Source: [[Watch These 39 Minutes If You Want To Live To 200+]]
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To push the persona strategy from [[Negative habits]] further...
On top of identifying personas and formulating algorithmic rules to automate decisions, you can combine that with a journaling habit of logging the trade-offs you willingly accept before listening to a persona suggesting a 'bad' decision.
Another interesting idea to fight lack of willpower is to list all the clever excuses each persona usually makes up, and to build a Q&A-style cheat sheet to answer these lines of internal dialogue.
This last strategy is very similar to what [[Allen Carr]] is doing with his book to help people quit smoking or drinking. Personally as a reformed alcoholic, it was very helpful to discover clever arguments able to shut down all my not-so-clever excuses for having a drink.
So, behavioural change can be summed up as follow:
- Identify negative patterns
- Isolate destructive personas at the root of vicious internal dialogue
- Write down a cheat sheet to destroy every clever excuse you can think of
- Formulate algorithmic rules to remove any decision-making on your end
- Setup your environment to minimize friction and temptation
- Make trade-off obvious
=> The cheat sheet is effective vs [[Willpower depletion]] as when you lack willpower there is no way you'll be able to reason properly
=> When low on willpower, we go on autopilot so we want our environment to favor healthy behaviours (cf. [[Availability Bias]])