Someone explained to me that the subconscious mind does not like giving up something that it likes in exchange for nothing.
Say for example you want to give up smoking.
So don't give up. Instead, just stop that behavior for the present time - then your subconscious is not fighting you.
So you want a cigarette? Well sure OK you can have one, but defer that decision to have it for some period of time. Maybe start with 30 seconds. Build up the defer period. See if you can defer that cigarette for 1 minute, 2 etc etc. After the defer period has elapsed, if you still REALLY want the cigarette then have it - don't fight your subconscious mind.
Eventually, you'll have deferred that cigarette essentially indefinitely. You never "gave up smoking", so your subconscious hasn't been forced to get you back in line by reestablishing the cigarette smoking behavior that it likes.
Even with this strategy, it still took me hundreds of attempts to give up cigarettes. Those things are addictive.
Nicotine itself is very effective at causing the brain to form habits. So that makes quitting cigarettes extra hard!
But we may be able to use it as a tool for developing other habits.
Glad you managed to find a solution that worked for you. Your technique seems good to stop doing something. But how do you make yourself start doing something you don't want to do? :)
>>But how do you make yourself start doing something you don't want to do?
Like going to the gym?
Well, the same person who advised me on the deferral strategy also advised me on your question.
He said - specifically on the topic of going to the gym and exercising - (paraphrased):
"Stop looking for techniques and mind tricks, for some things in life you must simply take action. You cannot avoid taking action if you want the outcome. There is nothing more to it than taking action. You know what the action required is, do it."
On the topic of going to the gym a (very fit) friend of mine said:
"I do not give myself a choice. I do not negotiate it with myself daily. I do not discuss it with myself. I just go."
When you hear people say "I don't have time to do X/Y/Z" then translate that to "I do not prioritise X/Y/Z high enough to actually do it."
You currently set priorities for yourself every day, every minute, every hour.
If you do something, it is because you prioritised it higher then everything else.
>If you do something, it is because you prioritised it higher then everything else.
This is exactly the sort of non-actionable advice that the article says doesn't work, though. Saying that you just need to "prioritize" something is the same as saying you just need to focus more willpower - it doesn't work for most people.
What it sounds like your friend did is used a mind trick to create a habit so it was a required part of his routine, which made it easier.
Right: that is willpower, which means that by the article's findings, even if it worked for one person, telling other people that they "just have to do it" won't work if it already hasn't worked for them.
I have to do things I don't want to do all the time. Once I am in the mindset, it is trivial to just continue it. If I go to sleep, it is easily lost and takes hours to recover. Therefore, the easiest way to do it, is to simply not go to sleep and stay up for another two hours and ruin my sleep. It's very easy, zero willpower is needed. Willpower is completely overrated.
People who talk about willpower don't actually use it, they pretend that whatever they do requires a lot of willpower or demonstrates their willpower to make themselves look good.
Cigarettes aren't bad because nicotine is bad, they are bad because you get addicted to the byproducts of additives.
Low nicotine cigarettes are just as bad for your health and in terms of addictiveness.
Meanwhile if you go the other way and possibly even crank up the nicotine with vaping, you end up with less chemical dependence. There is a significant difference between inhaling vapor and inhaling smoke that drives addictiveness.
Yes, vaping is still bad, but it takes less willpower to quit vaping than to quit smoking.
Almost every successful addiction therapy relies on slowly weaning the patient off the drugs, which then gets misrepresented as "making drug addicts high using tax money".
Atomic habits is about exactly this. The given strategy is to identify what triggers your habit and replace the negative habit with a more healthy one. Your brain still gets the trigger reward loop so it's much easier
This reminds me of a story I hear from time to time, about how monks quit bad habits. They practice mindfulness, which is staying aware of the habit every time they feel tempted. They still indulge in it, but they make sure they're always doing it on purpose, fully aware of their actions.
Once they've turned it from a compulsive behavior into an intentional one, they can stop. Their intentional behavior made the compulsive behavior shut up, so once they stop doing it intentionally, they don't feel the compulsion anymore either.
When done properly this is supposed to have a 100% success rate.
Yeah, I'm really wary of the "when done properly, it's effective" rhetoric. It's like "we know this isn't effective, but that's because nobody does it properly". Well if it's impossible to do properly, how is it effective?
I think the reason monks have a (reported) 100% success rate is because they've perfected explanation/mentoring for many generations. Obviously, someone on HN paraphrasing an article they saw once isn't going to have the same effect.
I still see the irony, though. "it works 100% of the time, for 1% of people!" So it works 1% of the time then?
Knowing these things hasn't helped me at all in life, btw. It's just some trivia.
> I'm sure most smokers trying to quit think about how bad it is every single time, yet they can't.
No, this isn't it. It's trying to take control of the actual act of doing the thing. Being self-aware about its harm doesn't count.
