Hi There,

gaming for me is a form of procrastination. I waste hours researching, buying and playing pc games which I do not need and in the end procrastinate on other tasks which are more important.

In an audiobook about procrastination (Solving the Procrastination Puzzle - Timothy A. Pychyl) the author talks about implementation intentions and its scientifically proven effectiveness.

Further research very quickly led me to several research articles which I think can be highly beneficial for everybody in this subreddit who has the goal of reducing gaming time or suffers from gaming disorder or internet addiction.

Research papers:

• A brief internet-delivered intervention for the reduction of gaming-related harm: A feasibility study by Jennifer J.Parka, Natalia Bootha, Kathleen L.Bagotb, Simone N.Rodda
• Weakness of the will: Is a quick fix possible? By Peter M. Gollwitzer
• Implementation Intentions - Strong Effects of Simple Plans by Peter M. Gollwitzer
• Goal achievement: The Role of Intentions by Peter M. Gollwitzer
• Strategies of Setting and Implementing Goals: Mental Contrasting and Implementation Intentions by Gabriele Oettingen, Peter M. Gollwitzer

Just follow the references in the above mentioned articles and you find more information.

I think this is gold and can help you immensly.

I noticed something last week and again today while standing in line today. The WG store nearest to me (16th street mall, Denver) has an issue that I would like to bring to light and I’m sure that this issue isn’t a novel one. This store is in the perfect location to serve the homeless and poor populations in the neighborhood. However, regarding the COVID vaccinations, there is no way for these people to schedule their vaccinations online. They have little to no access to internet aside from the public library which can not logistically handle this responsibility.

Is there something that could be done to help our neighbors?

Maybe invite one or two volunteers from a local shelter or other resource group to stage nearby with internet? Possibly offer a service using Walgreens resources?

Here is a link to an interesting approach how to increase suggestibility through combination of hypnotic instructions with implementation intentions. https://www.socmot.uni-konstanz.de/sites/default/files/schweiger-gallo_pfau_gollwitzer_2012.pdf

Hello, I'm seeing lots of posts and comments from players being matched with people above their skill level, so I thought I'd take a stab a breaking down the ranked system in an attempt to understand the Skill Based Match Making (SBMM) implemented in Apex Legends. I haven't solved the system and SBMM mostly likely uses more than placement and kills to determine skill, but here's what ranked is currently working with.

Basis/Goal

In a ranked system you typically aim to sort players based on their skill relative to each other. It takes time to accomplish this, but eventually players should start to stabilize around some statistic. Most ranked systems stabilize players using win rate. In a 1 team vs 1 team game, getting players to a 50% win rate is ideal. In Apex, we're dealing with 20 teams against each other, so ideally you'd hit each placement 5% of the time against opponents with skill equal to your own. Well, if you are facing players of equal skill and are hitting the 5% goal, then you likely also have a 1.0 Kill/Death ratio against your opponents, which means you also likely have similar accuracy, movement, etc. This seems like a fair way to stabilize players and, based on how players gain Ranked Points, it seems to be Respawn's choice, so let's do some analysis.

Breakdown

Setting aside the numerous issues that I'm sure you're already thinking of, let's dive into the current ranked system using the above assumption of 5% for every placement with 1.0 K/D ratio across those games.

Assuming you don't die during the game you place 1st and you don't get a kill during the game you place 20th (keeping a 1.0 K/D with 19 kills and 19 deaths across the 20 games) you'll end up with 605 RP every 20 games.

This is a fair amount of RP gain, but we haven't calculated the losses depending on what ranked division you are in. Let's just put the RP gains/losses into a table below. Remember, we are assuming the 5% rule regardless of rank and this gain/loss is after 20 matches

As you can see, if you are playing against players of your same skill in each division, you should continue rising in rank until you hit platinum. That would also mean that once players reach Platinum, they can't continue to rank up unless they play against players less skilled than them. We're starting to see the cracks in the system.

Analysis

So we now know that in order to con

Creating healthy habits is all about proper execution of tasks.

You're far more likely to do what you're supposed to do if you use the "implementation intention" from James Clear.

I wrote a brief 2-minute article to help you do this.

Enjoy having healthier habits :)

/u/Reav3

Hey fellow Jinx's! Just curious if there's any intent to give that lovely tail tech to jinx? Her models feel so stiff as a result :(

Please Reav3 :D

As the developers themselves admitted in each game the matchmaker tries to create as close of a 50/50 match as possible. In theory this is good. Sure, it has the unfortunate implications of making good players fight harder for higher rank and bad player stay higher for longer but as a tradeoff the number of stomps is reduced and we have fair matches, right?

