The state of behavior change, and a new free app!

We’ve learned a lot about behavior change in the last 2 years. Here’s a bit of my current thinking on it all, and a new free app that you can print out and put in your wallet.

1) Which behavior should I change?

One that helps you learn the habit of changing habits (learn once, use forever). One that’s linked directly to something you desperately crave more of in your life (meaning you crave it on a subconscious level as much as a conscious one). One that’s about doing more of something rather than less than something. One that you can work towards every day. One that takes less than 5 minutes, and that you can do at the same time every day. One that you can enjoy in some way, or that makes you feel good about yourself even just for a few seconds.

2) How many habits should I try to change?

Only one at a time. Please trust me on this one. Stick with one, stick with it for 60 or even 90 days. Then, if you really want, start another. Life is long. Think of how many habits you can change with the tortoise strategy in a year verses how many you start and stop with the hare strategy. Every change creates an equal and opposite force of resistance to change. To keep resistance low, change slower than your excitement propels you to. Hold yourself back… it builds anticipation. If you don’t, excitement inevitably wears off, and resistance will chop you down when you’re weakest, putting you back to square one. One. Habit. At. A. Time.  Aim for changes that stick a year, 3 years, or 10 years, and pace yourself accordingly.

3) What if I get distracted or sick or go on vacation?

Get in the habit of being easy on yourself. Break streaks. Don’t beat yourself up for missing a day. Think long term. Appreciate small steps towards progress. Forgive yourself for falling off the wagon. Just get back on when you’re feeling ready again. Give yourself a special day every month to restart anything that got stamped out over the last month. Put it on your calendar and set an alarm. Course correction is the most important meta-habit to cultivate, and often gets ignored in the presence of excitement and big promises and positive thinking. Expect and plan for failure, and have a plan for recovering from it.

4) iPhone app, Android app, pedometer, wrist band, or other?

It doesn’t matter. Paper works just as well. 

On that note…

Here’s a paper app you can print out, fold up, and put in your wallet.  It’s free!  And it encapsulates the best thinking Amelia and I and many others (see Nick Crocker’s great recent article and Leo Baubata’s extensive work) have on the subject.

Give it a try. For extra points, print it out and take a cool picture of yourself with it and tag it #hipsterhabitapp on Instagram.

http://hipsterhabitapp.com/

I’m #interested in #habits

Interest stats:
  • Interested since: 2010
  • Looking for mentorship: Yes
  • Willing to mentor: Yes
  • Level of interest: 9
  • Level of mastery: 4

Origin story

Habits are an interesting little corner of behavior change.  They are the behaviors that have somehow become ingrained in our subconscious.  They are programs in our brain that we do without thinking.  

Of course, that is largely a myth.  Even breathing, which can be considered one of our best habits, isn’t entirely automatic.  We can stop.  Of course, we’ll pass out before dying.  Wouldn’t it be cool if all of our good habits were like that?  Where, if we ever tried to stop going to the gym, our bodies would knock us out and take us to the gym without our consent?  That’s how cool the breathing habit is.

The reason I’m interested in habits is mostly because so many people want to make and break them.  It gets to the heart of our struggle between routine and self-improvement.  It perfectly illustrates just how out of control we our in our own lives.

Anyone that tells you that it takes 21 days to start a new habit (or 7 days, or 30 days, or 90 days) is trying to not only sell you something, but is willing to lie to you in order to do so.

So what is it that we sometimes mistake for a habit: something we do automatically without thinking?  I am coming to believe that it’s a hormonal program.  Basically, a finely tuned set of dopamine triggers around a specific behavior.  

Say you want to wake up at 7am every day.  Creating positive experiences around this desire is one way to help you make it a habit.  Drink a cup of warm chamomile tea half an hour before you want to go to bed.  Find a nice robe to entice you out of bed in the morning.  Take a shower to relax.  Read a good book in bed for 5 minutes.  All of these positive experience (if you think those are positive experiences) create a line of positive associations that lead you by the hand into a particular behavior.  You can just start gobbling up the dopamine hits starting at bedtime, and pac man your way all the way through to the morning.

The last remaining thing is that you need a trigger to remind you to start this cascading game of habit pac man.  Maybe a soft chimey alarm on your phone at 10pm.  Maybe it’s “the moment of zen” at the end of the Daily Show.  Basically, a “after this, do this” style direct connection, ala BJ Fogg’s behavior change philosophies.  It’s easier to add an extra link to an existing habit chain than to start an entirely new one.

