Studies suggest that relying on will power to break habits is hopeless (2019)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/can-brain-science-help-us-break-bad-habits

by PaulHoule • 3 years ago

176 214 3 years ago

proc0• 3 years ago

Wood ends her book with advice for those of us who have become hostages to our smartphones. She offers a stepwise strategy. First, recognize your dependency, and acknowledge how the habit disrupts work, social interactions, and safe driving. Next, “control the context cues,” meaning identify what triggers you to grab the phone

That still requires will power. It could probably be reduced to intention, and not so much the discipline to stick to some habit and avoid others. Even if you need to change your environment, the decision to do so comes from the intention and awareness to want change. I think it's dangerous to dismiss this and think will power is not a factor because it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think you don't have will power you will reduce the chances of having it.

tpmoney3• 3 years ago

I think the problem becomes that most people use "willpower", especially when talking about bad habits, in a sense of "just stop doing The Thing". Without deep examination about WHY you do The Thing, that is a very hard thing to do because all the triggers and incentives for you to do The Thing continue to be present and push you back towards doing The Thing. Saying someone lacks Willpower is often a fancy substitution for judging them for a moral failing.

This is largely why the "war on drugs" has failed to make any meaningful headway into stopping drug problems (and how despite more money than ever being poured into the war on drugs, the "opioid epidemic" still happened). This is why the "calories in < calories out" approach to weight loss while a simple and effective measure fails most people, because it doesn't address the root causes of the behavior. Likewise diets don't work because they implicitly are "temporary changes" rather than a permanent change to your entire approach to food. It's also why something like a safe and effective appetite suppressing drug will be so important to weight loss, because when you're not constantly hungry, it's a lot easier to have the "will power" to not eat that whole bag of chips after dinner.

Incentives matter a lot, and immediate incentives matter much more than long term incentives. Finding things that change the immediate incentives and changing those will go a lot further than just "willing" your way into change.

akira2501• 3 years ago

Will power is not some magic force that we are born with. To me "will power" comes from precisely the process you are describing, the self interrogation into the source of these negative behaviors, examination of how they hold you back, and anticipation of what you might be able to achieve if you master them.

What I've observed in people is the disconnect on the last part of that pathway. They understand their deficiencies but they either believe the costs are too great versus what they might be able to achieve otherwise, or they are not able to truly appreciate the scale of change that is possible in their life by starting on the smallest part of their problem. There's also people who were just raised poorly and reliably self defeat at this point as well.

Anyways.. to me, it's like anything else, it's much easier to do if you practice it, and most people just aren't truly given the opportunities to practice it successfully in their formative years.

JoeAltmaier2• 3 years ago

I can ignore my phone indefinitely. Leave it uncharged for a weekend, or even a week.

My spouse obsesses about it, to the point of badgering me to check out some notification that I'm ignoring. Can't rest until I've looked at it. If I ask her to stop, she gets upset, I'm picking on her. Gotta be addiction.

broscillator5• 3 years ago

It does, but the will power is aimed at doing a bunch of preparatory small things.

It is an important distinction. Let me paint an example:

You need to move a huge boulder, but someone tells you that boulder is too big, you're not strong enough to push it. And they're right. But you go and you grab a lever, you use a tool, and you move the boulder.

You did technically utilize your strength, but the take away of the deed, the key component, isn't how much strength you utilized, rather that you admitted that your body's strength isn't enough and utilized a tool.

antwerp16• 3 years ago

It’s just like decision fatigue: your capacity for it diminishes the more you use it (within a given time range).

Instead, carefully curate your identity . This is described well in Atomic Habits. Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”

ThrowawayR2• 3 years ago

Whether decision fatigue is a real thing has been called in to question: https://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_stor...

bitshaker3• 3 years ago

Doesn’t matter. Changing via willpower and context cues is quite difficult.

Identity change is the best, most lasting way.

refactor_master2• 3 years ago

What am I going to do with all my identical shirts now!

Supermancho2• 3 years ago

Anyone can make a decision without much thought, which most humans do at every moment of their existence.

Making informed decisions takes conscious thought, much less keeping the decisions equally informed. There's only so much of that you can do and humans are particularly bad at recognizing the subtle decline in quality of thought.

There's no question at all.

arp2422• 3 years ago

According to the article "hundreds" of experiments showed an effect. Then it goes on to talk about the reproducibility crisis, but in this case it has been reproduced, no? At least, that's what the article itself says.

Link to actual debunk study is dead, but "it now appears that ego depletion could be completely bogus" seems too strong. Certainly in my own experience something like ego depletion is very real – maybe not exactly as described, but you do run out of bandwidth at some point, so to speak. One of the reasons this is hard to verify experimentally is that, in my personal experience, everything is fine up to a point, after which it all breaks down. You can't easily re-create that in an experiment.

rodlette3• 3 years ago

This is described well in Atomic Habits. Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”

Is this just basically willpower?

Or perhaps I should read the book to find out.

bitshaker3• 3 years ago

No. Changing your identity is much more powerful and sort of operates in a background process whereas willpower is more of a conscious foreground one and very difficult to sustain long term.

Read the book. It goes into some detail.

