Ep. 85 The Habit Theory That Changed My Life, Explained

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1:31what is up and welcome to working hard hardly working for those of you who might not have listened to the podcast before when i started this i wanted it to be all about curating stories from a range of guests covering topics that we all need to know more about that all come under the umbrella of life improvement i feel really really strongly about life improvement but i feel like life improvement isn't solely about taking your supplements or getting enough sleep. I feel like life improvement is also about knowing things that we need to care about. I love making this podcast so much. It's really a passion project.

2:02And I've had conversations with everyone from housing campaigners to doctors to entrepreneurs to investors to sex therapists to an amazing refugee called Mez who travelled for a year to get to the UK and so, so, so much more. But this year we're not just levelling up the guests, we're revamping the solo episodes too. I have a nerdy obsession with knowing more about random things and theories, so I've given myself an excuse to spend hours researching the topics I wish I knew more about and spoken to so many experts to deliver solo episodes that mean you don't need to read a whole book to understand something important.

2:36There are nitty-gritty topics that there are no right answers on, home truths I've learnt with age and theories that I never stop talking about. I cannot wait for you to listen to them. so let's get into today's topic the habit theory that changed mine and probably everyone you've seen on Instagram's life.

2:55First of all let's talk about the context of habit theory. What activities do you do every day without fail? You might start thinking of the obvious brushing your teeth, drinking water, eating lunch. Maybe you're thinking about the habits that you want to break like checking social media in the evenings or snoozing your alarm. Whilst these small habits may not seem like they make much of a difference to your day, my life genuinely changed when I learned about habit theory and how if you want to make a change in your life it is the small daily actions, not the big changes, that make a difference.

3:27Habit theory has been around for decades and decades but it's really exploded in recent years. Most of this can be pinned to a game-changing book by James Clear titled Atomic Habits. You've probably heard of it before. In the book James Clear says that your identity is quite literally made up of your actions so you're defined by what you do. So if you want to change your identity to say become more successful or productive or to be a better friend, it's easy but it's not just a shift in your mindset, you need to distill it into daily actions. Claire's idea that a lack of clarity is often mistaken for a lack of motivation and that most of the time the reason we fail to reach our goals isn't because we can't be bothered but because we haven't turned our goals into achievable, trackable habits.

4:07My favourite quote from the book is, you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. This was always, always in my head while I was writing my book and designing the TPM planners as well. Goal setting means absolutely nothing if there's no system related to it that will help you actually achieve that goal. A goal is a wish without a system basically. There's decades of science behind Clear's theory, so let's get into the actual data.

4:36studies have shown that up to 43 % of our daily actions are habits so it makes sense that shifting them would have a huge impact on your life the idea behind clear's theory is very simple and the headline is that you've got to focus on shifting your habits so you're getting one percent better every day improving by one percent sometimes isn't even noticeable but here's the maths if you can get 1 % better each day for one year, you'll end up 37 times better by the time you're done. This doesn't sound like a lot. However, 37 times better is not 37 % better. It's 3 ,700 % better because of exponential growth.

5:15To give an example of this, if you started the year with£100 and you were able to increase that by 1 % every day, by the end of the year, you would have£3 ,778. pounds. So you wouldn't just have 100 pounds plus 365 pounds because of the exponential growth. This is how much your life can improve. Conversely, if you get 1 % worse each day for one year, you'll decline nearly down to zero. So what starts as a small win, or on the other hand, a minor setback, can actually accumulate into something much, much more. And this is backed up by business studies too. According to a study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, companies that integrate small consistent improvements into their daily operations are 30 % more likely to see substantial growth over time.

6:00So it's not just something for your routine but to apply to every element of your life and work. Start thinking about this every day in everything you're doing whether it is a skill, whether it is a habit, I promise you it will change your whole perception. There is a lot of psychology behind this and in order to understand it we need to understand the habit loop.

6:20In the 1990s researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decoded the structure of habits. They coined the idea of a habit loop to describe the neurological patterns that are the basis of all of our routines. The loop consists of four parts. Cue, craving, response and reward. Let's go through each stage together. Number one, this is the cue. The cue is what triggers your brain to initiate a habit. If you think of your brain like a sniffer dog that's always searching for a dopamine hit, the cue is its first whiff of reward. This could be a primary reward linked to a survival instinct like food or water, or it could be a secondary reward we've evolved to want like money, power, fame, approval, love or satisfaction.

7:06Number two is the craving. If your cue is your first hint that you could get a reward, the craving is the natural response to that hint. James Clear puts it brilliantly when he says that cravings are the motivational force behind every habit. So without some sort of motivation, we wouldn't have any reason to do any action. And what we crave isn't the habit, but the reward that habit delivers. A good example of this is you don't want to switch the light on, you want to be able to see in the dark. So you're not motivated by turning on the TV, but the promise of entertainment wants you do. Your specific thoughts, feelings and emotions are what transform a cue into a craving.

