Accountability

Today, I did not bring my phone to lectures–this ended up cutting my phone usage by around an hour. Overall, I felt pretty accomplished because I managed to finally spend some substantial time on leetcode, which I haven’t been able to do in a while.

I also got to relax a lot!

Productive Thought

Yesterday, I began thinking more specifically about breaking my bad habits. I decided that instead of just relying on my own intuition, I should read some material on habit formation instead.

One main takeaway is that habits are often more of a reactionary symptom to a cue/cause rather than a solitary effect–today, whenever I felt the urge to fall back into a bad habit, I tried to pause and analyze what was going on.

It appears to me that our reactionary actions are often more an attempt to shy away from discomfort–our conscious actions are then attempts to go towards some desirable goal. For example, in order to defeat my bad habits, perhaps I should look to new ways to avoid discomfort rather than blatantly just stop the bad habit. We’ve all been in that situation where we promise ourselves we’ll quit Netflix only to start watching YouTube, or to stop eating out only to start splurging on boba. We’re all complex humans–assuming that our actions are simple probably will have little long-term impact on ourselves.

I think it’s really interesting that our default/instinctive actions can be possibly reprogrammed. It’s almost as if we have some internal programs going on–given an input, we will have a quick output in response. And if we focus on trying to change the output with minor, surface-level tweaks, our new output would probably be hacked-together, similar versions of its past self. Rather, taking a deeper dive into the code base could provide the solution we’re all looking for–more work in the short-term, but inarguably beats the pain of continuously hacking together solutions over the long-term.

In conclusion, I’m a complex human being, you’re a complex human being, everyone’s a complex human being–perhaps it’s time to treat even simple actions as results of a complex system.