Habit Hacking

2009-10-22T16:42:00.000-04:00

This blog has been moved to WordPress.com:

2009-08-28T14:29:00.003-04:00

Habits Made Simple.

Bad habit industries

2009-08-27T13:19:00.005-04:00

Consumer habits around which industries have grown:

over spending
over eating
over drinking
over drugging

Consumer society encourages addiction:

I am a 54 year old (or young) woman who has been dealing with weight issues my whole life.

Addiction recovery industry temporarily saves you from your addiction:

I think I’ve tried every method of losing weight at least twice, from Nutrisystem and Jenny Craig to medically supervised fasting for months.

Then the consumer society in which we must live transforms the consumer into an addict once again:

I keep going back to Weight Watchers, which really is the only one that works long-term for me. The program does work if I stay with it, which is the catch.

Addiction recovery becomes a life habit. Is there anyone who broke this habit for life?

Corporate habits

2009-08-27T12:53:00.005-04:00

Humans get addicted to sugar. Corporation get addicted to their own sugar:

Sugar and its companion sweeteners are addictive; so are government subsidies. Individual Americans should break the sweets habit and demand their government wean corn farmers off the government dole.

It's not easy to kick the sweet bailout habit:

The FDIC wants banks to stand on their own two feet, but withdrawing insurance on big checking accounts won't be popular.

Wearing habits

2009-08-27T12:45:00.004-04:00

It's interesting that "habit" also refers to specialized garments worn to display status, profession or function. Like riding habit, tennis habit or religious habits. We wear our habits as well but they are invisible.

Yes, loaded down with all of your Vuitton accoutrements.

Well, the accoutrements are important. I took up tennis for the same reason I took up horseback riding—part of it is about the habit. Habit is an old word, like a riding habit or a tennis habit. Part of the intrigue was to go to Vuitton and get the tennis racket and the tennis bag, the box for the bottle of water. I don’t do anything unless I think about my habit.

Can't change a habit by persuasion 2

2009-08-27T12:29:00.004-04:00

Here's a monstrous and senseless bureaucratic way to fight a habit by showing graphic pictures and by using scare tactics to change a well-established habit.

Persuasion will not change a habit.

No matter how persuading and disgusting a persuasion is it will not communicate with the habit and will have no effect on the habit. It will only communicate with the reason, that is, the executive OS.

To change a habit you must create a new habit.

In this case you must create good driving habits. In other words, action can only be replaced by action. Words, imagery, graphics and violent warnings about the consequences of the habit will never be effective in changing a habit. In fact, it will make it more attractive to thrill seeking texters.

Driving a car is a strong habit. You can drive for miles without remembering how.

But apparently you still need your hands to drive. You cannot text and drive. And don't. The best advice is turn off your phone. Change your environment to change your habit.

The power of the environment 2

2009-08-27T12:00:00.002-04:00

A true story, My mother who is 93 now, was in trouble, she was living alone 5 years ago and could not pay bills, clean her house and could not remember her children's names.

I moved her into my house and later to an assisted living facility. Where she become more involved with the other people her age.

She now remembers her children's names and is taking care of her own bills and looking and feeling better about herself.

The doctors were amazed at her improvement.

I took her off all drugs and used the ole remedies she used to use on us when we were small.

The last check up she had with a doctor was excellent. He stated " I wish I had your secret, you do not need any medication just calcium tablets.

so I agree with the article that staying young is proper diet, interaction, and using your brain, it worked for my mother.

The power of the environment

2009-08-27T10:26:00.001-04:00

A former banker has said farewell to the remote island he had marooned himself on in a radical attempt to stop smoking.

Change your environment to change a habit.

How many days does it really take to form a habit?

2009-08-26T14:30:00.016-04:00

The traditional duration is 30 days. Here's a good example by Steve Pavlina:

A powerful personal growth tool is the 30-day trial. This is a concept I borrowed from the shareware industry, where you can download a trial version of a piece of software and try it out risk-free for 30 days before you’re required to buy the full version.

Celestine prefers 21 days:

1. 21 days is what it takes to fully break/form a new habit 2. A 21-day trial is more efficient than a 30-day trial

Dragos Roua thinks 15 days is enough and he has developed a day-by-day system to prove it.

