Applying Behavioral Psychology on Myself

If you have many things to do and you are wasting time, then you should number those things from 1 to n and assign n+1 to wasting time and then use http://random.org to generate a random number between 1 and n+1 (1 and n+1 included) to decide what you should do. This adds some excitement and often works.

Applied intermittent reinforcement results (1 month trial):

Household chores: The only time in the past month that I failed to tidy the kitchen before going to bed was two days ago, when I had a fever of 102 deg F. All other chores have 100% success rate.

Get to bed earlier: 0% success rate, alas.

I have mild ocd, habituation is used by me to overcome intrusive thoughts

I'm hoping he won't get mad at me for writing on the same topic he did so soon after his post.

It is very helpful that you wrote on the same topic you did so soon after his post. He describes public research on the these topics, and previous results. You took those results, together with suggestions in the comments, and performed a self-experiment (so close in fact that I thought you started this in response to his post). I find your summary more clearly presents the results, while his focuses on the research and I only got some of the background and results from the comments. I particularly was interested in the idea of variable rewards, which I hadn't thought to associate in a more positive (non-gambling) context.

I hope to use these in everyday life, as I have with many articles here. In fact, how would Less Wrong readers feel about a small self-help pamphlet/novella summarizing the various things posted here? I haven't encountered a very useful self-help book, although I haven't looked particularly hard either. Actually, the most results I'd gotten were from The Strategy of Conflict, which is a game theory book about deterrence. The Akrasia Tactics Review already went a decent way toward summarizing many of these.

In case anyone else wants to try the cron thing, here's what worked on Ubuntu. (Naturally you could also use a repeating timer. Here are a couple vibrating ones.)

First you want to choose a terminal editor if you haven't already. nano is supposed to be good for beginners. Unfortunately, I wasted the time necessary to learn Vim. (Click-and-type editors beat Vim handily in the editing-speed trials I've performed on myself using part of Vim's own tutorial document.) From the command line:

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

Then edit your crontab:

crontab -e

And insert the following line:

* * * * * env DISPLAY=:0 firefox /absolute/path/to/file.html

This should open file.html in Firefox every minute. Be sure to include a newline at the end of the file; that's supposed to be important. Logging in and out has sometimes jiggled things in to action for me.

Of course, every minute is only good for testing purposes. This should do every fifteen minutes from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday:

*/15 9-17 * * 1-5 env DISPLAY=:0 firefox /absolute/path/to/file.html

More docs here.

I recommend you choose a different font color and background for each distinct message you want to periodically send yourself. This helps the messages function as separate stimuli, and you can stop reading them after a while.

It might not be the specific behavioral-psych-like things you do that are doing the work here.

It might instead be focused attention on “the process” + a ritual + a sense of confidence granted by “science.”

Under this theory, you could swap out the ritual (2 minutes on/off or gummies) with any other ritual, as long as you could make yourself feel confident that it would work, and spent time visualizing and explaining how the arbitrary ritual would be effective.

For example, maybe if I’m having trouble studying on a regular schedule, I could buy a funny hat that I think of as my thinking cap. I decide that the thinking cap will make me want to study. And I do whatever explanatory/visualizing tricks I need for about an hour or two to endow the thinking cap hypothesis with an aura of reality.

Under this hypothesis, the real reason why these specific behavioral techniques are so powerful is that it’s easy for you to construct that compelling narrative, because you are a believer in science, and this seems like that.

A scientific skeptic would have low success with these techniques, but high success with techniques that have been blessed by their preferred sources of wisdom.

If true, others wanting to emulate your experiment would actually not want to just copy you, unless they found your specific ritual to seem highly compelling. Even if they did, they’d want to spend about as much time as you did on visualizing/explaining and experimenting with it. And if they didn’t like your ritual, they’d want to first search for one they find more compelling.

This sort of conditioning works best when the reward is administered within about 500 ms of the response (sorry, don't have a citation). Something to keep in mind.

That sounds like an extremely interesting process. I'll have to try that myself. Most appreciated.

Nice post, John. Please post more on those topics.

Question: not sure I understood exactly what you meant by "I started eating a gummy worm with 50% probability each time I did the chore at a pre-determined time early in the evening."

This is an interesting subject. Are there any other posts like this? My bigest flaw is procrastination :(

This is an interesting subject. Are there any other posts like this? My bigest flaw is procrastination :(

That was a damn good article!

It was short, to the point, and based on real data, and useful as well. So unlike the polite verbiage of karma whores. Even William of Ockham would have been proud of you.

Kim0+