Transcription
They say it takes 21 days to form a habit. If that's right, then how has it taken me years to figure out how to consistently do my physical therapy exercises? I don't need to know how to do the exercises. I've got that down. I don't need to know why I need to do the exercises. I know how important they are. Motivation and inspiration are not the problem. And yet, consistently doing my PT plagues me. So, what's the deal?
Welcome back, my productivity pals. In today's video, I'm going to share with you my top tips for developing habits. Yes, some of these are from the books and from the research, but some of what I have to share with you is stuff you haven't heard others talk about. So, I'm really curious if they will help you.
Okay. So, first I want to set you up for these top tips I'm going to share. They'll make more sense if we're on the same page here. So, let's first gather and break down what a habit is and why we want to make them. Habits are repeated actions that we do whenever we're prompt or cued to do so. A lot of them are very specific, like I take my iron pill after I brush my teeth in the morning. I uh take off my shoes when I walk in the door of my home. I have a weird thing I immediately label sent emails with the client name so I can easily find them. Again, those are just examples of these kind of one-step habits. But some habits are a series of steps or maybe, you know, they're a little broader. Like we might say, I consistently make sure my guinea pigs, Bill and Ted, have their hay throughout the day, but I don't really have a specific time I do it. I just like to check in on them and, you know, say hello. And when I do, I make sure their hay is topped off. I know how to take a shower, for example. from turning on the water to let it warm up to getting out and drying myself off. It all happens fairly consistently each time and I can kind of do it automatically. So I can think about my schedule for tomorrow or I can sing while I'm doing it. I don't have to tell myself to do each step along the way. So these are habits are repeated actions that we do whenever we're cued or prompted to do so.
So next you might ask why do we have habits? Well, because life without them would be almost impossible. It would be way too taxing for our brain to make decisions fresh on everything. Telling ourselves how to do everything. Like for example, something like 90% of adults in the US have a driver's license. And if you're one of these folks, let me ask you, do you remember how hard it was when you were first learning how to drive? You had to think of every little thing. But now you can do it without thinking. You can listen to the radio or talk with your fellow passengers like nothing. It's a habit. Another example, do you eat cereal? If so, you probably pour yourself that bowl of cereal, fill it with milk, grab a spoon, all chowing it down without much thought because you just know where that stuff is in your kitchen. You don't have to tell yourself like, "Okay, I'm going to go make myself some cereal now. So, I'm going to walk to the cupboard and then open the cupboard and then find the cereal and then grab the box and then pull it down and then open it and then think about where the bowls are and then go find that and so on and so forth down the line. You probably actually even grab the cereal bowl and the cereal and the milk and the spoon all in the same order all in the same way every time. That's a habit.
Researchers call this automaticity. And even though that's a mouthful, it's kind of amazing that we humans have it. We can let part of our brain go on autopilot. It can just run the show, drive us, eat that cereal, whatever we want, and then our conscious mind is free. If you've had to think about every little thing while you were doing it, you'd go nuts. So habits are crucial for just staying sane and running your life as a human.
So let's just pause here and let me ask you a question. Do you ever say that you're bad at habits? that you don't have habits, that you can't make habits. Nope. You have made countless habits in your life. They are all over the place. You do them all the time, every day. So, please give yourself some credit. You are a habit builder. Now, consciously developing habits is not always so easy. But once we get to know how habits are developed, we can make it work. We can work that habit routine to our advantage.
Okay. So, here's the classic habit sequence. First, we have a cue. Then, we have the actual behavior. Then, we have a reward. You are prompted to do something. You do it. And then, you're rewarded for it. The cue and the reward are important. You're unlikely to do the behavior without the cue, without the prompt, and you're unlikely to do it again if it isn't rewarding. So, both pieces are essential.
So, that leads us to our first tip. If you aren't doing the habit you want to do, rejigger the cue. Check the prompt. Is it really doing its job? Ask yourself. Now, when you do this investigation, there are three kind of prompts you could think about. For many of us, there's visual reminders. I take that iron pill every morning after brushing my teeth because every night, I actually pull the jar of iron pills and I put it on the counter right in front of my face. I just I just can't miss it. Before I started doing that, I wasn't taking my iron pills consistently. But when I pull them in and put them right in front of me, boom, I'm not going to miss it. Another classic prompt is when you attach a desired behavior to another one. This is so-called habit stacking. You find a habit that you already do and add something else to it. An example, I couldn't really get myself to do the dishes consistently until I started emptying the dishwasher. And I consistently started emptying the dishwasher whenever I uh set the microwave to start heating up a meal. A third prompt or cue to investigate would be your environment. An example in my life, I read all the time. Why? Because I love it, but also because I'm in four book clubs and my friends talk about books a lot. Reading is in my world and so I do it. So, if you're having trouble getting a habit going, take a look at that prompt, the cue, the thing that's going to get us started or the environment that you're working in and see what you can do to engineer to make it happen.
