Strategy for Happiness and Behavior Change

Jollybeard

There's an interesting interview with behavioral scientist, Paul Dolan (LSE), over at Men's Health. It's about happiness and about how to evaluate our habits to see whether they are mere habits or actual happy experiences. The interview is also about how we make habits and there's one important insight offered that is pretty relevant in this community: "if you want to do something, make it easier. And if you don't want to do something, make it harder." The point is that our brains and bodies fall into routines because they're reliable and repeatable; we don't have to think about them; they are easy. Habits (bad or good) are really just routines that we carry out because they're easy to carry out. As soon as they become harder to do, we stop doing them ... at least not routinely. So Dolan's point is to make easy the things we want to become habits. Make difficult the things that we don't want to become habits or that have become bad habits already.

It's an interesting thought exercise to choose one habit that you're proud of and one that you aren't proud of and ask: what do I do that makes it easy to keep this habit? What could I change that would make the habit harder to keep?