Patrik Edblad's Blog, page 10

How to Have a Peaceful Mind

If you’re like most people, you like to think of your mind as objective and rational. But as the ancient Stoics argued, and as modern psychology has confirmed, that’s not the case.

We’re all vulnerable to cognitive biases and logical fallacies; thinking errors in the way we perceive and reason about information from the world around us.

All of us filter each experience through our subjective lens that is tainted by our unique disposition, background, and emotions.

The Stoics taught that we can improve our perception of life — to polish our lens, so to speak.

By doing that, we can reduce irrational thinking, cut off negative emotions, and approach our lives with equanimity.

Sounds pretty good, don’t you think? Let’s have a look at the Stoic’s best techniques for creating a peaceful mind.

1. Focus on What Is in Your Control

“We should always be asking ourselves: ‘Is this something that is, or is not, in my control?‘”

— Epictetus

This is the most important practice in all of stoicism. If you take away only one thing from this article, let it be this:

Always identify, and care exclusively about, what is inside your control.

What you’ll find when you start doing this is that very few things are within your control. In fact, the Stoics would argue, the only things in your control are your own thoughts and actions.

Everything else — the past, most of the natural world, the thoughts and actions of other people, and even most things about ourselves — are ultimately outside your control.

This insight is crucial because, according to Epictetus, “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”

So, get into the habit of separating what is within and without of your control, and then act accordingly:

If it’s inside your control — take action! Spend the time, energy, and focus necessary to create the change you want.
If it’s outside control — let it go. Repeat the mantra “I don’t care” to yourself until you’ve developed a healthy indifference to the situation.

At all times, strive to focus only on what is in your power. That will make you calmer, happier, and more effective.

2. Choose Empowering Thoughts

“If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it. And it is in your power to wipe out this judgment now.”

— Marcus Aurelius

Imagine that you’re about to give a presentation to a big group of people. As you fiddle with your notes, you can feel your heart pound, your hands getting sweaty, and your mouth drying up.

In this situation, most people will try to calm down. But that’s actually not very helpful. A much better approach is to perceive the stress symptoms as excitement.

If you tell yourself to calm down, you’re nervous. But if you tell yourself you’re excited, you’re ready for action. It’s a small mental shift but it can make a huge difference.

Research shows that people who tell themselves “I am excited!” before giving a speech way outperform people who try to calm themselves down1.

What we can learn from that is something the Stoics figured out thousands of years ago: Your emotions aren’t determined by your situation, but by how you choose to perceive your situation.

And that’s a very powerful insight because it puts you in control of your state of mind. At any moment, you have the option to dispute and replace unhelpful thoughts with more empowering ones.

So, whenever you find a negative feeling stirring in your mind, find a positive way to reframe the situation, and your emotional response will follow suit.

3. Welcome Everything That Happens

“Let us meet with bravery whatever may befall us. Let us never feel a shudder at the thought of being wounded or of being made a prisoner, or of poverty or persecution.”

— Seneca

The Stoics taught that we shouldn’t wish for things to happen the way we want. Instead, we should wish for things to happen exactly the way they happen. This attitude is called “amor fati”, which means “love of fate”2.

To love fate is to make the best out of everything that happens no matter how difficult it is. It’s about courageously meeting life’s challenges head-on and continually getting stronger.

Marcus Aurelius wrote that: “a blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it”. In the same fashion, we should use obstacles, setbacks, and hardships as fuel to realize our full potential.

Life will inevitably throw you into difficult situations. That’s outside of your control. But, as we’ve covered, you can always control your reaction to these situations. And poorly chosen reactions will make life very difficult.

As Seneca puts it: “Fate leads the willing, and drags along the reluctant.” So, when life presents you with a challenge, don’t avoid it or complain about it. Instead, embrace it wholeheartedly, and use it as an opportunity to practice stoicism.

That will make you much stronger and life much smoother.

4. Put Your Life in Perspective

“Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it. Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it.”

— Marcus Aurelius

In my work as a writer, I often find that my day-to-day problems get blown way out of proportion. As I sit down at my computer, isolated from the rest of the world, even the tiniest difficulty can appear overwhelming.

