Willpower Hax #487: Execute by Default

This trick works for almost the reason you gave, and it will work for some people/things and not for others. It will work better for getting up because it's something you do every day. And belief is a factor (or more precisely, suspension of disbelief), because it will not work for a person who spends the 10-count thinking about it not working, or how tired they are, or anything else but imagining they'll get up at the end of the count.

That's because the actual mechanism that makes this work is something called monoidealism: having one and only one thought absorbing your nonverbal imagination. It's foundational to hypnosis, auto-suggestion and a variety of other things, including the "law of attraction". It's even used in my "clean your desk" video, although I didn't grok the theory at the time. (It's a side-effect of the set of directions I use, actually. But it can still easily fail if somebody is busy thinking "this is all bullshit" or something like that, while doing it.)

Since figuring out monoidealism (first through discussions about "suspension of disbelief" here on LW, then supplemented with client experiments and finally doing enough hypnosis research to find that there's already a word for it), I've found that I can get myself to do all sorts of things this way, with a much higher degree of consistency, even for things I used to have more trouble with.

(I have noticed one side-effect, though, which is that I sometimes hesitate to apply the trick -- which makes me realize at that point that I haven't really decided whether or not doing the thing in question is a good idea. So at that point I just fall back to my usual troubleshooting techniques to get rid of the conflicts before proceeding.)

I was most amused to read this, as I've been doing it - or, rather, a somewhat sillier version - since I was a kid.

When I was in the first few years of secondary school, I had a marvellously flamboyant drama teacher who used to start off exercises by saying aloud "a-one, a-two, a-diddly-diddly-doo". And then we'd all start, immediately, no more faffing around.

And somehow the habit got lodged in my head, and I use it - usually only mentally rather than aloud! - for things like getting out of bed or making myself get up from my computer when I'm thirsty but have got stuck reading things online rather than going to the kitchen for a drink.

Like, er, right now, actually. A-one, a-two...

This phenomenon--that it takes less much less will-power to carry out a predefined plan than to continually make decisions while acting--is well-known to athletes, especially runners. I think most people who train would agree that the hardest part of a workout is getting started, and it takes surprisingly little will-power to finish. There have been some interesting studies showing that an experienced runner maintains a constant pace on a long run--he has an nonconscious sense of the pace he will be able to maintain, which is largely independent of his current motivational state. Training books never say "run as far as you can at this pace"--this would be mentally and physically exhausting. Runners are often urged to set a pace and distance for themselves before starting the run.

From my experience there's also a long-term feedback process that affects how hard it is to start the activity. If I set myself a workout plan that is too strenuous and leaves me exhausted after each workout, then it becomes harder and harder to start, and after a while, I'm not putting my running shoes on.

So if we can generalize these lessons to other activities that normally require will-power, they would be 1.) set a plan (on whatever timescale is sensible) and follow it so you're not exerting will-power constantly, and 2.) set yourself a pace so that if you follow your plan, you don't feel exhausted afterwards--that way it will be possible to sustain the plan in the long term. Regarding (2), people have suggested enforcing a schedule like "45 minutes work, 15 minutes break", though I haven't tried this myself.

I think that by far most-powerful willpower hack of all is making oneself accountable to other people, but that's a topic for another day.

Slightly OT: Counting out loud rather than mentally seems to help for me.

I'd like some trick to get my body onto a 24-hour cycle instead of a 25-hour cycle. I only have trouble getting up in the morning because I had trouble getting to sleep the night before. If Earth had a 25-hour day, I could go to sleep when I was tired, and get up when I wasn't.

As far as I can tell, the trick is to remove willpower from the situation one way or the other. Brains are very good at doing things habitually, executing unconscious subroutines and freeing up willpower to do something else. If our supply of willpower is limited, then we should attempt to encode one or two good habits at a time, and once they are encoded we can move on to the next problem.

Speaking as someone who (literally as I type) is vainly struggling to get out of bed, I appreciate this post -- but do you happen to have any meta-willpower tricks? The techinque you described won't quite work for me, because I've realized I don't actually want to get out of bed; at best I want to want.

While we're talking about getting out of bed, try telling yourself to wiggle your toe rather than to get up completely, gets easier from there.

I read this, and some time later I started trying it.

I misremembered, so I've been counting from 1 to 10. Interesting thing is that I generally start getting up as I say the "1", or before. It seems that by the time I've decided to employ the technique, I'm actually ready to get up - I just need something to focus my mind and get out of the "monkey mind" thing that Buddhism talks about. The little bit of focus I get from deciding to count is enough to switch my brain into action.

Next: to try it for starting a work task I'm avoiding. I'll combine it with monoidealism (stopping everything else, and thinking about the task, but not doing it) then at some point deciding to do the countdown. Or the count up.

A similar trick once worked for hiccups. A friend of mine pointed at me and said "there's a trick to not hiccuping. You want to know what it is?"