So, you'd have to realize what you're doing before you get out the cigarette. The aim is to do it without relying on the compulsion so that the compulsion will eventually go away.
I didn't mean to suggest smokers trying to quit only think about how bad it is once their cig is lit. I don't understand your suggestion; that one can be more self-aware than noticing one doing something.
It's not about self-awareness, is the thing. If you notice you're doing something after you've already started doing it, then you already did it compulsively, without thinking. The goal is to start doing it on purpose so that the compulsion doesn't even have to happen at all. By doing this, you teach your brain that you don't need the compulsion anymore.
I read a paper recently that proposed that procrastination involves a slow increase in anxiety as a deadline approaches and a stimulus that is conditioned by the removal of that anxiety. That is, chronic procrastinators receive a greater reward when they wait until the deadline. This is supported by animal studies.
It is possible that there is a similar mechanism here. The choice to delay gratification is akin to procrastination; the urge itself becomes a conditioned stimulus reinforced by the strong reward of delaying gratification until the scheduled time.
> That is, chronic procrastinators receive a greater reward when they wait until the deadline.
Yeah, absolutely. I have severe ADHD and this is my experience. I usually can't do something until it's completely necessary, and doing it at the last second is the most exciting/rewarding.
In school I used to finish all my homework before I even went home, because forcing myself to do that was more exciting/rewarding than doing it any other way. But this same mechanism is responsible for a bunch of my procrastination, too :)
I also tend to hate my chores a lot, absolutely despise doing them, but I think that's on purpose to try to make the act of completing them more rewarding. Completing something I don't care about is meh, getting rid of something I absolutely hate is good.
Not aware of any research on it, no. Monks do it, but I don't know if they do it in the exact same way I describe. I searched through my history to see if I could find the article where I heard this, but I can't find it.
I quit smoking twice; once about 15 years ago, and then again last year (I started again during COVID lockdowns), both on the first (serious) attempt. Both times went relatively easy, the tricks were 1) make sure to scrub everything from everything smoking-related, 2) don't have friends who smoke, and 3) make sure you have $stuff to do (work, games, TV, books, whatever).
Especially 1) and 2) are what this article is about: make it harder to do $bad_thing and don't be reminded of it.
I don't think I'd be able to quit if cigarettes were easily available to me.
The older I get and the more experiences I have with people and their various vices, the more I'm absolutely convinced that most vices and addictions arise out of trying to "self medicate" some unfulfilled need your body has. Sometimes we learn that these actually have underlying medical phenomena (see ADHD people self medicating with caffeine via coffee consumption) but because of just how little we know and the long history of moralizing addiction, often times we don't know what's being medicated, and so we assume it's a moral failing instead. This might also explain why something like alcoholism seems to have a hereditable component. If the effect of alcohol fulfills some need your body has due to some sort of genetic / biological makeup, it makes sense that said need could be inherited in the same way anemia or any number of other conditions are.
In your case, I would imagine there was something your body needed that it got from cigarettes / nicotine that it was also able to get via the exercise and smoking, so the need to smoke went away as that need was filled elsewhere. That need could have been a chemical deficiency, but also could have been a mental need (like say, time to stop and think, which maybe you got via smoke breaks, and now also get via being in the water)
No it's not. Willpower is a brute force decision to stop and then fighting the urge until you beat the urge.
Deferring a decision to do something for increasing periods of time is not fighting yourself. The key is that when the defer period is up, you either do the thing such as smoking a cigarette - unless you are OK to defer a little further. You're not in a fight with yourself. It's just that eventually the defer period becomes so long that its same as stopping entirely.
A strategy of deferring doing something is working with your subconscious mind, not against it.
When temptation strikes, deferring that temptation is an act of will. Saying "not yet" and "not now" doesn't make it any easier and feels no different from "no" to the part of your brain that's craving it.
Most people have to have that cigarette/drug/etc right away, present conditions be damned. Distancing one's mind from the strong craving requires immense self-control as it's very uncomfortable, perhaps even painful, to do so.
You need another tool. Often people use distraction, look over here at this shiny thing. Perhaps this is what you used, if you think back on your experience. Distraction is essentially a type of substitution.
Say for example you want to give up smoking.
So don't give up. Instead, just stop that behavior for the present time - then your subconscious is not fighting you.
So you want a cigarette? Well sure OK you can have one, but defer that decision to have it for some period of time. Maybe start with 30 seconds. Build up the defer period. See if you can defer that cigarette for 1 minute, 2 etc etc. After the defer period has elapsed, if you still REALLY want the cigarette then have it - don't fight your subconscious mind.
Eventually, you'll have deferred that cigarette essentially indefinitely. You never "gave up smoking", so your subconscious hasn't been forced to get you back in line by reestablishing the cigarette smoking behavior that it likes.
Even with this strategy, it still took me hundreds of attempts to give up cigarettes. Those things are addictive.