A slight drop in book sales, a broken Internet connection or a negative comment from a reader all seem like a big deal. But, of course, they’re not. In the grand scheme of things, these issues are tiny.

Luckily, there’s a quick cure for this irrational inflating of problems, and it’s as simple as quickly contemplating the scale of your life:

Reflect on where you are, then slowly move outward, visualizing the street outside, and the city. Keep expanding further and further to your country, then the world, and finally the entire cosmos.

Carl Sagan’s famous talk about The Pale Blue Dot3 can serve as a great aid in this exercise.

Then, return to the difficulties in your life. From this new vantage point, you’ll most likely find that what was weighing you down wasn’t as heavy after all.

Zoom out to a cosmic perspective, and you’ll find peace and humility.

How to Have a Peaceful Mind, In Summary

Focus on what is in your control. If it’s inside your control, take action! If it’s outside control, let it go.
Choose empowering responses. Find a positive way to reframe the situation, and your emotional response will follow suit.
Welcome everything that happens. Cultivate a “love of fate” by wishing for things to happen exactly the way they happen.
Put your life in perspective. When your day-to-day problems appear overwhelming, zoom out and look at them from a cosmic perspective.

Footnotes

Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement
Amor Fati
Carl Sagan – Pale Blue Dot

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Deliberate Consequences: How To Make Bad Habits Unappealing

When entrepreneur Thomas Frank decided to start waking up early every morning, he invented a clever strategy to force himself out of bed.

In his work, he uses a social media app called Buffer to prepare tweets and messages to Facebook and LinkedIn ahead of time.

It’s a great tool for scheduling updates that you want people to see later. And, as Frank realized, that also makes it a great tool for scheduling updates that you don’t want people to see later.

Tweeting Himself Out of Bed

Using this insight to his advantage, Frank crafted a tweet in Buffer that he didn’t want his followers to see:

It’s 6:10 and I’m not up because I’m lazy! Reply to this for $5 via Paypal (limit 5), assuming my alarm didn’t malfunction.

Then, he scheduled the tweet to get posted 15 minutes after his desired wake up time. And, just as he had hoped for, this little message immediately became a powerful motivator.

The mild threat of social shame and monetary loss along with the hassle of sending money to five people was just enough to change his behavior overnight.

Since implementing his Buffer wake-up strategy, Frank now gets up early every morning to move the tweet’s schedule date to the next day. Once he has done that, he starts each day with a morning routine that prepares him for the workday ahead.

And that has made him vastly more organized, productive, and happy compared to when he was regularly sleeping in.

The Power of Deliberate Consequences

I love Thomas Frank’s Buffer wake up strategy1, because it’s such a great example of how to intentionally use consequences to your advantage.

In the moment, the immediate benefits of bad habits can be irresistible. But by deliberately adding consequences to them, you can make them a lot less appealing. And when you cross the point where the consequences outweigh the benefits, your behavior can change drastically as a result.

There are a lot of clever services you can use to make this happen. Let’s have a look at some examples:

Beeminder lets you create goals and pledge cash that you’ll lose if you fall enough off track.
Habitica is a role-playing game that helps you achieve your goals by giving you in-game rewards for completing real-life tasks.
HabitStop helps you break bad habits with the threat of paying a fine or getting shamed by your friends.
Lazy Jar is a fitness app that tracks your physical activity and penalizes you economically if you don’t achieve your weekly goals.
SPAR! lets you and your friends run challenges where each of you put money on the line that gets sent to the winner.
WayBetter is a collection of games (DietBet, StepBet, and RunBet) that helps you create better habits by betting on yourself and winning money if you stick to your goals.
Write or Die is a word processor that starts deleting your text if you go too long without sticking to your writing habit.

Oh, and if you’re serious about creating immediate consequences, you might want to get a Pavlok bracelet. This sinister little device lets you give yourself electric shocks to retrain your brain and avoid bad habits.