I, of course, asked to know.

"Don't hiccup."

And it worked for a couple of years.

I've also done this frequently. A similar alternative is to decide that I'm going to get out of bed when the time on my digital alarm clock flips to the next minute. That's also turning over the decision to an automated process, but in this case I'm not even in control of the automated process -- I can abort the countdown from 10 if I'm really lazy, but not stop the clock. I think I find this latter method slightly more successful, though I certainly don't have any numbers on it.

This trick is commonly used for scary things that don't take much time (eg jumping off a cliff). I tend to use a 3 count for this because 10 seconds gives too long to change ones mind.

I remembered this anecdote this morning, as I lay abed - it worked. Upvote.

Interesting, I used to do almost the exact same thing a few years ago. Except I counted down from 15, and physically tapped my foot against the bed on each count.

If memory serves, I stopped this practice after messing up enough times that I realized I could sleep in a little longer with my schedule, and now I get up a full 30 minutes after actually "waking up". I think I'll reimplement this and see if it affects my sleep-in habits. (Publicly announcing something also seems to work about 60% of the time for me.)

I get up most easily when I've slept enough. If I get 8 hours of sleep, I don't even have to try getting up. I feel refreshed and am happy to get up. I'm not sure if the number of hours is 8, but from memory it seems to be around that much.

Does anyone else have the same experience?

"incredible new technique that might revolutionize my whole daily life. Today, while I know that there are discoverables with that kind of power, I also know that it usually requires beginning from firmer foundations - reports of controlled experiments, a standard theory in the field, and maybe even math."

How do you know and what are these discoverables? Evolution has produced such a kludge in the brain that I suspect, until I can get reliable evidence, that all we are going to be able to do is a bunch of useful little techniques. Until we can start doing some serious redesign.

Given the various research suggesting that our back brains make decisions before "we" know about them (admittedly rather nicely challenged by Daniel Dennett in Freedom Evolves), here's to suggest that the only real influence we have on decisions is the processed information we feed into that back brain.

In other words, we formulate a problem, feed it back, and ask, "how do I feel about this?" Back comes the decision, with no take-it-or-leave-it options. It's a done deal.

I'd be willing to bet that ANY routine, no matter what it was, makes it easier to get out of bed if you stick to it. The trick is to do something enough times (I've heard that you need to do something 11 times in a row to make it a habit) to where it becomes the default behavior, so it actually requires a small amount of work to break the habit.

It's establishing a local minimum of effort you need to apply. The absolute minimum would be staying in bed - no effort required whatsoever. But to get there you need to break the habit you've established, which requires SLIGHTLY more effort than just getting out of bed. The result being you'll stick to the habits you've set up unless you interrupt the subconscious processes that carry them out with your "free won't" (conscious thought).

Hypothesis: Do this for long enough and eventually you will start feeling noticeably more awake before finishing the count.

The difficulty in this is, of course, ensuring that one actually does get up after finishing the count. In my experience, these kinds of cheap hacks work up until the point where some other impulse just gets too strong (maybe you're really exhausted), after which the illusion is dispelled because now the "subconscious" knows that you're trying to "trick it", and won't play along in the future.

Disclaimer: Scare quotes used because of loaded terms that I don't necessarily endorse fully.

This has worked a couple times. But the other morning, I realized that I wasn't using it because it would cause me to get up. Consciously, I hate sleep deeply and consider it temporary death.

Once the plan is in motion, the final action no longer requires an effortful decision - that's the theory, anyway. And to start the plan doesn't require as much effort because I just have to think "10, 9..."

This seems to be related to Fire and Motion: once you start coding/writing, it's relatively easy to continue for the rest of the day, the only problem is to actually start.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1, code!

Speaking as someone who (literally as I type) is vainly struggling to get out of bed, I appreciate this post -- but do you happen to have any meta-willpower tricks? The techinque you described won't quite work for me, because I've realized I don't actually want to get out of bed; at best I want to want.

This reminds of this probably well known Steve Pavlina blog post, where he suggests rote learning the act of getting up as fast as possible when the alarm goes off.

The solution is to delegate the problem. Turn the whole thing over to your subconscious mind. Cut your conscious mind out of the loop.

Now how do you do this? The same way you learned any other repeatable skill. You practice until it becomes rote. Eventually your subconscious will take over and run the script on autopilot.

Now I just need to fight my akrasia to do that damn practice.

That mechanism was known long time ago. It is in part to habituation, when you have a neural circuit that works in a certain way, one action will trigger another forever until you change the circuit. Neuroplasticity allows us to create this circuits, and also to change them. Also there is the fact that the mind responds to an internal generated scenario as well as it responds to an external one, although in a lower degree. Finally, it has been demonstrated that the belief that something will cause something else in our mental state usually becomes true; it works like a placebo for mental states.

off topic;

is there any real action in seed AI today?