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.

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.

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.

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

The technique seems valid, but I'm not really a fan of the rehashed "wait to cool down and reconsider" advice, to me it just seems like a form of emotional suppression. Of course you're going to feel differently in six hours or the next day as you return to homeostatis - that doesn't mean the flash of emotions you felt before was invalid.

I'm not suggesting you treat your colleagues like shit or get snappy over some feedback. But you also shouldn't be a suppressed, inoffensive doormat all the time. Emotions happen for a reason, the tricky part is knowing when they should be expressed and how.

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.

It's a cute idea and well told! I think the general idea is that you have a "watching" self and a "deciding" self. Perhaps like different AI agents that check each other's work.

My favorite version of this is the guy who imagines a village of dwarves in his head. When he feels annoyed or angry or whatever, he imagines the "angry dwarf" making his case in front of the dwarf counsel. "We should strike back!" Then he imagines how the rest of the dwarven counsel would respond. "Ah, but this could be chance for us to practice compassion," says the compassionate dwarf. And so on. According to him he finds this very helpful.

> This is where Virtue Garnishes come in: pre-loaded, micro-sized pieces of content

dear god not everything is content...

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.

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.