Or we could just throw up our hands at the epidemic of teen girl suicide and say "oh they shouldn't do that"
What a joke the APA has become
I tried writing my own blog post, and I don't think I got any positive feedback.
There might be a bit of nuance that a summary doesnt catch.
Anyway, I'd pay 100k to read Power of Habit, you basically can do whatever you want when you learn how the brain works.
A large chunk of your daily behaviors are governed by habits. Habits are made up of cues followed by some sort of routine that you do which results in some sort of reward. If you want to change a habit then you need to focus on the cues that set off the routine. When a cue occurs, alter the routine and give yourself an alternate reward.
I used to have a drinking problem, say 1-2 bottles of wine a night every night. I cook almost every night in my house, so starting to cook dinner was a major cue for me to start drinking. Specifically, whenever I would put on my apron around 6pm I would get a strong urge to pour a glass of wine. I had a lot of difficulty resisting that urge even when I genuinely wanted to quit. It felt eerily automatic and involuntary. I didn't start having success until I focused on that cue and replaced the routine that followed it. For me, I decided I would put on my apron and immediately make myself a plate of fancy cheese and some crackers. I still had a routine and a reward after my cue, but the new routine was significantly less destructive.
So you're right with your exercise example that simply placing your gym bag by the door isn't going to be successful. You need some cue to go exercise, then exercise, then immediately reward yourself with some chocolate or your favorite candy or whatever.
I won't go so far as to say we can cure everyone's addiction with this one neat trick, but I have found it to be a useful framework on my life.
(kidding)
Via iOS' automations feature the app allows you to configure a per-app waiting period during which you can decide you don't actually want to open whatever app you've tried to open.
Very grateful for this tool.
I've also customised the automations so I have added friction to opening, for example, Slack after 6PM or on weekends. However it opens immediately during working hours.
In my experience phisical separation is the best for when you don't want to use your phone (for example, when going to bed or if you want to focus on discussions when having lunch) but that is not always possible - then apps like one sec or other tricks like setting your phone to gray scale, moving icons around, focus mode, screen time... All serve to nudge your brain into thinking if you really want to waste time.
For making better use of your time... Eh. Everyone struggles differently of course, but I'm unlikely to go out and run, or do focus work, when I would waste 30 minutes scrolling through Instagram. But if you make sure to have better alternatives (reading a curated feed, listening to a audiobook/podcast) then they can nudge you that way. Finding a better alternative is entirely up to you. I do find that writing down things you want to do, no matter how silly it sounds ("of course I want to read more books!") helps, especially as you can always reference to that list later when you're bored.
You can use the website instead of the app, which lets you block them using extensions.
Part of this is not having something else to do in place of doing the old habit. Part of this is not getting a reward for doing the something else. Maybe make a list of things you (used to) enjoy and keep it somewhere visible, revisit it frequently, especially when you are about to hit a cue that sends you into an activity you want to avoid.
If I had kids I would 100% send them to a school that banned smartphones with dumb phones for texting and calling the only thing allowed between classes.
So if a class gets cancelled, online is the only way to find out about it.
Before doing a thing - particularly things I can easily lose myself in, like doom scrolling - I take a few moments and ask myself what I want out of that time, which naturally dovetails into how long I want to spend at it. Maybe it's ten minutes. Maybe it's three hours. Then I set a timer for that long, and when the timer goes off, (notionally) I halt, walk away from the thing for another few moments and re-evaluate. Maybe I go back. Maybe I don't. Maybe I go back after doing something else for a few minutes (say, loading a dishwasher).
One of the key bits it to not judge myself or my wants. If I want to binge Factorio for a day... like, alright. I'll do that, even if I know later-me won't like having done that. No judgment, no beating myself up about it.
Another key bit seems to be not not doing the thing. That's a hard fight. AFAICT it's one part awareness, one part wedging in some mental/emotional space to make choices inside the habit loop (stimulus -> response -> reward), and one part good old fashioned habit-loop interruption (AFAIK if you literally add breaths-worth of time to each step in the habit loop, it drastically diminishes the oomph of what's happening neurologically).
The magic seems to happen in two forms:
1. "Taking control of my time." - Even if I'm making the same choices, now, my experience is that I am making them, instead of "them" making me.
2. "Stopping before you're tired means you don't start the next thing exhausted". Previously I'd binge until I beyond exhausted my enjoyment of the thing. Now I have a way to do a thing while I'm enjoying it, and stop once I no longer am.
PS - I've also started wondering if this is whatever the hell people actually meant when they talked about "time management" when I was kid, but no-one actually ever explained.