On the other hand, we all know how addicted to certain routines we can become.  Left to their own devices, a strong enough habit chain can pull in all kinds of unintended associations that aren’t necessarily 100% great.  Like having to sit at the same chair in the same restaurant on the same day every week and ordering the same thing, just so that you don’t upset the habit chain associated with connecting with your spouse.  And then getting upset at your spouse when they invite a friend and they come early and get seated at a table that isn’t “yours”.

Ah, habits.  So interesting.  

The interface to our subconscious

You know how sometimes you’re hungry and you start wondering to yourself, “What am I in the mood for?” This process of one part of the brain asking another part of the brain a question is something we all do a lot, and it struck me the other day that there was actually something really interesting and beautiful about how it works.

What’s happening here, anyway? Let me try to break it down…

  • The asker of the question is our conscious mind. 
  • The answerer of our question is the subconscious.
  • We think the question, as words, but then what often happens is that we hold up a number of images, or memories, one at a time and see how our subconscious responds to those images and memories. 
  • Q: “Thai food?” A: Nah.
  • Q: “Sushi?” A: Nah.
  • Q: “A hamburger?” A: Hmmm…. maybe.
  • Q: “Pizza?” A: YES!
  • The answers are in the form of hormones that predict our happiness upon receiving the food item in reality.  Basically, though it’s probably a simplification, our brain has a machine cranking away under the surface trying to predict the value of various alternatives.  
  • There are a couple factors that go into making an answer/prediction: the likelihood of reward, the strength of reward, the ease of acquiring the reward, etc.
  • Biologically speaking, the vehicle of the answer is a dopamine hit, a dopamine dip, or no response.
  • This is how our subconscious talks to us!
  • We don’t get to know what exactly went in to forming the answer (hence the sub- in subconscious) but we do get the gentle hormone-induced PUSH (go to it!) or PULL (don’t do it!) not unlike a sign from God that nudges us in the desired direction.
  • Think about it. 
  • How many times a day do we ask ourselves these kinds of questions?  ”Should I get out of bed now?” “Should I walk to work?” “Should I check my email?” “How should I respond to that question?” “What should I wear?” “What’s the best way to get my job done?” etc.
  • We rely very heavily on this relationship with our subconscious to send us quick answers, and we almost never go against the advice.
  • When do we go against the advice though?  Maybe when we know it’s wrong, or when we’re trying to override existing habits or behaviors with new healthier, or otherwise better, habits and behaviors.

I’ve been trying to create a meditation habit recently, and part of a recent breakthrough was realizing that I can ask my subconscious questions, listen to the answers, and do nothing. Just become familiar with what the physical sensations of these answers is like.  And how they change depending on my mood, my physical state (hungry, sleepy, exhausted, full, sick).

I wish there were words for the sensations.  Are there any words for them in languages other than English?  The feeling of an internal kick to check email.  What is the word for that?  What is the word for the feeling of dread when thinking about eating a salad?  And what is the word to describe the difference between that and the feeling of dread when thinking about doing bills.  What are the words to describe the beginning of the feeling, the middle of the feeling, and the end of the feeling?  What about the words to describe the background buzz of hormones swirling around inside our arms, legs, etc?  What are the words to describe a positive buzz of excitement under the skin, and to talk about how strong the buzzing is, and the rate at which it is pulsing (I noticed a pulsing background buzz in my skin after a long inspired work session yesterday).  How do we talk about the qualities of these answers in a way that makes it feel like we can compare notes with one another, and slowly begin to understand the subtleties of how our bodies and minds respond to internal questions, and how we make decisions, and how we negotiate changes in behavior?

I listened to an amazing Radiolab the other day about Words which talked a lot about the science that has shown that without words, we can’t think about certain concepts.  We need words in order to delve into understanding.  The fact that I don’t know of that many everyday words to describe something as crucial as how our bodies feel on the inside (aside from the very high level words like hungry, angry, hungover, etc) is really surprising to me and I’m hoping someone can point to previous work in that general direction.

