#habit-formation

#habit-formation

Every January, millions of people make resolutions. By February, most have abandoned them. The failure rate, depending on which study you cite, hovers around 80 percent. We know this. We've lived it. Yet each year we return to the same strategies: be more specific, start smaller, find an accountability partner, track your progress. These aren't bad suggestions. But they miss something fundamental about how psychological change actually works.

Despite spending the last 15 years studying behavior change, personality development, and developing evidence-based treatments, I still feel the pull. Why? Because wouldn't it be wonderful if meaningful change were quick and easy? The idea that a single insight, habit, or system could instantly transform how we think, feel, and behave is deeply appealing, especially when we're tired and overextended (which, of course, we are as the holidays come to a close).

The question isn't whether agentic AI will change legal work. It's whether firms will change how they adopt technology. Successful adoption requires both well-designed technology and robust people-centered strategies. You can't technology your way out of habit formation challenges, and you can't adoption-strategy your way out of poorly designed tools. Most organizations are investing heavily in one while underinvesting in the other.

Around the same time, he was turning 40, so I called to wish him a happy birthday. While we were catching up, he mentioned that he'd been eating healthier and working out consistently. Then he said something that surprised me: "I had a salad for lunch today." My brother has hunted since he was a teenager. Salad was never exactly his go-to meal.

My favorite take on this perspective: Anything worth doing is worth half assing. Trying and failing at something, doing the bare minimum, or getting less done than you wanted to will almost never leave you in a worse position than if you didn't do it at all. For the sake of clarity, this does not apply to anything where half assing it will likely injure yourself or someone else. Don't half ass electrical work, good lifting form, raising children, or hostage negotiations.

Since I was little, I would repeatedly snooze my alarm clock each morning until I had to get up. The evidence on whether this makes you feel more tired is mixed, but I would get stuck in a state of sleep inertia, prolonging the period of confusion and sleepiness when you first wake up. It left me feeling anxious, and I would struggle to focus all day.

In 2023, Duolingo generated over $500 million in revenue with a deceptively simple feature at its core: a streak counter. This wasn't just any counter - it was the result of over 600 experiments conducted across four years, each one peeling back layers of human psychology to understand what truly motivates daily engagement. The numbers tell a compelling story: users who reach just a 7-day streak are 3.6 times more likely to complete their language course,

After a couple of months travelling where I didn't hold back on alcohol and carbs, I decided on radical action to get over my gym-phobia. I flew from France to Thailand, where I moved into a four-storey gym adjoined by 17 hotel rooms. I lived there for a week, taking as many classes, ice baths, saunas and scoops of protein powder as I could handle.

We usually think of the self as something we are-solid, continuous, obvious. Buddhist psychology invites us to look again: The self is not found; it is made. It's a living construction that emerges when our mind repeatedly meets certain objects, reacts strongly to them, and then weaves those reactions into a story that acts like "me." The Mechanics of the Mind In Buddhist psychology, the mind is "object-related."

This problem is urgent because I have seen too many colleagues and friends suffer serious health consequences in the name of productivity. A new research study in the UK and Australia reports that our behaviors are driven by habits and not conscious intention 65% of the time. We all understand that sustaining peak performance over time requires regular maintenance rests, but forming new habits and disrupting old habits will require intentionality, artistic vision, and a combination of diverse tools.

You've seen it on T-shirts, Instagram captions, and coffee mugs: "Good vibes only." But is it just a trendy phrase or is there real science behind the power of positive thinking? As it turns out, there is. Neuroscience shows what many of us instinctively feel: staying optimistic, practicing gratitude, and spreading kindness can do more than just lift your mood. They can actually change how your brain works, and even influence your long-term health. Let's take a closer look at how positivity affects the brain, and how you can train your mind to be more resilient, optimistic, and happier.

#619: I Lack the Patience For Other People

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