TL;DR: With methods and tools to control how your subconscious operates, and how to introduce good habits while eliminating the bad ones, we can better control what we produce, learn and accomplish.
“Discipline equals freedom.” – Jocko Willink, Navy Seal Operative
It is estimated that about 40% of all daily operations and practices are habitual.[1] This means that a huge amount of all processes bypass your conscious brain and go straight to your subconscious for their execution.
Welcome back UpRiver, biohackers.
Today we are going to be covering arguably one of the most vital components to truly upgrading yourself. We are delving into the realm of the subconscious in order to cover how habits affect our lives, how to implement a protocol to adopt productive habits and how to strike bad habits from our subconscious repertoire of action.
You may not realize it, but it is very likely the case that every time you turn on the light in your bathroom, you use the same hand; every time your tie your shoes, you start with the same foot; and each time you open the fridge, your eyes look to the same spot. The reason you do these things is because of what is basically a subconscious domino effect of action. For example, the reason you tie your shoes the same way every time is because the action that directly precedes it sets off a chain-reaction. Namely, you grab your shoes, bend over to tie the laces, and the mere consequence of those two actions triggers the subconscious to signal whatever automatic process it deems is the most effective for you. Over time, and to save cognitive battery, your body seamlessly repeats these actions in that same order over and over. Generally speaking, this is how habits work and they exist to both prevent cognitive exhaustion, which allows the conscious part of the brain to be allocated to more demanding tasks, as well as helps us with our survival.
Now, while this may come as either mildly fascinating to you, or completely trivial, the significance of habits cannot be overstated. Allow us to explain while delving further…
Habitual, and thus automatic, processes have a major negative effect when trying to break a bad behaviour… In other words, its really hard to stop smoking if the ‘trigger’ action to smoke a dart is getting into your car. Its really hard to stop watching porn if your ‘trigger’ is opening your laptop. It’s really hard to stop gambling if your ‘trigger’ is receiving your bi-weekly paycheck.
Conversely, habits and subconscious chain reactions are a blessing if your trigger for performing physical exercise is walking past your running shoes in the hall. Or if your trigger for calling your mother is waking up on Sunday morning. Or if your trigger for putting money into a savings account each time you earn money. Luckily, we are here to show you how to manipulate your habits so that your good behaviors become not just automatic, but relatively effortless.
4 Tips on How to Eliminate Bad Habits
While both sides have strong arguments for which is more difficult to accomplish – breaking bad habits or adopting good ones – we will start with how to break bad habits as this leaves more room to adopt the good ones! A forewarning though, even though these methods are simple that does not necessarily mean that they are easy.
Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind:
One of the best ways to break a bad habit is to eliminate the trigger entirely from your environment. If your trigger to smoking is seeing the cigarettes in your room, remove them completely. While this won’t in itself break a bad habit, it’s an amazing first step that will make the habit-breaking process more smooth and manageable.
Create a path of MORE resistance:
To make a particular action less desirable, discover and implement a high barrier-to-entry for the habit to be undertaken. For example, if your trigger to playing PlayStation is seeing your controller on your living room coffee table, each time you are finished playing, completely unplug the console and remove all associated peripherals from the room. Store it in a closet in a different vicinity of the house or apartment. By simply doing this, you are removing this action from your subconscious brain and forcing the conscious brain to evaluate if it’s really worth it to undertake said action. Moreover, while this in and of itself does not guarantee that you won’t reason yourself into performing the bad action, it at least removes the bad action from the realm of ‘habit’ – bringing you one step closer to elimination.
Public accountability and repercussion:
This one is an absolute classic. This method simply states that you make your desire to do away with a particular behaviour public by sharing it with others. While some people go as far as to take to social media, exclaiming their goals in order to create social pressure to do so, others decide to tell someone they respect and value the opinion of. To take it a step further, having solid and actionable repercussion imposable by another party deters one from committing a negative action even more.
