The Quantum Cigarette…
This post is about how HabitShaper handles the “Quit Smoking” goal, when you’re almost at the finish line.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzlw-vrG1-E
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(Windows only)
Ever wonder about how to approach zero? If you’re quitting smoking, it’s an important question.
You can reduce and reduce, till you’re down to 1 cigarette a day. And then what? Cold turkey?
It’s possible, of course, but when I was developing the HabitShaper formulas to help my little brother to quit smoking, I did it a little differently.
Once the original formula was telling me that he should have a max of “0.85 cigarettes per day”, I considered telling my brother he should chop off the top 15% of his cigarettes.
That thought lasted all of 5 seconds, when I realized it was ridiculous. The whole point of this HabitShaper thing was to reduce all thinking and planning to the bare minimum.
So, what is 0.85 cigarettes per day? It’s 85 cigarettes out of every 100 days! But there was much less than a hundred days left till the end, and of course those numbers were still going down. In a little bit, it was down to 0.75. A few more days, and it was at 0.5. Can you guess what I ended up doing?
I took the numbers to be a probability! If HabitShaper told me my brother was limited to 0.5 cigarettes a day, that means I’d flip a coin: heads = “cigarette allowed”, tails = “no dice”.
It’s a simple idea, but I felt pretty clever for it at the time. Oddly enough, I often feel more clever about my work on HabitShaper than I do with my quantum Physics work!
Fortunately, you don’t have to flip coins or roll dice to use HabitShaper. I added all of this behind-the-scenes, so that whenever you are approaching zero (or starting from zero), HS will use random numbers and probabilities to tell you if it’s 1 or 0 that day.
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