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Making Micro-Habits

So right now we're going to discussing, um, the bringing it all together, a core component system of the micro habit model, which we can use to help basically make it so easy to do that have it's become just a natural part of your day. So we discussed what a habit was yesterday have. It is when a trigger causes you to do an automatic action, something like When you wake up in the morning, you automatically feel that dry mouth that makes you go and brush your teeth or your the trigger of when you get home. Many people will sit down and watch TV as soon as they get home, and, ah, TV might be associated with eating popcorn or eating candy. So they began to eat on healthy foods. Um, that's what I have. It is. Habit is when it's harder for you to not do something than for you to do something. When it becomes so automatic, your brain doesn't even make a decision. You just find yourself, you know, reaching for your cell phone or or texting a check, checking Facebook or whatever. And we talked...

a little bit yesterday about how about the level of automaticity how many days it takes to form and you have it. So this was a graph from, uh, experiment, done at the University College of London Way discussed this quite a bit yesterday, but we talked about how different habits take a different amount of time for a habit to form easy habits like drinking a glass of water after breakfast can take about 20 days to form extremely difficult habits, the most difficult of which was to do 50 sit ups a day. Took 84 days to form. The average was about 66 days where the level of automaticity became the maximum level, sort of like you couldn't not do it. What I found interesting here is that it's very difficult to do 50 sit ups. I think we can all agree right. Doing 50 sit ups after breakfast is something that's really difficult to do. But how hard is it to do? One. Sit up? Not that hard. So I started. Think about this as I looked into the into the graph of the Fog Behavioral model, which was two in Crete. To make somebody change behavior one time, you need to make the action, make the increase the motivation and increase the ability. Yesterday we discussed increasing motivation through process of adding accountability and adding a bet for negative reinforcement and adding a reward for positive reinforcement. We didn't discuss too much about the act of making something easier to do changing the X axis from the left of the right. How do we move from hard to do, too easy to do. So as we started doing experiments that pavlak and hack the habit, we started to check out how we could start increasing ability as well as motivation. How could make it so easy to do that people couldn't fail and we came up with was sort of a, uh, a small formula. It's ah, essentially increased the ability and increase the motivation until it becomes so easy to do that you can't fail and it's so stupid to fail, why would you? And the way that it works is it culminated into a pattern that we call micro habits. Now micro habits are based on B J. Fogg. Tiny habits. Uh, B J. Fogg is a professor, Stanford University. He discussed how he would start adding a little triggers in Tuesday that he would use to remind himself to do small habits. The my favorite one is after he flushed the toilet before he washed his hands, he would do at least one push up in the bathroom. Small little habits like that. If you think about it, he would start to do with just one push up. It might add up to two or three or five. And then if you did that, like three or four times a day, that's 2030 push ups a day. It's not bad, right? Small little things like, um, like I set up in my own room. Ah, little pullup bar on, I said. Every time I go passed through my door in my room, I will do one pull up. Small, easy one pull. It's no big deal, and it ended up adding up to 30 or pull up today, so that becomes a massive shift in my daily routine. So we broke this down and combined it with our bets, which mechanism in order to create micro habits. And here is kind of how it works. It's like the journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step. We took an ideal habit, something we really wanted a form, and we broke it down into a bite sized piece. What's the first step in that habit process for me? About exercise, I realized that my first step in exercising each day was to wake up and go outside in my gym clothes. I was the first step. If I did that, I was a lot closer to exercising. Then if I didn't, it was it started off by, uh, by realizing that start like aiming for a difficult goal. Your dream have it at the beginning is just a recipe for disaster. If you want to lose £30 well, that means you have to eat perfectly and exercise perfectly. And the chance of you may maintain that motivation over time is extremely difficult. So what if we and in particular looking back at Thea at this graph? When I said to myself 50 sit ups, it might take days to form, but probably forming the habit of doing one sit up after breakfast would approach 20 days. It's probably