I’ve heard people talk about “Success Chains”—do something every day, and eventually you get a chain of successful days, and this helps pressure you to keep having successful days. Since this is generally a binary metric, it’s better to have a single catastrophic failure than numerous smaller ones—it reduces the number of “breaks” in the chain and thus keeps that momentum going.
In other words, if I failed my diet a bit, I might as well fail it severely—then my body will have tons of food, and it’ll be easier to get “back on track” the next few days.
Essentially, if your consequences don’t scale correctly, then you want to cluster your failures. If you get written up for being late to work whether it’s 15 minutes of 4 hours, you’d rather have one day where EVERYTHING goes wrong and you’re 4 hours late, rather than a week where you show up 15 minutes late. Since humans are horrible at scale, it’s not surprising that even our internal consequences of guilt and such don’t scale linearly to the size of the transgression.
It seems like this assumes some kind of conservation of failure where you’re going to have some amount of breakage and it’s better to get it over with on the front end, but that doesn’t seem normal to me. There’s not an obvious reason why binge eating would make your diet more effective or easier to stick to. Hunger doesn’t work in such a way that you can have a huge caloric excess one day and then not be hungry for several days while build a habit of eating less. The excess calories are excreted or stored and when you start to run a caloric deficit again, you will feel hungry and have more weight to lose.
I suspect the reason is that we’re using brain mechanism that evolved to enforce/evade social rules, and there one big failure is better than lot’s of small ones.
It seems like this assumes some kind of conservation of failure
Yeah, more or less. From my personal experience, it seems to require about the same amount of willpower to get either a string of small failures or a single big failure. I have no clue why this is, beyond the basic theory of “success chains” being good for motivating us—a single break doesn’t seem to slow down motivation, but a lot of little ones tend to kill it.
Hmmm, given that some people look at this advice as “obvious” and others are utterly baffled by it, there’s a chance that this advice only works for a certain segment of the population. It might help to model this as general advice, regardless of goal: I learned about it in terms of building career skills and fixing sleep schedules, and just naively started using it to build my diets on the assumption that it was a generic pattern (for me, at least, it’s where all my semi-stable diets come from)
If you want to get up early, and oversleep once, chances are, you’ll keep your schedule for a few days, then oversleep again, ad infinitum. Better to mark that first oversleep as a big failure, take a break for a few days, and restart the attempt.
Small failures always becoming huge ones also helps as a deterrent—if you know that that single cookie that bends your diet will end up with you eating the whole jar and canceling the diet altogether, you will be much more likely to avoid even small deviations like the plague, next time.
It seems to scale to willpower: For some people, “a single small failure once per month” is going to be an impossible goal, but “multiple small failures OR one big failure” is an option. If and only if one is dealing with THAT choice, it seems like a single big failure does a lot less damage to motivation.
If you’ve got different anecdotes then I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree. If you’ve got studies saying I’m wrong, I’m happy to accept that I’m wrong—I know it worked, since I used this to help fix my spouse’s sleep cycle, but that doesn’t mean it worked for the reasons I think. :)
I agree, you can get over some slip-ups, depending on how easy what you’re trying is compared to your motivation.
As you said, it’s a chain—the more you succeed, the easier it gets. Every failure, on the other hand, makes it harder. Depending on the difficulty of what you’re trying, a hard reset is sensible because it saves time from an already doomed attempt, >and< makes the next one easier (due to the deterrent thing).
I’ve heard people talk about “Success Chains”—do something every day, and eventually you get a chain of successful days, and this helps pressure you to keep having successful days. Since this is generally a binary metric, it’s better to have a single catastrophic failure than numerous smaller ones—it reduces the number of “breaks” in the chain and thus keeps that momentum going.
In other words, if I failed my diet a bit, I might as well fail it severely—then my body will have tons of food, and it’ll be easier to get “back on track” the next few days.
Essentially, if your consequences don’t scale correctly, then you want to cluster your failures. If you get written up for being late to work whether it’s 15 minutes of 4 hours, you’d rather have one day where EVERYTHING goes wrong and you’re 4 hours late, rather than a week where you show up 15 minutes late. Since humans are horrible at scale, it’s not surprising that even our internal consequences of guilt and such don’t scale linearly to the size of the transgression.
It seems like this assumes some kind of conservation of failure where you’re going to have some amount of breakage and it’s better to get it over with on the front end, but that doesn’t seem normal to me. There’s not an obvious reason why binge eating would make your diet more effective or easier to stick to. Hunger doesn’t work in such a way that you can have a huge caloric excess one day and then not be hungry for several days while build a habit of eating less. The excess calories are excreted or stored and when you start to run a caloric deficit again, you will feel hungry and have more weight to lose.
I suspect the reason is that we’re using brain mechanism that evolved to enforce/evade social rules, and there one big failure is better than lot’s of small ones.
Yeah, more or less. From my personal experience, it seems to require about the same amount of willpower to get either a string of small failures or a single big failure. I have no clue why this is, beyond the basic theory of “success chains” being good for motivating us—a single break doesn’t seem to slow down motivation, but a lot of little ones tend to kill it.
Hmmm, given that some people look at this advice as “obvious” and others are utterly baffled by it, there’s a chance that this advice only works for a certain segment of the population. It might help to model this as general advice, regardless of goal: I learned about it in terms of building career skills and fixing sleep schedules, and just naively started using it to build my diets on the assumption that it was a generic pattern (for me, at least, it’s where all my semi-stable diets come from)
If you want to get up early, and oversleep once, chances are, you’ll keep your schedule for a few days, then oversleep again, ad infinitum. Better to mark that first oversleep as a big failure, take a break for a few days, and restart the attempt.
Small failures always becoming huge ones also helps as a deterrent—if you know that that single cookie that bends your diet will end up with you eating the whole jar and canceling the diet altogether, you will be much more likely to avoid even small deviations like the plague, next time.
It seems to scale to willpower: For some people, “a single small failure once per month” is going to be an impossible goal, but “multiple small failures OR one big failure” is an option. If and only if one is dealing with THAT choice, it seems like a single big failure does a lot less damage to motivation.
If you’ve got different anecdotes then I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree. If you’ve got studies saying I’m wrong, I’m happy to accept that I’m wrong—I know it worked, since I used this to help fix my spouse’s sleep cycle, but that doesn’t mean it worked for the reasons I think. :)
I agree, you can get over some slip-ups, depending on how easy what you’re trying is compared to your motivation.
As you said, it’s a chain—the more you succeed, the easier it gets. Every failure, on the other hand, makes it harder. Depending on the difficulty of what you’re trying, a hard reset is sensible because it saves time from an already doomed attempt, >and< makes the next one easier (due to the deterrent thing).