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Breaking Bad Habits & Building New Ones

any sort of bad eating habits here in our students. I'm a big on ice cream, actually, and I don't want to kick it that way. Actually, we used to work in an ice cream store when I was about 15. I think I put them out of business. Anything bad from the studio audience? Well, when I travel, I really liked plain food, which I know is terrible. But you're a quantity eater, not a quality, you know, I bet there's like two types of years, which is like one person eats for the active eating. But the flavor is kind of irrelevant. It's kind of like the sensations and other person eats for flavor, where it's more like Do I enjoy? Like like I don't know. I have a friend who gets a bag of Skittles, and I've eaten the whole freaking bag before. She's eaten even a couple, but she, like, choose and nibbles on and gets the flavour. She's like, Oh, this apple tastes like a little bit brighter. Uh, what are you talking about? There's no flavor to those Skittles are all the same, right? Right. But no, ther...

e is, um, and so understanding that to that quantity. Eaters and quality eaters act differently, and understanding a personality from eating perspective can be powerful because you can see that, um, if you eat not that bad food and a lot of it it's much better than eating a bad food for a lot of it. So things like carrots instead of chips substitution method for breaking bad habits in particular, eating is incredibly powerful. There's a few particular substitution is that I recommend. Ah, lot of it comes down to cooking on your own. If you are traveling, this is extremely hard, and this is one of the main reasons I quit. Traveling after five years of travel was I got really fat, recognizing that I wasn't able to maintain any kind of form. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't travel. Obviously, it just means that you can identify what's the worst and figure out ways to solve it. So I moved to San Francisco for a month about a year and 1/2 ago, and, um, I was coming with a friend of mine who's extremely, extremely fit, uh, old host of ESPN SportsCenter, and he he came over and and as we landed. He made something very clear to me. He he said, Hey, man, we check in your apartment and I was about to go out and I said, Hey, let's go get some food There is like a burrito place down the street. I really like And he said, Look what we do on the first day in a new city becomes who we are in that new see that is a massive pat pattern interrupt when you move to new place. It's one of the best opportunities to form in good habits and break bad habits. But it's also one of those potential situations where everything goes awry. But what happens is that, um, when you sit down when you get to that new city, if you go out and get me Donald's the next day you wake up on what's in the refrigerator. Probably like the leftover McDonald's or whatever you ate. You remember what you ate the day before that that was the first step on your on your habit routine. But what he did is, he said, let's go the grocery store. Let's buy some kale. It's by cucumbers. Buy some vegetables that stock it don't put it in the crisper, but keep it on top the next day and let's be before you get home. Let's go up and sign up a gym. And what happened was the next day it was obvious I was the kind of person who ate healthy in San Francisco. I wasn't the kind of person who ate burritos in San Francisco. I do love burritos, but, uh, man, anyway, I missed them some or substitution that I've been doing myself. So I was doing a ketogenic diet recently, which is where you have fewer than 30 grams of carbs a day, and I found that there's a real power in substitution here because Keo Dai is so restrictive fewer than 30 grams of carbs a day. That's not even an apple. How do you make yourself? What can you eat? Possibly to solve your problems? Well, it turns out that the lack of options kind of increases creativity. So I discover that, um, zucchini acts as a pasta substitute about this little thing called a spiral Isar. But essentially, I just cut up bikini and then use that as a pasta, and it actually cooks way faster. You just throw zucchini and a pot. Pour some tomato sauce on it or whatever, and you done. It takes like five minutes instead of 20 and it tastes actually my opinion better than pasta. Another thing is cauliflower pizza. Using cauliflowers rice or cauliflowers crust is like a zero carb way to eat healthy, and I ended up eating a pizza day of 300 calorie pizza Day. It's fantastic. So, um, those are some. The substitution method can be really, really powerful for breaking bad habits. Now the aversion method of breaking Bad house is something that I spent a lot of time thinking about. I mentioned that form that I work with Pavlak. My company is pavlak, and there's a couple responds here from my company. What we use is a feedback mechanism that allows you to break bad habits, and the way that we use it is essentially Pavlovian conditioning. So are you all familiar with Pavlov's dogs? It yeah, if you're not