closer to a 20. They have it every day after breakfast. All do one sit up. It's much easier to go from one sit up to 10 sit ups than from zero sit ups to 10 sit ups. And so, um, the idea was to start forming to focus on the focus on the process focused on the habit. Focus on getting the core micro habit dialed into your brain, not the end goal, but the process itself. So we still we started working out working on this with a test group of 235 people on our hacked the habit Pavalock face group actually have 200 new members of the hack that haven't faced group as of last night. So thank you guys for joining from creativelive. It was fantastic. Um, of course, you can learn. How about pavlak dot com ford slash c L um, we broke down micro habits into a step by step process, and I'll show you this right here. This is our pavlak habit model. It's a ah, it's ah, mixture of the bet switch mechanism of accountability and of micro habits. And here's how it works. If you have a goal of exercising every day for 30 minutes each day, you want to start off by breaking it down into your first micro habit. The first step is to say, All right, all I need to do is go outside in my gym clothes, and for the first week, that's it. I'm allowed to go to the gym if I want to, but I don't have to. But if I don't go outside in my gym clothes, I have to pay a penalty a penalty of $50. In my case, it might be it might be whatever for whatever penalty works for you. It was adding a was making it so easy to do that you can't fail, but so stupid to fail. Why would I pay 50 bucks just cause I didn't go outside for one second and lock my door? Might as well do that. The second week I added a Ah, I will go outside of my gym clothes and I walked to the gym. I will swipe my card. I don't work out, but I do have to swipe my card. Fortunately, Jim is on my way to work to see the trigger. It's no big deal to go in there and swipe a card. I'm allowed to work out if I want to. I don't have to. The second day, the third week, we focused on doing activity of a choice for five minutes in the fourth week, doing the exercise for 15 minutes and building up to the goal of exercising for 30 minutes a day. But what's interesting here is by the time we get to the 30 minutes a day on the fifth week, the habit of going outside of my gym clothes is completely automatic. It's harder for me to not go outside in my gym clothes, then for me to go outside in my gym clothes. Sure, I might get to the gym on the sixth week when there's no bet that's enabled and not want toe workout for 30 minutes. But I've probably gotten used to working out for at least five minutes, and I'm sure everyone in the room knows that once you get started on during a task, it's harder to stop than it is to get started. It's always hard to get to the gym once you're there. It's very easy in particular. I remember I had a meeting. Um, I had to go to a, uh uh, investor meeting or something in Boston, and I told them I was wearing a suit and I said, Hey, actually, just have to run. I got to go to the gym, swipe my card. I'll be right back. It's no big deal back in 10 or 15 minutes. Um, So I walked out. I went to the gym. I swipe my card, But what happened? As soon as I swipe my card, I'm reminded of the context. I see all these triggers back starts to stretch. I'm like, you know, I should just go do a stretch really quick. I'll be gone in five minutes. I go up starting a stretch, I see. Fuck somebody. I know what the gym who's like, Hey, what's up? Venetian? I said hi. And he's like, Why are you in a suit at the gym? And I said, I don't even know really why I'm here. I mean, I gotta go. And he's like, Well, I'm doing an AB routine. Do you want to? And I was like, Yeah, I was two, and suddenly I found myself doing a full workout in a suit at the gym very late for my meeting. But it was a function of the habit working too well in this case. Ah, but what you can see is that when you start to form these micro habits and you start to base it on the core elements of the smallest possible goal, for example, I don't have to meditate for 15 minutes only to meditate for 10 breaths. But once you start doing 10 breath, it's a lot easier to keep that up for the 15 minutes. If you focus on that as your habit, it enables you to allow yourself some freedom. Like some days. You don't want to do a full 15 minute meditation, or you really don't have time to do it. You don't have time to do a full 30 minute workout. There's legitimate reasons why you might not have time to do a 30 minute workout some days, but there's never a legitimate reason that I don't have time to go across the street, swipe your card and come back in three minutes. There's never a legitimate reason for that. So being able to focus on the process became core. Does that make sense? What do you think about this micro habit module? Yeah, like you're staying up like multiple triggers like the further long you go. You know, the more your micro happy evolved, I guess. Yes. That's why I'm kind of thing. Yeah, it's like setting up multiple triggers that you start to layer one on top of