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Layers of Habits & Willpower

So we're gonna move on and start talking about, uh, one case study. Really? I met a person I met. His name is obvious and his story absolutely changed my life. So Abbas was a taxi driver. He was, uh I was just getting a cab in Boston to my work because it was raining and I decided I didn't want to walk for 10 minutes. I'd rather take a cat and I get in the cab. And obvious was sitting down next to me, and I was telling him and mentioning to him that I had been working on product that helps people form good habits and break bad habits. And I asked him what his habits were, and he told me that he had once lost £80. And I looked at him and I said, Wow, that's amazing. Um, but he was still a little bit big, and I asked him what happened. He said, Well, actually, I gained it all back, and I said to him, Right then, that is interesting. I need to know what this story is. How did you lose £80 how did you gain back £80? It's a significant shift. So then right then office told me that he he sai...

d, Hey, we're actually here so I'll talk to you later and I said Actually, let's just do this trip again. I want to hear this story And so we kept driving around and office, told me that he started Tell me and detail out exactly what happened in his life and he said that it was the beginning of a new year and he made a New Year's resolution that he was gonna get in shape this year and his house happened to be pretty far from his work. It was like a 45 minute commute and it would take up to an hour, hour and 15 minutes when he was in traffic. And he said that his the traffic just made him so angry and he would get really mad. And so what he did is he and a friend decided they were gonna wake up early. They were gonna drive to the gym and then they were going to skip traffic and the gym was on the way. Teoh, on the way to work, they would meet up together in carpool. Everything was a perfect storm for a proper good habit formation, accountability friend and just automatic path. Already on the way. Very simple. So he would wake up early in, his friend would meet, they would drive to the gym than from the gym. They would exercise and then they would get to work right after now. As he started to do this, he began to eat better. Exercise is one of those keystone habits that begins to make you want to eat better and makes you sleep better. You have to wake up on time to be able to skip traffic. Eso he started to quickly lose a lot of weight. In fact, in less than eight months he'd lost £80 which is fantastic now. His friend actually quit after four months. But he kept going. He loved it. He loves skipping traffic in particular. That was the big reward here. He didn't have toe sit and get angry all morning, so he lost £80. Then he told me that it all fell apart. And I asked him what happened and always said that it was, um it was a mixture of things. First of all, a few of his friends said that he was getting too thin. He started out himself a little bit then obvious. Uh, the big change was that his work shift. His schedule's changed, so he no longer had a specific time that he was supposed to go to work. He never knew exactly what time he'd be getting up. And he never knew if the traffic would be good or bad. And then lastly, the biggest change was this. He changed his gym now was no longer on his way to work. It was just a few blocks away from work so obvious would get to he would drive. And he would, uh, the conversation changing his head from Wake up, go to the gym, Goto work to wake up. If I take a left, I'll go to the gym. If I take a right, I'll go work. And what would you say in his head? He'd say, Well, just goto work, drop my bags off, get a little work done, and then head over to that head over the gym. On what happened instead is he never went to the gym again. And I noticed that this was a huge that that this was very. It was very middle of sense in my life because I lived in Boston and my gym was like five blocks north, and I walked by a gym every day on my way to work. There's one Jim that was a couple blocks after my work and one Jim that was on my way to work. So I said to myself how well what'll happen if I just switch my gym to the one that's on my way to work And the difference was astronomical. It was no longer like get toe work. And then I force myself to get to the gym, figure out a way to get my meetings, to be set and finish my work and then be able to turn off my distractions and make sure I have my gym clothes with me and all that other stuff. Instead, it was this I paid extra toe, put my clothes at the gym. I made sure that Jim was on my way to work, So as soon as I was walking down, I would look up and see the gym, just telling me, Go in there. You might as well your gym clothes air up there it's on your way to work. The gym was open earlier to so I could get to work earlier, and suddenly my gym attendants change from two times a week to five times a week. It was a massive shift, and all it took was just switching the gym. It was making it easier for me to do what I wanted to do, and so that small story made made me realize that there's a lot of layers, a lot of layers, toe habits. People think that the habits that they have are just what they're always destined to be. But the fact is, if you can change some small things, there's some small triggers that we can focus on that