About making things a habit

"the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken" - Warren Buffet.

quote favorite gua sejak tingkat 1 -- sempet digantikan posisinya oleh quote "Maktub" dari buku Alchemist --  dan sekarang kembali menempati posisi best quote ever.

Kenapa quote itu sangat menggugah bagi gua? Karena gua punya berbagai kebiasaan buruk; begadang (tanpa melakukan apapun yang produktif), bangun siang, terlambat, menunda pekerjaan, gak punya tujuan, gak pernah pasang target, you name it. Parahnya lagi, keinginan untuk berubah jadi lebih baik baru gua temukan di kuliah, dan bahkan keinginan itu harus diawali dengan kesadaran gua kalau gua adalah manusia yang kacau. Yak, gua sempet merasa bahwa kehidupan main-main dan seenaknya itu bukan hal yang perlu dirubah.

Terus liburan kemarin gua encounter suatu video di Youtube, has been in my recommendations for quite some time tp gua tidak tertarik (at first). Akhirnya di suatu sore gua memutuskan untuk menonton video itu. Intinya, pembicaranya ngasih tau pandangan dia kalau, in her own words, motivation is bull-crap (ini gua perhalus ya he). You don't depend on motivations, motivations just come and go, it's all about beating your brain to do things you usually would not do.

The science behind it adalah our brain would try and protect us from doing things we usually wouldn't wanna do, this makes for hesitation ketika kita mau -- for example -- workout. That's why the trick is to distract your basal ganglia from making you hesitate and let your prefrontal cortex to make the right decisions (karena prefrontal cortex adalah bagian untuk decision making). Kalo trik dari si pembicara itu sendiri adalah dengan ngitung mundur dari 5-1 supaya those sounds of doubts in your head will shut up and you just. do. it. 

"Improving your self discipline means changing up your normal routine, which can be uncomfortable and awkward. Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, explains that habit behaviors are traced to a part of the brain called the basal ganglia - a portion of the brain associated with emotions, patterns, and memories. Decisions, on the other hand, are made in the prefrontal cortex, a completely different area. When a behavior becomes habit, we stop using our decision-making skills and instead function on auto-pilot. Therefore, breaking a bad habit and building a new habit not only requires us to make active decisions, it will feel wrong. Your brain will resist the change in favor of what it has been programmed to do. The solution? Embrace the wrong. Acknowledge that it will take a while for your new regime to feel right or good or natural. Keep chugging along. It will happen."

source: forbes

kurang lebih isi video yg gua tonton dan artikel forbes yang gua baca semester lalu mirip, tapi mempatenkannya memang agak sulit. Godspeed