The Simple Guide to Building and Breaking Habits

149 pointsposted 9 months ago
by alexander2002
(alexy.tech)

78 Comments

sheepolog

9 months ago

The #1 thing that has helped me stick to habits over the long term is starting out as easy as I possibly can. I've been exercising consistently for years now, and what finally got me to stick with it was doing 1 pushup per day. That's it. I did one pushup per day for 5 days, then I moved to 2 per day, and started ramping up faster as time went on.

I've applied the same "make it as easy as humanly possible" to other habits (working on something for 5 minutes, for example) and it seems to work really well.

I believe the reason this works for me is because 1) it's laughably easy at the start, and I can knock it out in practically no time, and 2) I ramp up slowly enough that by the time it actually starts feeling difficult, I already have the habit established. The surest way for me to abandon a habit is by trying to do too much early on.

Another thing that is death to my habits is feeling guilt/shame about missing a day. If you miss a day, don't beat yourself up. It happens. Just remind yourself why you picked the habit, and try again. Maybe lower the difficulty a bit next time.

aenis

9 months ago

+1.

Plus, in my experience it helps to develop an easy habit first, reestablish one's belief in oneself, and then do the harder habit(s). When I was struggling with dieting - cutting out the unhealthy stuff - I first started playing the piano daily, and after hitting something like a 50 day streak it was a whole lot easier for me to start dieting (and keeping at it).

As someone on the spectrum, though, it takes very little to break a habit - as someoneone else has posted here as well. Just one or two days where I am travelling and it's very difficult to get back, and one broken habit often leads to all of the habits-in-progress being dropped all at once. (So, I bought a travel piano, for instance).

dddw

9 months ago

I find it helpful in those situations to remember what David Allen said about when that happens: "you may have fallen off the horse, but you can always saddle up again"

aenis

9 months ago

Those things come with a cost. Erode self esteem and reinforce the idea that failure is a very real option, since "its easy to get back on the horse later".

My piano teacher tells me that every single mistake takes two successes to undo, and I think this is the same with habit forming. Keep failing and you are not going to get better at getting back on the horse, you will get better at quitting and accepting defeat.

DavidPiper

9 months ago

> Erode self esteem and reinforce the idea that failure is a very real option

I feel differently about failure. I think failure failure is always, constantly, an option. But that doesn't mean it should erode my self esteem.

I don't want to negate your piano teacher's advice, because I think there's an element of truth in there, and I'm not sure what your goals are. But as a fellow (hobby) pianist who gave it away for 5 years from burnout, I now prefer to follow Stephen King's advice:

"If there’s no joy in it, it’s just no good."

thierrydamiba

9 months ago

There’s also the problem where avoiding failure leads to more conservative goals. If you look at failure as a thing to avoid, you won’t try as hard as songs when you’re learning piano. You might get good, but you’ll never reach your potential.

aziaziazi

9 months ago

Reaching your potential may not be compatible with experiencing joy through. In my experience I’ve been happier and better at doing things I like doing.

Always wanted to learn playing guitar, interact socially or starting a business but boy those makes me so bored.

thierrydamiba

9 months ago

That’s a good point. Sometimes you do something just to do it.

Etheryte

9 months ago

Breaking the chain of habit is something everyone will run into at one point and it's important to understand that it's the natural order of things that it will happen. Inevitably at one point you will either be sick, or have something important, or life will throw a wrench at you — and that's okay. The important thing is that if you still want it, you get back at it. I've been lifting weights nearly all my life and I can't even begin to count the times I've missed days, weeks, sometimes months because of various reasons. What matters is that you get back to it after.

taneq

9 months ago

I did something similar with HIIT workouts (don’t be fooled, the intensity wasn’t super high to begin with!) which worked because I couldn’t possibly tell myself I “didn’t have time” for a 10 minute workout.

james_anderson

9 months ago

Same. When I started running 5 years ago, I started with under 1km runs. Slowly built up to 5km runs over a 3 or so years. The hardest bit is getting out bed, once that habit is in the rest is easy.