familiar Pavlov or Pavlov's dogs. Pablo was a site was a Russian scientist who noticed that when he showed meet or steak to his dogs that they would start to salivate. You put like meat powder in their mouth and they would start to salivate. And so he started to say to them, Well, what happens if I ring a bell at the same time as adding meat to their to their mouths? And he would ring a bell at the same time and they would continue to celebrate. Over time, he started removing the meat completely from the situation, and the dogs would continue to salivate just from the act of the belt. It's called Pavlovian conditioning, and it's where you associate to stimuli with one another until they kind of joined, joined together, they become automatic. Their associative conditioning on this is powerful from a breaking bad habits perspective. By adding a negative stimulus to an action you no longer like to do so. For example, um, so the padlock respond, for example, uses vibration, beep and even electric shock toe help. You break bad habits. It's able to shock you with a couple 100 volts of electricity, um, instantaneously. And so I tested this on myself recently. Um, from my bad habit of using Facebook, I tend to use Facebook chat two or three hours a day. Eso I put on pavlak and I said to myself, All right, well, every time I log onto Facebook, I wanted to shock me the next week or so. What happened is that every time I got I went on Facebook, I get shocked. But going on Facebook was an automatic action. So it was like I would sit down and reach over for my computer in my hand, not even thinking types in F A A and hit enter and Facebook loads. And then the next six hours of my day or whatever wasted and I put on the shocking wristband and what happened is I sat down and instantaneously reached over and f a and turkey. Oh, every time, right? What? The first time it happens. Second time it happened. Third time I have it is not that painful shock. But it was enough that I noticed I shouldn't be doing this before time. I typed in f A and then before I hit and tries way I caught myself backspace I don't need to do is now. I can wait till later the next day. I got shocked once or twice, but then I stopped. And 3rd 4th 5th day didn't happen And then I had to go to California for a couple days, came back the next week and a friend of mine asked me, Hey, man, you should have you on my Facebook invite and I said, Oh, check on dialogue And again I had turned off. Wasn't wearing the padlock respond. I was allowed to use Facebook. There was no problem here, and I logged in and there was like over 30 notifications and messages waiting for me. I hadn't logged into Facebook for four days, and I have never done that before. And it was because my brain had associated the two penalties with each other. The idea of the act of the typing in letters instantaneously causing a shock, caused my brain to no longer not even not just go to Facebook but no longer think about going to Facebook completely. Forget about that action of hitting F and any enter. Now, some people say that this is Mawr operate conditioning, Skinner punishment, and some people say it's more Pavlovian conditioning associate to stimuli. But regardless it works, and there's other ways that you can do this if you don't have the power block wristband. Granted, you absolutely should get it. But the way to the old style of wearing a a rubber band on your wrist that you pull and snap is exactly an example. I mentioned briefly in the last segment that, uh, friend had had bitten their their finger whenever they had a depressing thought and their brain train themselves toe associate the two with one another that the act of having starting a depressing thought caused her brain to say, Hey, we don't have that cause the pain is about to come Like That's another example. And one of the coolest examples comes out of ah treatment facility called this Sheik Shah del Treatment facility that uses electric shock therapy to help people break smoking addictions. And what they do is essentially for a couple weeks. You sit with a doctor, you enter the street and facility, and you're asked by the doctor to smoke cigarette and as you smoke, the doctor shocks you. And then he says, all right, like smell the cigarette and the doctor shocks you. And for two weeks of that, you're at facility. Note that these are people who paid several $1000 to quit themselves to rid themselves more conditions, so they're probably people who have the deepest type of smoking addiction that they could. Then, for the next 4 to 6 weeks, they're asked to go home and self administer the shock where they actually smoke a cigarette for 15 or so minutes a day. Um, they smoke a cigarette and shot themselves, smoke a cigarette and shock themselves. What's interesting is that during the time period of the shocking situation, there is a 95% success rate that they don't smoke a single cigarette. Later on that day, and a year later, fewer than 50% of people smoke another cigarette. What's interesting here is the power of the cell that the fact that this was self inflicted even though