5 Habit HACKS You NEED to STOP wasting your LIFE in 2024!

multiple scientific Studies have found that most people give up their New Year's resolutions within a month of the 41% of Americans who made a New Year's resolution by the end of the year only 9% were successful in keeping it because their old bad habits are still there they never die if there's something in your life that you've struggled with something you've struggled to change that goal you've had that you've never quite managed to attain then this episode was made for you multiple scientific Studies have found that most people give up their New Year's resolutions within a month and according to a recent American study of the 41% of Americans who made a New Year's resolution by the end of the year only 9% were successful in keeping it 9% that means if you make a New Year's resolution at the start of the Year by the end of the year only 9% of you have achieved it I know this might make you not believe in New Year's resolutions it might make you think they're pointless but the study also reveal something that suggests otherwise 6 months after setting a new year's resolution 46% of people who made a resolution were still successful in achieving it they still had the good habits going compared to just 4% of people who made a similar goal that wasn't a New Year's resolution that's a 1,50% increase in the probability of you achieving your goal after 6 months if you set it as an ear Year's resolution so when you think about the Habit Loop and the Q routine reward side it becomes really clear why 91% of people won't keep their Year's resolutions and why 25% of us won't even keep the resolution for one week because their old bad habits are still there they never die in order to break those unwanted habits and make new ones whatever they're going to be I'm going to give you the five rules of making and breaking habits that have the most scientific evidence to support them from what I found the things that resonated with me the most that I honestly didn't didn't know so rule number one stress is your puppet master many habits as I'm sure you can relate including smoking or excessive sugar consumption involve the brain's dopamine or reward system and dopamine if you understand what that chemical is is a feel-good chemical that transmits signals between neurons in the brain the first time you engage in a new rewarding Behavior you get a euphoric feeling from doing it as a result of that dopamine release this leads to change in both the connections between neurons in the brain and the system responsible for action and can largely account for why we start to form bad habits in the first place or habits that we are we don't necessarily want many of these rewarding things like sugar or substances um are powerful and chemically addictive as well which means the Habit is even harder to unanchor and our psychological reaction to them in this day and age can be linked all the way back to evolution in the caveman days in the cavewoman days meat wasn't salted there wasn't such a thing as candy or sweets and highly addictive substances like tobacco have only been growing in the world for nearly 8,000 years but it wasn't until about 2,000 years ago that we started picking tobacco up and chewing it and smoking it Russell pldr who's the professor of psychology at Stanford University says our brains are not well equipped to deal with the big rush one gets from these sorts of things and this really brings me to a point from that professor at Stanford where he said you're more likely to do the thing you don't want to do when you're stressed out I.E you're more likely to go in search of that dopamine hit in the form of sugar processed food Drugs porn alcohol whatever it might be if you're stressed out therefore one of the most unobvious but important things you can do to make a new habit stick and form enough repetitions in that early phase to make the neurons fire together and wire together is to keep your stress levels low especially in that critical early phase while you're forming that new habit Loop I.E if you're trying to form a new habit whatever it might be go to the gym whatever it might be and if you want to be in that 9% of people that have achieved their New Year's resolution 12 months from now don't just focus on the Habit focus on your stress know your cues incredibly important and often overlooked as we've said previously and as you know I've indicated from that rat maze chocolate experiment but also in the example of my father and my ex-girlfriend habits have three main parts a Quee a routine and a reward cues are often just the context where you tend to engage in that behavior so if you want to break a habit step number one has to be getting crystal clear on exactly what your cues are if you're aware of it you're empowered to do something about it because the science shows that you're most likely to relapse to an old bad habit in the context of when you usually perform that bad habit knowing your cues and your triggers can help you to avoid them and scientists say that if a smoker disposes of a queue like and it could be an item a q item like an ashtray or something like that that reminds them of that habit they're significantly more likely to give up smoking rule number three don't focus on stopping bad habits focus on replacing them it is and I've experienced this over and over again in my life it's impossibly difficult to actually stop a habit um so I I delved into the science to try and figure out why and what happens when we try and stop doing a bad habit and the science shows that focusing too much on stopping something often makes you rebound eventually and do it more we are action orientated creatures not inaction orientated creatures and some Studies have shown that the more you suppress your thoughts the more likely you are to think about those things over and over again and therefore revert back to a bad habit one study done in 2008 on the topic of appetite found that those who suppressed their thoughts about eating chocolate exhibited behavioral rebound effects where they consumed significantly more chocolate than those who didn't and I tell you what I can relate rule number four is you need a better reason to quit neuroscientists have shown that even if you replace a quote unquote bad habit with a better one sometimes the original habit will have a much stronger biological reward than the thing you substituted it for and if you think about what I said earlier The Habit is always going to be there so even if you substitute it like the scientist said in the rat experiment it can so easily just toggle back it never disappears the pathway the are fired together they are wired together for example in the case of my dad who I keep mentioning throughout this podcast his brain obviously knows that the lollipop is not as addictive as the nicotine he's getting from those cigars and therefore it won't produce the same euphoric neurological feeling in the reward senses of his brain as those cigars did but this is where the importance of having an intrinsic motivation comes into play and listen an intrinsic motivation is a phrase any Avid listener of this podcast has probably heard me say a lot the word intrinsic is one of my favorite phrases it's basically a reason for doing something that is genuinely and personally important to you not something that you're doing for external Rewards or payment we call that an extrinsic motivation and for me and you've heard me bang on about this um because it genuinely changed my life my reason for getting healthy and cutting junk food out of my diet was always shallow as