can make habits become, ah, thing that were able to choose rather than the things that choose us. So what is it? Have it really? The definition of a habit is when a trigger causes an action to occur automatically in the brain. It's like when you get a vibration, push notification in your phone and your hand reaches down and grabs it automatically, and you don't even realize that you've done it. It's just there. In fact, it's so it's so deeply embedded in your brain that it requires more willpower to not do in action thing to do in action. I always give a few examples of habits that most people tend to have. Um, so 11 habit that's pretty common is brushing your teeth. Most people tend to brush your teeth. I don't ask that question to audiences anymore because some people sometimes don't, uh, is usually everyone raises their hand. And then later on, someone will be like, Hey, can you? My boyfriend was lying. Can you make him brush his teeth, please? So but brush your teeth is one of those habits that people think is just that. It's just something that everyone does where most people dio you wake up and you go brush your teeth. Why? Because your mouth has this dry feeling it right. If you don't brush your teeth, you have to rush out the door one day or you lose your Brooke toothbrush cause you're in a new city. You few weird all day, and until you start chewing gum or or figure out a way to get that taste out of your mouth, you can't stop thinking about it. What's interesting about it is that humans have been around for, I think, dozens of thousands of years before having toothbrushes. We never had a desire for brushing our teeth before then. But suddenly today we dio Why? Because we've brushed our teeth for long enough that it feels weird to not brush your teeth that simple. The trigger of that dry feeling in your mouth that's common for everybody is something that triggers your brain into thinking it's time to brush my teeth. Other things that I mean, if you do it enough times in the day before you eat breakfast, people tend to brush their teeth. Some people brush your teeth after breakfast. That's interesting, actually. Who here brushes their teeth before breakfast versus after breakfast? Somebody who's that who's before breakfast you want to and then after breakfast, the rest be one of your definitions of a habit, but I because I know I brush my teeth every day, but it actually can't remember when I do it just kind of do it. At some point, you don't even know if you do before or after breakfast. I can't remember, you know, interesting. Some dentists tell me before some dentist tell me after, I'm never really sure I'd rush before. And actually, that's one of those examples of like so brushing your teeth is really interesting. Another good example that's less. That's even less obvious people. If you drive a car, it's pretty common. Teoh hit your left turn signal before you take a left. Unless you're in Los Angeles, I guess. But if you're if you're driving a car and you're about to get the left turn lane, you'll notice your hand reaches over and hits the left turn signal right next time in the car. Try not to do that and see what happens. It's actually really hard. You had to physically put your hand behind your back sometimes in order to make yourself not your left turn signal. Now that's a habitat we didn't have until we were 16 or 17 years old, right? Some that we never did before. But suddenly you just do it enough times that the internal viewing of about to turn left the trigger of about to get in the left lane causes your hand naturally to reach over and hit that left turn signal. Now that's a great habit to have. Obviously, it's pretty safe. Um, but some habits are not good to have things like as soon as it's as soon as I get toe work and get tired or feel like taking a break. I walk outside and smoke a cigarette. That's a habit people wouldn't want to have. I don't smoke cigarettes, but I'm saying that's a habit that people might not want to have. Some habits could be good. Some habits can be bad, but in the brain, habits are typically the same. Now there are three core elements of a habit. There's actually two core elements of the habit. Um, there's the Q and the routine, which I mentioned in the process of forming a habit. There's often a reward. Ah, Ward is is some kind of of It's some. It's either internal or external stimulation that makes you makes you continue to do the habit. So ah que, in my case, from going to the gym, was the seeing the gym on my way to work. That was my cue to go into the gym. The routine was to enter the gym. I actually didn't have to work out each day. I only had to swipe my card at the gym, but that's a story we'll be talking about in a later segment. And in my case, when I was trying to form the habit of exercise, my reward was that if I went to the gym enough days in a row, I would get to get myself massage. So internal feeling of that external extrinsic reward was the reason I began to get myself that swipe my card of the gym. Over time, it felt uncomfortable to not go to the gym. I needed that young get that pump. So uh, so the reward became an internal feeling. And in the process of habit formation, it's often, ah, powerful trick to start off the extrinsic reward that we overtime shift to an intrinsic reward. Now it's interesting because a lot of people online are coming in with asking for advice on how they could