I’ve worked with thousands of people personally over the years to help them with supposedly difficult to treat addictions for instance. Willpower is fine to start, but completely fails in the long term. Identity change is the only thing I’ve found that works long term.

devbent• 3 years ago

People who consider themselves "gym rats" go to the gym because it is what they do.

People who are mountain bikers don't ride to keep in shape, they look forward to getting on their bike.

LargeWu• 3 years ago

It's more like discipline. You don't do something because you decide to become a person who just doesn't do that thing. It becomes part of your identity, rather than a decision you have to continuously make.

hn_throwaway_99• 3 years ago

The way I like to think of it is that it's possible to have willpower when I'm feeling strong and only have to make a big decision once - what's really hard is having to use that willpower over and over.

Thus, I've always felt it's better to change your environment than trying to improve your willpower. For example, I got a ton of exercise when I lived in a city when the most convenient thing to do was walk everywhere or take public transportation. When I moved out to the suburbs, I tried to force myself to walk more, but it never really worked. Driving was just by far the easier "default" way of getting places in the 'burbs.

The way I think of it is to try to set things up so you don't have to use willpower in the first place.

bitshaker3• 3 years ago

Environment change >>> willpower

hinkley7• 3 years ago

Buying groceries when you’re feeling good, and changing your route through the store to groom yourself for success instead of failure, are common, effective bits of advice for weight loss and healthy eating. Most of the garbage really is in the middle of the store, and I imagine myself diving into deep water to grab ketchup, soup, flour. Get in, get out, no sightseeing.

jancsika• 3 years ago

Instead, carefully curate your identity . This is described well in Atomic Habits. Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”

Interesting but orthogonal to the article.

The article: "I am the kind of person who has changed my environment such that doing x is inconvenient enough that I can avoid it most of the time without having to use much willpower."

antwerp16• 3 years ago

It’s not always possible to change your environment. In the most difficult scenarios, you will actually have very little control over your environment. But it’s still possible to overcome a challenge, without simply trying to willpower your way through it.

somewhereoutth• 3 years ago

Or perhaps (and by extension?) help to curate a society where these sorts of bad things don't happen.

refactor_master2• 3 years ago

Train yourself to think “I am just not the kind of person who does x.”

We are rarely who we really want to be. Yet, here we are. I’ve been trained, literally since infancy, to obey bedtime, but I’m writing this response an hour past my bedtime.

bmicraft6• 3 years ago

I think there's slight a difference there. Compare these two:

You: I’ve been trained to obey bedtime

Proposed: I'm a person that obeys bedtime

What I'm getting at here is that while you seem to think you _should do_ it, you don't actually think about yourself as someone that does do it. Which makes sense because it's true, but I think the suggestion is to lie to yourself, just a little.

ur-whale• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/OCuQK

alphazard• 3 years ago

Huberman did a very nice review of the literature here. Highly recommend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcs2PFz5q6g

quickthrower24• 3 years ago

Love Huberman, although gripping it is not the format for quick revision. Each episode is movie length. Take notes.

martinbaun• 3 years ago

Replacing bad habits with good ones seem to be the easiest thing for me.

Going for that cookie? Go for some pushups instead when you crave. Usually your mind is just bored.

quickthrower24• 3 years ago

Even replacing the cookie with 100g strawberries and 100g yoghurt goes a long way. And why is that cookie there? Shop on a full stomach. Take a list.

hinkley7• 3 years ago

If I didn’t keep a bowl of fresh fruit and fancy teas in the house I’d be having some very uncomfortable conversations about diabetes with my doctor right about now.

quickthrower24• 3 years ago

Once you realise you are more of a sheep than you think you can do things like adapt your environment to encourage giving up the habit. Or replace the havit with a new more powerful one. Or use a star chart!

I_am_uncreative• 3 years ago

Yes! If you eat too much, take up smoking instead. That's one old habit gone, and a new one added!

peterleiser• 3 years ago

Reminds me of a friend who's New Year's resolution over 20 years ago was to pick up smoking. He tried a few times but just couldn't manage to start the habit.

hinkley7• 3 years ago

Type one versus type 2 thinking, and pitting one against the other.

henriquez• 3 years ago

Every time I've quit drinking I used will power. So it's not hopeless. Now I'm 8 days sober! Checkmate, studies.

vanjajaja1• 3 years ago

This kind of study in this kind of magazine smells like they're pushing more 'dont even try' / 'no free will' propaganda... but I do with the premise. Relying on will power to execute is a set up for failure, better to rely on will power to create an environment that helps you succeed.

mitchbob• 3 years ago

About the author: https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jerome-groopman

tacocataco2• 3 years ago

I like how you bring up environment.

You can't therapy your way out of a terrible living situation. That's why it's important for people struggling mentally or otherwise to just simply hang on if they're unable to work on a solution.

Perhaps the wind of the storm will push you to safer waters some day.

jawns• 3 years ago

I am not a smoker, but I recently read through Allan Carr's "Easy Way to Quit Smoking Without Willpower" book. (There is a similar book out there called the Easy Peasy Way to Quit Porn, for those who are struggling with that.)

