You can train yourself to become more attuned to your interoception. This will make it easier to identify internal prompts like anxiety or hunger. In fact, a friend of mine was studying to become a psychotherapist and last year had me serve as a guinea pig for interoception interventions. In summary, if you find mindfulness practices that involve your body and your own thoughts, you’ll be more attuned to your interoception. Things like active meditations can help a lot. You can check out evidence-based and peer-reviewed programs like Healthy Minds.
You can train yourself not just to notice your interoception, but also to use interoception to build habits. I suspect this is what the people who do not use external prompts (like stickies) do: they have habits that kick in with not-so-evident prompts. They could be using something called an ‘action prompt’ or an ‘internal prompt’. I’m using the language of Tiny Habits because it’s helpful in this context.
Tiny Habits can teach you how to create habits of all kinds, whether you use external, action, or internal prompts. Tiny Habits prefers prompts that are actions (e.g. “After I put the toothbrush down then I will pick up the dental floss”). But internal prompts are perfectly viable (e.g. “When I feel the heat on my skin and the tension in my jaw, I will describe my inner emotions to myself as if I was listening to a good friend”).
You can understand cues and habits more in depth with contextual behavior analysis. CBA or a qualified professional can help us notice when we struggle to pay attention because of conditions like ADHD or anxiety. Something else that CBA can reveal is that, sometimes, we struggle to pay attention because we haven’t developed the mental information highways that can make our thoughts flow freely. Things like relational frame training can help us build those highways faster. Another option is to learn to think visibly (Harvard’s Project Zero) about our everyday life, so that we build dense information highways that we can later use in daily life.
Of course, the fact is that plenty of humans use external prompts deliberately to help them coordinate and remember things. There’s a reason Scrum boards and Kanban are so popular. There’s a reason calendar apps and Getting Things Done are so popular. There’s a reason many societies have daily, weekly, or yearly rituals. You’re among friends :)
You can actually train for this!
You can train yourself to become more attuned to your interoception. This will make it easier to identify internal prompts like anxiety or hunger. In fact, a friend of mine was studying to become a psychotherapist and last year had me serve as a guinea pig for interoception interventions. In summary, if you find mindfulness practices that involve your body and your own thoughts, you’ll be more attuned to your interoception. Things like active meditations can help a lot. You can check out evidence-based and peer-reviewed programs like Healthy Minds.
You can train yourself not just to notice your interoception, but also to use interoception to build habits. I suspect this is what the people who do not use external prompts (like stickies) do: they have habits that kick in with not-so-evident prompts. They could be using something called an ‘action prompt’ or an ‘internal prompt’. I’m using the language of Tiny Habits because it’s helpful in this context.
Tiny Habits can teach you how to create habits of all kinds, whether you use external, action, or internal prompts. Tiny Habits prefers prompts that are actions (e.g. “After I put the toothbrush down then I will pick up the dental floss”). But internal prompts are perfectly viable (e.g. “When I feel the heat on my skin and the tension in my jaw, I will describe my inner emotions to myself as if I was listening to a good friend”).
You can understand cues and habits more in depth with contextual behavior analysis. CBA or a qualified professional can help us notice when we struggle to pay attention because of conditions like ADHD or anxiety. Something else that CBA can reveal is that, sometimes, we struggle to pay attention because we haven’t developed the mental information highways that can make our thoughts flow freely. Things like relational frame training can help us build those highways faster. Another option is to learn to think visibly (Harvard’s Project Zero) about our everyday life, so that we build dense information highways that we can later use in daily life.
Of course, the fact is that plenty of humans use external prompts deliberately to help them coordinate and remember things. There’s a reason Scrum boards and Kanban are so popular. There’s a reason calendar apps and Getting Things Done are so popular. There’s a reason many societies have daily, weekly, or yearly rituals. You’re among friends :)