Ep. 9: Stick With Things Beyond Enthusiasm

What do you do when you don't feel like doing the work you need to do in order to get to your goals? Perhaps your initial rush of enthusiasm has faded away and now your old habits want to reassert themselves. Learn the benefits and dangers of enthusiasm, and how to create long-lasting habits that will carry you to your goals.

Chapters

• 0:00 What do you do when enthusiasm fades?
• 8:44 Goods and bads of enthusiasm
• 19:24 Be honest if the goal is not actually important to you
• 23:42 If the goal is important, remind yourself
• 30:50 You can build or change any habit
• 36:47 Cue, behavior, reward
• 46:00 Consciously create a cycle
• 58:40 Rewards
• 1:11:23 When to use willpower
• 1:17:21 Failures and relapses
• 1:25:29 Sticking with things is also about the big setbacks
• 1:27:22 Conclusion and mantra

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Hi, my name is David Murphy, and welcome to How to Be Happy and Successful, the podcast for and from the mildly incompetent. Okay. Hi everyone. Welcome to Stick with Things Beyond Enthusiasm. The next episode of what I'm calling the success side of the podcast. The first episode on the success side of the site was Set Goals. Next came work your behaviors. And now here we are with Stick with Things Beyond Enthusiasm. And we're kind of taking on the question: what do you do when your enthusiasm fades? You set a goal, you get after it, and then you just don't feel that rush anymore. And that can happen two days after you set your goal, it could happen six weeks in there. But it's rarely longer than that that our enthusiasm carries us forward with this pleasure and optimism we can feel when we're changing our lives for the better. And that can be very disappointing, but that's how it is. And you almost surely already know that. I can feel very confident in saying that any adult listening to this has had the experience of getting going on some new path that they believe will make their lives better and make them happier, and they feel really good about getting after it. And not too long later, they don't feel that rush anymore, and they quit. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, well maybe you don't need this episode. But let's say I'm talking to someone who does know what I'm talking about. You see, I I assume I'm talking to someone who in some way is going through the path that I recommend, right? Yeah, so to be successful, it's basically a three-step process. You know, you set a goal, you set up, you figure out what behaviors you have to do to get to that goal, and you stick with those behaviors long enough to get there. Now, if it's a very small goal, let's say the goal is clean my apartment. Depending how messy your apartment is, that can actually seem like a big goal. But it's not the same as say changing your career, buying a house, right? You can do the clean my apartment goal in a day or maybe a week of hard work if your apartment's very messy. What I'm mostly talking about was setting goals is the kind that are going to change your life and so the kind that take months or years or decades to achieve. And how do you get yourself to consistently do the behaviors you have to do to get there for those months and those years or those decades? You don't want to rely on enthusiasm or willpower to get yourself there. The enthusiasm, as I said, is going to fade. And that doesn't make you a failure of a human being when that is the case. It makes you a human being. Or we, you know, if you buy a new car and you're super excited about it, if six months later you're just as excited and you're showing people, look at my car, well, you might be a very happy person, but you're a strange person. You don't have this thing called hedonic adaptation that the rest of us have. And if you start some new program of working out of the gym and you're just excited and you get after you enjoying the gym, and you start going and you're pumped for two weeks. If a year later you feel the exact same kind of enthusiasm, again, you might be a very happy and probably by this time a very in-shape person, but you're a very strange person, right? That initial enthusiasm is gonna fade if you're a human being like the rest of us. And so we must find something else to motivate us. And for the willpower thing, I talked about this. I can't remember if it's in what a success or one of the other episodes. You know, I've got, you know, this is my eighth episode now. I've got so many episodes, who can remember them all? But willpower, first of all, let me say that in general, when we say we're gonna, you know, we get excited, so we say I'm gonna use willpower to overcome the resistance I have to doing this thing and I'm gonna make myself do it. That's actually you just usually just enthusiasm in disguise. Right? You're pumped up, and so you overcome resistance, which is terrific that you're able to do that for whatever it is we're talking about. Going for a run, cleaning your garage. I don't know what else. But it's terrific that you can do that. But the reason you you overcame resistance and push yourself so hard was because you were pumped and enthusiastic. You know, willpower is about making yourself do something hard when you really don't want to. It's painful, there's some other kind of cost, and you make yourself do it anyway. That's what willpower is about. Now, number one, I'm not anti-willpower. Willpower is admirable and it's useful, and I will talk about its use later on in the episode. Decades ago, in my 20s, I taught martial arts and self-defense for a living, and I used to push my students hard. I really wanted them to develop an ability to drive themselves when they needed to. Because I felt if they were in a fight, especially if they got hurt in a fight, they might need that ability. And of course, we all want that ability in our lives to push ourselves when we have to. But we don't want to have to spend years doing that. We want it when we need it. But the idea of setting up some goal is going to take five years to get to. And every time you go do the work to get to that goal, you hate it. And but you have to find the strength within to overcome that hatred and make yourself do it. Well, number one, it sounds miserable. And number two, it sounds like a real pathway to failure. Because most people aren't gonna do it. And I am not trying to insult you. I know you want to be John Wick, you know, who's I can't remember that quote exactly, but a man of great personal will. Everyone wants to be that. It's so admirable, terrific. Don't think you're gonna change your life with all the goals you want to get to by accessing your remarkable strength of will. It's not realistic, and again, it's not enjoyable at all. What you want to do, what you really have to do, is not depend on willpower, not depend on the enthusiasm to last, because I says it, as I said, it won't, but instead to build habits. And as you build habits, a habit is something is a behavior you do that is it's either easy to do or it is as close to easy as you can possibly make it. You're not trying to build behaviors that you have to dig down and find strength to make yourself do. You're trying to grease the wheels as much as possible so that you can really just do it again and again and again. And you don't have to love it every day, but you have to realize, oh, that's what I do. And you can know consciously, you know, I don't really like doing that. Or at least today I don't feel like doing that. But I know that once I get going, because I've done it so many times, it's not going to be that bad. That is sort of how a habit goes. Either we do it literally, we feel bad if we don't do it. So it's just easier to do it than not do it, or else, if it's not quite that easy, it's still easy enough where it doesn't take a surge of enthusiasm or a surge of strength to get ourselves to do it. We've got to make the work that gets us to our goals to be like that. Okay, yeah, I just said I'm not anti-willpower. I'm also not anti-enthusiasm. I mean, it is it feels so good to be enthusiastic about anything, right? It's exciting. And certainly when we are doing something, we're taking on something that we feel is gonna really make our lives better and make us more the person we want to be. How can we not feel enthusiastic? You know, it's one of the great things about getting going on a path like that is to feel that enthusiasm, and it can really help us get started. But there are a couple of dangers in there. There's two main dangers I can think of. Number one. Number one is that fading away. The enthusiasm that launches us on our path will diminish, and that can happen very quickly. You can be enthusiastic about uh starting running, and then you can go for your first run, and you know, a quarter of a mile in, your enthusiasm has faded. And that might be putting up mildly. Uh, there's that scene at the end of the movie Air, where uh Matt Damon, he you know, he he works for Nike in the 80s. They just signed Michael Jordan. He doesn't run, so he decides he you know, he puts on some Nike running shoes, goes to the track, takes about four steps or something. He's like, no, no, no. Just you know, I suspect he didn't have too much enthusiasm to start with. But uh the point is the rug can come out from under our feet uh very quickly, actually. But also it could be, you know, you're you're great, you love that first run, and you get going, but then three weeks later, you're like, uh, do I want to keep doing this? And it could go for anything. Yeah, anything, you know, reading every night. You know, it feels you make yourself do it, you turn off your television and you put away your phone, and you say, I'm gonna sit down and read for 30 minutes at night, and you start doing that. You know, two weeks later or four weeks later, well, it's a little harder to put away