#107: How to Break Negative Habits and Create Lasting Change

Often we fail to change because we don’t really understand WHY we do what we do.

In this episode we tackle the pressing issue of making change that lasts. We understand the struggles you face in your attempts to break free from unwanted habits and routines.

Join us as we dive into the importance of understanding the why behind our behaviors and adopting a more long-term perspective.

The truth is, we can't change without changing. We can't stay the same and have a better life.

Today we unlock the secret to changing your life and making it stick!

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

• Creating lasting change
• The What and the Why
• Getting to the root of the problem
• Replace it with something better
• Understanding why we do what we do?
• Adopting a long-term mindset
• The behavior is just the tip of the iceberg
• Why dieting doesn't work
• Driven by the future
• Curiosity and Compassion

ACTION STEP FROM THE EPISODE:
Consider any negative habit or action you want to change. Get curious about what want or desire that action seems to fill in the short-term. There's a reason you keep going back to it. Next  think of what positive action or behavior could replace the negative action—now using your long-term vision of who you want to be and commit to why it will serve you better. The real key is to move beyond the immediate satisfaction to a more purposeful goal.
 
RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Download your Free Habit Tracker to build habits around your 10X goals
• Launch your week with our FREE MAGIC MONDAY NEWSLETTER 

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Transcript

Jeff Corrigan: 0:00

Welcome to Habit Masters. I'm Jeff. I'm Sheldon. And today we have a very intriguing topic for you because I think so many and Sheldon laughs because we've been talking about this for hours and we, we wanna keep it as impactful as we possibly can. But here in a nutshell is what we wanna talk about today, How can we make change last in our lives? Yeah. And why so many times we try to change and we struggle to make that change stick. Yes. Am I wrong, Sheldon? How would you phrase it?

Sheldon Mills: 0:33

So from our whole discussion that's like the end result, the positive thing we wanted to happen. I would almost back it up a little bit. It goes back, if you guys aren't subscribed to it, we do a Magic Monday newsletter. And I wrote an article about how our actions are like the tip of an iceberg. So this whole discussion sparked because we're trying to figure out like why we do what we do, why other people do what they do. And unless you can get past the what. Which is like the 10%. It's the iceberg. It's sticking outta the water and get to the why. The beliefs, their values, their

Jeff Corrigan: 1:04

fears, their the

Sheldon Mills: 1:04

90%. Yeah. The 90%. Until you can get past the what happened into the why. You'll never really understand why people do what they do, and you'll never understand why even you do what you do. Your actions and your behaviors.

Jeff Corrigan: 1:18

Yeah. Why has it been so hard for us to change something in our lives? Like we have this goal. Like maybe it's a weight goal, maybe it's a financial goal, maybe it's a business goal, and yet we struggle to get ourselves to do it. We seem to really want it, but the routine that we're carrying right now is keeping us from that goal. Whatever our daily habits are right now are keeping us from achieving the next level. And in essence, what we wanna. Talk about is until we understand why we do what we do, we'll never be able to make that transition last. Yeah. Why are we currently doing the things we're doing? And when we understand that, it makes it a whole lot easier to say, okay, I can stop hacking at the branches and start. Chopping down the tree. Digging to the roots. Yes. Getting at the root of the problem versus just, oh, yeah. Band-aid fixes here and there,

Sheldon Mills: 2:11

and our actions, our behaviors are like a branch. And too often we just want to like, oh, change this, change that. But if you don't get down, to the root, the trunk of like, why those are growing in the first place, then you can't change it. It'll continue to keep coming back.