7:42So if you're a smoker, smelling a cigarette might be a cue to light one. However, if you're not, it could be a cue to move away because you don't want to smell the smoke. Number three is your response. So the response is the actual habit, like the action itself. Clear points out that whether a response occurs depends on how motivated you are and how much friction is associated with the behaviour. If a particular action requires more physical or mental effort than you are willing to expend, then you won't do it. Your response also depends on your ability. So brushing your teeth might be easy, but if you want to put away your shopping in a high cupboard but you're not tall enough, then you're more likely not to do it.

8:21This explains to me why I don't want to go on a run. And finally, what it was all for, the reward. The reward is really what makes the habit loop go round. Claire puts it like this, the cue is about noticing the reward, the craving is about wanting the reward, the response is about obtaining the reward. Think of your brain as a reward detector. It's always monitoring and bookmarking the actions that give you rewards so that it can repeat them again and again and again and the more immediate that reward the more likely your brain will be to repeat that action. So take eating chocolate for an example.

8:55This is an action that will give most of us an immediate dopamine hit. Compare that to cooking a long and healthy recipe and you quickly realise why so many of us find it hard to have a balanced diet. The psychology of the reward is also why we have tick boxes next to every item in the TPM planner. The more satisfying you can make finishing a task, the more likely you are to both do it and repeat it. Now this is really interesting because it explained to me why I feel really shit when I get to the end of the day if I didn't have a plan or a to-do list for that day in comparison to if the day before I had done exactly the same amount but had had a plan or to-do list, we are wired to want that dopamine hit.

9:35So if we're going to do a task, we want to know we've achieved that task. We want to be able to literally tick it off. Once you start understanding these things, you start understanding how you can hack that in order to be able to reward yourself, however big or however small, to keep doing habits in order to be able to overall improve your life. All these four steps in the habit loop are essential for making or breaking any habit. So without the first three steps, a behaviour will not occur. Without all four, a behaviour will not be repeated. So once you know about how this system works, you can hack it to create the right habits and break the wrong habits that align with the person that you want to be.

10:13To create a good habit, you need to make the cue obvious, make the craving attractive, make the response easy and make the reward satisfying. And to break a bad habit, you need to make the cue invisible, make the craving unattractive, make the response difficult and make the reward unsatisfying. So I'm going to give an example of both a habit to make and a habit to break. So for a habit to make, remember you need to make the cue obvious, the craving attractive, the response easy and the reward satisfying. So if I wanted to make a habit of working out in the morning, I would make my cue obvious.

10:46I would leave out my workout clothes the night before. I would make the craving attractive. So I would do something to make that workout easier, like making sure that I had a gym membership I was happy with, getting myself a Peloton if I was feeling super generous or getting myself some nice active wear obviously from Charla. You'd make the response easy. How are you going to make that workout easy? You're going to have a set workout plan. You're going to know exactly what you're doing. You haven't just left your active wear out. You also know today I am doing Pilates class 102 and then you make the reward satisfying.

11:18On a smaller level that is ticking it off. On a bigger level that could be once I've done six weeks of this I'm going to buy myself some headphones like I literally did last week. I made the reward satisfying. Let's talk about the break side. So for example say I wanted to break a smoking habit. I need to make the cue invisible. I need to make the craving unattractive. I need to make the response difficult and I need to make the reward unsatisfying. So to make the cue invisible. I'm obviously not buying any cigarettes and any I already have I'm getting someone to hide or throw away. I'd make the craving unattractive obviously with something like smoking this is hard to explain because the craving is going to be attractive because usually there's element of addiction behind it but how about a nicotine patch?

11:58So you're making the craving less attractive because you're not actually craving it as much because you are getting that hit from elsewhere. You're making the response difficult. You've already made it relatively difficult by hiding or throwing away, you're not buying any more cigarettes but on top of that maybe you don't go past the shop on the way home where you usually buy cigarettes and you can make the reward unsatisfying by maybe having an accountability partner and you have to tell that person every single time you actually smoke so you feel shit letting them down. These are just two examples.

12:25Obviously, you can apply this to any area of your life in order to make or break the habit loop.

12:33As part of these new solo episodes, I really wanted to talk to the experts themselves. So I have a voice note from Nir Eyal, who wrote the book that really put habit theory into the mainstream. My name is Nir Eyal, and I'm a behavioral designer. So I help companies build the kind of products that build healthy habits in users' lives. Also help people break bad habits like those associated with distraction. So the most surprising thing about habits is just how much of our day-to-day lives are guided by these behaviors done with little or no conscious thought, these habits. About half of what you do every day, day in and out, is motivated in some part through habit.

13:07Now, that's surprising, but I would also caution that not every behavior can become a habit. So it's very important to know the difference between a habit and a routine. When you hear people talking about how they want to create a habit, really what they're saying is they don't like doing something and they wish they could have some magic autopilot button to turn it into a habit. Now, that can work with certain behaviors, behaviors that meet the very definition of a habit. A habit is defined as a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. So certain behaviors you can absolutely turn into a habit.

13:39Think about the first time you learned to drive a car. When you first learned, it was probably white knuckling it the whole time. But as you got more comfortable and that behavior turned into a habit, you can have a conversation with someone while you're driving. You can listen to an audio recording, the radio, a podcast, all while you're driving out of habit. But some behaviors cannot and will never become habits. Those behaviors we call routines. Unlike a habit, which is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought, a routine is just a series of behaviors frequently repeated. So it's very important to know what behaviors can become habits and what behaviors cannot become habits.