TV. Like, I want to keep, I'm gonna finish this movie off or this show. I want to watch one more episode of it, and so forth, so on. You know, it just the the extra the warm feeling you get when you turn off the electronics and pick at the book, it's just not there in the same way. And so it it fades, and that fade is that first danger because that's so easy. That's just the easiest way to give up this habit that we're trying to create. We haven't really created it yet. Uh, this habit we're trying to create, we give it up because in fact the the immediate reward actually goes away. You know, one thing that James Clear, the writer of atomic habits, says is that with bad habits, the reward tends to be immediate. And with good habits we want to form, the reward tends to be delayed, it comes down the line. And so let's say we believe that reading will improve our lives, and I do believe that. It's my vote for you. But you know, we we think it's gonna improve our lives in the long run if we read regularly. And at first, when we start this habit, we have an immediate reward because we feel good about ourselves when we say, you know what? Boom, TV off. You can wait till tomorrow, Netflix. I'm pulling out my book. But after a few weeks, that immediate reward isn't quite there anymore. Because, you know, the enthusiasm, that hedonic reward of like seeing the new car, just like that goes away after a little while. It's no longer our brand new car. It's just our pretty new car. Okay. That feeling of I'm a person changing my life to start reading, uh, it's not such a big kick anymore. So we lose that quick reward that helps us resist a pull of our old habit of watching Netflix for four hours before we drag ourselves off to bed. So that very disappointing fading is the danger number one of enthusiasm. Danger number two is that our enthusiasm, when we are in its grip, when we are riding high on it, is so strong that instead of actually making space in our lives for some behavior, you know, for doing the work to get to our goals, instead of making a way to fit that into our lives that I talked about and things like and work your behaviors, instead, we just push things aside. You know, we normally spend, you know, every night at home with our families, helping make meals, you know, take care of the kids, et cetera, et cetera. And we're like, I'm going to the gym. Like I'm on a new path here, people. And you just walk on up and you say, I'm going to the gym every night. Well, okay, family, if they're supportive, they'll put up with that. But it's not building space, it's just dropping things and saying, too bad, I got to go do this. And they can go for anything. What we can so easily do is instead of looking rationally at what our responsibilities are and what our time constraints are, we could just plunge in and start doing the work to get to this goal we've set. And that actually can be useful, but it can also start to just stack up the conflicts until not only will our enthusiasm fade, but also something's gonna break. And so ideally, what we do with our enthusiasm when we're in it is we write it and we enjoy it. I'm definitely not against that. But also we have the maturity to realize okay, I'm in a wonderful episode here, but I'm not always gonna feel like this. I'm not always gonna be able to just push things aside. We use our enthusiasm to help us intelligently create space. You say, I really want to do this thing right now. I do have these responsibilities. Okay, let me use my energy right now to push things aside and make space in my calendar that can be ongoing to do this work. You see, enthusiasm makes us completely underestimate the power of our old habits and underestimate the busyness of our lives. We could just feel like nothing is gonna get in our way here. We set a new goal for ourselves, we know it's a great goal, and we get so pumped about doing it that when we start doing the useful behaviors, we think, I just broke my habits. You're broken. Bad eating habits, bad exercise habits, bad spending habits. I'm done with you. But you're not done with them. You see, in that first month, when you really get after it, you know, you start doing those crazy home workouts. I remember what 15 years ago, people were doing those insanity videos and they were like throwing up at home because it was such hard work. People got after it. You know, you you cut up your credit cards and you write down every penny you spend, and every time an idea comes up to buy something, you're like, no, I don't need that. I say no to spending. Good for you. You have not broken your old habits. In that month, you are making, if you imagine this is like an enemy army here, you are making a strong forward thrust into their territory. You're making a real advance here. Do not underestimate their ability to strike back. All your old habits have to do is bide their time and be patient and wait for the momentum of your advance to diminish, and then they can reassert themselves and take back all that territory. So that this doesn't happen to you, or maybe doesn't happen to you again, let your intelligence, let your rational mind see the truth of this pattern. Don't let your enthusiasm tell you what to lie. So you join Duolingo and you're all excited about learning Spanish, and you're so pumped, you think I don't need to make time in my weekly calendar to do this because I want to do it all the time. I'm doing two hours a day. You know, you watch yourself get all his experience points and you start moving up to his leaderboards, and uh, you think I want to be fluent in a year. Terrific. I am happy for you. Congratulations. But know that this is gonna turn from pure enjoyment and pure, you know, patting yourself on the back and feeling that good feeling you get from accomplishment. It's gonna turn into work. That's how it is. I'm not trying to rain on your parade, and I'm not saying you can't get pleasure from that work. Do not think that I'm telling you that once enthusiasm fades, it's all drudgery, all toil and misery as you continue working on your habits for years. That's not the case at all. In fact, one of the ways that we can get ourselves to continue doing the work after the fading of the initial enthusiastic rush is learning to find pleasure in the work as we go forward, in the work itself, and in the good feeling we have for knowing that we made ourselves do the work. But the Duolingo that you are loving is gonna turn into work. And so you just, if it's important to you, if you believe that you do in fact want to learn Spanish, you want to build into your calendar time to do it. If now or anytime you want to go over that and you can actually afford it on your calendar, you can afford the time, terrific. Keep doing extra, no problem at all. But build time in so you at least do the minimum you need to do to get to your goal. And I talk about how to do that in the in two episodes ago and work your behaviors. So that's the best thing to do with your enthusiasm is do the work I talk about in work your behaviors, where you sit with your calendar, you say, I'm gonna make time for this. I'm not just gonna slam my new wonderful habit on top of these things. I'm gonna make time so that my life can support this work. So that's the best thing to do with your enthusiasm is combine your wonderful energy with a rational assessment of your calendar. Now move on. On to the real topic here is what to do when you don't have that enthusiasm. And look, I do know that I've been talking a lot so far, and maybe it hasn't applied to you at all because maybe you've never had enthusiasm for whatever goal is most on your mind right now. That does happen, right? We definitely have goals, and they can be short-term goals. Like I have to move within this year. I've got to I've been living in this house I'm in for 10 years. I've got to move in six months. It's a big project, and I don't want to do it. Or your doctor has told you you have to get in better shape. You have to make a life change with your diet and exercise, or else it's going to be very bad consequences. You're not enthusiastic about it at all, but it's important to you. So all this stuff about enthusiasm, it doesn't apply to you. Okay, the rest will apply to you. Now, I do want to say quickly, before I get to that part of the conversation, uh, if you are all caught up in enthusiasm about some new goal that you got uh you know hooked on and you're doing work for you know four weeks on it, and the enthusiasm diminishes. If you realize, you know, if you can say to yourself, you know, this goal is not that important to me, just be mature and drop it. It's okay. You're not a bad person. You know, it it's kind of natural, frankly, to maybe watch a movie or hear someone talking about something and think that sounds super cool. And you get into it for a little bit, and then you realize, you know, this thing takes a lot of work, and I'm not as into it as I thought it would be. Just accept that. There's a lot of things in life for you to put your time into. Don't put your time into something that's not really an important goal for you. So if you, you know, you you hang out with people who love to rock climb, you go rock climbing at a gym with them for a day and you have a great time. So you sign up and you start doing it. Well, rock climbing is a terrific activity, and you could do it for years and decades. But if you are four weeks later, six weeks later, whatever, and you're like, man, it's that's six hours a week I'm doing this. It's it's really not as fun for me as it was that first two weeks, know that. It's just like if there's other things you are taking away from your life that are more worthwhile, go back to those things. You know, if you uh if you watched Penn and Teller on Masterclass, you know, these magicians doing their really cool videos, and you're like, I gotta learn that