We as humans are creatures of habit that are averse to change. But how do you ensure the creation of positive habits?
Our minds tend to lean towards the comfortable and familiar. That is why trying new things can seem scary to some people and to those who are actively seeking it will at least have a certain excitement because of the unknown.
This is the main cause of laziness and why a person usually tends to watch television instead of exercising. Humans are creatures of habit and if there is a set routine of familiarity, the activity will seem more natural and less tedious. To routinely engage in healthy and productive activities, the best way to do this is to establish positive habits instead of the unwanted “bad habits”.
The Benefit of Happiness and Positive Habits
In the book "The Happiness Advantage” from psychologist Shawn Achor, he says that the technique he calls the 20-second rule can be used to build good habits and break bad habits by making it faster and easier to perform a good habit and vice versa for longer. and harder to implement a bad habit. Basically, tricking our minds into preferring desirable activities over unwanted ones.
Shawn explains that willpower alone cannot motivate yourself to participate in activities that are considered a nuisance. According to Shawn, any action requires the so-called “activation energyand in general, productive tasks such as work require more of this kind of activation energy compared to leisure tasks such as indiscriminately surfing the internet. Willpower is a limited resource for the above activation energy and thus it can run out; therefore it is unreliable for creating (good) habits in the long-term. This is why we become lazy: we no longer have willpower.
How to proceed without willpower?
If we lack the willpower, we will tend to take the path of least resistance; pleasure > work. For the same reasons someone surfs the Internet more than they work, laziness can be used to our advantage to trick the brain into doing more "difficult" tasks.
Shawn describes in his book that he wanted to practice guitar, but encountered his own mental resistance. His guitar is stored in the cupboard; to participate in the activity of playing the guitar, he should go to the closet and take it out of his case.
This sequence of events is certainly not difficult, but compared to just staying on the couch and turning on the television, it is much more inconvenient. So this is the case of activation energy difference, sitting on the couch watching TV with the remote is much easier than walking up to the cabinet and taking the guitar out of the case.
So with this knowledge, Shawn changed several factors to lower the activation energy of practicing the guitar and increase the activation energy of watching television.
Reduce the activation energy required
Writer Shawn Achor took his guitar out of the closet, out of the case, and set it next to the couch in front of the TV. He then removed the batteries from the remote and kept them in another room. The next time Shawn came back from work, his habit kicked in and he wanted to lie on the couch and watch TV. But instead, he found the process of getting up and grabbing the batteries for the remote in another room more difficult than picking up the guitar lying right next to him.
Here the activation energy of picking up the guitar is much lower than getting the batteries. He used his own laziness to his advantage and at the same time broke his habit and started a new one.
After learning about this mentioned method from Shawn, it is very easy to replicate such changes to make working on your positive habits more appealing than wasting your free time uselessly.
For example, in the context of focus and productivity in your work, you can place the smartphone in another room to focus on your work. If the phone is needed for work, rearrange the apps on the home screen and put all the distracting leisure apps like YouTube and social media apps in hidden folders. If you need focus and are working on an offline project, turn off your internet connection, for example.
The key is to make sure that working on your desired positive habit is easier than falling back into the bad, easy habits.
Sources ao JamesClear (AND), Jobs4All (AND), ModelThinkers (AND), PQCWorks (EN), TheDecisionLab (AND)
