new hole in my body when a mosquito bites me. Some sort of mindfulness allowing me to catch myself. Reminds me of the AHA! moments in therapy where I started to work forward/backwards through a problem and identify where + how to be more mindful and in control of my emotions.
And yes, there's countless tiny benefits to real fingernails, and pitfalls! I've scratched and cut myself in some unfortunate places.
We have all these ways of losing weight: you can poop it, sweat it, band it off, run it off, lift it off, swim it off, dance it off, on and on. And yet there is only one way to put it on (pointed to his mouth) with these things (showed his hands)
I don't mean to be insensitive to people who have real weight issues, I'm talking for the majority of people. We over eat by choice and blame everything else.
Burning fat and sugars is essentially the same as what happens when you burn wood, or when you car burns its fuel. Where does the wood go as it burns? Gasses, mainly CO2 (though there is some residue left in the form of ashes; much much less than the initial amount of wood). Where does the fuel from your fuel tank go when you drive? Again, gasses out of the exhaust, except for a small amount of soot and other small particulate matter.
Weight loss is burning the fat reserves in the body, very similar to burning wood or fuel (but in a more controlled manner; there are no flames). The CO2 leaves your boy through mouth and nose by breathing. Burning sugars is good too: burning it before it gets converted to fat prevents it from contributing to the fat reserves.
Pooping makes no difference: poop is simply the non-digestible portion of your food that. It will make its way out of your body, but never contributes to fat and sugar reserves in the body.
Neither does sweating, by itself: you loose water, which needs to be replenished (it will result in short term lower weight, until the water is replenished; doesn't help against overweight, but is used in boxing and judo etc. to get in as low a weight class as possible). Again, doesn't affect fat and sugar. But when sweating is the result of physical activity, that physical activity does help loose weight.
When doing physical exercise, you'll notice you have to breath deeper and/or faster. That's to provide more O2 to your body, and to release the CO2 that is produced. Even during rest the body continually burns some fat and/or sugar, with the produced CO2 being expelled the same way. So yes, you lose weight by breathing it out. But that breathing out more CO2 has to be triggered by a higher metabolism, such as can be achieved through physical exercise.
That said, these habits don't usually develop as a choice, they're a sort of shield protecting us from deeper issues, formed during difficult times in our lives.
For example, there's girls who gain a lot of weight after being sexually abused, because being seen as less attractive makes them feel safer.
This is why it's so difficult to quit, they're complicated and contradictory.
haven’t beaten the habit of falling for engagement baiting headlines though i suppose
do not let yourself believe you are weak or a victim
the TLDR of the article is that if you (for example) are struggling with focus, a strategy that is basically telling yourself to focus (while loud music is playing around you) will not yield as much success as removing distractions (turning off the music) in your environment, then trying to focus again.
the efficacy of the two strategies is dependent not entirely on ones fortitude, rather ability to craft an environment that plays to the strength of will, so to speak.
> Studies suggest that relying on will power is hopeless
Which would indeed be extremely defeatist.
Willpower and better strategies can both work in conjunction. Willpower is not entirely hopeless as a strategy.
> Studies suggest that relying on will power is hopeless. Instead, we must find strategies that don’t require us to be strong.
nothing defeatist about it.
not to mention, why judge such a long article which is summarizing a long book by the subtitle which generally isn't even written by the author of the article...
Similar to the title, is is again framing it as an either/or situation.
Reality is that strategy+ willpower is the winning approach. Making change will almost always require strength, but strategy can make that requirement lower.
Throwing out your cigarettes/beer/ junk food makes abstinence easier, but it doesnt make abstinence easier than buying more.
It is like an article with starting and concluding with "bleach is safe to drink", and then discussing the dangers throughout the body.
I dont think everything needs to be dumbed down - but parts of it are literally false and contradictory.
If you want to quit smoking you get rid of your cigarettes.
if you want to lose weight you throw away your junk food.
Keeping junk food in your house when you're trying to lose weight relies on self control and willpower to avoid eating in a caloric surplus. Same logic applies to not going grocery shopping when you haven't eaten all say since you're likely to indulge and buy some stuff you don't need for example
And it's more about how rare it is than saying it's actually impossible.
It seems likely to me that some point along the lines of "sane diet" increased your brain energy, which gave you the presence of mind to do all those other things.
Really, I think that the premise of the article ought to inspire hope, by suggesting that simple materialistic interventions alone could be sufficient to produce change.
I’m no more a victim now than I was before and I’m not weaker for using the better technique.
But everyone can try what makes it tick for them. Once upon a time, I stored a big tub of ice cream in my freezer. Avoiding it gave me a dopamine hit. So for months I’d eat well and my identity of being someone who could resist it made me eat well. Now I don’t have that identity so I use other techniques. That’s just how it is.
No need to be a Luddite. Science gives us tools to be better.
There is one caveat:
You can make it easier by making better decisions sooner. I stopped buying shit food. I started making better food more often. I planned my day around exercise.
No temptation from being at the pub. No temptation from snacks and sweets at home. Not temptation to skip a day because I had already exercised and would exercise further.
We are powerful and building structures in our life is arbitrage from when we have excess power to when we need our power most.
Rich people always think they worked hard to be rich, while poor people rarely think they deserve being poor.
Attributing success to internal factors while externalizing failure is actually psychologically healthy, at least much more than the reverse, but it still leads to certain cognitive biases. Yes, some level of magical thinking, "You just need to want it" is actually sometimes helpful on the PERSONAL level but it is just a convenient lie we tell ourselves to keep pushing on. It is a very harmful lie when people try to understand society in general with this.