I also found that not timing myself worked really well. Too many times I would finish a run feeling good, check my time and then feel bad that I didn't beat my pb. Stopped that and every run was positive.

herrvogel-

9 months ago

There is this saying which helps me a lot. “Motivation follows action!”

mmarian

9 months ago

Exactly, make things as convenient as possible. That's why I have weights and a yoga mat, no excuse to take 30 minutes from the day to do a HIIT workout.

komali2

9 months ago

No habit book I've read, including this article, has included effective strategies for habit forming for whatever funky funk my brain has going on - most psychs say ADHD, recently one said maybe a spritz of autism.

Medicated or otherwise, the typical habit forming tactics don't work. Reward systems, identity based habit forming, habit trackers, leaving the gym shorts on top of my phone at night so I have to put them on before anything else, I can still kill a year long consistent habit overnight with a single disruption like an early meeting or by straight up forgetting. Gym shorts are there but I have to pee. Boom it's 10pm and I'm doing my habit tracker and damn I completely forgot to go to the gym today. Or I successfully pushed it off again and again until it was too late.

I have no solutions to offer. I keep thinking I've solved it and get ready to write my magnum opus how-to-have-adhd-and-still-be-a-productive-member-of-society blog post and then lose a habit again.

Probably pre planning times to do a habit a day ahead of time would help but I fail to do that daily, lol.

Oh well. I've managed to track my calories for 278 days consistently, but only because I can go fill in the previous day if I forget the day of. One day I'll forget two days in a row and that streak will die too.

cnf

9 months ago

Yeah, same, auDHD er , most of the ADHD people I know, and especially the auDHD people I know, including myself, can’t form habits our brain just isn’t wired for it. I stopped trying and focus on other coping mechanisms…

Jach

9 months ago

I see plenty of such people who don't seem to have such a problem, at least not uniformly (some habits stick, some don't), so unfortunately I don't think such a simple excuse works. I think examining Big 5 personality traits, and the sub-facets within, would produce more reliable results, but I'll admit that's just a guess. Whatever the reasons, there's nevertheless broad variation on whether habits stick or not. I read Stephen Guise's Mini Habits a couple years ago on suggestion from some other HN thread, as expected it hasn't exactly "worked" for me in that I have no new habits since reading it that I've been able to maintain consistently on a periodic basis (daily/weekly/monthly, and I even failed a yearly goal streak of 3 years last year and am on track to fail again this year). Streaks get broken, and gaps last longer than streaks. I still think it was useful to read though for two reasons.

First, it's one of the few sources that recognizes the huge variability:

How Long Does It Take To Form A New Habit? It depends. Anyone who tells you differently is repeating what they've heard (which is wrong). It is NOT 21 or 30 days. ... The 21-day habit myth was possibly started by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon. Dr. Maltz reportedly found that amputees took about 21 days to get used to the loss of a limb. So he argued that 21 days is how long it takes for people to adjust to any life changes. ... The most-cited viable study on habit formation duration was published in 2009 in the European Journal Of Social Psychology. Each participant chose an “eating, drinking or activity behavior to carry out daily in the same context (for example ‘after breakfast’) for 12 weeks.” And what did they find? The average time for a behavior to become habit was 66 days. But the range was wild, from 18 to 254 days, showing that there is huge variation in people's time to reach habit automaticity, and that it can end up taking a very long time in some cases. 21 and 30 day challenges are popular, but they're highly unlikely to form many types of habits. ... In my experience, the first sign of habit formation is decreased resistance, which makes perfect sense.

Second, it uses a fun trick to motivate some things later. The trick is this: touch your nose, right now.

I still like to think about that trick (and sometimes even do it) and what it could suggest. For me it makes me more suspect of concepts like "willpower" and "executive dysfunction". This trick is never a challenge to do, even to do multiple times. Yet, if I tried to turn it into a habit -- touch my nose every day between 1pm and 2pm -- I'm certain that would fail to take hold. But that's fine, action is what's important, not whether it's a habit.

noemit

9 months ago

I don't think this guy has really built or broken many habits. None of what he says is wrong per se, it's just wordy. You don't need such a deep understanding of the brain to build/break habits. You just need a reason.

