Posted by blitzpoet 7 hours ago
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.
dear god not everything is content...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)