stuff. It's so cool. But four weeks later, you realize you don't want to spend five hours a week working in your card tricks, just accept that. If it's interesting to you, keep going. But if it's not, put it away. Don't feel bad about yourself. You should always reassess your goals. And as you know, if you listen to the Set Goals episode, I say you should rewrite your life goals and five-year goals and one-year goals twice a week, every week. Part of that purpose is to reassess them. So as your enthusiasm fades, you should reassess and think is it important to me or not? If it's not, you should put it away. But if it is, well, knowing that will be one of the ways you will overcome your lack of desire to do the work right now is realizing this goal is still important to me. But let's say it's the other way. Let's say you reevaluate your goal, and it is important to you. And here you are, your enthusiasm is fading out. You're starting to get back into your old habits with your time. But when you think about it, you realize this goal is still important to you. And that is part of the purpose of rewriting those goals twice a week. You can realize when these goals don't mean something to you, but you can also reestablish your commitment to a goal and to all of the goals on your list. You can question those goals. Again, I am all for you getting rid of a goal that doesn't actually mean something to you. But if it does, it's your job to remind yourself of them and keep your life connected to them. And that can be it can be very disappointing when you look at a goal and realize you have not made progress toward it, that you might feel further from it than you did two months ago or a year ago. We have to be able to face that disappointment and discouragement if we want to keep pursuing these goals, if we really want to make ourselves get there. And the topic of this episode is one of these issues that will come up when you're rewriting your goals. You have decided that you want to get somewhere in a year or in five years, and then you're writing it out and you realize, oh, I haven't worked on that at all in two months. I used to like doing that work, and then I just stopped doing it very much. So here I am. It's not a way to feel good about yourself. Now, as I have said already, and as I will talk more about and blame the process in a couple of episodes, you're not here to beat yourself up. That doesn't do you any good and it's not even fair. So it's easy to feel bad about yourself, but don't emphasize that aspect. But ask yourself, do I want to do this? Now the answer, if it's on your goal list, the answer is yes, you've already decided you do want to do it. So you've got to get back into doing it. You've got to make yourself get going. And that can sound so obvious. It can sound like one of those statements that means so little to people receiving them. You know, hey, keep on keeping on. It's like, okay, thanks. You know, that might actually move somebody a lot, but a lot of people they're gonna get nothing from that. And maybe that's how you feel about what I'm telling you right now. But this is part of how to stick with things beyond your enthusiasm is to use cliche expressions of dubious meaning. But beyond that, for real, is reminding yourself that the goal itself is important to you. Very often, very often, sticking with things is about restarting things. Restarting the work. And that can be you haven't done it for a couple of weeks, time to get going again. It can be you haven't done it for a couple of years. That is the truth, right? We I don't know if we all, so many of us have in our past things that we were doing that we think were good for our lives. We look back and think they were good for our lives. We did it for six months, we did it for three years, who knows? And then for some reason, we just stopped doing it. Maybe there was some reason, you know, we twisted our ankles so we couldn't keep doing our training for a while. Or just for no reason we can now think of, we just stopped. And we feel lousy that we stopped. We wish we hadn't. Okay, now's the time. Get going again. You can spend more time regretting it, or you can just say, Okay, I guess I'll pick up. I won't be as good as I was at the moment I stopped, but I'll get it back because you will if you are consistent. In fact, as I'll talk about in a few minutes, it'll come back much easier than it was to gain the skill when you started. Because your brain still kept a lot of the information and even the physical habits. So remind yourself that the goal is important to you. It's still important to you. The only way you can get there is by doing the work, and so keep doing the work or start doing the work again. Okay, next get into talking about habit formation. Now, in the last episode I did about success, which is called Work Your Behaviors, I talk about some of the things you can do to get yourself to do the work when you aren't enthusiastic about doing it. Now, I really think that the first three episodes on the success side of the podcast, which are set goals, work your behaviors, and this one, stick with things beyond enthusiasm, to really go together. More so than on the happiness side. You know, I think it's great to practice gratitude and self-compassion and being here now and treating people well, but none of those depends upon the others. Though being here now helps the others. But really, you know, when it comes to being successful, as I've said, it's a three-step process. You set goals, you figure out the behaviors you have to do to get to the goals, and then you stick with those behaviors long enough to get there. They all work together. So I recommend if you haven't already, listen to the other episode. Work your behaviors to get some of those suggestions I have for how to make yourself get going when you just you don't have, you're not in the mood to do it. One of which I just spoke about a minute ago, which is remind yourself of how important the goal is to you. But next I'll talk about the ideas of habit formation and how to form a habit. Most of what I'm about to teach, like a large, the large, large majority of it comes from Charles Duhig and his the ideas he presents in his book, The Power of Habit. You know, as I said in my very first episode, I didn't create anything that I'm presenting. I'm just trying to present stuff that I've learned from. You know, I've talked uh at different points about James Clear, who's got this very successful book called Atomic Habits. You know, these two guys do not do not against each other or anything. You can either one or other people talk about habits as well. I think Doo Higg is the most clear when explaining how a habit works and giving practical advice for forming habits. So I'm mostly working off his stuff and sort of repackaging it here. Okay, first idea. Understand that any habit can be built or changed. You know, do he doesn't like the phrase, he doesn't believe in the phrase, that you break bad habits. He thinks you just change the habits. So I'm happy to go with that terminology as well. You can build any habit, you can change any habit. Now, will you build any habit or change any habit? I don't know. But it's possible to do that. You have to understand nothing's outside of your abilities when it comes to shaping your behavior. There's no magic to it, and there's no magical or arbitrary number of days it takes to create a new habit or break an old habit, again, to use that old-fashioned non-Charles Duhic terminology. Uh, you know, you might have heard things like you know, the 30-day rule or something like that. It says, This is how it, how many days it takes to start a habit. Not scientifically accurate. Now, it doesn't mean that that was terrible advice, or if you you may have heard or seen that. I mean, 30 days is a pretty good start to getting going on a new behavior. But in truth, you know, the threshold for something becoming a habit, it varies on the behavior, and it varies based on the person doing the behavior. And it also varies based on the factors in your life working against the behavior. So one lesson to take from that information is not to assume too early that you created a habit. Again, this is one of the dangers of that enthusiasm that can fill us sometimes with new life-changing behaviors to say, oh, we've done it for two weeks now, or 10 days, or maybe 45 days, and we think, I've got that habit. It's locked in. Don't make any kind of assumption like that. It's not that it necessarily takes more time than that. As I just said, we don't know how long it'll take for you to build this behavior, but likely more time than you think or than your enthusiasm tells you. And there are there are a couple of requirements for you to call something to happen. Like, first of all, you've got to have an actual craving to do it. And that doesn't mean you you crave it like you crave your favorite ice cream, but there's some kind of pull in you to do this activity, this behavior, even if part of you also says, Oh God, I've got to do that again. That's okay. But when you have a habit or some kind of craving, at least for the reward you get when you do the behavior. And two, for a habit to really be a habit, those rewards should ideally be more intrinsic than extrinsic. And I'll talk about this more later, but it's more about the feeling you get when you do the habit, when you've successfully repeated the behavior, that internal good feeling you get, than about, you know, the cookie you promised yourself or whatever the external reward is. But while you can't assume too early that you have created a good habit for yourself, one of the best pieces of news is that every day that you do it, the easier the behavior will get. That doesn't mean that every day you enjoy behavior more than the last time or you're more enthusiastic about doing it.

unknown: 34:22

Right?

