Having a routine though, even a very flexible routine, has been very effective. Things become automatic. Settling into an effective routing often involves not worrying too much about discipline, though. It's easier for people to get to the gym everyday if the goal is "get to the gym, and do something" than it is if the goal is "get to the gym and do a rigorous 2 hour workout." Small steps and environmental changes, as well as not stressing over what's optimal, have been the most effective approaches in my experience.
I've had months where I go to the gym and then something happens and its easy to not go. There's nothing on this earth stopping me from picking that back up, other than myself... which reminds me, I need to start going again. Crazy thing is you _know_ you'll feel better but getting up and going can be a drag sometimes.
Yeah, that’s because most of your agency is hooked up to the monkey brain. You’re not really fighting anything, your apparent incentives just don’t drive you to go.
- https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0...
Here’s a link to the Tiny Habits book:
- https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07LC9KDP5/
And related Tiny Habits website:
I'm trying to decide whether to purchase "Tiny Habits" and the blurb on the seller's page is nice, but somewhat generic.
- https://www.google.com/search?q=%22tiny+Habits%22+vs+%22atom...
Which produces comparisons like this:
- https://www.tobysinclair.com/post/tiny-habits-vs-atomic-habi...
TLDR: Atomic Habits focus more on systems design. Tiny Habits is focused more on designs a habit.
Free ebook linked to on page above above provides more information:
https://67d4e809-d682-43a5-b820-b52f25a5db57.usrfiles.com/ug...
The format follows what I’ve seen called as the English Essay style (as opposed to European style) – you start with a personal story, yours or a character’s. You use that story as a narrative device to make your point. The character works as a sort of template of the reader. For books, using multiple stories – up to 2 per chapter - works best. Weaving the character stories in and out throughout the book creates a sense of continuity and makes it easier for people to follow.
Whenever you want to make a point, you show the point or at least the situation with a character story. Real stories work best. You also lay out the point explicitly. The reader should never be made to guess. Setting it up as a punchline works, but use this sparingly because, again, readers don’t like to guess.
The whole book should have one, at most two, key points you want to make. It should be reducible to a pithy tweet. The rest of the book is there to make the point sink in for the reader.
The difference between making a point and conveying a point is crucial here.
I have yet to write a bestseller so I am likely missing some ingredients. This format applied to blogs/emails has worked great. People love it.
https://www.stevefenton.co.uk/blog/2022/09/the-difference-be...
If you’re aware of other notable examples, would be interested in links to them.
As for my guess, it’s at a best seller format, it’s 100s of tiny chapters, which makes the readers feel like they’re rapidly discovering new information.
While I am unable to recall the name of the book, recall a book on chaining hacking exploits that walks through a a fictional story while weaving in technical details.
Another example would be this book:
IIRC Atomic was still making things too “big,” i.e. the habit should be so small it fetches accusations of insanity by bystanders and your celebration, accordingly, can be ridiculously small too (just physically smiling induces a tiny reward, which is all that’s necessary for a sufficiently small preceding habit).
Also he allows the option of “time and place” to trigger habits which IMO is very bad advice. 100% of new habits should be placed directly behind an already-established habit, and specifically one that’s already resilient to variations in time-and-place. Takes a while to think of these habits (because they’re truly automatic) but you already have at least a dozen and identifying them is half the trick.
A habit tracker helps (I drop plastic jewels in a coffee mug with a satisfying clunk).
You can sign-up up to a free 30-day e-mail newsletter course from the author if not ready to buy the book.
One of them which sticks with me is about fighting addictions and habits - every time you win this internal fight (go do something unwanted, don't light up that cigarette or drink alcohol) you get a bit stronger and addiction gets slightly weaker. Same for habits and defeating procrastination.
The hardest part is the first step, when opposite side (in your own persona) is strongest and it feels its too high a mountain to overcome. With addictions you never chip it away to 0 - that's the unfortunate cold hard truth, but you can chip it away into something you can manage continuously. Good habits are often self-fueling after crossing some threshold, ie exercise and eating healthy.
I do make an exception with all of that when all the pub science guys shit on religion though. Can't seem to get enough of that even though I'm out of my angsty atheist teenager phase by 20 years
These folks need to feel popular and build a brand and its really hard to just stick with one thing, as it limits your audience, so you grow in to other venues.
Telling people what they want to hear in a nice package that makes them feel smart is a business as old as time. Oprah built a whole empire off of it. The internet has just widened the reach.
Have you spent any time wondering how those people knew this was coming years ago, but you didn't see it?
They just didn't care to spend more brainpower on the issue than they already had. Most people have better things to do than be the most well-informed voter or investigate the history of the people they see on YouTube.
After taking my ADHD medication, building and maintaining these habits ranges from easy to effortless.