I've said before I wanted to have a six-pack for summer so for the first few months of every single year when I made that New Year's resolution I would work out every single day and I would eat healthy food obsessively until one of two things happened until either I got in shape or until summer ended I would immediately revert back to my old habit of eating junk food and avoiding any form of exercise and it wasn't until 2020 when a certain virus spread across the world tragically killing millions of people in every corner of the world that I got to see as the most imprinting alarming example how fragile health is and how fragile life is and that's when if I think about it now that's when things changed in my mind I realized like a wonderful Epiphany that my health and fitness were the most important thing in my life rule number five and this is again slightly controversial slightly unconventional is willpower is not enough this is maybe the most fascinating study I read of all of them because it really made me Ponder and it kind of disrupted my thinking on Willpower and strength and um mental strength and motivation and it's probably a huge reason why 91% of people don't stick to their resolutions dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important habit for individual success and this is true but for a long time people thought that willp power is a skill that you could develop and that therefore remains constant Forever Until Mark Muran a PhD scientist argued that if willpower is a skill then why does it not remain constant throughout the the whole day or even throughout the whole week why does willpower seem to fluctuate he conducted an experiment to prove that willpower like all of the muscles in our body gets exhausted the more we use it throughout the day in his lab he did a fairly simple thing he set up one bowl of freshly baked cook cies and then he set up another bowl of radishes and listen everybody hates radishes including me well you know put them up chop them up put them in a salad maybe I don't hate them they're good for you but anyway in this example most people would prefer hot delicious cookies than radishes right and the participants in the study were divided into two groups one group was instructed to eat the delicious cookies and ignore the radishes the other group was instructed to ignore the delicious cookies and to eat the radishes I know which group I would have rather been in after after 5 minutes into that experiment the researchers re-entered the room and gave both groups of people a puzzle but the thing is the puzzle was impossible to complete and here's what happened the people that had eaten the cookie with their unused reservoir of willpower because they hadn't had to use their willpower they hadn't had to use their restraint looked way more relaxed when they were trying to solve that impossible puzzle and they would continue to try and solve it over and over and over again again some worked for more than half an hour before the researcher told them to stop on average the cookie eaters spent almost 19 minutes trying to solve that puzzle before they eventually quit on average now in the case of the radish eaters with their depleted willpower because they they had to practice restraint they acted completely differently it was completely opposite story they vented as they worked to try and solve that puzzle they got frustrated one even complained that that the whole experiment was a waste of time some of them put their heads on the table closed their eyes and one of them even snapped at the researcher when she came back in on average the radish eaters worked for roughly 8 minutes 60% less they tried to solve the problem of the puzzle The Impossible puzzle for 60% less time than the cookie eaters before quitting and when I read this study I was shocked but I'm a skeptic so I tried to think of why this might be I tried to think of other factors and I thought of maybe it's the sugar maybe the sugar in the cookies are causing them to work harder but when you look at other studies where there isn't sugar anytime someone's practicing restraint the same effects to scene willpower isn't just a skill it's a muscle like the muscles in your arms or your legs and it gets tired and it gets tired as it's forced to work harder so there's less power left over for all of the other things and since that cookie study was published I think in 1998 numerous Studies have built a case for the exact same thing they call it the willpower depletion Theory in one incredible example which is almost hard to believe volunteers who were asked to suppress their feelings as they watched an emotional movie gave up sooner on a test that they did after of physical stamina than volunteers who watched the film and were allowed to react in whatever way they wanted to so if you were asked to restrain yourself when you then did a physical exercise people gave up sooner in the physical exercise in a similar study which pointed at the exact same conclusion people who were asked to suppress certain thoughts were less able to stifle laughter in a follow-up test which was designed to make them giggle so if the science here is correct which I suspect it is and willpower is a limited resource it's really obvious that the more pressure and restrictions and strain you put on yourself when you're trying to make a new habit and break old ones the less the chance you have of achieving them the more chance you have of rebounding and relapsing this is why unsustainable crash diets just don't work this is why anytime you feel like you're depriving yourself of something that you really want you nearly always end up failing and falling into relapse this is why in a 2014 study almost 40% of people said they failed on their New Year's resolutions because the goal was too unsustainable or unrealistic and 10% said they failed because they had too many goals this is why it's so important as you think about what goals you're setting to make sure that there are small enough and achievable enough to become sustainable without the need for major sacrifice which will deplete your willpower reserves and that is that for me was a real Revelation because I think about all the habits I've tried to set you know when I talked about trying to get a six-pack for summer think about what I said I obsessively ate healthy food I went to the gym every day for six months my willpower eventually became depleted and I rebounded rebounded like a yo-yo like you've never seen before and this is why you shouldn't try and give up every bad habit that you have at the same time this is why less goals increase the chance of completing all of your goals because with too many big unrealistic sacrifice Centric goals your willpower will be under tremendous unsustainable strain it will run out you will fail and it will rebound and this is also why so many psychologists and scientists have found that the best way to create a new habit isn't by depriving yourself of all rewards that is totally counterproductive according to the science it's by finding new rewards healthier rewards less addictive rewards but nonetheless making sure that you still reward yourself in some way every day along the way if you love the dver CEO brand and you watch this 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Channel: The Diary Of A CEO Clips

Views: 183,889

Keywords: the diary of a ceo, podcast, the diary of a ceo podcast, life lessons, ceo, Steven Bartlett, Steve Bartlett, life advice, doac, diary of a ceo, diary of a ceo clips, Steve Bartlett Podcast

Id: CjI2xoK308c

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2024