Three comments:

1. Belief

How fast a habit is formed has a lot to do with belief. If you believe that you can change your habit in a week then you can change it in a week; if you believe it will take a month it will take a month. Celestine twits:

Argue for your limitations and sure enough, they're yours...

2. Emotions

The number of repetition (days) is not the strongest factor forming the habit. I believe that the strongest factor is emotion. A split second may be enough to start a habit. Lovers' first date is the start of a habit. The habit is formed by pure emotion and without repetition.

3. Environment

Another factor is the environment. If I'm starting a transition to raw diet by following a habit formation plan for 30 days, I may reach my goal in 2 weeks if I am living in a tent with no kitchen in a Mediterranean island with plenty of delicious raw vegetables and fruit available in abundance cheaply. If I live in the city and raw food is expensive and hard to find and if my apartment has an inviting kitchen, then it may take longer than 30 days and definitely more effort.

Can we state all the variables that enter in habit formation with proper units and state a general formula?

Inertia of habits

2009-08-26T12:50:00.004-04:00

Habits are the way we unconsciously solve the thousands of little tasks that confront us every day. Make something a little

easier
faster
cheaper
convenient

and new habits might emerge. Compared to a phone book, the Internet is superior in almost every respect, but the phone book continues to be published because businesses still advertise there. Phone books are still profitable, even though no one pays for them to be delivered. If it takes about 30 days to change a human habit, it takes 30 years to change a corporate habit and it takes 300 years to change a national habit and it takes 3000 years to change a habit of humanity. This why the human individual is incapable of causing real change in society by attempting to cause a change without changing habits. His lifetime is too short.

The science of habits

2009-08-26T10:32:00.024-04:00

The state of our knowledge of human habitual behavior is in pre-scientific state. Habits are still associated with organs. To define habit as a function of an organ is like associating the heart with feelings and claim to have understood its function.

People also use the word "mind" to explain behavior. Then they divide the mind into two sections: conscious and unconscious.

95 percent of human behavior is controlled by the unconscious mind

The unconscious mind is a term invented by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Ser Christopher Riegel and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The unconscious mind might be defined as that part of the mind which gives rise to a collection of mental phenomena that manifest in a person's mind but which the person is not aware of at the time of their occurrence.

This is so poetic and meaningless.

I propose to use Human Operating System or HOS instead of "unconscious mind." This way the concept is defined by its function not by its location.

Inspired by the convention proposed here by Neale Martin we can separate the OS by function into two parts: executive and habitual.

Executive human OS processes information by using a communications (or social) language such as English. The executive OS stores and retrieves linguistic elements (called memories and thoughts) and make connections between these elements to solve problems. Executive OS created the notions of present, past and future. This is like the computer interface seen and used by human users. The common user has no idea how a computer works or what assembly language is or where it is located.

Habitual OS processes functions necessary for the harmonious existence of the body. Regulations of periodic motions, body temperature and storage of learned behavior such as habits. Habitual OS lives in the present. It only knows the present.

The executive OS can be used to program the habitual OS. I want to make these programming rules systematic. One benefit of this would be to program habits as easily as programming a computer. An article like Cultivate a good habit in 21 days is almost like a script used to program a computer.

What do you think?

Consumer habits

2009-08-25T21:24:00.012-04:00

Habit begins with a revolutionary premise -- 95 percent of human behavior is controlled by the unconscious mind. This fact exposes the central flaw in marketing theory, market research, and a preponderance of business strategy--that customers are consciously aware of what they're doing. Habit explains why 80 percent of new products fail, why billions of advertising dollars are wasted every year, and why even satisfied customers aren't loyal. Google is a habit. Here's a tech writer complaining how he uses Google only because it's become a habit:

A few key players have become so entrenched on the Web and creatures of habit like me just make them more dominant.

This blogger thought that Google was a bad habit and tried to break free of his habit:

So … nothing for the last week or so. No fantastic revelations about missing tools, no desperate struggle to find new ways of doing things. In fact, if Google dropped off the face of the Earth tomorrow it would take me less than a week to move on completely.

Bing needs to overcome an entrenched habit. Is Microsoft using standard habit breaking methods on Goggle users?

