“What’s the typical feedback loop for someone who doesn’t exercise much? When she does the exercise, she gets discomfort, sweatiness, tiredness, maybe even soreness.  That’s negative feedback for doing the exercise.  Not doing the exercise is much more comfortable, because she’s on the Internet doing easy, mildly pleasurable tasks.  That’s positive feedback for not doing the exercise.  The combination of these two feedback loops is why—at first—it’s so hard to form the exercise habit.  People are up against much more than they realize, because no amount of willpower can overcome a setup of feedback loops that go against the behavior they’re trying to create.  And it works like that for every single habit: eating junk food and shopping and playing games are easy habits to create and hard to break, while exercise and mediation and eating vegetables and learning languages are much harder.  All because of the feedback loops.  So what are we to do?  Reverse the feedback loops to get the behavior we want.  We want positive feedback for the habit we’re creating: rewards, praise, physical pleasure, spending time with a friend, getting stars on a chart, continuing a streak, a feeling of accomplishment, enjoying the activity with a smile.  We want negative feedback for not doing the habit: embarrassment of people knowing you didn’t do it, losing a bet, enduring some embarrassing consequence, losing the streak you’ve created, experiencing some kind of difficulty or loss.  Grease the slope.  Create public accountability.  Set up rewards and consequences.  The smarter you’ve set up your feedback loops, the better you’ll be at doing the habit.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 42)