they're conscious brain knew they were shocking themselves. At the same time they smoke a cigarette, their subconscious brain, their basal ganglia started to associate the active that the taste of cigarette with the pain shock and no longer desired to smoke again. I found that really, really, really powerful because it could be used for multiple different things to train yourself to break a bad habit of biting your nails. For instance, this is not been tested, but all signs point that if you started to bite your nail and shock yourself at the same time for 15 or so minutes a day, your brain would start to associate those two and forget to bite its nails. Yes, to questions that just came up. One is what if you get used to the shock and you start to maybe enjoy it on some level or not minded and it doesn't have any bearing for you. And my second thing is, I was thinking about I absolutely need to do this for Facebook Exactly the same thing. But I don't necessarily want to quit Facebook entirely. But I do like it for a lot of, uh, reasons. So I'm wondering if I could It would be a good idea to say, Well, I'm allowed to use it from, let's say, 10 to 11 PM but that's it. Just this one window in which that's okay, or would that undermine the whole thing? Um, yeah. There were two great questions. Um, well, I mean, I can show you in a few in a little bit how this shock feels and, uh ah, I think you understand that it doesn't feel it doesn't hurt in any way, but it's more about. It's more about awareness. It's more about awareness. So it's whereas vibration becomes something that you just It just becomes a part of your of your back pocket and you don't even notice it. The shock does not stop, but it catches your attention in a way, and you're able to increase the level of a shock on the padlock. Respond, for example, until it's painful. But that said, we also offer ah beeping mechanism, which I find to be as effective as shocking a lot of ways and sometimes even more effective because it's a loud beeping noise that's annoying to people. So not just you feeling it, but also other people around you, feeling it on hearing it and causing you know, an awkward situation. If you're in a meeting, for example, that's an effective trigger and effective not a trigger, an effective ah negative stimulus to help you break that bad habits. So I dont identifying that habit is important. That said, um, the majority of people who have used this have asked that question, and none of them have for gotten used to the shock. Your second question was, Ah, about the window, and that's a great question. I think that the answer to that question is that first of all, we're building out our platform to do exactly what you said, allowing you to set either a maximum out of limit per day or set a, UM, window of time where you're allowed to use it. It really comes down to What are you attempting to do? So are you trying to remove yourself from Facebook forever? Then it should be a bad habit. It's gotta be gone. If smoking cigarettes. That's a good example. You don't wanna let yourself smoke a little bit if you want it to be gone. On the other hand, from Facebook usage, which is clearly a potential positive but also potential negative, you kind of want it to be there for a little bit. But not for a little bit. So you can absolutely add an amount of time during the day where you would say, remind me to get off Facebook. Remind me. Get off Facebook beep shot. Bigger shock until you have Facebook. But after five PM, you're allowed to that would not undermine it whatsoever because you would start to catch yourself as you used Facebook throughout that 9 to 5 period. In fact, not using Facebook throughout the day adds a reward scenario where, later on today, you get to use Facebook because you didn't use Facebook throughout the day, so it does not undermine until I yourself on amount of time. I don't mean to undermine myself, but I know myself. I would feel like I was just outsmarting this system that just not where the band like I want to go smoke and take the band off. It's gonna annoy me and I don't Is it possible? Not sure if it does this already, Or is there a way that you could make it start beeping when you're not wearing it for a certain amount of time yet? Because that would annoy the heck out of me, and I want to put it back on. Yeah, it's actually even better that one of the biggest things that you mentioned today is about pre committing. You're able to make better ideas and make your able to plan your day better in the future than you are. The moment of moment of temptation and that, you know your prefrontal cortex is powerful from the planning perspective. But then the the basal ganglia is succumbs itself to temptation and will solve any problem to allow itself to cheat and do whatever it can do. So Pavlak knows when it's on you and you're able to pre commit to a penalty if you take it off penalties, including post on your Facebook wall. I took off Pavlak and I'm using Facebook or also paint. Charging money was completely effective. If I take this off and I use Facebook payout $10 too. Ah, charity