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Habits & Willpower Review

I always get loosened up a little bit in the mornings by standing up and doing a couple jumping Jackson arms around, converting the audience. Stand up. And if you're a home, just get up right now. Stand up. I know it's weird, but no one's watching you here. There's a lot of people watching us. It's even weird for us. Just, uh, move your arms back. That's gonna stretch on. So you stretch up is gonna mess up everything, and it's like, leave back crack and then I always start off the my events that I want to do with a primal scream. So you guys want to copy off me. You need to go and scream as loud as you possibly can. It sounds like this. Oh, Great guys, let's do one more and then we're gonna be ready to go on. If your home along with us, right? Oh, all right, rates. Let's let's get going. I always feel way more awake after I started doing these primal screams, so I feel like I hope everyone at home is ready. I know that when you get your blood moving, you get a little bit of, ah motion ...

going on, it just feels more comfortable. I would always use that. I used to deejay in Berlin, and I would always use the primal scream right before I started doing a show. It just added, as acted as a trigger, sort of to get myself in the mode of being the deejay that I wanted to be. And actually, I usedto I used to work with a guy named Todd Herman from the Peak athlete who trains athletes in as a psychological coach. He helps them not coach as, ah, like, ah, on the performance of their ability as a football player as an NHL player, but Maurin the mental state. And he said to me that a lot of players, when they they would be awkward off the field, will be shy and quiet off the field. But he would train them toe as soon as their feet hit the grass. They would imagine that they were the Tasmanian devil, for example, and they would just say the words fury, fury, fury and over and over within the brain. Until they became that kind of person, they were able to act to use their there but the field as a trigger to completely shift their mental state. So I like the primal scream from me. It works for me because it really gets you. It gets me in this feeling of ah, confidence and ability to speak. So I hope it works for you guys. How do you feel after the primal scream, everybody? Yeah, it's surprising, Right? And getting up moving always helps a little bit too. So, um so I'm excited to talk. It should be chatting with you back again today. I got to see most you last night at at the at the after party and raw meats brain trust event with my brother where people seem to know me because I'm raw meats, brother. So I was always entertaining, but, um, it was really interesting to talk with you afterwards and here. The kind of stories and what you were learning about, um, and sort of habits. You have what you're trying to form and so start off for people watching home and everybody in the audience. I want to talk about just a quick review of of habits. We talked a lot yesterday about willpower. We talked a lot about habits. We talked about how to break how to form habits. We briefly talked about yesterday breaking bad habits, so breaking bad habits was a very different than forming new habits. Breaking bad habits was about adding substitution, substituting, Ah, bad habit for a good habit, a batter team for a good routine. So you keep the same. Q. You get same trigger, and you keep a similar reward, but you change the routine so that you don't have the bad habit anymore. So, for my example yesterday was frozen Berries. I would always eat ice cream, and I would binge on ice cream all the time. And instead of trying to go cold turkey, I instead switched Teoh to frozen Berries because frozen Berries gave me the sensation of cold. It gave me a sweet flavor, and I could still eat the whole bag. But instead of eating, you know 1000 calories are would be ingesting just 180 or 200 calories by finishing whole bag Berries. And I do finish old Maghaberry tonight. So, um, they're delicious. I really highly recommend getting a whole foods or Trader Joe's and, uh, and just bring it home and it just pop tastes like great. So that's one way to break bad habits. The second way to break bad habits that I mentioned yesterday was using aversion therapy Way invented pavlak for this purpose. It's a little wristband slash module that you can put on and where anywhere in your body sticks to you. Uh, and you said it, Teoh basically shock you when it does things that you when you do something you don't want to do. So every time I go on Facebook, my chrome extension sends a trigger to my arm slash wrist band toe shock me. So I stopped desiring to use Facebook was the example that I gave yesterday Um great. So does anybody in the audience of the questions today about breaking bad habits, anything you don't understand yesterday? Yeah, well, could you maybe go through an example how this white work for, like, biting nails? Sure, there's two ways to approach the bribing biting nails problem. Biting nails is a really, really good example of like automatic habit. It's something that you don't notice you're doing. You don't notice you're doing until the end of the day when your nails a gross or your you bitten off skin and hurts. So there's two ways you know, there's a few ways your approach, this problem one way that you should start off by doing is by meditating, meditating. Instituting that is a