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November 12, 2022 - February 10, 2024
From a scientific standpoint, the impact of having too much information to make choices when planning has been dubbed choice overload.
In the name of convenience and efficiency, the modern world is increasingly designed to create addictive experiences.
“Changing habits is hard work but doesn’t have to be painful.”
For most of us, an absence of willpower may be more of a failure of brain wiring (and evolution) than our own fault.
If you aren’t aware that you’re doing something habitually, you will continue to do it habitually.
Knowing why something became a habit isn’t going to magically fix it in the present moment.
familiarity of a mood state contributes to our staying in it.
The more rewarding a behavior is, the stronger the habit.
Behavior doesn’t change if the reward value of that behavior stays the same. And the reward value can change only when you bring awareness to bear and see the actual reward value.
If you really pay careful and close attention—without making any assumptions or relying on past experience to guide you—and you see that a behavior is not rewarding right now, I promise you that you will start to get less excited about doing it again.
Simply mapping out habit loops and seeing their lack of value doesn’t magically unwind years and years of entrenchment. This is where patience comes in.
It’s important to check with your old habits to see if they are still serving you.
If you bring awareness to your old habits for short moments, many times throughout the day, you will more quickly and efficiently unlearn the old and move into the new.
Fixed-mindset individuals dread failure because it is a negative statement about their basic abilities and a reminder of their inherent limitations. On the other hand, growth-mindset individuals don’t mind or fear failure as much because they realize their performance can be improved; indeed, learning comes from failure.
What does it mean to fail? If you learn, does what happened count as a failure?
mindfulness can help you pay much closer attention to what your mind is caught up in and allow you to see how absurd it is that something sucks merely because you convinced yourself that it was going to suck.
Oh, that’s just my brain. It’s important to always be kind to ourselves, rather than beating ourselves up for the way our brains are set up.
Mapping out your habit loops over and over helps your brain see that you are serious and committed to changing your habits.
Paying attention to that cause-and-effect relationship between your habitual behaviors and their results really does change their reward value, and really does help you become disenchanted with habits that aren’t helpful and more enchanted with habits that are.
Knowing that a habit is bad for us isn’t enough to change it.
The world outside our comfort zone isn’t always dangerous. We just need to check to see if it is.
Rules go out the window when we get caught up in habit loops.
It doesn’t matter what triggers worry or anxiety, but it does matter how you react to it.
The next time you are frustrated or anxious, try this. Stop and simply name the emotion (e.g., “Oh, that’s X emotion”). Check to see how narrow or wide your eyes are. Open your eyes wide (and perhaps add in a hmm) as a way to jump-start your curiosity. Keep them wide for ten seconds and notice what happens to the anxiety (or whatever difficult emotion you’ve just identified). Does it get stronger or weaker? Does it change in character, or shift in some other way?
Remember, you can’t think your way into changing a habit; otherwise you would already have done so.
The spin and commentary are what turn panic symptoms/attacks into a panic disorder: we start worrying about the next time we will worry; we start getting anxious that we might get anxious.
You build good mindfulness habits through short moments of practice, many times throughout the day.
A critical aspect of “one day at a time”—indeed, perhaps all of its power—lies in not looking too far into the future.
Worrying does not take away tomorrow’s troubles. It takes away today’s peace.”
“When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that’s my religion.”
“So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?”