Without it or after it runs out... IF I remember... it ranges from seemingly impossible to very hard.
On the them I am motivated but cannot prioritize tasks to save my life
Feeling like you’ve got control when it doesn’t actually produce a different or better outcome is a seductive delusion, no?
Executive dysfunction is a symptom of more than just ADHD
Psychiatry and psychology, in my experience, are both just a game of pin the tail on the condition -- simple, vague heuristics are used to diagnose conditions based on patient interviews.
I have ADHD, and during the diagnostic process, I never had a sleep study, any bloodwork drawn, scans, etc.. Could it have been something else? Not like I will ever known.
What's the old say that doctors commonly tote? "When you look hear hoof beats, don't look for zebras when there are horses in the room?"
It's so damaging because sometimes one needs to be looking for "zebras."
I have been medicated for a year now, and the common advice of "just do 5 minutes and nothing more" to get myself started now actually works. I still hate doing chores (I am procrastinating rn because my flat needs some cleaning), but if I start, you better believe they will get done and I might do a little more just because now I have dopamine to tell me "this is good stuff you're doing, carry on", whereas before I was fighting every second the urge to just leave the thing halfway and go do something else. Life was hard.
I'm on lisdexamfetamine FWIW.
EDIT: the dopaminergic system is exactly how you form habits. When taking amphetamines, you have more dopamine, thus habits are much easier to create. Both the good and the bad ones. You just have to fight against the lifelong learned helplessness that effort is not worth it. That takes a long while to rewire. Ok, time to close HN and clean my flat.
As some comments above mentioned everyone is affected differently. I have been on adderall for well over a decade, and constantly for the past 5-6 years in which I formed habits and routines that never stuck when I would go off and on due to hating the 'blunting' effect I felt it had on my creativity and personality.
So a couple months ago when I couldn't find them in stock anywhere I figured no big deal, I could keep doing what I was doing and maybe I was using the meds as a crutch anyhow. I was hoping I would get my old 'fun' personally back to go along with my new older-wiser-mature-self that had good work habits and routines. It's been such a complete disaster I had to ask my doctor to lower my dose because that was the only strength one pharmacy had left out of over 20 stores I called, and had them search other branches. Now I have to choose which days to take them because I have to take twice as many to get the workable dose. It sucks.
You have much more experience than me, but I believe with stimulants too low a dose is much better than too high a dose. During titration I tried the dosage immediately after and I was a machine, both in productive output and in emotional bluntness. I could've reached my full potential but honestly, it's not worth it.
Now I feel with good diet, good sleep and a little exercise I'm operating at 70% of my capacity, while the rest of my life I was running at 20%. This is good enough for me. When I'm off the meds I can see only negatives: hungry, horny, restless, bored, anxious. Perhaps a little more lighthearted, to be honest.
My problem taking a smaller dose is that it puts me to sleep. I sometimes split my original dose to use as a sleep aid because I get great sleep on it. Falling asleep on adderall was not fun to tell my doc or the pharmacist when I first started on adderall. I was recommended for more screening. It still makes me tired for 10-15mins as the first dose kicks in.
Lighthearted is a good word to describe the differences I feel as well. Though I am quite hyperactive, maybe they are related--bouncy and lighthearted off and matching the calm of the Vulcans on them.
I have a note titled "ADHD med cleaning spree" where nearly immediately after taking meds I start to realize how messy my surroundings are and just start cleaning because quite magically, cleaning is now just cleaning.
Try pinning your habit forming to 10m after taking meds or whenever you feel it activate.
I vet what you mean though... sometimes it's like a firehouse of focus you can't direct.
But more importantly, you'll need to work on your assessment of "invariably". If you think all efforts are predestined to fail, they will. Get help if you can't do it alone.
I get so tired of popular wisdom that assumes that all people experience life in essentially the same way, and that the 'recipe for success' should be universal. "Discipline" is a nonsense word to the folks with executive dysfunction, you might as well tell us that the key to personal success is learning how to fly. Everyone else is doing it, so it must be easy - you just need to try harder!
I have always thought that there are some "normal motivators" that are not commonly known.
for example, there are tasks I get done when procrastinating a higher-importance task.
(like getting cleaning done while procrastinating a term paper)
This isn't easy, but sometimes it works for me. One of the tricks is making sure it really is productive. For example, I work from home so picking up around the house or doing dishes can actually be very productive/helpful for me, but I've definitely found myself bogged down in mindless tasks that didn't really move the needle.
The medication does wonders for my physical symptoms of hyperactivity, which is justification enough to take them in my opinion.
However, something I have started to learn about stimulant medications are what I consider its true dangers. It's not necessarily dangerous for one's health, at least at therapeutic dosages, but rather it's extremely easy to become overly reliant on these medications, and if/when you stop taking them, lose access to them, etc. then life tends to sucker punch you back into reality -- a life where you can no longer maintain everything you were able to do, but yet the expectations are still as if you are firing on all cylinders.
