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emr comments on Open thread, Jan. 12 - Jan. 18, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Gondolinian 12 January 2015 12:39AM

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Comment author: tog 12 January 2015 06:20:02PM *  4 points [-]

Random unsolicited advice:

Here’s a self-improvement tip that I’ve come up with and found helpful. It works particularly well with bad habits, which are hard to fix using other self-improvement techniques as they’re often unconscious. To take one example, it’s helped improve my posture significantly.

1) List your bad habits. This is a valuable exercise in its own right! Examples might include bad posture (or, more concretely, crossing your legs), mumbling, vehicular manslaughter, or something you often forget to do.

2) Get in the habit of noticing when they occur, even if it’s after the fact. You can regularly try remembering whether they have at a convenient time for you, such as at lunch or in the evening. Ideally you should try to notice them soon after they occur however, for reasons that will become clear.

3) Come up with a punishment. The point of this is not to create an incentive not to lapse (you could experiment with that, but I’m not sure whether it will work, as bad habits are rarely consciously chosen). Instead, it’s to train yourself by Pavlovian conditioning - training "system one", in Daniel Kahneman’s terms. Examples of punishments would be literally slapping yourself on the wrist, pinching yourself, or costing your HabitRPG character health points (see https://habitrpg.com/ ).

Comment author: emr 14 January 2015 02:30:17AM 2 points [-]

How long have you been using this?

Comment author: tog 15 January 2015 10:08:49AM 0 points [-]

Just under a year, and I've been using it for posture (a really tough habit to break, at least for me), so I have a good bit of data.

Comment author: bbleeker 16 January 2015 01:09:18PM *  2 points [-]

If the problem is bad posture while sitting at the computer, you could try removing your chair's back and armrests. Once I learned how to sit right (with Alexander technique), I discovered that back and armrests are like magnets for my body, and they also make it quite easy to sit in a bad posture for a long time before noticing. Without that support though, a bad posture become uncomfortable much faster, and I soon notice and straighten up.