We'll call it the Zapchat or the Zapper and we guarantee it'll be SHOCKING how effective it is at keep us from looking at our screens every 5 min
You can combine it with a service like Beeminder to both shock you and part you with your money to make sure all the motivation centers are hit. :)
I was told to replace bad habits with other things. It didn't have to be some "good habit", but there had to be something else to fill the void left by the thing I wasn't doing. I had a list (I still have it somewhere) of healthy things that I enjoy, that I can do instead of falling into a porn binge (its been almost 5 years since I last willingly looked at porn) or a YouTube hole (that's been less than a week, small steps).
Having a list of other things to do, things I enjoy, made stopping unhealthy habits a lot easier. I didn't strap myself to "being more productive", rather I just replaced bad habits that produce dopamine hits with enjoyable things that produce dopamine hits.
Ding ding. I'm precisely in the process of replacing my brainless reddit scrolling with old retro games on an emulator.
The point is precisely that I'm not about to replace an absolutely brainless activity with reading literature or learning category theory. I'm replacing the brainless way I use to wind down with a more constructive/"structured" way to wind down.
Many, though not all, of the people here and in the YC ecosystem etc., work or have had worked or otherwise made their careers (and fortunes),
helping concerns whose business model is entirely, openly, founded on maximizing user growth and user engagement. So as to sell personal data in one direction and ads in the other.
This has been something like at trillion-dollar endeavor, and a lot of those dollars have gone into the science (formal and "field") of ensuring those two things.
I.e, to MANUFACTURE ADDICTION.
It's not a bug. It's not just a feature. It's THE feature.
What I tell my own kids, who are not allowed on TikTok, or any Meta property, at all, full stop,
is that against the evolved state of these properties, on our twinkly devices, we have no more defense against addiction than we do against the physiologically analogous fat and sugar.
It's not about discipline. It's not about habit formation. It's not about best practices in schools. It's not about "downtime" and tepid screen time controls.
The problem is more fundamental, and much, much, much uglier, and much, much, much intractable, than most discourse about it admits.
The only solution today, literally, is not to play the game.
Footnote: AI is going to make things 1000x worse, which I would not have believed possible a few years ago.
I don't understand - we have quite a lot of defense against those things.
...no to the willpower part, or choice, though this might quickly become tangled in the semantics of those words.
Part of what I believe (and assert) is that understanding, belief, intention—all the self-conscious cognition and knowledge we have around e.g. fat and sugar, has on the whole moderate (or no) influence on our actual behavior,
because it is opposed by and undermined by the other part of our brain, the part that evolved in conditions within which sugar and far were extremely scarce.
The dilemma the developed world has today is that cheap calories are cheap and we live in a condition of abundance, with bodies (brains) evolved for a condition of scarcity.
It's not that any one person might not make a reasoned decision, or successfully inculcate habits that remove them from situations where their own instinctual selves short circuit those decisions...
...it's that on the whole, most people are not very successful at this. Modulo the conditions of upbringing and culture etc... which are relatively modest influences...
It's hyperbolic to say we have no defense, I concede... it might be better to say, it takes some happy mixture of conditions including habit-formation and cultural context, to aid the cognitive self in overcoming the animal self.
The main point though was, we have recapitulated a comparable dilemma with respect to methodically crafting social media (etc etc) to engage the animal self. For fun and profit. And the hidden and deferred costs of this are legion.
Make them. I'm serious.
I used to be addicted to a bunch of mobile games. What cured me was the decision to simply automate all that stuff. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those habit forming daily tasks? Automated. I was free. That's when I realized how deep in that rabbit hole I was.
Programming changes lives.
It's gotten to the point I find the presence of timers unacceptable in almost any context. Almost all other forms of rate limiting too.
https://www.who.int/standards/classifications/frequently-ask...
Adults are vulnerable to this, there's no reason to believe children aren't. It's often difficult to spot the signs, designers disguise them very well behind pretty visuals and indirection. Their livelihoods depend on it.
I'll post here what I know from my own experience just in case it helps anyone:
If you see a timer anywhere, it's a red flag. A common form of timer are the rate limiting resources found in many games, especially freemium ones. There'll be some kind of resource that gets used up as you play and it refreshes periodically. For example, there's games where playing costs "energy" which you get for free every day. These are periodic rewards which create a schedule for players, forming habits. There might be a literal timer counting down to the refresh right there on the user interface. You can pay to reset the timer, of course.
Timers include even seemingly innocent stuff like "this building will take X hours to complete". The mere existence of explicit timers betrays the fact there's no actual game in there and they're just simulating the work as an abstract task that takes some arbitrary amount time to complete. Extremely common in mobile games which don't have good controls or much room for complexity. The strategy is to rate limit player progression and let players pay to skip ahead. In multiplayer games, this implies the game is actually a spending competition in disguise: whoever spends the most money on the game progresses faster, gets ahead and wins.
