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Precommit to Stopping Bad Habits

I want to actually hear from my students. What was then would like to share from the homework that finish was setting. It was to go first. All they look so stunned. Marty. Well, you know, you talk about the habits, you wanna build a break, And, um, from one habit, I definitely want to break his smoking cigarettes. OK? And I'm clear on was like, the key was like, Whenever I'm bored or full or when I just have time to kill, that's, like, my key right there. Like time suck. And then I guess my reward is that, like, I just, you know, house. We feel like I'm not wasting time. I'm kind, just like, you know, it calms me. I feel a little light headed from this tobacco. Yeah. So you're wondering how to break the habit of smoking cigarettes? Yeah, sure. So cigarettes and nicotine are really, really interesting chemicals, and ah, I'm not a smoker, but I have smoked, and it's very interesting to see how so. Nicotine is an interesting chemical. I don't really smoke cigarettes. I've rarely smoke a c...

igarette, but I have used experimented with nicotine as a chemical because it's actually a very interesting substance on. It's extremely addictive. But what's interesting about nicotine is it's the only drug in the world that doesn't really addict you to the chemical itself. It addicts you to whatever you're doing at the same time. So nicotine is actually a really powerful habit formation tool that I've talked about in the past. I'm not recommending people start smoking cigarettes or anything, but at one period time, I I used nicotine patches as a way to help me form the habit of going to the gym. It was like a 10 a.m. Bell made me stand up. I put a nicotine patch on my arm and I would walk to the gym, and as soon as I got to the gym, I pulled the nicotine patch off. And nicotine works in a strange way in your brain, where I would feel uncomfortable if I didn't go to the gym regardless. After a while, even if I used the patch anymore that said for breaking the habit of smoking addiction, what I was trying to get to with the last sentence is the fact that nicotine itself is not actually that terrible chemical nicotine itself doesn't cause lung cancer. It's the the burning tobacco that does. Nicotine is naturally present in tobacco, which is why you get addicted to the motion of your hand. You get addicted to the to smell tobacco. And as you mentioned, people smoked cigarettes when they're bored. They don't know to do what I want to break, Um, and so and because often friends air out smoking, so you go and join them for a cigarette where there's a couple ways to approach this problem. The first, of course I mentioned last time last segment with with Pavlak, you know, using like negative reinforcement and Pavlovian conditioning. Taste aversion therapy. Uh, literally saying, For the next two months, I'm going to smoke a cigarette for 15 minutes a day, and I'm going to shock myself every time I smoke. A puff can help you legitimately remove the desire to smoke a cigarette from a ring. Um, that's one way to approach the situation. Another one is to do substitution method, and this is pretty common. You'll see a lot of people who are trying to quit smoking. We'll start by adding and nicotine patch. I'm not fully convinced on the efficacy of nicotine patches. I think that cold turkey is pretty commonly shown Teoh have a better success rate than a nicotine patch. Um, a lot of it comes down to the decision to quit smoking, and the understanding that smoking a cigarette is about to is just it doesn't need to be done and that when you want that desire and getting over that week or two of chemical addiction to it, you're gonna have to suffer it. And more than that, it's like a desire to suffer it. It's like saying there's a book. I forget the name, but I will definitely attached to the resource is and pass it along later on. That's one of the cornerstone books and quitting smoking. Um, and what he says is kind of like making it like a war on cigarettes. It's like like the fact that it feels uncomfortable. The fact it's like a fact that it doesn't You don't want to quit smoking cigarettes. It's almost like you're a warrior fighting against this light desire this impulse, and in a way it's a mental model of attacking the problem from its core and lastly, it. One other thing that's really common with people who do quit. Smoking is a substitution factor, and that's where they say you'll notice a lot. People quit smoking tend to gain weight a lot of times. It's not the actual cigarette that is the habit. It's the walking around, taking a break, taking a step outside, walking into a park or whatever on seeing friends. So a lot of times really common that people will substitute the habit of smoking a cigarette with the, uh, with like eating food. That's why you see a lot of people who gain weight right after, because they have ah, or fixation and a desire something at its core. My true belief is that, um, e cigarettes are not that bad. I don't think nicotine is that terrible chemical. I think that cigarettes are really bad, but I don't think the containers that batter chemical the first thing I would say is substitute and remove your tobacco cigarettes and just by you cigarette, you'll save money. It'll, um I mean, you can still do everything that you already do. The only difference is your It's blue instead of red on the color of the light. But, um, yeah, it's really to think about that, then the second thing is you can start to use. You can start to use, uh, the active using of taking a break of looking