Are You Afraid to Do Things? Turn Your Laziness Into Advantage With The 20 Second Rule

Repetitive behaviors strengthen the neural networks in the brain. With the developing networks, these behaviors turn into habits after a while.

Do you remember the first day you woke up in the morning and picked up the phone? When did you first start lying in front of the TV after eating?

We repeat some behaviors so many times that we cannot remember the beginning. We may feel like we've been living like this since the day we were born.

Behavior that becomes a habit as it is repeated does not always have to be bad. For someone who has been constantly reading books since childhood, reading has become a habit rather than a behavior. It has also become an indispensable part of sports life for the person who exercises every morning.

With the pandemic process, the biggest problem I experienced for myself was that I could spend hours on social media while I could not find time for what I really wanted to do.

How was this happening? I was always at home but didn't have time to read a book. As such, the time I spent on the phone could increase day by day. As I was sitting in the living room, I realized that the idea of ​​going to my room and setting a suitable light to pick up and read my book was getting very tiring for me. I was running easy.

How to Get Away from Habits with the 20 Second Rule?

Shawn Achor, who is a successful writer with positive psychology studies at Harvard, includes his own experiences and solutions in his book The Happiness Advantage. Achor, who wants to improve himself in playing the guitar, says that it was very difficult for him to get up while watching TV and pick up the guitar from his room and start playing.

Achor, who continues to watch television because he is too lazy to do this, realizes that after a while he must take steps to change his habits.

It will take about 20 seconds to get up and pick up the guitar. Shawn puts his guitar next to the TV so that he doesn't grow in his eyes for 20 seconds. He also takes out the batteries of the remote control and leaves it in another room. The other day, when he comes home, he finds himself in front of the TV after eating as he always does.

However, there is something he forgot. Since the remote has no batteries, it cannot turn on the TV. At that moment, he grabs his guitar standing next to the TV and starts working. It continues to do this for a while. After a while, he realizes that the remote is getting lazy to take his batteries and turns to the alternative guitar.

The hardest part of doing a job is getting started. When you start, you can bring more in some way. However, there is always an excuse to take the first step. For example, the 20 seconds it takes to get the book from your room is too long. The simplest thing you can do to eliminate these excuses is to minimize the effort and time it will take to get started.

You may want to exercise in the morning but you may not be able to start. How would you like to sleep in your sportswear? In this way, when you wake up in the morning, you will shorten the time you will spend 20 seconds to get dressed and eliminate one of your excuses.

For the behaviors you want to get rid of, you should do the opposite. For example, if you spend a lot of time on your social media accounts, you can create a home screen that you cannot access with a single click by deleting the applications.

Perhaps you will be stunned by the first two or three attempts to restore apps. However, if you are a little patient and take care not to host applications on your phone, the effort you will spend to enter applications will grow in your eyes after a while. In this way, you can gradually get rid of your social media addiction.