8 ms·

Just like you can practice going to sleep at a reasonable hour, so can you practice keeping your bed made, liking a particular food, or doing col

Just like you can practice going to sleep at a reasonable hour, so can you practice keeping your bed made, liking a particular food, or doing collage. This is so true and so powerful. People in general really underestimate how "hackable" their brains and habits are. It's probably the single biggest fixable difference I see between people who are successful and happy and those who aren't. I think the general HN demographic is perhaps more inclined to recognize this than the general population. Not that the hacker community has a monopoly on it by any means. Athletes, successful executives, etc. They know it too. Edit: I want to be extremely clear. I am talking about a mindset of self-improvement. It is not a magic cure for anything. I am not telling you that you can just magically "mind hack" problems away. I recognize that there is a fine line to walk here. There are a lot of people who think that your depression or your ADHD or your whatever is a result of you simply not trying hard enough or not finding the right "hack." Those people are wrong, and that attitude is misguided and hurtful. In my experience happiness and success is the result of finding a happy middle ground between (a) learned helplessness (b) a toxic and delusional belief in magical positive thinking. You should believe that you can continually hone your skills and habits. You should not take that sort of attitude to a toxic extreme, and you certainly should not use it as a tool to hurt and judge others.

anonyfox 3y ago
ADHD chiming in. That approach just doesn’t work when you have to actively spend nontrivial brain energy to even brush your teeth, every day. There is no such thing as a hackable routine, atomic/keystone habits, or „too lazy to stay on track“.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  I have ADHD and I choose not to make excuses.
  - tonyarkles 3y ago
    I'm having a hard time not saying something really snarky here, but that's not particularly productive. Your comment isn't going to bring any good into the world, it just serves to shame someone who's struggling. We've got enough of that already.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
      I disagree. It was extremely productive and liberating for me to view my ADHD this way. I don't allow it to be an excuse.
  - compscigirl 3y ago
    While I agree that it’s quite common these days for people to use ADHD as an excuse for why they can’t do X, in this case I don’t think your dismissal of others’ symptoms is fair. It’s generally true that people with ADHD are unable to form and maintain routines without significant external incentives and that maintaining those incentives is a precarious and exhausting endeavour. As many others in this thread have noted, they lack habit forming momentum and end up quickly depleting their “willpower” since it’s constantly necessary for even the smallest of everyday tasks. Their routines are also easily disrupted by a change in external input and it can be quite hard to recover. That said, different people experience more or less severe symptoms and if you are able to tolerate ADHD medication it can significantly reduce the effort required.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  Also ADHD here, with a thought that might be useful for you. I am not even a little bit refuting the "non-trivial brain energy to even brush your teeth" bit. That 100% takes brain energy for me. But I would challenge the assertion that we don't have habits. They're just not necessarily the habits we want, but they do get made and broken and exist. As an example, if there's a project I want to work on (getting that motivation is a different problem), I will feel vaguely uncomfortable unless I grab my bag and laptop and drive to a particular coffee shop that's a non-trivial distance from my house. And once I get there, I am generally quite productive. After I eat a meal (remembering to eat is a struggle sometimes, of course), I don't feel "at ease" until I have a cigarette. I've found it slightly useful to not think about habits in the way that the positive-thinking motivational speakers talk about habits, but rather at least spending a bit of time reflecting the things I do when I'm in "autopilot mode". I'm not very good at changing the things I see, but recognizing that they're there has been a bit helpful in tweaking them or at least figuring out why/how they work.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  ADHD chiming in. That approach just doesn’t work [when you have ADHD] Professionally diagnosed ADHD here as well. Extremely aware of the hurtful and unfair "lazy" stigma. Positive thinking, an improvement mindset, and life hacks are not cure for ADHD. There's no cure! I'm not one of those people who's trying to tell you that the cure to your ADHD is "just try harder" or some bullshit. I know we have all heard that too many times in our lives. But our brains are still hackable. Our habits are still improvable. I'm in middle age and I'm still finding improvements and workarounds.
- skygazer 3y ago
  I have ADHD. My intended habits are very fragile, and if a single visual cue goes missing, I'll skip a step -- if my wife removes my antiperspirant from the counter, then I just unwittingly skip that step that day. I rely on rube Goldberg machinations. I have one trick that works, but I hate it. I build checklists with routine tasks, like morning and evening routines, or packing for a trip, etc, and automate sending them to the relentlessly annoying iOS Due.app, which can send reminder notifications about a timed task every minute once due and syncs with watch, so I can dismiss them once complete -- I have them scheduled spaced out enough to generally allow completion of one task before the next one comes due. I turn on Announce Notifications for the Due.app so the phone speaks the tasks aloud, and just wear airpods so I alone hear the announcements. I used this successfully for 6 months to emulate being a conventional person, and it was successful, but it didn't end up building any very strong habits that could stand alone outside this system. It felt like an oppressive dystopian crutch that I was embarrassed to need. However, one situation where I do love it is "before I leave the house to go to X" checklists, if I schedule backward from the time to leave, I end up not forgetting anything and leaving on time, which is not normally easy for me, otherwise. That reduces a common stress. Oh, and outside of habits, I do really like dictating a stream of consciousness list of things I have to do to my phone, and have a shortcut run it by GPT3.5 to extract task names, estimate on task durations, and order tasks in a reasonable way, which it is surprisingly able to do with a good prompt, and then automatically feed the results into Due.app. I haven't figured out the psychology of when I do and don't like nagging reminders.