If you don't do well, don't you start? — 2022 Weekly Inspiration N16

The 140th original article by Happy Ant

This article is about 2048 words, and it takes 7 minutes to read in full. Thank you for your stay.

Keywords: 100-day run

On May 6, 2022, I completed the 100-day run.

I think completion is important because it can become a personal habit. Similarly, unfinished can become a personal habit.

Just like a 100-day run, the first thing is to be willing to start running. Starting January 10, 2022, during these 100 days, complete the run for 5 kilometers per day. Most of the time I run on the Riverside Greenway, sometimes in the gym, and sometimes I trot around the playground with an umbrella; Sometimes you don't run for 5 kilometers, and sometimes you run 30 kilometers to get over it.

As long as it can be done, meaning and value will automatically come. Even if these 100 days are bumpy (basically every 10 days off), at least you can get a clear self-awareness: Very good, I do have the ability to complete the goals I set.

We choose others, but also for others to choose, everyone likes the so-called reliable people, what is reliable, reliable is used to completion.

There is a passage like this:

Someone in his forties was still doing nothing, so he ran to find a fortune teller. The fortune teller pinched his fingers and asked, "A good news, a bad news, which one do you listen to first?" "Dude said, then listen to the bad first." The fortune teller said, "The bad news is that you were poor before you were forty years old..." The brother raised an eyebrow and asked, "What about the good news?" The fortune teller said quietly, "After forty years of age, you will get used to it." ”

"Waiting" is our most common excuse: when I reach XX, I'm going to do what I want.

Except for some legal provisions that certain age groups are not allowed to do something, most of the waiting is really just an excuse.

Increasing age does not guarantee an increase in ability.

But if you always only pick what you are good at, it is easy to fall into the pit of "not doing well and not starting at all".

Here is a small suggestion for everyone: set a time period for yourself every day, during which time you will do some things that you are not good at, forcing yourself to finish these things.

When such things become a habit, you will find that the things you are not good at are gradually decreasing, and your skilled skills will gradually become more.

Key sentence: How do you develop a habit?

The process of habit formation is the process of our cerebral cortex (rational brain) constantly learning various habits, packaging the three elements of "clues| behaviors| rewards", stringing them into habit loops, and handing them over to the basal nucleus of the brain (biological brain) for use.

Where do you find the clues? The clues we usually use in life basically can't run out of the following five. The first is time, and the second is place. These two are well understood, and habits are often tied to time and place. Such as getting up early to run, walking the dog, etc.

The third is the emotional state. Do something when you're bored, do something when you're stressed, and everyone has their own habits. After a busy day in the unit, go home and push open the door and don't want to do anything, just want to throw away the bag, sit on the sofa, play with the mobile phone and watch TV for a while, the emotional state here is a very important clue.

The fourth is other people. What about other people, for example, in the early 20th century, in such a big environment, everyone did not have the habit of brushing their teeth. It's certainly much easier for people, including children, to develop the habit of brushing their teeth today than it was in the early 20th century, for the simple reason that everyone brushes.

The fifth is called what happened before. Something just happened and can often remind you that something should be done. Or the previous habit directly causes the next habit, forming a chain reaction.

Now that the clues are out, let's talk about how the reward is designed.

There are many specific forms of rewards, which can be roughly divided into two categories. One category is the reward that your act itself can bring, which we can call a natural reward. Brushing your teeth with toothpaste sweeps away the tartar membrane and the feeling of cool silk, which is a natural reward for the act itself. For example, running can make our body produce a lot of endorphins, which bring you inner peace and make you believe that you have enough energy to control your life, which is also a natural reward.

Of course, in addition to the natural rewards, you can also set some rules, additionally specifying what benefits you can get immediately after doing something, which is called the rule reward. For example, whenever I complete a milestone, I reward myself with a pair of running shoes or equipment.

Key sentence: How to change bad habits?

When you change a bad habit, don't think about suppressing it and making it disappear from your life completely. In a way, habits cannot be completely erased. Why? The reason is that a certain habit of running the basal nucleus occurs on a subconscious level. This habit is like a time bomb buried deep in the brain, and it has the potential to be activated as long as the clue is right. To defuse this time bomb, what we have to do is not to delete it, but to replace it, to find a substitute for this habit.

The right thing to do is to keep the clues and rewards on the habit loop and embed another, not-so-bad behavior into the habit loop so that you can pass the time when you're bored with this new behavior.

Specifically, it can be divided into the following steps:

The first step is habitual awareness. First of all, you have to find out what bad habits you have. Many people don't know what habits they are doing, and if you find yourself falling into the same pit often unconsciously, think about whether there is a bad habit hidden in it that you have not yet discovered.

The second step is to identify clues and rewards and draw a habit loop. Sometimes clues and rewards can't be determined at once what it is, and in this case you may have to make a written record, write down what situation you acted under each time, what you wanted to feel most at that time, do such a statistic, restore the habit circuit, and you will know what habit is doing it on you.

In the third step, after identifying the clues and rewards, you can start looking for alternatives. Because of so much awareness and so much documentation, when the clues come up again, you have a keen premonition that "well, you're going to do something stupid again." That's when you have the opportunity to intervene and force yourself to use that new option, so that your brain gradually prefers to solve problems in new ways. Stick to it for a while and the brain will get used to it very quickly. After all, the clue is still the clue, the reward is still the reward, the outer packaging has not changed, it has become just something inside, no longer a time bomb, but a relaxed and fun Easter egg.

Therefore, stealing beams and changing columns is the golden rule for changing habits.

Sunny summer

May 7, 2022

NO.2

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