The Simple Guide to Building and Breaking Habits
alexy.tech
alexy.tech
I've applied the same "make it as easy as humanly possible" to other habits (working on something for 5 minutes, for example) and it seems to work really well.
I believe the reason this works for me is because 1) it's laughably easy at the start, and I can knock it out in practically no time, and 2) I ramp up slowly enough that by the time it actually starts feeling difficult, I already have the habit established. The surest way for me to abandon a habit is by trying to do too much early on.
Another thing that is death to my habits is feeling guilt/shame about missing a day. If you miss a day, don't beat yourself up. It happens. Just remind yourself why you picked the habit, and try again. Maybe lower the difficulty a bit next time.
My piano teacher tells me that every single mistake takes two successes to undo, and I think this is the same with habit forming. Keep failing and you are not going to get better at getting back on the horse, you will get better at quitting and accepting defeat.
I feel differently about failure. I think failure failure is always, constantly, an option. But that doesn't mean it should erode my self esteem.
I don't want to negate your piano teacher's advice, because I think there's an element of truth in there, and I'm not sure what your goals are. But as a fellow (hobby) pianist who gave it away for 5 years from burnout, I now prefer to follow Stephen King's advice:
"If there’s no joy in it, it’s just no good."
Always wanted to learn playing guitar, interact socially or starting a business but boy those makes me so bored.
Plus, in my experience it helps to develop an easy habit first, reestablish one's belief in oneself, and then do the harder habit(s). When I was struggling with dieting - cutting out the unhealthy stuff - I first started playing the piano daily, and after hitting something like a 50 day streak it was a whole lot easier for me to start dieting (and keeping at it).
As someone on the spectrum, though, it takes very little to break a habit - as someoneone else has posted here as well. Just one or two days where I am travelling and it's very difficult to get back, and one broken habit often leads to all of the habits-in-progress being dropped all at once. (So, I bought a travel piano, for instance).
I also found that not timing myself worked really well. Too many times I would finish a run feeling good, check my time and then feel bad that I didn't beat my pb. Stopped that and every run was positive.
Medicated or otherwise, the typical habit forming tactics don't work. Reward systems, identity based habit forming, habit trackers, leaving the gym shorts on top of my phone at night so I have to put them on before anything else, I can still kill a year long consistent habit overnight with a single disruption like an early meeting or by straight up forgetting. Gym shorts are there but I have to pee. Boom it's 10pm and I'm doing my habit tracker and damn I completely forgot to go to the gym today. Or I successfully pushed it off again and again until it was too late.
I have no solutions to offer. I keep thinking I've solved it and get ready to write my magnum opus how-to-have-adhd-and-still-be-a-productive-member-of-society blog post and then lose a habit again.
Probably pre planning times to do a habit a day ahead of time would help but I fail to do that daily, lol.
Oh well. I've managed to track my calories for 278 days consistently, but only because I can go fill in the previous day if I forget the day of. One day I'll forget two days in a row and that streak will die too.
First, it's one of the few sources that recognizes the huge variability:
How Long Does It Take To Form A New Habit? It depends. Anyone who tells you differently is repeating what they've heard (which is wrong). It is NOT 21 or 30 days. ... The 21-day habit myth was possibly started by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon. Dr. Maltz reportedly found that amputees took about 21 days to get used to the loss of a limb. So he argued that 21 days is how long it takes for people to adjust to any life changes. ... The most-cited viable study on habit formation duration was published in 2009 in the European Journal Of Social Psychology. Each participant chose an “eating, drinking or activity behavior to carry out daily in the same context (for example ‘after breakfast’) for 12 weeks.” And what did they find? The average time for a behavior to become habit was 66 days. But the range was wild, from 18 to 254 days, showing that there is huge variation in people's time to reach habit automaticity, and that it can end up taking a very long time in some cases. 21 and 30 day challenges are popular, but they're highly unlikely to form many types of habits. ... In my experience, the first sign of habit formation is decreased resistance, which makes perfect sense.
Second, it uses a fun trick to motivate some things later. The trick is this: touch your nose, right now.