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    > However, one situation where I do love it is "before I leave the house to go to X" checklists Not diagnosed with anything, but I put things in my shoes, such as the occasional paper envelope that needs sending. The computer chair is another "an item is physically obstructing me I must deal with it before I continue" destination. (Example: Some dirty laundry, indicating I need to start the washing-machine I loaded earlier.)
    - JohnBooty 3y ago
      I love it! This is a great habit. ADHD or not, it's all about reducing cognitive load.
- zaat 3y ago
  Not only it is not working, believing it does work with regards to other people, especially one's children or pupils (with or without ADHD) can be toxic and harmful. I have been too lazy to stay on track on many things, yet on others I wasn't to lazy to fight day after day til I won. I surely am happy I didn't keep putting effort in the hopeless efforts to improve my penmanship skills.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Just a thought. I am diagnosed with ADHD as well and struggle at times. actively spend nontrivial brain energy to even brush your teeth I doubt you'll see this but this statement has really stuck in my mind. Do you think that neurotypicals aren't spending non-trivial brain energy to build and maintain habits? I agree that this kind of thing is harder for those of us with ADHD. It is not just a discipline issue. But, I don't know. I think people who aren't good at _____ often see people who are good at _____ and think it's just some kind of magical innate thing they didn't put any work into.
  - anonyfox 3y ago
    Oh, I totally get your point. And of course habits require energy spending (but less and less over time). But with adhd it’s kind of different game. Like a mental „erectile dysfunction“ - if you *really* are in the mood it can be done, but if not there is no way to force it. (Except for some pills.) it’s not a willpower issue to begin with.
zaat 3y ago
I find it extremely naive, and I highly doubt there's lack of unsuccessful people who hold similar views. Maximal versions of the belief are actually quite fashionable from time to time, "The Secret" book for an example. In reality, you can try liking a particular food containing Coriander, but your genetics can interfere, and try as you might, it will still taste like soap. You can lie in bad every night in total silence, counting from 300 to 0 again and again, and still fail to fall a sleep in less than 40 minutes. Moreover, after you practiced and practiced to go down from 2 hours to 40 minutes, all you need is to attend one wedding or going single time to pub with friends after few months, and you are back to square one. One thing I'm in agreement with the author on - you have limited amount of willpower. Some have more, some have less, but regardless of how much you got, you will be much more successful in life if you invest it breaking barriers you can overcome and avoid fighting losing battles.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  you will be much more successful in life if you invest it breaking barriers you can overcome and avoid fighting losing battles. Cheers to that. I don't see any conflict between what you wrote and what I wrote. genetics [etc.] Please, be reasonable. I said that it was valuable and powerful to realize our brains are hackable, not that it was some limitless ridiculous sci-fi ability that could rewrite or circumvent your genetic code or other hard limits. I understand that there are people who seem to believe such things, but if you re-read what I wrote (or maybe read it for the first time) I think you'll find I very clearly never hinted at such nonsense.
  - zaat 3y ago
    My issue was with the sentence from the article that you have started your comment with its quote, and described as so true and so powerful. In contrast to how you perceived that sentence, it had an immediate and strong negative effect on me when I was reading it in the article, exactly because > genetics [etc.] are known to be the underlining cause for the pains and struggles experienced by many night owls struggling to cope with society where everyone is expected to be a morning bird. And just like genetics interfere with the ability of some people to go to sleep at reasonable hours, genetics have very strong influence on the possibility that with practice you will be able to teach yourself to appreciate particular foods
smeej 3y ago
Some of the best advice I've ever received is, "Don't overestimate what you can do in a day, but don't underestimate what you can do in a year, never mind a decade," and I think it's relevant to your comment and this article. We live in a "success now" culture. It's almost anathema to be willing to be bad at something long enough to become good at it. If you haven't demonstrated an aptitude for something, don't touch it. But the compounding effect of even very slight changes over years can change everything. You can't double your performance overnight. But if you get 1% better every week for 70 weeks, you can double your performance that way, and you're not even a year and a half in. So can you start sleeping an hour earlier? Not overnight, no. But can you get 1% better at it per week for a few months by practicing and succeeding at small changes? Yeah, you probably can.