another. That starts to add up to something much larger than itself and creates a bigger hole out of individual parts. Um, Jeff Question. I really like this concept of focusing on the process instead of the goal, because you can. You can really kind of psych yourself out, too, with the goal or the goal can feel overwhelming. You can have a lot of, you know, psychological stuff about whatever the goal is. But if it's just like, for example, if it were losing weight, you might have a whole bunch of other things in your head about what it means to lose weight. You know, control, image, all these things. But if you're just focusing on the small aspects of the process, you kind of eliminate a lot of that. A lot of that stuff? Absolutely. Yeah. I was speaking with Keyshawn Shaw yesterday of Ah downsize fitness, and we were talking about UM, both Weight Watchers and his program and the number one function of successes. Consistency, it's. Do you continue to show up toe weight watchers Doesn't matter if you follow through with the way. Watch your goal. You eat correctly for that week because as long as you keep showing up week to week over time, the graph will bring your weight down to you. Go away towards your goal weight. It's all a function of process. And, like Woody Allen always says that 90% of success is starting is showing up in most in almost all situations. That's true. Just by getting started, you're able to form habits over time that become completely automatic. That makes sense. So one kind of obvious question is, if you if you did act so I guess the idea is most of the time you go and swipe your card and then actually do work out. But is it? Does it still work? If you literally just go and swipe your card and then just leave or you just do one push up with this? What work do you still form the habit, or or, you know, get get to the point where you are going to the gym, like over a long created form, the habit of swiping the card, which is actually pretty powerful. It's like I was discussing Mark Bell about strong lifts and the squat routine where I squatted on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And what was really cool is noticing that when I got to the gym, even when I quit the squad routine, I was quitting squads. I would get to the gym and I would just walk up to the squat rack and just pick up the squat rack, put it up, pick up a 45 our double pick with 45 weight. And I was like, Wait, hang on. I'm not even doing squats today. Why my? Because I got in the habit of just laying out the squat rack Once I got to the gym. It was the trigger that made me start doing setting me that setting out. So in this case, the trigger. The habit of entering the gym is actually like, ah, high percentage of the success of a gym habit of exercise have getting There is really, really hard. But once you focus on that on that swipe, absolutely you're focusing on building the habit of that individual motion. But that motion is is a path towards towards what you're trying to build. Yeah. Um, yes, I think. OK. And then what was It was really incentivizing was adding rewards for this. So, um, all I have to do is swipe a card. If I don't swipe a card, I lose $10 or whatever. Maybe I allow myself one day off if I allow myself one day, miss, if something happens. But if I do it five days in a row, I get to get myself a massage. So I did that. That reward where I don't have to work out. All I have to do is swipe the card. But if I swipe my card five days in a row, that on Friday I get a massage, it's like, Well, that's great. Like, why would I fail? It's stupid to fail. It's so easy to go swipe the card and then I get a massage on Friday. If I do it well, this is awesome. So that adding that and publicly stating this to my accountability partner that I would be getting massage on Friday was very very powerful. Um, yeah, that I was really useful. I did it with meditation in the Hack the Habit Group. And it was just a simple I will meditate for at least 30 seconds. And if I meditate for 30 seconds, five days in a row, I get to get myself something and get toe to a specific restaurant that worked at very effectively. Yeah. Did you have any similar experiences with the meditation group and hacked the habit? I think that what happened with that is that because it kept coming back like, I couldn't let it fall off on my own like it does feel weird not to do it. And I didn't quite set it up from a reward perspective. But like if I go a couple of days and I know I'm doing it feels weird. Yeah, said internal feeling. So the extrinsic motivator is eyes kind of placeholder. The goal is to move towards an internal feeling. I should do this because that's who I am, and over time it becomes kind of you don't need to continue Abby's negative. These external rewards the act of going to the gym in and of itself is a reward. And that's the kind of step you want to get to. And that's when your brain has reached that maximum level of automaticity. I have a question. Sure. Um, do you Do you still do that to dio your your three day to do list without the But I do it with a bet. You