Thanks for engaging, and glad to hear you find my comments interesting :) I forgot to say that I do really like the little “flashcards” interspersed in the essay—great device for increasing recall. (I immediately started wondering whether to implement them for some of my own upcoming articles.)
If we agree on these strategies not being useful for becoming like Ty internally, then I guess there are two separate questions:
Is it useful to lump these strategies together as counteractive
Are they useful in general (regardless of whether they’re counteractive or not)
Addressing the second question first, I do acknowledge that I’m probably biased towards these kinds of approaches because they have tended to not be very effective for me, making me somewhat unfairly assume that they’re not going to be very effective for others, either. :)
But putting my personal bias aside, I do grant that these are useful for many people. My bigger issue was that even if they are effective, I do think that many of them are counteractive, and both the title (“Self Control Without ‘Self-Control’”) and the initial Ty story led me to expect a discussion of non-counteractive (“transformative”) methods.
And to be clear, even though I think that transformative methods are better if you can use them, I again don’t mean to say that counteractive methods are worthless. They’re just not what I was expecting. :)
As for my argument that they’re counteractive… by ‘counteractive’, I mean:
An approach that involves countering an existing response with a new response, so that the old and new responses compete.
Competition may mean that they a) are locked in an eternal struggle without either one ever becoming clearly dominant or b) the counteractive response may eventually establish itself as mostly dominant but still fail in some circumstances or c) the counteractive response may eventually suppress the original response completely, but getting there requires some time and effort.
One could reasonably argue that option “c” may be fairly described as “self control without self-control”, since while self-control is required to set up the response, it becomes unnecessary over enough repetitions. Options “a” and “b” however require perpetual use of active self-control to maintain the counteractive response as the dominant one.
So let’s look at the strategies in turn:
1. Sidestepping temptation: Sally is a sucker for ice cream. When it’s in the freezer, she eats the whole container in one go. But when she’s at the store, it’s easy enough not to buy any. So she doesn’t buy ice cream anymore, and she asks her husband not to buy it either.
If it’s genuinely the case that Sally can just decide never to buy ice cream, then I agree that this is not counteractive. But if it’s the case that sometimes when she’s at the store, she gets tempted, then that requires a counteractive response to fight that temptation.
2. Total elimination: Kenneth used to have a problem with alcohol. He finally quit by going cold turkey. He doesn’t even allow himself one beer, because he knows that if he does have one, he’s going to be extremely tempted to have more.
Going cold turkey isn’t usually just a single decision; it can get easier over time and possibly even effortless over time, but it usually requires an active intention to stick to that decision, making this anywhere between type a-c counteraction depending on the person.
3. Avoiding impaired decision-making: Don used to do his weekly food shopping after work, which meant he would do it when hungry and exhausted. Now he does it on Saturday after lunch, when he is fresh and well-rested, so these days he finds that he naturally wants to buy healthier foods when he’s at the grocery store.
This feels somewhat counteractive but weakly enough that I’m happy to just grant it as being non-counteractive. The counteractive elements would be that the new routine takes some time to establish, and external disruptions to the routine may require active effort to figure out how to do it in the changed circumstances. But honestly neither of those is probably going to be a very big deal, practically speaking.
4. Attention triggers: Jupiter took a Center for Applied Rationality workshop, where she learned to design Trigger Action Plans (TAPs) for paying attention. These are plans of the form “if this happens, then I’ll execute this action plan”—for example, “when I’m finding my daily writing difficult, and I’m thinking about quitting, I’ll notice that and try to figure out what’s going wrong (rather than mindlessly checking Twitter to avoid writing).” By rehearsing this TAP, she was able to use it in real life. This helped her to make her writing sessions longer. Note: if you want to design your own implementation intention, and then apply techniques to help make it stick, you may find our Program Yourself tool useful.
I’ll just say that I’ve tried setting up exactly these kinds of TAPs—I think one of my formulations was something like “when I notice I’m procrastinating on work, check whether the problem is just that I have no clear idea of what my next step would be”—and I still just keep forgetting to execute them. :-) So they definitely require ongoing active effort to set up until they become reliable, in my experience.