at why you're doing it when you're doing it and what you're doing it on, what you're doing as, um, something to analyze. There's a really comments, really well known study where they say that people who track how many cigarettes they smoke a day tend to lower the amount of cigarettes they smoke a day. Just the act of writing down how much they smoke in trying to automate the times and days that they smoke can be a really huge first step to breaking the addiction, as you just simply say, like, I just want to keep it level. The states, they asked most 16. Yesterday it's 1 15 just writing it down and noticing how it keeps it on a chart. You can start to use that as, um, and just by measuring it, it'll actually naturally drop it. So there's a lot of a lot of things I just said to attack that problem. Uh, what out of those ideas sounded interesting to you? Um probably probably the tracking at part because I mean, I don't track things in general. I mean, just having that just makes it more real for because, like, I lose track like sometimes I'll be like, Oh, this pack is done already. Yeah, there's actually in some great techniques toe automate that this new company called Quit Bit. They're based out of Boston, one of the founders. They created a lighter, which is Bluetooth controlled, committed to your phone, And it lets you know every time you light the lighter to just track how many cigarettes you're having. You could only use the quick bit lighter, which I think is like 50 or $75 to just track the amount of cigarettes or having a day. But just the idea of knowing what you're doing is a great step to get started getting into the next step, where it's like adding aversion therapy, shocking to yourself to reduce it. Whatever. There's a bunch of ways to attack a problem, but first is understanding how much you're doing, what you are doing and what it's leading to, and there's a huge reward and not smoking cigarettes. The amount of money you save. Think about every cigarette pack you could buy is what, 10 bucks in San Francisco? Or so on average, the pack side by five. Well, is in the East Coast. Eso If you were to imagine, like, $5 a day, 150 bucks a month that as it to a nice little vacation at the end of the year, you know what I mean? It's like the act of saving money can be added to a fund where you where you are able to like for every cigarette you don't smoke for every day you have less than your baseline level. You could consider making a reward of contributing to an account that allows you to buy something at the end of the month or something like that. There's a lot of ways to attack the problem. We have not tested our shocking aversion therapy system out with Pavlak yet, so that's something you're interested in trying out. Let's talk after me and grab you give you one, and we could do ah case study of attempting to use aversion therapy to quit smoking as well. Cool responses that came through online while we're on break mission I'll just run through. Some of them are the first ones. I want to break the habit of hitting that snooze button. So I want to develop Teoh, wake up early with my alarm clock and also work work out right way and then meditate. Eat a high team broke breakfast as well, so clearly they want to start the day in a much more positive and and energy full environment is currently right now, the snooze button is just running their lives. Yeah, there's a There's no real disincentive to hit the snooze button. Do do people in the audience often hit the snooze button. Sleep through, alarms you to do you, do you? You you don't. So about half the audience does. Um, well, this is one of court use cases of Pavlak. For one thing, we designed it so that the wristband is set to know you, said alarm, and it starts to vibrate when it's time for you to wake up as like a silent alarm, and you can set your level of penalty. So it's like if you hit the snooze button, which is just the button right here, you can snooze it once or twice. But on your third snooze, it'll start to shock you and you can't get out of it. Shock, we found, has been extremely effective at you. Kind of. Just wake up. You don't you don't sleep through it multiple times. Hitting the snooze button is a big one. There's no real disincentive for a lot of people, and in fact, it's just It's detrimental to the entire day because you don't just hit the snooze button and waste your morning. You also don't get to sleep like you don't actually get to sleep. So one thing that's important is to make sure. Are they getting enough sleep, one of their falling asleep? Why? Why are they not? Why are they tired in the morning? Is it simply a habit of waking up later? Perhaps there. Ah, night. Our more than they are morning bird, and they should just simply set their alarm later. Maybe it's just the right thing to Dio. That's, Ah, potential answer. On the other hand, if they mean if they're hitting the snooze button for an hour or so, and I've seen this happen well, if it's every single day, something is wrong. Are either need to be sleeping more or they need to be. They be sleeping more. They There's no reason for it to happen. So perhaps they need to sleep earlier. In this case, it seems to come down to they should look at their sleep cycles now notice. Are they getting enough sleep? Really? Track that How they recommend the basis for this Because this respond the basis. Just knows when you fall asleep. There's no entering into sleep mode like the Fitbit, you to press a button, the basis just you fall asleep and it says you fell asleep at this minute and you can look at that graph in that data on