The tl;dr is that it's much harder to quit an addiction with the mindset, "This thing is great, but I'm going to deprive myself of it." Instead, you need to realize that you've been deceived and maybe even brainwashed into thinking that this vice has any redeeming value. Lots of people who've never become addicted are walking around enjoying life without it. So you kind of have to do your own reverse brainwashing to get your brain back to that state.

I used these techniques to break a bad habit. Every time my mind so much as wanders in that direction, I have a mini speech I give myself. "Boy, I am so glad that I have escaped the slavery of that dopamine cycle, where I wasn't getting joy from the habit itself, but just satisfying the craving of the addiction. I'm in such a better place now."

In the moment, I might not always fully believe the words I'm saying, but it does help.

mhalle• 3 years ago

This American Life had an episode that challenges the premise of this book: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/806/transcript

joshghent• 3 years ago

Completely agree! Ultra processed people by Chris Van Tullekan is similar for eating unhealthily.

hinkley7• 3 years ago

Additionally people crowd out a bad habit instead of abstaining from it.

Give yourself less time to be bad. Do something instead to sublimate some of that energy.

wruza• 3 years ago

If your automatic firewall is too hard, there are ways to bypass it and eventually punch a hole. E.g. instead of “I’m much better without it” (obviously wrong, you’re suffering) you can carry the thought “I like to think that I’ll become happier without it”. There’s no obvious contradiction, so it can incorporate and create a tunnel where there was a thick wall. Learned that from my therapist.

clwg• 3 years ago

I was a smoker for over 20 years, then I switched to Juul - I was content. Nicotine is by far my favorite drug. I could smell again, and my stamina and breathing were noticeably improved.

When they started to ban the stronger vapes, my options were to go back to cigarettes, suffer withdrawal from a less potent nicotine concentration, buy one of those contraptions and start a hobby, or quit entirely.

I quit entirely, and it sucked. Luckily, there was a pandemic going on, so I could contain the 'blast radius', but it was very much a self-hate process to get through it - hating myself for smoking in the first place as a teenager, hating that I was controlled by something like that, and hating that I didn't have agency over my own cravings, and just hating because Nicotine withdrawal sucks.

I don't think I could have done it with a positive attitude and inner strength. I still miss nicotine, and if they brought back the stronger Juul's, I'd probably start again.

PaulDavisThe1st4• 3 years ago

Instead, you need to realize that you've been deceived and maybe even brainwashed into thinking that this vice has any redeeming value.

This has been 50% of my approach to trying to (almost entirely) give up drinking. I realized that (a) I rarely, if ever, get the happy buzz any more (b) it doesn't get me the sex that it once did (c) it doesn't actually assist with being emotionally open with my wife the way it once did (d) it contributes to weight gain (e) it probably has other negative health effects (f) it costs quite a bit of money.

All that's left of the positives is that I really, really enjoy the actual taste of the wines I love.

The other 50% was being told I had high blood pressure, and realizing the alcohol can play a role in that too.

broscillator5• 3 years ago

I want to congratulate you for taking that decision.

em-bee4• 3 years ago

when i was young i avoided watching to much tv or spending to much time on the computer when i realized that i was just wasting my time without getting much benefit out of it. that led to focusing on doing more useful things on the computer, and structuring my tv habits to only watch stuff i really wanted to see.

slibhb• 3 years ago

I used these techniques to break a bad habit. Every time my mind so much as wanders in that direction, I have a mini speech I give myself. "Boy, I am so glad that I have escaped the slavery of that dopamine cycle, where I wasn't getting joy from the habit itself, but just satisfying the craving of the addiction. I'm in such a better place now."

Sounds a lot like will power.

Boogie_Man2• 3 years ago

Quitting things for me personally requires tricking my base lizard brain. I recall an Onion News video with a parody PSA: "Smoking is Gay". You have to use the smart guy you to outsmart the dumb guy you. Set traps for him. Anticipate his moves and crush him.

jnsie• 3 years ago

You can't bring us this far without some examples! Fess up, OP!

Boogie_Man2• 3 years ago

Cigs: Not telling him he couldn't smoke, but that he could only smoke outside bare-chested one winter Eating: Mirror at gut hight in the kitchen Drinking: Reading that Infinite Jest section [pick one] twice a week Weed: Picked a fist fight with the guy I bought it from (he won) (this section is just a joke I do not commit crimes) The only thing a human man can't give up is onanism (I don't believe those who say they do).

SilasX• 3 years ago

Haha I remember seeing that and thinking … hm, that … would probably be more successful than most of their PSAs.

https://www.theonion.com/new-anti-smoking-ads-warn-teens-its...

burnerburnson• 3 years ago

The onion made me watch an unskippable ad before I could watch the video, and then started another ad 30s into the video. Incredible. No wonder they're irrelevant now.

MarkSweep• 3 years ago

I could not get the video to load; I assume this video on YouTube is the same one:

https://youtu.be/82x9pzHkHK4

tines• 3 years ago

The problem is that the dumb guy me usually recruits the smart guy me to help him in the moment. So the smart guy has to outsmart both the dumb and the smart guy together in advance, which is pretty hard!

zogrodea• 3 years ago

My first thought after reading the title was about ego depletion (a controversial theory that willpower is a limited resource), but the claim here seems unrelated to that since it instead states that willpower is just not effective at eliminating bad habits, not touching whether willpower is a limited resource or not.

