Self-discipline and habits
Trent Hamm has an interesting post exploring the interplay between self-discipline and habits. I encountered these issues in the context of weight loss, and it struck me then how interrelated they are.
Habit allows one to put discipline in “rest” mode: habit carries you through tasks and activities without requiring “willpower”, that mysterious energy we employ when we attempt to act counter to our habits. In this sense, discipline is what we use to extinguish old habits and establish new habits, and that does require some alertness: if we drop our guard, the old habits are able to reassert their control, at least until new habits are well established.
I also found it useful to think about habits as responses learned by unconscious agents in the mind. Breaking the habit and establishing a new habit means retraining these unconscious agents, and that retraining can involve a variety of techniques. Common to all is the need for awareness of what you’re doing and what you’re feeling—as soon as you drift into automatic responses, the old habits kick in. That’s what they’re for: to provide direction for when we don’t want to be bothered thinking about it. Example: tying your shoes—indeed, getting dressed in general.
It’s obviously hard to extinguish well-established habits—that’s why they’re so invaluable—but it can be done. I just learned recently of the “extinction burst” just as the habit dies, and in some cases I think that action causes people to abandon their efforts to change the habit. It helps to know that one is experiencing the dying throes of the habit, not its resurgence.
The benefit of considering habits as activities of unconscious agents is that it allows you to address the agents (your unconscious) directly, and that does seem to help.
In general, the more you can arrange things to avoid the exercise of “willpower,” the better. For example, if you tend to crave cheese and/or butter popcorn in the evening, and you’re trying to lose weight, it greatly helps if you don’t have any cheese or popcorn in the house. That makes things much easier than have a refrigerator well stocked with cheese and full container of popcorn (with lots of butter in the fridge) and then sitting around all evening thinking about them, seeing the cheese when you open the fridge, and resisting as best you can the temptation to eat them. Just keep them out of the house, and less willpower is needed.
In other words, the amount willpower required to not purchase the item is MUCH less than the amount required not to the eat the item once it’s on hand. And if even purchasing it is too much resist, it generally requires less willpower simply to avoid that section of the store than to resist buying the stuff once you’re standing in front of it. And so on.
The nice thing is that once new habits are established, they become self-reinforcing: they are what you do when you’re not really thinking about it.
