Very interesting post: but I wonder what counts as a ‘habit’. ‘Getting up at 5am for swimming three times a week’ is very different to ‘eating healthily’, and I think they need to be distinguished. The first sort is more specific and rigid: you know WHAT you’re meant to do and (more importantly?) you know WHEN you’ve failed to hit it.
As an example of these two kinds of habit:
I have tried to cut down drinking by ‘drinking less’ or ‘only drinking when it’s a particularly special occasion’, and within weeks this went back to default of ‘drinking when I wanted’. Ditto with ‘eating less meat’, ‘eating healthier food’ etc.
On the other hand, I have also had times of quite happily not drinking AT ALL, or not eating meat AT ALL: within a few weeks, I get to a point where I’m quite content with this, and only start drinking or eating meat because I’ve reached the end of the intended time of ‘fasting’ or because of more external events.
Now, I’m not sure whether the latter sort of habit is actually more sustainable or just easier to sustain right at the start—or possibly it depends on the purpose. For me, the absolute terms make the system feel external: I can’t think my way round it and make excuses on individual cases.
Yes. With smoking cigarettes, for instance: “smoking less” didn’t work, but “this is my last cigarette EVER” did. I’ve seen it occur in other areas, too: it seems to be easier to be entirely abstinent than merely moderate—probably for the reason you list; you can’t make excuses.
From Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict (Section II-4):
[A] focal point for agreement often owes its focal character to the fact that small concessions would be impossible, that small encroachments would lead to more and larger ones. One draws a line at some conspicuous boundary or rests his case on some conspicuous principle that is supported mainly by the rhetorical question, “If not here, where?” The more it is clear that concession is collapse, the more convincing the focal point is. The same point is illustrated in the game that we play against ourselves when we try to give up cigarettes or liquor. “Just one little drink,” is a notoriously unstable compromise offer; and more people give up cigarettes altogether than manage to reach a stable compromise at a small daily quota. Once the virgin principle is gone, there is no confidence in any resting point, and expectations converge on complete collapse. The very recognition of this keeps attention focused on the point of complete abstinence.
I definitely think that overeating is one of the hardest habits to break (and I’ve never been significantly overweight), because of the reasons you say. Any other bad habit you can simply say “no more” (possibly excepting situations where physical withdrawal symptoms become severe). Note that I’m not saying it’s EASY to say “no more”, just that it’s possible and very well-defined. With eating, on the other hand, you’ve GOT to eat several times per day, so it becomes all too easy to overeat.
Yet another good reason to do intermittent fasting. It’s comparatively easy to execute skipping 2 of your 3 meals by default once you get used to it, and then you only need conscious self-control for one meal a day.
That sounds like a rather bad idea to me. Not eating means being hungrier next meal, and will probably lead to… overeating. What’s more, it seems having many small meals is better than having a few big meals (your glucose level is more stable, and your insuline regulation will be less likely to make you overweight).
Actually for me it’s all mental. Normally I hate being hungry: that gnawing feeling in your stomach that says “FEED ME NOW”. But if I’m trying to lose weight, I somehow flip my mental state such that the gnawing feeling is a GOOD thing: that’s what losing weight feels like. As long as you’ve got that feeling, you’re losing weight. However, if you eat enough that the gnawing feeling goes away, that’s a bad thing: you’re not losing weight any more. And god forbid you should eat enough to actually feel FULL—that’s the absolute opposite of losing weight! Whatever happens, you don’t want that!
Because of the mental flip, I don’t feel like I’m depriving myself of something—instead I feel like I’m moving towards a goal, which is a positive feeling, not a negative one.
I wish I could tell others how to perform that mental flip, but I really wouldn’t know how to start—it’s one of those things you just DO.
Leverage the insight from above, don’t rule out all food some of the time, rule out some food all of the time. In other cultures outside the States, at least in many sections of society, these kinds of rules are followed. 1). No sweets, cakes, donuts, any mixes of fat and sugar (or at least never eat these on your own or when not celebrating something) 2). stick to meal times. … then if that still doesn’t work you can do things like buy smaller plates, rule out meat or dairy… there’s always a rule that will fit.
Over-eating is probably more difficult for other reasons like image and identity, ideas of physical permanence, the brain chemistry.