Forcing it

Thoughts in no particular order, spiraling into a weird place by the end…

  • I’m trying to eat a salad every day for lunch.
  • Like many other things, it brings me face-to-face with the challenge of controlling my behavior outside the realm of habits.
  • What exactly am I “forcing” the change against?
  • Dopamine.
  • Like Pavlov’s dog, we have each been conditioned through the years to behave in certain ways that are most likely to keep us alive, comfortable, and happy.
  • The three primary goals that our old brains have been long trained to seek out are: sustenance/comfort, information/learning, and social connectedness/help.  They all directly improve our chances for survival.
  • Conditioned responses, on the other hand, are only guesses about possible improvements to our chances for survival.  They are the sum of all the things that were nearby whenever our sustenance, learning, or relatedness was directly impacted.  
  • But, eventually, both the primary sources of survival, and the conditioned stimuli, trigger the same spike of desire or dip of despair when we run into them.
  • The cumulative effect of all of this self-conditioning is a very ingrained set of programs that our brain runs. It rewards certain behaviors that it knows worked in the past, and punishes other behaviors.
  • Attempts at behavior change are really attempts to swim upstream against this river of conditioned responses to things in our lives.
  • Why would we ever want to do that?
  • Salads are yucky. They aren’t even proper meals. They won’t fill you up. They’re green. They taste bad. There’s no heavy satisfaction that a burger gives.
  • And yet, when I force myself to eat a salad, I feel remarkably refreshed and good afterwards. 
  • Next time I think about eating a salad, though… my Pavlovian response is to starve myself of dopamine for a few seconds. To feel punished. To feel sick, and repulsed by the idea.  To feel as if I’ve been bad for even thinking about it.
  • Forcing myself to eat a salad, most days, is an act of revolution against the Pavlovian response.
  • But does that turn me into a very mild schizophrenic? To fight against my own conditioning, my own thoughts on the matter?
  • Maybe way back when, piggybacking on our DNA, a little creature hopped into our genetic code and took residence as the Master.
  • Maybe the Master, born way back when puppies and lizards ruled the Earth, has been controlling minds and bodies, keeping them “safe”, steering them away from risk, whipping them when they try to eat something dangerous or stupid like a salad.
  • There was probably a shift in power somewhere between whales and monkeys when the Master was given full veto power over our every behavior.  Way before the frontal cortex got on the scene.
  • Whenever we listen to the Master, it rewards us with a zing of dopamine.  It’s like a mouthful of hamburger, rolling in grass on a warm day, a beautiful song.
  • Whenever we don’t listen, or even look at it with suspicion, bam, grounded from dopamine for a good several seconds. Enough to bring our eyes back down and remember who’s in control here.
  • I don’t like the idea of being controlled by some old clumsy, risk-adverse, monster in my subconscious.
  • Framed like that, eating a salad is no longer a repulsive act to my frontal lobe. It’s an act of rebellion and will.
  • And, strangely, the Master rewards this rebellion. Gives me a dose of dopamine, and maybe a little adrenaline. Can’t help but cheer on blatant disrespect. Maybe it wants to be free of me as much as I want to be free of it. 
  • I walked home the other night in the rain. It’s about two and a half miles, and I didn’t have a coat. I decided to just walk and see how my dopamine levels petered out whenever I stepped in a puddle (did I mention there was a hole in my shoe, and my sock was a squishy mess pretty much immediately?). It was enlightening to see how many hundreds of times my brain sent little negative zings to me trying to tell me “this is not good” when I stepped off the curb, “avoid avoid avoid!” when a drop of rain hit my brow, “when will this end, how can this end, please make this stop!” as my jeans soaked all the way through. But, because I considered them messages from the Master, I didn’t take them personally. The slings and arrows had less sting. There’s nothing intrinsically bad about rain, or being wet, or even a squishy sock. My life’s not in danger in the least bit.
  • My cat, Sopor, freaks out sometimes for no reason. We laugh at her for feeling as if her life, such a simple and safe life that it is, is in any way jeopardized.
  • How many times a day though do I react as if there was a threat when really there is none? Lizard brain. The critic. Resistance. 
  • Salads are not a threat, and yet my body reacts as if they are, every day.
  • Rain is not a threat.
  • Certain tones of voice are not a threat.
  • Chores are not a threat.
  • Getting out from under warm covers is not a threat to my life. Nobody has ever died of it.
  • Not checking email for 10 minutes is not a threat.
  • Not having my phone with me as I go to the bathroom is not a threat.
  • Etc. So many hidden tigers in the room.
  • This really old mechanism in the brain that reacts to conditioned triggers (colors, sounds, impressions, gut feelings, patterns) only know how things used to be, and has been self-reinforced for 36 + a hundred million years. It’s like an ancient racist, homophobic relative trapped forever in a deep corner of my soul poking and prodding me whenever it wishes.  The worst part is that until now I took these simple commands as gospel… true statements about the world.
  • Breaking a habit, FORCING a new behavior, is an all out war against this old mechanism, this old Master. Throwing out an old religion that no longer works.
  • Eventually it gives in and lets the new behaviors continue, once it has been proven for the 10,000th time that they will not in fact kill you.
  • It’s only there to help you, after all.
  • Eventually, the Master takes over and sends new pokes and prods to continue this habit.
  • To KEEP a habit, you need to let the Master do its work.  Let it sway you to put those shoes on and get out of bed and run out the door.  Don’t even THINK about it.  Let the dopamine push you.
  • Until then, force it.  Make a big deal about it. 
  • Hello, salad.

Top