Buffet of Bad Habits: Why I Stopped Putting ‘Skip Work’ on the Menu
You ever have one of those mornings where you stare at the ceiling, eyes unfocused and think,
"How many sick days do I have again?"
Yeah. Same.
One morning, somewhere between hitting snooze for the third time and wondering if I could fake a convincing enough cough, I had an epiphany:
If I considered staying home… I would stay home.
It was like my brain was running a decision-making drop-down menu:
Get up and go to work
Stay in bed and scroll memes till you are late
Fake plague symptoms and play cozy farming sims all day
And as long as “stay home” was on the list of options, I was absolutely gonna pick it at least 30% of the time. Maybe 70% if the weather was bad and my NPCs in Stardew needed me.
Then it hit me: this wasn’t just a work thing. This was an everything thing.
Every habit I wanted to break—snacking when I wasn’t hungry, doom-scrolling instead of sleeping, putting off that creative project “until I felt inspired”—all of them lived in this mental buffet of options, and I was out here loading my plate with stuff I didn’t even like.
The Mental Menu Hack
So I started doing something wild:
I started to consciously change my drop down menus.
Like a picky MMO party planner who only wants DPS who actually show up, I only invited actions I actually wanted to take into my mental drop-down list.
Not:
“Work out OR binge-watch three seasons of 00s reality TV”
But:
“Yoga for 15 mins OR a 10-minute walk while pretending I’m on a fetch quest”
Not:
“Journal OR fall into a Reddit rabbit hole at 1am”
But:
“Journal OR sleep like a responsible adventurer who knows they have a raid tomorrow”
When the tempting but terrible options just aren’t on the menu? You don’t pick them. It’s not willpower—it’s UX design for your brain.
Patching the System
A lot of this shift came from my training as a therapist. You can’t teach someone else how to do something without getting very good at using it yourself. Previous exposure to ideas about metacognition met neuroscience, marinated in my love of games and combined to help me to figure out how to remove ‘eat an entire sleeve of cookies’ as a valid strategy from the stress reduction options menu.
I was able to see the pattern:
Thought ➡️ Options appear
Options ➡️ Potential actions
Potential actions ➡️ benefit vs effort
And like clockwork, the option with the least effort would get extra DKP points making it harder to resist.
So I stopped letting my brain autocomplete with the junk choices. I combined mindfulness with reframing and a vivid imagination to see myself changing the limits. The subconscious only understands when you draw it pictures and you REALLY want it onboard to make these changes routine. If it’s not on the dropdown, I can’t click it.
TL;DR for Fellow Questers:
Your brain is basically running a UI with a bunch of behavioral macros.
Bad habits stay habits because we keep offering them as options.
Remove the option, remove the temptation.
Design your life menu like a responsible player, not a chaotic neutral bard.
You don’t need more willpower. You need a better menu.
Still seeing “Stay in bed all day and pretend you’re an NPC” on your internal dropdown? Might be time to update your life settings—and if you want a coach to help debug the system, you know where to find me.