are anti charity or to the people who did succeed. That pre commitment system is kind of core. The idea that I promised to do this and I can't cheat no matter what in the fourth segments. A on how to make it impossible fail. We'll talk a lot about pre commitment, the idea being your basil ganglia brain you're having brain. Your reptile brain will desire to cheat as much as possible. If you make it so that it can't cheat or it can only cheat so much it still might try to cheat, but if you lower the amount of potential that you can cheat. For example, like you say, uh, I'm gonna do my to do list by 10:30 a.m. and then you'll wait until 29 AM to do your to do list. You absolutely will happen, but you'll still get it done. So allowing yourself kind of, um, identifying who you are and letting yourself pre commit to something, it turns out that it gets down the point to where it's the hardest part to do is tow. Press the commit button, but once you're committed, your ableto easily sustain it. Yeah, great. So let's move on a little bit. Keystone habits are an example. That's one small change that causes a ripple effect that leads to bigger results. A keystone habit is a method for creating a macro shift in your life. It's sort of identifying the big habits that have a ripple effect threat your day that can lead to changes and that influence other habits without any extra effort. So I've mentioned a few, but what do you think? What are some keystone habits? I'd love to know from the audience to if they could write down some guesses for what the Keystone Keystone habits would be in their daily routines. You mentioned, uh, uh, meditation you like, Focus in clear head and find out your day. Uh, your checklist seemed like a big keystone habit because that one habit of checking your checklist forced you to do for others? Absolutely. I think that more was a morning routine, but yeah, in the same way, it's having some list of things you're gonna do for sure. Your sleep routine. Yeah, Sleep is actually incredibly powerful. It's ah, it's the sleep is like the force multiplier. There's a lot of having you guys mention and three of them in particular. I've looked into you and studied and used fitness, sleep and meditation and those air three habits that if you focus on them, they can cause bigger shifts than most of the habits you form. So, um, and one that's not shown here is a morning routine that's highly coupled with sleeping well as well. There's a lot of habits we could change this day. I could change what she would put on first in the morning. I could change. Uh, I could change, you know, McDonalds for Burger King. But if I focus instead on adding fitness as well, my daily routines fitness is one of most well researched types of keystone habits. What happens with fitness is that because you exercise, you tend to sleep better. You tend to sleep earlier. You have a segment of your day where you go and leave your daily daily routine and go and exercise here out of that consistent, responsive mode. You tend Teoh eat better as well. Their natural progressions that occur from exercise. Sleep, as I mentioned, is the magnifier. It's one of the most effective ways to restore your willpower. It leads to massive shifts when you have a better willpower system built into today and, um and uh, it's probably one of those keys. One of those important keystone habits, because it really does becomes it's necessary from a will power from willpower regimen like being able to to achieve sleep and effective sleep can lead to ah, it leads to just more willpower through the day. Um, waking up early and having a morning routine is highly couple with that, as I mentioned because when you wake up early and you finish the things in the day when you have willpower to do them and you get through the checklist and finish on time. You don't find yourself rushing and running out the door. You're able to do the things like meditation. Do things like exercise before the rest. The world is even awake. Meditation is an important one to, um, because it allows you to train your prefrontal cortex to allow itself to shut up its internal voice. That internal monologue. Allow yourself to take a step back and look at what you should be doing throughout the day. Does that make sense? Everybody, um, for sleep, There's a lot. I want to talk a little bit about how to achieve perfect sleep. Sleep is really hard. I mean, I'm honestly I'm not the best. Asleep, Uh, sleep is really, really difficult, and it's very easy to continue working throughout your day. Continue to check your phone. There's always something respond to. There's always another email. There's always another action item that you didn't finish. But here's some of the steps for achieving perfect sleep. One thing we should note is that human beings have only slept as we sleep for like 100 or so years, industrialization caused us to remove our by physics, sleep and go into a mano physics sleep. Even Benjamin Franklin wrote about this that he and all people during his time would fall asleep as a sunset around 78 p. M. And we fall asleep, wake up around one