Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Tag: Habits

Simple Health

Spiritual Programmer, , ,

To improve your health, do the simplest thing that could possibly work. Don’t start an intricate supplement regimen or try to follow a complex set of dietary guidelines. The traveling snake oil salesman has moved online and is now a health influencer, but that doesn’t remove the quackery.

Decide on one parameter you want to track (weight, sleep, whatever) and make one simple change to your life. For weight loss, it could be preparing more meals from scratch. For sleep, it could be putting down your phone one hour before bedtime. Track your adherence to your chosen change and the tracked parameter for two weeks.

If you got results, good.

If you didn’t, either your adherence wasn’t strong because you couldn’t implement the change consistently, or the change didn’t affect the tracked parameter. Never mind. Choose another change and try again.

You Can Do One Minute

Spiritual Programmer, ,

There are two possible outcomes of this day: One is that you did no work towards your goals. And the other one is that you did.

You want every day in 2026 (and the rest of your life) to fall into the second category. The way to achieve that is to lower the bar. Yes, lower it. Decide that even one minute working towards your goals counts.

But one minute doesn’t make a difference, does it? Well, on its own, it’s still 6 hours more than nothing over a year. But the interesting thing is that once you get started on the one minute, it leads to another, and another. The hard thing about hard things is to get started. One minute counts.

Journaling

Spiritual Programmer, ,

I hope there is something you want to change in your life. If there isn’t, there are two possibilities.

Either you are completely healthy, happy, and successful (unlikely)

Or you haven’t thought about what you want to change (much more likely)

If you want to change, you need to define a goal and track your progress. The goal-setting is the easy part – in two weeks, many people will easily produce a list of New Year’s resolutions. The problem is that most of these will be the same as last year’s.

It’s the progress tracking that makes the difference. You can use habit tracking apps and all sorts of brain hacks, but the simplest and most effective is to keep a journal. Every morning, write down what you intend to do today to move closer to your goal. Every evening, write down how it went. For inspiration, read up on Benjamin Franklin’s journaling. You have a note-taking app or a piece of paper. You can start today.

Fight the Manipulation

Spiritual Programmer, , ,

You are being manipulated, and you need to fight back. Apps and websites want you to stay as long as possible, and they are employing well-researched brain-hacking tricks to make you spend more time than you intended.

TikTok is famous for taking attention-trapping to the next level, but today, the AI chatbots are moving the game up another notch. Notice the evolution of ChatGPT: First, it just gave you what you asked for. Then it started ending all answers with a friendly offer, “I can also get you…” Now they don’t offer you the option to continue; instead, they present you with an A/B choice: “I can get you A or get you B, which do you prefer?” Notice that the option to end the conversation has disappeared.

Your defense is to engage your conscious System 2 (cf. Kahneman) to set a limit. If you just let your automatic System 1 loose, you will be dragged down one rabbit hole after another.

Whenever you decide to spend some time on TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, SnapChat, Instagram, or ChatGPT, set a timer. If you are accessing on your phone, use its features to limit the time spent in each app. If you are accessing through a web browser, install a browser plugin.

You only have so much time, and evil people are out to take it from you. Fight back.

Set your Mind’s GPS

Spiritual Programmer, , ,

Did you ever set your GPS wrong? I know I have. It takes a little while, but I eventually figure out that something is wrong with the directions I am given. But if you set your mind’s GPS wrong, it can take much longer to notice.

If you are unhappy about the path of your life, you need to re-program your mind’s GPS. A simple way to do that is by saying affirmations. An affirmation is a compelling sentence that describes how you feel after reaching your goal. One of mine has been “I am happy and proud that I won the Best Speaker award.”

Design an affirmation and say it to yourself every day. You will find that it directs your mind to seek a way to reach the goal your affirmation describes. And yes, I did win the award I was looking for 😉

How to Break Bad Habits

Spiritual Programmer, , ,

There seems to be a day for breaking every bad habit. For example, today is “World No Tobacco Day.” Having one special day can be good for awareness campaigns. Actually changing habits takes much longer.

The reason we call habits “bad” is because they are working against some other goal we have. Our habits might be bad for our health, or take time away from more important things. The trick is not to focus on the habit you don’t want, but instead focus on the better result you do want.

Find Time for Some Walking

Spiritual Programmer,

You don’t have to run. But you do have to exercise a little every week. Your news feed and social media will be full of exercise tricks and gadgets, but the official recommendations are really simple: 150 minutes of moderate exercise like walking or cycling, or 75 minutes of running or similar.  

You can easily fit 150 minutes of walking into your week in 15-minute intervals. Get off the bus or train a little before your destination and walk for 15 minutes. If you do that on the way to work and on the way home, that gives you 30 minutes each work day. If you are in the office five days a week, that adds up to 150 minutes. 

If you are working from home, walk to work anyway. That means taking a 15-minute walk around the block when you start your workday, and another 15-minute walk when you end it. That has the added benefit of setting boundaries around your work time. The first walk can put you into focused “work mode”, and the second walk can allow your mind to change from work to relaxation. 

Reprogram Your Brain

Spiritual Programmer,

Are you using your brain right? As Daniel Kahneman showed, our brains have two thinking systems: A fast system and a slow system. The slow system is for carefully considering situations, and it uses a lot of energy. The fast system provides quick answers in routine situations and uses much less energy.

Our brains have evolved over thousands of years to automatically select which system to use. In every situation, the fast system gets the first try. In 98% of all cases, the fast system comes up with what it thinks is a good answer, and doesn’t even ask the slow system.

Fortunately, you can use the slow system to re-program the fast system. To change your behavior, think about a situation in advance and tell yourself what you want to happen. Your fast system might automatically say yes when your boss asks you to handle one more ticket today. Tell yourself that next time, you will say that you will do it tomorrow. Simply stating your goal reprograms your fast thinking system to select another response next time.

Talk Nicely to Yourself

Spiritual Programmer,

How do you talk to yourself? When our actions lead to bad outcomes, we blame ourselves. That is OK if it leads us to reflect on our behavior and do better next time.

But the language we use when we blame ourselves is sometimes much worse than we would ever use with other people. If a colleague breaks the build or drops a production table, we don’t call him stupid. But we might call ourselves stupid. Don’t do that. Talk to yourself at least as politely as you talk to others.

Focus on the Action

Spiritual Programmer,

You control the effort, not the results. If you want to change your life, you can take action today. There is no guarantee where your actions take you – your environment, other people and chance all play a part, too.

That is why the focus of your daily review before bed should be on the action you took today, not the results you experienced.