Skip to main content

How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits



 Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking.

The author employs an interesting strategy to help smokers eliminate their cravings. He systematically reframes each cue associated with smoking and gives it a new meaning.

He says things like: 

  • You think you are quitting something, but you’re not quitting anything because cigarettes do nothing for you.
  • You think smoking is something you need to do to be social, but it’s not. You can be social without smoking at all.
  • You think smoking is about relieving stress, but it’s not. Smoking does not relieve your nerves, it destroys them.

By the time you get to the end of the book, smoking seems like the most ridiculous thing in the world to do. And if you no longer expect smoking to bring you any benefits, you have no reason to smoke. It is an inversion of the 2nd Law of Behavior Change: make it unattractive. 

WHERE CRAVINGS COME FROM

  • Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper, underlying motive.
  • Some of our underlying motives include:
  • Conserve energy
  • Obtain food and water
  • Find love and reproduce
  • Connect and bond with others
  • Win social acceptance and approval
  • Reduce uncertainty Achieve status and prestige
A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive.
Look at nearly any product that is habit-forming and you’ll see that it does not create a new motivation, but rather latches onto the underlying motives of human nature.
  • Find love and reproduce = using Tinder 
  • Connect and bond with others = browsing Facebook 
  • Win social acceptance and approval = posting on Instagram 
  • Reduce uncertainty = searching on Google 
  • Achieve status and prestige = playing video games 
Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires. New versions of old vices. The underlying motives behind human behavior remain the same. The specific habits we perform differ based on the period of history.

Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it. 

Habits are all about associations. These associations determine whether we predict a habit to be worth repeating or not.

Every time you perceive a cue, your brain runs a simulation and makes a prediction about what to do in the next moment.

Cue: You notice that the stove is hot.
Prediction: If I touch it I’ll get burned, so I should avoid touching it.
Cue: You see that the traffic light turned green.
Prediction: If I step on the gas, I’ll make it safely through the intersection and get closer to my destination, so I should step on the gas.  

You see a cue, categorize it based on past experience, and determine the appropriate response.

 Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. All day long, you are making your best guess of how to act given what you’ve just seen and what has worked for you in the past. You are endlessly predicting what will happen in the next moment.
The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them. 

These predictions lead to feelings, which is how we typically describe a craving—a feeling, a desire, an urge. Feelings and emotions transform the cues we perceive and the predictions we make into a signal that we can apply. They help explain what we are currently sensing. For instance, whether or not you realize it, you are noticing how warm or cold you feel right now. If the temperature drops by one degree, you probably won’t do anything. If the temperature drops ten degrees, however, you’ll feel cold and put on another layer of clothing. Feeling cold was the signal that prompted you to act. You have been sensing the cues the entire time, but it is only when you predict that you would be better off in a different state that you take action. 

A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state. This gap between your current state and your desired state provides a reason to act. 

Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future.Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge-eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different. 

Our feelings and emotions tell us whether to hold steady in our current state or to make a change.
Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings, and we can use this insight to our advantage rather than to our detriment.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 Loss is painful, guilt can be devastating. Worse than losing one's dream is the knowledge that the loss was self-inflicted. Problems are solutions that have outlived their usefulness. Problems are pattern that were learned in emotional circumstances during one period of life and that now have taken an existence of their own. Many times, outdated solutions replay themselves in a variety of life situations, leaving people mindlessly repeating their mistakes in work, love, and trading. There can be no free will for people who are locked into patterns developed for past challenges. Successful traders are therapists both learn to do what comes unnaturally. The resolution to problems can be found in what people are doing when those problems are not occurring. The problem with many traders is not that they have problems, but that they are focused on their problems. It is this problem focus that prevents them from appreciating what they are doing right, that blinds them to solutions alrea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Three Choices

When we are unhappy and our Life Conditions do not match our Blueprint, we have three choices as to how we’re going to handle the challenge: First Choice: Blame The first choice people have is to assign blame, and there are three things you can blame: a) Event . There’s a story, something that happened, behind why things are the way they are. However accurate the story may be, blaming an event is convenient because it helps preserve an identity designed to shield us from our true fears: fear of failure and fear of not being loved or accepted. b) Others . “I’m in this situation because this person …” Similarly, the story may be true, but it’s convenient and gives you comfort in the moment. “There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s this other person. There’s nothing I need to change.”  c) Yourself . Most people think that this is being responsible, but blaming yourself will not make it better. There’s a difference between responsibility and beating yourself up—between “Here’s a pattern th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Wealth File #15 Rich people have their money work hard for them. Poor people work hard for their money

Working hard is important, but working hard alone will never make you rich. Rich people can spend their days playing and relaxing because they work smart. They understand and use leverage. They employ other people to work for them and their money to work for them. You do have to work hard for money. For rich people, however, this is a temporary situation. For poor people, it's permanent.. Rich people understand that "you" have to work hard until your "money" works hard enough to take your place they understand  the more your money works, the less you will have to work. To win the money game, the goal is to earn enough passive income to pay for your desired lifestyle. In short, you become financially free when your passive income exceeds your expenses. Rich people think long-term. They balance their spending on enjoyment today with investing for freedom tomorrow. Poor people think short-term. They run their lives based on immediate gratifications. To in...
Post a Comment
Read more