5.Making goals more desirable: Killroy used to force himself to run daily. This was hard, and he often avoided it. But then he tried swimming and realized that he enjoys it much more, and finds it easier to get himself to do. By swapping running for swimming (which he finds a lot more fun), he made healthy exercise much easier.
“Just do the fun thing instead of the unpleasant thing” might technically qualify as counteractive, but it’s going to establish itself in like three seconds, so in practice I’ll just grant this as non-counteractive.
6. Associations and framing: Joel used to love cake and ate it all the time. But now, when he thinks about eating it, he immediately imagines the regret he’ll feel five minutes afterward—and the cake has a more negative association now. And when he thinks about going to the gym, he imagines how buff he’s going to be in 12 months (from all that lifting) and gets excited. His long-term goals tend to jump to mind when he’s considering doing something he may regret.
Have tried this kind of thing, noticed that they sometimes work but often fail. I’d say that this is a TAP of “when you think of X, remember to think of Y” (replacing the original response of “when you think X, do / don’t do X”), which like all TAPs requires some time to establish itself… but for me, the counteraction itself often gets counteracted by something like “but if I imagined the regret I’d feel after eating the cake, I wouldn’t eat the cake, and I want to eat the cake”—which requires non-counteractive work to get to the bottom of “so why do I find it so important to eat the cake”.
This is not to say that everyone would have a similarly deep-seated desire to eat the cake, so the technique may still work for some people, but I think that the fact that it fails to work for some people does highlight the counteractive aspect.
7. Temptation bundling: Marija hates going on the treadmill, but loves playing video games on her phone. By only allowing herself to play those games when on the treadmill, she finds that she now looks forward to the treadmill.
This feels clearly counteractive, as it’s replacing the default “play games on your phone” with “get on the treadmill in order to play games on your phone”. This doesn’t work for me—I’m too aware of the fact that there’s nothing actually preventing me from just playing on my phone without getting on the treadmill, and then when I can take the (in the moment) strictly superior option of “play games without getting on the treadmill”, it nearly always wins.
Again, other people may think of this differently and find the technique to work for them, but again it wouldn’t fail for me in this fashion if there wasn’t some competitive response going on.
8. Mindfulness of desire: Philip sometimes has a strong desire to watch TV before bed, even though it interferes with his sleep. Fortunately, from his meditation practice, he’s developed the skill of viewing his thoughts and feelings from an outside perspective, and observing them without being sucked into them. He’s learned that he can observe a desire, and then just watch it without acting on it. So he notes the desire to watch TV and then lets it drift away, imagining that the desire is a leaf drifting away slowly on a stream. This is one of the skills we teach in our app for anxiety, Mind Ease (there we call it “defusion” because you are un-fusing from a thought).
Mindfulness of desire is awesome! (I even wrote an earlier LW article about it where I also used the term of “defusion” to describe it. :))
But, in my experience, very much something that requires maintenance and counteracting one’s default impulse. If you spend long enough meditating and practicing daily mindfulness, it may eventually become automatic, but I’ve meditated with varying amounts of regularity starting from 2011 and I still keep just totally forgetting to be mindful. And there are plenty of desires that are just strong and overwhelming enough that any mindfulness about them just completely vanishes.
9. Routines and habits: Jimmy had set a goal for himself of doing push-ups the moment he gets home from work. The first three weeks were a struggle. But now Jimmy hops down onto the ground for push-ups as soon as he’s home (sometimes before he even realizes what he’s doing). Doing push-ups went from something Jimmy would occasionally think about doing but usually avoid, to a routine that he would think of upon entering his home (and then usually do by default), to a habit that has become automatic. Note: if you want to form a new daily habit, you may find our free habit formation tool, Daily Ritual, useful for that purpose. It can be especially useful to start with a simple morning habit that you can then attach more pieces to overtime. Your morning habit could even be a “meta habit,” such as “when I wake up I do the things from this list I keep,” then you can keep adjusting what’s on the list over time.