having your daily routine begins to add awareness into everything you do. So by meditate in the morning, you might start noticing that as you bring your hand to your face, you just tend to notice it. That's the first thing you should do. And because meditation is a keystone habit, it's something you should do anyway. Starting off with that is just a general no brainer, a positive way to do it. The second thing that we that we're testing out right now with Pablo is that we have an accelerometer in here. So, um, the act of So we're trying to build a product to help cure this situation because, uh, the accelerometer can measure the motion we hand, and we're working on building it so that as you wear the risk fans and bring it close to your face, it can start to beep toe ad awareness toe. The fact that you're bringing it close to your face. Um, the one thing that actually exists and has been tested out currently is that that nail polish that tastes really bad. Do you buy your nails, Mark? Yeah, so I mean, they have a clear version of the nail polish. My sister bites her nails all the time, and she mentioned that it just didn't work for her. Like the biting nails she just wouldn't would. She wouldn't even notice the flavor. That said, It definitely works for a lot of people. And legitimately breaking bad habits really does come down to awareness. The fact that you're doing the bad habit is the first step in breaking one and one like that. Like like biting your nails. It has. It's such a automatic feature that it's not like smoking a cigarette where the actor smoking a cigarette requires a lot of steps we actually can notice for a period time that you're smoking a cigarette with bite your nails like it's done. I cracked my not my neck and my back a lot, and I used to crack it all the time, overly, and that was one of those habits you just don't even notice you're doing So just to think about that, for my own perspective and how that might reflect on on breaking bad habits of bite your nails, the way that I started to lower the amount of cracking my back was actually toe solve the underlying issue, which was in my case, it was like a It was like standing up straight sort of muscle issue. When I use my laptop on computer, it would make me have to crack my neck. So what I noticed was I looked at when I wanted to crack my neck and found that I could remedy that situation by changing my environment. It's good to start noticing when you're biting your nails and, um, see, what is the situation that you're in when you bite your nails? What's causing that to happen? Is it happening because you're stressed? Are you at your laptop what happens? And when you start to notice these patterns, you can at least add a little more awareness and target down into that awareness. Under the last thing was that I was gonna bring up was there is science that shows that if you add like uh uh, snapping, you're not snapping a rubber band slash adding a shock as you bite your nails manually, like you bite your nails and out of snap by your nails and press the shock button. Your brain will start to associate the pain of shock with the act of your hand being in your mouth and stop desired into reaction whatsoever. So all of those are things worth testing. Yes, I had a question. Eso if you're you talked about a couple of the keystone habits, so things that basically everybody should do, like meditation, morning routine, sleeping well, exercise. If you once you start toe, establish a base of that you want toe make improvements in other areas. So like, for example, a really big topic for a lot of people is losing weight or just like getting in shape. There's probably a lot of really bad habits. They're adding up to you being overweight or not really having the body that you want. How do you recommend breaking down and kind of finding water? The best bad habits toe start with with something like being overweight? So you're saying, What if you are somebody who has a problem with reading or you're overweight? How do you identify what the bad habits are with the biggest bad habits are and help you focus on the big Just where do you start? Because it seems like something like being overweight is probably the result of multiple have. It's not just one bad habit. Yeah, there's a couple ways to approach it. You can try breaking each individual bad habit, or you can start by trying to form the good habit that makes those bad habits unnecessary or irrelevant. In the case of losing weight on, we'll be talking about this today and the second in this in this segment. Um, if you focus on in my case, uh, exercise adds up to exit the keystone habit that would make me eat better and naturally sleep better and naturally, not desire to eat food. Plus, it got me out of the house. I would focus first on what's the big win here, um, and saying like if I confined, if I naturally, if you do the kind of heavy lifting that we talked about with Mark Bell yesterday, your you can eat a lot of food. In fact, you're you're asked to eat a lot of food, and it doesn't even matter if the food often doesn't matter. The food is higher, low quality as long as you're getting your macro account correctly. So, um, I would start off by approaching. What's the big win? How can I form a good habit to help that that would make those that would render those bad habits unnecessary. But the second thing about that is on. We're going to talk about this in the second segment. Um, modifying your daily routine