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You Can’t Simply Decide to Be a Different Person

Five takeaways:

1. For generations, the agreed-upon scientific understanding of human habit forming (for instance: becoming a habitual runner) was that it was all about attitude. If you wanted to be a runner badly enough, you would simply become one. New research says it is more complicated than that– that habit forming is affected “by some combination of heredity, culture, and environment.”
2. That combination of heredity, culture, and environment is boiled down in the article to a phrase: “Trait self-control” – and everyone’s trait self-control is different. Someone who can wake up at 4:30am to run every morning has higher trait self-control and is not going to be as easily distracted by common factors, be they leisurely, work-related, or otherwise, that keep them from that habit.
3. Research shows that forming new habits as an adult, while difficult, is possible– and very much a measure of altering life conditions to enable a habit to become second nature.
4. Studies prove that people who live closer to gyms tend to work out more, just as people who live closer to good grocery stores tend to eat more vegetables. If you want to make a habit second nature, you should do as best you can to eliminate the conditions in your life that form barriers to performing that goal on a daily basis.
5. Obviously eliminating certain conditions in one’s life is not an easy thing to do- this is why it is important to be realistic in forming new habits, and to be forgiving of yourself when the pickup is slower than desired. Those who demonize themselves for not picking up a habit are more likely to drop the pursuit entirely, whereas people who make slower, incremental progress are more likely to stick to habits until they are indeed second nature.

From Amanda Mull at The Atlantic:
Read the whole story.

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