Removing bad habits

2009-08-25T19:31:00.007-04:00

There are many techniques for removing bad habits once they have become established. One example is withdrawal of reinforcers identifying and removing the factors which trigger the habit and encourage its persistence. This type of observations that I keep reading lack the actual concrete and practical steps that can be applied. The best time to correct a bad habit is immediately, before it becomes established.

I don't think this is correct. A habit may be 30 years old. It takes only 30 days to replace it with a new habit. It's not yet clear to me if the habits are removed or overlaid or just their triggers renamed.

Habits and instincts

2009-08-25T13:28:00.002-04:00

Habits are different than instincts because they are learned. Habits are formed by practice, and without practice, for example, you could never have walked up to a computer for the first time and type 90 words a minute. A habit is any behavior that is repeated often enough to become automatic and almost effortless. And if certain conditions are present when you are learning the behavior (a particular room, for example), eventually those conditions will tend to trigger the habit or make it easier to perform.

What we know about habits

2009-08-25T13:18:00.003-04:00

Habit is overcome by habit
It is difficult to change a habit but once you started it gets easier and easier
Some habits run on the background and they are unknown to the person
Our behaviour is defined by habits
Habits make decisions
Each habit has a trigger associated with it
Each habit has an emotion associated with it
Habits allow us to multitask
Habits are created by repetition
...

Habit is overcome by habit

2009-08-25T10:38:00.007-04:00

Desiderius Erasmus knew that habit is overcome by habit. He lived in the 16th century:

A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.

About the same time, Thomas à Kempis was writing that getting rid of a unhealthy habit was not enough, we must replace it with a healthy habit:

We are working each day to completely remake our lives, bit by bit. We are replacing unhealthy habits with healthy ones.

The important knowledge that habit is overcome by habit has been around for 500 years and probably more. It is repeated today as well:

The way to stop a habit is by not stopping it cold turkey but by substituting a new habit. The new habit is a beneficial one and good for you. It could be good for you physically, mentally, or emotionally. It is the course of action, in an ideal world, you would like to take but are are struggling to do it.

A new habit can take up to 30 days of doing it to become established. The first six days of the new habit is hard to follow, the six days after that a little easier, going six days forward again it becomes easier still. As the habit is performed every day it does get easier and better.

If so much is known about the mechanics of forming and removing habits how come we still have bad habits? How come removing a bad habit is not as simple as learning to drive a car? And as free of prejudice?

Dogs (and humans) are creatures of habit

2009-08-24T16:43:00.006-04:00

This article says that dogs are creatures of habit:

Dogs find comfort in habits
Dogs base their life around 3 things: feeding, playing, sleeping
Dogs like a regular feeding routine: the same amount at the same time in the same bowl makes a dog happy
Don't offer your dog too many treats, unearned, at random opportunities
Dogs enjoy exercise and play on a regular schedule
Maintain an evening routine to make certain that a dog settles in a night: A calm toilet walk, a milk bone, lights out ... all of these will make it clear to a dog that night is for sleeping, not agitating at the window
A dog that has routine and consistency will be most calm and well-adjusted.

The same applies to humans:

Humans find comfort in habits
Humans base their life around 4 things: feeding, playing, working, sleeping. The only difference appears to be that humans need to work.
Humans like a regular feeding routine; the same amount at the same time in the same location (with some variation in the menu) with same company, brings happiness
Restrict yourself from eating too many treats, unearned, at random opportunities
Humans enjoy exercise and play on regular schedule
Maintain an evening routine to make certain that you are settled nicely for the night: a warm shower, fresh fruit, a nice book, lights out . . all of these will make it clear to you that night is for sleeping not turning and tossing in bed.
A human that has routine and consistency will be most calm and well-adjusted.

Other organisms such as bureaucracies enjoy strict routines as well.

Psychology of habits

2009-08-24T13:27:00.007-04:00

Why is habit considered a part of the academic field called psychology?

Studies about habit formation fall under the rubric "classical conditioning," I guess. The term refers to simple and beautiful experiments done by Pavlov in the 19th century. In over 100 years that followed academic psychologists successfully managed to obscure the original experiments with layers of complex terminology. They invented so many "new" labels that they had to classify the original research as "classical."