I have definitely achieved that state before and I know exactly what you mean. Unfortunately, it was while I was a) not especially overweight, only thought I was, being 14 and self-consciously trying to be anorexic so I would be “less ugly and more popular”, and b) swimming 7 times a week. I now associate making myself hungry with that not-especially-healthy period in my psychological development, and also with constantly feeling like I’m about to pass out. Also, when I’ve used that technique in the past, once I’ve either lost the weight I wanted to lose or given up, I tend to stop caring and just eat high-calorie foods all the time. I can definitely see how it would work in specific circumstances, though.
There are a lot more things that people can consider a ‘habit’ than most people would consider, I would expect. It’s easy to think of ‘getting up at 5 AM’ or ‘eating well’ or ‘exercising’ to be a habit. I’ve witnessed exercise as a habit, to be sure, when I watched my siblings—who were very active in sports—get downright surly if they didn’t have time for their morning jog.
But there’s a lot of small habits in everything we do, that we don’t really notice. Necessary habits. When someone asks you how you are, the habitual answer is ‘Fine, thank you,’ or something similar. It’s what people expect. The entire greeting ritual is habitualness, to the point that if you disrupt the greeting, it throws people off.
The most important habits this can be used to engender and train yourself, relative to this site, are the habits of rationality. For instance, the habit of asking ‘why?’ Amusingly enough, this is the habit of breaking habits.
I feel bad. Why? I’m not that sort of person. Why? I don’t like that. Why? I do like that! Why? I don’t believe you. Why?
This can also be the habit of listening. It’s so easy to cross something off a list of things that you’ll consider—for instance, aliens, or ghosts. Someone claims that they believe in aliens. I see many people who absolutely refuse to even consider that. It’s stupid. The arguments are all the same. No one’s ever actually seen one, they just know someone who’s seen one. The arguments for not listening are many and varied...
But it takes only a couple minutes, when someone tells you that they believe in aliens, to listen and actually appraise their reason. And I mean, really listen. Tell yourself, “Well, it’s possible I’m wrong. Let’s hear.” The thought, in your head, is more vital than the act of listening.
If you act like you’re listening, but your thoughts are saying, “There is no possible way they are right, I’m just listening because rationality demands it, and I’ll be able to dismiss their arguments in a moment,” then you’re closing your mind. But if you truly let yourself listen, and tell yourself, in the silence of your mind, that there’s a chance they’re right, then you open yourself up to amazing things… even if it’s not something that supports what they’re arguing, you might come across some stray fact, some mental structure, that you hadn’t considered before, and it could open up some level of understanding on an otherwise unrelated area of consideration, such as, “Ah, wait… what if this is why people act in this way?”
What I find the most important part of this article is not ‘how can we use our thoughts to create habits,’ but instead ‘be more aware of the thoughts you have—are they the thoughts you want to become word and act?’ Just having a thought does not guarantee it will become word or act, but if you find yourself in the habit of evaluating the thoughts running through your mind … you will be far more able to encourage the good habits and destroy the bad habits.
Only then can you move forward to ‘create’ habits… for instance, what you were saying about sustainable habits, and coming up with exceptions for ‘new habits’ - you need an all or nothing approach, or else you think your way around it and make excuses. That suggests that your thought was not controlled, and that you think you’re the sort of person who makes excuses. What if, instead of trying to get into the habit of eating less meat … you instead had a goal of trying to create a habit of not making excuses for yourself?
Not trying to target you specifically, but more thinking about the topic on a much more general level and tossing out some general ideas that might apply to a number of different people.
What I find the most important part of this article is not ‘how can we use our thoughts to create habits,’ but instead ‘be more aware of the thoughts you have—are they the thoughts you want to become word and act?’
I think that’s one of the most powerful messages of the quote. A thought doesn’t have to become word or action, but an unquestioned thought, a thought that is allowed to determine what kind of person we think we are, is much likelier to become word, action, habit, character...etc. Whereas if a thought that is stopped in its tracks and corrected, then it will stop there. And yes, that has a lot to do with asking ‘why’.
Not critical to your point, but I can’t stand this habitual exchange:
But there’s a lot of small habits in everything we do, that we don’t really notice. Necessary habits. When someone asks you how you are, the habitual answer is ‘Fine, thank you,’ or something similar. It’s what people expect. The entire greeting ritual is habitualness, to the point that if you disrupt the greeting, it throws people off.
When people ask how I am, I want to give them information. I want to tell them, “Actually I’ve had a bad headache all day; and I’m underemployed right now and really lonely.” Or sometimes I’m feeling good, and I want to say “I feel great!” and have them actually know that I feel great and not think that I’m just carrying through the formula.
