Forget Discipline: A Real Science-Based System to Stop Procrastinating

psychologists used to believe that human behavior is a direct response to our environment they base this theory on the assumption that when there is an environmental stimulus people will always respond in predetermined Ways by this definition I Am Not a Human Being I can put on my gym clothes and lie down scrolling on my phone I can also enroll myself in a hard-working medical degree and want to do anything apart from hard work I can set reminders to study be healthy respond to people and ignore them all in short I am very bad at having a good response and that's because changing behavior is hard you might be wired more than the behaviors than I am but when it comes to me it will take a lot more than a few stimuli and reminders in order to consistently change the way that I act if you also don't understand why you can't just decide to do something and then follow through with it it's okay I've got you after 10 years of trying and failing for the last year I've tried different psychological Frameworks in order to change just one aspect of my behavior and finally I have something that works for me it's a combination of CBT sfpt into subjectivity and Scaffolding which sounds like a lot but I've broken it down into three steps the behavior I decided to change was exercise because for almost three decades I did not exercise at all for one of those decades I tried really hard to consistently go to the gym and now finally for the Press time for six months I have managed to work out regularly and it's completely changed my life part of this process has been how I've used copilot a personal training service and the sponsor of this video but when it comes to changing something so big for me it's about a lot more than just external support so I wanted to use this opportunity to talk in depth about the psychology of Behavioral change and how you can apply it to your own life too there's a lot to go through there's a detailed summary along with trackers and templates that you can download below but there's no gatekeeping you can just as easily follow along with this video [Music] when changing a behavior it might not be that you're not trying hard enough you might just be focusing on the wrong thing I always used to think that I just needed to be stronger and have more willpower to overcome procrastination but actually what I needed was a bit of strategy and a lot more patience let me let me explain let's say one afternoon I have the thoughts of I need to go to the gym today this will be very quickly followed up by a sense of discomfort because honestly I would much rather not this feeling might eventually even progress onto anxiety as I realize I am spending my money wasting my time and failing again eventually I'm very likely to just end up not going I'm aware of how bad I felt so I think it is these negative feelings that cause the behavior of not going if I didn't feel bad I would be able to go this is not the case and this is why trying to be stronger and ignore your emotions eventually doesn't work because emotions are not the ones that are stopping you from executing the behavior in the first place CBT tells us that the whole friction that we experience when we're trying to do something is actually composed of four things the automatic thoughts the emotional reaction the physiological reaction and the behavioral reaction of all of these it's the automatic thoughts that is the most powerful and dangerous dangerous because we almost never know it's there unless we try and Powerful because it is the most likely one to change the outcome focusing on the automatic thoughts is much more effective than focusing on the emotion alone so what is it the automatic thought is the subconscious reasoning that leads to the emotion that leads to the behavior this sounds crazy so let me work in detail what actually happened earlier in that example initially I went I need to go to the gym today the discomfort is actually composed of stage one the automatic thoughts going well actually I'll go later because I'm a bit tired now and the gym is too busy my emotional reaction is that I'm actually quite scared to work out my physiological reaction is that I'm genuinely tired as I often am and my behavioral reaction is I'll just scroll on my phone for a bit longer this leads me to stage two where my automatic thought is I failed to go again I'm a failure I can't go to the gym today I'm way too anxious to go now my emotional reaction is that I'm really anxious my physiological reaction is that I get flustered and my heartbreak goes up and my behavioral reaction is now I am very much Frozen swollen to resolve the state I move on to stage three where my automatic thoughts is I'm just not a gym person it's fine I'll cancel my membership and stop wasting my money I'll just focus on the things that I can do now this provides me with the emotional reaction of relief the physiological reaction of my heart rate coming down and the physical reaction of now just keep scrolling on my phone this is the eventual behavior of me not going to the gym this hopefully shows the power of automatic thoughts in driving our emotions and then driving our reactions it's helpful to now even think of our unhelpful behaviors as ways to gain short-term relief from the negative consequences of automatic thoughts sometimes it is possible for me to just shut these thoughts out and power through but most of the time I'm too tired or too insecure or just too human to keep on consistently doing this and therefore instead of biting with myself the best long-term strategy is to identify and remove these automatic thoughts people who find