Common advice for at least a millenium has been that a consistent good habit, even if small, is better than a large gesture that's not long maintained. Andreas Kling (author of SerenityOS) can relate to this. https://awesomekling.github.io/Excellence-is-a-habit-but-so-...

anon848736284• 3 years ago

Aspects of executive function like attention/focus, impulse control, etc do seem to be consumable resources. Most of the "tricks" are about changing the problem so it depends on different resources instead. But there is often a startup cost of that reframing which can be easier said than done.

elchief• 3 years ago

use your lack of will power to your advantage

fill your fridge with healthy food, and force yourself to leave the house if you want junk food

arcastroe2• 3 years ago

That doesn't work at all. Ordering junk food is a few lazy taps on your phone whereas eating the healthy food requires forcing yourself to cook and prepare it as well as washing dishes afterwards

maximus-decimus2• 3 years ago

That's why you need Soylent^TM bottles, so that drinking them is even less effort!

The way I see it, that's kinda the whole advantage of something like soylent.

PaulDavisThe1st4• 3 years ago

Move to a small village with no services and 25 miles from the nearest town, so you'll have to drive for an hour round trip if you want junk food (or any food, actually).

pi-e-sigma8• 3 years ago

Better yet, get rid of your car, too. 25 miles of trekking will offset any calories intake if you happen to actually make it to the town

keyle• 3 years ago

One of my friends who's a marathon runner told me once something rather powerful.

   We have all these ways of losing weight: you can poop it, sweat it, band it off, run it off, lift it off, swim it off, dance it off, on and on. And yet there is only one way to put it on (pointed to his mouth) with these things (showed his hands)

Made me think for a while and he made an impact on me. We control our hands. We control what goes in our mouth.

I don't mean to be insensitive to people who have real weight issues, I'm talking for the majority of people. We over eat by choice and blame everything else.

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

According to the eminently reliable folks at SciShow, the chief way that anyone loses weight is by breathing it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8ialLlcdcw

roelschroeven• 3 years ago

Not just according to them.

Burning fat and sugars is essentially the same as what happens when you burn wood, or when you car burns its fuel. Where does the wood go as it burns? Gasses, mainly CO2 (though there is some residue left in the form of ashes; much much less than the initial amount of wood). Where does the fuel from your fuel tank go when you drive? Again, gasses out of the exhaust, except for a small amount of soot and other small particulate matter.

Weight loss is burning the fat reserves in the body, very similar to burning wood or fuel (but in a more controlled manner; there are no flames). The CO2 leaves your boy through mouth and nose by breathing. Burning sugars is good too: burning it before it gets converted to fat prevents it from contributing to the fat reserves.

Pooping makes no difference: poop is simply the non-digestible portion of your food that. It will make its way out of your body, but never contributes to fat and sugar reserves in the body.

Neither does sweating, by itself: you loose water, which needs to be replenished (it will result in short term lower weight, until the water is replenished; doesn't help against overweight, but is used in boxing and judo etc. to get in as low a weight class as possible). Again, doesn't affect fat and sugar. But when sweating is the result of physical activity, that physical activity does help loose weight.

When doing physical exercise, you'll notice you have to breath deeper and/or faster. That's to provide more O2 to your body, and to release the CO2 that is produced. Even during rest the body continually burns some fat and/or sugar, with the produced CO2 being expelled the same way. So yes, you lose weight by breathing it out. But that breathing out more CO2 has to be triggered by a higher metabolism, such as can be achieved through physical exercise.

broscillator5• 3 years ago

I had that realization with another habit, in first person. My hands can do so many things yet I choose to do this repeatedly.

That said, these habits don't usually develop as a choice, they're a sort of shield protecting us from deeper issues, formed during difficult times in our lives.

For example, there's girls who gain a lot of weight after being sexually abused, because being seen as less attractive makes them feel safer.

This is why it's so difficult to quit, they're complicated and contradictory.

tacocataco2• 3 years ago

I quit smoking by delaying my first smoke in the day as long as I could. There was no "end date". Just me lasting as long as I could.

Someday, it's a smoke right in the morning day. Shit happens and I wouldn't feel bad for smoking when I needed it.

But after a couple of months, I started getting later and later in the day.

Rolling my own and buying the worst tobacco in the world helped to. Have as much as you like! But it's shit.

Of course if I buy delicious smokes i was not going to quit! But a all you can smoke buffet of the worst smokes? Yeah I'll pass.

They were so bad people didn't want to bum smokes from me. 50 cents a pack back in the day, help yourselves!

BaculumMeumEst• 3 years ago

Good thing I didn’t read such a bullshit defeatist conclusion before I dropped 40 lbs 7 years ago (adopted sane diet, never gained it back) and dug myself out of a deep hole of alcohol dependence.

haven’t beaten the habit of falling for engagement baiting headlines though i suppose

do not let yourself believe you are weak or a victim

endisneigh4• 3 years ago

what a bizarre comment. the conclusion is hardly defeatist.

the TLDR of the article is that if you (for example) are struggling with focus, a strategy that is basically telling yourself to focus (while loud music is playing around you) will not yield as much success as removing distractions (turning off the music) in your environment, then trying to focus again.

the efficacy of the two strategies is dependent not entirely on ones fortitude, rather ability to craft an environment that plays to the strength of will, so to speak.

kaashif• 3 years ago

The conclusion may not be defeatist, but the conclusion is different from the subtitle of the article (and the title of the submission):

Studies suggest that relying on will power is hopeless

Which would indeed be extremely defeatist.

