Study Prof

The Zenhabits blog has a great post on motivating yourself when you don't want to get started studying or working on that project.

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Get help

Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto, kemosabe. There’s no reason you have to try to change those bad habits all by your lonesome. Here are a couple of good sources of help.

Friends and relatives can be a tremendous encouragement. Send them an email detailing exactly what you are trying to change, how you are going about it, and your target date (more about that later). But choose wisely, young padawan. Pick people who are interested in your success and will be good about following up! I usually ask my mom, dad, brother, and two friends to help me keep on track with my goals and to ask me how I’m doing on a regular basis. Thank them each time they bring it up; they’re doing you a real service!

Stickk.com is a nice little website that will allow you to support charities as you work on your goals. Stickk.com asks you to spell out the exact details of your goal and how you will accomplish it, and then put money down on it. You report on your progress on a regular basis, and if you’ve failed to keep your goal, Stickk will send a percentage of your money to the charity of your choice. At the end of the period you specified, Stickk returns to you any money left in the pot. For example, you could commit to studying two hours every day for the next month and send Stickk $300. Every day Stickk emails you to see if you did your two hours. If you didn’t, Stickk sends $10 to PETA or the NRA or whoever you picked. At the end of the month, Stickk returns any money that’s left. The trick is to pick a charity you REALLY don’t like!

Challenge partners are people who are working on their own goals and are willing to encourage and challenge you in exchange for you doing the same for them. The more people you get involved in this, the better. Schedule weekly meetings where everyone in the group shares their progress for the week. This is the idea behind twelve-step programs, Weight Watchers, etc. It’s been phenomenally successful for many years with those programs. It can work for you too!

Get leverage. Stickk.com is a great example of getting leverage on yourself to make meeting your goals much more doable, but you don’t have to use stickk.com! You could do the same process with your friends, relatives, and challenge partners. Clearly write down your commitment and then put something on the line. It could be money, as with stickk.com, but it doesn’t have to be. I know of two ladies who were trying to lose weight. Their agreement was that if they failed to meet their commitment, they would have to eat a full can of Alpo dog food! You could also blackmail yourself. Write down something really embarrassing about yourself and put it in a closed envelope. Give that to someone you really trust with instructions to open it only if you don’t keep your commitment. However you decide to get leverage on yourself choose something that makes failure unthinkable.

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Reward yourself

Did you just engage in your target habit? Then reward yourself! A little reward is appropriate at this point; something easy. How about a mental “attaboy!” Allow yourself a little self-congratulations and pride in your achievement. Sounds silly, I know, but it’s actually very effective and has quite a bit of psychological research to vouch for it. Check out covert conditioning at wikipedia for more info.

Have you been reliably carrying-out your target habit all week? Time for a bigger reward. Make a list of things you love to do but don’t get to do very often. At the end of a successful week, pick something from the list and enjoy!

Here are some rewards you might want to add to your list…

? Go to the movies

? Read a favorite book

? Eat something you love that’s bad for you

? Call an old friend

? Sleep until noon

? Play your favorite sport

? Rent a really nice car for the day

? Buy something you’ve really been wanting

? Save up gift cards you get for Christmas or your birthday and use one today

? Spend time at addictinggames.com

? Chat with friends

? Waste an hour of your day

Continue…

(Continued from previous post)

Change your environment
Getting rid of temptations makes it much easier to get rid of your bad habits. Changing your environment is a quick and easy way to get closer to your goals. Some concrete examples should help clarify.

Trying to lose weight? Throw away all the chips in the pantry and the ice cream in the fridge. It’s tough to throw away perfectly good food; that’s okay. It will make it much more memorable and strengthen your commitment.

Want to watch less TV? Unplug it and put it in the closet. You can still lug it out on weekends, but it’s just not worth it most of the time. Remember to find a good habit with which to replace your TV time!

If you’re trying to concentrate on studying, rather than talking to friends or messing with your cell phone, turn off your cell phone and put it somewhere you can’t easily reach it. Systematically eliminate everything that distracts you. Have a friend drop you off at a distant coffee shop to study—somewhere that none of your friends go—with instructions to come pick you up in four hours. Take only study materials so you really have absolutely nothing to do and no one to talk to; oh well, might as well study.

How can you change your environment right now to make your habit easier to perform? Make a list and put it into practice!

Practice
Habits arise from doing the same thing over and over again. Just like training a pet, you have to train yourself to perform the desired behavior by practicing it repeatedly. The best way to do that is to put yourself in the situation over and over again and practice performing the good habit. If you can’t do that for whatever reason, then mentally rehearse.

As any top-level athlete can tell you, mental rehearsal works! Watch those Olympic high jumpers before they make their run. You can see them staring intently, sometimes even bobbing their head in time to their imagined footsteps as they picture themselves making their approach and jump. You might also take a look at the research behind cognitive behavior therapy which makes heavy use of mental rehearsal to bring about behavior change.

Set yourself a goal of practicing (or mentally rehearsing) your desired behavior several times a day for the next month. In your mental rehearsal, make sure to include the initial situations in which you will perform the behavior, the behavior itself, and your mental feeling of satisfaction and pleasure for having accomplished it.