things a lot easier are probably not better at ignoring their feelings they're just lucky or have already done the work do not have the same automatic thoughts that are holding you and me back but that's fine because we can put in the work to get rid of them so if you also have a similar breakdown of your own behavior bring your automatic thoughts onto stage two where we will start to consider them Solomon's Paradox state that we are much better at solving other people's problems than our own because Detachment yields objectivity barcatal also found that we can benefit from the same Detachment by viewing ourselves in the third person this is why I think I benefit and like analyzing myself so much this feels like a good time to introduce co-pilot the sponsor of this video because I've been using them as an adjunct and a supplement to the self-cbt that I'm doing for myself when it comes to exercise having studied the psychological theory already I knew exactly what I needed a personal trainer for and where they could help me on this CBT Journey this is why copilot was the best option for me it's been six months now since I first drone co-pilot and had my first onboarding call with Candace my personal trainer and since then there's been almost not a single day where I haven't in some shape or form interacted with her and with my Fitness on the app kyopilot combines the human elements of connecting us with coaches and benefiting from their planning and guidance and support with also the technical logical side of really teach teaching us how exercises are done how to plan them and looking at them as I'm doing the exercises which for me as a beginner I was absolutely essential six months ago I'd never properly used free weights I'd never done an upper body exercise I was terrified of doing anything at the gym I was a mental and physical harm to myself and others and right now that has completely changed my confidence at the gym although it goes up and down has changed so much at one point I managed 54 workouts in a row which was amazing but then I moved my house and I had to break my streak which broke my heart but I've never been more consistent and organized with anything in my life I've had my fears be assured I've had a plan made for me when I had no idea how to do it myself I've been managing to stick to and work through my personalized fitness goals for such a long time I unless I've had incredible space and incredible access to a professional to talk to about the specific issues and insecurities that come up as I am going to the gym it's no wonder that it's been listed as Forbes as one of the best personal train in our apps of 2022 and I have a co-pilot link which will give you 14 days of free personalized training with a real Coach if like me you also have fitness goals or things come up throughout this video it might be useful to use this 14 days of free time to have these calls with a personal trainer to talk through rationalize and understand some of the things that might be holding you back from achieving the health that you want and hopefully you find it just as helpful as I do because I truly think nothing ever replaces that genuine and real human connection okay so back to considering our automatic thoughts my favorite thing to do to eventually get rid of them is to introduce space space to consider in between having the automatic thoughts and then trickling down the progression of emotional reaction physiological reaction action and then not doing the thing that I need so if we go back there are some amazing questions that I make myself consider when it comes to rethinking the way that I feel for example one of my common automatic thoughts is I'm too tired or too bloated to go to the gym today the question I will ask myself is what is the worst thing that will happen and how will you cope with the situation it sounds really obvious but I often do something called selective abstraction which is focusing on a single aspect of a situation and ignoring everything else and I genuinely think that it is impossible for me to do to go do a workout or impossible for me to follow through with something because I will truly die that's how I feel however having this space to just open this up and stop it from progressing then helps me go well the worst thing that will happen is I'll have a shorter workout or I won't do as well or I'll just feel a bit uncomfortable or yeah I'll be like how will I cope with it I mean I'll be fine I've been through so much worse this already poses a sequence even the thought that I can text my PT and say hey can we make my workout shoulder or feeling super bloated today don't know if I can do it the thought of knowing that I can be talked through this process on copilot for example just helps me get through the things super quickly and then progress without having to foreplay to the normal sequence of doing nothing a second common automatic thought of mine is what is the point of even trying this I know I'm never going to enjoy exercise anyway I might as well give up now the question to ask myself in this case is what is the best thing that could happen or what is the most realistic outcome of the situation I have a huge catastrophizer for a lot of things I think things will be terrible I don't just think that I'm going to have a bad workout I think I'm so tired that a dumbbell is going to fall on me and I'm going to die I think someone's going to see me and I'm going to get canceled because I'm so bad at doing chest fly or I think that I'm going to topple over some someone and I'm going to be so embarrassed I'm going to get kicked out of the gym or I'm going to feel working out and I am going to be in financial