I still like to think about that trick (and sometimes even do it) and what it could suggest. For me it makes me more suspect of concepts like "willpower" and "executive dysfunction". This trick is never a challenge to do, even to do multiple times. Yet, if I tried to turn it into a habit -- touch my nose every day between 1pm and 2pm -- I'm certain that would fail to take hold. But that's fine, action is what's important, not whether it's a habit.
If you really wanted to do that habit or get rid of a habit, you just would.
Most of you live high agency lives and are making decisions every day that are creating your life exactly how you have decided to make it. A lot of stuff feels "hard" but you just don't want it bad enough.
One example is how easy it is for 99% of women to quit social drinking when they get pregnant. These same people, without such a clear and strong motivation, would probably "slip up" and struggle with 9 months of sobriety.
Jokes apart, what you wrote is really true and made really think about it.
And it's probably okay, because each wording/phrasing can make the message "click" for different people. Same thing with the timing. Reading something when you're 18 and when you're 30 can be totally different.
You don't need to 'try harder'; you need to question your motivation for the habit in the first place. Either a thought will click that clarifies why a habit is actually important, or you'll realise you are pressuring yourself to take on a habit that doesn't really matter to you (when you strip away the bullshit)
edit: and if the importance finally clicks for you, you'll generally just start working on the habit. I struggled with weight for years, and then eventually motivation/understanding clicked and I lost 6stone/40kg/90lb in around 18 months (and have lost a little more since, and kept it off for years).
"Just try harder" is not the follow up to "You don't want it bad enough."
Sometimes you just have to accept that you don't want it. And that at some point the time will come when you will want it bad enough, like it did for you.
The alcohol thing is a good example: when not pregnant, it gives us short-term pleasure, at long-term cost. When pregnant, the cost of alcohol is moved up to the now and so it's easier to get out of the habit. It's not about strength of motivation, it's about immediacy of consequences.
I have heard rumours that some people are able to channel motivation to pursue what's good in the long term even when it goes against short-term gains, but I believe this ability is more rare than it may appear. For many, it's more effective to try to re-arrange the environment such that the consequence profile aligns with the long-term goals.
When you live a high agency life, you have to screw it up in strategic ways to push you towards success. I actually chose to have children when I felt like I was making too much money and it was making my life a little too easy. (It wasn't the only factor, but it was a conscious factor).
And it worked - I have way less time, way more important things, and my software projects have become much more hyper focused and I goto market and test things much earlier, I simply dont have the luxury to sit around and think like I used to.
This is ridiculously naïve. You seem to be completely forgetting the existence of addiction.
> One example is how easy it is for 99% of women to quit social drinking when they get pregnant.
Because they weren't addicted to drinking, like most healthy people.
Do you think a single fat person wants to be fat? It's uncomfortable, inconvenient and embarrassing; nobody wants it, and they know exactly what causes it. The reason more than half of our population is overweight is they are addicted to food and our society not only enables it but encourages and reinforces it. They can't "just stop".
You can't just quit food, though.
It could be a valid point to bring up, but being combative/aggressive with it doesn't benefit the conversation. You could word it as something "perhaps some people need to question if something is a bad habit, or if they are addicted...", rather than calling parent 'ridiculously naive'
> Person 1: Just stop it. Want harder.
> Person 2: I can't.
> Person 1: Well, you have an addiction then, not just a bad habit; my point was about habits.
If we grant this: then the great-grandparent's response fails to inform us of anything beyond merely how we choose to define words. The advice works until it doesn't, which is tautologically true but not useful.
I took the original comment as question if you actually want the habit or are just doing it out of social or self pressure, or just for the sake of 'that seems like a good thing'.
Emphasising that you are free to drop habits, rather than pressuring yourself to achieve something that you might not really want.
Most of us dont. I certainly have very little choice over my day to day life.
After I was diagnosed with gluten intolerance, I stopped drinking it overnight without any problem. Very interesting, but it just comes down that the consequence overweight the immediate gain. Hangovers were never a big enough reason for me to stop drinking, but the overall negative consequences of being glutened overweighted that
Reminds me of the Eric Thomas speech where he tells the class they don't want it bad enough.