Jeff Corrigan: 2:27

Yes, exactly. And , I take this reference from my childhood, so when I was a kid, my mom would have me go out and weed, I don't know if you guys had that in your life. We had a big yard and I had to go weed, and there was this spot in the back of my dad's yard that he acted every year like he was gonna plant something there. He never actually did until we were grown up and gone outta the house. But it was this, it just ended up being this nasty weed patch. Once spring came along and then he'd probably be like, all right, it's time to go. We that. I think he may have actually put that there specifically to teach us how to work or what. I don't know. Maybe there was some psychological thing there, but we always had to go out there every year and this is, woe is me, right? You guys probably had lots harder jobs than I did, but we had to go weed out this yard and if you didn't do it soon enough in the spring, the weeds got really tall and it would take forever. And of course, yeah. Being kids and procrastinating. We would wait until, June until it was super hot outside and the weeds were taller than us. Then it would take us hours and hours and we'd always complain about it. But one thing we knew from the beginning is my, we had to take the shovels out and dig down to the roots of the weeds. Cuz if you just chopped off the top of the weeds, if you just went through with the weed hacker, they'd be back next week. And they'd be probably taller than before.. I think Frank Sonenberg said lessons are repeated until they're learned.. But in essence, w we learned pretty quickly that you actually had to dig and get the roots out and then do the weed killer, which my dad didn't like to put down cuz he always acted like he was gonna plant something. But you put the weed killer down so the weeds didn't come back. And that's essentially what we need to do with our behaviors is find out what's at the root instead of trimming at the branches or , just using our weed hacker to cut off the top of the weeds. We gotta dig 'em out all the way. Yeah, and the best case scenario not to use poison is to plant something in their place. So Sheldon, go ahead. That was my story.

Sheldon Mills: 4:17

Yeah. Again, we were coming up with examples because a good story is how, it relates to us and we can relate it to like our situation. So I think there's a numerable stories here. It's like I. Sometimes we don't understand why other people are doing what they do. So Jeff and I are into this a lot, and one that I was like, we were talking about stories we'd be willing to share without getting too personal or anything. I was like, okay, without making you guys feel uncomfortable. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I know better, but still, again, it's not like every night, but more often that I want, I find myself, watching television later than I should. And eating Ben and Jerry's or licorice, you know what I'm saying? It's okay, why after all this time am I still doing these same old things that if future me, mourning me is should have not watched three shows, one would've been enough. You

Jeff Corrigan: 5:06

know what I mean? Morning, you who wants to exercise and make breakfast. Yeah, exactly. Is yeah.

Sheldon Mills: 5:12

I gave some concrete things in my newsletter, but one of the ones to get curious and get to the why, right? Mm-hmm. Because it's doing something for you. All of our behaviors, every time anybody acts and does anything, there is a reason. It may not be logical to us, it may not be, and our. Current state of understanding. We know better, but at the same time, there's always a reason, right? So it's serving you somehow. Staying up late and watching television shows and eating my ice cream is helping me. I put that in quotes, right? It is serving me somehow. So what need is that feeling? We gotta get curious to figure out like, how is this actually. Helping me feel better. What need is this fulfilling? Am I using this as a way to escape? Is this a coping mechanism, an avoidant behavior? You have to dig into that. Mm-hmm. And until you can compassionately get curious, not beat yourself up about the behavior, the action, then it's hard dig to dig into the why.

Jeff Corrigan: 6:07

Yeah. And psychologically, this is a great example you're giving because psychologically our bodies and our thing, they don't care about the future. They're worried about the now. It's like your brain and your body are like, I care about right now. I'm hungry. I need food. I'm unhappy. I wanna change that. So a lot of our actions are short term. In the moment, right? They're self-gratifying. They're indulgent. And the reason why is because our bodies want things now. They don't want to delay until tomorrow or the next year. Or the next year. But one of the best ways to combat this outside on top of getting curious, like Sheldon is talking about, is also having a long view of where you want to go. Where, what's the path you're on?, it's like hiking up a mountain, right? I go hiking sometimes with my family. I run trails and when you start at the bottom, Okay. The goal is to get to the top, right? And if I wasn't gonna, if I didn't wanna get to the top, then of course I wouldn't even start the run. And I think a lot of times that's how we face our decisions we make day to day is that we aren't thinking about the top of the mountain. We're just thinking about well, yeah, that sounds painful, right? Or that I'm hungry, I want to satisfy this hunger right now. Or, all these behaviors that we're doing that aren't taking us to the, to where we want to go. They have a value like Sheldon's talking about they're giving us some kind of satisfaction or a physical need