Consequences Drive Behavior

Of course, it doesn’t really what product, service, or strategy you use. The important thing is that it provides a strong enough consequence. Because if it does, it can change your behavior quicker than you ever thought possible.

Footnotes

How Buffer Forces Me To Wake Up At 5:55 AM Every Day

The Pavlok bracelet link is an affiliate link. So, if you make a purchase, I earn a commission. Thank you for supporting my work!

The post Deliberate Consequences: How To Make Bad Habits Unappealing appeared first on Patrik Edblad.

Social Pressure: How to Use Conformity to Break Bad Habits

In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments to investigate the power of social pressure1. At the start of each experiment, a participant entered a room with a group of strangers. The subject didn’t know it, but these people were actors pretending to play other participants.

Asch began by giving the group a “perceptual” task. First, he showed them a card with a single line on it and a second card with a series of lines. Then, he asked each person to point out the line on the second card that was the same length as the line on the first card. It seemed easy enough:Initially, everything went as expected. For the first couple of trials, the entire group agreed on the same line. But after a few rounds, the actors would deliberately selected what was obviously an incorrect answer. The bewildered subject then had to decide whether to trust their own judgment or conform to the group.

The Power of Social Pressure

Asch ran this experiment several times in many different ways. And what he found was that as he increased the number of actors, the conformity of the subject also increased. One or two other “participants” had little impact. But as the number of actors increased to three, four, and all the way up to eight, the subject became more likely to give the same answer as everyone else.

Overall, 75 percent of participants gave an incorrect answer at least once. In the control group, where there was no pressure to conform to actors, the same error rate was less than 1 percent.

How could that be? Well, one of the core human needs is to belong. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s far more important to be accepted than to be accurate. So, for the most part, we prefer to be wrong in a group than right by ourselves.

As a species, we are ill-equipped to live on our own, so the human mind has evolved to get along with others. Because of that, we experience tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group. And, as a result, we tend to conform to those around us.

It’s a natural thing to do, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. But there can be severe downsides to this tendency. If you’re not mindful of it, your intentions can get consistently overpowered by the prevailing group norms.

Pick Your Influences

If something seems like the normal thing to do, you’ll naturally gravitate toward it — regardless of the outcome. So, when you’re trying to break a bad habit, it’s important to apply positive social pressure. Here are some examples:

Find a relevant support group where you live.
Sign up for an online community related to the bad habit you want to quit.
Join a Facebook group with people who are trying to make the same change as you are.

You become the average of the people you spend the most time with. Over time, the way they do things become the way you do things. So, choose your influences wisely.

Footnotes

Effects of Group Pressure Upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments

The post Social Pressure: How to Use Conformity to Break Bad Habits appeared first on Patrik Edblad.

Bright-Line Rules: How to Banish Bad Habits

In 1966, the police arrested a man by the name of Ernesto Miranda in Phoenix, Arizona. They suspected Miranda of kidnapping and raping an 18-year-old woman 10 days earlier. And after two hours of interrogation by police officers, Miranda admitted to the rape charge and signed a confession.

But there was a problem. During the interrogation, the police never told Miranda about his right to legal counsel. They didn’t tell him about his right to remain silent and that they would use his statements against him.

When the case went to trial, the court used Miranda’s confession paper as evidence and quickly convicted him. But, since the police hadn’t informed Miranda about his rights, his lawyer objected and claimed that the confession was not fully voluntary.

The Miranda Warning

The Arizona Supreme Court upheld the decision, but the case eventually made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where they overturned Miranda’s conviction because1:

“The person in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed that he has the right to remain silent, and that anything he says will be used against him in court; he must be clearly informed that he has the right to consult with a lawyer and to have the lawyer with him during interrogation, and that, if he is indigent, a lawyer will be appointed to represent him.”

With that, The Supreme Court had created a so-called bright-line rule2; a clearly defined rule or standard that leaves very little wiggle room. In other words, it’s a rule that establishes a bright line for what is allowed and what is not.

If a police officer doesn’t inform a criminal suspect of their rights, then the defendant’s statements are not admissible in court. And that’s why, ever since the Miranda decision, US police departments are required to inform arrested individuals using the Miranda warning3:

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?”