and modifying your environment around you can be massive for shifting bad habits. So you know you can always minimize your bad habits. So one of the things that I used to notice is that when I work from home, I eat a lot of food and there's no I mean my my working environment is in my kitchen, so I'm surrounded by a trigger of bad of food all day. It's all I think about it. I see it so easy to get big or the refrigerator. But I noticed when I started going to my office that I didn't eat is poorly anymore because it just it just wasn't as easy right. I didn't have food around me all the time, so optimizing your environment, noticing what are the bad habits you're doing and noticing how you can minimize those bad habits is a first step to getting going. So I want to talk a little bit about willpower. Willpower was a is in exhaust, will resource and willpower is replenished by sleep and can be augmented by glucose. Willpower is a muscle that you can train and willpower is is something that really it shouldn't be the core of your system. It shouldn't be the core of your of your focus when trying to form and break habits. Willpower is a resource, but the people who make effective decisions, the people who are effective managers and effective leaders use their willpower strategically to implement systems that won't allow them to fail. I mentioned I mentioned in the previous session that, uh, I mentioned previous session about my system for making myself finally do it to do list by creating a system where I made a bet to make a bet. Each day I had to write down three things that I would do each morning or else I had to pay a massive $150 fee, and each of those things had to be done by the end of the day, at least to the three or outside to pay another fee. But when I succeeded, I would receive a reward, adding creating a system of this one month that to make a bet each day took a moment. It took one email to my assistant saying, Hey, I will be making three things. I will be making a list of three to do items each morning by 10:30 a.m. And if they're not done, I will be a take away my money and that was a one period was a one second decision used up one piece of my willpower, but that will power was used to teach tickly to create a larger system that would not allow me to fail. So that's how you should be using will power. Um, I have a few quotes from a book that's an excellent book by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney called Will Power Rediscovering the greatest human strength. And, uh, there's a few cool parts about this. I wanted to bring up that I didn't talk about yesterday, um, in particular I was just mentioning that people is a quote from the book. People with good self control mainly use it mainly use it not for rescue in emergencies but rather to develop effective habits and routines and school work. They use their self control not to get through crises, but to avoid them. They play offense instead of defense. Instead of focusing on responding and using their willpower each moment, they focus on looking upward and building the system that won't allow them to fail. That we talked about in the in the fourth session yesterday, Um, a couple of the really cool things from the book that I wanted to bring up that might get you get your mind moving and might get you thinking about about how willpower affects your life. Um, a lot of times people I mentioned about meditation, the beauty of meditation is that allows you to just shut up. You're the voice in your head that continues to talk all the time. And this is called Zai Garnick effect, which is that uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one's mind. Once a task completed in the goal was reached, this stream of reminders comes to stop. Ah, One of the famous examples of this effect is when you have a song stuck in your head. I don't know if you've all everyone has a song Simon had at some point. Um, for me, it's usually Gloria Estefan. She's amazing. I don't even want to get it out of my head and kind of kidding, but not that much. Uh, what I've noticed with what The Saigon effect is really interesting. That song will continue to play in your head forever and ever and ever until you listen until the end of the song. If you hit the play button on the song, actually listen through to the end that tends to you tend to tends to go away from her mind. And if you don't have access to listen to the song, then uh, even if you create an ending to your song and do it in your head, you can actually help get rid of it. So that's a pretty cool effect. In one particular case. It's like if you have it to do like if you have a to do list. If you have ah, fewer follow like the getting things done. System of David Allen or, uh, one of core components is that you need to have a list. An unknown, assembled undifferentiated list. It's like a capture folder where any time you have a new idea, a new thought pops in your head. It just goes in the capture folder, and then you contextualized and sort it later. And why that's important is that which, once you have a list that you know you do check. Once you have a list that you know, you'll come back to your able to get whatever thought is in your head out of your head. And it sits there in that list so that that's Ah, very good habit to form is focusing on making sure you have a way to capture information and keep it in one location. Unsorted. Something pops in your head. Just write it down. I tend to use an app