This post outlines a hierarchy of behavioral change methods. Each of these approaches is intended to be simpler, more light-weight, and faster to use (is that right?), than the one that comes after it. On the flip side, each of these approaches is intended to resolve a common major blocker of the approach before it.
I do not necessarily endorse this breakdown or this ordering. This represents me thinking out loud.
[Note that all of these are more-or-less top down, and focused on the individual instead the environment]
Level 1: TAPs
If there’s some behavior that you want to make habitual, the simplest thing is to set, and then train a TAP. Identify a trigger and the action with which you want to respond to that trigger, and then practice it a few times.
This is simple, direct, and can work for actions as varied as “use NVC” and “correct my posture” and “take a moment to consider the correct spelling.”
This works particularly well for “remembering problems”, in which you can and would do the action, if only it occurred to you at the right moment.
Level 2: Modifying affect / meaning
Sometimes however, you’ll have set a TAP to do something, you’ll notice the trigger, and...you just don’t feel like doing the action.
Maybe you’ve decided that you’re going to take the stairs instead of the elevator, but you look at the stairs and then take the elevator anyway. Or maybe you want to stop watching youtube, and have a TAP to open your todo list instead, but you notice...and then just keep watching youtube.
The most natural thing to do here is to adjust your associations / affect around the behavior that you want to engage in or the behavior that you want to start. You not only want the TAP to fire, reminding you of the action, but you want the feeling of the action to pull you toward it, emotionally. Or another way of saying it, you change the meaning that you assign to the behavior.
Some techniques here include:
Selectively emphasizing different elements of an experience (like the doritos example in Nate’s post here), and other kinds of reframes
Tony Robins’ process for working with “neuro associations” of asking 1) what pain has kept me from taking this action in the past, 2) what pleasure have I gotten from not taking this action in the past, 3) what will it cost me if I don’t take this action?, 4) what pleasure will it bring me if I take this action.
Behaviorist conditioning (I’m weary of this one, since it seems pretty symmetric.)
Level 3: Dialogue
The above approach only has a limited range of application, in that it can only work in situations where there are degrees of freedom in one’s affect to a stimulus or situation. In many cases, you might go in and try to change the affect around something from the top-down, and some part of you will object, or you will temporarily change the affect, but it will get “kicked out” later.
This is because your affects are typically not arbitrary. Rather they are the result of epistemic processes that are modeling the world and the impact of circumstances on your goals.
When this is the case, you’ll need to do some form of dialogue, which either updates a model of some objecting part, or modifieds the recommended strategy / affect to accommodate the objection, or find some other third option.
This can take the form of
Focusing
IDC
IFS
CT debugging
The most extreme instance of “some part has an objection” is when there is some relevant trauma somewhere in the system. Sort of by definition, this means that you’ll have an extreme objection to some possible behavior or affect changes, because that part of the state space is marked as critically bad.
Junk Drawer
As I noted, this schema describes top-down behavior change. It does not include cases where there is a problem, but you don’t have much of a sense what the problem is and/or how to approach it. For those kinds of bugs you might instead start with Focusing, or with a noticing regime.
For related reasons, this is super not relevant to blindspots.
I’m also neglecting environmental interventions, both those that simply redirect your attention (like a TAP), and those that shift the affect around an activity (like using social pressure to get yourself to do stuff, via coworking for instance). I can’t think of an environmental version of level 3.
A hierarchy of behavioral change methods
Follow up to, and a continuation of the line of thinking from: Some classes of models of psychology and psychological change
Related to: The universe of possible interventions on human behavior (from 2017)
This post outlines a hierarchy of behavioral change methods. Each of these approaches is intended to be simpler, more light-weight, and faster to use (is that right?), than the one that comes after it. On the flip side, each of these approaches is intended to resolve a common major blocker of the approach before it.
I do not necessarily endorse this breakdown or this ordering. This represents me thinking out loud.
[Google Doc version]
[Note that all of these are more-or-less top down, and focused on the individual instead the environment]
Level 1: TAPs
If there’s some behavior that you want to make habitual, the simplest thing is to set, and then train a TAP. Identify a trigger and the action with which you want to respond to that trigger, and then practice it a few times.
This is simple, direct, and can work for actions as varied as “use NVC” and “correct my posture” and “take a moment to consider the correct spelling.”
This works particularly well for “remembering problems”, in which you can and would do the action, if only it occurred to you at the right moment.
Level 2: Modifying affect / meaning
Sometimes however, you’ll have set a TAP to do something, you’ll notice the trigger, and...you just don’t feel like doing the action.
Maybe you’ve decided that you’re going to take the stairs instead of the elevator, but you look at the stairs and then take the elevator anyway. Or maybe you want to stop watching youtube, and have a TAP to open your todo list instead, but you notice...and then just keep watching youtube.
The most natural thing to do here is to adjust your associations / affect around the behavior that you want to engage in or the behavior that you want to start. You not only want the TAP to fire, reminding you of the action, but you want the feeling of the action to pull you toward it, emotionally. Or another way of saying it, you change the meaning that you assign to the behavior.
Some techniques here include:
Selectively emphasizing different elements of an experience (like the doritos example in Nate’s post here), and other kinds of reframes
Tony Robins’ process for working with “neuro associations” of asking 1) what pain has kept me from taking this action in the past, 2) what pleasure have I gotten from not taking this action in the past, 3) what will it cost me if I don’t take this action?, 4) what pleasure will it bring me if I take this action.
This here goal chaining technique,
Some more heavy-duty NLP tools.
Behaviorist conditioning (I’m weary of this one, since it seems pretty symmetric.)
Level 3: Dialogue
The above approach only has a limited range of application, in that it can only work in situations where there are degrees of freedom in one’s affect to a stimulus or situation. In many cases, you might go in and try to change the affect around something from the top-down, and some part of you will object, or you will temporarily change the affect, but it will get “kicked out” later.
This is because your affects are typically not arbitrary. Rather they are the result of epistemic processes that are modeling the world and the impact of circumstances on your goals.
When this is the case, you’ll need to do some form of dialogue, which either updates a model of some objecting part, or modifieds the recommended strategy / affect to accommodate the objection, or find some other third option.
This can take the form of
Focusing
IDC
IFS
CT debugging
The most extreme instance of “some part has an objection” is when there is some relevant trauma somewhere in the system. Sort of by definition, this means that you’ll have an extreme objection to some possible behavior or affect changes, because that part of the state space is marked as critically bad.
Junk Drawer
As I noted, this schema describes top-down behavior change. It does not include cases where there is a problem, but you don’t have much of a sense what the problem is and/or how to approach it. For those kinds of bugs you might instead start with Focusing, or with a noticing regime.
For related reasons, this is super not relevant to blindspots.
I’m also neglecting environmental interventions, both those that simply redirect your attention (like a TAP), and those that shift the affect around an activity (like using social pressure to get yourself to do stuff, via coworking for instance). I can’t think of an environmental version of level 3.