Okay. Now, let's look at the other side of the habit sequence, the reward. The reward comes in the form of a dopamine hit. Yes, good old dopamine. Uh, we hear about it all the time these days. When you're first building a habit, that dopamine reward comes at the end. Like, when I was first starting to clean the house, you know, you you look around the room, the you know, you just vacuumed and you say, "Ah, that's a nice clean vacuumed floor. Yay, dopamine hit." Or take my classic uh chocolate. Eat a piece of chocolate, tastes so good, dopamine hit. Or take an example from Charles Doohig's book, The Power of Habit. He talks about how toothpaste companies would make toothpaste taste minty and fresh. And that feeling of minty and freshness is what gives you that dopamine hit and keeps you coming back for more.
Now, here's something interesting. Uh actually what happens is the dopamine hit that you get at the end of a new behavior as it becomes a habit that dopamine hit gets earlier and earlier and so that actually uh dopamine turns into a craving where you uh know that you really have a habit if your dopamine is happening early. So well now when I eat chocolate, I get that dopamine hit when I see the chocolate and then give me more, give me more and then I satisfy that craving by eating the chocolate. But either way, no matter when the dopamine hit is happening, it is important. You're not going to keep slogging through your habits if they're a slog. You need that ping, that hit, that good feeling to keep coming back.
So this leads me to tip number two. If you're having trouble sticking with your habits, check in with the reward part of it. Some researchers, especially Tiny Habits, author BJ Fog, let me go grab his book. Here we go. Here's his book. BJ Fog suggests that you manufacture a reward if it's not there. He says, "Celebrate, make it fun, pat yourself on the back, high-five yourself, whatever it takes." Many other folks suggest that you get a reward from somewhere else, like maybe an accountability buddy who will pat you on the back or tell you that you're doing a good job or what have you. Little warning though, outside rewards can be a little bit dangerous because if you lose the external hit, then you might lose the habit. Some people do this uh for themselves with sticker charts or habit trackers or anything where they can like check it off with a little celebration. You can check out my video on the book Elastic Habits for more on that. Uh link will be in the end screen of this video. Or some people will like buy themselves things or gift themselves like uh screen time or I have a friend who got herself a dress when she uh you know racked up a certain number of days on a habit she was working on.
Now I've used all of those to some success, but my favorite reward hack leads me to tip number three. Take a moment to take in the intrinsic rewards of your behavior. Really notice what that habit is doing for you and soak in the goodness of that. It may feel a little cheesy, but take a moment to breathe it in. Feel it in your body. With those few moments, you can wire your brain to experience those more subtle rewards. By the number of times I bring it up in my videos, you may know that I kind of hate doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen. For a long time when I was doing the dishes, I would like hang up my apron and just move on like maybe with a thank god that's done. But recently, I've been doing it a different way. When I hang up my apron there, I've been pausing for just a moment to feel the satisfaction that I'm done. Now, there's a subtle difference here, but I want to clarify that I'm not getting a good feeling from congratulating myself or telling myself good job metaphorically or actually patting myself on the back. Instead, what I'm doing is looking around the kitchen and saying, "Ah, this feels good. This moment is the reward for doing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen. It's so nice to have clean counters. It's so pleasant to hear the hum of the dishwasher going. It's great knowing I'll have clean knives for chopping veggies for myself and for the little piggies." I'm wiring my brain to crave this feeling. If I brush past it, I'll miss the moment. So instead, I'm taking in and maybe even amplifying the fact that this clean kitchen makes me happy. So now the reward is built in right to the habit. I don't need habit trackers or buddies to help me pat me on the back or, you know, give me any screen time rewards or something like that. The habit is its own reward.
So much good stuff. I love talking about habits and we have a few more uh top tips to go. There is one habit that you can develop and that is watching this channel. If you pop down and hit that subscribe button along with the bell uh notification that there's a little icon there, you'll be notified when new videos come out. That is the perfect cue to keep on coming back. And I hope you'll get rewarded while you're here. And if you are rewarded, please hit that like button so the YouTube algorithm knows to spread this videos to others.
So, now that we have a base understanding of habits, cue, behavior, reward, let's run through my last top tips. Next up, sounds goofy, but that's kind of the point. Practice your habit. I have to once again think, whoa, thank BJ Fog for this one. He talks about doing a dry run. When I do this, I will do this. When this happens, I will do this. When I see that, I will do that. You walk it through. Even if it's one step or multiple steps. The silliness of practicing your habit when you're not actually doing your habit will make it stand out for you. Now, if you can't practice physically, see it in your mind's eye. You know, imagine what it will look like, feel like, maybe even smell like. Like, get all your senses in there if you can. The idea is we're opening the pathways in your brain, getting them ready to wire this habit from a set of conscious steps to automatic behavior. So, it may seem silly, like I said, but it's actually part of it. Practice that habit. Do a dry run. Talk yourself through it.
