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Q&A: How to Form Good Habits

We actually got a question that came in from Lana, which I thought was quite interesting. Saying is, will para muscle, and if so, can it be trained in the same way that you can train a muscle? Yeah, willpower is muscle, and in exactly the same way it could be trained. Um, there's a lot of research on this. Willpower is, is something that can be trained in the way that if you make mawr important decisions, you use it in the if you like training your brain from, ah, a decision making perspective in a willpower perspective, the first thing to start doing is meditation. In my opinion, a lot of research has shown that meditation allows you to focus on the right things and to calm that annoying voice in your brain that never stops talking and acts responsibly and just does what it always does. Meditation allows you to take a moment to be silent and train yourself to shut that voice off and focus on the things that you really do need to focus on. Meditation is a great way to start training yo...

ur willpower. Muscle making. Automating your your systems will allow you to conserve your willpower, and it's really about planning out your method of attack. So in situations where you say, like I know the acknowledges power here and knowing that willpower exists, knowing that willpower muscle allow you to understand and recognize and monitor your internal thoughts and see that you know, if you sit down to do a 25 minute or accession and you catch yourself moving on to another task and you catch yourself moving on to something else that that's a function of willpower. If you catch yourself, take a deep breath and focus on what you're supposed to dio over time, it just becomes automatic. It becomes what you dio. Another great question is money. Shall we gonna be covering the habit of no habits, saying I wake up at different times due to how late I get home from work when I wake up, sometimes I'm starving to eat first. Other times I shower first, some others I work out for us. How do we form habits from no habits? Great. So this sounds like a morning routine question where this is one of those examples where you don't have a good sleep pattern. You don't have a good routine. In most people's cases, you're able to have a better routine. It's like you decide when to go to sleep and sometime it's, ah, function of you. Like Bryce mentioned just finding themselves online too late because something catch their attention. Other people have legitimate reasons why they can't sleep at the same time because of scheduling issues or constraints. But what you can do is understand that when you do wake up, it is important to automate the beginning of your of your day. And if people don't have habits, what they're doing is allowing themselves to suffer from decision fatigue. They're waking up, and they're allowing themselves to make a decision for everything they do and the in particular in the morning. When you do have willpower, it's a great time to conserve that will power and use it on the right tasks. So people who don't have habits in the morning they still do have habits. They're still showering there, still brushing. They just haven't put it in the right order. I think that ordering is putting things in the right order is a great way to conserve their willpower and train themselves throughout the day to conserve that cognitive abilities. Any questions from all students of this point here in the studio, I have a question price. So one that's come up a couple times so far is getting a morning routine and having a morning routine where everything is kind of automatic. But having everything planned out and set up so that it's automatic in the morning is dependent on a lot of ways. How you get ready for bed at night, which is kind of, as you were talking about it sounds like, is when your willpower is the lowest order. Some of the things that could be done in the evening before to kind of set you up for success the next day. It's a great question. So we're gonna talk about sleep a lot today and tomorrow, and sleep is actually, it's It's like one of the most powerful things in our lives. That we don't do a wish as we should. Sleep is the replenish of habits. Sleep is also the time when you're your body is realized. It was resting if you exercise the time where your muscles are regenerating and, uh, people who don't sleep enough tend to think that they slept enough. They think that they don't require more sleep. It's an illusion. It's been shown time after time and time again. The people's actual ability to focus and people's perceptual ability to focus is not intertwined over time, people who sleep four hours a day, they start to add up to their to their sleep debt and, um, and they end up ruining the rest of the day and then unproductive. The extra two hours they get at night does not translate into two hours of productivity. It translates into two hours of wasted time, often or at least 50% or 30% time. So you were asking about specific things you can do at night. Teoh help you prep for the day after. The first thing you can do at night is to sleep. The first thing to do tonight is to plan your sleep and develop a sleep routine that helps you get to sleep. Now I'm not gonna lie and say that I'm an expert on sleeping on time and, in fact, extremely bad at it. It's one of those habits that I have on my short list of being able to get to sleep on time. On the other hand, waking up on time has never been a problem for me. I practiced a lot of very, very strange sleep schedules back in high school. I did a few months of Polly physics sleep where I trained my brain to go into sleep mode every four hours for about 20 to 30 minutes. So I slept a total of two hours a day for a month or month and 1/2. Um, that was Ah, interesting experiment. But always before then, I always overslept. And