still do it with the bed. What happens when you stop doing them? But, um, what happened? Starting about this month, I took a few weeks off and I stopped doing it right. Yeah, OK, so for me, like when we did the little like when we did our micro habits, it was really easy for me to stick with it for the 30 days. Like in fact, there was one night I didn't do it because mine had a night component to it actually woke up after I'd been out drinking and did it playing at three o'clock in the morning like that's how wired I was for it. It's students of 30 days was over. I stopped doing it, So there's an element that I'm still using will power to churn through that time period. So my question is, how do you get past that past the session where you you need that reinforce and a lot of cases you can just continue to do the bet. And in fact, if it works, it works. I think that different personalities are definitely motivated often by this negative reinforcement. Um, in particular, I was mentioning yesterday about about how we have similar personality types that are are different than Bryce is, and we're really able to were really were more motivated by a fear of loss than than other people. And so implementing negative reinforcement and continuing that can be can be valuable. In that case, I'm actually okay with understanding that I'm more motivated by BET and that I will continue to do bets and make building habits of actually using bets, because I know that it's such a powerful resource for my type of brain and my type of thinking. And so if that is the truth, if you are more motivated by negative reinforcement and when you take it away, it it doesn't it doesn't continue. Then there's no reason to stop. In that case, just keep it up. You can keep the you can keep the negative, reinforce er, keep that. If I don't at least meditate for five breaths, then I will pay a penalty. You can even lower the penalty, but usually that doesn't make that big a difference. It's just the fact that there is a penalty that motivates you. Just just so you maintain the habit you know is best for you. I have overlapping bets, like going on in my life at all times because I know how effective they are from for me. So I don't have any problem with accepting that. If I make sense, does I can't answer your question. You didn't have there been some that after, because it goes back to that. The one the graph, That's kind of the hand written graph. I mean, have you found that there's a point when you don't need the bed anymore? It's because that's what I'm trying. I think that's what I'm playing with Right now in my head is whether it's a willpower thing, and I'm just pushing through it and using the bet Teoh increase the willpower or whether it's actually becoming a habit. That's a great question, actually. I think that what we've discovered in our in our research was that the negative reinforcement makes a habit get started and that the positive reinforcement makes a habit stick. And that fact might be that as you start to find yourself like moving towards the habit I've just tried to do for 20 to 30 days, you may want to start decreasing year of penalty and increasing your reward and just testing and seeing how you can make yourself make it more automatic, but in particular adding, um, adding sort of ah, anchor A trigger. So, like, it sounds like you were told to do your meditation at some point in the day like he did it in the middle of the night or you did it in the evening and it wasn't always right after a task. No, I didn't mind. Mine was, I did. I did the five minute journal, So there was. I did it first thing in the morning, but there was also an element where I had at the end of the day, I had checked in and did it at night. Yeah, and that's that's so I did have the two triggers and that the one particular case, though I blew through the trigger because that's what I don't that evening and I still look up for, though you still look out for like, three o'clock in the morning like I woke up and I was like, I didn't do it and I actually wrote it so cool how that works. So So, I mean, it's really good to have you safeguards in place. I mean, there's always the ability to add leniency in, you know, nothing has to be done forever every single day. There's always a case where you can miss a day or two, and that's not It should never be an all or nothing routine in the case of what it sounds like is that the bets really work for you. And if it's something you want to do, keeping those up will be effective, in my opinion. The five in a journal, for example, is a great example. It's really easy to do in the morning. It's really tough to do in the evening because you use your will power throughout the day. So as you get towards the evening, it's really hard to go back to it and fill it out. In fact, I have that situation exactly with the five in the journal, and we'll be actually speaking with you, Jay Rhonda's of the five journal today in a separate session. Um, we can ask him specifically this question, but it is really, really hard to fill that out, especially in the evening. I