break this habit or that have it or start good habits. I think we're going to covering a lot of that in the next couple days. Not any necessarily specifics to the questions are being asked, but we definitely will be money. She'll be sharing through the how to create all these good habits and how to break yourself those bad habits, too. But please keep your questions coming. Keep the chat coming as well. It's interesting, and we had a question coming in from online saying they understand how they need to do the habits. But they they are raising small Children as well, and they find that the Children are breaking habits, breaking the happens that they want to set. Is that somebody gonna cover in the next couple sessions? Yeah, handling distractions is definitely a significant thing, and there's some distractions that you can't turn off, you know, and can maybe block it. But it's tough to block your Children. We will definitely in a later segment in the next segment will be talking about the process of forming habits and will shortly after be discussing about how to break habits and change habits. And the idea of forming habits and the idea of breaking habits are completely different. They're very different ways, and in particular, I think that we have some novel things that some novel ways of approaching breaking bad behaviors that no one has ever done before. So I'm really excited to talk about that later on, Um, we'll start off, though, by talking a little bit about the evolution of habits and why they exist. So, as I mentioned, 40% of our day is spent inhabit, and that time that we spend inhabit is completely automatic. I mentioned briefly about the about the shower story about why a lot of great ideas come in the shower, and it's because our brain allows us to outsource our cognitive load to our habits, our basal ganglia. And, um, what happens is that it allows our cognitive brain to start thinking more, have more free time to think. And this is really, really powerful from an evolutionary perspective in the past focusing on the lion and not the spear. Instead of having to focus on the act of picking up your spear and looking at it and throwing it, you can focus on the actual thing coming at you. That you need to aim for the ability to do to automate habits is just everything we do. In fact, one common meditation that I do is a walking meditation, and in that walking meditation, I spend time thinking about how my body moves, and I can remember the first time I did it, and I noticed how my body moved. And the way that it moves. It's so awkward. It's so strange, and you start to think about it like one foot in front of the other than a hand is moving. It's so strange the way that our bodies move if you start to think about it. But when you're actually walking, you don't think about it. There's no reason to think about it because you're so used toe walking. It's just something you do is just basic motor reflexes. So habits allow us to outsource our focus away from these menial, repetitive tasks. You know, people rarely focused on the dishes that they're washing. They just think about whatever else is going on because they're used to that action. But the first time you ever washed a dish, it was really hard on Yeah, and without the ability to rely on habits to complete specific actions, we would have died off a long time ago. Most animals and I believe probably all have habits or have ingrained instincts. Habits are really just things that we do all the time and habits are, ah, part of who we are there deep within our brain. So here, right here we have a We have a model of human brain. I really was hoping the creative like producers could get us a really human brain, But apparently it was hard to get on Amazon. So we have I offered the mine Minute is useless. Yeah, I know JK. Just kidding. But But here you have a model human brain and up here on the screen, you can see a side view of human brain. Um, so in the front, we have a prefrontal cortex that's this big pink area as pretty big right, large percent of our brain. In fact, it's extremely large for humans. The prefrontal cortex is over developed for human beings. In fact, it's kind of where our thoughts later it's what makes us human. On the other hand, there's a small part here called the basal ganglia, which is what I consider a reptile brain. That's where our habits live. A lot of our motor reflexes, a lot of on a lot of emotion happens there, and what's interesting is that this part is pretty much the same and in most species, definitely. Apes have a very similarly the developed basal ganglia, but a much smaller prefrontal cortex and habits are stored down here. The things that we just do are stored here. The thoughts that we have are stored here, and what's interesting here is that we think that we are in control of what we do. But realistically, a large percentage of our day, a large percentage of what we do is controlled here by a habits. Now there's a great book called Switch, which gives the explanation of which gives the it gives a analogy of a human brain and decision making to a writer and an elephant. Uh uh. It says that if you imagine a person who is riding an elephant who is planning on going somewhere, and they basically directed in a location, you could think of the writer as the prefrontal cortex. He's got a plan. He's deciding where we're gonna go. But the actual location, the actual elephant