Willpower and better strategies can both work in conjunction. Willpower is not entirely hopeless as a strategy.

Lucky-026• 3 years ago

I didn't read this particular article but I've heard of other studies that express the same idea. The point isn't that you can't beat bad habits, its that the best way to beat bad habits is making them harder to do.

If you want to quit smoking you get rid of your cigarettes.

if you want to lose weight you throw away your junk food.

Keeping junk food in your house when you're trying to lose weight relies on self control and willpower to avoid eating in a caloric surplus. Same logic applies to not going grocery shopping when you haven't eaten all say since you're likely to indulge and buy some stuff you don't need for example

galangalalgol• 3 years ago

I did have luck once by keeping some candy I didn't like all that much on my desk at work. It was ok, but not great. I think my thought was generally "I could go get a snack, meh, I've got this candy right here! Double meh, doesn't sound that good back to work."

Dylan16807• 3 years ago

Did you "rely on will power" to do that? They're definitely not saying people are unable to change habits!

And it's more about how rare it is than saying it's actually impossible.

aeblyve2• 3 years ago

Something I've been exploring for the past year or so are means to increase biological energy, and brain energy in particular. If one finds themselves unable to escape their routine, brain energy could be a bottleneck.

It seems likely to me that some point along the lines of "sane diet" increased your brain energy, which gave you the presence of mind to do all those other things.

Really, I think that the premise of the article ought to inspire hope, by suggesting that simple materialistic interventions alone could be sufficient to produce change.

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Misunderstanding. Claim here is that some techniques don’t work as well as others. When I was young, someone told me that if I lifted with my back I’d injure myself. I lifted with my back and didn’t injure myself. Now I know it’s a probabilistic thing. So I lift properly, force through the legs, back straight.

I’m no more a victim now than I was before and I’m not weaker for using the better technique.

But everyone can try what makes it tick for them. Once upon a time, I stored a big tub of ice cream in my freezer. Avoiding it gave me a dopamine hit. So for months I’d eat well and my identity of being someone who could resist it made me eat well. Now I don’t have that identity so I use other techniques. That’s just how it is.

No need to be a Luddite. Science gives us tools to be better.

Affric• 3 years ago

I agree with this comment 100%. I stopped drinking and lost 20kg by changing my diet and taking up exercise.

There is one caveat:

You can make it easier by making better decisions sooner. I stopped buying shit food. I started making better food more often. I planned my day around exercise.

No temptation from being at the pub. No temptation from snacks and sweets at home. Not temptation to skip a day because I had already exercised and would exercise further.

We are powerful and building structures in our life is arbitrage from when we have excess power to when we need our power most.

cardanome• 3 years ago

If you had failed at losing 40lbs of weight and quitting alcohol dependence, would you be here writing that the only reason you failed was lack of willpower?

Rich people always think they worked hard to be rich, while poor people rarely think they deserve being poor.

Attributing success to internal factors while externalizing failure is actually psychologically healthy, at least much more than the reverse, but it still leads to certain cognitive biases. Yes, some level of magical thinking, "You just need to want it" is actually sometimes helpful on the PERSONAL level but it is just a convenient lie we tell ourselves to keep pushing on. It is a very harmful lie when people try to understand society in general with this.

The truth is that we can only break habits when external and internal circumstances align to allow us to do so.

k8svet2• 3 years ago

I really like this thread. Thanks to those for sharing their own processes and tricks. It's fascinating the ways people trick themselves into will power. Cool stuff, potentially life changing.

I wrote and deleted mine a few times. Will power is weird and I've found weird ways of enabling some in myself. And then some I can't explain. I've been destroying my fingers for literally 30 years and about a month ago I decided I wanted healthy fingers. If you know, you know, that sounds absurd. And yet, my fingers look better than they have in literally 22 years. I don't get it, I actually have imposter syndrome. I've never, ever made it even 1/5th this far. It's something I'm embarrassed of and also secretly proud of myself.

PaulDavisThe1st4• 3 years ago

I've chewed my fingernails for pretty much my whole life. In 2004, before my 2nd marriage, I manage to resolve to grow them out for the wedding. I succeeded, but a couple of months later they were all gone again.

This spring I cycled from Santa Fe to Seattle (18 days). Pretty hard to chew your nails while they are down the handlebars all day. It was the first time in 20 years, and only the 2nd time in my life, that I had fingernails.