Batching / Pairing (Negative + Positive):
This is an interesting one, and one that should not be overlooked. The idea of batching or pairing is the idea that each time an action is performed, one conditions oneself by, in this case, punishing oneself for performing negative actions, or rewarding oneself for abstaining from negative actions. For example, this method could take the following shape: the reward for denying oneself a cheeseburger and staying on diet is allowing oneself a reward elsewhere in another realm, perhaps going out to a movie.
These are great standalone tips for helping anyone to get rid of pesky habits that impede one’s journey upriver. You can see clearly how these steps can be stacked together in order to really help ditch a bad habit. On the other hand, now that you have the tools to get rid of the bad, let’s now focus on how to introduce the good. Luckily, they are basically just a reversal of the aforementioned tips regarding the elimination of bad behaviors!
4 Tips on How to Form Good Habits
Obvious Positive Triggers:
Create an environment that is conducive to your habits. If you want to pick up a meditation practice, have your chair or mat out and ready at all times. Have a designated spot where this action will occur and have it visible from all possible areas in your environment. This will create more automatic queues for your brain and will drastically increase the chances of an action becoming both subconsciously instigated and effortless.
Create the path of LEAST resistance:
Piggybacking off the first tip, make it easy for yourself to accomplish a given goal. Namely, if you want to go out for a run, keep your running shoes in the most accessible place of all your shoes. If you want to take it a step further, make it actually difficult to NOT perform the task. For example, if you want to write a 5-minute journal every morning, place the journal on top of your laptop or on the floor where you have to step over it to get to the bathroom.
Concrete and physical accountability:
Remember how professors and teachers always told you to write things down by hand, as it enters the brain better? Well it seems that if we want a particular task performed at a given time, it’s important to do the same. Write down not only what you’re going to do, but write also at what time it will be performed and, in detail, what the task actually is. Bonus tip for you Gen Z’ers and Millennials out there… this means ON A PIECE OF PAPER, not simply on your phone.
Batching:
A great way to adopt a new habit or behaviour is to pair something you actually enjoy doing with a new habit that you’re trying to adopt. This can mean anything from chewing gum while you go for your daily walk, or watching your favourite show while running on the treadmill. Find what works for you and pair it with whichever action you’re looking to adopt!
Author’s Notes
With all this said, you now have a pretty good grasp on what it takes to adopt new habits and break old ones. As mentioned above, these methods are relatively simple, but that does not mean that their implementation is effortless.
In fact, it is important to recognize that even though science tells us that to truly banish a bad habit or adopt a new habit takes roughly 60-70 days depending on which research you look at, there are unfortunately some forces working against you. One of these demons is called the Chaser Effect.
Roughly speaking, the chaser effect describes the phenomenon whereby your brain craves a certain stimuli more strongly than before because you haven’t provided the brain with the dopamine it receives as a result of performing X action. Thankfully, the chaser effect reaches its peak at around the 7 day mark and declines from then on, until the 14 day mark – at which point it almost vanishes. This isn’t to say that cravings wont arise given the right conditions, it is only to say that the brain and its pesky dopamine are finished with trying to sabotage your efforts.
Author’s Motivation
Guys, we’ve all been there. We’ve all have that bad sh*t in our automatic repertoires that we shouldn’t – especially if we’ve decided to commit to a life moving upriver. These tips have come from a variety of biohacking experts, but have been here summarized for your benefit and ease of digestion. I used to be addicted to porn, food, sex, and frankly a whole bunch of other garbage (… food and sex are by no means garbage, but the extent to which I indulged was unhealthy – porn on the other hand is for losers… sorry…). I wanted to do real research into what the science says, and what the anecdotes claim to help all those reading this right now. Hopefully you’ve received some value.
Conclusion
We are creatures of habit. Which habits we are creatures of, is up to you. After reading this article, hopefully it is not lost on anyone what double-edged swords these bastards really are. With a little work, however, you can use these parts of the brain to fuel your desires and goals of becoming the best biohacker you can be.
As Jocko Willink says, “discipline equals freedom…” habits are a huge part of discipline.
Until next time biohacker, and keep moving upriver.
REFERENCES
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140808111931.html
