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Personal anecdotes about habits and promises. I've tried many different things to motivate myself to either abstain from behavior like smoking or to keep up hea

Personal anecdotes about habits and promises. I've tried many different things to motivate myself to either abstain from behavior like smoking or to keep up healthy streaks. An example would be a promise I made last Christmas to my fiancée. I've had a hard time quitting smoking because it's my go-to solution when life is stressful and feels like the walls are coming down. I gave her 500€ and told her that money is for a small holiday for us next summer if I don't smoke. If I smoke she can keep it all and use it for whatever she wants. Now when I wanted to smoke, I'd have to weigh the decision against that promise. The downside was, I had a clear price that I could decide to pay if I wanted a cigarette. Needless to say, I failed in two months and now she has a new sewing machine. On the other hand, I've now managed to keep a 45 day streak on duolingo. It's a way smaller thing and there's nothing externally motivating me except that damn little owl and a little lit flame icon displaying my streak. There's no penalty for failing nor is there any way to wiggle out of failing if I choose not to do my daily exercises. My main motivation is just to learn Welsh for the sake of it and I find it much easier to keep this up than any other habit which comes with internal or external pressure. Making your friends hold you accountable to something just sounds like the recipe for getting unmotivated and losing the actual goal and swapping the enjoyment of doing something into fear of some sort of penalty which one could decide was worth facing. I've also heard that talking too much of your ideas and goals will decrease motivation as you gain some feeling of success which should be rewarded to you after you've actually done the deed. I feel that this personally affects me and I've stopped talking about goals and I'm just trying to reach them and celebrating afterwards.

PaulStatezny 6y ago
As far as I understand, your experience mirrors the research. External motivation (like a reward/penalty, accountability partner, etc) is weak. Internal motivation is incredibly strong. So the question becomes, how do you get internally motivated? I wish I had a reference, but I remember hearing about a study (here on HN) about where internal motivation comes from. The conclusion — a mixture of 3 elements: Purpose, competence, and freedom. Basically, you're in a situation where there's something that needs done. You have a strong sense of purpose that it ought to be done. (There's a huge "why" element to this!) You have the freedom to achieve it in whatever means you see fit. And you have any skills necessary. Sounds like with DuoLingo, you're already at the point where it's a locked in habit. (So your mind is on autopilot with that, not requiring a lot of motivation.) But with smoking, you never had enough internal motivation. And I imagine smoking like other "bad" habits has a big emotional element to it. (You turn to it to calm down stress/anxiety.) Have you thought about those emotional elements and what's causing those? Maybe trying to address those things _on top of_ an effort to kick smoking would be more effective.
vharuck 6y ago
The problem with DuoLingo is the complete loss when you slip. I was using it with my wife to learn German (I studied in high school and convinced her it'd be a great vacation). It worked great until a very busy stretch of days (I think it was around when we moved). We both list our streaks, and she stopped using the site entirely. I only kept up because there was nothing better to do during lunch breaks.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Did you replace smoking with something else? My understanding is that habits can't [easily] be removed, only changed (short-term at least) - did you take up lollipops, or chewing matchsticks, or fidget-spinners, or ...
ycombinete 6y ago
Unfortunately with smoking you have to want to stop smoking. Most of the time you either know you should want to, or you want to want to; but you don’t actually want to stop. Ultimately I became disgusted by the hold it had over me. That I was dependent on it. That it changed my mood, and my personality. I really resented that. The health effects were never a strong enough motivator. I started using snus, while still smoking, then stopped smoking for the most part. Just using the snus. Then I went cold turkey on the snus.

PaulStatezny 6y ago

As far as I understand, your experience mirrors the research. External motivation (like a reward/penalty, accountability partner, etc) is weak. Internal motivation is incredibly strong. So the question becomes, how do you get internally motivated? I wish I had a reference, but I remember hearing about a study (here on HN) about where internal motivation comes from. The conclusion — a mixture of 3 elements: Purpose, competence, and freedom. Basically, you're in a situation where there's something that needs done. You have a strong sense of purpose that it ought to be done. (There's a huge "why" element to this!) You have the freedom to achieve it in whatever means you see fit. And you have any skills necessary. Sounds like with DuoLingo, you're already at the point where it's a locked in habit. (So your mind is on autopilot with that, not requiring a lot of motivation.) But with smoking, you never had enough internal motivation. And I imagine smoking like other "bad" habits has a big emotional element to it. (You turn to it to calm down stress/anxiety.) Have you thought about those emotional elements and what's causing those? Maybe trying to address those things _on top of_ an effort to kick smoking would be more effective.

vharuck 6y ago

The problem with DuoLingo is the complete loss when you slip. I was using it with my wife to learn German (I studied in high school and convinced her it'd be a great vacation). It worked great until a very busy stretch of days (I think it was around when we moved). We both list our streaks, and she stopped using the site entirely. I only kept up because there was nothing better to do during lunch breaks.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

Did you replace smoking with something else? My understanding is that habits can't [easily] be removed, only changed (short-term at least) - did you take up lollipops, or chewing matchsticks, or fidget-spinners, or ...

ycombinete 6y ago

Unfortunately with smoking you have to want to stop smoking. Most of the time you either know you should want to, or you want to want to; but you don’t actually want to stop. Ultimately I became disgusted by the hold it had over me. That I was dependent on it. That it changed my mood, and my personality. I really resented that. The health effects were never a strong enough motivator. I started using snus, while still smoking, then stopped smoking for the most part. Just using the snus. Then I went cold turkey on the snus.