Habits
Habits are formed slowly over time through repetition of an activity. So how do we get ourselves to do things consistently?
Willpower is
“The willpower response is a reaction to an internal conflict. You want to do one thing, such as smoke a cigarette or supersize your lunch, but know you shouldn’t. Or you know you should do something, like file your taxes or go to the gym, but you’d rather do nothing.”; under prefrontal cortex
one of the most replicated findings about willpower is that it seems to be finite—that is, we only have so much and it runs out as we use it. -- We can look at willpower like a muscle—it can get exhausted by overuse, but just like our physical muscles, there are some researchers who believe we might be able to strengthen our willpower by training it.
I also found an interesting article and ted talk about how important it is to keep your goals to yourself, which I think would also be true for habit forming. Basically, it was saying that if you tell people your goals and they applaud you then you get the dopamine dump that you would normally get when you actually achieve something.
Below are some interesting quotes (mostly from my man CS Lewis) that I think apply to habits:
“Good company corrupts good character” - The Bible
“ [E]very time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before.” - CS Lewis
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”
“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”