Maurizio Caló Caligaris maurizio@cs.stanford.edu

A guide towards leveraging negative habits in your life to trigger new, positive behaviors

Addicted to Facebook? Get ripped instead!

Got the

addiction?

If you find yourself mindlessly opening facebook.com in a new browser tab every 20

minutes, GREAT!

HUH ?

If you find yourself mindlessly opening facebook.com in a new browser tab every 20

minutes, GREAT!

You can use this addiction to trigger a new, positive behavior in your life.

The key to developing a new behavior (such as doing pushups) is to associate it with an already existing habit you do reliably (called an “anchor”)

and attach the new behavior after the anchor.

[BJ Fogg, Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxngufGsdzg)

“After every time I [extremely reliable habit / anchor] , I will [new habit].”

The Secret Recipe for Creating a New Habit

For more info, see BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits program: http://tinyhabits.com/

“After every time I open Facebook.com in a new browser tab, I will do 5 pushups”.

To make the task easier, change your [virtual] environment:

Redirect Facebook.com to a motivational website which triggers you to do pushups.

Clicking on the image takes you to Facebook, so if you really want to use Facebook, you could!

Facebook.com 107.21.119.50

1. In Finder, choose Go=> Go to Folder.

2.In the Go to Folder dialog, type /etc/

3.Locate the hosts file and Cmd+click it. From the context

menu, choose Get Infor. In the Ownership & permissions area,

set You can to Read & Write

4. Open the hosts file

5.Add the following line:107.21.119.50 facebook.com

1. Open Notepad or some other text editor with elevated privileges (right click and clicking Run As Administrator)

2. Open the file named hosts, located in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC

3.Add the following line:107.21.119.50 facebook.com

Frequently Asked Questions

This guide was aimed for college students, who often study from their dorm rooms and spent a lot of hours in front of their laptops, so it’s easy for them to do pushups right there.

What if I can’t do any pushups in my workplace?

You can also try to associate opening Facebook.com with a different habit besides doing pushups!

Absolutely! You can say: “After everytime I open Facebook.com (or Reddit.com) in a new browser tab, I will:-Think of one positive thing that happened today-Close my eyes and take a deep breath/meditate-Stretch one part of my body briefly-etc.

What if I want to develop a different new habit that’s not doing pushups?

If you’d like to customize the motivational website so a different image shows up, or if you want the image to link to a different site (e.g. Reddit) please leave a comment and I’ll work on it!

Quitting Facebook is hard, and I’d argue it’s not worth it, as Facebook is a wonderful communication tool.

The whole point of this guide is to help you become aware of the already existing habits in your life (“anchors”), start noticing when you do those habits and use those habits to your advantage to trigger positive events.

But this won’t help me quit FB!

I’m Maurizio Calo Caligaris and I’m an aspiring entrepreneur / CS masters student at Stanford. I’m interested in behavior design, life design, self-improvement & using technology to transform people’s lives.

maurizio@cs.stanford.edu

Thanks!