How to Change
Earlier in this chapter, we discussed how to change our self-image by entering a period of flux. That said, self-images aren’t the only aspects of our behavior we may seek to change, and periods of flux aren’t the only way to change a self-image. Here we will review several systematized methods for realizing—and then securing—the change we want in ourselves and ensuring that our improvements stick.
Costly Thresholds
The start of almost any journey of real self-change should involve taking a step over a “costly threshold.” A costly threshold is something of real and substantial cost to you that is symbolic of the change in yourself you wish to make. This cost doesn’t need to be monetary, but instead can be a social cost or giving up something important to your identity/habits. Be sure the costly threshold you decide to cross is giving something up that it is not something easy to re-acquire, such as alcohol or TV—it must be permanently lost once given up, like a friend network, job, significant other, or money.
Costly thresholds help us clearly signal to ourselves that we have made a real change in our lives. They create cognitive dissonance when we fail to follow-through with the change tied to that threshold. We end up creating the thought pattern of, “Did I give up X for NOTHING!?” when we find ourselves tempted by old habits. Costly thresholds also help us see ourselves as different, new people, which is useful when committing to major character changes.
We strongly recommend anyone inspired to create a new public persona based on this guide to focus on a uniquely effective costly threshold: the outfit and persona change outlined in the next chapter. By changing the way you dress, you reinforce a change in your public and private persona. This is a uniquely effective costly threshold as it not only has the benefit of both monetary and social costs, but also forces you to intentionally contextualize yourself as the new “you” every time you suit up. Getting dressed as your “new and improved” self helps to keep you in character.
Confrontation Patterns
An easy way to ensure change in our behavior is to create extremely simple rules that we do not allow ourselves to break, ever. It is for this reason that abstinence is scientifically more effective than moderation from addictive substances. One of the most life-changing rules we can create for ourselves is a “confrontation pattern.” This rule is specifically designed to help people who feel that they struggle with avoidance patterns.
An avoidance pattern begins when a person avoids something for what usually starts as a trivial reason (this process is also discussed in the “Reinforcement” section). For example, a person may have one negative social interaction at a party, then decide to not go to the next party based on a very slight impulse to not go. Not going to the next party reinforces a habit of not going to parties and the impulse to not to not go to future parties becomes stronger until eventually it snowballs and becomes crippling. This can happen with phobias around everything from dirty objects to flying and rejection (e.g., asking people on a date).
If you recognize that you have developed an avoidance pattern like this and view it as worth your time and effort to remove that pattern from you autopilot, create an opposite but equal set of rules you always follow to breaks it. For example, if you have developed a fear of going to social events, create a rule forcing you to attend any social event you are invited to on a night in which you don’t have other plans and always follow that rule. This can quickly break impulses associated with avoidance patterns around social events.
Proselytizing
Surprisingly, one of the best ways to persuade yourself to maintain a change you have made in your life is to persuade someone else to make the same change. Having convinced another person to make a change in his or her life creates strong cognitive dissonance when you fail to make and maintain the same change in your life, especially when the person you helped points out your hypocrisy to you. In addition to creating cognitive dissonance when you are failing to live up to your values, proselytizing pragmatic values in general acts as a very real costly threshold in which the cost is the social capital you expend promoting a pragmatic outlook on life.
Say David convinces his wife Emily to adopt a pragmatic outlook on life and specifically to stop wallowing in self-hatred after making mistakes (pointing out that indulging in self-pity was not helping her achieve her goals). When Emily later calls David out for doing the exact same thing, she will cause him strong cognitive dissonance, which will make it very easy for him to stop indulging in self-pity.
Because proselytizing to a friend network can be particularly costly in terms of social capital, the Pragmatism Foundation will attempt to set up opportunities for individuals who want to proselytize about changes they want to make in themselves to strangers. For example, we may help you get a speaking gig at a local school where you give a presentation on not acting on anger. After giving a speech on a topic like this to children, most would feel quite silly allowing themselves, as grown adults, to succumb to anger and raise their voices at a loved one or friend.
Tokens
A token is a physical reminder you carry with you to remind you of some pledge you have made to yourself or some change you are trying to create in your character. Tokens are relatively low in terms of effectiveness but also low in terms of cost and can be a great addition to anything you are using to ensure personal change.