SPEAKER_00: 34:22

If you say you've been going to the gym now for three weeks, and now it's Tuesday of the day, you're supposed to go to the gym again. Maybe today you don't feel like doing it because you really feel exhausted, you didn't sleep well last night, you're sore, whatever. There's a there's a sports game on you really want to watch. It could be any kinds of reasons why tonight is not the night you really feel in the mood. But in truth, once you get your tennis shoes on, whatever, and you go, it'll be easier than it was two weeks ago. And that is the same with you know making yourself study, with doing dishes in your house, with practicing a language. Every time you do it, it actually gets easier to do. Because as you do a behavior, your brain is making neural pathways. Well, it's making or it's reinforcing neural pathways. So if you have a pathway you've already created, the more you use it, the stronger that pathway gets. And that means that because the pathway is getting stronger and stronger, using it again is easy. That is terrific. Now there's an upside and it's a downside to the neural pathways, or rather to the fact that these neural pathways don't go away. Once you create them, they stay in your brain until you die. You know, maybe barring a, I don't know, a stroke. Which means that the very strong neural pathways you created through years of bad behaviors, they stay with you, which is one of the reasons it's so easy to go back to bad behaviors. Why you should never underestimate the strength of those old behaviors to come back and pull you back in and start, instead of you using them, they're using you in a way. Those pathways are still there, so you can go back to them. But also your positive behaviors create these pathways. It makes it easier to do a habit. And if you stop doing a good behavior for whatever reason, because the pathway is still there, it'll be easier to go back to it. If you were doing something for two years and you, for whatever reason leave it for three years, don't think, God, if I go back, I'll be back to square one. You won't be. You might not be thrilled at your performance on day one, but it'll be much easier if you get back into that good habit, that good behavior, because the pathways are still there in your brain. Okay, now as we get started doing this work of building habits, you should know that every habit has three parts. There is a cue, there is a behavior, and there is a reward. Now, in there, there's also a craving. The craving is what makes the behavior happen. You crave the reward, and so you do the behavior. And the craving sort of triggered by the cue, really. But the three things we got to keep in mind to help build our habits. So there's a cue, there's a behavior, and there's a reward. You're trying to get yourself to do a good behavior, or you're trying to get yourself to stop doing a bad behavior, you've got to think about the cues and you gotta think about the rewards. And neither's more important, isn't they're both important. If you have a game where two people are throwing a ball back and forth, well, which is more important? A person throwing the ball or a person catching the ball? You need both, or you don't have a game. Same thing here. Now, there are five types of cues. As we learned from Charles Duhig. There is a there's time of day. This is pretty clear. It's 12 o'clock, I go get lunch. That's what I do at 12 o'clock. It is 6 p.m., I go work out. Whatever it is. You know, it's it's 9 p.m., I watch my shows. Even though I could watch my shows anytime because I watch it on a streaming service. 9 p.m., that's when I get to sit down and watch my shows. Next, there's your location, the place you're in, the environment you're in, it's essentially the same thing, right? The you're in a certain place, you get cued to do something. So a lot of people don't smoke except when they go out to a restaurant or bar with friends. When they go out to a bar or a club with friends, they're gonna step out on the sidewalk and smoke a cigarette because that's one of the things they do in that environment. You may have heard the story that back during the Vietnam War, there was a concern at a certain point that just an incredibly large number of Vietnam veterans are gonna come back to the US and do heroin because there was so much heroin use by soldiers in Vietnam. And some did come back and continue that habit, unfortunately, but many, many quit. And they quit without even having any kind of a treatment plan because the environment at home was so much different that without the environmental cue, and I would have to imagine the stresses involved in war, which are part of that environment, the veterans were able to quit. Again, sadly, not all of them. Next, a particular emotion. Right? Classic one is you feel super stressed or something really makes you unhappy, you want to eat seven donuts. It can go the other way. You do something fantastically excellent at work, your boss rewards you and you say to yourself, I did a great job. You know what? I deserve donuts. So it can be a good emotion or a bad emotion or a less easy to define emotion. But any emotion can be the trigger for a behavior. And maybe that behavior is not great. Okay, next cue: the presence of certain other people. Certain other people will trigger you to do certain behaviors. This is pretty clear, right? You might swear with certain friends. You don't even think about swearing with other people. You might drink with certain friends or smoke with them or do you know harder drugs. You might work out with certain people, right? Those people that get you to do something like working out or who knows, studying. So there are people that will trigger you and encourage you, not even necessarily through words, though maybe they do, but just encourage you by their presence to do a certain behavior because you are so used to doing those behaviors with those people. And I'll talk about rewards in a few minutes, but socialized rewards, rewards that come to you because of some kind of social interaction or even social association. You don't even have to have an interaction. But if some kind of behavior and reward means something to you that has to do with your social group, you know, they are very powerful for us. And they actually don't even have to be from social praise, though they often are, and those are great ones to use to help you create a behavior. But even if you feel just in yourself that you fit into a group better, yet somehow this behavior is tied to social ideas in your mind, that's a very powerful reward system set up in our brain. And it is very useful for making a reward intrinsic instead of extrinsic. And again, that's going to be the eventual goal. And the final cue is the presence of another behavior, and it just gets ritualized, the connection between the two. If you do one behavior, you're going to do the next behavior. So maybe you floss and then you brush. And it just the moment the floss goes away, you're reaching for the toothbrush. And yeah, it was like, well, I'm trying to get my teeth cleaned. Yes, exactly. But you don't you might have started off using your head to think about it. Maybe your parents started you off using their head to try to get you to do those behaviors. But now the reward, you know, the motivator for the behavior is not a rational understanding of what you're doing. It's that you have it associated that you floss and then you brush. That's how it is. Or it could be something like you eat dinner, then you go read a book for half an hour. And you might say, I don't do that at all. I do the teeth cleaning stuff, but I don't read after eating. I know, but you can. You can create that behavior and that sort of ritualized connection between finishing your dinner and reading a book if you want to. I'm not telling you that should be your goal, but you can create these behaviors. To give a real life example, I'll talk about a friend of mine. And uh, you know, if he hears this, he's gonna know I'm talking about him, and so probably will our other friends, our mutual friends, but uh, I don't think he listens to the podcast. You know, so too bad for him. You know, he should have thought ahead about that. Anyways, so this friend of mine, uh, we really like uh deep dish pizza from a place called Zachary's Pizza that's here in the Bay Area. Great Chicago-style pizza. And often I will bring that over to his house because I live closer to one of the restaurants in this little chain. So I'll bring the pizza over there. It is great. Every slice is heavy. My friend loves it. So he doesn't hold back. You know, he has a number of slices. And I'm not judging because I don't usually stop when I'm full when I eat uh Zachary's pizza either. And so we'll be sitting there, we're talking, we're eating, we're enjoying our meal. The moment he finishes, in general, he will take his plate over to the kitchen sink, put it away, go to the freezer, pull out some ice cream, and give himself a serving. And this is a guy who actually exercises a fairy paint, but he has at times expressed his desire to lose weight. And actually, in recent days, he's actually made some real progress with that. Good for him. Now, I am not trying to make fun of this guy. He's a great friend of mine, he's a very successful person, uh, and he is just demonstrating an automatic action that comes from the cue of a previous behavior. I finish a meal that I like and I want to go sort of top that off. I want to have sort of the final perfection placed on the evening by now having dessert that I like. You know, if he were listening to his body, as they say, in sort of the new age world, if you're being in the moment and paying attention to the cues in his brain, he would say, I'm totally full right now. Like maybe I do want some ice cream later, but I certainly don't need it right now. I can just keep enjoying the pizza I just ate. I can think about that enjoyment. But the cue is there to I finish my wonderful meal. I'm gonna go and eat a great dessert. And the reward there is not exactly even the flavor of the ice cream, though that is nice. It's really that feeling that look what I did. I perfected the meal. I had a great dinner and I just made it excellent by having a great dessert on top of that. That's really the reward. It's more psychological than sensory. So, fifth cue, one behavior just automatically leads to another sometimes. Now, if this is the way it works, if this is how our habit behaviors are, there's a cue. The cue triggers a craving, so then there's a behavior, and then there's some kind of reward afterwards. And you might think, I don't give myself rewards when I smoke a cigarette or