ruin from all of the money that I've spent in my life for gym memberships that I've never gone to this is the kind of thinking that I will have in my head so having a bit more space to think what's the most reasonable outcome of this specific situation can help that anxiety from building and me spiraling out of control it's really helpful to discuss the specific point with the personal trainer too because thinking I'm never going to enjoy this it's much more helpful for me to trust that she's probably had other clients like this and that she's helped them through it too so that I know okay even if I don't trust myself I trust that she can get me through us another very common automatic thoughts is what am I even supposed to do today I cannot be bothered to figure it out so I won't do anything at all the risky question and I'm going to explain why it's risky but I really like this is what is the best thing that you can do today and what can you plan moving forward I'm a huge planner but I love plans because I always follow through with them almost and if you're the kind of person that likes planning but then doesn't execute this might be not a great one to do but I know that to do something effectively I can calculate my bandwidth tax which is basically the emotional and mental resources that I need to do something for which I have scarce resources so for example me figuring out a workout when I don't know how the hell my body even moves or should move or in what kind of exercises will get me somewhere has a huge bandwidth tax so it's much easier for me to get a PT and kind of remove that obstacle and therefore not have this complete exhausting thoughts that will then lead to other terrible feelings when you know following through with an exercise this might look completely different for you but it's very important to evaluate your bandwidth tax at the beginning of an action or behavior so you don't have to calculate it every time like do I have the capacity to do this calculate it once and then try to replace it with something else in order for you not to have this blockage when considering our automatic thoughts and how to resolve them it's really important to not do it just by ourselves but involve other people the flip side of Solomon's Paradox this is the theory of scaffolding which was described by wood at Al as the sort of thing that enables a child or a novice to achieve something that would be outside of their competences were they unassisted the other person can be a professional in my case a personal trainer or just a colleague or a friend or someone who doesn't feel about us the way that we feel about us the personal trainer will show me where my reasoning and thinking needs to be and I can trust that they will get me there at some point in the meantime I can focus on my competence level and where I am without the stress of where I'm going I openly told my personal trainer contest when I met her about my automatic thoughts my concerns and my insecurities that using that specific term I can now slowly believe think and do what I can trusting that at some point I will get to where my goals and her goals are for me this is inter-subjectivity when two people are starting from different points but end up understanding each other so I want to adopt Candace's healthy automatic thoughts when it comes to exercise while she helps me understand and Tackle my problematic ones this is a much better way to achieve goals that seem impossible I do the same thing about automatic Thoughts with other friends we finally arrived at correct we've understood that vague feeling of Badness that we have when we can't do something that we want to do we've understood where it comes from and changed the automatic thought now we are moving on to the actions that we need to do in order to change our Behavior I have three exercises no pun intended to achieve this goal the first one is borrowed from solution Focus brief therapy and it is called the miracle passion it's so fun I absolutely love it it says that you have a behavior that you want to do or something that you want to achieve that you're being held back by a problem or something stopping you so imagine that you are going to sleep one night and a miracle happens during the night and this problem vanishes so you wake up and you're able to do the thing that you wanted but how would you know how how would you know that you were able to do it how would you feel what is different this morning what has disappeared or changed in your life so when I think about this going from someone who hates to exercise I think that I would love to I go well I I'd wake up and you know I'd be I'd be energized I wouldn't have any back pain I'd you know want to have a big breakfast so that I can stretch and like get into my gym cure and immediately work out I would feel like I don't want to sit and lie around all day I just want to you know get things done I want to be out there and beating the stun a lot more by saying this I realized really quickly that these things I'm saying are not that crazy they're not like putting your gym clothes on in the morning going to gym it's not ridiculous I always thought that you know being someone who loved exercise must be so so different but when it comes down to imagining myself as that person actually shows me that it's not too it's not too far up it's not too crazy to want to start to the morning and it kind of helps with while we've been struggling with something for so long and assuming that it's so difficult and unattainable it's actually composed of a lot simpler things and even imagining ourselves in that position makes it more likely that it comes across so this is a great one the second