Extreme Methods for Breaking Bad Habits | Hacker News Reader

Extreme Methods for Breaking Bad Habits

medium.com

55 pointsshaunroncken19 comments

The greatest advice I have gotten regarding breaking bad habits comes from "The Easy Way to Quite Smoking" book. I think it applies to much more than smoking.

Basically what it argues is you can't quite smoking (or change a bad habit/addiction) using will power. Trying to use will power is just admitting that that habit gave you something and you have to 'give it up'. Instead it's realizing that you are actually gaining something by not having that habit in your life anymore. You are not 'giving' anything up. You are gaining.

I think that you are adding cognitive dissonance, not removing will power, from the equation. Will power means following through on an intention. Unless you accidentally stop smoking because you all of sudden realize that it does not in fact makes you feel good and makes you feel worse, you are ultimately following through on an intention that is hard and many smart people fail at or relapse.

I found it didn't require will power to quit at all after I changed how I viewed it. I just didn't want to anymore. I didn't have to try to not anymore.

I think what he discusses resonated with me because the times I tried to quit using will power there was cognitive dissonance. I was trying so hard to give something up which created this idea in my mind that I was giving something up that provided me something positive otherwise why did I have to try so hard to give it up. If it actually was so bad and had no benefit it should be easy to just stop, right? So it must be giving me something good! So it was easy to fall back into it and justify it etc.

I don't know if that makes sense, but I feel like it summarizes what I went through - although it was a while back now :p

> This ‘Extreme Prescription’ approach might work as a way to improve. And I hope it does.

Okay, so I just wasted 10 minutes reading a half-hearted list of milquetoast "extreme" improvement methods (like not keeping a to-do list) that the author has not bothered to test on himself yet.

This is a rather poor marketing pitch for whatever this "Crew" thing is.

Not to mention 3/4 of the article is just rephrasing Derek Sivers' post [1] on the same issue. This author even stole all the artwork.

[1] https://sivers.org/compensate

This is certainly how dieting works for me.

I do much better when on an "extreme" diet. I feel like I don't have to exercise any willpower, I just eat what I planned to eat and in six months I have a six-pack.

It's so much more draining for me to exercise restraint at restaurants and with snacks than it is to just never darken their doors and banish them from my cupboard.

Same experience here (less the having a six-pack). The best way I've found to keep my eating consistently healthy is to take as much temptation or thought out of it as reasonably possible. My weekday lunches are pre-portioned and basically identical every day because it's one less chance to screw up.

Yep, Soylent has helped me get better about this, and having the will / foresight to not bring unhealthy things into my house makes unhealthy late-night snacking more involved than going to the kitchen, so I'm less likely to do it.

An opinionated framework allows you to just get on with things! Like with programming. Finally deciding on a JS stack is one of the best feelings you'll have. The terror of even dishing out cursory glances toward the next shiny thing... yikes.

"I don't eat sugar this month" is very easy to announce internally. Also, once you have ticked off a few days, continued adherence is much easier.

I tend to not be convinced by self-improvement recommendations that aren't explicitly tailored to specific people and their personalities. There are so many variables in play!

Here's how I would theorize about the problem of self-change. Change is hard, it would seem, because our habits are a large complex system that often reinforce our current ways of operating. Perhaps an "extreme" change in one dimension is a sufficient and even the most effective way to trigger systemic change. But in other cases, one might need "medium-level" change in two or more dimensions. It depends on how "the system" (i.e. the person and their environment) are interconnected.

In any case, I'd be interested to hear what people think. For people that try this, please report back.

> I tend to not be convinced by self-improvement recommendations that aren't explicitly tailored to specific people and their personalities. There are so many variables in play!

I tend to agree with this sentiment especially considering I have read and tried to apply quite a few in my own life.

However, I am currently working my way through Thinking, Fast and Slow[0] and I can't recommend it enough. It's not so much a self-improvement/help book as it is a way to define the language we use in speaking about the different systems of the brain (think intuitive vs effortful). Worth the read.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp...

I just started reading this and I think it's pretty good:

https://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Instinct-Self-Control-Works...

This is great, too, and I think there's a PDF floating around:

https://www.amazon.com/Self-Discipline-10-days-Thinking-Doin...

> I suck at a lot of things:

> Trying to get too much done in a day.

> Working out regularly.

> Keeping my closet clean.

I like how the post is really just a cleverly disguised humblebrag.

I didn't understand that list. It seems like a mix between "things I do bad" (1) and "things I wish I did" (2, 3).

Or you can punish yourself [1], ala Pavlok dog [2]