Bright-Line Rules for Life

So, what does all this have to do with bad habits? Well, it turns out that bright-line rules can be just as useful in everyday life. Take, for instance, the following examples:

I want to eat less candy.
I want to cut down on coffee.
I want to waste less time on social media.

These are all good intentions, but they’re also very vague. Consider, in contrast, the following alternatives:

I never eat candy at work.
I don’t drink coffee after lunch.
I only check social media once a day.

These statements establish bright lines. They make your intentions specific and measurable. And, as I’ve covered in a previous article, what gets measured is what gets improved.

You can also use bright-line rules to phase out bad habits gradually. If you, for example, want to quit cigarettes, you can allow yourself to smoke one cigarette less each week until you’ve kicked the habit.

Obviously, this strategy won’t produce perfect results. You might break your rules now and again. But at least you’ll know when you crossed the line. And that will make it much easier to correct the behavior going forward.

(Oh, and in case you wondered, Ernesto Miranda didn’t escape prison for long. He was sentenced to 20-25 years in prison for a robbery he committed during a separate crime.)

Footnotes

Miranda v. Arizona
Bright-Line Rule
Miranda Warning

Thank you to James Clear for writing about bright-line rules as a strategy for behavior change in Atomic Habits.

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Replacement Habits: How to Turn Bad Habits Into Good Ones

If you examine bad habits closely, you’ll find that they’re almost always caused by two things: stress and boredom. Consider, for instance, the following list of common bad habits:

Biting your nails
Smoking cigarettes
Excessive shopping
Drinking too much
Browsing social media
Eating junk food
Wasting time on your phone

Behaviors like these are coping mechanisms we use to avoid uncomfortable feelings. They provide immediate relief from stress and boredom. And as we turn to them repeatedly, over time, they become bad habits.

So, bad habits aren’t all bad. In the moment, they help address certain needs. And when you stop doing them, you simultaneously stop meeting the need it was addressing.

It’s no wonder breaking bad habits can be so difficult. But it doesn’t have to be. You can learn new and healthy ways of dealing with stress and boredom, and then use them as replacements for your bad habits.

This is best illustrated with an example. Let’s say that you want to stop wasting time online. You’ve tracked the behavior and established that you tend to browse the Internet to unwind in the evening. In this scenario, your habit loop might look like this:

Cue: Get into bed → Routine: Browse the Internet → Reward: A sense of calm

Now, if you tried to simply cut out online browsing from your evenings, you would remove the sense of calm it provided as well. Since that need will go unmet, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to just “stop wasting time online” for very long.

A much more effective and sustainable approach is to use a replacement habit. That is, to find an alternative routine that provides the same reward and then insert it after the same cue. You might, for example, try this habit loop instead:

Cue: Get into bed → Routine: Read a book → Reward: A sense of calm

Obviously, you won’t know if the new habit loop works until you’ve tried it. But if you experiment with different replacement habits (along with the other habit change strategies), you’ll dramatically increase your chances of success. So, let’s have a look at some more replacement behaviors to better cope with stress and boredom:

Walk, run or swim
Do push-ups, pull-ups or squats
Practice meditation, yoga or breathing exercises
Plan, schedule or make a to do-list
Listen to audiobooks, podcasts or music
Slow down, rest or take a nap
Eat a healthy snack

These are just a few examples, of course. There are countless good habits to help better cope with stress or boredom. The key here is to experiment until you find a replacement habit that works and then execute it consistently.

Your bad habits didn’t build up overnight, and they won’t go away overnight either. But if you can find effective replacement habits, dealing with them will be so much easier.

Footnote

Thank you to Leo Babauta for originally writing about stress and boredom as the main drivers of bad habits.

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Urge Surfing: How to Break Bad Habits with Mindfulness

In a previous article, we learned that reducing exposure to cues can be a powerful way to cut off bad habits at the source. And that’s indeed a powerful strategy for handling any kind of external triggers like people, places, and things in your surroundings.

But what if the cue is internal? What if your trigger is a thought, feeling, or impulse that’s taking place inside your mind?