If you really wanted to do that habit or get rid of a habit, you just would.

Most of you live high agency lives and are making decisions every day that are creating your life exactly how you have decided to make it. A lot of stuff feels "hard" but you just don't want it bad enough.

One example is how easy it is for 99% of women to quit social drinking when they get pregnant. These same people, without such a clear and strong motivation, would probably "slip up" and struggle with 9 months of sobriety.

globular-toast

9 months ago

> If you really wanted to do that habit or get rid of a habit, you just would.

This is ridiculously naïve. You seem to be completely forgetting the existence of addiction.

> One example is how easy it is for 99% of women to quit social drinking when they get pregnant.

Because they weren't addicted to drinking, like most healthy people.

Do you think a single fat person wants to be fat? It's uncomfortable, inconvenient and embarrassing; nobody wants it, and they know exactly what causes it. The reason more than half of our population is overweight is they are addicted to food and our society not only enables it but encourages and reinforces it. They can't "just stop".

NoGravitas

9 months ago

I think about when I quit smoking. I failed several times because I didn't really want to quit smoking. But then, when I really had had enough of smoking, and actually wanted to quit, addiction was in the way. I failed a couple of times because the consequences of stopping were so severe (headaches, anxiety, fatigue). Then I added a non-rewarding nicotine replacement (patches) to prevent the withdrawal symptoms, and suddenly quitting was manageable.

You can't just quit food, though.

noemit

9 months ago

Most people aren't addicted to bad habits. Thats why I said 99% of people. Alcoholism, real alcoholism, is not actually that common.

davisoneee

9 months ago

...and you seem to have quickly conflated habit with *addiction*.

It could be a valid point to bring up, but being combative/aggressive with it doesn't benefit the conversation. You could word it as something "perhaps some people need to question if something is a bad habit, or if they are addicted...", rather than calling parent 'ridiculously naive'

niam

9 months ago

This seems a semantic carving of the discussion to match the argument though.

> Person 1: Just stop it. Want harder.

> Person 2: I can't.

> Person 1: Well, you have an addiction then, not just a bad habit; my point was about habits.

If we grant this: then the great-grandparent's response fails to inform us of anything beyond merely how we choose to define words. The advice works until it doesn't, which is tautologically true but not useful.

davisoneee

9 months ago

You seem to have taken the message 'want harder' from the original comment.

I took the original comment as question if you actually want the habit or are just doing it out of social or self pressure, or just for the sake of 'that seems like a good thing'.

Emphasising that you are free to drop habits, rather than pressuring yourself to achieve something that you might not really want.

kqr

9 months ago

You're almost right. Habits don't just show up – we engage in them because they give us something useful back. The trouble is this useful thing is often optimised for the short-term, and habits can have negative long-term consequences.

The alcohol thing is a good example: when not pregnant, it gives us short-term pleasure, at long-term cost. When pregnant, the cost of alcohol is moved up to the now and so it's easier to get out of the habit. It's not about strength of motivation, it's about immediacy of consequences.

I have heard rumours that some people are able to channel motivation to pursue what's good in the long term even when it goes against short-term gains, but I believe this ability is more rare than it may appear. For many, it's more effective to try to re-arrange the environment such that the consequence profile aligns with the long-term goals.

noemit

9 months ago

Yep, all great points. If you want to go deeper, I think we can actually trick ourselves into being "pregnant" by creating some sort of urgency in our lives. An investor I worked with once told me the best way to be a successful entrepreneur is to become unhirable (through scandal or something like that) because then you would absolutely have to make it in business on your own.

When you live a high agency life, you have to screw it up in strategic ways to push you towards success. I actually chose to have children when I felt like I was making too much money and it was making my life a little too easy. (It wasn't the only factor, but it was a conscious factor).