Timers also take the form of "daily tasks". You get rewarded if you login every day and maintain some baseline activity. This is straight up designed to form habits, the whole point is to get players logging in 7 days a week. You can even find this in non-game apps. Duolingo for example has this obnoxious design. Streaks, daily tasks, monthly badges, you name it.
In more traditional games, the timers are more indirect. Progression in pretty much every RPG is a function of time. You can calculate values such as experience per hour, levels and skills per hour. There's a timer hidden in there. More benign since it's not literally designed to hijack people's brains for profit but it's still addictive. "Grinding" just means doing meaningless tasks over and over until some reward is obtained. There are people out there who spend truly pathological amounts of time doing this.
Gambling is also prevalent in video games. Lootboxes, gachas, collectibles, card games. Anything involving the chance to gain something. Plenty of documentation on the addictiveness of gambling and its effects on the brain.
I mean no ill-intent, but this feels like an incredibly naive thing to say. The inference "I read X book, therefore I am immune to / protected from addiction".
I didn't think it needed spelling out that they were saying "I read this book, I understood its message and was able to incorporate it into my life with notable results, so I am better at quitting or avoiding addictive behavior"
> If that [Power of Habit book] was taught as a class in high school, it might eliminate long-term drug addiction.
No.
The book "Power of Habit", while incredibly valuable and informative, will not have this effect. If you believe otherwise, you have no understanding of the root causes of long-term addiction.
> If that was taught as a class in high school, it might eliminate long-term drug addiction
This level of lack of empathy or insight into other people’s lives causes me borderline physical pain.
Regarding drugs I would be surprised if addicts are simply not evaluating their situation properly in order to "think their way out".
What the hell does that have that is so extraordinary that you gain magical powers to break any and all habits? x) Genuinely curious.
Most people can easily quit most things, that’s why addiction is treated as a pathological condition.
I suspect its more like “I read Power of Habit, so I am inclined to credit Power of Habit with my normal human ability to quit things” combined with “I exhibit the common human trait of mistaking my normal human ability to quit things with superiority to people who fall into addiction”.
I must be a weird man because the first thing I do on any new phone/tablet is block notifs from everything including the kitchen sink.
If it's a notif, it's not worth my time as far as I'm concerned. If you want or need my attention, fucking call me instead; no guarantees I'll pick up, of course. You don't have my phone number? That's your answer.
How will reading a book help anyone with physiological dependency to quit a drug? Some drugs like alcohol can't be quit by going cold turkey. Unless you want to end up like that cold turkey (i.e. dead).
Let alone other factors like being environment, outlook on life, etc.
I appreciate the sentiment — reducing long-term drug addictions would be wonderful —- but saying “might” is only a starting point for such an analysis of how to achieve it.
Books provide one mechanism to bring a conscious appreciation of techniques for habit formation and dissolution. Putting them into practice requires sustained effort by individuals and groups.
> Telling people to 'use less' and 'monitor' are [easily overwhelmed by] addictive platforms.
Yes! It is foolish to rely on individual willpower in the context of systems that were designed to be (or evolved to be) addictive.
We need some combination of:
- a broad cultural mindset shift whereby people recognize the current reality and realistic ways to improve it
- political will for policy changes that reduce the addictive dark patterns used by our online ecosystem so it can be a “fair fight” at least
- technology that serves humans core values, instead of preying on their weakness
- business models to adapt; they always do
Business models will adapt, even if some particular businesses do not.
So many so-called ‘business’ people tend to use their wealth and influence to sway politics and policy so they don’t have to do the hard work of adapting their business to the scenarios of the future.
It is selfishly preferable to make your own future, indeed. This is good work if you can get it. In other words, this is rational and expected behavior. So, public policy is wise to be a step ahead of business entanglements and entrenchment.
It makes one question the line between functioning in a market versus defining that market. Many business people conflate the two ideas, as evidenced by their actions and their mindsets.
Some make the claim that fiduciary responsibility demands such action by corporations. Perhaps in the short run.
But I would argue that fiduciary responsibility writ large demands a longer-term eye towards not “poisoning the well”. By this I mean: if social media platforms act in ways that lead to public outrage and backlash, they would fail their shareholders very miserably. Defining the time horizon is key.
Additionally, it is possible for organizations to clarify their missions; namely, who they are serving. It does not have to be shareholders at the exclusion of everything else. Broader and more balanced charters can give more leeway for a chief executive to act in ways that play better with the ecosystem as a whole.
Have I got this right, more or less? Maybe. But there might be unintended consequences. In particular, “playing nice with the ecosystem” might be hard to distinguish from “anti-competitive behavior”. It sounds tricky, but we should give it a lot of thought and try out the best ideas.
How many times are people subjecting themselves to social media they don't really want to view because they habitually unlock their phone and check their notifications?
These kind of things are fighting fire with a squirt gun. Telling people to 'use less' and 'monitor' are easy to beat with addictive platforms.