Hacking Your Brain to Stop Fumbling

Well-chosen Snudges/self-nudges can improve life. We can be our own choice architects by making certain options harder or less fun, or by eliminating them altogether.

Almost all the tools that work to nudge other people, you can use to change your own decis...

This is an extreme and effective version of self-nudging. It starts with the elimination of bad choices, by tactical reduction of one's own freedom.

Like Odysseus, from Homer's Odyssey, who was tied to the mast of the ship for a 10-year commute while the sirens would entic...

You get better with money when you get better with time.

Write letters to your future selves, making this older version of you into a real three-dimensional character can make this sort of self-conversation easier to recognize the benefit of something, like an automatic sa...

In a study where one group was served fresh-popped kernels and the other, a week-old stale popcorn at a theatre, no one seemed to notice or care about the freshness or taste of it. It was because the act of inhaling popcorn at movies is so automatic. 

We waste a lot of time and money while ...

Habits are hard to start and even harder to maintain. A retainer is basically proof that braces alone don’t really solve the problem.

We're optimistic about nudging ourselves to make long-term changes but agnostic and pessimistic about changing day-to-day ones.

Think...