It's now nearly 7 months later, and somehow I still have them. It's pretty awesome having actual fingernails, although it's a ton of work to keep them in shape (which is what prevents me from chewing - I would never chew a perfectly good nail, only a damaged one). Scratching my own head (previously something I would have to rely on intimate partners to do) is so awesome, and this keeps me going.

k8svet2• 3 years ago

although it's a ton of work to keep them in shape (which is what prevents me from chewing - I would never chew a perfectly good nail, only a damaged one).

yes, this 100%. Often when I notice myself picking, and then notice myself doing it again 30 seconds later, I just take a moment to admire them. Find a spot I can file a bit. Put cuticle lotion oil, put lotion on, pat myself on the back. And then it usually passes and is fine.

A friend and I were also discussing skin picking, related to finger picking, and related to OCD. And it's a similar thing. Something is off and needs correcting. Something is crusty or flakey or hard, and it's satisfying to scratch the itch. That's actually another, I've stopped tearing a new hole in my body when a mosquito bites me. Some sort of mindfulness allowing me to catch myself. Reminds me of the AHA! moments in therapy where I started to work forward/backwards through a problem and identify where + how to be more mindful and in control of my emotions.

And yes, there's countless tiny benefits to real fingernails, and pitfalls! I've scratched and cut myself in some unfortunate places.

andrewstuart4• 3 years ago

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.

JoeAltmaier2• 3 years ago

Didn't Mark Twain say "I don't know what all the fuss is about quitting smoking. I must have done it a hundred times"

dylan604• 3 years ago

I've also heard "I quit smoking at the end of every cigarette"

anon848736284• 3 years ago

This was posted to HN a few months back and I found it quite interesting:

https://gwern.net/nicotine

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? :)

andrewstuart4• 3 years ago

>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.

glitchc2• 3 years ago

That's still just willpower, usually people need more. A combination of willpower, friction and substitution is usually effective.

andrewstuart4• 3 years ago

> That's still just willpower

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.

arp2422• 3 years ago

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.

yCombLinks• 3 years ago

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

ThatMedicIsASpy• 3 years ago

I quit biting my nails for a few days and then I always come back to it. I just can't. Nails are more accessible than going for a smoke.

The only way to fight back is keeping the mouth busy with gum, toothpicks, pens, whatevers.

ZunarJ5• 3 years ago

Try NAC, seriously. It's the only thing that worked for me and this is coming from someone that will bite off acrylics.

https://www.today.com/health/how-stop-nail-biting-supplement...

If you have a poke on Google Scholar, you'll find the science is quite good on this one.

LoganDark6• 3 years ago

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.

bmicraft6• 3 years ago

When done properly this is supposed to have a 100% success rate.

Sounds a lot like the No True Scotsman fallacy. I'm sure most smokers trying to quit think about how bad it is every single time, yet they can't.

How would one even know when you've "thought about it hard enough"?

claytongulick• 3 years ago

I was really lucky, I guess.

I smoked around a half a pack a day for about 20 years.

I decided to start getting in shape and started swimming every day.

All of my desire to smoke vanished overnight. I don't know why, or what the mechanism was. I never intentionally decided to "quit".

It just suddenly happened that I had zero desire to smoke, so I didn't anymore.

I still work out regularly, and it's been 10 years now since I've had a cigarette.

tpmoney3• 3 years ago

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)

imtringued2• 3 years ago

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".

ceejayoz• 3 years ago

These threads always bring out a whole bunch of people who confuse confirmation bias with population-level statistics.

If you kicked a heroin habit, good for you! Societally we still can’t use “suck it up you pansies” as a drug rehab strategy just on your say-so.

endisneigh4• 3 years ago

It is interesting that a forum filled with a disproportionate amount of techies still fall for such biases

TillE• 3 years ago

Technical ability and knowledge just doesn't correlate with critical thinking at all. At worst, it makes you more likely to fall into that common trap of believing you're "smart" and therefore know everything about everything.

wwtdtgotiatl• 3 years ago

Why would techies be less susceptible to bias compared to the general population?

That statement itself seems like it would be a cognitive bias.

notnaut• 3 years ago

I only recently started working with SWE type folk in the last few years and while they are, on average, the smartest people I have ever met, they’re also some of the least well-rounded and most siloed minds I’ve ever encountered.

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

You find it interesting that techies are people?

I find that interesting.

For the record, the only cognitive fallacy I admit to is denial.

jacquesm3• 3 years ago

It would be far more surprising if it wasn't.

s1artibartfast9• 3 years ago

I think that is because it is a terrible message. It isnt an either/or situation, and successful breaking habits does rely on willpower, just not willpower alone.

Smart strategy can make things easier, but there is no strategy that makes it easier to stop heroin than do to keep it.

It advertises the idea that with the right circumstances, you can make it so that the desirable option is always the easiest option - this simply isnt true.

Levitz• 3 years ago

I beg to differ, and we know this. Want to stop taking heroin? Stop surrounding yourself with people who take heroin. See a medical professional. Get away from wherever you get the heroin. Try to get your life in order so you have other things to look forward to.

It's a terrible, terrible idea to just "stop taking heroin". Pray tell, if you see someone who is an heroin addict and they say they are going to stop it and make no changes to their life, do you believe for a single second they are going to succeed? Hell no.

rtsil• 3 years ago

To break a habit, you have to replace it with a different habit. Willpower is one of the ways to do that, but others are more successful on more people.

