You can break a habit.

Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.

Here is what I discovered today in our Dadly Daily Declaration readings from Chapter 7 of Atomic Habits by James Clear.  The title of this chapter is “The Secret to Self-Control.”

Today’s chapter ends the first law of behavioral change (Make It Obvious) and self-control and habit forming. Here are a few highlights from today’s readings:

• Recent research illustrates interesting findings about self-control. When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.
• The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often. While perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, the way to improve these qualities is by creating a more disciplined environment.
• A habit that has been encoded in the mind is ready to be used whenever the relevant situation arises. Whenever the environmental cues reappear, the urge tract follows. If you’re not careful about cues, you can cause the very behavior you want to stop.

• Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the feeling they try to numb. For example, you feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food, you feel bad.
• You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. 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.  That means simply resisting temptation is an ineffective strategy.
• It is hard to maintain a Zen attitude in a life filled with interruptions. 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.
• A more reliable approach is to cut bad habits off at the source. One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
  • For example:
    • If you can’t seem to get any work done, leave your phone in another room for a few hours.
    • If you’re playing too many video games, unplug the console and put it in a closet after each use.
• To eliminate a bad habit, make it invisible.  In other words, make the cue invisible. Remove a single cue and the entire habit often fades away.

Tweets by JamesClear

Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:

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. This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.