Habit, by Wendy Wood (feat. audio clip)

While cleaning up my Naver cafe and blog,

I happened to notice that Naver runs an audiobook service.

And it offers a "one book a day" free audio service.  

This is a book I bought used at Aladin and have been letting ripen for a year.

So I've been listening to it on loop for two hours now. 

audioclip.naver.com/audiobooks/6B1265756F

Messages that stuck with me

That feeling that things are running on their own, out of your hands. From the moment you open your eyes until you reach the gym, your mind (conscious self) stays crushed under mental agony and starts finding ten thousand reasons not to go. You have to keep resisting the urge to quit.

That's why continuation is more remarkable than starting. Everyday action patterns: don't think, just act. Through this, you create habits (non-conscious self) that can move immediately and automatically. And that habit ultimately starts to shape your life.

The cause of failure in continuing lies in the paradox of desire. Just like you're told "don't think of an elephant" and then you think of an elephant, the conscious self turns even yesterday's resolution - even that desirable action - into an agonizing choice. Even so, trying to resist inertia on willpower alone is just too hard. So there's no need to feel hopeless about repeatedly failing. 

Like suddenly thinking about vacation while exercising, most of the things we do (about 43% of a day's actions) are the result of habit (non-conscious self) - where there's no link between awareness and action. The key thing to remember here is that what matters isn't "what action is a habit" but "how to act so it becomes a habit."

To resist temptation, to build new habits, changes to your situation matter more than self-control or willpower.
Rather than exploiting yourself, don't create the situations where you could break. Many people try to stave off temptation in front of the marshmallow using distraction tactics - deliberately thinking of other things. But that's extremely temporary, and in daily life (as opposed to a lab), you'd have to do it countless times, which is impossible. 
You need a situation-control strategy. For example, go to a library, or throw out the cake - deliberately avoid it, or make sure the situation doesn't arise in the first place. Experiments show that people who resist temptation or build new habits mostly don't "endure A," they do "B instead of A." What's more, they didn't consciously fight back with self-control. They didn't even feel the need to endure A. They acted as if A simply wasn't in front of them in the first place. They didn't feel the need to experience abstinence.

How did they build good habits without clinging to abstinence? They said they just exercised without really thinking about it. They exercised at the same time in the same place every day. They could achieve small accomplishments through exercise without any real effort. They didn't clench their teeth. They say "the first kilometer can be hard. The last kilometer can be hard." But once they'd started, they didn't deliberate about whether to stop, or whether their body was uncomfortable. They don't think much about what they're doing. They don't make decisions. Once formed, a habit eases your suffering. They acted without any particular thought. Every night they went to bed at the same time, and every morning they got up at the same time. They didn't torture themselves with "one more game," "just one more Twitter scroll." For them, sleep was not an inner conflict.  

People with excellent self-control always achieve their goals through automation, not struggle. They don't clench their teeth to reach their goal. They repeat specific actions at the same time in the same place. They act without thinking, and once they start, they don't deliberate. Without any notable effort, they win small successes day after day. They don't struggle.  

Self-control doesn't mean willpower or asceticism. It just means being more adept at automation. Self-control generally gets better as we go through the process of forming and breaking habits. Not through abstinence, patience, and grit - but by building and maintaining stable action patterns, we can appropriately control our self-control. 

People with excellent self-control don't experience undesirable urges. 
They know how to form habits by repeating the same thing at the same time and place. They don't create the situations where they could break. 

Additional things I remember 

1. At the right spot, friction - psychological or physical distance (placement) matters. (e.g., in an apartment, the unit at the far end gets the most face-to-face traffic) 

2. Overlapping, go for two birds with one stone! (e.g., not stand-alone actions - get the side-benefit) 

3. Immediate reward, and ideally, rather than an external reward, an internalized reward you get from the process itself.

4. Gamification - the reward itself isn't the point; the key is "uncertain reward." (e.g., the running partner you only occasionally run into during a run, known only to you)

5. Until when? The moment it no longer occurs to you that "I should do this" is the moment the habit has formed. Until then, repetition is needed.