exercise is the exceptions or what I like to call the hypocrisy rule this is also based on solution focused therapy and it's basically the idea that for every single problem that we have there are situations in our life where either the problem is not there or it's there but it doesn't hold us back I like to call this hypocrisy because for example for me a big reason I don't enjoy working out is because I'm super insecure I think you know I'm never going to be one of those healthy outgoing energetic people so what's the point of even trying I'm never going to have like muscles and be ripped and I'm never going to want to be outgoing so just you know let's just stick to what you can do don't do that now I'm a hypocrite so because I'm insecure about everything I'm talking about so many things before I got into medicine I was so insecure I thought there is no chance in hell they're going to accept my application that I'm going to be good enough to do this and yet when it comes to exercise and I feel insecure I don't do the action I just hide away try to ignore it get anxious when it comes to studying and insecurity I'm a completely different person I think there is no way in hell like I am going to work my hardest I'm going to over compensate I do not care I will do everything under the sun to get this thing done I am completely different now of course both of them have their negatives I'm not saying over compensating and avoiding neither of these are good but it already shows me that I have some of the skills that are needed to deal with the problem of insecurity differently than I'm currently dealing with it so highlighting the errors in your life where you're not doing this because you feel scared where else have you felt scared and done something just shows you that you already have the tools and the processes inside you to overcome this behavioral change you're probably just ignoring it and kind of thinking that oh I can never do this because I've never done it but broadening It Up This Way makes it a lot more likely that I at least change that behavior the last thing if you're tired with overthinking is super easy it just has to do with writing or giving a number to your Mastery or to pleasure so basically what you want to do before you do the activity is to rate how good you think you're going to be at it so how masterful and how fun you're going to feel the activity is and at the end you're going to give yourself a new rating and the purpose here is to kind of see the mismatch between the ratings so for example in the co-pilot app whenever I finish a workout I have to rate it in order to submit it so I need to say how good the workout was if you ask me before I go to the gym how much pressure I think I'm going to have in this workout I will give you a 0 out of five every single time I'm like oh my God I cannot be bothered but then every single workout almost I've rated a five out of five two seconds after I've started my workout I'm like oh my God this is the best thing ever when I'm done and I'm coming home I feel amazing so this just keeps on showing me that one I'm not as unmasterful as I think I am and two the things that I want to make myself do are not as bad as I think they are so this little kind of mismatch doing it intentionally all the time really really helps you marry these things with one another so yeah this was everything it's a super long video my camera is showing the hot sign so it might turn up soon I'm showing the hot sign and I might turn off soon because I'm drenched and so it's really hot in this room but basically I wanted to thank you so much if you spent so long listen to my voice um this has been incredible the video has been really hard to get out for some reason um harder than working out because genuinely I have enjoyed co-pilot so much if you've watched my first video which I really recommend if you're specifically struggling with working out this has helped me through so much the personalized aspects having my own goals having the huge variety but having such a high level of support having someone to immediately like reassure me of my craziness and insecurities that pop through my mind all the time has been absolutely essential in getting me through this behavioral change as I would strongly recommend it it's no surprise to me at all that over 75 of people who are using her Palace after 100 days are still working out which is nine times more successful than other apps and similar resources so I think it's been absolutely instrumental and essential in my kind of life and behavioral change it's so adaptive the fact that in a few minutes I need to run to a whole different City from my medical placement and yet I can still have like my body work and floor work workouts when I'm there and I don't have my weights and like readjust everything and make sure that I'm not falling behind and feeling as though I'm kind of like getting nowhere with what I'm doing with exercise has been absolutely essential um so thank you so much to co-pilots for working with me promoting anything super healthy but especially especially the things that I know for that worked incredibly so yeah I'm going to leave this here because you are very very sick of my voice I'm sick of my voice so thank you very much for spending this time with me I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day good luck with your behaviors and your thoughts and your feelings and everything be kind to yourself and others and do not believe everything you think thanks bye [Music]

Channel: Elizabeth Filips

Views: 121,294

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Id: NWzRfV8f6Hg

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2023