when I go work out. I don't give myself anything. There is some kind of reward coming to you. As I just said with my friend eating his post-dinner ice cream. That's why it happens. You know, if you put money aside, if you consciously every week, every month, you take some money and you put it aside into a 401k or some kind of long-term savings account, as opposed to let's say you set it up a year ago where money automatically goes into an account, so you don't think about that at all. But if you have a behavior where you every month take money and put it in some of a savings account for your future, you might think, well, I'm doing that so I can retire well. That'll be my reward in 30 years when I get to retire. Well, yes, that's true. Good for you. I think that's an excellent action. But you're getting a reward right now. You're getting a good feeling that you are preparing for your future. You get maybe a sense of ease that your future will be positive, not negative, but also you get a touch of pride or you get some kind of belief in yourself as an intelligent and capable person. So, what do we do with this understanding of this cycle? Well, we use it. So let's say we're trying to build a habit. Well, we need our cues, we need the behavior. We sort of know that. Like, I am trying to make myself study more, do the work for my class that I'm taking more than I do. We need to create cues that get us to do that behavior, and we need to create some kind of reward for ourselves. What are the cues going to be? Well, the cues have to be one of those five things I talked about: a time of day, a location, an emotion you feel, the presence of certain other people, and a previous behavior. Now, if you're trying to build a habit, you need at least one cue, but know that the more cues you use, the better. If you can create three cues that are associated with the behavior that you want, that is great. There's three triggers that can help you make that behavior happen. Now, if we're talking about studying, like you want to get yourself to study more, okay. First of all, it could be a time of day, right? Let's say I'm at 7 p.m., that's what I'm doing. I finished dinner around 6:30, 6.45. So that means at 7, I'm gonna go study. That's gonna be one of my cues, is the time. Location. All right, I'm gonna do it in this room in the house where no one will bother me. Or if you live in an apartment, I'm gonna do it at the kitchen table. I will clear the kitchen table, and that's where I'll be. And if other people are bouncing around, I'll tell them to get lost because I've got to do this work here. But I will do it at seven, and this is the location where I will do it. And that is very useful to you. Location environment is more powerful than you think. I talked about the Vietnam veterans and how so many of them were able to drop their heroin habit when they let the environment of the Vietnam War. One of the things that sleep experts strongly recommend is if you are awake at 2 in the morning or 3 in the morning, and I know that feeling very well, don't stay in bed. Get up and go somewhere else in the apartment or the house. And if you want to have a good sleep cycle, don't sit in bed for two hours before you go to sleep watching movies or doing anything. Make your bed about sleeping because your body and your brain, they get used to things. They build habit cycles. Environments are a big part of that. You know, who knew, right? You want your brain associating the bed with sleeping. So if you want to get yourself in the habit of studying, don't say, well, tonight I'll study while sitting in bed. Uh, tomorrow I'll study while sitting at the table. Next day I'll be sitting in that chair over there. You might think, well, what does it matter? Like I'll take my books or my computer wherever I go, I could do it there. Fine, you do what you want. If you want to make it easier on yourself, you want to be more likely to do it, create the cue. And with the behavior like studying, where it's not just that you do it, that's the most important thing, but also the quality of your efforts matters. Having a cue like the environment where you do it at the same place every time matters because then you will have an easier time focusing on the studying. It doesn't mean it's going to be easy, but it'll be easier because you're there in that same place that you are every night, maybe three times a week, whatever it is. The cue will help you get to work and will help you stay on task. All right, next cue. A particular emotion. Well, you're not likely to create a particular emotion when you're trying to create a habit like studying, or almost creating any habit. That is one of those cues that's very important to see when you're trying to break or change a bad habit. We'll talk about that in a minute. So I'm not trying to get you to generate some kind of emotion before you start, you know, working out, studying, etc. All right, next cue is the presence of certain other people. Well, sometimes in studying, you just want to be on your own and have no other people around you. But as you know, people often study together. That can be very useful. That, of course, is harder to manage, and that you know, you're not in charge of other people. So sometimes getting together can be frustrating or impossible. But maybe you can do it in person, maybe you can do it, you know, over the phone. Someone else is in your class and be like, we're gonna get on the phone call, we're both gonna sit and study, and we're just gonna know we're on the phone together, or we're gonna talk about, you know, like a study group. We're gonna, you know, talk about the schoolwork that we're doing. So the presence of other people can be useful for that. It is most often used for creating something like workout buddies, and that is very, very useful. Creating a good behavior that you do with other people, the usefulness of that cue is that not only does it become a cue, you get on the phone with somebody, you see somebody, and you're gonna start to get triggered to do the good behavior, but also beyond that sort of psychological trick, so to speak, you're also creating somebody you have an obligation to. The phrase you might have heard already is an accountability partner, right? You you owe this behavior to somebody else because you doing it and showing up helps them do it as well. And you don't want to blow it in front of other people. So, again, one of the reasons why this kind of social cues and the idea of social rewards are particularly powerful for social animals like us human beings. And the last cue is the previous behavior that's become ritualized. And what I I mentioned at the start of this little example was that right after dinner, that's when you're gonna study. So the the dinner goes away, the tray gets put in the the dishwasher or the sink, you will pull out your books or pull out your computer, and that's when you'll start studying. Now, if you're not totally caught up yet, you might think right now, no, no, no, I don't get cued like that. I finished dinner, but I don't suddenly want to study. Yeah, I know. Not yet. You are almost arbitrarily creating something, you're creating a cue from your behavior. People don't get up in the morning and automatically feel an urge to pray, or go to bed at night and feel before they should get into bed that they should pray. That's not from birth. You are trained to do that. Usually the older generation will train you to do that kind of behavior, and eventually, usually when you're still young, it will become automatic. And it will become, you know, that action. It's time to go to bed, and I'm in this environment. You will pray first. Another example: there is nothing natural about finishing a meal and pulling out a cigarette. But for generations of people in the 20th century, that was automatic. Just you finish your dinner, you pull out a cigarette. That's what you do. Why? The cue was created, it was not, it's not built in. In that particular case, they would see other people do it in real life, they would see people do it in television shows or in movies, and they started to copy it, and it became a habit. You are creating, again, somewhat arbitrarily, the cue of I finish dinner, then I study. One behavior leads to the other. It will take a while, we don't know exactly how long, but they will get connected in your brain. So one becomes an easy step to the other, where you actually feel a little off if you're not taking that step. Now, if I may suggest a behavior that you can use to cue the behavior that you have in your mind to add to your life, I'll make a suggestion that might seem a little strange to you at first, but there's a reason for it. So, the behavior I'm suggesting that you sort of arbitrarily, you add it to your life and you arbitrarily connect it to the good behavior you want to do that you might find it hard to make yourself do, such as studying, such as making yourself clean the house for half an hour a day, such as make yourself get out and go exercise. The behavior I'm suggesting you do first is to write a gratitude list. Now, if you go back a number of episodes on this podcast, the first piece of advice, real the first episode entirely about giving a piece of advice is on the happiness side and it's about gratitude. And it's basically I urge you to write a gratitude list five days a week at least. And I'm suggesting it here now, not just because I think that's a great behavior for you to take on, go listen to that episode, find out why uh think it. I'm not going to recapitulate the whole episode now. Too bad for you. But also, if you listen to the Happiness Lab podcast and Dr. Laurie Santos's episode on gratitude, one of the points they make there is that gratitude has been shown in studies to actually increase our willpower. Some it just makes it easier for us to do tasks that we otherwise kind of have resistance to. When we express gratitude and think about things in our lives that are good, we have an easier time doing things that aren't usually so appealing to us. So if you get yourself to take five or ten minutes to write a quick gratitude list, you can start to make yourself happier in the way that I talk about in that other episode, and you can decrease the resistance you might have to whatever it is you're trying to get yourself to do. And then, of course, if you say, Well, I finished in okay, gratitude list and then study, for example, well, the gratitude list will become a trigger to stepping you into that next behavior. Okay, so you know, just think about that. You're getting two benefits. Okay, getting back to the main story here. As I said, the more cues that you can pile on, the better.

