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VAuroch comments on Open thread, Sept. 29 - Oct.5, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have had the loose intuition for a while that I don't form habits in the sense that other people describe habits; doing something daily or more doesn't reduce the cognitive load in doing it, even after maintaining the pattern for >10 months with minor deviations (this has been true of my Soylent Orange diet). Additionally, even when I have a pattern of behavior that has kept up consistently for >1 year, less than a week of skipping it is enough to destroy all my inertia for that "habit" (this was my experience with Anki).
Two questions: Does this seem like a genuine significant discrepancy from baseline, and has anyone else experienced something like it?
Not being able to form certain kinds of habits sounds plausible to me. When I stopped wearing retainers it was as though I had never had them. I never even thought about putting them in again.
Not having habits sounds a bit impossible to me. A habit is just a way of doing things consistently and without thinking about it. For example, you probably button your shirt up the same way every time. You probably have some quirks in how you walk or sit that you couldn't get rid of easily. If you play an instrument, you almost certainly have habits in how you play notes and phrases that would take time to relearn. Have you done any public speaking training? If not, when you talk in front of an audience you probably use filler words like "and, so, um, like" and it usually takes time to get rid of those. Do you not do any of these things?
For the specific things you mentioned? No, neither, n/a, and insufficient data for meaningful answer; definitely have filler but unclear whether the distribution of that filler is at all consistent.
For most things, I do have ways I do things consistently but I am specifically thinking about it at the time. So, to use the example of making Soylent Orange again: there is a particular sequence of putting ingredients into the blender that seems to make it mix the easiest and be completed the fastest (sunflower seeds first, then marmite + spinach leaves to wipe the marmite off the measuring spoon, then flour/bananas before OJ/milk). I usually follow this pattern, but if my attention wanders from it, often deviate from it in an unpredictable way, skipping and/or re-arranging steps, and when I regain focus have to basically review all my actions since I entered the kitchen to figure out which things I've done and in what order and whether I've missed any steps and whether this will put it at risk for a spill.
None of your Soylent making procedure sounds unusual to me. Not being able to form procedural habits of a certain kind (or not choosing to) are entirely possible.
What I am wondering is if you are lacking muscle memory, which many physical habits are an instance of. Perhaps I'm just using the word "habit" more inclusive way than you are, I'm classifying things as habits that you wouldn't. Do you think that is the case? Not having muscle memory sounds impossible to me - if you can walk and have a conversation at the same time then you have muscle memory (basically the ability to put something in auto-pilot).
If you can play any reasonably complicated piece of music then you have muscle memory.
If you consistently make the same mistakes when playing a sport and have a least a tiny bit of difficulty correcting them then you have muscle memory.
Do you have muscle memory?
I do have muscle memory, at least for basic things. I do not think that should be lumped in with habits, for the most part.
Not all habits are muscle memory, and not all instances of muscle memory are habits. But a lot of habits are muscle memory: crossing your legs when you sit, leaning on one leg when you stand, lip biting, cracking knuckles to name a few things.
It seems to me that a habit must be a bit more complex than Anki reviews or fixing Soylent to notice the difference in reduced cognitive load. Habits dying easily sounds pretty normal to me unless they're intrinsically fun or there's a strong immediate incentive.
I've had a slightly different kind of problem with habits. Since I started working full time it seems I can't form or maintain habits outside of work. My free time has become quite chaotic. I still get some things done but it seems never the same way or the same order. My work has become quite habitual and I don't have to put effort into thinking about what to do next most of the time. The difference in cognitive load is huge, I used to be exhausted every day after work and now my energy levels are just fine.
If it wasn't clear: Soylent Orange is more complex than Soylent itself; it runs several ingredients through a blender, and takes more effort than cooking some basic meals. And going from 'hungry' -> 'eat' is something I have to specifically exert mental effort to do, so while this has been simpler and less effortful than my previous diet (and healthier), it has still been a significant distraction.
I didn't seem to develop habits at my most recent job, either, but that lasted all of four months before they lost the budget for my position, so that's not necessarily conclusive.
Do you have any habits? How did you form them? Do you think you could deliberately form a bad habit?
I think the success rate for most attempts at self-initiated personal change is poor, (think New Years resolutions, quitting smoking), although the expected value from trying is often still good. Despite this, the habit model seems to describe most people quite well: The levers you can pull are less powerful than the levers you can't (or won't).
I've had good luck with the very behaviorist "habit formation is learning a cue-behavior-outcome relationship" model of thinking about habits. Is there a cue (to deploy the learned response)? Is there an outcome that reinforces the behavior?
I've had some habits stick and not stick, and the ones that stuck had "more going for them" than just being repeated every day.
As far as I can tell, no, I have no habits. There are even some human-standard habits (notably "when hungry, eat") that I definitely do not have. The closest I get is default behavior when bored (which could be summarized as simple 'Internet.', but I think actually cashes out closer to 'relentlessly seek out new things', for which Internet is usually the easiest method.)
EDIT: In that model of habit-forming, the discrepancy is probably in the 'outcome' step. I think I might disassociate sufficiently from my autonomic responses to stimuli that they don't meaningfully affect habit formation.
Anki is structured in a way that it doesn't ask you the same questions today that it asks you yesterday. That makes habit building harder.
When it comes to habit building, the structure also matters. If you do 20 minutes Anki every day after waking up that's more likely to become a stable habit than when you do it at random times each day.
To add a random data point I have a similar experience. I've found setting dailies on habitrpg helps a bit.
I have found several methods that help manage my routine (HabitRPG was one), but they are usually short-term solutions and never seem to actually ingrain habits in the sense of behaviors which don't require conscious organization/maintenance.