Sheldon Mills: 7:30

or, some kind of fear or value or belief or feelings or something. There, there's a why behind it there. There's

Jeff Corrigan: 7:37

always a why. Yeah, whether it's like to protect ourselves socially, where we feel like, hey, we, we don't wanna be vulnerable. And if you're, listen to Brene Brown, she's got tons of stuff that would help with this. But and admittedly we wanna put in a little disclaimer here. We are not therapists, we're not psychologists, but we've had lots of positive impact over the years from the changes we've made, and being able to start podcasts and do businesses together, and lots of things that haven't always worked out the way we thought they would. But have taken some time and effort to change, and we've had to make changes in our own lives. And so for all of us, making change can be hard, but understanding why you're making that change is really important. But then also understanding why you do the things you do right now is vitally important.

Sheldon Mills: 8:22

We look at other people and it's just like we don't understand like why they do what they do or, and we feel confused. But then if we're honest, we look at, our behaviors and action sometimes and you're like, why am I still repeating these things that I, ultimately don't want? I'm not saying it's easy to figure that out, but I am saying if you only focus on the behavior, the action that's only the 10%. That's only the tip of the iceberg. I shared a thing in my newsletter. It was an interview with psychiatrist talking about the addictive effects of marijuana. Trying to figure out, this actual addiction potential, right. And the physicians and people who are talking to basically said, yeah, like anything, right? There's some addictive qualities to, sugar, right?

Jeff Corrigan: 9:09

There are a lot of, most anything has addictive quality. Yeah. Most anything, right?

Sheldon Mills: 9:12

But they said the substance itself has less relevance than the reasons uh, you're engaging in those behaviors. So if you're engaging in a coping mechanism, a strategy to avoid discomfort, the behavior does get reinforced. So literally it does, I, I've, maybe I do have a sugar addiction. I don't know, right?

Jeff Corrigan: 9:30

So literally your brain starts it, your body starts to crave, it starts to need, it starts to want it, right?

Sheldon Mills: 9:34

So that happens. But the coping strategy, whether that's. Eating, binge watching porn, alcohol, gaming, social media, like that's fairly interchangeable. Which I found was like shocking. Those are just the things that we're using to avoid the discomfort, the motivation, we talk about approach versus avoid, that's the motivation to avoid something painful, some feelings, some trauma, some something, right? But the avoidance is actually the problem. And seeking out the coping mechanism, like that's the largest predictor of having some kind of problematic use of these things. It's not the behavior of the substance itself, it's the, if there are things we're seeking to the numb to escape from to this avoidant behavior. Yeah. And all of a sudden it's if that's the model, that's your framework, then whatever the behavior is, it's a symptom, right? It's a problem, and the problem can escalate into bigger and more problems. But until you can attack, the reasons why and we're talking kind of heavy stuff here, like compulsive behaviors and things like that. Yeah. But anything that we, or other children whatever we do, until you can figure out like the why behind it. It's just surface level stuff. If all you're talking about is like behavior or actions.

