MindCraft Challenges

Metacognition is the term used in psychological science to describe thinking about one's own thinking. Metacognition encourages people to think about their thoughts from new perspectives, which opens up the possibility of introducing new and different responses. You have already seen this example in Challenge #4, where it was used in distant self-talk. We can apply a similar kind of distancing to dealing with cravings (remember that for uncontrollable cravings, you should talk to a professional).

Challenge: When you feel a craving for something you are trying to avoid or a habit you are trying to break, imagine distancing or looking at your thoughts from far away and remind yourself that the craving is “just a thought”. If you are a Christian, you may find it helpful to consider the craving as “just a thought,” subject to Romans 7:25—you can be delivered from it through Jesus Christ.

Read More
Distancing is the key skill to developing control over cravings
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2014.01.072
Metacognition involves distancing
https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615594577

Michael Scullin is a psychology professor and sleep researcher. He decided to help his students sleep during finals week by offering extra credit for averaging more than 8 hours of sleep each night during the final exam week. His challenge worked! The students reported getting more sleep each night and scored higher on their exams than students who opted out or tried the challenge but didn't succeed (even after controlling for their performance in the class before the challenge).

Challenge: Try the eight-hour sleep challenge for a week. Because the offer of a reward was an important part of the challenge, I will provide 25 XP for any student who successfully completes the 8-hour sleep challenge and reports it in a MindCraft report. Your report will need to document the amount of time you slept each night for a week, and you must average 8 hours or more per night. This will require some time management!

Read More
Scullin’s 8-hour sleep challenge
https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628318816142
Consistent sleep predicts academic performance, not sleep the night before a test
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-019-0055-z

One of the challenges of hunger motivation is that people can’t completely cut eating out of their lives—so complete avoidance is not an option. Genetic set points and environmental influences also make it difficult to change eating patterns. The most recent research by Traci Mann suggests that adopting new healthy habits is easier than getting rid of old bad habits—especially by modifying the environment (making good choices more easily available, pre-packaging food in intended portions).

Challenge: Make one structural change to your environment to make a healthy choice easier. What change did you make? Did it make that healthy choice easier?

Read More
A review of eating and self-control
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-012424-035404
The stigma of weight controllability in the workplace
https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2023.78

Today, we discussed how intentional activities contribute to happiness. The fit of those intentional activities with your identity is also important. Sonja Lyubomirsky has developed an instrument to help people identify which activities might be a good choice for a person based on their motivations for doing the activity.

Challenge: Take the Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic at https://pathtohappier.com/. The score for each type of activity will appear after you rate each of the five motivations for that activity. The activity or activities with the highest score are good fits for your current motivational profile. Try one of these activities for a week and monitor your happiness and sense of well-being. You can take a broad well-being inventory at https://psytests.org/life/ohien.html to track your well-being if you answer based on the last day or so each time.

Read More
Changing goals and activities promotes happiness
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00002.x
Simple activities increase well-being.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721412469809

What should a person do if they realize that they have hostile habits online or in real life (or, likely, both)? Sheri Johnson and her colleagues used a WOOP intervention (a kind of implementation intention) to help people develop a plan for hostile habits.

Challenge: If you have a hostile online habit that you want to reduce, form and implement a WOOP plan:

Wish: (What do you want to stop doing?)
Outcome: (What is your goal?)
Obstacle: (What is the trigger of your habit?)
Plan: (How will you stop the trigger from activating the habit? What will you do instead?)

Implement your WOOP plan for a week. Were you able to reduce the hostile habit as you wished?

Read More
The WOOP intervention
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2020.103708
Another intervention to reduce hostile attributions and aggression
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-020-10147-8

An earlier challenge was about making a habit, but this challenge is about breaking a habit. Wendy Wood and her colleagues discovered that when students transferred to a new university, their habits (exercising, TV watching, and reading) were disrupted because the cue that started the cycle of cue-habit-reinforcer was missing. This suggests avoiding cues to habits you want to change might be an important first step.

Challenge: Identify a habit that you want to block. Try to identify the context or situation that is the cue for your cue-habit-reinforcer cycle. It might be something in the environment or an internal state. Now, try to disrupt the cue so it can’t start the cycle (avoid certain places at certain times, plan actions that disrupt internal states). Did the disruption help you block an unwanted habit?

Read More:
Disrupting habits
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.88.6.918
Habits and behavior change
https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214241246480

Can people use evaluative conditioning to help them like new habits? There is some preliminary evidence that this might be possible. Conroy and Kim set up people’s cellphones with rotating wallpaper on the lock screen that paired positive images with images of an activity that they wanted people to engage in more often (physical exercise). People did report liking and engaging in physical exercise more often during the experiment.

Challenge:
Set a goal: increasing the frequency of a desired behavior or forming a new habit. Create a set of 4 or 5 wallpapers to set as a rotating gallery for your phone lock screen (see the first ‘Read More’ link for an example—the picture of the behavior to increase should be one-half of the screen, and a paired positive image should be the other half). Track the target behavior or habit during the week. Did the evaluative conditioning seem to help you change behaviors?

Read More:

Evaluative conditioning via lock screen:
https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0000886
More about evaluative conditioning:
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032420-031815

Wendy Wood suggests that we can move tasks from System 2 to System 1 by practicing the task regularly in the same context (the context will become a cue).

Challenge:
1. Choose a behavior that you want to make into a habit (read more books, go to gym, eat veggies).
2. Choose a context. When and where do you plan to do this new behavior? Specify a context (location, time).
3. Reward yourself for the behavior and track the development of your habit over several days using this scale and set of questions:

Disagree ①②③④⑤ Agree
Sometimes I start _____ before I realize I’m doing it.
______ is something I do without thinking.
______ is something I do automatically.
______ is something I do without having to consciously remember.

Read More:
Wendy Wood on habits: https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721424124648