How to Change Your Own Habits
Habit switching, just like task switching, requires mental energy. Every time we make a decision, we deplete our energy stores and make it just a little more likely that we’re going to engage our default behaviors rather than our desired behaviors. It’ll be just a little easier to have a beer, eat a little more chocolate, or snap at someone when we’re mildly annoyed with something that they’ve done.
A couple of tactics that you can employ, in addition to the one mentioned below by Huberman, are to frontload decision making and to create identity statements about yourself.
Think about an upcoming decision or difficult situation that you’re going to face. Imagine all of the aspects about that situation: the mood, the weather, the lighting, the people; the more you can imagine, the more effective your desired result will be. If you decide in advance how you’re going to respond, keeping in mind all of the aspects above, you are going to be more likely to engage the behavior you want. Frontload that decision so that, when the situation presents itself, you respond exactly how you want to respond without having to think about it. For me, I noticed that every time my wife and I had pancakes for breakfast, I was a little bit cranky about an hour later. I didn’t realize until much later why that was, but I recognized the pattern and knew that it wasn’t about our conversation or anything else that was bothering me; it was about the sugar crash that I was experiencing. So, next time it happened, I resolved to just head outside and do yard work. That avoided any conflict that would have been created by my dietary choice.
We can also create rules for ourselves that have to do with the kind of person we want to become. For example, you might have a rule that you don’t respond to work emails outside of work hours. You create the rule and you set expectations for everyone around you so that they’re aware of the rule as well. For me, I don’t eat pork. There are a lot of reasons why this is the case, some ethical, some philosophical, nothing to do with taste; it’s just a rule that I have. My friends know this rule and it’s an expectation when we get together for meals at their place. It’s not something that is open to debate or modification. Other people make rules around perceived future states. For example, some people decide to exercise because they want to think of themselves as a runner and they make rules to become that runner. Instead of saying that they try to go for a run a few times a week, they say “what would a runner do?” and make rules based on this.
Both frontloading decisions and making rules around an identity help to alleviate the burden of making decisions in the moment and put you on a path towards developing better habits.
Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath
Self-control is an exhaustible resource
The research shows that we burn up self-control in a wide variety of situations: managing the impression we’re making on others; coping with fears; controlling our spending; trying to focus on simple instructions such as “Don’t think of a white bear''; and many, many others. … And when people exhaust their self-control, what they’re exhausting are the mental muscles needed to think creatively, to focus to inhibit their impulses, and to persist in the face of frustration and failure.
Andrew Huberman from the Huberman Lab Podcast
Identify the habit that you don’t want, whenever you perform the habit, don’t punish yourself: perform the habit that you do want immediately after that. Why it works: it breaks the habit loop and makes you more conscious of the habit. The cognitive mismatch between the two sets of neurons dissociates the unconscious routine and makes it conscious.
For example, you’re picking up the phone to alleviate “boredom”. You become aware of it. You put the phone down. A new habit that you want to create is drinking more water during the day. Once the phone is down, you go get a glass of water.
