What the Research on Habit Formation Reveals about our Willpower | Hacker News Reader

What the Research on Habit Formation Reveals about our Willpower

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33 pointsLeonW9 comments

I never trust just my willpower, so I trick myself into habits that I want. Want to eat healthy? Only have healthy food at home (no cookies). Want to be productive and not go on Facebook or Hacker News or Twitter? Install Self Control, and have these websites blocked. Want to get out of bed right away? Keep your phone far away from bed, etc. I found this works a lot better than putting myself in the path of tempting bad habits and relying on willpower to ignore these.

That's one way to do it, but consider the power increasing your willpower would have. Consider this extract from The Willpower Instinct where the subject builds up willpower by resisting a temptation he places in plain view himself: http://books.google.com/books?id=evc6jaibNd8C&pg=PT66...

I tried your method, it was a recipe for disaster for me.

Want to eat healthy? Eat so much bad food that you get tired and bored with it. Want to be productive and not goto facebook? Find something you want to do so badly that you forget facebook. Want to be productive and not goto HN? Go there and read every article on the first page for 2 weeks, then become bored. Want to fall asleep upon entering your bed? Stay awake until you're tired -- if this means you'll be too tired for work, then you need to change your schedule, or find a way to work tired.

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Visualize Jack Sparrow's compass -- it always points toward what you want. But compasses are balanced metal bars, with the magnetic end pointing toward, and the other end pointing away from what you want. Visualize the rod bending in half, so both ends point toward what you want. Now do this with your wants.

Find something you want to do so badly that you forget facebook.

An underrated point, IMHO. When I find myself constantly surfing or otherwise distracting myself, there is invariably a good reason for it: I'm not that into what I'm doing at work. I wouldn't be any good at it if I did force myself to do it.

Excessive self-distraction is not a problem: it is a symptom of another problem.

I usually do both. The research suggests that it's possible to raise willpower, but slowly. So if I have several habits I want to accomplish (e.g. eating healthy, going to the gym, and spending less time on facebook) I'll make n-1 of them automatic, and use the last to exercise my willpower.

I generally think of this strategy as "engineer the situation instead of yourself", but then I often times find a way around the trick, end up with an unintended consequence, or am in a non-engineered situation.

Have no cookies at home? End up eating all the cookies at friend's house, event, etc, where I can't make there be no cookies.

Unproductive websites? End up replacing the "mental reboot" process with some other task.

Far away phone? Tolerance to the ring goes up so that I just don't care.

That all said, engineering the situation can be really effective, it just has to fit in your "natural rhythm" - When I start browsing, I always start with the 8 sites on my Chrome new tab page, so if I change those, I change how I browse.

> By developing a new positive habit, such as regular exercise, a meditation practice or making your bed in the morning, you will immediately reap the direct benefits of the new habit. On top of this you will also increase your willpower and naturally implement better behaviors across many aspects of your life, including health and social activities.

Having a brain-fart here...but this calls to mind the famous study in which it seemed that altering the color of the walls positively affected workers' mood...when it was the perception of change -- *that is, the subjects reacting positively to the idea that managers cared enough to repaint the walls to improve working conditions -- that was bringing about the positive mood change.

So by entering into a new habit, you will automatically feel better because you're implying, to yourself, that you care enough to try something new.

You're probably thinking of the Hawthorne effect[1]. It's like a placebo effect for productivity experiments. It basically says that when employees were being observed (as part of an experiment to boost productivity), their productivity would increase even if no other changes were made. So you have to control for the Hawthorne effect to see the impact of other changes.

That said, the Hawthorne effect is short-term, so you could measure the impact of building willpower and habits by looking at how people perform over a year. I imagine that this has been done, but I don't know of any studies off the top of my head.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

Yep, but sometimes that short term boost can be what helps you finally commit to a long term practice.

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