always, ever since then, I I always wake up on time, so I don't know why that happened, but I was back when I was, like, 16 or 17. What I've noticed is that sleep is eso. If you prep your like in the evening, let's say that you really want Teoh prepped for the day after. One of the best things that could be done is to write down what you're gonna do. Simply writing down the three things that you're going to do the next day could be one of the core components of having a productive day. Now there's so many things that we have to do each day, right, like there's just so many things and people like things like like waking up is, Once you wake up, you have to like starting off with just base instincts. As soon as you wake up you have. Do you take a shower, brush your teeth, cook food, eat good work, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, then taking account of things that we want to do, like exercising or meditating or writing All those things are a completely are things that we don't have to do each day. They're more of things that we want to do and think that we should do. Problem is that the rest the day the immediate, urgent factors tend to take over. So what? The first thing you could do is by planning the three things that you want to dio the next day and then making yourself stick to those things. And I'll be talking later on about how to force yourself to stick to things that could be a really core component of having a successful day. One thing is that a lot people feel stressed all the time about not getting the things they want to do done. And the act of having a list of three and Max three things that you're gonna do each day and getting those three things done. Well, at least let you know that you got the most important things done, so at least the rest the day is all right, because you got those three things done now, other things that you can automate our plan for the date the night before. Things like setting your clothes before you go to sleep. Things like setting alarm for when you wanna wake up having a list of what you want to do when you wake up. One of the, uh, one of the habits that I had tried to form and I do you stick with is a morning routine and and what I found was interesting was that I always wake up pretty early compared to when I have to go to work. But I tend to spend that morning wasting time watching TV, browsing Facebook and read it. Whatever I did, Um, and I noticed that there were so many habits. I wanted a form that don't take up a lot of time. Things like meditation and journaling things like, uh, what else do I do? Meditation. Journaling gratitude journal. Ah, I started writing down three things I wanted to do. Each day. I noticed that I always focused on trying to form each of these habits. One by one. All literature says you have to form habits one by one. Never try to form more than one habit at a time. I thought to myself, Well, all these habits of things I want to form and all these habits or things that don't take up that much time. Meditation takes up 10 to 15 minutes. Writing down what I want to do. Takes up five. Writing down my gratitude Journal takes up five or less journaling itself takes up 10 to 15 minutes. What if we could chunk them together? So one thing I started work on was creating a paper list of all the things that I wanted to do as a morning routine each day, and I kept that morning list on my bedside table. What I found was really fascinating. I used the bet switch mechanism to help me focus on on making sure I couldn't cheat, and I had to do these things. We'll discuss that a little bit later on what the best which mechanism is. But what I found was that I was able to chunk these habits all at one time. So I ended up forming four habits or five habits at the exact same time, whereas usually it was about it would have taken me five months to form those five habits. Instead, I focused on forming one habit. The habit of following this list in the morning and that ended up solving a bunch of habits at once. Continue on your question things other things that really good. Like, I honestly believe the more you automate your entire morning, the better. One thing I'm working on right now is instead of cooking in the morning, which I do every day, every day instead just cooking once a week, having that food ready and just knowing what I want to eat. I tracked my food, everything that I intake, which is really interesting because I'm not the kind of guy who tracks this food. I decided to test my have information system on myself if if if you don't know, I'm actually extremely d I'm in the second percentile for focus, which means that 98% of people focus better than I do. And, um, tracking my food was one of those example habits that I assumed would be impossible, absolutely impossible for me to form. What happened instead was I tricked myself into forming that habit until it became so automatic automatic that I couldn't not write down what food I eat. It got to the point where I was I was, Ah, dinner. I was on a date dinner and my my friend said, Uh, my date said, Hey, can you not track your food today? Like, I just want to have a nice dinner out? And I said, Sure, of course I won't track my food And then I gotta go to the restaurant really quickly. I'm sitting there just like a junkie, just typing in my fitness pal like two ounces of guacamole. If three ounces of grass fed steak and what was interesting from that was that, like the voice in my head just won't shut up about what food I'm eating until I type it in. That was an experiment I did on the head information, but What I want to do now is automating plan on my food beforehand, so I know what I will be eating in the morning. You know, if you plan the night before what you gonna eat today after it's a lot easier to prepare to eat a salad, whereas when the salad versus the french fries are in front of