another one for an hour and then go back to sleep again. That's how humans are designed to sleep or design asleep by physically. They still do this a lot in some countries, like like Spain with a siesta time. But today we don't have that option. Most people don't have the ability to sleep as they always like to sleep. But here are some things you can do to improve your sleep. First thing is to make sure there is no light in your room. Blackout curtains being able Teoh, adjust the amount of lightning room led. These are fascinating to me because because some lights that are like that I lit up throughout your room. Think your VCR if you have one. I don't know why you have a VCR, but think about your like alarm clock or whatever lights you have in your room. can affect your sleeping pattern not just from your eye perspective, but also hormonally from your skin perspective. If you have a blue light going off throughout the throughout the evening, it can. It can cause you not to secrete melatonin and not fall asleep on time. Making sure you cover up your ladies is really bad. It is really important. High fat meals are important as well. I have families to help you fall asleep. Justice is ah, one of programmers at my pavlak, and his formula for falling asleep is to have a giant almond butter plus butter mixture before he goes asleep. Try it out. You like it? A big one is no screens before bed If you sleep. Um, when you whenever you sleep uh, basically, every always says like, Hey, I want to go to sleep on time. I can't fall asleep. I feel like I have insomnia on my first response is hey, are you using your laptop or IPhone in bed and their answers like, Yeah, but how do I go to sleep? I'm like, Don't use your laptop before bed and they say, OK, well, what else? Now there's no else that's it. Just stop it, Put it away. Put in another room. When I used to work with Tim, Ferriss slipped his house like two months straight, and he lived on the top floor. But he left his phone on the bottom floor so he couldn't check it at night. That was very effective for him on another way to help this out. If you do years laptop at night, there's an app called flux, which lets you as you go as it gets evening Thea. The APP changes the color lights Teoh redder light so it doesn't affect your sleep cycles. It removes the the waking No way the particular lights that wake you up and then reading fiction instead of nonfiction helps you release some. Uh, let's see released worries often and can help you fall asleep. But also it something boring can often help you fall asleep. If you find yourself being insomniac one night, don't just try to force yourself to sleep. Instead, go to the other room, read for a little bit. Come back to your room, fall asleep and there are some supplements which could help you fall asleep. Magnesium, melatonin. All them are very effective. What are your thoughts on Ambien and such? Um, yeah. So I don't have too many thoughts on my mind. I have used it before. I have Ah, um see, on a d. D. So whenever I take Adderall, I've noticed it to be a cycle that's actually really interesting from that perspective. If I went on vacation for a while, I was in the wilderness for a while with no light, and I came back and there was no problem with my a d d symptoms. I had slept like 10 hours a day, and I was able to wake up early and focus and go to sleep. And that night, one day problem was that I didn't sleep well enough. And I woke in the morning and I just was tired. So I had a pop and I roll on the night, kept me up in the evening, and so suddenly I couldn't fall asleep, So it became a really bad negative feedback loop. And sometimes adding a drug, uh, can help. You can help in that. In that situation from Ambien as a particular drug, I've read and heard that it kind of dilutes your sleep cycles. So, like it doesn't actually let you get quality sleep. But other drugs are better. Melatonin. Trazodone, for example, with magnesium. Those are very effective at making you fall asleep and don't ruin your sleep cycles. What I mean when I say it ruin your sleep cycles? I mean, you get fewer rent, a few hours of REM sleep and fewer hours of deep sleep. In comparison, it's like drinking alcohol. You can fall asleep when you when you're when you're drunk, but you don't actually get the restorative powers of sleep from that. So that's something. Be careful of. I use the basis respond, which I mentioned, which tracks my sleep really effectively down to the realm cycles, light sleep and deep sleep. And that's been really effective for me to monitor how particular things interact. And lastly, um, I just want to put this system together before we talk about homework for the section. But it's when you're trying to build a system around a habit you want to form. It's important to find the trigger link that action that you want to do to trigger and use kind of reward to reinforce the system to break a bad habit. You can keep the trigger in the reward, but replace the bad action substitute with something good. We talked a little about Keystone habits, and we talked about sleep. Is that a pretty