For a token to be effective, it should be acquired specifically in association with something you wish to change and be rare or unusual in some way. Examples may be a large old coin you keep in your pocket, or a hair clip you wear every day. While you can procure your own tokens, they can be more effective if given to you by another individual also trying to make the same change in their life you are. For example, if you have pledged to yourself to act more intentionally in accordance with applied pragmatic thought and meet someone through the Pragmatist Foundation who is taking the same journey, obtaining a small keepsake from them that you keep in your pocket every day can help remind you to focus on your goals.
Tokens are useful in that they are a physical reminder of something not to do. When you feel a tendency to do that thing you can reach into your pocket and hold them until that tendency dissipates. After a period of using tokens, you will no longer feel a desire to engage in the behavior they were reminding you to ignore. When this happens, the token can be ceremonially disposed of (throwing it in the ocean, burning it, etc.). Doing this creates a point in your mind from which which is difficult to regress without creating a huge amount of cognitive dissonance.
Association
One way to sustainably remove an unwanted habit is to associate it with something your core character despises (small mindedness, weakness, etc.). For example, if you want to stop drinking alcohol in excess, you may create an association between drinking in excess and weakness instead of the culture of your ancestors. It is easier to vanquish behaviors if you associate them with something for which you have visceral disgust.
Naltrexone
On the subject of strategies for overcoming biological addictions to substances like alcohol under control, let’s talk about pharmacological interventions for dramatic self-reinvention. Naltrexone is an opioid antagonist and can be used to “delete” addictions fairly quickly through the Sinclair Method.
Essentially the Sinclair Method is entails taking a pill (Naltrexone) before engaging in whatever activity you are addicted to. In about 80% of the population, this causes the addiction to quickly fade because the neurological reward pathway that hijacks your brain to force you to do something that your logical mind opposes breaks. Naltrexone works great at tackling addictions to gaming, gambling, overeating, sex, and drinking, (the primary addiction against which Naltrexone is infective is nicotine due to different neurological paths being involved). It is uniquely great at handling addictions you don’t want to totally shed.
While the use of Naltrexone for addiction treatment is common in some countries, it is fairly rare in the US, so if you want to get your hands on it in the USA one of the only strategies is to buy it illegally from shady Indian websites. That said, we are not recommending you do so, nor are we recommending the use of Naltrexone at all. You should consult your doctor and other trained professionals for help with addiction.
When Naltrexone is used in the US, it is (at least at the time of publication) commonly used incorrectly—as if it were an addiction suppressant to help with abstinence (which studies show is completely pointless). Even when you are not self-medicating, be sure to do your research! Naltrexone is just one of many examples how many medical professionals can fall behind on reading new research.
Social Pressures
One of the most effective but difficult-to-engineer mechanisms of maintaining desired change is sustained social pressure and group accountability. While it is easy to join a social group that will pressure you to be a certain way, it is much harder to join a social group that will pressure you to make the changes you want to make in yourself.
There are a number of somewhat independent mechanisms through which social pressures reinforce behavioral changes:
• Conditioning: Members of a group can push back when you do something out of line with your desired character. If you receive reliable and immediate negative or positive feedback in reaction to a specific behavior, you will be able to more easily correct said behavior.
• Conformity: As much as we hate it, we have an innate desire to “fit in with a group,” so we might as well leverage this evolved tendency to our advantage. Part of fitting in with a group involves adapting to that group’s normative culture. By creating groups with a beneficial normative culture and being clear that one of the group’s core purposes is to provide beneficial normative culture, we can easily improve ourselves.
• Group identity: When we believe we “fit in with a group,” we begin to adopt that group into our self-identities. This is an easy way to change the how we perceive ourselves.
• Accountability: When we know someone else is going to say or think, “You said you would do x but didn’t follow-through,” we are much more likely to follow-through than we would if we were only accountable to ourselves (it is easier to make sure you don’t skip your morning jog when you are doing it with someone else).
Utilizing group influence to solidify the change we want in ourselves does not require large groups. Even a single additional person who helps you actualize the change you want in yourself can have an enormous impact. However, this impact will not be realized to its full potential unless you interact with said person in an intentional way.