And it worked - I have way less time, way more important things, and my software projects have become much more hyper focused and I goto market and test things much earlier, I simply dont have the luxury to sit around and think like I used to.

bippihippi1

9 months ago

"just try harder" isn't a strategy or good advice.

davisoneee

9 months ago

I don't think the parent's advice is anything to do with "just try harder"...I think he's saying that we try to create habits for things we don't really care about...just stuff we think we should do for productivity or health or whatever.

You don't need to 'try harder'; you need to question your motivation for the habit in the first place. Either a thought will click that clarifies why a habit is actually important, or you'll realise you are pressuring yourself to take on a habit that doesn't really matter to you (when you strip away the bullshit)

edit: and if the importance finally clicks for you, you'll generally just start working on the habit. I struggled with weight for years, and then eventually motivation/understanding clicked and I lost 6stone/40kg/90lb in around 18 months (and have lost a little more since, and kept it off for years).

noemit

9 months ago

I'm not a dude, but yep you get it.

"Just try harder" is not the follow up to "You don't want it bad enough."

Sometimes you just have to accept that you don't want it. And that at some point the time will come when you will want it bad enough, like it did for you.

watwut

9 months ago

> Most of you live high agency lives and are making decisions every day that are creating your life exactly how you have decided to make it.

Most of us dont. I certainly have very little choice over my day to day life.

hashtag-til

9 months ago

You could copy/paste this paragraph and create the shortest book on self-motivation ever created.

Jokes apart, what you wrote is really true and made really think about it.

doix

9 months ago

Most motivation/self-help books are reiterating the same things in different ways.

And it's probably okay, because each wording/phrasing can make the message "click" for different people. Same thing with the timing. Reading something when you're 18 and when you're 30 can be totally different.

taneq

9 months ago

I think Shia LeBouf has this beat with “do itttt!”

zigman1

9 months ago

Yeah, I was a recreational amateur beer drinker, to the point where it was almost my social identity. Would lie if I'd say i never tried to tone down

After I was diagnosed with gluten intolerance, I stopped drinking it overnight without any problem. Very interesting, but it just comes down that the consequence overweight the immediate gain. Hangovers were never a big enough reason for me to stop drinking, but the overall negative consequences of being glutened overweighted that

FranklinMaillot

9 months ago

A distinction that is rarely mentioned when talking about habit forming is the one between building a new habit, like exercising every day, and breaking a bad habit, like quitting junk food. The latter is much harder in my experience but the article hardly acknowledges it.

The former implies building up the willpower to exercise and once it's done, you don't have to think about it for the rest of the day. Quitting a bad habit, on the other hand, is a constant struggle to resist the urge a thousand times per day. When grocery shopping, when out for dinner, when bombarded with ads for ultra processed food... The slightest patch of hardship in your day can make you trip up.

I find the identity-focused strategy can help. Other strategies that somewhat work for me:

- I condition myself to associate the bad habit with the worst things I can think of. Anytime the temptation to eat junk food creeps up, I picture the fat building up in my arteries, I convince myself that the processed food industry is evil, etc.

- I remind myself that the road to success will not be straightforward and I should focus on the general trend instead of the day to day success and failures. Having some kind of habit tracker can help with that.

xtiansimon

9 months ago

I’ve had some success compromising with myself to trade a related good for a related bad. The bad thing you’re trying to quit needs to have some relation to the good thing, so they both come to mind—even if only tenuously.

pugio

9 months ago

I'm just doing a reread of Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg (one of the OG researchers on the topic). It's really good, and I'm already thinking of dozens of ways to apply this to myself and my kids. (He presents his framework as a model for human behavior, not just what we normally think of as habits.)

