Will power and how to handle bad habits (not addictions)

[Intoxicun7]

What do you guys do to help get out of bad habits and/or stick to better new ones?

I'm what everyone calls 'type A'. I'm somewhat compulsive and neurotic. I have some behaviors I wish to quit. None of them are physical addictions. I just do not know what techniques or mechanisms there are to assist me when I am resisting my own will. For example, what do you do to prevent yourself from stealing if you have a bad habit of thievery? Breathing, counting, electroshock every time I think about it? If I could find a good way to handle situations like this, I would apply it to everything from picking at chapped lips to stealing to being a sarcastic bitch.

Also, there is the flip-side where I want to do something positive, like begin a new daily routine that will improve my life. But I just don't have the motivation or something. I wish I knew of a way to make myself cooperate. It's like an internal war. I need some sort of incentive or punishment, I believe, to modify my own behavior. Because simply wanting to make a change doesn't seem to be enough.

Thoughts?

 

[Dave]

Look into behavioural psychology. Within that realm, there are many techniques to help you change how you behave - both removing bad habits and starting (and cementing) good ones - as well as identify and avoid common pitfalls.

A quick primer to start: make very small changes, but make them regularly, make them incremental, and don't allow any slip ups. For example, let's say that you want to start exercising daily. Rather than dive head first into a complex and difficult routine that takes 90+ minutes a day, start by doing 5 minutes of some vigorous exercise - say, jumping jacks - every single day for a week. There is absolutely no way that you can't do that at some point in your day, right? Right. So do that for a week, and reward yourself by, I don't know, watching a movie that you really like. Then, next week, do 10 minutes, or 5 mintutes of one exercise, and then 5 of another. After a week non-stop, reward yourself again. And so on.

Every increment is small, and easily achievable. Each timescale is short, and at the end of which there is a reward. Make sure that the reward does not go against what you're trying to do; if you're trying to quit smoking, for example, don't reward yourself with an extra cigarette! You can track your progress, and see how far you've come. All of these things will help you slowly to get into a good habit.

The converse is easily doable too for removing bad habits. Taking cigarettes as an example, start your first week by simply counting how many times you smoke each day, and keep a tally. Reward yourself at the end of the week. Then, the next week, take the 'usual' number of cigarettes in the day - somewhere between the average and maximum amounts - but smoke them as close as you can to evenly throughout the day, and smoke them all. Do that for a week, and then reward yourself. Each week, remove one cigarette from your daily tally, but still space them out evenly. Reward yourself weekly. And so on.

 

[Intoxicun7]

Thanks for the helpful reply, Dave.

I can and will try something like what you are talking about, but my biggest problem is that I seem to have some sort of mental block against any modification. Maybe I'm lazy or spoiled, but I can't trick myself. I try to say, "If I clean my room for thirty minutes, I'll let myself watch an episode of a TV show." But I end up just not cleaning and watching the TV show anyway. It's like I try to trick my subconscious but it tells me to screw myself and does what it wants.

For some reason, I have a REALLY hard time with establishing new routines, even really easy ones. It's possible that I just resent feeling obligated to do something. It feels like a chore. Even if it's something as simple as taking a pill every day. What a ridiculously easy task. But I just can't/don't stick to it. My parents are the same way, so I'm not sure if it's a psychological trait that could run in families or something.

It seems that as soon as I identify something as a behavior I need to do, I resist doing it. If only I could find a way to WANT to do these things.

 

[Intoxicun7]

Wanted to elaborate:

It's like I'm SO unmotivated that I can't even talk myself into using any psychological techniques to talk myself into doing things I ought to be doing. I'm too aware. I just feel like, hey, I could be NOT cleaning my room and still watching TV! It's like setting your clocks forward slightly to compensate for being late chronically. I tried that, but then when I would wake up and decide how much time I had to get ready, I couldn't help but add on the amount of minutes I had set the clock forward by. I just can't trick myself.

 

[VanWeyden]

First of all: You can't change who you are. You can learn how to control anger, compulsiveness etc. but changing character traits takes years and is extremely exhausting.
Secondly, it is easier to change habits you aren't at war with.
Thirdly, Dave gave an excellent advise on the technical part

 

[herbavore]

I have a terrible time changing habits (starting new healthy ones or eliminating destructive ones) so i can really relate. I find that choosing just one thing to work on (in my case, exercise) and just brute force forcing myself for a while is the only way. I always feel better afterwards and eventually that knowledge becomes a motivator. Still, at my age, I have to admit that I am never going to be a person that loves to work out so recognizing that it will always be a struggle, but a worthy one, is helpful.

Changing compulsive habits is different. I had a friend that used to compulsively eat sweets where we worked. I noticed that she had stopped and I asked her how she did it. She said that she would actually pick up the plate with the pie on it and look at it and imagine how good it would taste and then she would imagine the whole scenario all the way through: how good it would taste, how long that taste would actually last and then how bad she would feel for giving in to the very brief amount of pleasure and she would just put it down. I've tried that and it does work for me. It's almost as if by going to that last feeling (regret) you can invert the impulse or craving and take the strength out of it.

 

[stardust.hero]

Wow, Dave and Herb, both of your techniques you listed are really good. Exercising is a terrible problem for me and I always get discouraged by how difficult. The advice Dave gave about starting for the first week with a quick 5 minute routine that basically doesn't take any of your time up, I can see how it would work. I would have never seen it that way either. I would have seen it as: pfft what is 5 minutes going to do for me and I feel like that would have been discouraging, but seeing it as a stepping stone a very non invasive one at that I think puts it into perspective that it's worth doing after all. I think that advice can be tweaked for other situations as well.

Herb, your advice about your friend with the sweets and visualizing the entire scenario start to finish in your head. That too can be tweaked to work in so many other situations.

I myself am horrible at just about everything that requires concentration, willpower and persistence. Whether it be studying for school, dieting, working out, getting stuff done. I am like an all around give upper. Those two recommendations are great though .

 

[Dave]

The key, Intox, is to make the changes so small that no matter how demotivated you are, you can still manage to do them. Every single day. I chose 5 minutes of exercise as an example, but maybe just 20 jumping jacks? Something tiny, especially to start. Build as slowly as you need to. That's the technique, right there. Got to get the changes in under the lazy radar. It often helps to do the same thing at the same time every day-- take advantage of our propensity to fall into mindless routines.

Oh, and I'm living proof that this works, by the way. I'm as lazy as they get, and suffer from serious bouts of demotivation. I've also spent most of my life quite depressed, and with a slew of other 'things' going on that would keep me enclosed. Even at my worst, I was able to train myself to exercise regularly. Much less than I do now, but considering what I had to work with, it was pretty amazing.

 

[DexterMeth]

Nootropics, diet and exercise. Piracetam for starters