I’d say this one varies. I do think that most of human behavior consists of habits in one form or another, and we do have lots that are established enough to be basically immutable unless we specifically want to change them. (E.g. my habit of “when I want to type the letter ‘t’, I press the letter ‘t’ on the keyboard” isn’t going anywhere soon.) And it happens that I have gotten a lot of benefit of my “meditate as the first thing in the morning when I wake up” habit—my longest streaks of uninterrupted meditation have largely been because of it.
On the other hand, I also have plenty of habits that I’ve tried to establish over the years and which have failed to stick, for one reason or another. And even my “meditate as the first thing in the morning” habit has been disrupted on occasions when I’ve slept poorly, meaning that trying to meditate in that state would just make me groggy and cause me to feel bad.
So I’d say best case, “c” counteractive (so eventually not counteractive at all), worst case “a”.
10. Plunging ahead: Teddy finds it really hard to sit down and write for an hour, and he typically avoids it, even though he aspires to be a great writer. However, he finds it easy to commit to a five-minute writing session. Once he has started, he finds that he usually gets so engrossed that he can write for twenty or thirty minutes before he even realizes how long he’s been doing it. When even five minutes sounds difficult or unpleasant, he sets the simplest possible goal: just opening up the document he’s working on. Even this tiny action is usually enough to get the process started.
Would categorize this as a particular kind of habit. There have several times when I’ve personally tried to establish a habit like this for some particular issue, and it has often felt useful for a while but then failed to stick in the long run.
11. Altering costs: Tom has figured out a way to drink less coffee. By keeping the coffee maker in his wife’s office, she sees him each time he gets one. Since he fears her raised eyebrow with regard to his excessive caffeine intake, this makes it no longer worth it to get more coffee after the first two cups.
Seems good as long as the coffee maker remains in his wife’s office, and he doesn’t end up in an environment where that particular strategy can’t be used. So I’d say not counteractive in that environment, but may still be disrupted by external factors.
12. Accountability: like most of us, Roxana wants other people to think highly of her, to not be judged by the people she cares about, and to keep the commitments that she’s made. She leverages those social motivations to get herself to engage in healthy behaviors by spending time around people that care a great deal about health, and who live in an exceptionally healthy manner. This influences her to eat more healthily and to exercise more. Another way that Roxana uses social influence to her advantage is that when she has an important project she keeps putting off, she’ll schedule a co-working session with a friend or colleague and pre-commit to working on that project during that time. Note that some types of accountability could be viewed as a specific form of “altering costs.” (Incidentally, I was finding it difficult to get myself to sit down to write this essay, and so I used this very method—thanks Clare for holding me accountable!)
I think you’re actually talking about two very different strategies here:
shaping your social circle so that people around you care about X, so that your automatic “I want to fit in” mechanisms start incentivizing you to also care about X
the thing that “accountability” reminds me more of, such as the co-working and the precommitments
I agree that the first strategy gets pretty automatic pretty quickly, so I’ll grant that it’s not counteractive.
My experience with the second one is that it typically works well for a while, but then easily gets disrupted by the “but if I implemented this strategy, then that would cause me to do the thing that I’m trying to avoid doing” issue. E.g. being held accountable for writing a blog post may not be counteractive once I’ve agreed to be held accountable for it. But if I want to maintain it as an ongoing strategy and keep ensuring that people hold me accountable for writing (say) a blog post for every week? In my experience, that requires me to either establish the habit of always asking someone that (running into the issues typical for establishing/maintaining habits), or if I’ve made some more open-ended commitment like “please ensure that I write a blog post every week”, then—once I start getting frustrated with needing to write one every week—I need to actively resist the temptation to say “you know, forget about holding me accountable for this”.
“Do co-working” has often been useful for me, but has typically required effort to maintain (finding new co-working partners when my previous one has no longer been available), and has tended to lose effectiveness as my old procrastination habits have re-asserted themselves even in the co-working context.