Human speech is one of the most valuable resources in the universe, and he were are wasting it on things that convey no information.
Human speech is one of the most valuable resources in the universe, and he were are wasting it on things that convey no information.
It is not a scarce resource on the relevant scale. Water is valuable in the sense that you can do a thousand things, some essential, with it; this does not mean that flush toilets are an abomination.
It’s about ten times easier to become vegetarian than it is to reduce your consumption of meat. Becoming vegetarian means refusing meat every time no matter what, and you can pretty much manage that from day one. Reducing your meat consumption means somehow judging how much meat you’re eating and coming up with an idea of how low you want it to go, and pretty soon you’re just fudging all the figures and eating as much as you were anyway.
Likewise, I tried for a long time to “reduce my soda drinking” and could not achieve this. Now I have switched to “sucralose-based sodas only” and I’ve been able to do it remarkably well.
I have tried to cut down drinking by ‘drinking less’ or ‘only drinking when it’s a particularly special occasion’, and within weeks this went back to default of ‘drinking when I wanted’. Ditto with ‘eating less meat’, ‘eating healthier food’ etc.
‘Eating healthier food’ is not, I don’t think, in the same category as ‘drinking less’. You can impose it on yourself by, for example, making yourself eat whatever you count as “healthy food” before you go near the “junk food”, with the necessary consequence that you’ll eat more healthy food, and less junk food because you’ll be full. Also, all of those categories can be turned specific. Eating healthy can ‘eat at least 3 fruits every day, less than 1 fried thing.’
True: and you can also impose ‘drinking less’ through saying ‘I will drink a pint of water between each alcoholic drink’ or ’I will drink no more than X drinks a week.
When I saw this response, I thought you’d missed my point, but actually I think you’ve put your finger on the nub of the issue: my successes are to do with highly specific, clear-cut things that involve total abstinence on one front. Obviously the specific side helps in itself, and all-out approaches aren’t necessary. But I find it easier to stick to the all-out ones for some reason.
But I find it easier to stick to the all-out ones for some reason.
In the short run. Until it becomes really, really inconvenient to never drink, even when all your friends are drinking and you’re sober and bored to death, or never eat junk food, even when the junk food in question is your best friend’s birthday cake. All-or-nothing is much easier for periods of days to weeks, because it stops you from negotiating with yourself. The danger of all-or-nothing, though, is that if you do eat your friend’s birthday cake, or drink with your friends, it might be harder to go straight back to all-or-nothing the next day. Whereas a five-year-old habit of ‘only drinking when everyone else is, to a maximum of twice a week, and spacing each drink half an hour apart to a maximum of five drinks per night’ could accomodate this.
When I try to generate a new habit, I usually ask myself “Do I want to keep this up for the rest of my life?” and “Would it even benefit me to keep it up for the rest of my life?” If not, the initial habit needs re-shaping.
Very interesting post: but I wonder what counts as a ‘habit’. ‘Getting up at 5am for swimming three times a week’ is very different to ‘eating healthily’, and I think they need to be distinguished. The first sort is more specific and rigid: you know WHAT you’re meant to do and (more importantly?) you know WHEN you’ve failed to hit it.
As an example of these two kinds of habit:
I have tried to cut down drinking by ‘drinking less’ or ‘only drinking when it’s a particularly special occasion’, and within weeks this went back to default of ‘drinking when I wanted’. Ditto with ‘eating less meat’, ‘eating healthier food’ etc.
On the other hand, I have also had times of quite happily not drinking AT ALL, or not eating meat AT ALL: within a few weeks, I get to a point where I’m quite content with this, and only start drinking or eating meat because I’ve reached the end of the intended time of ‘fasting’ or because of more external events.
Now, I’m not sure whether the latter sort of habit is actually more sustainable or just easier to sustain right at the start—or possibly it depends on the purpose. For me, the absolute terms make the system feel external: I can’t think my way round it and make excuses on individual cases.
Other people have the same experience?
Yes. With smoking cigarettes, for instance: “smoking less” didn’t work, but “this is my last cigarette EVER” did. I’ve seen it occur in other areas, too: it seems to be easier to be entirely abstinent than merely moderate—probably for the reason you list; you can’t make excuses.
From Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict (Section II-4):
I definitely think that overeating is one of the hardest habits to break (and I’ve never been significantly overweight), because of the reasons you say. Any other bad habit you can simply say “no more” (possibly excepting situations where physical withdrawal symptoms become severe). Note that I’m not saying it’s EASY to say “no more”, just that it’s possible and very well-defined. With eating, on the other hand, you’ve GOT to eat several times per day, so it becomes all too easy to overeat.