The former implies building up the willpower to exercise and once it's done, you don't have to think about it for the rest of the day. Quitting a bad habit, on the other hand, is a constant struggle to resist the urge a thousand times per day. When grocery shopping, when out for dinner, when bombarded with ads for ultra processed food... The slightest patch of hardship in your day can make you trip up.
I find the identity-focused strategy can help. Other strategies that somewhat work for me:
- I condition myself to associate the bad habit with the worst things I can think of. Anytime the temptation to eat junk food creeps up, I picture the fat building up in my arteries, I convince myself that the processed food industry is evil, etc.
- I remind myself that the road to success will not be straightforward and I should focus on the general trend instead of the day to day success and failures. Having some kind of habit tracker can help with that.
I think the key with any kind of self-help advice or book is that you have to study it, not just read it. I plan to be working with this book for at least the next six months. I read too many other "inspirational" books that didn't have a lasting impact; the first read is just research to decide whether it's worth devoting time to. Then the real work begins.
"Tiny Habits" by BJ Fogg is another one which I find very useful. Just the basic idea of having tiny/baby steps to take is a powerful one.
"Loop Habit Tracker" app is a great app to keep track of your habits especially the ones where you want to record yes/no responses. It's free app available on android (I am still looking for something similar for iPhone for my wife!).
I’ve spent so much time trying to find Loop replacement and somehow stumbled upon this one. You can even use exports from Loop with some script I found on reddit.
It works ok, but I would love official Loop app for ios.
[1] - https://dashways.com/blog/cloudflare-error-1034-edge-ip-rest...
EDIT: Its available on Archive.org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20241001232008/https://alexy.tec...
I saw people in the comments referencing 4-6 habits but I don't see it in the snapshot. EDIT: nvm found it in the text.
Each chapter itself also has embedded review points and notes.
It could "work" in audiobook form, but I think doing the exercises would be more challenging.
Also there was one about habit forming that focused heavily on the power of compounding returns in terms of habits. Cant remember the name, if anyone can help me out, but that one was great too
This seems counterintuitive as I would expect this to reinforce the bad habit. No citation or explanation given. Any ideas?
It will continue to encourage subconsciously that bad habits are o.k. if I do something else to compensate it.
For a simple example, I eat a lot of sugar and then do a 10minute exercise. Then feel good about it that my sugar eating is fine, as I will exercise afterwards anyways. But the exercise is separated from any rewards or motivation and will likely often get skipped when my willpower is low(time when bad habits set their claws on mind).
First of all we have to remember that everyone has habits. Unless you wake up every day as if you were just born with no idea what to do yet, then you have habits. Quite likely you'll do something like wash, change your clothes, imbibe fluids etc. In fact, your entire day will likely consist almost entirely of habits.
So when we say "make habits" what we really mean is replacing some habits with other habits. If you want to start running you'll need to make time for that. Some other habit will have to give. It's a zero-sum game. If the habit that gives is "mindless scrolling of social media" then that's generally considered a good thing, but if the habit that gives is cleaning your house or sleep then it's probably not.
It's easy to replace a habit like cleaning your house with a habit like running because cleaning your house sucks. It's less easy to replace mindless scrolling, though. Making the habit is not the difficult thing here, breaking the habit is.
So what's difficult about breaking habits? Well, if we know something is bad for us, it should be easy to stop doing it. If, for some reason, you had a habit of banging your head on a wall and it hurt and was unpleasant, you'd just stop doing it. But we know this isn't the case for a lot of bad habits. Things that you can't stop doing despite knowing they are harmful to you are called addictions.
Any talk about habits without even mentioning addiction is not going to get anywhere. The article seems to be like a "can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude where you try to make the "good things" just as addictive as the bad things. I don't think this will work. I think you need to identify and attack addictions first.
>? You've requested a page on a website that is part of the Cloudflare network. The host (alexy.tech) resolved to an IP address that the owner of the website does not have access to.
SIX? Um, how about we start with, like, one?
That aside, a concise article with good advice IMO, but I would add “find a partner and be accountable”, especially for eliminating addictive / tempting bad habits or replacing them with good ones.
The first 3-4 weeks are a bit heavy, but after that your mind switches over from "Should I run today?" to "When should I run today?". And from that point it is mostly downhill really.