The Secret To Creating Habits That Stick: Professor BJ Fogg | Feel Better Live More Podcast

emotions great habits so you don't have to have people change 40 things at once or do this huge thing you just have to help them feel successful on something really really small the feeling of success is what wires in the habit so BJ welcome to the feel better live more podcast thank you thank you for having me in Rangoon well look I'm in one of the most beautiful towns I think I've visited in America before in Healdsburg it's absolutely gorgeous and I'm here studying with you tomorrow well and thank you for coming so you know I teach my stuff for two days and I think I'd call a boot camp that's all about how to think about behavior change and design for it and I love love love teaching in the setting yeah I can see why so I'm just halfway in so far I've been one day the boot camp we're just recording this 7:00 a.m. early in the morning before but have you wanted to talk to you for a long time BJ I've been super fascinated by your work and you know you are arguably the world's leading experts and behavior design mmm so what is behavior design yeah well behavior design is a set of models about how to think clearly about human behavior and a set of methods methods are ways of designing so together those models and methods is what I call behavior design the the phrase behavior design came out of my labs work at Stanford in 2010 we realized that for a couple years we hadn't really been studying persuasive technology which is what the lab began at in about 1999 and we're like no we're really studying just more about human behavior and so we put our heads together at all what do we call this new thing and we called it behavior design and so now the labs name is the behavior design lab and that's at Stanford and that's I run that year-round and we do projects year-round and it's really fun and flexible and it's a research lab and that means training students in research and doing the best job we can what's striking for me is that the principles you talk about you know I'm a daughter so I'm interested in health I'm interested in how can I help my patients make better choices but the principles you are talking about seems to be universal to all human behavior and so not only has their is their merit their fear for people you know in the health world but also in the science world the engineering world the IT worlds the the tech world and I think that's with Lexington you know this diverse group of people you have here at the moment studying with you yeah is it true that one of your students set up Instagram yes yeah so Mike Krieger took my class in 2006 at Stanford and one of the projects there so this is pre iPhone this is before the iPhone shipped and there wasn't really the concept of apps but a lot of my work is about looking ahead and saying what's coming and and what are the good things we can do with technology and so I anticipated these things we call mobile phones we'd be able to take photos and share the photos and so in the class there was a design challenge students broke into teams of three and the brief was find some positive way to use this a capacity that's coming the ability to take photos and share them and my Krieger and his two teammates came up with a concept called send the sunshine which was all about taking a picture of a sunset or a you know your pad or something happy and then sharing it with somebody who needed an uplift in their day so fast forward a few years Mikey and then another co-founder Kevin started Instagram which is very much along those lines Wow so so the idea in many ways was seated in one of your classes yeah Wow yeah I don't know how many users Instagram has around the world I'm guessing it's probably around 1 billion or maybe getting some of us last yeah yeah yeah I guess in many ways you could you can make a strong case that your work is impacting a significant amount of the world's population yes yes that's true I at the beginning I was really really proud of Instagram not like I had really much to do with it but I just felt like it was this really simple straightforward way of connecting people and in fact one of the things my family Thanksgiving I have a big family we tend to like to get together I had people go around the table and say what are you grateful for and this is probably like three years and Instagram and about half the people said Instagram what our Thanksgiving what are you grateful for and I was like you know that's kind of an interesting moment it's like okay awesome it's helping them feel connected and so on today the way the way things are going I'm a little bit less I don't know I don't know what's going on there but certainly at the beginning it was I thought it was a great way to connect people and it was fun and not exploiting people and it was super great yeah it's amazing how you say that because it sounds like you were ahead of the curve a little bit and predicting what was going to happen you're talking about the Cree iPhone era so you know if any of us can even remember that proof - era I certainly can I'm sure there's a generation you probably can't and is not even grown up in that era but it's interesting that you were thinking about it as a positive you know a positive way to affect people that was the idea that was the the project you set that people were in that class yeah and you're right it has certainly evolved spiraled maybe to a point where actually the founders never imagined it I'm guessing well-named they left Facebook so that says something about what they you know when they saw what was happening they let Facebook and decided to pursue something else and I think that was a real signal Wow you know that is incredible I mean we'll come back to this a bit later I think because there's a few things I want to touch on about that and about technology which