you, it's a lot user to accept the french fries. So planning a food ritual applying your food routine can be well could be important to those air a few examples, but in general, the more you think about not thinking the next day them or it becomes the more you're able conservative power and have a better morning. The beauty of having a good morning routine is that when you wake up, you don't feel that rushed. Got to get up. Gotta get everything on, got to shower, gotta run out the door feeling. Instead, it's more like I'm calm and I can plan out my day. Do you think a lack of good habits or willpower can contribute to depression? I think that well, yes, absolutely. In fact, there's a lot of ah, interesting studies on depression as a habit. Um, a lack of good habits can definitely cause depression. The type of foods that we eat can cause depression. And there's a lot of research that indicates that depression for many people might itself be a habit. The negative feedback loop of internal monologue and internal thinking can often be a habit in and of itself. Uh, I'm more familiar with with obsessive compulsive disorders as well as depression, and I found that there's a book called Making Habits Breaking Habits, which talks a lot about depression and obsessive compulsive disorders. But think about this thing about if you were a child and you, uh, you're washing a dish in a particular way and your mother says Good job, and then you wash it in a different way. And she says, No, no, not like that. Do it this way. Well, there's a reward for Washington dish in the right way, and you might start toe. Think about only washing a dish that way. And in another section, another situation. If you're turning off the tap in a particular way, your mother says the same thing and you think, Oh, I need to start turning it off this way. Well, that actually is. You start to as a child begin to build up this habit of doing things that is very particular way, scrubbing a very particular way, and over time it can multiply into a complete disorder of of obsessive compulsive disorder. Over time, it just becomes your internal thought that you have to do it that way. Now I'm not saying that there's no medical science behind it. Of course, there's definitely brain issues and structural issues, but there is evidence that indicates that that that could be a negative thought pattern. I haven't anecdotal story of a friend who had a depression who had depression, and she trained herself that whenever she had a depressing thought, she would bite her nail like the skin on her now extremely hard every time she had depressing thought she would do that. And what happened is that over time it became a sort of Pavlovian conditioning kind of A as she had a depressing thought that would appear in her brain, she would make her her brain, would catch itself and say, I don't think about that because otherwise you're gonna hurt yourself. Don't do it so In some ways, that's more secure than an example depression. Now from the question that was specifically asked about, Can a lack of habits or can bad habits contributed depression? Absolutely. Your, um, your mental state can be can be completely modified by amount of sleep you have by the type of foods you eat. There's gonna all contribute very deeply to these sort of sort of internal monologues you have with yourself and your ability to focus on what you want to focus on. So yes, fantastic. Now somebody was saying about that. They're trying to get into good sleep habits, except about they get. They suffer from night terrors so they don't want to. They they know they need to get into a habit good sleeping. But they actually find the idea of sleeping very terrifying, cause they know what's going to happen. They want to try and break themselves of the night, that terrorist, so they get into the habit of good sleeping. That's interesting. I'd love to know more from that person about the sort of night terrors that have, or if there's any days where they don't have night terrors. If there's anything they do that is different on the days they don't have night terrors of these that do have my terrorist. I'm not particularly familiar with the idea of with with night terrors for the psychology behind it. But I do think that what I would do in that situation to diagnose would be to start tracking my days on my sleeps and noting the days that I do have night terrors in the days that I don't have night terrors and start to see if there's any sort of consistency in what I've done on those proper days. It could be a diet issue. It could be it could be an action issue, something that they do each day. Um, but I don't have a very good response to that answer. Okay, actually, I actually experience this. I'm not. I'm not a doctor, obviously, but I usedto experience night terrorism. I had trouble sleeping, and my doctor recommended exactly that. He said I should start tracking things like, what time do I go to bed? What we eat before bed? Uh, what temperature or things like that? And I started finding some things like, Well, when I'm overheated like I have to meet blankets on them that causes it. Or if I eat a bunch of junk food before I go to bed, then that causes that No. Over time, I was able to kind of reduce it down. I don't know if that if that fits into the habit framework, but that was something that I thought that was related to the question. Well, it absolutely does. The ability of knowing what you're doing is Day does affect who you are. In fact, fortunately, knowledge is power. Um, it turns out that, uh, that kind of by knowing who you are, your brain and body could make physiological changes in of itself. So there's a great example of the maid's torching calories. There's a study at a Harvard that, uh, that looked at housekeepers at a hotel in the Boston Cambridge area, and they discovered that so housekeepers do a lot of exercise. In