I think the key with any kind of self-help advice or book is that you have to study it, not just read it. I plan to be working with this book for at least the next six months. I read too many other "inspirational" books that didn't have a lasting impact; the first read is just research to decide whether it's worth devoting time to. Then the real work begins.

locuscoeruleus

9 months ago

I made flash cards when I read atomic habits as an exercise as I wanted to put some of the ideas from Andy Matuschak to the test. I remember and have internalized more from this book than any other self help book I have read. I can barely remember the titles of the other books I've read. For some reason, I never read a self help book like this again despite how successful it was.

treetalker

9 months ago

Seconded. I picked up a copy a few years ago when Costco was selling it. It’s pretty good and seems based on fundamentals and actual research.

justgaurav

9 months ago

I have finally been able to form a habit that I wanted for more than a few decades and the book which helped me finally get it was "Awaken the Giant Within" by Anthony Robbins. This was my third or so reading of the book and this time it clicked! It's a bit dense book which seems to have aged well (and you may have to look past some of marketing for his other events).

"Tiny Habits" by BJ Fogg is another one which I find very useful. Just the basic idea of having tiny/baby steps to take is a powerful one.

"Loop Habit Tracker" app is a great app to keep track of your habits especially the ones where you want to record yes/no responses. It's free app available on android (I am still looking for something similar for iPhone for my wife!).

konto

9 months ago

There is basically copy paste iphone app of “Loop habit tracker”: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1471303896

I’ve spent so much time trying to find Loop replacement and somehow stumbled upon this one. You can even use exports from Loop with some script I found on reddit.

It works ok, but I would love official Loop app for ios.

Full_Clark

9 months ago

Streaks is similar on iOS, but unfortunately not free.

justgaurav

9 months ago

Thanks for the suggestion. One time payment is not a problem for such apps (though not a big fan of subscriptions). Will try it out.

konto

9 months ago

Can Loop data export be used in Streaks?

dgs_sgd

9 months ago

if you don't mind sharing, what was the habit?

justgaurav

9 months ago

Getting up early in the morning! It's not a big deal for those who can get up easily, but I struggle to get up even at 8 AM and then have to rush things. I have also tried "The 5 AM Club" by Robin Sharma and excellent "The Miracle Morning" by Hal Elrod but to no avail. Currently, on a 57 day streak! Please don't ask what time I get up as it's still late from the point of view of morning people :)

polotics

9 months ago

if I may suggest something: instead of setting an alarm to ring for when you have to get up, set an alarm to get you to turn off all screens, quieten down, and get ready for sleep asap, ten hours before when you have to get up.

slowcooked12_

9 months ago

"Error 1034: The host (alexy.tech) resolved to an IP address that the owner of the website does not have access to." is what I'm seeing after clicking that link, it seems to work fine for others in the comments?

abound

9 months ago

My go-to for habit formation/breaking stuff is "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, highly recommend. It's one of those books I find useful to re-read every few years.

DontchaKnowit

9 months ago

This is the only self help book that ever actually helped me.

Also there was one about habit forming that focused heavily on the power of compounding returns in terms of habits. Cant remember the name, if anyone can help me out, but that one was great too

halfcat

9 months ago

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy?

calmbonsai

9 months ago

Preach! "Atomic Habits" is the only self-help book that I can recommend for everyone regardless of their particular life circumstances.

grisha322

9 months ago

Wanted to buy an audio book, but some reviews there suggest that printed version is better. Will audio book work?

calmbonsai

9 months ago

I highly recommend at least the e-book for reviewing the material and exercises.

Each chapter itself also has embedded review points and notes.

It could "work" in audiobook form, but I think doing the exercises would be more challenging.

zephyreon

9 months ago

I’ll echo this, I found Atomic Habits to be one of the only self help books whose strategies I actually use on a daily basis. Required a lot of work but I really improved myself after first reading this book.

treetalker

9 months ago

Although I don’t agree with everything the author says (particularly his unrelated political views) I use Scott Adams’s “systems beat goals” idea (from “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”) almost every day.

scrollbar

9 months ago

> Instead of relying solely on penalties for engaging in a bad habit, introduce a positive action right after to replace it.

This seems counterintuitive as I would expect this to reinforce the bad habit. No citation or explanation given. Any ideas?