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(continued from Change a Bad Habit: Step Two)

Start NOW

Don’t wait until tomorrow or next week to get started. Start right this minute! Do something—anything!—to put your new commitment into effect. When I decide something like this I’ll write it on my wrist and keep renewing the ink until I’ve performed the habit five times.

Keep records

Whatever behavior you pay attention to will tend to increase, so keeping a simple record of each performance of your target habit is a really easy way to increase its occurrence. Don’t worry about getting fancy with a calendar, spreadsheet, etc. Go for simple. Every day I get out a 3×5 card and label it with the date. Each time I perform the behavior, I make a check mark on the card. Then I total them up at the end of the day. Try to beat your record. You’ll be amazed at the results!

OPTIONAL: Keep track of your daily totals and add them up by week or month. Gives you a real sense of accomplishment, and makes it more likely that you’ll continue building the habit.

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Great post over at lifehack.org.

[Continued from Change a Bad Habit: Step One]

Recent brain research done at MIT indicates that habits never really die. They just play dead, like a monster in a bad horror flick, waiting for the right cue to come back to life. So before offing that bad habit, make sure you have a good habit waiting to take its place. That way, when the bad habit rises from the grave it’ll see your shiny new habit in its seat, shrug its slimy shoulders, and shamble back to the pit from whence it came.

Recall in the last post we thought about what precedes or leads to your bad habit. We’re identifying the cue(s) that trigger our bad habit. That’s an important step, because we’ll use that same cue to trigger our new, improved habit. Let’s say that you tend to gorge on chips and salsa whenever you watch TV. What cues trigger the chips-n-salsa zombie’s rise from the dead? Lying on the couch with the TV on perhaps? If that’s correct, then we know where to put our replacement habit. How about making sure you have a big bowl of rabbit food with you when you plop down in front of the idiot box? Or how about popping a stick of gum first? Both of those will help.

We’ll need to set a reminder at first, to make sure we’ve got the replacement behavior on deck when the evil monster habit shows up. We could put a post-it note on the remote; “Get Veggies.” Now every time we sit down and get ready to watch TV we’ll be reminded to begin the good habit.

IMPORTANT: The good habit should make performing the bad habit difficult or impossible. You can’t very well eat chips-n-salsa while chewing gum. It makes the gum crunchy, and the chips taste fruity.

Howzabout another example. Perhaps you tend to sit at your computer and type for too long, and you need to get more exercise. Cues? Sitting in front of the computer. Solution? It’s got several steps, but it integrates several good habits, so it’s worth it.

First, set your screensaver to display, “drink a glass of water,” after two minutes of inactivity Now, as soon as you get ready to work on the computer, you see the screensaver. You must down an entire glass of water before you can begin typing. (Be tough on yourself; think seventh grade soccer coach.) That’s good habit numero uno; drink more water. In thirty minutes to an hour–depending on how big a glass you used and your bladder size–you’re going to have to get up and use the facilities.

Now for good habit number two; after using the little lady’s room, do a set of twenty push-ups (or sit ups, or walk up and down a flight of stairs, or the exercise of your choice). You may have to post a reminder on the back of the bathroom door until you remember to do it regularly (no pun intended). Then you return to that computer … aaaand, there’s the screen saver reminding you to drink a glass of water. Chug another glass o’ water. Lather, rinse, repeat.

You’ve seen enough horror movies to know that monster won’t die the first time you kill it. That bad habit will keep coming back, so you’ll have to keep practicing the replacement habit until the bad habit stays dead … research shows that it usually takes around thirty days for habits to be extinguished, give or take a week. So every time the chips-n-salsa zombie shuffles into the room, eat another carrot stick and pat yourself on the back. Sigh…. Only 29 days to go.

Next time we’ll talk about the three things that make behavior change a cinch.

Continue…

My friend Carly was having an 11 PM rant session about how she never sleeps well. She took a long pull off her vente double-shot espresso and whined, “Why can’t I just go to sleep like normal people?” Granted, there are lots of potential causes for insomnia, but downing enough caffeine before bed to make your fillings hum is probably fairly high on the list. When I very gently and circumspectly suggested that caffeine before bed has been known … in some cases … to (more…)

Men’s natures are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart. Confucius (551 BC – 479 BC)

I used to be much heavier and less healthy than I am now. That state was the result of chronic over-eating and physical inactivity. About seven years ago, I decided to make a change, so I developed better eating and exercise habits. I developed the habits of stopping eating when I felt full, of eating small meals every few hours, of eating less unhealthy foods and more healthy food. I developed the habits of getting up and moving around every hour or so, of exercising four days a week, and of tracking my progress. Slowly, over the course of a year, I lost 35 pounds. Now I’m as healthy and strong as I’ve ever been, and it’s completely the result of a change in habits.

What works for our physical health will also work for our academic health. In fact, most of our stresses—in school as in life—come from a lack of good habits. In the next weeks, I’ll look at how to break bad habits, how to build good academic habits, and exactly what habits to build.

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