Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.
This is an inversion of the 3rd Law of Behavior Change: make it difficult. If you consistently struggle to maintain your plans, consider making your bad habits harder to maintain by using a technique psychologists call a commitment device.
A COMMITMENT DEVICE: is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind you to good habits, and restrict you from bad ones.
There are many ways to create a commitment device.
- You can limit your screen time by setting app usage restrictions on your phone.
- If you're trying to save money, you could set up automatic transfers from your checking to your savings account.
- To ensure you exercise regularly, you could schedule workout sessions with a friend, making it harder to cancel.
- You can purchase an outlet timer, an adapter that you can plug in between your internet router and the power outlet. At 10 p.m. each night, the outlet timer will cut off the power to the router. When the internet goes off, everyone will know it is time to go to bed.
WHY IT MATTERS: Commitment devices are useful because they enable you to take advantage of good intentions before you can fall victim to temptation.
GO DEEPER: The key is to change the task such that it requires more work to get out of the good habit than to get started on it.
- If you're eager to learn a new language, purchase a subscription to a language learning app, which is a financial commitment.
- If you're inspired to read more books, join a book club where you'll be expected to read a specific book each month.
Commitment devices increase the odds that you’ll do the right thing in the future by making bad habits difficult in the present.
More tomorrow,
Hunter