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So overall, having looked at these more closely I’d say that these include more non-counteractive strategies than I thought at first, but still a fair number of ones that require active self-control to maintain or at least establish. Which again isn’t necessarily bad, but it is something that I think doesn’t quite match the title—as I’d interpret it, anyway. :)
I’ve read focussing and have spent 3-4 hours learning about and experimenting with using IFS but I don’t think I could boil either down to a simple and useful strategy that can be described in a paragraph (maybe the answer is that that’s not something worth attempting).
I’ll need to think about it, but yeah, I do suspect that there isn’t a good way to boil any of it down to a single paragraph—at least not if the paragraph’s meant to be useful on its own.
Thanks for engaging, and glad to hear you find my comments interesting :) I forgot to say that I do really like the little “flashcards” interspersed in the essay—great device for increasing recall. (I immediately started wondering whether to implement them for some of my own upcoming articles.)
If we agree on these strategies not being useful for becoming like Ty internally, then I guess there are two separate questions:
Is it useful to lump these strategies together as counteractive
Are they useful in general (regardless of whether they’re counteractive or not)
Addressing the second question first, I do acknowledge that I’m probably biased towards these kinds of approaches because they have tended to not be very effective for me, making me somewhat unfairly assume that they’re not going to be very effective for others, either. :)
But putting my personal bias aside, I do grant that these are useful for many people. My bigger issue was that even if they are effective, I do think that many of them are counteractive, and both the title (“Self Control Without ‘Self-Control’”) and the initial Ty story led me to expect a discussion of non-counteractive (“transformative”) methods.
And to be clear, even though I think that transformative methods are better if you can use them, I again don’t mean to say that counteractive methods are worthless. They’re just not what I was expecting. :)
As for my argument that they’re counteractive… by ‘counteractive’, I mean:
An approach that involves countering an existing response with a new response, so that the old and new responses compete.
Competition may mean that they a) are locked in an eternal struggle without either one ever becoming clearly dominant or b) the counteractive response may eventually establish itself as mostly dominant but still fail in some circumstances or c) the counteractive response may eventually suppress the original response completely, but getting there requires some time and effort.
One could reasonably argue that option “c” may be fairly described as “self control without self-control”, since while self-control is required to set up the response, it becomes unnecessary over enough repetitions. Options “a” and “b” however require perpetual use of active self-control to maintain the counteractive response as the dominant one.
So let’s look at the strategies in turn:
If it’s genuinely the case that Sally can just decide never to buy ice cream, then I agree that this is not counteractive. But if it’s the case that sometimes when she’s at the store, she gets tempted, then that requires a counteractive response to fight that temptation.
Going cold turkey isn’t usually just a single decision; it can get easier over time and possibly even effortless over time, but it usually requires an active intention to stick to that decision, making this anywhere between type a-c counteraction depending on the person.
This feels somewhat counteractive but weakly enough that I’m happy to just grant it as being non-counteractive. The counteractive elements would be that the new routine takes some time to establish, and external disruptions to the routine may require active effort to figure out how to do it in the changed circumstances. But honestly neither of those is probably going to be a very big deal, practically speaking.
I’ll just say that I’ve tried setting up exactly these kinds of TAPs—I think one of my formulations was something like “when I notice I’m procrastinating on work, check whether the problem is just that I have no clear idea of what my next step would be”—and I still just keep forgetting to execute them. :-) So they definitely require ongoing active effort to set up until they become reliable, in my experience.
“Just do the fun thing instead of the unpleasant thing” might technically qualify as counteractive, but it’s going to establish itself in like three seconds, so in practice I’ll just grant this as non-counteractive.
Have tried this kind of thing, noticed that they sometimes work but often fail. I’d say that this is a TAP of “when you think of X, remember to think of Y” (replacing the original response of “when you think X, do / don’t do X”), which like all TAPs requires some time to establish itself… but for me, the counteraction itself often gets counteracted by something like “but if I imagined the regret I’d feel after eating the cake, I wouldn’t eat the cake, and I want to eat the cake”—which requires non-counteractive work to get to the bottom of “so why do I find it so important to eat the cake”.
This is not to say that everyone would have a similarly deep-seated desire to eat the cake, so the technique may still work for some people, but I think that the fact that it fails to work for some people does highlight the counteractive aspect.
