Are Habits BS?

[gettoefl]

habits make you a good dog, you are here to be a good god

contemplate this

do what the moment needs and you should do nought else

[hyruga]

To change your karma and maybe your personality, you have to break out of old habits and you should try out something new and even things you supposedly do not like to do.

[PenguinPablo]

Yes but not in a forced way generally speaking.

So what has worked is to not make it a big deal and maybe baby step it at first.

Meditate for only a few minutes.

Then things take a momentum of their own because you actually enjoy doing something difficult that has a positive effect on my life.

I could play Xbox out of habit but seems relatively un-challenging, and wont have a long term benefit.

The key is mini habits!

I mean the key is kinda finding the middle ground, where I nudge myself in the direction I want, without cultivating a negative attitude towards it because I am forcing myself.

[soos_mite_ah]

16 hours ago, The Renaissance Man said:

Yes, flexibility is always the solution. All those "protocols", typically stage orange, fail to see the flexibility requirement of a successful integration. Anyway, notice how the "habits" you adopted weren't out of dumb, sheer repetition and force, but out of a simple understanding of the place of such practices in your life. Or at least, that's my whole hypothesis: I believe if you just don't see the point in doing something, there's no amount of repetition that will make you indifferent to doing that thing. And this would mean the whole habit thing is... BS. As a method of integrating new practices, not the fact that changing behavior is BS, to be clear.

I think you have a limitted view of what a habit is and you're mainly coming from a stage orange perspective. You can have a habit and still have it be flexible. Whose to say that getting ice cream once a week on a Tuesday is a habit but getting ice cream once a week but the day of the week doesn't matter isn't a habit. Sure, habits that aren't rooted in some form of authenticity is less likely to stick but it is still something that is possible. There are plenty of habits that I have, particularly related to my job, that I don't particularly like or see the point of, but I still continue it because sometimes being an adult and taking responsibility means doing things that you're not quite fond of doing and sometimes, flexibility is not the solution. Sure sometimes sucks at first, but eventually you get used to it and your brain gets used to certain pathways it created. That's where the indifference comes from and hell, sometimes you end up liking the once new behavior because your mind adapts in such away that it likes the comfort of familiarity and it got into the habit. 

17 hours ago, The Renaissance Man said:

I believe if you just don't see the point in doing something, there's no amount of repetition that will make you indifferent to doing that thing. And this would mean the whole habit thing is... BS.

Yes, this can be the case sometimes but just because it's true sometimes doesn't mean the whole  of the habit thing is to be discounted. 

[Delusion Slayer]

One practical example of habits working for me is my recent 50 day added-sugar fast 2 months ago.

I abstained from eating any food with added-sugar for 50 days. During this time, consuming nutritious and non-sugar meals became ingrained day by day. The most interesting thing I found is -- even way after this 50 day commitment ended, I never buy sugary food anymore, and there is no effort in this anymore / is automatic now. Whereas before, it took so much will-power to not eat garbage, which would eventually run out my decision fatigue and I would cave in and snack on candy / sweets. It has become hard-wired into my identity, and that came from the consistent habit of not doing something that harmed me, and replacing it with someone that enriched my life (healthy food). 

My diet still is not perfect, but this incredible evolution came from the habit, which came from the commitment itself, and now is embedded in my identity.

[Asayake]

If you believe forming habits is very difficult and overhyped, that's how it will be initially, until you have changed that belief. That's why you should start with a small habit, pick one wisely that is relevant to your current goal in life. If you try integrating too many habits at once it will be an overwhelming task, you will slip up and it will fail, thereby reinforcing your belief regarding habits being a useless concept. Instead choose your battles wisely, start with something small but meaningful.

Be specific about it, which time of the day you do it, optimize the step. For example if you want a habit of flossing every night, plan in when you're gonna do it and check it off everyday for a month. Look up flossing technique and refine the activity itself so that you're forced to focus more on that thing for the first month. This way you'll not only pick up a habit, but refine a skill in the process. You'll not only be a person who flosses their teeth every night, but you'll do it properly, creating a habit of attention to detail and doing things right. Small habits like this are way more powerful than they seem. How you do the small things in life will carry over to how you do everything in your life. The small things add up. You learn something from everything you do, it programs you. 

Then when starting a habit like the gym, having a gym program that you stick to is a form of habit. Learning those particular excercises better by practicing them & your body getting used to doing them in a certain order allows you to make adaptations, alterations to the program that are specific to it remaining the same, refining it. You'll get better at those excercises and setting up the weights, the technique, a lot of things will get automatic and that's why habits are powerful you'll not have to think about it, you'll know "today is Monday, time to hit the gym whole body day A program, go there, barely need to look at your program and you'll remember your settings and do the setups faster because you're used to those excercises".

It takes a long time to automate something completely, the more automated something becomes the more easily it will put you in a state of flow. Everything just runs smoothly because more and more steps become automatic, the process becomes faster as a whole and requires less effort. You're approaching mastery.

[The Renaissance Man]

@Asayake It's actually the opposite. I started off with "believing" this habit thing, and then my direct experience showed me how it didn't work in that way. And now I was checking if it was just me or if the way habits are typically conceived in the self-help industry are a poor extrapolation of another principle. And from the responses here it seems to be the case.

[The Renaissance Man]

@soos_mite_ah Consider I'm challenging the typical stage orange perspective on habits. I'm not rigid at all, actually, to the point I believe the whole concept does not exist.

I believe what those people call "habits", automated, are actually organic, hyper-flexible changes that occur for reasons that are totally different from the sheer repetition those sources propose.

About the whole habit thing: the concept of habit is not just about repetition, that's true. It's also about being strategic with cues that trigger certain behaviors, etc. And those are actually great tips, I didn't specify that in the post, my fault. What' I'm specific pointing to is the idea of a "habit" that becomes automated.

You said there are things you do even if it sucks, especially in the beginning, but then you get used to it. I'm not saying this does not happen, what I'm saying is that it did not happen because of repetition, but because of a higher degree of comprehension. And while it can be facilitated by repetition, there are a lot of more powerful and nuanced ways to go straight to the source of change.

Possible critique is: but if I don't use a bit of discipline and force here and there I risk becoming super lazy and wasting my life. Maybe it's not your thought @soos_mite_ah, but if it is, you'll see that trying to not be disciplined will be impossible for you. Not doing the thing will be too painful, and you'll end up doing it anyway. It's as if the discipline, the punishment, the force, is all an illusion, and only makes the process less effective.

[The Renaissance Man]

@Delusion Slayer I absolutely agree. But in this case it was about not doing something, rather than doing a new positive activity.

So in this case, repetition wasn't the mechanism involved, and what I'm critiquing is the repetition aspect. But it's also true that I didn't specified that in the post, so it's my fault.

I would just change "habit" into "behavior change". Because habit implies something is "habitual", or "automatic", while I'd argue the actual thing at work is just you becoming more mature and conscious, and not just indifferent to the discomfort.

And then, manipulating cues is very effective to make you a bit more conscious of the behavior, and making you struggle more to engage in it. In your case, not buying sugary food means it's incredibly harder to eat it.

Edited May 1 by The Renaissance Man

[The Renaissance Man]

By the way, @soos_mite_ah, @Delusion Slayer, your contribution was very useful, it's true that there are many aspects of the "habits" umbrella that are complex and very effective.

I overgeneralized a bit too much, and while I believe there's truth in what I experienced that hints at a larger mechanism at play, I need to consider the larger context of everything that influences behavior.

With this post I isolated a very narrow aspect of behavior change, and as you pointed out, this creates contradictions.