How to improve your routine using willpower, pleasure and pain
Motivation alone is not enough. We need a system and here’s a starter pack to help you build one.
This is part of a series of daily texts I’m writing while doing inktober. Enjoy some of my random thoughts on different topics…
This is the third day from my “suicidal” endeavor of developing multiple new habits at the same time. My goal is to write a piece of text for Medium, compose one ambient piece of music and drawing with ink for Inktober. All of this on a daily basis. Although I know a little how to write in english and draw, I still need to overcome my personal barriers if I want to form better habits. The reason I’m doing this is so I can finally finish the things I start. I’m turning this public because it forces me to state that something I’ve created is “done”. Once published, there’s no turning back for most of them. I know it’s a bit early to talk about impacts on doing this, but I’m going to let my mind flow today on everything I know about habit change.
Like many people around the planet Earth, I’m constantly looking for ways to create good habits. First of all, we have to know why do we have them. From Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit, habits are a way for the human brain to save energy on repetitive tasks. These tasks often have a trigger, something like a call to action, and a reward that makes us feel good at the moment. In order to enter such state, we obviously need the cue, which makes us go to a routine to get our reward. Many resources I’ve been reading state that habits are formed from altering the routines that comes after the cues. So you preserve the cue and the reward, but change the routine. The brain shows some resistance to change the habits because they make us feel good at that moment, so our brain thinks it’s always a good thing. Only that it isn’t always a good thing in the long run. According to a Duhigg, there isn’t a straight solution to solve the problem. However, I want to try to solve my case using willpower with the notion of pleasure and pain.
I extracted this bit of pleasure and pain from several different books. They usually state how we, as human beings, want nothing more than maximize our pleasure and minimize our pain. We see this in television all the time, we have obese people afraid of dying from all that fat they have accumulated. Even at that point, some of them still eats junk food on camera. Since the dying consequences are not visible, the pleasure of the junk food tastes better than the pain of possibly dying. On the other hand, healthy people that frequently exercises change their focus when it comes to pleasure and pain. While it might be okay for you to feel tired by going up 5 rows of stairs, this simply means pain to those exercising addicts. They decline junk food for the same reasons obese person eat them. They know that the taste of junk food will cause them to feel pain for not being able to wake up as psyched and ready as they usually do. Their pleasure comes from the fitness they’ve build, and everything that threatens this form of pleasure is considered pain.
Thinking about our habits as a battle of pleasure vs. pain might seem easy, but how do we improve that? If I start eating healthy, how am I supposed to know that I’m not going to give up after a week? I personally don’t have a goal of healthy eating, but no matter what you’re doing, you must start developing your new routine with your will to change. That’s right, willpower. What we usually do however is to also resort on motivation to push ourselves towards our destiny. Sometimes our brain creates invisible walls between us and our goals. We know that if we do that thing, we’re gonna be happy, but sometimes the reward is not visible most of the time. To solve this issue, we need to do it daily and not push ourselves beyond our limits. Willpower is a finite resource. If it seems infinite to you, it’s perhaps motivation. When we’re motivated, we do the impossible on a daily basis. But the real change is to form a new habit. By that, I’m meaning you shouldn’t be able to write 7000 words on one day and then slack for five without a single word. That’s not forming a new habit. A reading which I found quite interesting on this subject is the Mini Habits by Stephen Guise.
In his guide, Steven shows us how to use only a small portion of our willpower to actually develop the skills and habits that we’re looking for. If you want to be healthier, instead of changing all your dishes to green. You could add one piece of healthier food which you’re not usually familiar. Or you can change your breakfast to a full healthier breakfast, while keeping your lunch and dinner intacts. You’re probably going to realize how good you feel in the mornings, and will look for ways to maintain that good feeling throughout the day. It is important to change around one to three things in your life and these changes need to be very very tiny. Want to learn a new language? Start practicing for a minute or two every day. Want to exercise more often? Start with a single push up daily. The most important part is to do it daily.
Based on that, you can see why my project is “suicidal”. I’m setting a goal for 1,000 words on Medium, which I still haven’t met. I’m in a online art event that is beyond my current drawing skills. And I’m also producing original music on a daily basis. On top of that, add my routine as a game developer. My tactics so far have been pretty much hectic, but I intend to share some of them at the end of the first week text. All I can say is that I’m still motivated. On the Mini Habits course, Stephen never actually condemned the use of motivation in order to do more. He just said we shouldn’t rely on motivation alone. Duhigg, on the other hand, said we don’t actually have an all-in-one solution for the habit change question. Based on those, I’m looking forward in trying the impossible with this personal challenge. Currently on day 3 and I still have not failed.
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