Jeff Corrigan: 10:48

Yeah. And there's two, two parts of this that I wanna touch on because I think the first example would be we can almost willpower ourselves into stopping or changing a behavior temporarily anytime we want. Like with enough motivation, we can change for a time. What we are trying to share with you is ideas on how to make change last long term, and because take for example, I had a friend who was dieting and she was trying to lose a certain amount of weight and she went on a cleanse diet. And during the diet, I just talked to her about it. How's it going? What's going on? And as she got closer to the finish line, right? And she'd been eating almost nothing and starving herself. And of course she's losing weight, right? She gets near the end and she tells me, and everybody in the room at the time, she's oh, I am so excited. Guys, as soon as I'm done with this, I'm gonna go take my, we're going with my daughter and we're gonna buy a whole thing of. Cinnamons, we can eat 'em all at once on while we watch a movie, da. And to me it was a little bit sad, but also funny because I thought to myself, okay, so she, it's the same thing a lot of us do, right? We use her as an example, but we all do this to some extent in some area of our lives where we are wanting to change. Are we wanting our lives to change, but we're unwilling to change our lives, if that makes sense. Like we're we're like, Hey, I wanna live a healthy lifestyle changing, right? It's and we wanna change without changing, and that's just not possible. So to make something stick, we need to figure out, Hey, why am I doing what I'm currently doing that's keeping me from this better life that I want? Yeah. And then we also need to look at the future and say, I need to be driven by the future rather than the past. It's I'm not stuck where I am. That's the number one thing I think I wanna share with you today is you're not stuck where you're at. Your routines, your actions, your activities, your addictions, all those things can be mastered, can be changed, can be moved beyond, moved through, whatever you want to call it. And I don't know that the cravings ever go away. These, there's a lot of things that that never go away, right? We still have the desires, we still have the needs, we still have the wants of all these things, but we focus our attention on who we wanna become. And we start turning activities that bring us closer to that. Right? In essence, I feel like using both, Our curious mind to figure out what's at the root of our problem, what is it we're actually seeking, and then using our future self method to figure out, hey, this is where I actually want to go. And aligning those two with the actions that will take us there, even if it's just a little bit, can be super helpful.

Sheldon Mills: 13:14

Yeah, if I want you to take away something of this, it's this twofold of It's both curiosity and compassion because most of us beat ourselves up mercilessly for the behavior, the action that we want to change. Right? And when you're in that like kind of self-loathing, maybe that's too strong, but maybe not right? Like when we're in that frame of mind, it is hard to be curious about something. It is hard to peel back the layers of the onion to see why do I. Feel this way. Why do I need this? Why do I what? How is this serving me? Yeah. And it takes a lot of compassion and empathy for yourself and for others. It's like we gotta quit beating ourselves up so much for these things that we wanna change for these actions that we kind of hate about ourselves. And that's the only possible way you could even get curious. You can even start to peel back the onions and figure out the why behind it, because if you don't, you'll forever be stuck in the what, that 10% of you gotta get past the what and get to the why.

, Jeff Corrigan: 14:14

you bring up a really important point. I think it's probably the most important point of all is what this really can do for you. Because a lot of times we're just angry with ourselves. Maybe we're angry with others for things they've done and we don't understand why or. What their reasoning could be and seems so illogical and far from what we could imagine. But everybody has a reason for everything they're doing, whether we agree with that reason, whether they, whether they're, whether they know what that is, whether they know what that is. Yeah, it doesn't really matter. But what you can do is start to have compassion both for yourself and for others in the fact that Okay. They're seeking something. And now if it harms others they're gonna have to deal with the consequences and they should. And we're not gonna condone anyone's negative actions. But what we are saying is it can be really hard to forgive ourselves and move beyond certain actions or even. At peace with the fact that, okay, I've done things a certain way. I've eaten ice cream, watching Netflix for my whole life. Now it's 20 years and I'm older than 20, by the way, but I'm just saying for 20 years, right? And but now you can say, but I have the power to change that. I just need to figure out what's at the core. And instead of being angry with myself for not changing before, now I can say, okay, I changed best by feeling good and. Why is it that ice cream's making me feel good? What do I gotta do? Yeah. To give myself a similar feeling that's moving me in a better direction. A healthier direction. Yeah. I dunno if I made that point very well, but yes. Sheldon should have left it with you right there. Okay.