started at, ah, location based reminder on my on my IPhone. So it it's, uh, a soon as I get home, it pops up and says, Fill out, finish fill out Gratitude journal. It pops up as soon as I get home. So that acts as a trigger, Um, to help remind me to do it when I get home, but absolutely at the evening, you're gonna have a lot tougher time to complete a task. So understanding that and adding and safeguards is important in this case is sometimes all right toe. Allow yourself to fill it in the morning or 3 a.m. In your case as well. Another thing I'm finding is figuring out what level of reinforcement I want, like I right, and I've been doing it for the last month, and forcing myself to do it doesn't actually help me execute that activity. Other ones work really well with the buttons. Some of them don't so for writing. I don't have any prompt. I don't try to force it at all. I just let it happen. Um, and it's made a huge difference in terms of how I do it. There's other ones. So like when I did the journal, it was amazing. Like how it just shot off like it changed my entire life if I really did. Yeah, that's great. So you're saying that the process of the journal I'm sorry the process of writing was difficult when you gave yourself a prompt When you let yourself freedom, right When you do your meditation, do you tend to have an easier time when you are trying to focus on your breath, or when you're just allowing yourself to think about whatever you want? Have you ever done like a headspace meditation? I've been done ahead, Space one, but what I do is I tried just to focus on my breath. If that doesn't work, then I shift what I do now, as I shipped really quickly into a mantra, because the students I do that my brain focuses on the mantra, and it goes like that. I mean, the time instantly it's gone. You bring yourself back to one thing. Yeah. I was speaking with, uh, with, um, Dr Daniel. Amen. A few weeks ago was, ah, professor who's like a very well researched in 80 HD. And he told me something interesting that when an 80 80 person tries to focus on something, if they're told to just try harder or focus on something, their brain actually shuts down and I won't let them focus and in fact, create unless that unless they have some kind of stimulation, let's they have some kind of like deadline or necessity. They won't be able to focus on anything, no matter what. And the truth is that that's something that they have to accept and allow themselves freedom to think. In my own particular case, it headspace. There's, ah, part where you're supposed to focus on your breath, and there's a part where you're supposed to focus on anything at all. And I noticed that there is, like, voices in my head popping up, telling me things I need to do all day whenever I'm focusing on my breath. But as soon as I'm allowed to think about those things. Everything goes away, and it's like the fact that I'm allowed to do it. My brains like, Oh, well, I don't do that now, like not what I'm allowed to do that. And the worst thing was was was testing, and I was trying to do a meditation thing. I left my audio recording, So whenever I had an idea pop in my mind, let me record it. I'll say it out loud. And that way that thought will go into my like it'll be a Lupoli closed Garnick effect, etcetera. And as soon as I left the recorder on, no thoughts popped in my head. Everything I had to do was gone. I couldn't think of it because I was allowed to, and it was so that's that's like That's a symptom. I mean, that's an HD thing, but it might be something that's representative of just how you think. Or just when you give yourself freedom, you might be able to calm yourself down their mantra. Something you dry yourself to a similar way. I have a question. I'm wondering what APP used that has this location based reminders on your IPhone built in tow. Is it really? I didn't. Yeah, it's great. I just use Siri and I say Syria. Remind me, Teoh, check my graduate journalists and I returned when I get home and Siri says, Where is your home? And then it memorizes the first time. And then every time I go home, it brings up a notification. Yeah, he's really cool, Martin saying, Manish, would you recommend a new process every 67 days or every period, say, 20 minutes of meditation, then 40 minutes, etcetera. Do you recommend Building up is a better way to approach stuff, So I think that building up from a meditation, a mindset perspective, I think that, I mean, I've never doing 40 minutes of meditation is a lot especially done. Twice a day. I would really high recommend working with five or 10 minutes and building up to 15 maybe 20 twice a day. Max, like you can always over go overboard on anything. So in that case, I would say, like if it's for, for if it's for any habit, it's always best to build up to a habit, but it's always best to build up towards it. But you also don't want to overdo anything. Now. Quite a number of our viewers of our expressive they've had challenges with a d d as well on The View is coming said I have a d d. I find the creativity of creating systems on the implementation is where