Those kinds of cues arise spontaneously, so you can’t remove them proactively. And to make matters worse, any attempt to suppress them only makes them stronger.

An Intrusive White Bear

If I, for example, ask you not to think about a white bear, you can be sure the bear pops into your mind anyway. And the more you try not to think about it, the more intrusive the bear will become in your mind.

Psychologists call this phenomenon ironic process theory1, and it shows that suppression is not only ineffective but actually counterproductive.

So, if it’s not a good idea to suppress unhelpful thoughts, feelings, and impulses, how should you deal with them? The answer, in short, is that you should do the exact opposite. Instead of trying to stop these triggers, you should welcome them.

Confront the Cues

A study2 by research scientist Sarah Bowen illustrates the power of this approach. She invited a group of participants who wanted to quit smoking and asked them to bring an opened pack of their favorite cigarettes.

As the experiment began, Bowen placed the smokers around a table and gave them some rather torturous instructions. Step by step, the smokers had to look at their cigarette pack, remove the cellophane, open the pack, smell it, pull out a cigarette, hold it, taste it, and take out their lighter and hold it close to the cigarette without lighting it. At each step, Bowen forced the participants to stop and wait for several minutes.

The purpose of the experiment wasn’t to torment the participants but to investigate if mindfulness can help smokers resist cravings. Before the test, half of the smokers had learned a mindfulness technique called…

Urge Surfing

Bowen explained to the participants that urges always pass, whether or not you act on them. So, when they felt a strong craving, they should imagine it as a wave in the ocean. At first it builds up, but then it inevitably crashes and dissolves.

Urge surfing3 is a technique where you picture yourself riding the wave. Instead of resisting or giving in to the craving, you pay close attention to it. What thoughts are going through your mind? What feelings are passing through your body?

When the participants left Bowen’s torture chamber after 90 minutes, she didn’t ask them to change their smoking habits or encourage them to use the technique they’d learned. She did however ask them to report back how much they’d smoked, their daily mood and cravings for the following week.

By the seventh day after the experiment, the participants who had not learned to surf the urge showed no change while the smokers who learned the technique had cut back by an impressive 37%.

Catch the Wave

While you can’t get rid of unwanted internal cues, you can choose your response to them. Urge surfing is a very helpful technique to do that. The more you practice it, the better you’ll get at catching urges as they appear, and the less you’ll get swept away by them.

Surf’s up!

Cue Elimination: How to Break Bad Habits the Easy Way

During the Vietnam War, congressmen Robert Steele and Morgan Murphy made a shocking discovery. While visiting the U.S. Troops, they learned that over 15 percent of soldiers stationed in Vietnam were addicted to heroin.

And follow up research showed that the numbers were even more alarming. It turned out that 35 percent of the soldiers had tried heroin and as many as 20 percent were addicted to it1.

In response to these findings, President Richard Nixon created a special office to work with prevention and rehabilitation of drug addictions as well as researching and tracking the paths of the addicted soldiers when they returned home.

Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge, and what she found completely upended the prevailing beliefs about addiction. At the time, heroin addiction was considered a permanent and irreversible condition. But as the U.S. Troops returned home, roughly nine out of ten heroin-using soldiers kicked their addiction nearly over night2.

The Power of Environment

In Vietnam, the soldiers spent their days in an environment that drove them toward heroin use. They were put under extreme stress, befriended other soldiers who were heroin users, and had easy access to the drug.

When the soldiers later returned home, suddenly they found themselves in an entirely different environment. In these surroundings, there weren’t any triggers promoting heroin use, and as the context changed, so did their behavior.

Compare this scenario with that of a typical drug user. Someone gets addicted at home or with their friends and goes to a clinic to get clean. The clinic is entirely empty of the cues that prompt their addictive behavior, which makes it much easier to quit. But as soon as the person returns home, all their old triggers will reappear and make drug usage much more likely.

It’s no wonder that you usually see relapse numbers that are the exact opposite of those in the Vietnam study. Usually, about 90 percent of heroin users become re-addicted as they return home from rehab3.

