#hack your mind

miniWOD shared something: http://gd.is/6BMNP6

Breaking Boundaries: Two Ways To Hack Your Habits

Some people don’t like the sound of it, but in a lot of ways, we are like robots.  We are routine-based and programmable.  Not so sure?  Let’s take a quick quiz.

Are You a Creature of Habit?

Do you have daily habits that you cannot explain?  Like brushing your teeth or finishing the entire box of Girl Scout cookies.

Do you auto-respond to cues in your environment?  Remember the time you met someone with a really big zit on their nose.  It’s hard to stop yourself before you scrunch your nose in disgust.  Then you feel bad (maybe).

  It can be a fun exercise to list out your routines.  You may just discover that you are a robot.

  Step 1: How to Hack Your Program

Once you become aware of a routine, you’ve taken the first step towards becoming your own hacker.  Now that you are now conscious of it you can do something about it.  Like Neo in the Matrix, you’ve ejected yourself out of a life of sleep walking.

  Step 2: Break it Down

Now take that routine and break it into three pieces:

First: The cue.  The combination of stimuli that triggers the behavior.  Say when you step into a coffee shop, you often buy a snack (and beat yourself up over it later).

Second: The routine, in this case it’s eating the snack.

Third: The reward.  Don’t get hung up on this, because it’s quite complex.  In the simple cookie example, you have sensory responses: tongue, eyes, etc.  In your emotional psyche you may have dozens of pleasant memories tied to eating cookies.  Then you have the chemical rush of sugar.  Seriously, It’s complex in each case.

Step 3: Hack it!

Okay, so you’ve broken out the cue and the behavior.  Now you have to do the work.  The work is as follows.  First, every time you notice the cue, stop and think.  Then replace it with your desired new habit.  To ensure it sticks, there are two tools you need to apply:

Repetition

Incentives

When I say repetition, I mean, do it over and over until your new behavior sticks without thinking.  A good trick is to reward yourself in some way.  Pavlov’s science does not just apply to dogs and monkeys.  It’s you too.

An example.  I wanted to cut breakfast out for a period of time to drop weight.  However, I had the habit of waking up in the morning and eating cereal.  Here are the steps I used to stop it.

I gave away all my cereal

I choose a new habit to replace it with: drinking 2 large glasses of water

I rewarded myself by checking my weight loss once a week

Quite simple really.  Over the years I repeated this with other experiments:

Removing sugar from my diet (sugar is probably the biggest drug we’ve are all programmed to consume from childhood.  Guess what, it makes you fat, rots your teeth, and hurts your internal organs)

Reducing carbohydrates in my diet (I’m not a farmer;  I don’t need heaping amounts of bread, rice, and noodles to make it through my average, sedentary day)

Removing processed food and dairy (chips, fries, and other non-foods contain little-to-no nutrients thanks to how they are manufactured.  Drinking baby-formula from a cow doesn’t make a lot of sense to me scientifically.)

Quitting coffee after noon (messed up my REM sleep or deep sleep)

However, there are some minor details that might give you trouble when you start hacking.

  Quick Fact: Areas of your Brain

Basal Ganglia: No it’s not an island in the Mediterranean.  It’s more like where your brain stores habits, emotions, memories, and patterns that are used in automatic behavior.  So, this is where the cookie-eating program is stored.

Prefrontal Cortex: Where you make conscious decisions.

Prefrontal CortexWhen you are training yourself to drink a glass of water first thing in the morning, the minute this decision becomes automatic (or habitual) your prefrontal cortex forgets about it because it’s now stored in with the rest of your GPS maps.

Caveat 1: Habits are like the Terminator

Habits canNOT be erased, killed, or deleted (except through time travel).

Old habits can come back with a vengeance (like the Terminator)!

  Like grafting new skin over a burn, new habits are placed on top of old ones.

  Caveat 2: The 21 Day Myth

Myth: It takes 21 days to form a habit.

Wrong.  You are far, far more complex than that.  Even if you’re not, your brain is.

Building habits depends on hundreds of little variables:  you, the old habit, the new habit,  other habits that get in the way, your social circle, family, etc.  If you find yourself struggling with a particular habit, don’t give up.  Step back and re-analyze your situation.  Chances are good that what you took for one habit is actually a whole bunch of habits stuck together.  Break them out and take them on piece by piece.  And don’t give up at the end of 21 days.  Some will take you a few days to do, others, a lot longer.

  Caveat 3: Not All Habits Are Equal!

There are plain old habits, like brushing your teeth.

Then there are:

Compulsions based on social norms (peer pressure).

Addictions: chemical and otherwise.

Lots of other technical psychological and sociological stuff.

Be aware that if you’re struggling with a particular habit it may be because it is a compulsion or addiction.  Don’t give up.  Do enlist allies.  Use the buddy system.  Failure is one of the easiest measurements of progress.  If you’re not falling down, it’s likely that you’re just not moving at all.

  So dear reader, if you are ready to hack your mind or give it another try on an old habit you’ve tried to change in the past, let me hear about it.  Maybe you will help another reader out.

From 'A girl's guide to taking over the world".