Can Brain Science Help Us Break Bad Habits? | The New Yorker - 0 views
-
Texts arrived with the tones of a French horn and were similarly dispatched. Soon, I was reaching for the device every time it made a sound, like Pavlov’s dog salivating when it heard a bell. This started to interfere with work and conversations. The machine had seemed like a miraculous servant, but gradually I became its slave.
-
Habits, good and bad, have long fascinated philosophers and policymakers. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, surveyed existing notions of virtue and offered this summary: “Some thinkers hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it is by instruction.” He concluded that habits were responsible. Cicero called habit “second nature,” a phrase that we still use.
-
Our minds, Wood explains, have “multiple separate but interconnected mechanisms that guide behavior.” But we are aware only of our decision-making ability—a phenomenon known as the “introspection illusion”—and that may be why we overestimate its power.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
n Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, only a quarter of the subjects were able to resist eating the marshmallow for fifteen minutes. This implies that a large majority of us lack the self-control required to succeed in life.
-
They were most successful at adopting productive behaviors not when they resolved to do better, or distracted themselves from temptation, but when they altered their environment. Instead of studying on a couch in a dorm, with a TV close by, they went to the library. They ate better when they removed junk food from the dorm refrigerator. “Successful self-control,” Wood writes, “came from essentially covering up the marshmallow.”
-
Both, too, emphasize the role of conscious effort—not in resisting habit but in analyzing it, the better to formulate a strategy for reform.
-
Wood advises us to come up with new rewards as substitutes for the ones the phone provided. I listened to music on the car radio. In the evening, instead of scrolling through tweets and e-mails, I sought out authors I’d never read. At the end of each day, I felt calmer, and free.