Many Paths.

It’s slow going but I’m finding some direction. Each decision I make reinforces a path. It’s opportunity cost but supercharged, in that one decision can rule out other options, but by choosing something over another in reinforces that behavior to the brain. The question isn’t how to have pure willpower to do make the right decisions, although that is certainly a part of it, the question is how to shape my life to incentive the right decisions.

If I refuse to by sweets, it’s much easier to have willpower at the grocery store than it is downstream at my house. Maybe a technique will be finding the strongest link in the chain and using that to break from a cycle. If I work down the chain until I reach the weakest link, then I’m already at a point where my willpower needs to be strongest.

I guess the first step is finding when it’s easiest not to do something. But you also have to rule out activities that you can’t do all the time. So that might mean stacking activities or taking actions earlier that make it hard or impossible to carry through with a bad habit. I think this is why routines can be really effective for me — they stack my schedule and build my willpower making it easier to avoid doing what I know is not good for me or what I want for myself.