Apart from what @[email protected] said, it’s also important to understand how a human brain works.
Massively oversimplifying, you have a “primate” brain, good at complex and novel things like logic, casuality, motivation etc; and a “reptile” brain, good at just keeping you alive by repeating the same thing over and over. Crucially, the primate brain takes up a lot of energy and other resources when it works, so your reptile brain will shut it down wherever possible. The trick is to use your primate brain to form habits by repetition, which the reptile brain will pick up, because that’s literally the only thing it’s good at.
To form a (good) habit, you need three things: first, motivation. You need to understand why doing some action is good for you. Second, a trigger - some concrete event that “breaks the flow” of your life, e.g waking up, coming home from work, or just a loud alarm you set on your phone; this is needed for your reptile brain to wake up your primate brain so that it could use the motivation you have to force your body to do something. Third (and this is the hard part) repetition. If you force yourself to do the action every time a trigger occurs, your reptile brain will eventually start catching on. Remember, it is wired to simply repeat what you have been doing before, because you’ve survived up until now so it must be a good thing to do. This can take different amounts of repititions depending on various facrors, somewhere between dozens and hundreds. After that, you will start doing the action almost automatically when the trigger happens.
E.g. I exercise when I take a break from work in the middle of the day. To do that, I forced myself to do exercise whenever I took a break for like a month. Now I get this natural urge to do push-ups when I stand up from my table :)
Apart from what @[email protected] said, it’s also important to understand how a human brain works.
Massively oversimplifying, you have a “primate” brain, good at complex and novel things like logic, casuality, motivation etc; and a “reptile” brain, good at just keeping you alive by repeating the same thing over and over. Crucially, the primate brain takes up a lot of energy and other resources when it works, so your reptile brain will shut it down wherever possible. The trick is to use your primate brain to form habits by repetition, which the reptile brain will pick up, because that’s literally the only thing it’s good at.
To form a (good) habit, you need three things: first, motivation. You need to understand why doing some action is good for you. Second, a trigger - some concrete event that “breaks the flow” of your life, e.g waking up, coming home from work, or just a loud alarm you set on your phone; this is needed for your reptile brain to wake up your primate brain so that it could use the motivation you have to force your body to do something. Third (and this is the hard part) repetition. If you force yourself to do the action every time a trigger occurs, your reptile brain will eventually start catching on. Remember, it is wired to simply repeat what you have been doing before, because you’ve survived up until now so it must be a good thing to do. This can take different amounts of repititions depending on various facrors, somewhere between dozens and hundreds. After that, you will start doing the action almost automatically when the trigger happens.
E.g. I exercise when I take a break from work in the middle of the day. To do that, I forced myself to do exercise whenever I took a break for like a month. Now I get this natural urge to do push-ups when I stand up from my table :)
Yeah, the “reptile brain” vs “primate brain” is 1960’s science. And disproven. I wish people would stop saying it.
Not only that but difficulty building habits is literally a symptom of ADHD.
Call it what you want, the man has now a craving for push-ups
I stand corrected.