called Wonder List. Uh, that's been really effective for me. I can share with people, and, you know, my system is like every time something pops in my head, I think I should do something. I know I should do something. I grabbed my phone press the button hit Wonder list and type it in recently. I've actually just I haven't assistant who's on my, um I'm a hip chat chat room. So every time I have something important that I think of, I moved away from Wonder List and just chat with him and let him figure out, uh, so those air both effective ways. But the idea is just having a list or having a way for you to get that out of your mind will make that disappear from your internal monologue. Any questions about that? You seem to be cool. Um, a couple of the really cool, interesting facts about willpower, something that's called the hot, Cold Empathy Gap, Which is that people who are Witten you. Ah, when you're in a rational, cool, peaceful moment when your willpower is high, it's hard to appreciate how you're gonna behave during a moment of passion and temptation. No one ever thinks that they're gonna, you know, attack a loved one, for example. But no one will. Once they're in that situation, things change. The study that they always site has to do with has do with people talking about like sexual things and they basically ask a group of people, What would you do in this sexual situation? And 99% of people say that there's no way that they would ever touch that. There's no way that situation ever affect them. And then I asked him again after ask after having been be aroused, and the answer is completely shift so people don't always understand how they're going to react in future situations. But the knowledge that you may act differently is key here. Monitoring who you are in these in these different situations allows you to understand that you aren't who you think you are in particular. When you're looking at the brain and you're in a cool moment, you're thinking from the prefrontal cortex that there's no way you would ever be the kind of person who would be run by their basal ganglia. But when you're in that new situation, everything changes that make sense. Great. Um, a few other points that I want to bring up and we'll be talking about this today as well. Um, when you're creating your goals, including your habits, your credit, your triggers is very important that you have bright lines or clear, unambiguous rules. So things like I I I I want to be healthier. Eat healthy is not clear. It's very ambiguous. You're not sure what that means, but something like I will walk steps as measured by my risk, my Fitbit wristband or whatever. Um, that is a very clear goal in the, uh, in the homework packet I gave out yesterday from pavlak dot com, ford slash ceo. There was a, uh, the the Minimalist guide. The hacking, your habits, uh, worksheet, and in that guy detailed out a smart goal, which is a way to make a goal completely measurable. I think this smart goal stands for specific, measurable, attainable. Uh, time based. His tea and that are relevant is relevant to your your task and t is time based. So you want to make sure that I will do X that is very specific by a specific time. And it's completely Ah, it's a bright line. You know, when you succeeded, you know when you failed. Um, a few more things is that understood? If you add to your habits are hard maintained, habits are hard to form and it's very easy to fall of task. There's very, very ambiguous situations, and they're very difficult situations, like I want to walk 10,000 steps. But today I can't because I'm on a plane, for instance. How do I deal with that situation? Well, in a lot of people, for a lot of people in particular, this is very common. During New Year's resolution time, uh, people will make a decision to say I will go to the gym every day, and then when they fall off the bandwagon, everything fails. It's like the end of the game, and that is not a good way t live in the situation. The one of the solutions here is If, uh if X, then why will occur? So if I can't hit 10,000 steps, then I will do push ups. Or like that is a ah way that you can keep yourself on track with your goal and allow yourself for malleable failures that aren't real failures because you've planned for it. Does that make sense? Yes. Price. Eso won one thing that I've noticed about myself. It's like with dieting or something, for example, or just trying to eat healthier. Then sometimes all have some opportunity, like will be at work. And I'm not really supposed to be eating brownies or cake or whatever at that time for my dia. But someone will bring in some home baked, you know, something that they cooked and I just can't turn it down. And so I eat something, and then I do This stupid thing were then I think, Oh, well, okay, well, the whole day is basically shot at this point, and I just kind of give up And then I end up eating even mawr bad stuff when I get home and it's almost like it's this all or nothing mentality that happens. Do you do? Is there a way to to kind of prevent that? Or is that what you mean by the if then or water some good ways? Toe? Think about not kind of giving up when things go wrong in a situation. Yes, that is a incredible point that you just brought up on. This is really, really common with people who have a binge eating mentality or grew up like chubby. It's very common where they basically say, uh, if I get if I messed up, then I might as well give up on today. Today's