Table of contents:
Video: Sean Young's Habits For Life - Reviews
- Young S.
- Habits for life. A scientific approach to developing sustainable habits.
- M.: Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, 2018.
40% of people quit dieting within a week, and more than half even gain weight as a result. Companies are shutting down because they cannot force customers to buy their products and services. Doctors do not always manage to convince patients to take medications, change their lifestyle or somehow take care of their health
When it comes to behavioral change, we look for simple solutions and think it's all about willpower and motivation. But humans are more complex, so a more detailed model is needed. It's easy to change character only in words. Each person has a core, a core of personality, which practically does not change during life.
Fortunately, you don't need to change your personality to achieve lasting change. It is enough just to understand the scientific background and learn how to get involved in the process that is right for you.
The author of Habits for Life, a professor of family medicine at the University of California, has identified seven psychological forces that support sustainable behavior change in any situation. The more of these forces a person includes in his behavior, the higher the probability that he will not go astray until he reaches the goal.
This method is called SCIENCE and includes:
- stairs,
- community,
- importance,
- ease,
- neurohacking,
- fascination (fascination) and
- a habit.
1. Ladder
Science shows that the chance of success is higher if you move towards your goal in small steps. But even knowing this, people fail and cannot keep what they have achieved. The point is that they do not understand how small these steps should be, and they do not have a guiding model.
It may seem that the idea of a staircase is nothing new. The principle itself is easy to understand, but it is not so easy to implement it. There's a reason: it's hard to get the thrill of planning small steps - dreaming big is much more fun.
2. Community
The scientific approach is a powerful tool. We need to take a fresh look at the power of communities and use them to bring about lasting change for ourselves and others.
3. Importance
If you want people to regularly exercise or buy your products, this action or behavior must be important to them. Everyone knows that, doesn't it? But you have to redefine the concept of importance.
4. Lightness
People often think they understand what "lightness" is, but in reality it is not. The author explains how to achieve real ease and thereby increase the likelihood of the desired behavior fixing.
5. Neurohacking
Have you heard the expression "who wants, he will achieve"? Or "if you want to change your behavior - change your way of thinking"? The concept of the power of reason over behavior is at the heart of many popular books on self-development and pop psychology. They say that a person can transform his behavior if he imagines these changes and wants to become different.
But this is not the case. Most smokers will not quit the habit just by presenting it. New Year's promises won't come true if you just convince yourself that this year will be special.
In fact, the opposite is true: you need to change the actions, and the mind will tighten: the brain falls for this trick and begins to imagine that change is possible. Neurohacking is a series of techniques that will rewire the brain and help bring about positive, sustainable change.
6. Fascination
How do you make something so attractive that people keep doing it? Gamification is popular today, which is based on the idea that giving people rewards will make them want to keep doing some activity. This method only works when it is based on psychology.
7. Habit
The human brain strives for efficiency. It is designed in such a way that little mental effort is sufficient for action. If you constantly - even unconsciously - see, hear and feel something, the brain will store this information and will quickly and without thinking recognize and restore it.
If you do something over and over again, for example, go to work on the same route from day to day, the brain will learn this and there will be no need to remember how to get to the place.
Many people feel that, despite all their efforts, they cannot achieve lasting changes, they are unable to take life into their own hands.