good overview? Lastly, I want everyone to go ahead and check out and the homework for right now, which is to figure out what habits you want to build, Which happens You wanna break? Try to identify the Q routine reward for each and we prayed. A survey. Pavlak dot com ford slash cl survey one where you can write down your habits, your cue routine, your reward, and that will be effective for ah, for you to be able Teoh Kind of think it through. So a lot of the habits that we talked about our things that are kind of controllable. It's like like smoking. It's like smoking or not smoking or eating healthier, not eating healthy. Order some habits that you could do for more complex activities or parts of life, like like business or being being an entrepreneur. Like when you're running a business, then you have. There's all these different tactics or strategies you could be trying. You don't know what to be focusing on what not to be focusing on. What are some habits that you know of that work well for business people, our entrepreneurs? Sure. Well, when we come back from break, we'll be talking to chase Jarvis about the habits of effective artisan entrepreneurs. In particular, there are some habits that I think are effective for everybody thinks like sleeping right down your to do list is a big one, you know, thinking broadly. Um, some people have recommended ideas. Like James, all toucher always talks about having a list of 10 new ideas each day and making that a habit to help you generate, Um, just to get your brain the mode of of thinking hourly rather than inwardly. I think individual people on individual jobs and professions require different sorts of habits. The trick is to understand that there is no magic habit besides sleep probably, and that, um, individuals who are looking to identify how they should improve their business or improve their lives should break it down into what does improving their life or their business mean, is it writing more? Is it calling a networking more? Is it you know, is eating better. Is that relevant to them? Is it lifting more if they're a trainer, those when you break it down to something as a pure ACU routine and reward and ideally, fill it out on the survey right there, you'll be able Teoh. It's a lot easier to attack a habit that you know that I don't generalize Massive habit. I'm very interested what you were saying earlier because you're saying you do like some of the benefits of social medias. You don't want to get rid of it entirely. But you see, I did the opposite. I did get rid of it. I I thought this is just so irritating. So I'm curious what the benefit is that you feel you do you need to have Isn't that in itself about habit? Just curious. I like, uh, that I'm able to connect with a lot of people that aren't in my life all the time and for his new people live meet it lets me get to know them a little better in a different context. Um, and a lot of people are messaging and putting event invites, you know, solely on there. And I would he outside of that. If I was to just go cold turkey, that makes sense. Does it make sense? There's a lot of value. Tonto, Facebook and social media, for example. Like a lot of my investors or people who purchase a product or people who have supported me throughout the way have I kept in contact with them through Facebook? But the trick is to let you run your habit, not the Have it run you so optimizing your Facebook as a period of time per day, you're allowed to use it or even better, double using it as a reward. So, like when I go to the gym, I get to use 15 minutes of Facebook can be really, really, really powerful. The trick is just not toe. Let yourself get sucked into it. Um, yeah, that's that's my main response there. I'll see the slap worked for you, but then you actually turned into a trick shot. Peter, Of course, in coming from a Casio Pieris online, Cassidy is saying finish. This is a really interesting course and that their struggle is with habits that because they're a control freak and they find that they just over well themselves all things they believe they have to do and keep control off. Are we going to get into more of a want out of, perhaps break that sort of cycle and become less country controlling? Yeah, we could talk a little bit about that. Teoh. There's a little bit of personality issues here, so, like some people are controlling, something will release a fair and identifying who you are and also identifying what is happening when you're doing the thing you don't want do in pre setting that as something you want to stop yourself from doing so. Being controlling is a very broad task, but something like I often do. I often say these words that caused me to realize I'm being controlling. And then that is my cue of me, hearing me say these consistent words, then the routine being Let's take a break and water and take 10 breaths before I continue the sentence. That can be an effective habit to form for people who have those kind of issues. Really, it's about awareness from a large perspective and being able to break it down toe what you want to stop yourself from doing