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Right?

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So if you can say, I want to start this behavior, and it's gonna happen every day at this time, or three times a week at this time, it's gonna involve these people, it's gonna be in this place, and it's gonna be right after I do this other action. That's gonna be very strong. Four cues is better than just one cue. Sometimes it's hard to create four cues. The more you compile on, the better it is for you. The more likely you are to be able to get that habit going. Now let's talk about rewards. You know, the other side of this habit cycle, the person who's catching the ball, right? So for rewards, a few things. Number one, you're giving yourself at first what's called an extrinsic reward. So just a really clear, positive item or action that you already know you like, right? So you get to have a cookie. You finish your studying, you get your cookie. Or what might make more sense is that you spend an hour studying, and then you get to have half an hour or a whole hour of watching your shows, spending time on your phone, and you get to do it guilt-free as opposed to every time I spend an hour doing that, I feel like I wasted my time because I have so much to do. Not in this case. You do your hour of studying, then you get an hour of your television or your phone time guilt-free, even if you have other things to do. Because you're not wasting your time, you're building that very good habit of studying by rewarding it, and the rewarding is important. Now, a couple of quick points about these extrinsic rewards, and I mentioned these points in the episode on work your behaviors. So you'll be shocked to hear I'm repeating myself. Number one, don't get extra. You know, don't say every time I do this behavior, I go to the gym or I do my studying, I'm gonna buy myself a new jacket. You can't afford that. You're not trying to make yourself bankrupt here. Also, don't do things that are working against whatever goal you're going for. You know, if your goal is to uh save money by spending less, and so you spend the whole, spend three days not buying anything that you normally would buy. Don't say, well, my reward is going to be to buy myself something really nice. You know, that sounds obvious, but it could be very easy to turn to rewards that are really working against our goals. Another thing, do not underestimate the power of feeling just proud of yourself. One of the examples that Charles Duhig talks about is a study where they're trying to get people to wash their hands more, right? I'm a nurse. Washing your hands is, as we are taught regularly in nursing, the best way to help prevent the spread of infections. That's in the hospital and that's out in the regular world. Okay, so you're trying to get people to use soap and wash their hands more. What did they do? Well, one of the things that was done at first was making soaps, you know, really nice, smell very nice. But that didn't do it at all. You'd think that would give the reward if they were to enjoy the experience more, but it made soap seem not like something you do all the time, but rather like a very special kind of a special kind of event to get this very nice smelling stuff under your hands. And that's not what you want. You want people washing their hands regularly. You actually want it to be a commonplace event. And what they ended up doing is actually reducing the sort of the pleasant smell and the pleasant sensation, but talking in advertisements about how when you wash your hands, you're keeping your children safe. You're being a good parent and a good person when you wash your hands more. That did the trick. It got people to say, Oh, I wash my hands and I'm a good parent. That's a nice feeling. And even people who weren't parents, I'm sure, got the feeling, oh, I'm a good person, that this is a good thing to do. And so that feeling of pride, even if they didn't rationalize in that sense or even think about I'm proud of myself, they just get a good feeling about who they are and what they're doing, that's a powerful feeling. And you should understand that about yourself. And you're not playing a mind game or some kind of a trick on yourself exactly, unless you consider this whole thing to be a trick or a mind game. I mean, we're trying to build habits, trying to make our brains do something, but you're not doing something tricky or fraudulent to say, well, I'm gonna remind myself that this is a good thing that I'm doing. And it can be you think about the consequences of reaching this particular goal. I am studying, because by studying, I finish this class and I get tomorrow as a degree, then I can earn more money and that will help my children. Or I can earn more money and that will help me eventually give more money to charity. Any kind of a goal you have in particular has good consequences, right? That's why we're going after it. And you can also just tell yourself, look at me, I set out to do something and I'm doing it. Now you might say, I'd rather have the cookie. Great, I got no problem. Whatever. You want to give yourself the extrinsic reward, terrific, do that. But understand the other one is actually really quite strong. And it's eventually it's going to happen, anyways. If you really do build the habit and you keep at it, it will be you will get an extrinsic reward. So that, for example, with the studying, if you it gets to be, you finish dinner, it's seven o'clock. Even if for some reason you can't give yourself the reward of an hour of you know computer time afterwards because you've got something else planned, if you don't do the studying, you're not going to feel as good about yourself. Over time, you have developed a craving to do the studying. Even if you've never learned to like the studying, if your topic is statistics and you don't like statistics at all, if you have been practicing the cycle, Q behavior reward for long enough, the reward starts to become intrinsic at least as much as extrinsic. So you will have a craving to do the studying because when you finish the studying, you'll say, Unconsciously, I feel better because I did that behavior. It's okay to make that good feeling to bring it more to the front of your mind to make it extrinsic. So I not that long ago started using something that I call a wind jar, which it can, surprise, not originated by me, this idea. But what I just have is a glass jar, you know, I have glass jars sitting around the house, put it on my uh counter of my kitchen, and every time I do any kind of action, it helps me get to my goals. And that's a I have a lot of goals, it's a broad range of things. Any kind of action, in fact, helps me do what I think is making me a good person and a good parent, whatever it is, helping me create the life that I think I want to live. I put a little token in the glass jar. And the tokens are just little pieces from a board game that we never use sitting around. So it's not some magic token. But I drop one token in. Every time I drop it in, I don't get a rush of emotion, but I drop it in and I know this is a good thing. And I I get rewarded as I do it. It's like a it's this physical and visual stimulus that you I did a good act. And every time I see the jar getting more full, I get that reminder that I've been doing good acts. And if you do something like that, you can create a ruler. When I fill the jar up, then I give myself some kind of a nice reward because I've done all these actions, enough actions to fill up this jar. That's great, great idea. I don't even do that because I know just the getting that jar more full or using up all of my tokens makes me feel good. You just have to be aware and conscious of what's going on. You've got to pay attention to yourself to sort of notice, okay, part of this whole game I'm playing is to feel good about myself. That's just the truth of it. And I do feel good about myself when I do things that get me to the life I want to live. And the last thing I want to say about rewards, and this is important, is that when we are first creating a behavior, what we want to reward is just showing up. We want to reward just being there to do something. Just doing step one of this journey of 10,000 miles. In other words, we are not only rewarding ourselves when we are impressed with our quality of work, when we hit a certain goal. I'm not saying you can't create goals even for the first time that you are doing this behavior trying to turn into a habit. I'm saying what you want to reward, and you really want to reward it, is just doing it, right? You finish your dinner, you put away your dishes, you bring out your studies guides to the table, you sit down and you start studying. Even if you stop after 10 minutes, you don't make it the hour. You stop after 10 minutes, you give yourself a reward. It's so easy to go the other way and say, look at you, you're just pathetic. 10 minutes, that's all you're gonna do. You said you're gonna do it for an hour, you're just worse than nothing. No, no. 10 minutes is much better than nothing. 