Dr. Kentaro Fujita

Let's say it was 500.

I had 500 and I wanted that to keep going.

And just knowing that I had that unbroken streak of 500

in and of itself became motivating to me above and beyond the desire to exercise and all the reasons why I wanted to do the workouts, right?

So these theoretical analyses have suggested that one of the things that helps us maintain self-control is the knowledge of the pattern.

The pattern itself has strength

over us in a way that doing something once, every once in a while, sporadically does not.

So if you're able to tell yourself, I do this, I've done this every week for, you know, this every Sunday for every week for the last X number of years, that has a special motivational power that perhaps even the same number of things, in the same number of times you've done the activity, if you've done it more sporadically, it doesn't have that power.

Perhaps it could be just because you have the habit, perhaps the habit locks you into place.

And it's possible that we have like psychological and cognitive things that help us in place.

Others have argued that we like the sense of completeness, the gestalt of having this pattern.

Whereas again, the sporadic doesn't have that sort of orderly system, right?

But one of the things that you might recognize is that patterns tend to lead to really rigid behaviors.

So when I had the streak going, I was up at the middle of the night on a treadmill just trying to get my steps in just because I wanted to keep the pattern, which was really stupid.

So they can take a life of their own, which in some cases could be good, but the rigidity of these behaviors could also be bad.

So it was this idea that there might be trade-offs associated with abstinence, like drawbacks of abstinence that got my student Feng Lei and I really interested in if there were other alternatives.

And the most common alternative is some version of moderation.

So at its extreme, abstinence is doing like never indulging in the temptation or always doing the goal-directed option.

And moderation is...

generally doing the thing that's good for the goal, but allowing yourself to have the occasional lapse.