The truth is that we can only break habits when external and internal circumstances align to allow us to do so.
If you kicked a heroin habit, good for you! Societally we still can’t use “suck it up you pansies” as a drug rehab strategy just on your say-so.
Do you have any other examples where you think critical thinking abilities cannot be universally applied?
Okay,singing requires manipulation of your voice (diaphragm + airways. You also need to know the correct posture to keep,but its not 100% necessary).
Dancing requires manipulation of your feet, legs, hips, shoulders, arms, hands, and head. Sometimes your belly and butt as well.
Just having a sense of rhythm isn't good enough. You can bob along to a rhythm with 100% accuracy, and not be "dancing." You need to know how to move your body in a way that is rhythmically accurate and pleasing to the eye, coordinating different body parts in alternating, but synchronized patterns. It's a totally different skill set. Musicians,for example, are often very reluctant dancers.
“Preposterous, my vast intellect can easily overcome anything!”
I think a significant factor is tech skews young. Once your gem turns black, it's time for carousel. (Amusingly, if you understand that reference, you're probably already older than many tech companies are comfortable with).
That statement itself seems like it would be a cognitive bias.
Computer Science is the worst named discipline. Many times when reading code it's like a window into someone else's mind, or a direct window into your own confused mess of a mind from the past.
Problem is, it's really really complicated, and no matter how good you get, or how much practice you put in, it still feels like we humans are trying to fly by flapping our arms.
I find that interesting.
For the record, the only cognitive fallacy I admit to is denial.
Smart strategy can make things easier, but there is no strategy that makes it easier to stop heroin than do to keep it.
It advertises the idea that with the right circumstances, you can make it so that the desirable option is always the easiest option - this simply isnt true.
It's a terrible, terrible idea to just "stop taking heroin". Pray tell, if you see someone who is an heroin addict and they say they are going to stop it and make no changes to their life, do you believe for a single second they are going to succeed? Hell no.
>Smart strategy can make things easier, but there is no strategy that makes it easier to stop heroin than do to keep it.
You then say:
>Want to stop taking heroin? Stop surrounding yourself with people who take heroin. See a medical professional. Get away from wherever you get the heroin. Try to get your life in order so you have other things to look forward to.
Those things are all a complex sequence of tasks that requires a huge amount of planning, logistics, task initiation, etc etc. Not to mention money, uncertainty, fear etc. They are literally orders of magnitude more difficult for a person to do than continuing to take heroin.
It'd be like if I told you, "want to stop being hungry for breakfast in the morning? Just go change your whole life instead of eating a bagel."
My point is the inverse. Resisting the urge to do heroin is a necessary part of every solution. Necessary but not sufficient
If your strategy is exert no willpower with respect to your cravings, it doesnt matter how much support you have or how many life changes you make.
The reason why so many people hire a coach for physical activities, diet or even life decisions isn't so much that these are extremely specialized domains that need high expertise; it's that having someone make the decision, i.e. not relying on willpower, is often more effective and easier. It also leads to accountability: you have to show results to someone else, not just to your brain. And for most people, that's also more effective and easier than willpower.
Telling people to get over themselves and take charge is generally a well-meaning, but often misleading call to action. And after a couple of failures, the lesson they'll learn is that they're weak and ineffective and there's nothing that can be done about it, which compounds the problem instead of solving it.
The coach isn't a contradiction to willpower. You still make the choice to get up and go when you are lazy, you have just changed the incentives and accountability.
It also takes willpower and initiative to hire a coach.
If you avoid anything difficult and quit the second things get hard, no a mount of support will help.
By all means, use every trick in the book to make it easier. However, you are setting yourself up for failure in life if you avoid everything that requires effort, or think everything can be made easy with enough tricks
Thats a weird observation to make. can you point to where anyone has said that?
I certainty havent said things require the same effort and will power, just that any action with effort requires some willpower.
If you want to form a habit of doing sports for example, it certainly makes a difference whether you see yourself as a unsporty lazy-ass that will never achieve anything, or whether you see yourself as a unsporty person still looking for a way to get into this and make it part of your life.
What I think is important is to break habits out of band. If you are eating unhealthy or too much a good starting point is to limit your food ordering, cook yourself more. And then you can control what you can cook by buying the right things in the right amount. Ideally you don't go grocery shopping hungry then.
So make following your habit the thing that requires extra steps and is complicated, while the better alternative should be easy, available and fill you with some sort of joy. For me jogging became about listening to new music albums or my favourite podcast while exploring new parts of town. So instead of just moving my body, the sports part was actually just a nice side effect to an activity I actively enjoyed.
Sure, depending on your condition, such simple tricks might not work for everybody, but my point is: The mind is powerful. It tricks you into many bad habits, it can also trick you into the good ones if you wield it the right way.
Raw willpower alone will not help you, you also need to identify patterns and avoid creating situations where you fall back, depending on your situation this might mean even things like totally restructuring your life, cutting off contact, moving somewhere else, etc.
People need to have the "willpower" and commitment to change themselves, that is different from expecting them to not do drugs when they're in withdrawal and holding the drugs in their hands.
This is why there are things like gambling blacklists, where gambling addicts can register themselves so that they can't relapse in a moment of weakness. They need the willpower to register themselves so that they don't have to rely on the willpower to not go into a casino when they pass by.