a chart which will be actually talking about today S O. Being able to identify your current sleep means and like how much you're currently sleeping is important afterwards. It's this function off. If they're waking up on time, that needs to be disincentive to adding that wake up. Hitting that snooze button padlock obviously can help, but it's not the only solution, so I think that that's that's the first step. I think in the days 20 years ago, we all worked in offices. The disincentive with you basically got fired if you relate every day, but that's kind of disappeared. Now that we all work from home and set around Justin Services, we have another happened on online view. Wants to break his eating junk food on what they'd like to help Help build is eating healthy exercising and spending more time with their Children and family. Sure, I mentioned previously that substitution is a really good way to attack this problem. Finding what the junk food is and finding a less bad version of the junk food is a really good way to approach this problem. I think that a lot of people don't understand or don't realize the quantity and quality of the food that they're adding, Um, like if you go to ah fast food restaurant in San Francisco, they have a calorie count on every menu item, but they don't have that on the East Coast. Always in Boston, they certainly don't. And there's going and getting a burger from McDonalds versus getting chicken nuggets from Donald's versus getting fries. For a lot of people, it's the same, like you know, the difference between a Big Mac and a regular cheeseburger is it's not about the amount of calories they're eating is just that the fact that eating something salty and and and fattening and, um, if you can start to just reduce a little bit, that's better than doing nothing at all. There's a fantastic book called Mindless Eating that talks about the small changes that affect your entire day routine. One look. What they say is that if we accept the hypothesis that 3500 calories is a pound of fat. If you accept that hypothesis, that's that's pretty common. We heard that if you eat 3500 calories, you'll gain a pound of fat, and if you lose $3500 you'll lose a pound. Then if you eat 100 calories a day more, that's £ a year. If you burn 100 calories more, you'll lose £10 a year now. This is really interesting because there's particular ways that human beings look at food and decide on what they want to eat, and, um, and a lot of it's not based on hunger. A lot of it is based on, uh, portion size optical illusions. So the book Mindless Eating which I highly recommend, this person and everyone in this audience is. The first step, he says, is that if you want to lose weight, the first thing you can do is go into your kitchen and take all of your big plates thrown away, but by and only eat out of small place. Take your glasses of of of water, make sure that they're not short and fat. Make sure they're tall and thin because tall and thin looks like this looks like a lot more than the size of like a smaller, thicker glass that would be the same out of water. But the size is different, so look like attacking those easy situations like the one time changes. Just getting smaller bulls can be the first step. The second thing to junk food is that, um, and this is coming from me. I actually lost £40 in the last year, Um, and a lot of it came down Teoh, Recognizing that what I was eating hunger that I had wasn't actual hunger, it was environmental hunger. One thing is water. People misconstrue thirst for hunger that's very commonly known that when people are thirsty, they'll often think it's hungry. They're hungry and the eat food. And one thing that is that's bad about America. As I think greater than 50% of Americans are chronically dehydrated, so you can imagine the math that works out to people think that they're hungry, but they're actually just thirsty. And the fact is that they I need to drink a glass of water. Not Coca Cola di Coca Cola. Not a burger, but just a simple glass of water. So I'm taking this prom for a lot of fronts. What I do myself is start the morning off by drinking a leader of water. And also, I have a glass of bulletproof coffee, which has its high fat. Uh, it's butter and oil keeps you pretty full for the first morning part of my day. And that usually removes the desire to eat bad food, which is actually really, really interesting when you don't even we don't even notice you don't want the food. Now what have it myself when I drink, I drink probably two litres a day, but I do exactly the same as you and started off. Unfortunate has a very different detrimental effect when you're broadcasting. I think the same thing right now. Exactly. And I tried the bulletproof coffee, but I ended up disaster trousers. Mark, I'm curious because your drive being in your shoes. I took time off when I traveled for for a long time. Are you finding your budget now? Driving or perhaps eating more junk food than you want to be? Or if he really tried very hard to avoid that, I try to avoid it. I'm I'm willing to spend more for healthy food. But like we talked about, when you go out with friends, it's often still difficult. Teoh break out of those habits. The people I'm staying with now they like to get ice cream at night. So when everyone around you is getting ice cream, you're very likely to go get ice cream as well. Yeah, You know what? I've noticed that I weighed two. This is and we're gonna talk about this a lot in the next segment where we talked about how to not make it impossible to fail if you pre commit audibly to them. Hey, I'm not having any