This feels clearly counteractive, as it’s replacing the default “play games on your phone” with “get on the treadmill in order to play games on your phone”. This doesn’t work for me—I’m too aware of the fact that there’s nothing actually preventing me from just playing on my phone without getting on the treadmill, and then when I can take the (in the moment) strictly superior option of “play games without getting on the treadmill”, it nearly always wins.
Again, other people may think of this differently and find the technique to work for them, but again it wouldn’t fail for me in this fashion if there wasn’t some competitive response going on.
Mindfulness of desire is awesome! (I even wrote an earlier LW article about it where I also used the term of “defusion” to describe it. :))
But, in my experience, very much something that requires maintenance and counteracting one’s default impulse. If you spend long enough meditating and practicing daily mindfulness, it may eventually become automatic, but I’ve meditated with varying amounts of regularity starting from 2011 and I still keep just totally forgetting to be mindful. And there are plenty of desires that are just strong and overwhelming enough that any mindfulness about them just completely vanishes.
I’d say this one varies. I do think that most of human behavior consists of habits in one form or another, and we do have lots that are established enough to be basically immutable unless we specifically want to change them. (E.g. my habit of “when I want to type the letter ‘t’, I press the letter ‘t’ on the keyboard” isn’t going anywhere soon.) And it happens that I have gotten a lot of benefit of my “meditate as the first thing in the morning when I wake up” habit—my longest streaks of uninterrupted meditation have largely been because of it.
On the other hand, I also have plenty of habits that I’ve tried to establish over the years and which have failed to stick, for one reason or another. And even my “meditate as the first thing in the morning” habit has been disrupted on occasions when I’ve slept poorly, meaning that trying to meditate in that state would just make me groggy and cause me to feel bad.
So I’d say best case, “c” counteractive (so eventually not counteractive at all), worst case “a”.
Would categorize this as a particular kind of habit. There have several times when I’ve personally tried to establish a habit like this for some particular issue, and it has often felt useful for a while but then failed to stick in the long run.
Seems good as long as the coffee maker remains in his wife’s office, and he doesn’t end up in an environment where that particular strategy can’t be used. So I’d say not counteractive in that environment, but may still be disrupted by external factors.
I think you’re actually talking about two very different strategies here:
shaping your social circle so that people around you care about X, so that your automatic “I want to fit in” mechanisms start incentivizing you to also care about X
the thing that “accountability” reminds me more of, such as the co-working and the precommitments
I agree that the first strategy gets pretty automatic pretty quickly, so I’ll grant that it’s not counteractive.
My experience with the second one is that it typically works well for a while, but then easily gets disrupted by the “but if I implemented this strategy, then that would cause me to do the thing that I’m trying to avoid doing” issue. E.g. being held accountable for writing a blog post may not be counteractive once I’ve agreed to be held accountable for it. But if I want to maintain it as an ongoing strategy and keep ensuring that people hold me accountable for writing (say) a blog post for every week? In my experience, that requires me to either establish the habit of always asking someone that (running into the issues typical for establishing/maintaining habits), or if I’ve made some more open-ended commitment like “please ensure that I write a blog post every week”, then—once I start getting frustrated with needing to write one every week—I need to actively resist the temptation to say “you know, forget about holding me accountable for this”.
“Do co-working” has often been useful for me, but has typically required effort to maintain (finding new co-working partners when my previous one has no longer been available), and has tended to lose effectiveness as my old procrastination habits have re-asserted themselves even in the co-working context.
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So overall, having looked at these more closely I’d say that these include more non-counteractive strategies than I thought at first, but still a fair number of ones that require active self-control to maintain or at least establish. Which again isn’t necessarily bad, but it is something that I think doesn’t quite match the title—as I’d interpret it, anyway. :)
I’ll need to think about it, but yeah, I do suspect that there isn’t a good way to boil any of it down to a single paragraph—at least not if the paragraph’s meant to be useful on its own.
Thanks for this very thoughtful reply Kaj, I really appreciate the time you took to break down your thoughts on each strategy! :)