clearly an expert in but let's dive back into human behavior mm-hmm so as a doctor I think the bulk of what I now see in my practice may be 80% of what I see is in some way driven by our collective modern lifestyles and there's a problem out there and that's we can give out information continuously we can you know do public health messaging about what people should be doing that's interesting to me that information is not necessarily leading to action right so why is it that people know what they should be doing but don't actually do it well I have two answers for you I'll be brief on one hand I mean if we wanted to get into it sometimes I'm not sure people know exactly what they should be doing I think I think they know the abstract thing like oh I should eat better I should be more active but the specifics like what exactly can I do to be more active in my day or what exactly should I be preparing for my family those are the specific so that's one answer the other answer is you know people well you know this as well as anybody life can be really hard for some people and life can be hard I tend to be a big optimist I think you're an optimist but we both see situations where man life is tough and people get discouraged they get defeated they tried to change their behavior before it hasn't worked and so on and then the environment the food environment the sedentary jobs we have and so on it just adds up and a big part of my work so there's a research part of me at Stanford and then just kind of on a whim an accident I started this habit formation method that called tiny habit and started teaching hundreds of people weak tiny habits coaching them personally this is back to 2011 and about four months into that I probably coached 2,000 people in tiny habits and really getting a strong sense of what everyday people do in a way that an academic research wouldn't I mean you do as a doctor but you know the way the academic thing is set up and the way you do research you're not really interacting with hundreds or thousands of people personally and so that was a new thing for me and about four months in I got an email from a woman who said oh my gosh BJ thank you so much you know because in tiny habits I teach people how to feel good about their successes and not beat themselves up and she wrote me an email that said you have helped me see I've endured a lifetime of self trash-talk and that just set me back I just looked at that and I read it and I read it and I was like well I mean this was something as a researcher as an experimental psychologist I hadn't studied and I really didn't know but it was by interacting with like hundreds and then thousands of people and in this particular person saying wow I've had you know a lifetime of self talk trash that made me just it woke me up in some ways and it helped me understand where people are really at and people have hard lives and they they detract you know that the bill collectors calling them their kids are mad at them it goes on and on and it gave me even more compassion for everyday people and gave me it was that moment her saying that that took tiny habits from this quirky thing I was doing on the side too oh my gosh this really needs to be a global global intervention if this can help people feel more positive and stop the self trash talk I need to get this out there so all that is to say yeah people may have a sense of what they need to do and even if they know specifically what to do so many people are discouraged and feel like I'm not ready I've tried before and so on and and that's a big part of what my work is about it's like yeah you can do it you can do this and it's not as hard as people have led you to believe yeah I was so much of what you're saying because as you say when we were talking about this yesterday we come from very different backgrounds at the sense that you have been a researcher and or a researcher and I'm a sort of in the trenches clinician and so a lot of the tools and techniques that I have found that work with people in real life are very consistent now that I study your model and in particular yesterday going through this in detail I'm thinking wow that's why that works that's why this works and it's really nice for me to see that I guess what I've intuitively figured out in practice with people has this research backing yeah and it's it's really fun for me that because I'm very proud to be a clinician and you know research it very much interests me but I've got as a you know as a doctor I've always been more interested in what works with my patients yeah and obviously when it can marry up with a research that's fantastic you know you mentioned you got this email that this lady had been trash-talking to herself for many years yeah a lifetime she said yeah and I think this is worth exploring because it's something I see with patients and it's they can have this narrative in their head that they can't do these things that you know every time I've tried before and failed I'm not the sort of person who can stick to these habits oh it works for them it doesn't work for me and one of your sort of key Maxim's is to make people feel good about themselves I want to you know on one level it's it's quite obvious why does important but on another level I don't think it is quite as obvious why do you think feeling good is important when trying to create new behaviors yeah I'll try to be brief and you can drill-down go as long as they want me this is probably my next vlog but anyway so the maxim has helped people feel successful and that maximum applies to people creating products and services like Instagram one reason it really took off is because it's people used it they took a picture they put a filter and like oh my gosh I'm an artist look at my picture it's so awesome so they immediately feel successful the feeling of success is what wires in the habit yeah