Comment by haswell

On the subject of habit change, I think the author makes some interesting points, but there’s a failure mode lurking here.

Sometimes unhealthy habits did form for a reason, but trying to understand those reasons isn’t always necessary or even helpful, and can seriously hold a person back from making positive life changes. Some habits are inherited through conditioning, and the original factors are long lost memories.

I think the potential failure mode is a kind of Learned Helplessness. Here’s this thing that I do, and I don’t understand why no matter how hard I try. If I wait to change until I understand, I might never change.

In these cases I think it’s most important to evaluate whether the habit is indeed something that I don’t want, and leave it at that while I go about making the effort to change it.

Time and time again, I’ve found that the thing stopping me from doing the thing that I know I should want to do - is thinking about it too much. It’s possible to get trapped in thought processes that go nowhere because the habit itself doesn’t actually make rational sense.

It’s often not until I’ve started to make a change that I realize why I was doing the old thing in the first place.

When the fences are internal/psychological, I think there’s more latitude and just jumping in and trying new things can be incredibly useful.

Understanding the function of unhealthy habits can absolutely be helpful, and habit replacement is most effective when you understand what you’re replacing, but don’t let a lack of understanding be a fence of its own.