I did say in theory, in practice this is not the case at all.

You see, because grouping and smurfing is allowed and completely fine this does not turn into a fair system no more. Smurfs and groups(you know the kind of thing, from a diamond carry + gold pocket to booster/s ranking up a bunch of people) skew what is supposed to be a fair system and turn it into hell.

But why? The 50/50 works for them too. It tries to find good players to pit against the smurf/group to stop their advancement. Now suppose you've been on a winning streak, tearing up the enemy opposition. Suddenly you land into a game where the enemy's levels are curiously low, or their rank badges look kind of funky. You click on their profiles to double check(most smurfs do keep them public, after all I am sure they enjoy their inflated stats) and oh dear what is this? 17 wins 4 losses? But I thought the game tried to 50/50 every match??

The cruel thing is, the current matchmaking cant do that. It doesn't matter what teammates a GM who plays in diamond gets. Similarly it doesn't matter what kind of opponents they get(unless they are smurfs themselves), they will own and carry almost always.

So in a nutshell: competitive becomes the exact thing it tries to prevent. Quick irreversible stomps followed by benign completely winnable games with people who are mostly solo queueing and having silver/gold portraits. Sometimes I feel like a yo-yo, being thrown into an unwinnable game if I win and then being given an easy win after I lose. 25 SR makes this much of a difference, huh? Who would have guessed.

And now for the real shocker: but but what if your team has smurfs? What if the system does become a true 50/50 with for example 2 smurfs on each side? Well, what about it????????? They'll fight amongst each other while slaughtering the non-smurf folk. In the presence of people this much superior to the rank they play in your contributions similarly dramatically decrease.

You are at the whim of smurfs and groups. But hey, it is a good learning experience, right? Makes you play better, right?

And now for the tragic pa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ue4_CNgvCs&t=68s

This reduces the amount of time and effort you spend having the dreadful internal debate of whether or not you should go for that run or hit the gym. Takes 30 seconds, and will have significant benefits in the long run.

So I have just stumbled onto implementation intentions, and it's clear if I had clear plans to do when I'm under pressure at work or fighting with my girl or whatever, I would not have had so many relapses.

Please share your best implementation intentions (pre-plans to do in each situation) along with the specific situations here.

http://healthyinfluence.com/wordpress/case-studies/implementation-intentions/

I'm specifically interested in what your plans are when you're having an argument with your SO, a really bad day at work, or dealing with unpleasant family. Thank you all.

PS: It's day 1 of quitting after many a day of trying and failing, and I'm not gonna fail tonight. I have this feeling that I have it covered today.

As a bit of background, I am currently a University Student, and I have been attempting to "get disciplined" for a long time now. Obviously, one of my biggest problems is procrastination.

I have tried many different methods and techniques to become more productive, and at their core, 99% of them follow a very simple structure "plan, then review". A method I always find myself returning to is Getting Things Done, which is pretty much the purest form of the list making framework for being productive.

As anyone who has tried a system like this knows; the "planning" phase is the most enjoyable part of these "anti-procrastination" methods (even though if you aren't careful it quickly becomes its own form of procrastination). Having all of your obligations laid out in front of you is extremely satisfying, and reduces stress immensely. However, all the lists in the world are useless if you don't regularly review your lists.

When I follow the system properly, I am much more productive. I'm able to achieve goals I set for myself, within reason. I don't overwork myself or try to micromanage every moment of the day, and I am able to, at the very least, reorganize my thoughts and lists daily, at the end of each day.

Unfortunately, these systems never last. I start having less and less reviews, "harder" tasks get ignored indefinitely, and at some point, I start avoiding my lists all together, and the system breaks down. Very rarely will any attempt to stay productive last more than a few weeks (usually much less than that).

Even when the system is working "perfectly", I often will avoid checking my "Next Action" list until the end of the day, when it is obviously too late to actually act on any of my projects.

Has anyone else had a similar problem? Is there a method I can use to remind myself to review my Next Action list throughout the day, while I still have the time and motivation to work? Are my views on self-discipline completely wrong? Thanks for reading!

Disclaimer. I like to read books about psychology and summarize them. If this kind of post is wrong to make, I will delete it but I thought it could give folks here some ideas to try out.