fact, they're in the top echelon of exercise each day. They tend Teoh their on their feet all day. They're cleaning their vacuuming, their washing clothes and laundry, and, uh, they're actually doing quite a bit of manual exercise. But when they brought in the the Harvard psychologist Toe. Ask them how much exercise I did. 2/3 of the of the housekeeper said they did little to no exercise at all. What was interesting is that the psychologists and psychiatrists measured their vials. So they measured their heart rate, their blood pressure, their waist to hip ratio as well as a large number of other vitals, and discovered that their actual how they looked and how they other vital signs matched closely to their expected levels of exertion and not their actual levels of exertion. So the professor split the to the group. I believe it was 80 80 something. Housekeepers split them into two groups and one group, she explained to them. You know you're actually burning 20 calories Every time you make a bed, you're burning 30 calories by walking up a flight of stairs by and to the other group, she said. Nothing came back a month later and discover the a massive shift in the two groups. The first group was, she told, how much exercise they were doing had a believe 10 was a to 15% drop in blood pressure. They had lost a bunch of weight, their waist to hip ratio was was approaching their expected level of exertion, the actual level of desertion, not their perceptual level of exertion. The other group had no change. Now there's two explanations to why this happened. The first was that the knowledge that they were already being active change their brain. To think that they were an active type of person and they would try to walk more. They would think that they would eat less. Um, but there's a deeper a deeper part to this that I believe, uh, the physiological knowledge of knowing what you dio the psychological knowledge. No, you can change your physiological actions as well. So I believe that your body, by knowing how much exercise is doing, can actually help change what, how it burns fat, how it burns collars and how it exists. Uh, from a personal level, I wear a wristband. Ah, basis wristband that measures my heart rate steps, uh, and calories burned per day. We will be developed. That, of course, into our pavlak respond as well. And what was interesting to me is a lot of days I stayed home. My house is very small, probably the size of this stage and, um, I one day I remember leaving my office, leave my house for my office, 3 p.m. And I calls all day that morning, and as I walked out, I looked down on my wrist and pressed the button to see how many steps I walked. And I walked 3500 steps at home, which is almost two miles, because I pace when I take phone calls. And I realized that the act of simply tracking my steps automatically just sits on my wrist and tells me when I'm walking, had allowed me to realize that I was approaching my my my. If they good amount of approaching my ideal level of activity that day, I'd actually done more than 1/3 of the steps I plan to do that day just by staying in my apartment, so people don't always realize exactly how much they are exercising, how healthy they are. They assume that because they were at home all day, they ate more calories and they actually eight. They didn't burn any calories. But when I started to track my steps attract my sleep, I tracked my food intake. Some very interesting correlations began to arise from that, we'll be talking about that. More data, of course, is a great starting point for transformation. But it isn't always enough to provoke change on. We'll be talking mawr about habits about how toe insight changing yourself over the next few segments. Do you have any recommendations on how toe force yourself toe actually tracks things? My struggle is I'll try to get on my fitness pal or one of these things, and I'll do it for two days. And I feel like I'm torture myself every time. You know, eating a meal after write down what I'm eating and looking at packages, and it's actually more of a struggle for me to actually do the tracking. Then the reward feels, yeah, um, as I mentioned, I have exactly that experience with my fitness pal in particular. I wanted to track the food that I was eating, and I said to myself, This is the kind of habit that I will never be able to form. So let me see if my algorithm for a padlock habit model can work. And I ended up getting to the point where I was in bathrooms, typing in how much, Uh, how much food I eat, and the voice in my head won't stop talking. And, uh, we'll be talking about that specifically in the next section about how to form these difficult habits and how to make it happen. Um, from a core level, it's just about making yourself do it enough days in a row until it becomes harder to not do it than to do it. Now we'll talk about it in the next segment. Exactly how to make that happen. Yeah, but on a side note, tracking your food is still difficult. Getting easier, usually really hard. Imagine if it was before my fitness pal, where you wanted to track your macron's. You legitimately had to write down calories and protein from the label on a piece of paper and then added up at the end of the day. Today we can use your cell phone to write down and search from a searchable database or with bar coded items. Actually, take a photo and and see, and it calculates the majority of it for you. You'll notice that it's much easier today than it's ever been, but it's not automatic yet. That said, We're moving towards a life where it is automatic, where we're actually able toe scan automatically the food, and it knows what we're eating other things, like taking tracking steps that was extremely hard on past. Suddenly, today, this thing just sits on my wrist and just knows in fact, your your mobile phone if you have ah, if you have a mobile, phone a