lost A. So I might as well go out and Vinge hard. And in fact, like I remember mentally from when I was ah, a couple years ago, when I was a lot larger than I am now. Um, I can distinctly remember when I was trying to keep up on habits, and then I wouldn't miss up on my habit. So I would go to McDonald's in New York, where they have a list of all of the calorie counts, and I would straight up by the item that had the highest calorie count per dollar possible. I was like, Oh, I better take advantage of the fact that I failed. Of course, your body isn't quite work that way, right? Your body calories, Add calories, add calendars. Add if you messed up for a day and you can mess up more for a day. There's no such thing as a shot day. Um, if this then that formula is perfect here. So it's like if I go over, it's easy to cook for your If you cook for yourself, it's easy to know how many calories you're eating. It is easy to eat what you plan to eat cause you're cooking yourself. But if brownies are brought into the office, then I will cut a brownie into four pieces and bring it to my table and eat it slowly. Is is a way to affect this. You might want to add safeguards here, so these are things like, uh, if I, um if I binge, I allow myself one binge day per week. I've used up that benj day, and if I eat more than I should plus 1000 calories, I will pay $100 to charity. That way you can add a little safeguard in to prevent yourself in these huge situations. There's a study out of willpower, and I can't exactly recall the exact study of how it worked. But it was essentially. There's, like three groups of people who were asked to eat a lot of food, um, and count how much food they were eating, and it was like a completely forget the exact study. But the group that was that had this habit of bingeing would essentially just stopped counting after point and just over eat forever. And so we need to like it's hard to shape that mentality. But knowledge that that you might do that And now that's your kind of personality would allow you to set up safeguards in these situations is, like, sort of answer a question on. And then I guess, Ah, you kind of brought up another question. So if the if you're setting it up with some of the systems that we've talked about, where there's a negative reinforcement or something, so, like if I eat sweets, you know, then I will pay $50 or something is the Is that if then scenario planning Is that most effective to do kind of before you eat the sweets? Or is that after you have already kind of messed up and like eating something like OK, well, even if I eat a brownie, then I will do this. Or is it more of something that happens like beforehand? Before you're saying we should you make the plan before understood? You set up the if plan that if I eat a brownie, I will do X or versus if I'm about to eat a brownie, I should do this first, right? Yeah, yeah. Do you set up the if then toe help you kind of before you cross the line her after you cross the line. I think that it's good, Teoh. I mean, it depends on the person. I would say that having the situation is like like, for example, one really good one is if I drink a glass of alcohol, I will drink a glass of water a same time or in between. And so in that case, it's not. It doesn't make a big difference if I drink it before. If I drink it after, although drinking it before my prevents you slow down, you're from drinking alcohol. Probably the best answer is to do it before. If I'm about to eat a brownie, then I will eat drink a big glass of water first. That's probably best solution, but I think it works differently for individual people as well. Yeah, um, and then the last thing which actually comes up is relevant to your point. Price is the trick of telling yourself I can have it later, and this is actually really interesting. It's the same kind of situation of the closed loop Garnick effect of of the music playing in your head essentially, if you have, uh, Skittles in front of you and you were trying to not eat it and you say, uh, I'm not gonna have any. You're using up willpower. And if you say on a couple, you're using a bull power. But if you say I can have that, but I'll have it later. You're not using up willpower. And so what? You What you can do is actually train yourself to start thinking of it from a later perspective, it closes the loop in your brain. It allows you to think of it in a different way. And, um, it's really, really powerful for, like, cutting portions. For instance. Like I can eat this bag of Skittles. They have three or four Skittles and you close the bag and say, and I could have the rest as soon as I want. Just put it away. We were talking about that in the second section second session today, where we talk about how toe optimize our food environment and optimize your context to cut down on mindless eating. But, um, the telling yourself you can have it later is a really cool trick, and I've actually seen people form and as a habit themselves, where they actually just try to form the micro habit and try to build a habit of anything that they eat, saying that they will have it later so they'll just every time to eat anything. They'll get a big portion that would cut in half and sale. Have the rest later, and they start off just doing that by but and then getting into the habit of always saying that we'll have it later, and it's very fascinating toe wash the mental conversation because it really does close a big loop in your brain.