is really driving the motion of the elephant decides he's gonna walk across the street to the peanut stand. L the writer can't change his decision. He could only just recommend the decision, and what happens in the same way is eyes our decisions. Each day we wake up in the morning, we say it's not when I get home, I'm gonna write. When I get home, I'm gonna go to the gym. What happens is that as we as we get home from work in particular, when our willpower is is lacking towards the end of the day, the basal ganglia kicks in, the habit section kicks and he says, You know, like maybe today you're tired. Let's rationalise some reason that we don't really need to go on exercise. We don't have to write today. Tomorrow you could do. But right now let's relaxes in the couch. Realistically, you think that you are making that decision, but the basal ganglia is making a decision for you, and he's creating a reason why you why your prefrontal cortex thinks that it's making that decision of the of the day. So if we can start to train these habits and figure out the way to get the right habits deep into our basal ganglia will be able to make the right decisions from the beginning. What Marcy said recently was about you mentioned being able to plan your day, being able Teoh to resist, resist distraction and just being able to focus on one thing. And, um, in a way, we were. If we can use our prefrontal cortex and use our willpower to create systems that enable us to resist, have it's later on in the day, we'll be able to focus on focus on what we want to do. Um, a lot of time today. A lot of time is spent. Reacting and reacting is not the right way to approach most situations in a reactive process. You can only do what other people want you to do or what problems are occurring. The rial solution to successes toe look upward and to start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what people want to you want you to do and and what you should do can be preordained. And that's kind of a pre frontal cortex thought, thought activity. Now, Um, before I had mentioned anything, I will power. I do want to say we will be having a lot of book recommendations and book notes, and one of my favorite books is by eyes Switch by the Heath Brothers that I just mentioned. Another book is called Will Power by Baumeister and Tierney. So Will power Now. Willpower is a fascinating concept, and if anybody has ever has access to the book Willpower by Roy Baumeister, is life changing in a massive shift? Um Now will power is a really, really interesting concept because people think that will power. It's sort of what makes us do what we do. And if we fail in our in our goal for, ah, New Year's resolution, that's a fault of ourselves. A fault of our willpower. That's not true. Willpower has actually been measured and researched, and willpower is a muscle, and willpower is inexhaustible. Resource willpower is a, uh, it's ah, it's a resource that lives in your brain, and it's exercise throughout. The day is replenished by sleep and replenished. Uh, it's replaced by sleep, and it basically is used up for each decision you make throughout the day. Decisions are not habits. Habits do not use up willpower habits or just what you do, but decisions do require will power, and every small decision requires a little more willpower. So, for example, when you wake up in the morning. You have to decide what you gonna wear. What do you eat? Have oatmeal, or you gonna have eggs. You have doing add cheese or you're not had cheese. You're gonna put guacamole in your eggs if you have a moment. The answer is yes, that what's interesting is that each of those tiny decisions removes your finite amount of willpower. Any small decision, no matter how small, removes a little bit of your willpower throughout the day. So the mawr decisions you make in the morning show where green or should I wear red causes you to be much more likely in the evening to eat a cookie when you didn't want to or to not right. The more you automate your day, the more you habitual eyes your day, especially in the morning and throughout the day, the more likely you are to conserve your willpower and be able to do what you want to dio throughout the rest today. So this is one of those things about the morning routine. Why it's such a keystone habit. If you begin to automate the morning of your day, you can really, really, really conservative willpower throughout the day. Some of the things that I'm working on personally are like, really systematize ing my day. My morning routine is very, very chunked. It's very automatic. It's Ah, it's written down on a piece of paper and I have to do it. I'm trying to plan out my clothing before I go to work. In fact, I should just wear the same shirt all the time. Not the same exact sure, but I just have a bunch of Pavlak shirts that I only wear. Everything is just easier. Even President Obama wears the same suit and tie every day because he says that it's just it's not a decision he wants to make. He needs to conserve his own willpower for the rest of day. So understanding that will power comes from will. Power is used up in decisions that is called decision fatigue and, um, the prisoner and judges study is very interesting now. There was a lot of research done on on, um on prisoners who are going for a pellet hearing toe, decide on if they will be released or not from prison, and they discovered that no matter