0 1. Watch out for "false wish syndrome" without setting a flag.

When cultivating a new habit, people usually set themselves a goal and set up a banner.

However, it turns out that in most cases, at the moment you set up the flag, you have already lost.

We try to explain this behavior from a psychological point of view:

When the flag is erected, it will deepen the illusion that I can achieve my goal.

Unconsciously, "setting goals" and "accomplishing goals" were equated.

In this regard, psychologists at the University of Toronto use "false wish syndrome" to describe such people.

The so-called false wish syndrome is to mistake changing one's mood for changing oneself.

When the sign is set, sometimes the amount of dopamine secreted by the brain is similar to that when watching movies. At the same time, dopamine will drop rapidly at the moment of flag-raising, which makes most people want to relax and have some fun after flag-raising.

The trigger of this behavior is often closely related to the "moral licensing effect".

The so-called moral permission effect: moral permission is a strange trap. When we do good, we will feel good about ourselves, thus allowing ourselves to make mistakes and do evil subconsciously. "

This is terrible. For some students who try to quit sex by doing good deeds, I advise you to stop.

Otherwise, you may fall into a vicious circle of moral permission.

Only after you start doing good deeds can you really feel healthy and feel good about yourself. But when addiction comes up, under the "moral permission effect", you will not only feel that going to the brain is a terrible thing, but will indulge it, slowly corrode your rationality and eventually lead to breaking the precepts.

At the same time, the moral permission effect also occurs after you set up the flag. The reason for this result is also very simple: after the flag is established, you have an illusion of "I used to be so good", so you will let yourself make decisions through intuitive preferences and eventually lead to failure.

02. Get closer to the goal in the right way.

Ps: The banner mentioned above is usually a big goal that takes more than one or two years to achieve, while what we are talking about later is a short-term goal, which can get feedback in a short time. I hope readers can predict.

A. Stay healthy

In Emily Balcer's visual research, she discussed "Does health affect a person's judgment on the difficulty of a goal?" The conclusion is that "healthier people will find it easier to achieve their goals and exercise less."

B. Focus on the goal

Emily Balcer tees continued the experiment and divided the experimenters into two groups:

The focus reward group was told that they could only focus on the finish line and focus on the finish line. Everything around the focus should be vague and unrecognizable.

The natural control group was told to look at the surrounding scenery and pay attention to the eyes of others while achieving the goal.

The experimental results are self-evident.

I know all the reasons, but in real life, don't most people come from that natural control group? On the way to your goal, you are constantly concerned about unimportant things around you, attracted by news and entertainment information, and very concerned about other people's eyes. If you abuse this process, you will naturally be abused.

I suggest you watch Forrest Gump several times. I know you do, and you may even think it's too chicken soup. With all due respect, the person who said this movie chicken soup didn't understand this movie, and he was still a keyboard man.

C. Establishing an incentive mechanism

As of April 9, 2020, some people think that reading more articles about harm can help them quit. In fact, before I came into contact with psychological abstinence, I thought this way: if I consider the consequences more seriously, I will be more motivated to persist and naturally succeed. Although it is the difficulty of the goal itself that determines whether we can stick to it, there is also the question of whether the consequences are serious. For example, there is a "harm column" in the abstinence bar, urging us to insist on abstinence, but a discerning person knows at a glance that there is suspicion of exaggerating the consequences.

To this end, we designed a multiple-choice question:

How likely are you to be completely ED in the future?

A. exit the color bar. A passerby said: If we continue to indulge like this, the probability of complete ED is 90%.

B According to the statistical results, the probability of ED in people over 50 years old is 52%.

The result is as we expected: 80% people choose B, and people are more willing to believe those nice words than to be afraid.

This is because people naturally avoid negative and fearful information. For example, you found in the abstinence bar that "I indulged 10 years, and I actually got neurosis." You will find more people who have been addicted to 10 for more than 0 years, hoping to get the answer you want.

We come to the conclusion that knowing the injury can't motivate ourselves, because people always try to escape.

Therefore, we encourage you to establish positive feedback. People always prefer the present reward to the future punishment.

He asked himself to quit smoking for 200 days, and if he couldn't quit, he would donate money from 500 yuan. It's better to ask yourself to use 500 yuan to reward yourself with gradient when you complete small targets such as 3 days, 7 days, 15 days and 30 days.

Of course, sometimes material rewards are not very attractive. If you have the encouragement of your peers or the supervision of your elders, you will achieve your goal more easily. Psychologically, we classify supervisors as "social support". It's like if you want to do something, and your teachers and family give you both material and spiritual encouragement, you will do it better.

There are two types of social supervision:

Social constraints (if I don't do it, ta will be disappointed, and ta must think I am a useless person.

Social motivation (ta is very supportive, even if I make a small mistake, it is acceptable, because ta wants me to be better)

In this way, you will find that we actually prefer the second mode of social supervision. And this pattern is very missing in the stop color circle. It is not that our circle lacks partners who help each other and make progress together, but that it lacks a backbone who seriously spreads science and is cautious in seeking knowledge, but can blend in with the masses.

Of course, we have such a circle. If you want to join, you can trust me privately.