10, you know, getting these cues set up of dinner ends, it's 7 o'clock, I sit down at this place and I start doing the studying, all that is helpful to me creating new behavior unless, unless what I do is beat myself up because I didn't get as far as I thought I would. You know what that does? That creates a negative reward. That makes me feel bad about doing these behaviors, and your brain is going to remember that. Every time you give yourself a negative and stressful outcome, a negative reward for behaviors, your brain remembers that too, and it makes you resist doing the behavior. Don't do that. In the beginning, all you're doing is rewarding yourself for showing up. If you go way beyond showing up, hey, terrific. Really, great job. The goal is to create a habit, and that's what the reward should come from. As time goes by, you can get more demanding at the rewards. So I'm gonna get whatever this reward is. If I really do get to an hour of studying, whatever, if I really do run four miles, whatever it is, you can start to pump it up. But realize getting the habit going and then sticking with it, it's the name of this episode. Sticking with it is the key. And so if later on, you know, you build these habits and you really it's going great, and now you're being more demanding of yourself. If then, for whatever reason, the motivation wavers, right? Your compliance, your ability to make yourself do the stuff wavers. Go right back to rewarding yourself just for showing up. There's no shame in doing that. That's how we succeed. It's how we build a behavior that lasts for years, which is the whole point here. You can't lose if you keep doing it. You will lose if you quit it. And so let's say you've been doing whatever it is for a year, and for whatever reason, you start to lose the habit. Yeah, I'm not even gonna go into the host of reasons I can cause that. One of them can just be, oh, you just your motivation changes, but the goal still matters to you. All right, go back just to rewarding yourself for showing up. And it again will be so easy for your inner voices to go like, look at you. Look at you, what a big step back. Back to square one, aren't we? No, we're not. We have spent a lot of time strengthening neural pathways. We have learned a lot over this past year. Okay, for a little while we gotta we gotta plateau and float and just reward ourselves for showing up. We'll get through that and we'll get going again. That voice that's criticizing you for not being hard enough on yourself, it is trying to get you to quit. It doesn't say that. The voice tells you I'm trying to make you better. Nope, that's a quitting voice. So don't listen to it. All right, we've talked about the core of how to build a habit. Let's go over a few more thoughts. You know, when I was new to this game, you know, two months ago, I I thought, you know, you gotta like an hour, that's gonna be about the limit. You know, you've you you gotta wrap it up. No longer, I don't worry about that. You know, years ago, I I heard one of the Monty Python guys say that one of the things about their show, and just you know, I don't liken the quality of this podcast to the greatness of Monty Python. But, anyways, they put on their show, it was on this like very late hour on the British television, they assumed nobody was watching. And that assumption, it gave them a lot of freedom to do all this crazy stuff. Okay, for this podcast, you know, kind of nobody's listening. There are people listening, and that's gratifying. You know, someone in Singapore is listening to all my episodes. That's terrific. But, you know, if you start a podcast and you're not already a successful podcaster or a successful writer or a well-known actor, etc., you're not gonna have an audience to start with. And, you know, you should take that freedom to say, I'll do just what I want to do. And then if people end up finding it, hopefully they'll like the episodes, whatever length they are. Anyways, that's not really about sticking with things, but I thought I'd throw it in there. Now, more thoughts. First of all, let's talk about willpower. I have already talked about willpower, saying you don't want to rely upon willpower to get you to your life goals, your five-year goals, even your one-year goals, because it's just so hard to drive yourself all the time to make yourself do things you don't want to do. That's not a fun way to live your life, and you're probably not gonna have the strength to do it. But you do sometimes need willpower. You you have to be able to make yourself do something or make yourself not do something, say no to things at times. What's important to understand about willpower is a couple things. First of all, it doesn't come in a limitless supply, it's not a bottomless purse always available to you. And that's it's not I'm talking about you, because you are flawed. I'm talking about for human beings, that's how it is. You can learn to have more willpower, but again, I don't think that should be your top priority. But understand as a human, you've got a limited amount of willpower, and the more exhausted you are, the less you're gonna have. That's when people usually give in on something. They're tired either of sort of they've had a lot of opportunities in the day to use their willpower. They had to force themselves to do things. They get tired, sort of they get willpower exhaustion, you might say. But also if they're just plain tired. If you've been up for 20 hours, your willpower is not gonna be as strong. That's the truth of it. So just know that about yourself. You don't want to have any major challenges that require you to make tough decisions when you're exhausted or when you've already been making yourself take make tough decisions. And you can actually be strategic about using your willpower. For example, if you go to the grocery store, you know, if you're in a grocery store for half an hour, you're gonna be tempted, maybe all that time, but more likely a few minutes here, a few minutes there, to buy junk that you don't want to eat. Asn't you want to eat it, but you know you shouldn't eat it. You've made a decision, you're not gonna be buying that stuff anymore because you don't want to eat it so much. So use your willpower in the store not to buy it. And that way, you don't have to use your willpower for hours every day throughout the week. Right? If you fail with your willpower when you're at the store, that means you're gonna have to exert a lot of willpower the next day, the next day, the next day, the next day, or else you're gonna be eating all that junk. So instead, know when you go to the store, it's time to toughen up here. When I see candy or I see chips, or whatever it is that excites me, I'm gonna just say, uh-uh, not this time. Maybe next time, I'll do it every other time. But this time I'm not gonna do that. Willpower can also come up when temptations arise right before you start your habit. So let's suppose you have this habit where you are finishing dinner, you're putting away your dishes, you're bringing your books out, and you're studying for an hour. In between finishing dinner and starting studying, a temptation can arise, or, you know, even like another problem can come up, and you have the temptation to try to solve this other problem. You have to use the willpower to say, no, I'm doing the studying. That's what's happening right now. Yes, I want to talk to my friend on the phone, or yes, I want to, you know, watch that show now, or someone just texted me something, they say it's amazing not to watch that, or I just remember this other problem that I haven't solved yet. Okay, all these things come up, and you need to use willpower for a few minutes to start your studying behavior. It doesn't have to last for an hour. It's believe me, once you get the ball rolling on the behavior that you want to do, you know, that neural pathway will carry you along much better than you think, and you won't need so much willpower to finish the hour and then go back to doing whatever you want to do. So willpower really is important at times. You gotta know when it's important to use. And of course, we're not trying to build a whole plan of working towards our goals on exertion of willpower. It's not gonna work. Okay, let's talk about failures and relapses. And what I mean by failure in this situation is you you stop doing it. You're supposed to be doing your studying or you're working out, you're supposed to be cooking at home, supposed to be reading to your kids, whatever it is. You do it for a little bit, and then you just stop for two days, for a week, for two months, whatever. And a relapse, of course, is that you have managed to stop doing some harmful behavior, and then you go back to it, start smoking the cigarettes again, whatever it is. Now, sometimes people have those failures, those relapses, but then they get back in it. They go back to work and they have success. And other people, they have those failures or relapses, and that's it. They stop and maybe they try again next year or two years later or 10 years later. What's the difference between these two groups of people? Well, one of the big differences is that the people who end up quitting because of a relapse or a failure are the ones who are caught by surprise. They have no plan for restarting. They can't believe it. Like, oh, it's just I had no idea this was gonna, I was gonna do this, I was gonna blow it in this way. Though in fact, they often have a voice in their head or a few voices in their heads that tell them, aha, you knew it all along. You were just a fraud. You were never made to do this, you can't do it. That those wonderful, loving voices come out. They think this is a this is a demonstration of the real you when you go back to, you know, when you do buy the chips at the store and you go back to eating what you don't want to eat, like, aha, just as I knew it all along. Now, if you're caught by surprise by a failure, or if you've been afraid it's coming and then it comes and you just can't believe you let it come, well, you're setting yourself up for a failure overall, because of course you're gonna have times you don't do the right thing. You either don't do the behavior you're supposed to do or go back to the bad behavior. People do that. Human beings do that. To think that you're gonna have a perfect streak is like saying you're an NBA player learning how to shoot free throws, and the moment you miss a free throw, you just this ruins everything. Now you can never learn to do it well. You should just know that. And then you have a plan. So you have a plan that says, okay, well, there's there's the time I dropped the ball, like I expected. Okay, let's just start the next day. That's what I said