Habit Pairs & Poka-Yokes
There’s a fair amount of effort required to instigate change in our lives, and maintaining change over time often requires additional mental effort.
Some behavioral changes stick because there are no alternatives, or because they’re latently enjoyable, but many adjustments of this kind require conscious, deliberative motivation, and that motivation is psychologically costly.
Research has demonstrated that what’s often called “pairing” or “stacking” can help us stick to new habits after their novelty has worn off, as it reduces the overall cognitive cost of both remembering to integrate these behaviors into our lives, and actually performing them.
What pairing means in practice is attaching a new habit to an existing habit: I’ll take the medicine I was prescribed when I eat lunch each day, or I’ll read fiction for twenty minutes every night right before I go to sleep.
Existing habits are already pinned to particular moments in our lives, so tying these new habits to those extant milestones saves us the energy we would typically expend just trying to integrate them into everything else we do each day.
This can also help reduce potential frictions that are associated with some habits for some people.
I personally find that having the space and necessary equipment to work out at home means I work out every single day, whereas if I have to get myself to another location to do the same, I more often skip days.
The opposite may be true for you. Whatever the specifics, though, the idea is to figure out what’s allowing your brain to justify away sustained maintenance of positive habits, and to get rid of those excuse-triggers whenever possible.
This type of friction-reduction is an example of what you might call a “forcing function,” “behavior-shaping constraint,” or “poka-yoke”—the latter of which is a Japanese term that means, roughly, “mistake-proofing.”
Poka-yoke was popularized for its success in Toyota’s vehicle production lines.
The idea was that they would proactively make adjustments, even if just small ones, to their machinery and systems to correct for potential human errors before they could become persistent problems.
If there was a small chance—let’s say 1 in 10,000—that the human operator of a machine would hit the wrong button at some point during their work day, poka-yoke might prescribe a change to the layout of the buttons, better labeling on the button in question, or swapping in a switch instead of a button for that particular purpose.
In essence, this is a recognition that even though we humans can learn and get better at things, it makes sense to provide us with rails to run on, at times, so that we don’t flub important decisions or tasks.
Fool-proofing our habit-building systems, then, may mean investing in a few small pieces of workout gear so that the journey to the gym doesn’t serve as an excuse to miss our daily workout. It may also mean not keeping unhealthy snacks at home, if we know that we’ll eat them if they’re available, despite our best intentions to eat more healthily.
I’ve use a lot of health-related examples here, because statistically, they’re some of the most difficult habits to introduce and stick with over time. But this applies to any kind of habit, from reading more books to learning a new language, from writing every day to being more outwardly appreciative of the people in your life.
Something I’ve noticed, too, is that these sorts of efforts tend to compound over time.
Successfully integrating new habits is a muscle that can be developed, and the process of rooting out frictions, identifying existing habits to which we might attach new ones, and tweaking our environments to make those habits work better, becomes second-nature after doing so a few times.
That doesn’t mean all new habits will stick immediately, and it doesn’t mean those habits will necessarily take us where we hope to go.
But who we become is in many ways a consequence of all the small things we do each day.
Having a better sense of how those small things fit together, what makes them sustainable, and awareness of our ability to swap them in and out if we choose to do so grants us more control over our eventual outcomes.
—
If you found some value in this essay, and if you’re in the financial position to do so, consider buying me a coffee.
In early 2016, I was fortunate to participate in a (I think it was the first?) NASASocial event, which allowed non-government, non-science-professional people like myself to tour NASA sites that usually aren’t open to the public. It was an absolute blast—I toured the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and saw some ridiculously big rocket-building and rocket-testing infrastructure.
Projects
This week on Brain Lenses I published an essay about Benford’s Law of Controversy, and a podcast episode about Risk Perception.
Last week’s episode of Let’s Know Things was about the recent Twitter Bitcoin Scam, when all those celebrity/politician/brand accounts were hacked.
I mentioned last week that I redesigned the Exile Lifestyle site, and now the about page and such have been updated, as well. Please let me know if you notice any typos or whatnot!
Next up is my author/project page :)
Another big ol’ science building at the Stennis Space Center.
Interesting & Useful
Some neat things:
Timelapse of Two Months on an Icebreaker(interesting, exploratory video)
Manufacturing Process of a Glass Bottle(surprisingly meditative video)
The Flying Train(video shot in 1902 from a suspended train in Germany)
CIA Lacing(how to tie your shoelaces to send hidden-in-view messages)
Ravenous Frogs & Surprised Bears(adorable ceramic artworks)
For more interesting things of this kind, pop on over to Curiosity Gadget.
Outro
Habits have been on my mind, of late, as I’ve been reading (and hearing) more about how people’s lives are changing as the world changes around them, while doing my best to maintain my own state of healthful equilibrium despite all the uncertainty, pain, and discomfort in the world right now.
I didn’t receive any messages meant to be shared in this newsletter this past week, but folks who wrote to me privately have been overall concerned and off-kilter, but also finding their feet (or attempting to), exploring new possibilities, and rebuilding their lives using slightly—or dramatically—different blueprints than before.
Which I think is probably prudent, for most of us, whatever the specifics of our individual circumstances. Shifts in the world around us can be opportunities, if we allow them to be. Not all forcing functions are planned, but they are all potentially valuable, depending on how we approach and choose to perceive them.
Speaking of which: if you’re having a hard time right now, if you’re not feeling capable of doing much more than going through the motions and just making it through the day—you’re not alone, you’re not failing, and this isn’t forever. I’m rooting for you.
If you want to vent/share/say hello to a stranger from the internet, tell me how things are going in your neck of the woods, or tell me about something interesting you learned recently, I’m here, and I respond to every message I get.
Please feel free to reach out by responding to this newsletter, or at colin@exilelifestyle.com.
—
You can also say howdy via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or something you built after learning how to code for free.
If you’re finding some value in what I’m doing here, consider supporting my work by becoming a patron of my writing or my news analysis podcast, buying one of my books, or subscribing to Brain Lenses. You can also buy me a coffee if you’d like.
An interactive map of all the (known) satellites orbiting Earth.