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Posted by blitzpoet 7 hours ago

Virtue garnish: A mental hack to short-circuit bad habits(ledgeroflife.blog)
65 points | 32 comments
monodeldiablo 3 hours ago|
This is just repackaged cognitive or dialectical behavioral therapy, with cutesy names like "whisper" and "virtue garnish" to make it seem novel. But if it speaks to people, I see no harm in that.

If you're genuinely interested in changing your habits, I recommend investigating these therapies, as they're backed by decades of research and results.

And if you want to tune in to these "whispers" in the first place, there's really no substitute for meditation and mindfulness practice.

qmmmur 6 minutes ago||
> This is where Virtue Garnishes come in: pre-loaded, micro-sized pieces of content

dear god not everything is content...

jbotz 4 hours ago||
That "gap between stimulus and response" is in some circles known as "mindfulness". And meditation is an effective exercise for building and strengthening that gap.
mpnsk1 3 hours ago|
That seems to fly over a lot of heads. Anyone who actually meditated will tell you the process of fixing yourself through meditation is painstakingly slow, you mostly become aware of how your mind does not do what it is supposed to, and if you stop meditating you quickly lose all progress.

What the post describes is essentially some form of micro journaling to build a cached hashmap of the thought patterns you want your mind to have.

nico 5 hours ago||
It’s pretty good advice

But the title is misleading. Sure, once you’ve built the habit of breaking bad habits, it will take 3 seconds each time. However, it will take quite a bit to build that habit

The article references Dale Carnegie. Related to that, and with much better exercises to build habits, I’d recommend the book The Charisma Myth. It addresses the type of situations mentioned in the article and a lot more, all with great step by step, habit-building exercises on each chapter

praptak 1 hour ago||
This says you can't fix what you don't notice. This is obviously true. But then it jumps to the moment where you jot the impulse down. There's a gap here - to write something down you gotta notice it first too.

Anyone working with awareness and attention will probably tell you the missing components: intention and positive reinforcement. You can't directly make your awareness notice things. You can do two things which work indirectly. The first is cultivating intention. Remind yourself to notice your mental states whenever your conscious mind happens to remember to. Consciously check in on your mental state - again, whenever your conscious mind remembers to. This primes awareness - it tends to notice things that you previously consciously focused on.

The second component is positive reinforcement. Whenever your awareness works by drawing your attention to the trigger ("whisper"), pat yourself mentally on the back. This trains your awareness to notice this more often.

blitzpoet 1 minute ago|
Creator here. Good points. Ledger of Life actually does try to address intention and positive reinforcement, though it's not explicit. The journal encourages keeping it on you and logging whispers in real time, which requires consciously priming yourself to notice (that's the intention part). The weekly review also helps set clear intentions for what to watch for the next week.

As for positive reinforcement, I agree — it’s not just about knowing when to decompress or apply a virtue garnish, but also about rewarding yourself for noticing at all. That’s something that could be highlighted more: just catching a whisper is a success worth a mental pat on the back. Thanks for pointing out that gap.

mpnsk1 3 hours ago||
What I like about this approach is that it goes back to looking at what your problems actually are. A lot of self help and social media sells you virtues in the form of solutions looking for a problem. It makes people go around with hammers of virtue seeing everything as a viceful nail they can hammer down. And of course they see the nail in other people first.
blitzpoet 5 hours ago||
I find the military saying "pain is weakness leaving the body" effective for workouts. The slogan is short and sticky, and I tend to exercise harder when I think of it.
citizenpaul 5 hours ago||
Sometimes its cartilage leaving the body.
zhivota 4 hours ago||
Hah yes or broken down muscle tissue in the case of rhabdomyolysis.

As I've gotten older I've had to discard this kind of maximalist thinking with exercise and think of every workout as just a smidge more than the last, after an appropriate period of rest and recovery.

leptons 4 hours ago||
That's the kind of toxic masculinity platitude that causes men to not seek medical help when they are in pain, which causes worse outcomes for things that are preventable.
seanhunter 2 hours ago||
In what sense is the platitude you’re supposed to think of in crucial moments a garnish? “Garnish” has two meanings: Firstly a decoration or embellishment, especially for food. Secondly it can mean to deduct something (eg garnish someone’s wages to pay child maintenance or a fine of some kind). So is the dumbass saying supposed to be a decoration for your virtue or is it supposed to be reducing your virtue?

I certainly feel that the overall quality of hackernews has been garnished by having this drivel on the front page. Unfortunately in the second sense of the word, not the first.

evertedsphere 1 hour ago||
Another day, another LLM-generated blog post on the front page about a deeply human topic. Do others not detect the tells, or do you not care?

(And, no, there is no "respond to content rather than style" issue here. There is no meaningful content here. That would be the prompt, but of course the author doesn't want to just post that.)

scootz1 45 minutes ago|
Immediately noticed from the style of writing and the clearly AI illustrations. The blog is brand new and no links go to anywhere, the Github, LinkedIn and Twitter links are circular. Plus the content is just rehashed behavioural therapy concepts with different wording.
jcmeyrignac 1 hour ago|
Sorry, but these tricks cannot work on aphantasic people (I'm one of them), since they cannot visualize.
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