The reason why so many people hire a coach for physical activities, diet or even life decisions isn't so much that these are extremely specialized domains that need high expertise; it's that having someone make the decision, i.e. not relying on willpower, is often more effective and easier. It also leads to accountability: you have to show results to someone else, not just to your brain. And for most people, that's also more effective and easier than willpower.

Telling people to get over themselves and take charge is generally a well-meaning, but often misleading call to action. And after a couple of failures, the lesson they'll learn is that they're weak and ineffective and there's nothing that can be done about it, which compounds the problem instead of solving it.

atoav• 3 years ago

You are right. On the flipside however this can lead to fatalism of the "if I can't change anything why even bother"-kind.

If you want to form a habit of doing sports for example, it certainly makes a difference whether you see yourself as a unsporty lazy-ass that will never achieve anything, or whether you see yourself as a unsporty person still looking for a way to get into this and make it part of your life.

What I think is important is to break habits out of band. If you are eating unhealthy or too much a good starting point is to limit your food ordering, cook yourself more. And then you can control what you can cook by buying the right things in the right amount. Ideally you don't go grocery shopping hungry then.

So make following your habit the thing that requires extra steps and is complicated, while the better alternative should be easy, available and fill you with some sort of joy. For me jogging became about listening to new music albums or my favourite podcast while exploring new parts of town. So instead of just moving my body, the sports part was actually just a nice side effect to an activity I actively enjoyed.

Sure, depending on your condition, such simple tricks might not work for everybody, but my point is: The mind is powerful. It tricks you into many bad habits, it can also trick you into the good ones if you wield it the right way.

Raw willpower alone will not help you, you also need to identify patterns and avoid creating situations where you fall back, depending on your situation this might mean even things like totally restructuring your life, cutting off contact, moving somewhere else, etc.

Ferret7446• 3 years ago

There's a difference between "sheer willpower" and "wanting to change and putting in effort toward habit breaking strategies". There's quite a lot of knowledge about habit forming and breaking, and one of the key strategies is to set up measures so that you don't have to rely on willpower during the key moments when you're being tested.

People need to have the "willpower" and commitment to change themselves, that is different from expecting them to not do drugs when they're in withdrawal and holding the drugs in their hands.

This is why there are things like gambling blacklists, where gambling addicts can register themselves so that they can't relapse in a moment of weakness. They need the willpower to register themselves so that they don't have to rely on the willpower to not go into a casino when they pass by.

derbOac• 3 years ago

I was at a research colloquium once and this came up in the context of dieting. The author of that research was making similar statements, although the focus of the research was different.

The problem I had with what they were describing was that they basically defined away willpower. That is, it felt like they basically said "once you control for all the downstream effects of willpower, willpower no longer has an effect." If you think about it, what's really the difference between saying "I'm not going buy cigarettes anymore or have them in my house" and willpower and environmental control?

There was more to it than that but that was the gist of the thing. They defined willpower so extremely narrowly that it didn't have the same meaning anymore, and it wasn't clear what would be left.

But it was several years ago and I haven't followed the literature closely.

I can see how just willing yourself to not do something, in itself, is probably not enough, but I'm also not sure how you can do that without it resulting in a whole set of things that collectively probably define the consequences of willing yourself not to do that thing. That is, removing something from your environment, or removing yourself from the environment, changing your attentional focus, finding something else to occupy your motivations, and so forth.

broscillator5• 3 years ago

The way I view it is fairly simple: the things you list involve planning. Willpower is how you react in the moment.

You could phrase it like this: the willpower to resist going out and getting cigarettes is much easier to perform than the willpower to not grab a cigarette that's in front of you.

However "will power to resist going to the store" isn't really utilizing will power to stop smoking, it's having an effective strategy that relies on knowing how hard it will be for your future self to actually employ that will power if the cigarettes do reach your desk.

anon848736284• 3 years ago

Yes, great point.

In learning about people with ADHD I learned that it is actually a constellation of possible executive function disorders. There are many different aspects or subtypes of executive function, such as time management, working memory, impulse control, etc.

Then you realize that "willpower" isn't a real thing; it's just a vernacular term that ambiguously refers to some aspects of executive function.

And people with lots of innate executive function have a very hard time understanding what life is like for people who have less of it -- which seems to be what you observed and made you feel skeptical.

There is something to be said for "use the types of executive function you do have to compensate for the ones you don't". These become the strategies that neurodiverse people use to function where necessary. But it requires very deliberate analysis and practice; it's not as easy a simple how-to article or list of tricks.

navjack27• 3 years ago

Thank you for taking the time and learning the ins and outs of ADHD and executive functioning.

armchairhacker• 3 years ago

The thing with dieting is that you have to maintain some sort of diet to maintain the weight loss. And that means unless you maintain a diet which requires minimal willpower, so that you're no longer "suffering", you're required to suffer almost every day for the rest of your life.

I think many people are actually good at delaying gratification: suffer unbearably for a few minutes, intensely for a few days, or mildly for a few months. But everyone who suffers long-term eventually burns out, and people who are forced to suffer long-term past burnout (e.g. forced to work intensely to survive, or experiencing chronic unbearable pain) experience so much stress it changes them physically.