One effective way to build this intentionality is for you and this person to adopt a daily routine such as a strategy walk or daily phone call in which you discuss your life strategy and how you are striving to achieve it daily. Not only does this create accountability but talking something through with another person allows you to access different thought pathways than those you access when writing or thinking by yourself (slightly different parts of your brain process spoken information when contrasted with written information, to tackle a topic with 100% of your potential you will need to both talk and write about it).
Without a social group, friend, or romantic partner who is willing to reinforce the change you want to see in yourself (or worse still, friends or partners who actively fight for the status quo), you will find improvement to be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
Thought Experiments
Most of the mechanisms for behavior change we discuss focus on changing the way you react to various stimuli. However, through changing the way you view situations in a systematic way you can systematically alter the stimuli, in turn changing behavior.
You may, for example, create a habit of believing that you will only have sustained free will for about the next five minutes and will only regain it occasionally. This is easy to believe because, as we have regularly discussed in this guide, your autopilot-impulse-driven behavior almost always overwhelms your lucid mind. In a very real way, you will not have free will for the majority of the future of your life.
Let’s explore how this perspective change might play out in a few scenarios:
(1)
• Impulse: “I’ll have an hour to do this project tomorrow, so I don’t need to do it now.”
• Perspective shift: “Do I expect that during that hour I have available tomorrow I’ll actually do this project? What does my past behavior imply about whether I will actually do it?”
• Result: “Since I don’t actually expect I’ll spend that hour tomorrow doing the project, I’d better do it now.”
(2)
• Impulse: “Once I’m back from vacation I’ll start going to the gym every day”
• Perspective shift: “Based on what I know about myself, will I actually start going to the gym daily when I’m back from vacation? If I had to bet money on it, which side would I bet on?”
• Result: “Since I probably won’t start going to the gym daily when I’m back from vacation as things currently stand, I’d better use the next 5 minutes to begin tweaking the situation to increase my odds of success, such as by picking the gym I’ll go to, and asking a friend that lives nearby if he wants to go to the gym with me regularly.”
(3)
• Impulse: “I don’t need to make this decision about where to invest my money now; I can make it at any time.”
• Perspective shift: “If I don’t make this investment decision now, when do I predict I will actually make it? Will it be later this week, or more realistically, months from now?”
• Result: “Since this investment decision will never feel urgent, I know I’ll probably by default put off making it for a long time, but since I don’t have time to make the decision thoroughly right now, I should set aside 3 hours on Saturday to do it, which I can block off in my calendar right now.”
(4)
• Impulse: “I’ll choose not to eat those delicious cookies if I leave them on the kitchen table.”
• Perspective shift: “Even if I successfully avoid eating the cookies on the table a few of the times that I pass them, do I expect that I will avoid them every time? Or will eventually give in and eat them?”
• Result: “Since I am in control of the decision right now, I should put the cookies into a jar that is out of sight, so that I won’t be tempted over and over again every time I pass the table.”
This perspective shift is powerful for two reasons. The first is that is forces you to take ownership of your current behavior by jarring you into a state of lucidity. Secondly, it forces you to recognize that you can predict your most likely future behavior from your past behavior. For example, if you almost always drink more than you want to when you go out with your friend Don, you’ll almost certainly do it next time too, unless something about you or that situation is significantly different next time around.
More generally, if you almost always do action A1 in situation S1, why would you assume you’ll now instead do a different action—A2—in the same situation? The fact that you can “choose” to do A2 instead of A1 is not convincing because last time, and the time before that, you could have chosen A2 instead—but you didn’t; you chose A1.
Whatever previously drove you to action A1 will likely cause drive you to A1 again. If you want to do A2 instead of A1, then you should do what you can right now (while you have awareness and control over the next 5 minutes) to change the future situation from S1 to S2, where S2 is a new situation that pushes the balance towards your choosing action A2 instead of A1. It could be that the change from S1 to S2 is a change you make in the surrounding environment (e.g., moving the cookies), or it could be a change in yourself (e.g., reminding yourself regularly about why you care about going to the gym), but whatever it is, it had better be a change. Otherwise, you’re stuck doing A1.[[40]](#_ftn40)