I would do. Maybe there is some plan to give you even more strength to restart. And that's especially important if this is a big deal to you, whatever this behavior you're trying to stop is, or the one you're trying to start is, or if it's been a while, it wasn't just you missed a day, but it's been gone, been going wrong for a couple weeks or a month. You might need more help. So you need to pile up more cues and especially maybe get somebody else involved, right? A classic example of this is AA, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous, where you have a sponsor and you have meetings you go to with other people involved, and those people can help support you if you feel like you're shaky, or if you do blow it, if you have a relapse, there's people you can turn to who support you and help you get back going in the right direction. Okay, that can be done for things that are much less important. Getting yourself to go back to the gym, getting yourself back in the study routine. First, know that it's expected to happen. Remember me telling you that it's expected that you will have a failure at some point. So you don't need to beat yourself up and know that you've already built some neural pathways so you can restart and it'll be easier than it was to start the first time. And you can again use more rewards. You start rewarding yourself just for showing up, and you can get a friend involved, another classmate involved. You know, anybody who is supportive of you and say, Hey, man, I've not been doing this. Why don't you want you to text me later or call me and tell me I've got to do it? Or come over and don't let me do this thing that I'm I'm gonna get distracted by. Make me do this thing I want to do. You know, or meet me at the gym so we can go work out together, or whatever it is. Have a plan ahead of time what you're going to do when you blow it. And then just you be nice to yourself. That should be part of the plan. Another thing, this has to do with scheduling your time. I talk a lot about this in work your behaviors. I recommend you get a weekly calendar in front of you, you block out the things in your life that you have to do or that already take your time, so you can find time when you can block out the work to get into your goals. If you manage to find like a 45-minute spot somewhere, you know, oh, look here, if I between 5 15 and 6 p.m., I could just make time right in there to do this task. And this task is, I don't know, exercising or something. Something that takes, you know, really like an hour and 15 minutes, but you're gonna try to, you know, use a wrench to get it in there, this is very likely gonna lead to failure. You know, if you squeeze a task into a time slot that is really not big enough for it, first of all, you likely can't get it all done. And you're not gonna have time to give yourself a reward. A reward is important for creating a habit. Instead, what you're gonna do is create a lot of stress. So maybe you will get something useful done at that time, and that is great that you did so, but you're so stressed by you know, by the time you finish, you're already late for something else, and you gotta rush and do this and rush and do that. You didn't give yourself any kind of a reward because you're too busy running around trying to catch up now. It's very likely gonna end up giving yourself sort of negative rewards, right? You're gonna end up piling stress upon yourself instead of any kind of pleasure upon yourself for doing this good behavior. So, what does that mean? It means that your mind will associate a bad feeling with doing this behavior. You're not gonna want to do the behavior, you're certainly not gonna develop any kind of craving. It's a problem. It doesn't mean that if you're busy, you can't use a small window time to do something, but you have to realize if you have a 45-minute window, you can only do like 30 minutes of a task because what you don't want to do is create more stress through this work. It really is important to have enough time to give yourself some kind of reward, and that reward can't be more anxiety. Okay, one of the last things I want to say is kind of a repetition of what I've already said. It's just that your environment really matters. I've already said that I know, but it matters and often you can have a lot of influence on it. So put effort into influencing your environment as much as you can. It will pay off in the behaviors you do in the habits you form. And know when you can't. If you are gonna go to a party at someone else's house and you have no influence over what's going on there, and you have to go, know that this is gonna be a challenge. And you might think ahead of time what you can do to make it go better for whatever goal might be put to a challenge there, or you know, anything, any situation where the environment is gonna be a challenge to you and you can't do anything about that, know that ahead of time. But many of us or most of us have some kind of influence on our environment and can help to shape the cues and take away some of the the cues that trigger negative behaviors. All right, the last thing I want to say before I wrap things up is that this idea of sticking with things it's about big setbacks also. It's not just about creating a behavior and and a habit, you know, this is not coming six months and it's coming here. But it's about believing that you can get to long-term goals. You can achieve your life goals. And along the way, it won't it won't be surprising if there aren't some big setbacks. It'll be kind of surprising if there aren't some big setbacks. Very often it seems like those setbacks are times when we should or even have to just you know stop the plan and give up on the work. Sticking with things means that we believe in our ability to persist one way or another, and then to get to those goals. If you get delayed by a decade, okay. I say okay, like I know that's not great, but you as long as you're gonna live more than one decade, you can get back to work. How do we succeed with anything? We set a goal, we choose the right behaviors to get to the goal, and we stick with those behaviors. And that could be losing 10 pounds this year, or it could be some goal is gonna take you 40 years to set up wealth or an environment that's gonna protect and provide for your family. Commit yourself to being a person who sticks with things even if you've never been that person before. And will you have setbacks and failures? Yes, you will. Great. Start again. Okay, that's the episode. I started off talking a lot about enthusiasm, and then I transitioned midway or something like that over to habit formation. You know, with the enthusiasm, it's just that it's great to get carried away by that in the beginning, but you can't think it's gonna carry you all the way. Just know that going in. So again, you're not caught by surprise. You have a plan when the enthusiasm diminishes, the plan is that you're gonna be working on creating habits. Again, for learning more about habits from people who know more than I do, there's a lot of resources out there. If you want to learn more about Charles Duhig, you know, from whom I got most of the ideas on this particular episode. His book is called The Power of Habit. You can also find him on the internet, on YouTube and places. I think one particularly good uh resource is he was on a podcast called The Drive by Dr. Peter Atia. Uh that's a long episode. That's even longer than this episode. It's like two and a half hours. You can watch the first half, watch or listen to the first half, and you can learn a lot of great ideas and frankly hear some of the same stories, and certainly hear the same points, maybe express a lot better, than here in the first half of that episode. Okay, let's finish with the mantra as always. If you've heard an episode before, you know the mantra. It goes, you matter, this work matters, you could do this work. So you matter, that's a baseline. You have value even if you have 18 voices in your head telling you how much you suck at things, such as sticking with things. You can't do that at all. You know, those voices are incorrect, and my voice is right. This work matters, it matters that you stick with the things you want to do because you achieving your goals matters, and you could do this work. You can. Whatever your experience is, you can learn to do this. Any habit can be changed or created with the right amount of work and with persistent effort. And if you reward yourself for showing up. In fact, you can give yourself a reward for listening to this podcast. Lord knows it's long enough. Okay, as always, thank you for being here. We'll see you next time. All right, this has been the How to Be Happy and Successful Podcast. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. So if you're interested in reading an article that goes with this uh podcast episode, you can go to the website. Website is www.happy-successful.com. So it's happyandsuccessful.com, there's types in between the words. You can read articles there, you can also sign up for the mailing list there. So when I put up new content, you will get an email saying, hey, there's new content. Go listen or go read. I also offered coaching. So if you'd like some help being happy or being successful, or both, you think my ideas are good, reach out to me through the website. If you like the episode, please go add a nice review about it wherever you listen to it. And if you didn't like it, or you just keep that to yourself. And if you really like the episode and the podcast in general, feel free to go to the Patreon page and become a supporter of the awesome. If you have any questions or comments or complaints, go to the website and uh send me an email. I will do my best to respond. So actually I barely have time to put this thing together, so I won't promise, but I will try. Okay, I think that's it. Until next time.