Can we simplify -or better yet- ignore this academic stuff to understand how habits are formed?

Yes. Personal development field is the non-academic version of the study of habits and how they influence human behavior.

And personal development formulation of habit comes with practical applications and solutions to specific problems faced by the individual.

Surprisingly, during our early education personal development is not emphasized; instead education aims to turn the natural human being into a dedicated consumer infected with various addictions to consumer products.

From reading the Wikipedia article it seems that stimulus and association are at the root of habit forming.

Hygiene habits

2009-08-24T11:01:00.004-04:00

So many habits to evaluate, rate, change, establish or remove every day!

Picking

nose

Cleaning

ears

Re-wearing

cloths
underwear

Washing

bathing
hands
hair

Teeth

brushing
flossing

Replacing

toothbrush

---------------------

Washing

sheets
dishes
fresh produce

Cleaning

refrigerator
tub/shower
toilet
towels
trash can

Make it easy to break a habit

2009-08-24T09:47:00.014-04:00

-Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of.

Why is it so easy to form a habit but so difficult to change-break-extinguish a habit?

Here's a tip. To initiate your campaign against the habit start small by setting easy goals with actions that you complete within a time frame:

Write down one very simple activity that you agree to do every day. Example: write on a piece of paper "Read this text." That's a simple commitment.

For the next few days, make sure to pick up that piece of paper, read and follow what it says.

Start adding simple activities that you'd like to do every day. One of the things that I wrote down initially was "Keep work desk clean". I used to clean my desk every 6 months or so. Always felt guilty about not doing often enough, but could never convince myself to do it - it seemed like too much work.

Then one day I read somewhere that "the state of your immediate surroundings affects your ability to focus and be productive" That same day, "Clean desk" went on my "daily ritual" piece of paper. After doing it for a while, I no longer have to think about cleaning my desk or argue with myself about whether or not I really need to dump those unnecessary papers or carry the coffee mugs to the kitchen. You've trained yourself to look at it every day - now you can be reasonably sure that you won't be forgetting to do stuff that's written on it.

If you make it easy breaking a habit is not difficult at all!

Can't change a habit by persuasion

2009-08-23T20:12:00.004-04:00

Telling someone directly to change a habit never works. You cannot use persuasion on someone --or yourself-- to change a habit. Habit is action and action always wins against reason:

Simple information, reasoning, and appeal to fear of negative consequences are not enough to dissuade a high sensation seeker from trying some risky behavior that promises an intense reward. Once established a habit that provides reward is difficult to extinguish because of the negative emotional and physical state produced by withdrawal of the reward.

If you are to make some behavior off-limits and therefore remove the reward, then you have to replace it with another rewarding behavior.

Can you break a habit?

2009-08-23T10:18:00.004-04:00

There is a school of thought which says that you cannot break a habit:

Well, you may think you are, but the truth of that matter is that you cannot break or change a habit. You can, however, create new, better and even stronger habits. And while you may think that the old habits are forever gone, they are simply hiding out. At some point in time, one or more will get triggered.

What do you think?

Masters of marketing 2

2009-08-22T23:13:00.004-04:00

It seems that all of our habits we label as "bad" are programmed as "automatic behavior" into us by consumer product companies. We spend a huge chunk of our life trying to free ourselves from these bad habits.

These malhabits -as in malware- run in the background and use up energy and influence our decision making process.

Addiction to food
Addiction to drugs
Addiction to credit card debt

are all manufactured by global corporations -the unhuman organisms- to make humans sick and keep them sick in order to perpetuate their growth. Ok, everyone knows this already. Is there anything I can do as an individual? Or am I supposed to be fatalistic and accept the fact that my habits will be formed by unhuman master marketers?

This New York Times article is informative and leaves no room for doubt that global corporations are masters of human programming. Their impact on human behavior is immense. They define how humanity live all over the globe.

Let's learn the science of habit hacking so that we are better informed against the entertaining propaganda unhuman organisms use to program an individual into a consumer.

Masters of marketing

2009-08-22T16:58:00.005-04:00

Consumer goods companies teach anthropologist Val Curtis how to sell hand-washing the way Speed Stick deodorant and Pringles potato chips are sold.