Remove the Cues, Change Your Behavior

We tend to think bad habits are the result of poor self-control. Most people believe that you need strong willpower to kick your unwanted behaviors.

But that’s not what the research literature suggests. When scientists analyze people with unusually strong self-control, they aren’t very different from anyone else.

What separates “disciplined” people is their ability to structure their lives in such a way that they don’t need to exert a lot of willpower. It’s not that they’re extraordinarily good at avoiding temptations — it’s that they spend less time in tempting situations4.

If you want to break a bad habit, you don’t have to become a more disciplined person, but you do have to create a more disciplined environment. And the way to do that is to eliminate the cues that initiate the unwanted behavior.

If you watch too much television, cancel your streaming services.
If you waste too much time on your phone, delete the most addictive apps.
If you procrastinate too much, turn off your Internet connection while you work.

Cut off your bad habit at the source, and you’ll break it before it even gets started.

Footnotes

Vietnam Veterans Three Years after Vietnam: How Our Study Changed Our View of Heroin
How Permanent Was Vietnam Drug Addiction?
Lapse and Relapse following Inpatient Treatment of Opiate Dependence
Everyday Temptations: An Experience Sampling Study on How People Control Their Desires

Hat tip to James Clear for sharing the Vietnam drug addiction story in his great book Atomic Habits.

The post Cue Elimination: How to Break Bad Habits the Easy Way appeared first on Patrik Edblad.

Cue Elimination: How to Break Habits the Easy Way

During the Vietnam War, congressmen Robert Steele and Morgan Murphy made a shocking discovery. While visiting the U.S. Troops, they learned that over 15 percent of soldiers stationed in Vietnam were addicted to heroin.

And follow up research showed that the numbers were even more alarming. It turned out that 35 percent of the soldiers had tried heroin and as many as 20 percent were addicted to it1.

In response to these findings, President Richard Nixon created a special office to work with prevention and rehabilitation of drug addictions as well as researching and tracking the paths of the addicted soldiers when they returned home.

Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge, and what she found completely upended the prevailing beliefs about addiction. At the time, heroin addiction was considered a permanent and irreversible condition. But as the U.S. Troops returned home, roughly nine out of ten heroin-using soldiers kicked their addiction nearly over night2.

The Power of Environment

In Vietnam, the soldiers spent their days in an environment that drove them toward heroin use. They were put under extreme stress, befriended other soldiers who were heroin users, and had easy access to the drug.

When the soldiers later returned home, suddenly they found themselves in an entirely different environment. In these surroundings, there weren’t any triggers promoting heroin use, and as the context changed, so did their behavior.

Compare this scenario with that of a typical drug user. Someone gets addicted at home or with their friends and goes to a clinic to get clean. The clinic is entirely empty of the cues that prompt their addictive behavior, which makes it much easier to quit. But as soon as the person returns home, all their old triggers will reappear and make drug usage much more likely.

It’s no wonder that you usually see relapse numbers that are the exact opposite of those in the Vietnam study. Usually, about 90 percent of heroin users become re-addicted as they return home from rehab3.

Remove the Cues, Change Your Behavior

We tend to think bad habits are the result of poor self-control. Most people believe that you need strong willpower to kick your unwanted behaviors.

But that’s not what the research literature suggests. When scientists analyze people with unusually strong self-control, they aren’t very different from anyone else.

What separates “disciplined” people is their ability to structure their lives in such a way that they don’t need to exert a lot of willpower. It’s not that they’re extraordinarily good at avoiding temptations — it’s that they spend less time in tempting situations4.

If you want to break a bad habit, you don’t have to become a more disciplined person, but you do have to create a more disciplined environment. And the way to do that is to eliminate the cues that initiate the unwanted behavior.

If you watch too much television, cancel your streaming services.
If you waste too much time on your phone, delete the most addictive apps.
If you procrastinate too much, turn off your Internet connection while you work.

Cut off your bad habit at the source, and you’ll break it before it even gets started.