I feel sorry. They love the creativity and creating systems. Is the implementation where they fail? Do you have any tricks to overcome constantly recreating the process? Yeah. Um, there's a few tricks and a few things that have been really revolutionary from my perspective. Um, so as I mentioned, I have pretty security. And, uh, there's so 80 is usually, um not having a deity is correlated with a lot of successful factors. If you consider a distraction and you look at the Big Five personality types, the Big Five personally test includes, like openness and new experiences and conscientiousness and your neuroticism and a couple other factors. Conscientiousness is one of those is one of those Big Five that's highly correlated with success and making money and like having a long life and having ah loving marriage and not divorcing conscientiousness is the act of finishing what you start keeping things clean conscientiousness is essentially not having any d. I'm in the second percentile for conscientiousness, which means that 98% of people are more conscientious than I am, which means that, uh, I should, according to all the standards, be a complete failure. And I was looking into this and I read a block post about conscientiousness and about how everything is highly correlated with it. That's positive, except for one thing. The one thing that's negatively correlated with it is creativity. People who are who don't have the ability to focus are often the most creative types of people. And internally I can understand it because as I start to think about things, I'm not able to focus or bring my thoughts on toe one thing. So my mind will start jumping from idea to idea to idea to idea that ends up being a an idea that's really cool. Whereas when I meditate, I start to catch myself and stop myself from down that path. So is obviously goods, and by positives and negatives here, now that's one of the cool symptoms of a D D of is that they're able to succeed. I was always trying to focus on building a blogger for the last five years before I started Pavlak and one of the reasons was because my brother has a very successful blood called I will teach you rich and he was like he was killing it and I said, Oh, well, I have something similar stuff to do And we started bloggers well, and I noticed that I had, you know, ah, lot of difficulty writing, in fact, like I'm a pretty good writer when I give myself a deadline and a bet. But getting myself to write was incredibly hard. And recently, in about a year ago, while I was working out of in Boston, I was doing pavlak. I essentially had a writing task that is very simple. It was right, a 750 word article and, uh to an investor, and I will receive an investment. It was that simple, right? 700 worries and I will get $10,000 and I said, Oh, this is great. Well, I have a train ride. I'm going to be on train for four or five hours. I'll easily right some 150 words. That's like not that long and 4.5 hours later I got off the train. I hadn't even opened up Microsoft Word. I was on Facebook the entire time and I said, Well, this is ridiculous has frustrated. I get to my house and I said, I'm not going to sleep until I finish this article Until I finish this this investor letter I couldn't blame it on the fact that, like college, I would say like, I just don't care about the subject. So it doesn't matter to me this I clearly cared about this clearly wanted to do this, but I couldn't get myself to write. So now it's now seven AM I haven't slept. I've read 136 words, and half of them are like chiefs, and, uh, and I don't know what to do. And I'm extremely frustrated. And last minute last ditch effort, I pull out my cell phone and I record a video of me saying What I want to say, and I send it over to my intern from Tufts University, and 30 minutes later he sends me back a basically complete completed draft of what I wanted to get said, and it clicked at that moment that some people are designed toe execute on writing articles. Other people are designed to know what articles need to be written. And if you're the type of person who has that mindset of knowing what needs to be done, in fact, you might want to be not doing the writing. In fact, you might want to find somebody who you can partner with who's really good at just execution. Who allows you to think of the ideas and articulate them but not have to actually do the writing. So that was a big revelation for me that I needed to hire people who would support my who would allow me to use my strength and instead trying to repair my strengths instead of trying to repair my weaknesses. Start exit, start focusing my strengths. So from that angle, building systems like like the bets and such can work really effectively. But even better than that could be partnering up with people who really support you. 80 people often are very good. People are often very good at at speaking and articulating, and often they could get to the deep levels of focus when they are when they are speaking and explaining. So that is a very good a very good indicator that they should work with somebody else.