Yet another good reason to do intermittent fasting. It’s comparatively easy to execute skipping 2 of your 3 meals by default once you get used to it, and then you only need conscious self-control for one meal a day.
Or 1 day out of every 2, if you do it that way.
That sounds like a rather bad idea to me. Not eating means being hungrier next meal, and will probably lead to… overeating. What’s more, it seems having many small meals is better than having a few big meals (your glucose level is more stable, and your insuline regulation will be less likely to make you overweight).
Actually for me it’s all mental. Normally I hate being hungry: that gnawing feeling in your stomach that says “FEED ME NOW”. But if I’m trying to lose weight, I somehow flip my mental state such that the gnawing feeling is a GOOD thing: that’s what losing weight feels like. As long as you’ve got that feeling, you’re losing weight. However, if you eat enough that the gnawing feeling goes away, that’s a bad thing: you’re not losing weight any more. And god forbid you should eat enough to actually feel FULL—that’s the absolute opposite of losing weight! Whatever happens, you don’t want that!
Because of the mental flip, I don’t feel like I’m depriving myself of something—instead I feel like I’m moving towards a goal, which is a positive feeling, not a negative one.
I wish I could tell others how to perform that mental flip, but I really wouldn’t know how to start—it’s one of those things you just DO.
Leverage the insight from above, don’t rule out all food some of the time, rule out some food all of the time. In other cultures outside the States, at least in many sections of society, these kinds of rules are followed. 1). No sweets, cakes, donuts, any mixes of fat and sugar (or at least never eat these on your own or when not celebrating something) 2). stick to meal times. … then if that still doesn’t work you can do things like buy smaller plates, rule out meat or dairy… there’s always a rule that will fit.
Over-eating is probably more difficult for other reasons like image and identity, ideas of physical permanence, the brain chemistry.
I have definitely achieved that state before and I know exactly what you mean. Unfortunately, it was while I was a) not especially overweight, only thought I was, being 14 and self-consciously trying to be anorexic so I would be “less ugly and more popular”, and b) swimming 7 times a week. I now associate making myself hungry with that not-especially-healthy period in my psychological development, and also with constantly feeling like I’m about to pass out. Also, when I’ve used that technique in the past, once I’ve either lost the weight I wanted to lose or given up, I tend to stop caring and just eat high-calorie foods all the time. I can definitely see how it would work in specific circumstances, though.
There are a lot more things that people can consider a ‘habit’ than most people would consider, I would expect. It’s easy to think of ‘getting up at 5 AM’ or ‘eating well’ or ‘exercising’ to be a habit. I’ve witnessed exercise as a habit, to be sure, when I watched my siblings—who were very active in sports—get downright surly if they didn’t have time for their morning jog.
But there’s a lot of small habits in everything we do, that we don’t really notice. Necessary habits. When someone asks you how you are, the habitual answer is ‘Fine, thank you,’ or something similar. It’s what people expect. The entire greeting ritual is habitualness, to the point that if you disrupt the greeting, it throws people off.
The most important habits this can be used to engender and train yourself, relative to this site, are the habits of rationality. For instance, the habit of asking ‘why?’ Amusingly enough, this is the habit of breaking habits.
I feel bad. Why? I’m not that sort of person. Why? I don’t like that. Why? I do like that! Why? I don’t believe you. Why?
This can also be the habit of listening. It’s so easy to cross something off a list of things that you’ll consider—for instance, aliens, or ghosts. Someone claims that they believe in aliens. I see many people who absolutely refuse to even consider that. It’s stupid. The arguments are all the same. No one’s ever actually seen one, they just know someone who’s seen one. The arguments for not listening are many and varied...
But it takes only a couple minutes, when someone tells you that they believe in aliens, to listen and actually appraise their reason. And I mean, really listen. Tell yourself, “Well, it’s possible I’m wrong. Let’s hear.” The thought, in your head, is more vital than the act of listening.
If you act like you’re listening, but your thoughts are saying, “There is no possible way they are right, I’m just listening because rationality demands it, and I’ll be able to dismiss their arguments in a moment,” then you’re closing your mind. But if you truly let yourself listen, and tell yourself, in the silence of your mind, that there’s a chance they’re right, then you open yourself up to amazing things… even if it’s not something that supports what they’re arguing, you might come across some stray fact, some mental structure, that you hadn’t considered before, and it could open up some level of understanding on an otherwise unrelated area of consideration, such as, “Ah, wait… what if this is why people act in this way?”