Footnotes

Vietnam Veterans Three Years after Vietnam: How Our Study Changed Our View of Heroin
How Permanent Was Vietnam Drug Addiction?
Lapse and Relapse following Inpatient Treatment of Opiate Dependence
Everyday Temptations: An Experience Sampling Study on How People Control Their Desires

Hat tip to James Clear for sharing the Vietnam drug addiction story in his great book Atomic Habits.

The post Cue Elimination: How to Break Habits the Easy Way appeared first on Patrik Edblad.

Pointing and Calling: How to Track Your Bad Habits

Japan’s railway system is regarded as one of the best in the world. Its extensive network of tracks moves about 12 billion passengers each year with remarkable punctuality. The average delay on the Tokaido Shinkansen line between Tokyo and Osaka in 2018, for instance, was just 0.7 minutes1.

To keep the line operations safe and efficient, train conductors play important roles. And if you ever get onto one of their trains, you’ll notice that they have some peculiar routines. As each operator runs the train, they make a variety of physical gestures and vocal calls.

When the train approaches a signal, the conductor will point at it and say, “Signal is green.” As the train pulls into each station, the operator will point at the speedometer and say the exact speed out loud. When the train pulls out, the operator will point at the timetable and call out the time.

Pointing and Calling

Out on the platform, other staff members perform similar routines. Before each train departs, they point along the edge of the platform and exclaim, “All clear!” Every important detail is identified, pointed at, and called out.

This method, known as “Pointing and calling,” is a safety system designed to minimize mistakes. It might seem silly to visitors, but it works incredibly well.

Research shows that “Pointing and calling” reduces mistakes by almost 85 percent2. In New York City, the MTA subway system adopted a similar “Point and acknowledge” procedure, and “within two years of implementation, incidents of incorrectly berthed subways fell 57 percent.”3

The reason methods like these are so effective is that they raise the awareness of the staff. When the workers have to use not just their eyes, but also their hands, mouth, and ears, they’re much more likely to notice problems before something goes wrong.

My girlfriend Lisa does something very similar. When she’s leaving our home, she walks by the stove, points at the knobs, and says “zero, zero, zero, zero, zero” out loud, ensuring that the plates are all turned off.

Raising Awareness

Many negative outcomes are largely attributable to mindlessness. Maintaining awareness of what we’re doing is one of the most challenging aspects of behavior change. So we can benefit a lot from creating our own “Pointing and calling” system.

Whenever you want to break a bad habit, begin by raising your awareness about it. When does it happen? How often do you do it? Where are you? Who are you with? What triggers it?

A great way to start is to track how many times per day your bad habit takes place. Put a piece of paper and a pen in your pocket. Each time your bad habit happens, mark it down. At the end of the day, count up the tally marks and calculate your total.

This simple exercise will make you much more aware of the behavior. You’ll gather valuable data that you can use to track your progress. And you’ll start generating ideas for how to break it.

Footnotes

Central Japan Railway Company Annual Report 2018
JR Gestures
Why Japan’s Rail Workers Can’t Stop Pointing at Things

Hat tip to James Clear for introducing the idea of pointing and calling your behaviors in his great book Atomic Habits.

The post Pointing and Calling: How to Track Your Bad Habits appeared first on Patrik Edblad.

How to Make 2020 Your Best Year Ever

Do you know the feeling?

You’re excited about the new year. You’ve decided your resolutions. And you can’t wait to start working on them.

But as the new year rolls around, the situation changes. After a few weeks (or maybe just a few days), your initial inspiration runs out. Your good intentions start to wear off. And before you know it, you’ve quit your goals… again.

If you can relate to this scenario, you’re not alone. Research shows that nine out of ten people fail to achieve their New Year’s resolutions.

Accomplishing your goals can be terribly hard. But it doesn’t have to be. With the right strategies in place, it gets much easier — and even a lot of fun!

In this guide, I’ll share all the strategies you need along with straightforward action steps. To make it as easy as possible for you to implement everything we’ll cover, I’ve put together a companion resource:

Click here download your free copy of The 2020 Personal Mastery Workbook.

Then grab your favorite beverage, and let’s make 2020 your best year ever!