Now about the decoy effect. Basically, you create a decoy, less attractive option with the goal of making people buy your target option more often - which increases overall profit.

In restaurant context.

Let's say you normally have 2 wine options: one that costs 12 dollars and the other that costs 19 dollars.

If you introduce a decoy, an option that costs let's say 35 dollars, you can expect the 19 dollar wine to be bought more often because the 12 dollar option gets perceived as more cheap/inferior.

But that's not the only way to implement the decoy effect. You can also create or sell an inferior/cheaper version of a product as a decoy which could increase the sales of your original product. This works well when people don't know much about the product or service that they are buying.

Let's say you own an electronic store. You have 4 headphone options for sale on display that have a similar price but differ in various features and attributes, so it's hard for a person with not much knowledge to know which ones to pick.

Here is how a decoy could influence them to pick specific headphones.

Near those headphones, you display an inferior/cheaper version of one of the choices, let's call it -D. This will create a comparison point and the options will look like: A, B, C, D, -D. You should expect an increase in sales for option D. Various studies show that this kind of decoy has the potential to increase sales of a superior product even if -D option does not help the person to compare D with other A, B, C options.

Source: Predictably irrational by Dan Ariely (great book) and various studies that I read over time.

If anyone finds this stuff interesting, I write about similar psychological effects in more detail here, not too many posts yet. Would be curious to know if anyone here actually tried to implement stuff like this into their business.

Hey guys,

the shitty thing about anxiety or nervousness is that we usually stop focussing on the other person. When we are anxious what happens most of the time is, that all our attention is directed on our anxiety and the attempt to suppress it. However as we all know that doesn't really work.

A great way to overcome this and to shield yourself from the negative aspects of nervousness are implementations intentions. Implementations intentions are "if-then" strategies.

There are several studies that show, that by using "if-then" strategies you can be anxious or nervous but it doesn't impair your performance and you actually stay an engaged conversation partner.

Using a "if-then" strategy means "defining a stimulus which will evoke a goal-directed response". Now this is nothing else than picking a feeling, a specific moment or any other trigger, which will then automatically be followed by a certain behavior. For example such a strategy could look like this "If I notice I get nervous, I change my body language to appear more confident" or "If I notice I get nervous, I start to focus on my partner's voice". So you pick a trigger or stimulus and then you make a plan what you will do once you notice the trigger. This sounds very simply, but study after study showed that this works.

According to Chadley Stern from NYU you don't need to overcome your anxiety, simply define "if-then" strategies and you can circumvent the negative aspects of anxiety during a conversation.

Here is a link to a video where I explain this a bit more in detail (I upload more videos where I present peer-reviewed studies on strategies to deal with nervousness and anxiety.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsq1jN-q8_0

And here is the reference to the study:Stern, C., & West, T. (2014). Circumventing anxiety during interpersonal encounters to promote interest in contact: An implementation intention approach. Journal Of Experimental Social Psychology, 5082-93.

Hey :)

the shitty thing about anxiety or nervousness is that we usually stop focussing on the other person. When we are anxious what happens most of the time is, that all our attention is directed on our anxiety and the attempt to suppress it. However as we all know that doesn't really work.

A great way to overcome this and to shield yourself from the negative aspects of nervousness are implementations intentions. Implementations intentions are "if-then" strategies.

There are several studies that show, that by using "if-then" strategies you can be anxious or nervous but it doesn't impair your performance and you actually stay an engaged conversation partner.

Using a "if-then" strategy means "defining a stimulus which will evoke a goal-directed response". Now this is nothing else than picking a feeling, a specific moment or any other trigger, which will then automatically be followed by a certain behavior. For example such a strategy could look like this "If I notice I get nervous, I change my body language to appear more confident" or "If I notice I get nervous, I start to focus on my partner's voice". So you pick a trigger or stimulus and then you make a plan what you will do once you notice the trigger. This sounds very simply, but study after study showed that this works.

According to Chadley Stern from NYU you don't need to overcome your anxiety, simply define "if-then" strategies and you can circumvent the negative aspects of anxiety during a conversation.

Here is a link to a video where I explain this a bit more in detail (I upload more videos where I present peer-reviewed studies on strategies to deal with nervousness and anxiety.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsq1jN-q8_0

And here is the reference to the study:Stern, C., & West, T. (2014). Circumventing anxiety during interpersonal encounters to promote interest in contact: An implementation intention approach. Journal Of Experimental Social Psychology, 5082-93.