ice cream for the next couple days. Like if I have any ice cream. It's going to like. I will pay each of you five bucks or something like that. You tell them that outlaw, believing they will hold you to it. You will not be eating ice cream, so that's an effective way Teoh pre commit to that ice cream thing. Good idea. Yeah, yeah, we have some more comments coming from the online. Somebody's asking. How can I get out of my head socially? How can I build a habit of how can I build a habit about not thinking? Are they talking eyes? This a common is like a social situation or get out of my own head social. So I'm imagining that there overthinking everything that they're perhaps running conversations through in their own head. Justin, what? We're left with this gentleman over here. And it was a social thing. It was, he asked me very nicely. Just wait what you do with people, he says. What do you do? And I get nervous in those situations, and I kind of just have a tendency to shut down, which makes me terrible parties. And it take makes me terrible meeting new people and then later I'm mad at myself. for being so terrible with people. Um, thus, it's a habit I'd like to change. Um, is there any solution mean I kind of feel like that person might be in the same boat? Sure. So this is a part about personality, which I hope we have time to talk about in depth. But basically some people are introverted, cynical, extra word and the definition of introversion. And the definition extra version is that an introvert, Lou, uh, loses energy when they meet new people. It's like they have a finite amount of energy, and any new person kind of sucks it away from them. And extrovert gains energy from talking to people. And you often see an extrovert talking new people at a party. They tend to talk to all their friends and and all these new people, and they actually leave Maura Wake than when they got to the party. I am like a 9 to 1 extroverts. So if you find me, I find myself tired on by myself. But it's with people. I feel great. Um, that said, training yourself to be better in a social situation. There's a thing called Oh my gosh, what's the name. It's resistance, resistance training, some that are idiots. It's where you feel there's there's a rejection therapy. Uh, that's the title. There's a guy who was trying to meet, to use, like, really awkward, because really shy. He never was able to chat with women. And he said he was based in New York and he said, Here's what I'm gonna do for the next year I'm going to sit down on a bench in Central Park, this particular bench and anybody, any female who sits down next to me, I will talk to her no matter what it takes. And the story. And this is there's a New York Times article Better with reading. Was he with super awkward? Couldn't do it. Couldn't do it for the first couple days. He tried. He did. He talked. They were awkward. They look like walking away from within seconds. Over time, he became very, very, very comfortable and essentially learned and trained himself to feel more comfortable in these social situations, in particular in social situations, you'll notice that people who are pretty effective in social situations have particular strengths. A lot of it is, um, body position. So, like confidence level often is a reflection of of your posture, and sitting up straight will make you more confident with With Mark Bell. We're looking at some particular exercises that are affected for making yourself sit up straighter and just generally become more confident because of the way you stand. So that's one. The second thing is having a couple things prepared that you say that people who are all everyone asked what you do, What's your name? I never ask those questions. I say, What's your story? Everyone? No one has a story, but everyone can think of a story like and, uh, there's ah, on the third thing is a man. Forget the acronym, but there's like four things that you should talk about with any person when you start. The conversation stressed so low it's like family occupation, things, Ford family occupation. Um, and then there's two more things I can't recall but asking the right questions if you asked like you don't want to talk about religion, you want talk about politics, but you do want to talk about their family as some of the brothers sisters. How many siblings that have asked them about what their work is asked them about their hopes and dreams in particular, people have, like there's a lot of studies that talk about on a date like on speed dating, being able to talking about what movies or TV shows you like is a negative thing. But asking somebody, what kind of what? Where have you traveled? Where would you like to travel? To be a very effective way? Teoh made people in the speed dating thing like people talk about travel at a much higher likelihood of rating each other highly because it was about hopes and dreams, something cool you could do together rather than trying to talk about like what you do movies do you like? Which was kind of insulating conversation piece In general, it comes down to practice like you don't need toe talk, going to go to bars and chat with random people for the rest of your life. But putting down a month and putting on stakes toe where you have to go out and at least for 15 minutes, try to talk to people just so you get used to. It could be a very powerful way to train your social anxiety I would just add it. So I did rejection therapy for 30 days, and it was like a game changer It. At the end of those three days, you could notice a big difference. Yeah, it was very, very tough, but very rewarding.