what with taking away any other sort of arbitrary variable as it approached lunchtime. It was much more likely that the prisoner will be sent back to prison and not be released. But right after lunch time it changed. They would be much more likely to be released in the morning. I don't have a graph of it, but in the morning the judge was kind. As they approached the afternoon, he seemed unkind right after lunch. He was kind until the end of the day. He was unkind. And that simply has to do with will power. The more tired, more decisions, more hunger that mawr it affects decisions that make a huge impact on the lives of others. Now, um, here's a section on Why, If it if I just try harder, I just need to try harder. Why does that not work well again? You only have so much willpower. So if the idea is Teoh to focus on writing each day, if it's your goal, have you're trying to form and you say, Well, I'll just get home and I'm just gonna do it. I'm just gonna write today. Writing is a difficult task. It requires a cognitive load, and if you've used up your willpower, you don't have the ability to resist your basal ganglia is instinct to sit down and watch TV and consume rather than producing. So what we need to do is learn how to optimize our willpower, how to conserve it, how to use it and how to systematize it now. Coca Cola Willpower in a bottle. That's an interesting study that, uh, I'm pretty excited to talk about, So I'm going to preface this by saying, Be careful. Coca Cola. Just an example. There was experiment recently done on day where they were, scientists asked people to suffer a situation decision fatigue. It was basically think about a lot of questions about I think it was about an example wedding. Um, would you prefer red balloons or white balloons? You prefer a green or blue? Would you prefer daffodils or lilacs or whatever and the more decisions they make? Then they would ask them a question, which judged they're which has a decision fatigue. The experiment was to ask them if they would rather receive a check for $100 today, or $150 post dated a month from today. The correct answer from economic perspective is $ post dated a month from today, because where else in the world are you going to get a 50% interest rate in one month? Very rare. And usually, when asked before suffering any willpower, fatigue or decision fatigue, that answer was common was 2/3 to 2/3 of people would say, Yeah, I'd prefer the I prefer to get a post dated check for a month from today. But after they suffer from decision for T, they be like, uh, just just give me the money, just I'll take it like just give $ tomorrow, $100 right now unless right before they asked that question, they hand them a glass of Coca Cola. Coca Cola is full of glucose, and it basically re energizes your will power reserves for a short amount of time. Even in the study, it was said Coca Cola is used just for a testing case. We do not recommend you drink a lot of sugar and glucose and Coca Cola to replenish your will power reserves because what happens is spikes or insulin, and then immediately dropped your insulin So it's Spicer insulin for a period of time while it's in the testing facility. But then as soon as they go home, they're probably gonna go watch TV or drink more Coca Cola. Most likely so will power. But the fact was that they were able to measure and see the results of one particular type of food on their on their willpower building. Make decisions. Now, a decision. Fatigue is a really powerful tool. If you're like a negotiator, a car salesman or ah, wedding planner, I think about the wedding planners. If you if you ever have to deal with one, they, uh, they'll come out and start off with hours of conversation about irrelevant things, like, Do you prefer white or pink? Do you prefer balloons and flowers? And then, of course, assumes you're tired will start bringing out the real questions. Do you want this $5000 extra photographer plan? Just give it to me. Come on. Final Take it like that is a very powerful trick to use, um, from from from those standpoint and you start to see it when you when you look at a different ways of negotiating car salesman for example, and there's an evolutionary perspective as well. Teoh willpower. We were doing the same study where they asked, Ah, they asked about the $100 in a $100 later on, and in this case, they showed. Right before the decision was made, they showed a photo of either a beautiful. They had a group of men in a group of women and to the group of men. They asked them. They showed them a photo of a sexy car or attractive woman and to the woman, they show the same thing a tractor man or a sexy car, and they try to see if it would affect their willpower, affect their decisions. And what they discovered was that only in one of those four test groups the test group of showing an attractive woman to a man. As soon as that picture was shown, the man was far more likely to say, just getting out of books. Now just $100. Now I don't want to wait for a month. It was an evolutionary perspective of of willpower, where when a man sees an attractive woman, they think about the present, they think about impressing they don't think about the future. So there there's, Ah, deeper analysis here, Teoh to human beings and our ability to make decisions pretty interesting. This is a great quote from John Dryden. We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.