14:13And for those behaviors that can become habits, great. There's a methodology around that. But for behaviors that will never become habits, we need what's called deliberate practice. Routines require you to do behavior by leaning into the discomfort, by doing something that's difficult. That's how you become somebody who can repeat a behavior with a routine. The problem is when people get their wires crossed, they wake up one day and they say, oh, this behavior is still hard. It's still difficult. I still don't like it. There's no autopilot here. and they think that they did something wrong so they quit altogether.

14:43And so it's really important to understand what behaviors can become habits and which will never become habits. God, I find this whole thing so interesting and hearing from him is a real privilege on this. So now you know about the theory, you can second guess your own habit loop. For example, you could turn off your social media notifications to silence your cues to check it 100 times a day. Or you could allow yourself to watch Netflix once you've stuck to your dishwasher, making the reward for that habit more satisfying. The most useful time to think about your habit loop is when you're goal setting.

15:12So let's say you want to do 10 ,000 steps every day. Think about how you can optimise the habit loop for that action. What's your cue to do it? Are you going to walk at a specific time every day? How will you make it an easy action to do? What reward will you give yourself after you've hit that target? These are the systems that I use every time I set a goal because they're science-backed. Whether that is a goal in business or in my personal life, you need to break down every single goal into habits and then track them every day. It sounds both overly simple and also a huge faff but it is literally the basics of achieving anything.

15:46Remember that goal setting episode we did at the beginning of the year? Say you've set these amazing goals, you feel really excited about them, you've had this dopamine hit because you feel excited about like I'm going to do this, this and this this year, how great is this going to be next year when I get to this point when I'm like I've done all of these things. Those goals will never ever ever come true if you have not integrated them into your every day if you haven't built a habit loop based on them. So why not look back at the goals you set at that point, look at the top three ones and break them into a habit loop?

16:16What is going to be your habit loop for that specific goal? Then when we're taking that into the kind of atomic habit theory, that is when we start to see how important it is not just to have these habit loops to know how to make and break habits, but when we zoom out a little bit more from that, how we make sure that we are getting 1 % better every single day. It's not as easy as it sounds, but it's also not as hard as it sounds. 1%, 1 % better. You can do that. And the way you can do that is by making sure that the habits you are doing every single day are exactly aligned with the overall goals you set.

16:52It's not about setting the goals. It's not about the big picture. It's about how you break that down into the everyday is what's going to determine whether you reach those goals or not. So I hope you really enjoyed learning more about habit theory. I feel like I need a reset on it every few months because when it's at the forefront of my brain I'm so much more productive and I feel like I'm so much closer to the person I want to be, the goals I want to reach. I fully believe in goals being wishes until you genuinely have a plan and this is the theory I can get behind. And when I was doing some of my reading on it and just like refreshing to make sure that I am actually getting 1 % better every single day, I was just thinking, I was like, I'm so glad I know about this.

17:34And I feel like it's the type of thing that everyone sees everywhere. Everyone sees atomic habits. Everyone sees habit theory. And everyone's like, yeah, but if you don't know about it, you should know about it. And this is why I wanted to do just like an in-depth explainer so that we can all actually get 1 % better every day. If you want to do some more reading up on the subject, because I've really only scratched the surface here, I've included a reading list in the notes below. So that is your whistle stop tour on habits theory. Let me know how you are going to be implementing it into your life and also please let me know what you think of these new explainer episodes.

18:02I'm the type of person, I don't want to start something or try something if I don't know if it's really going to work but I feel like I listen to explainer episodes on celebrity drama, on like big things that have happened, on the news, on whatever it might be and the things I really want to hear about are these things like the life improvement things or like the in-depth things like why are we so obsessed with life improvement? I want to know deep dives into things like the beauty myth, why we're so obsessed with life improvement, why the world makes women poorer, all of these types of things I would love to do deep dive episodes on.

18:35Let me know if that's the type of thing you would be interested in. I wanted to try this new setup by just recording one episode. Let me know what you think. You can tell me you hate it. I personally absolutely loved preparing for this episode and as I said I feel like life improvement isn't just about the things like habits. It's about being a better person by knowing more things about the world and being more interesting and being able to hold better conversation and talk to people about things that aren't just other people. And that's why I'm so passionate about this type of thing. In case you cannot tell, if you follow and rate this podcast, it means that we're able to get incredible guests, have really in-depth, interesting conversations, and I'm just really grateful if you can.

19:13Either way, have a wonderful day.

19:46We'll be right back. up a chair and join us at Fremont Avenue, a world premiere play only at Arena Stage. Performances start October 8th. Tickets at arenastage.org. For a limited time at McDonald's, get a Big Mac extra value meal for$8. That means two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun, and medium fries, and a drink. We may need to change that jingle. Prices and participation may vary. This episode is sponsored by Morgan Stanley's Thoughts on the Market. It can be difficult to stay up to date on the financial market in today's ever-changing environment.

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