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pnrjulius comments on Action and habit - Less Wrong
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Very interesting post: but I wonder what counts as a 'habit'. 'Getting up at 5am for swimming three times a week' is very different to 'eating healthily', and I think they need to be distinguished. The first sort is more specific and rigid: you know WHAT you're meant to do and (more importantly?) you know WHEN you've failed to hit it.
As an example of these two kinds of habit:
I have tried to cut down drinking by 'drinking less' or 'only drinking when it's a particularly special occasion', and within weeks this went back to default of 'drinking when I wanted'. Ditto with 'eating less meat', 'eating healthier food' etc.
On the other hand, I have also had times of quite happily not drinking AT ALL, or not eating meat AT ALL: within a few weeks, I get to a point where I'm quite content with this, and only start drinking or eating meat because I've reached the end of the intended time of 'fasting' or because of more external events.
Now, I'm not sure whether the latter sort of habit is actually more sustainable or just easier to sustain right at the start - or possibly it depends on the purpose. For me, the absolute terms make the system feel external: I can't think my way round it and make excuses on individual cases.
Other people have the same experience?
It's about ten times easier to become vegetarian than it is to reduce your consumption of meat. Becoming vegetarian means refusing meat every time no matter what, and you can pretty much manage that from day one. Reducing your meat consumption means somehow judging how much meat you're eating and coming up with an idea of how low you want it to go, and pretty soon you're just fudging all the figures and eating as much as you were anyway.
Likewise, I tried for a long time to "reduce my soda drinking" and could not achieve this. Now I have switched to "sucralose-based sodas only" and I've been able to do it remarkably well.