Sheldon Mills: 15:44

So we'll wrap this up. We're starting to wander, me and Jeff could talk, we literally talked about this for three hours and was like, So how does this really help people? What's the message we really wanna share? Okay. We want you to know ultimately that you can, and that the power is in you to change any aspect of your life that you wanna change. Motivation is both, we've talked about this before. Approach and avoid. Our motivation is often to avoid pain and things that, that we don't want. And that's okay. That can be powerful, if you're gonna rip out. The weed right that's causing you pain. That is a noble effort. That is like a good thing in my book, but you have to replace it with something you want to grow there or the weeds come back.

Jeff Corrigan: 16:32

That is such a great example of how this works. Lessons are repeated into learned, we had to dig up that garden spot. Year after year because we never planted anything else in its place. And now I will say this, we do go help my mom and dad garden still, and that garden spot's still there. They live in the same house and he planted things there. And now when we weed it it's really pretty easy. It's not just a giant patch of weeds taller than me. It's like normal weeds. So we go and it takes us, a few minutes. So that's what can happen in your life. The feelings are still gonna be there. Maybe even some of the cravings are still gonna be there for a long time. Anybody who's dealt with addiction knows this type of thing. But what matters is that you can dance with those now, and you've replaced it with a greater y of where you're going. The destination you have in mind is more than tomorrow. It's and chill. And I have been talking about this and we actually got this from our friend and mentor, Ben Hardy, is, what's gonna matter in 10 years for you? So what's gonna matter in 10 years for you if you apply that. To all the things you're concerned with changing in your life. It really does simplify it for you and into understanding, okay, what does it really matter to take action on now? How can I build routines that take me to that place? If you know where you want to go and where you wanna be in 10 years, the actions today become a whole lot easier, and you're less interested in satisfying a craving right now. Finish us off. Sheldon,

Sheldon Mills: 17:55

how do we finish? Yes. We hope you have found this as enlightening as we did, I think far too often we have been, I've been stuck at least like too behaviorally focused and it's been made, very apparent to me that if we don't get into the why behind the what, We're destined to repeat it over and over or substitute it with something else, right? So get curious, have empathy. Start to plant those new seeds that you want, and we promise you that step by step, weed at a time, better tools, better professionals to help us. Like you'll get where you wanna go. It may take time. It always does. It's always harder than we think it'll be, but you'll get there, the journey, and it'll be worth it. It'll be amazing. The journey is long. It's amazing though. I, we're always still learning and growing and weeding and planting and

Jeff Corrigan: 18:47

yeah, a and to quote ourselves from a previous episode is count every step forward as a win is a win is a win. It is a win, and if you're moving towards the better place. If you're moving out of negative habits, that's more than most people, right? And you can do it.

Sheldon Mills: 19:07

And you are, the very fact that you're here if we're listening to this, again, knowing people how they are, you're beating your stuff up saying, yeah, but I'm not really moving toward my I'm not really doing that much. It's no, but you are. Okay.

Jeff Corrigan: 19:20

Yeah. True that if you listen to this whole episode, you definitely are. Okay. You guys, you are amazing. Thank you so much for listening. As always. If you liked this episode, please go give us a review. We're trying to get to a hundred reviews on Apple Podcasts,

Sheldon Mills: 19:37

More importantly, share it with someone who you feel needs, needs a message of hope. Needs, needs a little bit more. I don't know. I didn't say wisdom, but maybe that's too much to call myself someone who's imparting wisdom. Yeah,

Jeff Corrigan: 19:50

and if you would like a little more of our wisdom, you haven't had enough already. We do a two to three minute read email every Monday. We call it Magic Monday because really, who doesn't need a little magic on Mondays, and it's really short and a good read. I hope you guys enjoy it. We'll put a link in the show notes and on our website and go sign up for it as well. No funny business. Just a fun newsletter we'd like to share with everybody. See you next time. It's time to start living your best life.