anonyfox 3y ago

ADHD chiming in. That approach just doesn’t work when you have to actively spend nontrivial brain energy to even brush your teeth, every day. There is no such thing as a hackable routine, atomic/keystone habits, or „too lazy to stay on track“.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I have ADHD and I choose not to make excuses.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  I'm having a hard time not saying something really snarky here, but that's not particularly productive. Your comment isn't going to bring any good into the world, it just serves to shame someone who's struggling. We've got enough of that already.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    I disagree. It was extremely productive and liberating for me to view my ADHD this way. I don't allow it to be an excuse.
- compscigirl 3y ago
  While I agree that it’s quite common these days for people to use ADHD as an excuse for why they can’t do X, in this case I don’t think your dismissal of others’ symptoms is fair. It’s generally true that people with ADHD are unable to form and maintain routines without significant external incentives and that maintaining those incentives is a precarious and exhausting endeavour. As many others in this thread have noted, they lack habit forming momentum and end up quickly depleting their “willpower” since it’s constantly necessary for even the smallest of everyday tasks. Their routines are also easily disrupted by a change in external input and it can be quite hard to recover. That said, different people experience more or less severe symptoms and if you are able to tolerate ADHD medication it can significantly reduce the effort required.
tonyarkles 3y ago
Also ADHD here, with a thought that might be useful for you. I am not even a little bit refuting the "non-trivial brain energy to even brush your teeth" bit. That 100% takes brain energy for me. But I would challenge the assertion that we don't have habits. They're just not necessarily the habits we want, but they do get made and broken and exist. As an example, if there's a project I want to work on (getting that motivation is a different problem), I will feel vaguely uncomfortable unless I grab my bag and laptop and drive to a particular coffee shop that's a non-trivial distance from my house. And once I get there, I am generally quite productive. After I eat a meal (remembering to eat is a struggle sometimes, of course), I don't feel "at ease" until I have a cigarette. I've found it slightly useful to not think about habits in the way that the positive-thinking motivational speakers talk about habits, but rather at least spending a bit of time reflecting the things I do when I'm in "autopilot mode". I'm not very good at changing the things I see, but recognizing that they're there has been a bit helpful in tweaking them or at least figuring out why/how they work.
JohnBooty 3y ago
ADHD chiming in. That approach just doesn’t work [when you have ADHD] Professionally diagnosed ADHD here as well. Extremely aware of the hurtful and unfair "lazy" stigma. Positive thinking, an improvement mindset, and life hacks are not cure for ADHD. There's no cure! I'm not one of those people who's trying to tell you that the cure to your ADHD is "just try harder" or some bullshit. I know we have all heard that too many times in our lives. But our brains are still hackable. Our habits are still improvable. I'm in middle age and I'm still finding improvements and workarounds.
skygazer 3y ago
I have ADHD. My intended habits are very fragile, and if a single visual cue goes missing, I'll skip a step -- if my wife removes my antiperspirant from the counter, then I just unwittingly skip that step that day. I rely on rube Goldberg machinations. I have one trick that works, but I hate it. I build checklists with routine tasks, like morning and evening routines, or packing for a trip, etc, and automate sending them to the relentlessly annoying iOS Due.app, which can send reminder notifications about a timed task every minute once due and syncs with watch, so I can dismiss them once complete -- I have them scheduled spaced out enough to generally allow completion of one task before the next one comes due. I turn on Announce Notifications for the Due.app so the phone speaks the tasks aloud, and just wear airpods so I alone hear the announcements. I used this successfully for 6 months to emulate being a conventional person, and it was successful, but it didn't end up building any very strong habits that could stand alone outside this system. It felt like an oppressive dystopian crutch that I was embarrassed to need. However, one situation where I do love it is "before I leave the house to go to X" checklists, if I schedule backward from the time to leave, I end up not forgetting anything and leaving on time, which is not normally easy for me, otherwise. That reduces a common stress. Oh, and outside of habits, I do really like dictating a stream of consciousness list of things I have to do to my phone, and have a shortcut run it by GPT3.5 to extract task names, estimate on task durations, and order tasks in a reasonable way, which it is surprisingly able to do with a good prompt, and then automatically feed the results into Due.app. I haven't figured out the psychology of when I do and don't like nagging reminders.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > However, one situation where I do love it is "before I leave the house to go to X" checklists Not diagnosed with anything, but I put things in my shoes, such as the occasional paper envelope that needs sending. The computer chair is another "an item is physically obstructing me I must deal with it before I continue" destination. (Example: Some dirty laundry, indicating I need to start the washing-machine I loaded earlier.)
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    I love it! This is a great habit. ADHD or not, it's all about reducing cognitive load.
zaat 3y ago
Not only it is not working, believing it does work with regards to other people, especially one's children or pupils (with or without ADHD) can be toxic and harmful. I have been too lazy to stay on track on many things, yet on others I wasn't to lazy to fight day after day til I won. I surely am happy I didn't keep putting effort in the hopeless efforts to improve my penmanship skills.
JohnBooty 3y ago
Just a thought. I am diagnosed with ADHD as well and struggle at times. actively spend nontrivial brain energy to even brush your teeth I doubt you'll see this but this statement has really stuck in my mind. Do you think that neurotypicals aren't spending non-trivial brain energy to build and maintain habits? I agree that this kind of thing is harder for those of us with ADHD. It is not just a discipline issue. But, I don't know. I think people who aren't good at _____ often see people who are good at _____ and think it's just some kind of magical innate thing they didn't put any work into.
- anonyfox 3y ago
  Oh, I totally get your point. And of course habits require energy spending (but less and less over time). But with adhd it’s kind of different game. Like a mental „erectile dysfunction“ - if you *really* are in the mood it can be done, but if not there is no way to force it. (Except for some pills.) it’s not a willpower issue to begin with.