Furthermore, food addiction is unique because, unlike drugs, you can't "quit" food entirely. I imagine it becomes easier to avoid smoking or heroin if you haven't done so for years (though maybe I'm wrong on this point), but food is constant, so unless you form "healthy habits" (AKA eat food which both satiates you and maintains your weight) the suffering never goes away. I'm fortunate to not have weight issues myself, but as a long-distance runner, I know hunger, and it's not something you can live your entire life with. I also know that it's not always as easy as "have a cheat day every once in a while", because if you're really lacking nutrients, you'll feel hungry no matter how much you eat, that hunger only goes away after time (and presumably for some people with serious metabolic issues, it never goes away).

The good news with weight-loss is that we've done so much research, we have a lot of tools and techniques so that even people with metabolic issues can be satiated. Not even pills (which are probably only required for a minority which truly have metabolic issues), many people can probably maintain long-term weight loss with diet alone. The key is, these people maintain the weight by sticking to a diet which isn't suffering to them, like one with whole foods (which are known to be more satiating). Even then, you're maintaining constant willpower by not choosing the less-satiating but addictive processed foods, but it's not a willpower which makes you "suffer".

aeblyve2• 3 years ago

It seems appropriate to share an article of Ray Peat's here.

https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/dark-side-of-stress-le...

Supermancho2• 3 years ago

Can someone link to the study, not the book?

jacquesm3• 3 years ago

That may well be true. But will power is extremely important in resisting peer pressure and the start of the creation of (some) bad habits.

HKH2• 3 years ago

So is disgust.

jacquesm3• 3 years ago

Yes, good point: disgust can really help. I never figured that one out so thank you for mentioning it, it explains some of my revulsion against particular kinds of behavior.

em-bee4• 3 years ago

here too, willpower alone is not enough. you also need good rolemodels and support (pressure?) from their side to help you.

vonnik• 3 years ago

BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits is a great method in which will power plays a very small part.

j7ake• 3 years ago

I find it effective to break an old habit by establishing new ones.

For example, the author probably had a bunch of old habits that got superseded once they got a smartphone.

Need to find something else that can dominate over smartphone usage. For example reading a book, listening to music, watching a movie, or doing sports.

miggol• 3 years ago

I enjoyed the article. Even though I've heard most of it before, I'm the kind of person that really needs reminding of the core message. Somehow it's so easy to fall back into the "willpower is the trick" mindset. Perhaps because it's reinforced so heavily in popular culture, as the article mentions.

The article does however, in my opinion, commit a crime in bringing up the often misrepresented marshmellow experiment as some kind of fundament of psychology. The one where a child is promised a second marshmellow if they can resist eating the first one placed in front of them for a 15 minutes.

Children make do with the mental faculties and model of the world available to them. They live in a world shrouded in mystery in which adults regularly break promises to them for reasons they can't comprehend. Once the adult telling them what to do has left the room, I don't blame the kids for feeling an urge to take a bird in the hand over two in the bush. That's a perfectly good default instinct to have before you've acquired absolute trust towards friendly strangers in university buildings.

Imagine a real-world analogy to this kind of experiment. Adults choosing to go for the double reward would likely be labeled naive, bad with money, or gamblers. Extrapolating to the general population is ridiculous. Mischel's research wasn't about that at all.

From the article: In Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, only a quarter of the subjects were able to resist eating the marshmallow for fifteen minutes. This implies that a large majority of us lack the self-control required to succeed in life.

(disgruntled noises)

leereeves• 3 years ago

Well said. It's often presented as a study on willpower, self-control, delayed gratification, etc, but it's also a study about trust.

And looking at it that way, it's not surprising that a child who grows up in an environment where strangers are trustworthy will be more successful than a child who doesn't.

Perhaps the sad take-away should be that a large majority of us lack the supportive environment required to succeed in life.

augustk• 3 years ago

Another source of error is that not all children are equally obsessed with candy.

m0llusk• 3 years ago

I remember being given the marshmallow test as a kid. It was so blatantly condescending and manipulative that I was utterly disgusted.

For one thing, I lived in a household dominated by a raging drunk father who would mercilessly beat anyone who dared to question him, let alone disobey. So, sure, I could take adult orders just fine. But that left the question as to why. Apparently this creep expected to learn something from the exercise which made me sad. And I feared having to deal with his children as peers if he had any.

They also completely failed to ask or notice anything about my loathing for marshmallows. I thought they were completely awful non food and didn't want anything to do with them ever. Just smelling them and touching them was unpleasant. So I took my two marshmallows from the encounter and gave them to the first other kid I met who wanted them.

sumeruchat• 3 years ago

Will power is just like a muscle like any other and needs flexing to become stronger. If you dont have a strong muscle then indeed you couldnt do much with it and need crutches. But try to flex this muscle on unrelated things and soon it will be good enough to say no to anything even smoking.

bmicraft6• 3 years ago

What you're saying goes hard in the exact opposite direction of ego depletion. Which, while despite being a bit controversial, is still a thing research has shown to exists under some circumstances.

Essentially ego depletion says you only have a finite capacity to act against your impulse.

rayiner• 3 years ago

Wasn’t this all debunked?

Studies suggest that relying on will power to break habits is hopeless (2019)

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