Full_Clark

9 months ago

I understood it as "do the bad habit, regret it, do a new good habit right afterwards." The aim is to rob the bad habit of whatever reward is attached to it and mentally transfer the reward to the good habit instead.

n_ary

9 months ago

How about a third mindset, where after a bad habit, I do a good habit and feel that my bad is compensated by good one?

It will continue to encourage subconsciously that bad habits are o.k. if I do something else to compensate it.

For a simple example, I eat a lot of sugar and then do a 10minute exercise. Then feel good about it that my sugar eating is fine, as I will exercise afterwards anyways. But the exercise is separated from any rewards or motivation and will likely often get skipped when my willpower is low(time when bad habits set their claws on mind).

Kirth

9 months ago

You could do that, but then you're being wilfully dishonest with yourself. At which point you'll find that you're not getting any closer to your goals (assuming those who switch out eating sugar for doing exercise want to lose weight). And if you're being (subconsciously) dishonest and self sabotaging, then the level of mind/abstraction this guide targets is not relevant

globular-toast

9 months ago

I think this puts too much emphasis on making habits and not enough on breaking them.

First of all we have to remember that everyone has habits. Unless you wake up every day as if you were just born with no idea what to do yet, then you have habits. Quite likely you'll do something like wash, change your clothes, imbibe fluids etc. In fact, your entire day will likely consist almost entirely of habits.

So when we say "make habits" what we really mean is replacing some habits with other habits. If you want to start running you'll need to make time for that. Some other habit will have to give. It's a zero-sum game. If the habit that gives is "mindless scrolling of social media" then that's generally considered a good thing, but if the habit that gives is cleaning your house or sleep then it's probably not.

It's easy to replace a habit like cleaning your house with a habit like running because cleaning your house sucks. It's less easy to replace mindless scrolling, though. Making the habit is not the difficult thing here, breaking the habit is.

So what's difficult about breaking habits? Well, if we know something is bad for us, it should be easy to stop doing it. If, for some reason, you had a habit of banging your head on a wall and it hurt and was unpleasant, you'd just stop doing it. But we know this isn't the case for a lot of bad habits. Things that you can't stop doing despite knowing they are harmful to you are called addictions.

Any talk about habits without even mentioning addiction is not going to get anywhere. The article seems to be like a "can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude where you try to make the "good things" just as addictive as the bad things. I don't think this will work. I think you need to identify and attack addictions first.

tgaj

9 months ago

Huh, for some reason I'm one of these people who wake up every day with no plan. I am not sure if that's because of ADHD or CPTSD but I start every day with empty head and a bit of anxiety. It takes me at least 15 minutes to remind myself that I have to go to work.

hooverd

9 months ago

Hmm...

>? You've requested a page on a website that is part of the Cloudflare network. The host (alexy.tech) resolved to an IP address that the owner of the website does not have access to.

joshdavham

9 months ago

I'm getting the same thing. Might be a country restriction thing? I'm in Canada, for example.

user

9 months ago

[deleted]

dextrous

9 months ago

“List six habits you wish to adopt, assign them to different times of the day, and aim to consistently perform at least four.”

SIX? Um, how about we start with, like, one?

That aside, a concise article with good advice IMO, but I would add “find a partner and be accountable”, especially for eliminating addictive / tempting bad habits or replacing them with good ones.

qrian

9 months ago

Looks like the article is saying goal of 4 out of 6 is better than just setting 1 goal because missing 1 out of 1 really demotivates you.

fifilura

9 months ago

I have a 2+ year long run streak ( https://www.runeveryday.com/ ) .Before that not doing a lot of exercise.

The first 3-4 weeks are a bit heavy, but after that your mind switches over from "Should I run today?" to "When should I run today?". And from that point it is mostly downhill really.

antonvs

9 months ago

The article is filled with claims with absolutely no references or even vague descriptions of what they’re based on.

user

9 months ago

[deleted]

nullandvoid

9 months ago

Just a heads up I had to go on VPN with a US IP for this to load, strangely a resential UK one didn't

mmarian

9 months ago

On a related note - what can be a good habit for coming up with a successful bootstrapped business?

user

9 months ago

[deleted]