Mind Hacks 2 - New Year's Resolutions and Forming Habits

‘Tis the season to make resolutions. It seems like a fun time to write about habits and how they can work for us and against us. In the last article, we discussed how we improve the progress in our lives by creating mental models and prime ourselves for quick decisions. In a sense, recognition-primed decision-making is a form of habit. Some of us rely on habits more than others. The power of our brains is one of our limited resources. Habits are mental shortcuts we form so our brains can act with less effort. This instant decision-making ability is a key aspect of good strategy.

We form all types of habits, good and bad. We may think we do some things habitually because we find them pleasurable. We are wrong. We may start some habits because they are initially pleasurable, but we use habits because they are routines, requiring no thought or decision-making. A routine that is good for us but painful—like my morning workouts—is easier than disrupting our routines. Our habits only use the areas at the back of the brain that guide automatic behavior, not more demanding pathways. I always say that I work out first thing in the morning because I won’t do it if I am entirely awake.

The sad truth is that most of our progress in life is dictated by the habits we form, not how brilliant our decision-making skills are. Success is built from small incremental steps. The more of those steps we take habitually, the more progress we will make and the better our lives will become.

Forming Alternative Habits

Forming better strategic habits starts as a conscious choice. Methods must not only be learned but they must be practiced until they become habits. This is not to say that these habits cannot become pleasurable, but the pleasure they offer is not a “high” of meeting a challenge as much as it is a certain peace of mind. We can see ourselves getting necessary and practical things done without the difficulty of deciding what to do.

Let us start with a simple example. Listening is usually the best place to start because it fuels the Four Steps for improving our positions. Listening is difficult for habitual pleasure seekers because it initially seems boring. The only way it can become interesting is if we sincerely take an interest in other people, their lives, and their needs. Each person is a challenge. As Carl Rogers, one of the twentieth century’s great psychotherapists wrote,

The great majority of us cannot listen…because listening is too dangerous. The first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it.

This is why courage is one of the five aspects of command. Why is listening dangerous? Because we almost certainly will learn something, something that can upset our plans, change our viewpoint, and give up some cherished part of ourselves. Going back to Rogers:

This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face.

To improve our listening, Rogers suggested doing the following:

Stop the discussion for a moment, and institute this rule: ‘Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the idea and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction.’

His approach, however, is really designed for resolving disagreements, and it is difficult because it requires cooperation from the other person. For most strategic purposes, we listen to learn and, more specifically, to spot opportunities, not to win or resolve an argument.

We can improve our listening by habitually stopping ourselves and repeating what we think we heard and asking the other person to confirm our interpretation. This works for a number of reasons. It rewards the person that we are talking to because it demonstrates that we are really listening, not just thinking about what we want to say next. Actually, we are making the job of thinking about what we are going to say easier because all we are going to do is rephrase what we just heard. Finally, it works because the other person will reward us by telling us when we are right.

Small Specifc Steps to Good Habits

The above example works because it illustrates the five steps toward forming good habits:

1. A specific habit, not a vague goal: “improving our listening” is a goal, not a habit. Checking what we think we heard is a habit. Goals provide us a direction but not a task. Habits are tasks that we can train our brains to perform automatically.

2. An easy task, not a big one: We think we want to tackle big challenges. The song says, “to dream the impossible dream.” When it comes to habits—as opposed to missions—the song is wrong. We need the satisfaction of small successes. Big missions can take a lifetime to accomplish. Habits can last a lifetime too but only as repeated accomplishments.

3. We can practice it often: We don’t have monthly habits, we have daily habits. we can have monthly obligations, monthly reports, and monthly routines, but we cannot perform them unconsciously. I take out the household garbage weekly and, though the task is somewhat unconscious, I can forget on any given week.

4. It is totally in our control: We can practice it without the cooperation of others. In the words of Sun Tzu, we can only trust ourselves and the self-interest of others. Can two people form a habit together? Yes, but not without providing each other occasional excuses for avoiding it.

5. It can win a reward: If the one we are listening to agrees with our restatement about what we heard, we have won something. That something is small, but it can be repeated many times during every conversation.

Conclusions

In this context, I should also refer you to the article on the excuses we give ourselves. Some people put their mental effort into creating excuses instead of being lazy and just creating habits.

This article on habits originally started with research on the addictive cycles and why people today, with all our abundance, are in more pain than ever. We will discuss those topics, which includes my favorite brain chemical, dopamine, in the next article.