Here’s a self-improvement tip that I’ve come up with and found helpful. It works particularly well with bad habits, which are hard to fix using other self-improvement techniques as they’re often unconscious. To take one example, it’s helped improve my posture significantly.
1) List your bad habits. This is a valuable exercise in its own right! Examples might include bad posture (or, more concretely, crossing your legs), mumbling, vehicular manslaughter, or something you often forget to do.
2) Get in the habit of noticing when they occur, even if it’s after the fact. You can regularly try remembering whether they have at a convenient time for you, such as at lunch or in the evening. Ideally you should try to notice them soon after they occur however, for reasons that will become clear.
3) Come up with a punishment. The point of this is not to create an incentive not to lapse (you could experiment with that, but I’m not sure whether it will work, as bad habits are rarely consciously chosen). Instead, it’s to train yourself by Pavlovian conditioning—training “system one”, in Daniel Kahneman’s terms. Examples of punishments would be literally slapping yourself on the wrist, pinching yourself, or costing your HabitRPG character health points (see https://habitrpg.com/ ).
Positive reinforcement works better than negative. If noticing is followed by a punishment you are disincentivizing yourself to notice. This is bad because noticing is its own super power. Instead maybe try congratulating yourself for noticing, and then replacing the negative habit with some other reward. Eating too many gummy bears in the short term is probably worth it to repair bad habits in the long term for instance.
If the problem is bad posture while sitting at the computer, you could try removing your chair’s back and armrests. Once I learned how to sit right (with Alexander technique), I discovered that back and armrests are like magnets for my body, and they also make it quite easy to sit in a bad posture for a long time before noticing. Without that support though, a bad posture become uncomfortable much faster, and I soon notice and straighten up.
On the subject of self-improvement and self-control: My big tip for achieving goals is to set goals you actually want to achieve, not goals that you want people to think you want to achieve. For example, if you want to sit with your legs crossed, not only in the immediate term but also upon weighing the advantages and disadvantages of doing so, you’re not likely to succeed in trying to make yourself sit differently.
For example, my goal in anger management is not “always stay calm, even when I stand to personally gain by being angry.” My goal is “avoid being more angry than I want to be.” Thinking things like “it is okay to be angry, but I don’t want to experience desires to do things that I think are immoral, so I should calm down to the point of not wanting to punch anyone” has been far more effective than thinking things like “you’re not allowed to be angry right now, calm down!”.
Random unsolicited advice:
Here’s a self-improvement tip that I’ve come up with and found helpful. It works particularly well with bad habits, which are hard to fix using other self-improvement techniques as they’re often unconscious. To take one example, it’s helped improve my posture significantly.
1) List your bad habits. This is a valuable exercise in its own right! Examples might include bad posture (or, more concretely, crossing your legs), mumbling, vehicular manslaughter, or something you often forget to do.
2) Get in the habit of noticing when they occur, even if it’s after the fact. You can regularly try remembering whether they have at a convenient time for you, such as at lunch or in the evening. Ideally you should try to notice them soon after they occur however, for reasons that will become clear.
3) Come up with a punishment. The point of this is not to create an incentive not to lapse (you could experiment with that, but I’m not sure whether it will work, as bad habits are rarely consciously chosen). Instead, it’s to train yourself by Pavlovian conditioning—training “system one”, in Daniel Kahneman’s terms. Examples of punishments would be literally slapping yourself on the wrist, pinching yourself, or costing your HabitRPG character health points (see https://habitrpg.com/ ).
Positive reinforcement works better than negative. If noticing is followed by a punishment you are disincentivizing yourself to notice. This is bad because noticing is its own super power. Instead maybe try congratulating yourself for noticing, and then replacing the negative habit with some other reward. Eating too many gummy bears in the short term is probably worth it to repair bad habits in the long term for instance.
How long have you been using this?
Just under a year, and I’ve been using it for posture (a really tough habit to break, at least for me), so I have a good bit of data.
If the problem is bad posture while sitting at the computer, you could try removing your chair’s back and armrests. Once I learned how to sit right (with Alexander technique), I discovered that back and armrests are like magnets for my body, and they also make it quite easy to sit in a bad posture for a long time before noticing. Without that support though, a bad posture become uncomfortable much faster, and I soon notice and straighten up.
On the subject of self-improvement and self-control: My big tip for achieving goals is to set goals you actually want to achieve, not goals that you want people to think you want to achieve. For example, if you want to sit with your legs crossed, not only in the immediate term but also upon weighing the advantages and disadvantages of doing so, you’re not likely to succeed in trying to make yourself sit differently.
For example, my goal in anger management is not “always stay calm, even when I stand to personally gain by being angry.” My goal is “avoid being more angry than I want to be.” Thinking things like “it is okay to be angry, but I don’t want to experience desires to do things that I think are immoral, so I should calm down to the point of not wanting to punch anyone” has been far more effective than thinking things like “you’re not allowed to be angry right now, calm down!”.
Amusing product you could use with this—the Pavlok, which gives you electric shocks ( http://pavlok.com/ )
There was also a kickstarter device that sucked off your blood as a penalty, but they banned it.