Next tip. This one has comes in a little few parts here. So, if your habit isn't working, I want you to break it down. So, break it down could mean one of a few things here. A, it could mean making it smaller to the point of being absolutely ridiculous. You, let's say your habit, you want to be doing 20 push-ups a day. Something I could never do, but anyway, maybe you start with simply doing one plank on your knees. You just get going. You want to go for a run, just put on your shoes. You want to read a book, take it off the shelf and open it. Making it tiny makes it so you're focusing on just the getting started. Getting started can be the big hurdle and we're trying to make that hurdle as close to the ground as possible. You can always expand and get bigger as you go, but we want to just get you in the habit of starting your habit.
So, another thing breaking it down means is getting granular to the point again of being ridiculous. Get ultra clear about the steps, especially the first one. If your cue to empty the dishwasher is the microwave, but you're not doing it, maybe you get clear and even practice that the very thing that happens right before you empty the dishwasher is hitting the start button on the microwave. So, when I hit the start button is when I walk to the dishwasher and open it. When I do this, I will do this. When I hit send on an email, I will pop into the send folder and label that sent email. When I do X, I will do Y. Break it down. Make it super simple, super easy.
The last one in this set of break it down. Break it down means make sure you have the tools, resources, and skills to actually do the habit. Like if I mean to take my iron pills every morning, but I don't have a glass of water nearby. I'm probably not going to take my iron pills. I have to make sure that I have a glass in or near the bathroom kind of all the time. If I need to top off the guinea pig's hay and I don't keep guinea pig hay nearby, I'm probably not going to nearly fill up their hay as much as I want to. If I want to do my physical therapy exercises and they require a weight, I'm need some weights nearby. You get the point. Make sure that you break it down and understand that you need to get yourself resourced and uh able to do the habit before you expect yourself to do it.
Next tip, keep trying. You remember that 21 days to establish a habit thing? That came from a plastic surgeon named Dr. Moltz in the 1960s. He observed that it took about 21 days for people to get used to the way they looked after surgery. And somehow over, you know, like games of telephone across people writing articles and articles about articles and books about books and so on and so forth, that became it takes 21 days to develop a habit. But that's not what the research bears out. You can actually develop a habit in one go. If you rehearse it, if the cue is prominent, if the reward is strong, if you have the skills, tools, and resources, and it's easy to do, boom, easy, one go. Or you can start and restart and restart and restart many times before a desired habit becomes ingrained and automatic. So, please cut yourself some slack and keep trying.
Next tip, tweak, iterate, adjust. It's not a given that your habit will go perfectly on the first go. With kindness, observe what's not working. Why? And then make changes. Do you need to make it smaller? Do you need to borrow an extra 5 lb weight so that your physical therapy exercises can be done both in your living room and your bedroom? Do you need to make the reward more rewarding? You get the idea. Ask yourself, interrogate again with kindness. Make it playful. Experiment. Test. See what works. what works for you, your particular circumstances, your brain, your life.
Another important tip, notice your self-talk. Observations, adjustments, tweaks, improvements, yes to all that. Self-recrimination, yelling at yourself, bashing on your slower than hope for progress. No, that is counterproductive. Your habit isn't failing because you're a loser with no self-control. It's just not working yet. So, we iterate. We try again. And if you're a nerd like me, the making those tweaks, iterating, investigating can be fun. You can actually enjoy the process.
And last but not least, my top tip for you, remember that making habits is an act of self-love. If that sounds too strong or just say that you're supporting yourself. You know yourself and what you need. You deserve to be supported and treated well, and you're the one who knows best how to do that. There is so much messaging out there that tells you what habits you should develop, especially when it comes to eating, clothing, grooming, exercise, hustling, being more productive. And some of that can be really harsh. I do not want you to adopt a habit because some skinny influencer told you to count your calories or whatever. So, please, please, please adopt habits out of a mindset of support, love, and self-acceptance.
So, how did I finally figure out how to consistently do my physical therapy exercises? Honestly, it was nothing magical. I just kept trying things until one of them stuck. And the one that worked for me was to do it first thing in the morning. After I wake up, I go to the bathroom and then I do my exercises. Other timing just wasn't working out for me for one reason or another. Other prompts were just too easy to skip over. This one just worked.
Now, one tip I didn't talk about in this video was creating different definitions of a successful habit. That is making your habits uh wins a flexibly defined. Sometimes that can make that easier to stick with them. So, you might want to check out the video that's floating here where I walk through Steven Guy's Elastic Habits. I'll see you over there. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time. [Music]