The lesson is that habits can be branded just like a consumer product. This makes them hard to recognize as bad habits.

Bad habit busters

2009-08-22T15:47:00.005-04:00

Robert Hruzek has a single advice to get rid of a bad habit:

Know to avoid it before it forms.

How?

Know yourself

Know your own strengths and weaknesses
Know there is a problem

Know your goals

State your goals clearly

Know your decision ahead of time

Decide right now what you're going to do
When it comes time to actually do it, you'll find it so much easier

Habit in Y Combinator

2009-08-22T12:11:00.007-04:00

Lots of interesting links on all facets of habits. A small sample:

How to break a habit

2009-08-22T11:15:00.002-04:00

Already some common recommended actions are appearing. This article is about how to break a habit.

Breaking a habit is difficult but not impossible
Make sure you really want to change the habit
Keep a journal
Choose an alternative behavior
Start a replacement schedule right away
Don't keep it secret
Be patient

This is good advice. But what I want to do in this blog is to

collect actual case studies
formulate general rules applicable to all.

For instance, how do I decide that I really want the change a habit? First, I guess I need to be aware of the habit. How? Strong habits run on the background and make decisions for us.

How to create a habit in 15 days

2009-08-21T21:18:00.010-04:00

How to create a habit in 15 days is full of good advice.

Here are some comments:

Most of our life is lived by habits. Habits run on their own with "minimum effort."

True.

habits define our comfort zone
they make us happy
when running on habit we don't feel time passing and we feel happy

Habits are not good or bad, they are just ways of handling repetitive tasks that would otherwise require a lot of energy.

I think this is a very deep observation. Habits are branded as good or bad by society or religion to further their own agenda. Removing the branding is a major step to understand habits.

The master habit of creating/breaking your habits can be quite an asset

If we possess such a master habit and we can use it to manipulate habits that would be fantastic.

Master habit is divided into 3 parts

assess
decide
implement

All these new activities are made by some repetitive tasks, a set of moves you have to do daily in order to get some positive results

Try to achieve tasks every day at the same time.

Name your habit

It is also a good idea to associate the habit with some powerful emotions familiar to us.

Write everything you need to perform in order to create that habit.

What about trying and testing first and then let habit take hold?

In the implementation phase do not editorialize. Break the doing from the analyzing.

Very good advice. Thinking, analyzing and editorializing get in the way of doing. Established habits work on the background and try to stop the establishment of new habits.

On the next stage, comment and analyze your progress.

Creating a habit is largely a matter of defining it right first and then implementing it.

Did you try to create a habit in 15 days using this method? Share your experience with us.

Welcome to Habit Hacking

2009-08-21T13:14:00.004-04:00

In this blog I would like to learn about habits. We all live by habits.

We are our habits -Aristotle

Habits are programs used by human body. Without habits the body is like a laptop without any software installed. Habits are functions. Imagine learning to drive anew each time you get into your car.

A preliminary list of topics

1. Default habits

Learned early and common to all

walking
talking
eating

2. Habits and morality

habits as branded by religion and society

3. Habits induced by consumer society

spending
smoking
eating
drugs

These are defined usually as addictions resulting by consuming something beyond its prescribed limit:

money/credit cards
cigarettes
food
drugs

4. Mechanics of habits

How habits are

formed
altered
removed
ignored
used
triggered

5. Where are habits stored

probably in the spine (habits are reflexes?)

6. Habits in other organisms

What can we learn from them

pets
wild animals
nature

7. Habits of bureaucracies

war
growth
rule
hierarchy
law

8. Habits of systems

orbits
gaia

9. Habits of thought

beliefs
faith
likes
desires
emotions

10. Practical tips and how tos

Step by step guides

As far as I know habitology is not a mainstream academic science yet. In order to make the Mechanics of Habits a science we'll define new units so that we can measure related quantities.

There is a lot of information scattered around the internet about habits. I'll try to collect and classify them here.

With your help I wish to identify how habits work. Please share your experiments with habits:

Are you aware of your habits?
How do you change a habit or create a new habit?
How do you define habit?

Let's start our journey to discover and conquer habits!