smartphone and install the moves app or if you have an IPhone five s and you install the on your install the breeze up, it just sits in your back pocket and knows how many steps you've walked without any calculations whatsoever. So the new, um, sensor revolution, which is allowing us to automate low powered sensors that are able to track what we do each day, are starting to build up a really great profile of our individual activities and sort of the correlations and causation, causation, factors that allow us to improve our own lives. So I'm ah, big proponent of the quantified self movement and a popular question is, is there a dark side to tracking all of this data? Um, so, for example, my dad has a Fitbit, and he is consistently been reaching his 10,000 steps. But when on days when he's not quite there becomes very anxious. And so people ask often, um, what is the dark side here? Is there a negative psychological effect to not reaching your goals? Six months ago I was at 9400 steps and it was about p.m. And so I said, Let me just go outside and take a walk around the block. I took a walk to the convenience store where I bought ice cream and came home and ate, and I said, Uh, something went awry here. Is there a dark side? I'm sure there is. I think that for everybody anxiety, a being anxious about your score about your you know, there's obviously no, it can't be good to be like to have toe have something done. You know, obviously there is a downside to that, but I have to balance it against the positives. Like how many steps would he walk had he not warn the Fitbit? All 10,000 steps a day is fantastic. It's an incredible goal. He's achieving and the days that he's not achieving it. What's interesting is if he's getting anxious. That's an example of a habit that he's formed, where your brain feels anxious when you're not brushing your teeth in the same way your brain might feel anxious if you haven't walked 10,000 steps. What he could do is to start rather than being simply anxious about it. Pull out correlations about it. Why is he not approaching the steps? What did he do differently on the days that he did walk the 10,000 steps versus the days hit? He didn't, um, there's really, really interesting factors there. Play. I walked 10,000 steps for four months in a row almost every day and suddenly the last month and 1/2 I've walked very few steps. I haven't hit 10 on the steps of single time, and I started to ask myself, Why is this happening? What changed? Well, a couple things I diet changed. I moved from a bulking diet to ah ketogenic diet, so I think I have less energy to some extent. Secondly, I might work changed. Now I don't walk one mile each day back and forth to work. It's like a couple steps so suddenly has changed those small situation contextual factors can really, really change. So the number of 10, steps is just a number. And there's, of course, there's no reason to be anxious if you haven't had a specific goal. I mean, the ability of walking you 9000 steps in a day is great. It's way better than walking 500. Identifying why is a better a better solution? But yeah, there there is a dark side for sure, but I think it's outweighed by the positives. Do you any more questions? No more? Um, is there a way to track willpower? Uh, as far as I understand, glucose, while it is effective at replenishing willpower can't be used to actually measure willpower. Although I would imagine that with the new technologies we have these days, you could probably identify some interesting willpower factors. I'll be up dental in a little bit later on a muse e g headset, which measures your Alfa beta theta and gamma waves. I'm not sure if it's correlated whatsoever toe willpower, but I do believe that over time will be identifying a lot of interesting facts about that. Yeah, fantastic. Now some people are asking, obviously they were you were saying earlier that Coca Cola is clearly a bad habit, although it has a quite a positive short term effect. Are there other things that you could take, like honey or green tea, or something that is healthier but has the same impact? Yeah, eso. The case of Coca Cola is not about health about glucose, and that's a short term spike in your insulin level that causes you to have more willpower for a short period of time. Um, I built in the case of even this study, they recommend not to drink glucose as a reason Teoh to improve your willpower. Instead, it's better to have better have a steady insulin level throughout the day. So the idea of being able Teoh you know diet that keeps your willpower steady throughout the day can be very massive for your whole days. Willpower. Here's an example. When you eat something sugary or starchy, eat in the morning, your insulin rises and then it drops, and when it drops, you're hungry. You need to have more insulin to make it back up and then drops again, and suddenly you're in this spike drop spike, drop spiral. How can you cure that by having something for breakfast that doesn't spike your insulin rather than focusing on periods of high powered high willpower and low willpower. If you begin to eat a diet that keeps your willpower steadily high throughout the day, you can start to focus on the on the big wins. So for breakfast, have eggs and bacon, don't have any sugars, don't have any carbs and you're gonna have a great breakfast morning routine. Have some bulletproof coffee if you're in the toe. Dave Asprey is bulletproof stuff. But what rather than focusing on on on the brand of coffee, what he what Dave is really done with bulletproof coffee is making sure that people have good fats in the morning fats that are metabolized and digested slowly throughout the day that keep you from being hungry and desire ing carbs. Focusing on on removing carbs from your breakfast routine is a great way to keep your your your willpower steady at least to the morning and three today.