What I find the most important part of this article is not ‘how can we use our thoughts to create habits,’ but instead ‘be more aware of the thoughts you have—are they the thoughts you want to become word and act?’ Just having a thought does not guarantee it will become word or act, but if you find yourself in the habit of evaluating the thoughts running through your mind … you will be far more able to encourage the good habits and destroy the bad habits.
Only then can you move forward to ‘create’ habits… for instance, what you were saying about sustainable habits, and coming up with exceptions for ‘new habits’ - you need an all or nothing approach, or else you think your way around it and make excuses. That suggests that your thought was not controlled, and that you think you’re the sort of person who makes excuses. What if, instead of trying to get into the habit of eating less meat … you instead had a goal of trying to create a habit of not making excuses for yourself?
Not trying to target you specifically, but more thinking about the topic on a much more general level and tossing out some general ideas that might apply to a number of different people.
I think that’s one of the most powerful messages of the quote. A thought doesn’t have to become word or action, but an unquestioned thought, a thought that is allowed to determine what kind of person we think we are, is much likelier to become word, action, habit, character...etc. Whereas if a thought that is stopped in its tracks and corrected, then it will stop there. And yes, that has a lot to do with asking ‘why’.
Not critical to your point, but I can’t stand this habitual exchange:
When people ask how I am, I want to give them information. I want to tell them, “Actually I’ve had a bad headache all day; and I’m underemployed right now and really lonely.” Or sometimes I’m feeling good, and I want to say “I feel great!” and have them actually know that I feel great and not think that I’m just carrying through the formula.
Human speech is one of the most valuable resources in the universe, and he were are wasting it on things that convey no information.
It is not a scarce resource on the relevant scale. Water is valuable in the sense that you can do a thousand things, some essential, with it; this does not mean that flush toilets are an abomination.
Arguably… They could be.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1857113,00.html
It is really easy (and almost costless) to reduce the quantity of water they use. It might indeed seem an abonimation to continue using them.
It’s about ten times easier to become vegetarian than it is to reduce your consumption of meat. Becoming vegetarian means refusing meat every time no matter what, and you can pretty much manage that from day one. Reducing your meat consumption means somehow judging how much meat you’re eating and coming up with an idea of how low you want it to go, and pretty soon you’re just fudging all the figures and eating as much as you were anyway.
Likewise, I tried for a long time to “reduce my soda drinking” and could not achieve this. Now I have switched to “sucralose-based sodas only” and I’ve been able to do it remarkably well.
‘Eating healthier food’ is not, I don’t think, in the same category as ‘drinking less’. You can impose it on yourself by, for example, making yourself eat whatever you count as “healthy food” before you go near the “junk food”, with the necessary consequence that you’ll eat more healthy food, and less junk food because you’ll be full. Also, all of those categories can be turned specific. Eating healthy can ‘eat at least 3 fruits every day, less than 1 fried thing.’
True: and you can also impose ‘drinking less’ through saying ‘I will drink a pint of water between each alcoholic drink’ or ’I will drink no more than X drinks a week.
When I saw this response, I thought you’d missed my point, but actually I think you’ve put your finger on the nub of the issue: my successes are to do with highly specific, clear-cut things that involve total abstinence on one front. Obviously the specific side helps in itself, and all-out approaches aren’t necessary. But I find it easier to stick to the all-out ones for some reason.
In the short run. Until it becomes really, really inconvenient to never drink, even when all your friends are drinking and you’re sober and bored to death, or never eat junk food, even when the junk food in question is your best friend’s birthday cake. All-or-nothing is much easier for periods of days to weeks, because it stops you from negotiating with yourself. The danger of all-or-nothing, though, is that if you do eat your friend’s birthday cake, or drink with your friends, it might be harder to go straight back to all-or-nothing the next day. Whereas a five-year-old habit of ‘only drinking when everyone else is, to a maximum of twice a week, and spacing each drink half an hour apart to a maximum of five drinks per night’ could accomodate this.
When I try to generate a new habit, I usually ask myself “Do I want to keep this up for the rest of my life?” and “Would it even benefit me to keep it up for the rest of my life?” If not, the initial habit needs re-shaping.
This is an excellent point. And where the absolute ones often do fall down, as mentioned above.