I feel like I am living out the plot of Flowers for Algernon, and honestly, it's somewhat bothersome to me.
Are you talking about issues accessing medication? If so, I completely agree. The system is rather difficult and unforgiving to navigate -- that alone makes deters many from even attempting to get treatment, and I do not blame them one bit.
I take IR instead of XR, and I am about to be in a similar boat as you.
How bad is the process of going cold-turkey? How long does the Hell that I am in for last? I have serious concerns for keeping my current job without access to medication, but part of me wants to know if I am just being overly anxious and hyperbolic, or if I am actually am screwed.
I think it varies wildly from person to person. When I've quit stimulants in the past it was really just a week or two before I was close to what felt like my baseline. The hardest part for me was the daytime sleepiness.
Then slight depression at confronting how much harder things were to do a few more days.
Back to normal in 7-10 days.
Like when there are shortages? lol
I agree, but it can help to make sure you focus on establishing habits while medicated.
I found that I can retain at least some of the habits after being off medication, though there is extra difficulty.
They fail to adress documented disorders, like ADHD. And also the fact that a huge chunk of the population had its dopaminergic system completely hijacked by artificial stimulants, ranging from food, drugs, social media, etc.
They're so superficial that their answer would be: "you can circumvent your dopaminergic mess with discipline."
And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small...
The idea of doing something every day in a row for 3 months causes me pain and revulsion. If I think about it a bit longer, I I know I would get mad at myself for missing a day, and would get really mad at myself for forgetting for 2 years, and I'm already jumping the gun at trying to avoid setting myself up for failure. I floss my teeth when they feel dirty, anything else seems unsustainable. But maybe that's why I don't have motivation or discipline.
What purpose do you think getting mad at yourself serves?
A very common mistake is to procrastinate doing something until you feel motivated. Our minds often doesn't work that way.
But if you start the task without any motivation, or expectation it will get done, you'll often find yourself motivated and making progress within minutes.
In reality, once you put some effort in, that can make you motivated.
Having said that...I'm not diagnosed as ADHD but I definitely feel I exhibit executive dysfunction symptoms, and one of my siblings was diagnosed, so I'm feeling confident I'm ADHD adjacent at least...and just trying to implement Getting Things Done helped me immensely. Not only does it help with having a less stressful day (no longer do I have "what am I missing? what am I forgetting? Ahhh, angst!" feelings), it also helps me to just stay on task and/or when I switch tasks, know that I have the confidence to come back to wherever I was.
My question, though, is how does a good habit expand into a great habit, without motivation? For your tooth example, once you start flossing you might as well floss all your teeth. The upfront cost of getting started with the floss is the worst part of it, but once you're there it's easy. This isn't true for all habits though. For many it's easy to just bail out fast. If I started doing 5 push-ups a day will I eventually do 100 and then 1000? Or would I settle somewhere on a mediocre range because it's easy to stop? Is there some sort of recursion or positive feedback loop that kicks in that rescues me from mediocrity if all I have is discipline and not motivation?
The key was to make it a habit I do every day, like brushing my teeth. If I've had a bad day and miss doing my "workout routine" (such that it is, I'm no Arnold), it feels weird to miss one and I look forward to doing it the next day. So in that way once you've made it to a certain point it's self-fulfilling.
You can swap the terms as well, there are exercises or tasks that you start enjoying with time, repetition and experience
The difficulty here is primarily in initiating the task consistently imo. Once you are already at the point of flossing one tooth there likely isn’t much mental resistance to flossing the others. I think it’s better to do things that lower the resistance to starting the task in the first place as opposed to just making the task smaller.
If "floss one tooth" is still too much, go smaller: "take my floss out of the drawer and put it on the counter."
As far as knowing to initiate the habit, place it directly behind an already established habit. Flossing is easy since you probably brush your teeth regularly.
Simple as that.
Of course this is just the regime that helped me build 4 or 5 brand new daily habits in under two years, all of which I had tried and failed several times before. YMMV.
"The enemy's gate is /down/!" (downward) [1]
That is, orientate yourself such that where you want to go is as easy/automatic as falling.
[1] Ender's Game, and the Ender'r Shadow sequence. Though, I wish the catchphrase had used "downward" rather than "down", as the latter is confusingly similar to "has fallen / is breached".
And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. Let your good habits progressively and slowly consume more time, similar to what bad habits do.
For all intents and purposes you should just assume both discipline and motivation are completely mythical and you should construct a system of high-leverage habits to obviate the need for them. You don’t rise to the level of your talents/motivation/discipline, you fall to the level of your habits.