Why Telling Yourself ‘Don’t Think About It’ Makes Bad Habits So Hard to Break
There’s a much more effective way to conquer your vices
In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, there’s a scene where Harry, Ron, and Hermoine are captured by a magical plant called Devil’s Snare. The vines wrap around their bodies like hungry pythons as they struggle to escape.
“You have to relax,” Hermione tells the other two. “If you don’t, it’ll only kill you faster.”
“Kill us faster?!” shouts Ron, suddenly struggling even more. “Now I can relax!!”
Kudos to J.K. Rowling for this brilliant illustration of a psychological phenomenon called ironic processing, in which deliberate attempts to avoid certain thoughts make those thoughts even more persistent. Russian novelist and philosopher Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously captured this tendency in his 1863 essay Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, where he presented the experiment: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” There’s the irony: The more effort you expend trying to avoid a thought, the more that thought will nag at you. It will only kill you faster.
