on 25-Sep-2022 (Sun)

Trigger-Action Planning is a technique for changing and creating habits that are totally automatic and don't require conscious thought.

The basic idea is that you tie the habit to a specific, simple, concrete thing that activates the 'do this habit' program in your brain.

trigger - The simple, specific sight/sound/smell/thought/feeling/etc. which you hook a behaviour onto.

action - The behaviour you enact on contact with the trigger.

plan - A deliberate plan to create the above pattern of trigger-action.

pattern - A pattern of trigger-action, whether deliberate or not, sometimes created unconsciously.

(TAP can mean either Trigger-Action Plan or Trigger-Action Pattern.)

Trigger-action patterns occur naturally in everyday life. They can be useful, such as [Finish lathering hair → wash shampoo out] or [Close front door → lock door], or they can be detrimental, such as [Feel restless → comfort-eat].

Understanding how they work means you can intervene and break undesirable patterns, or create your own patterns.

Properties of a trigger:

• Unique - Triggers must always be followed by the action, or else the TAP breaks. (Because if there are exceptions, that means you then have to think about whether to do the action, instead of it being your automatic default.)
• Appropriate - Are there any situations where the trigger comes up and you wouldn't want to do the action? If so, make the TAP simpler so that the action is always appropriate, or attach it to a different trigger.
• Non-vague - Actions need a specific, concrete trigger to hook into. (Imagine trying to hook jello: it'd just go *whubble*. So make your trigger solid!)
• Actually happens - If it's rare, the TAP might not stick. If the trigger doesn't come up when you want to do the change of behaviour, or only does sometimes, try to find a trigger that a) comes up in all situations where you want to do the habit, and b) comes up in no situations where you don't want to do it.

The way a TAP gets installed isn't just by thinking "wouldn't it be nice if I had this behaviour trigger-action" – you have to actually do it (or visualise doing it) several times before it becomes a trigger-action pattern running in your brain.

Typical install time : 10 rehearsals.

(Yes, rehearse it 10 times. This may sound like a lot, but the point is to help your brain clock on to the fact it's going to do this TAP every. single. time.)

The Monty Hall problem is a brain teaser, in the form of a probability puzzle, loosely based on the American television game show Let's Make a Deal and named after its original host, Monty Hall. The problem was originally posed (and solved) in a letter by Steve Selvin to the American Statistician in 1975.^[1][2] It became famous as a question from reader Craig F. Whitaker's letter quoted in Marilyn vos Savant's "Ask Marilyn" column in Parade magazine in 1990:^[3]

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Vos Savant's response was that the contestant should switch to the other door.^[3] Under the standard assumptions, the switching strategy has a 2 / 3 probability of winning the car, while the strategy that remains with the initial choice has only a 1 / 3 probability.