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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
April 19 - July 11, 2019
They foster the feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food, you feel bad. Watching television makes you feel sluggish, so you watch more television because you don’t have the energy to do anything else. Worrying about your health makes you feel anxious, which causes you to smoke to ease your anxiety, which makes your health even worse and soon you’re feeling more anxious. It’s a downward spiral, a runaway train of bad habits.
“cue-induced wanting”: an external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit. Once you notice ...
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Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely—even if they go unused for quite a while.
It takes too much energy. In the short-run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long-run, we become a product of the environment that we live in. To put it bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.
One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
Rather than make it obvious, you can make it invisible. I’m often surprised by how effective simple changes like these can be. Remove a single cue and the entire habit often fades away.
Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one. You may be able to resist temptation once or twice, but it’s unlikely you can muster the willpower to override your desires every time. Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment.
People with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting situations. It’s easier to avoid temptation than resist it. One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes
Adult herring gulls have a small red dot on their beak, and Tinbergen noticed that newly hatched chicks would peck this
Soon Tinbergen discovered that the bigger the red spot, the faster the chicks pecked. Eventually, he created a beak with three large red dots on it. When he placed it over the nest, the baby birds went crazy with delight. They pecked at the little red patches as if it was the greatest beak they had ever seen.
When I see a round object nearby, I must roll it back into the nest. The bigger the round object, the harder I should try to get it.
Scientists refer to these exaggerated cues as supernormal stimuli. A supernormal stimulus is a heightened version of reality—like a beak with three red dots or an egg the size of a volleyball—and it elicits a stronger response than usual.
Placing a high value on salt, sugar, and fat is no longer advantageous to our health, but the craving persists because the brain’s reward centers have not changed for approximately fifty thousand years. The modern food industry relies on stretching our Paleolithic instincts beyond their evolutionary purpose.
orosensation.
After a few minutes, your brain loses interest and you begin to feel full. But foods that are high in dynamic contrast keep the experience novel and interesting, encouraging you to eat more.
The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.
Advertisements are created with a combination of ideal lighting, professional makeup, and Photoshopped edits—even the model doesn’t look like the person in the final image.
They exaggerate features that are naturally attractive to us, and our instincts go wild as a result, driving us into excessive shopping habits, social media habits, porn habits, eating habits, and many others.
Video games are a more concentrated form of play than board games. Compared to nature, these pleasure-packed experiences are hard to resist. We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
We begin by examining a biological signature that all habits share—the dopamine spike.
By implanting electrodes in the brains of rats, the researchers blocked the release of dopamine. To the surprise of the scientists, the rats lost all will to live. They wouldn’t eat. They wouldn’t have sex. They didn’t crave anything. Within a few days, the animals died of thirst.
Even though dopamine was blocked, they liked the sugar just as much as before; they just didn’t want it anymore. The ability to experience pleasure remained, but without dopamine, desire died. And without desire, action stopped.
(Humans are not so different: the average slot machine player will spin the wheel six hundred times per hour.)
When it comes to habits, the key takeaway is this: dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it. Gambling addicts have a dopamine spike right before they place a bet, not after they win.
Interestingly, the reward system that is activated in the brain when you receive a reward is the same system that is activated when you anticipate a reward.
As an adult, daydreaming about an upcoming vacation can be more enjoyable than actually being on vacation. Scientists refer to this as the difference between “wanting” and “liking.”
Once a habit is learned, dopamine will not rise when a reward is experienced because you already expect the reward.
The sensitivity of the dopamine response can clearly be seen when a reward is provided late (D).
Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.
We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place. This is where a strategy known as temptation bundling comes into play.
Then he wrote a computer program that would allow Netflix to run only if he was cycling at a certain speed. If he slowed down for too long, whatever show he was watching would pause until he started pedaling again. He was, in the words of one fan, “eliminating obesity one Netflix binge at a time.”
Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
Businesses are masters at temptation bundling.
They branded it as “TGIT on ABC” (TGIT stands for Thank God It’s Thursday).
The brilliance of this strategy is that ABC was associating the thing they needed viewers to do (watch their shows) with activities their viewers already wanted to do (relax, drink wine, and eat popcorn).
Using temptation bundling, you could only read the tabloids and watch reality shows at the gym. Maybe you want to get a pedicure, but you need to clean out your email inbox. Solution: only get a pedicure while processing overdue work emails.
“more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.”
eventually you’ll look forward to calling three clients or doing ten burpees because it means you get to read the latest sports news or check Facebook.
Doing the thing you need to do means you get to do the thing you want to do.
Engineering a truly irresistible habit is a hard task, but this simple strategy can be employed to make nearly any habit more attractive than it would be otherwise.
Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. When dopamine rises, so does our motivation to act.
It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action. The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike.
Laszlo was a firm believer in hard work. In fact, it was all he believed in: he completely rejected the idea of innate talent.
The house would be filled with chess books and pictures of famous chess players. The children would play against each other constantly and compete in the best tournaments they could find. The family would keep a meticulous file system of the tournament history of every competitor the children faced. Their lives would be dedicated to chess.
At fifteen years and four months old, she became the youngest grandmaster of all time—younger than Bobby Fischer, the previous record holder. For twenty-seven years, she was the number-one-ranked female chess player in the world.
The Polgar sisters grew up in a culture that prioritized chess above all else—praised them for it, rewarded them for it. In their world, an obsession with chess was normal.
Humans are herd animals. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and to earn the respect and approval of our peers. Such inclinations are essential to our survival. For most of our evolutionary history, our ancestors lived in tribes. Becoming separated from the tribe—or worse, being cast out—was a death sentence. “The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.”* Meanwhile, those who collaborated and bonded with others enjoyed increased safety, mating opportunities, and access to resources. As Charles Darwin noted, “In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise
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We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.
Each of these cultures and groups comes with its own set of expectations and standards—when and whether to get married, how many children to have, which holidays to celebrate, how much money to spend on your child’s birthday party.
In many ways, these social norms are the invisible rules that guide your behavior each day. You’re always keeping them in mind, even if they are at the not top of your mind.