zaat 3y ago

I find it extremely naive, and I highly doubt there's lack of unsuccessful people who hold similar views. Maximal versions of the belief are actually quite fashionable from time to time, "The Secret" book for an example. In reality, you can try liking a particular food containing Coriander, but your genetics can interfere, and try as you might, it will still taste like soap. You can lie in bad every night in total silence, counting from 300 to 0 again and again, and still fail to fall a sleep in less than 40 minutes. Moreover, after you practiced and practiced to go down from 2 hours to 40 minutes, all you need is to attend one wedding or going single time to pub with friends after few months, and you are back to square one. One thing I'm in agreement with the author on - you have limited amount of willpower. Some have more, some have less, but regardless of how much you got, you will be much more successful in life if you invest it breaking barriers you can overcome and avoid fighting losing battles.

JohnBooty 3y ago
you will be much more successful in life if you invest it breaking barriers you can overcome and avoid fighting losing battles. Cheers to that. I don't see any conflict between what you wrote and what I wrote. genetics [etc.] Please, be reasonable. I said that it was valuable and powerful to realize our brains are hackable, not that it was some limitless ridiculous sci-fi ability that could rewrite or circumvent your genetic code or other hard limits. I understand that there are people who seem to believe such things, but if you re-read what I wrote (or maybe read it for the first time) I think you'll find I very clearly never hinted at such nonsense.
- zaat 3y ago
  My issue was with the sentence from the article that you have started your comment with its quote, and described as so true and so powerful. In contrast to how you perceived that sentence, it had an immediate and strong negative effect on me when I was reading it in the article, exactly because > genetics [etc.] are known to be the underlining cause for the pains and struggles experienced by many night owls struggling to cope with society where everyone is expected to be a morning bird. And just like genetics interfere with the ability of some people to go to sleep at reasonable hours, genetics have very strong influence on the possibility that with practice you will be able to teach yourself to appreciate particular foods

smeej 3y ago

Some of the best advice I've ever received is, "Don't overestimate what you can do in a day, but don't underestimate what you can do in a year, never mind a decade," and I think it's relevant to your comment and this article. We live in a "success now" culture. It's almost anathema to be willing to be bad at something long enough to become good at it. If you haven't demonstrated an aptitude for something, don't touch it. But the compounding effect of even very slight changes over years can change everything. You can't double your performance overnight. But if you get 1% better every week for 70 weeks, you can double your performance that way, and you're not even a year and a half in. So can you start sleeping an hour earlier? Not overnight, no. But can you get 1% better at it per week for a few months by practicing and succeeding at small changes? Yeah, you probably can.