it's not repetition it is a feeling of emotions great habits and specifically in tiny habits what we focus on is the feeling of success so when you do something and feel successful that behavior becomes much more automatic you're more likely to do it in the future so if people can do a behavior like two push-ups or you know eat broccoli or any little thing and feel successful then that behavior will become more automatic and there's ways to hack that and help yourself create habits very quickly very very quickly if you know how to fire up a positive emotion the other thing that the feeling success does is it motivates you to do it again in the future that's different than wiring in a habitant to your brain so that's you know effect number two is increases your motivation and the third effect and there's more but I'll stop here I call it success momentum as people do behaviors and feel successful their confidence you could call it self-efficacy increases and that means when they hit roadblocks or little bumps in the road they can get through them that's why I like calling it a success momentum they can get through it and with that increased confidence with that success momentum then they can tackle other challenges in their life more effectively so that and other reasons are why you know that Maxim no I only have three Maxim's and that's number two and it's just it if you're designing products and services boom that's a key for you if you're creating new habits in your life that's a key help yourself feel successful if you're coaching other people helping other people like you do that's another you know that's the same thing help them feel successful now it's only four words help people feel successful but the way you do that can be challenging and it's not obvious to everyday people how you know the fact that they just set out their vitamins and took a sip of water how they can feel successful about that but people can learn to bring up that emotion and wire in these positive habits really quickly yeah it's incredible really and it it very much marries up with what I've seen you mentioned that's what your next book is about this is personally well tiny habits yeah tiny have a dis at the end of this year yeah I don't know when this podcast ships but let's say January 1st 2020 90 habits is available I think your work is incredible and I think it will help people understand how to create a new behavior yeah but it also helped them understand maybe where they you know I don't like using word where they went wrong before but where maybe in the past where they haven't succeeded it might help them see hey I get it yeah or how people have handed them products and programs or they've seen them on TV and the internet and those products and programs were wrongheaded they were poorly designed and that's a big part of what I hope people understand is if you've tried to change your behavior in the past and you didn't succeed it is very likely not your fault you are not the one that is lacking motivation or willpower the program needed to be better and accurate and there are so many programs out there that set people up to fail and now I'm an optimistic guy a lot of people think I'm a lot like mr. Rogers but I get grumpy about this when when somebody some company or some institution creates a behavior change program and it says feel up to Vale that's bad that's that's where I get really that's where I get my grumpiest is when I see that yeah absolutely I'm an optimist too like you I think this one of the reasons why we're getting on so well last couple of days I I always think people can make those changes if we can communicate things in the right way you you you say that it's not your fault - what comes at the same time as yours they feel better in five and actually I think you're gonna really like it because I think the program I've set out for people actually a lot of it comes from my clinical research and my clinical experience but also I was trying to search through the research to try and figure out well why does this stuff work and you know your work is heavily influenced that part of the book and says it's explaining down why it works and I think you'll like the program so we'll maybe talk about that a bit later but let's go into specifics so emotions create habits okay and I love that now this is a story I shared with you yesterday but I think it's worth exploring as to why this has worked so well I've got my own view on it I'd love to hear your expertise on this so a few years ago I was in my practice a patient came in to see me I had a whole variety different problems and I was coming across all the research on strength training at that time and we had a long chat about here and we felt that strength training would be a really good thing for him to do it would help his physique it would help his energy levels it would help his mood and he was he was like yeah okay doc I get out you've convinced me yeah and he said what do you want me to do would you like me to do 40 minutes three times a week at a gym I said hey yeah that'll be amazing if you could do that and he said right I can't wait to do it okay so he goes out the door really really motivated really inspired the hate I'm gonna go and do this four weeks later he came in to see me at the follow up and I said hey how are you getting on said doc you know what I've actually not been to the gym yet works been busy the gyms quite far away from where I live it's pretty expensive I've just not got around to it I mean he looks demoralized and he felt a little bit sheepish that he was telling me this he probably didn't want to come to the appointment yeah exactly but all credit to him he did and it was interesting cuz that that moment really changed things for me because I thought I didn't think for one minute why is he not doing what I've asked him to do there's a lot of doctors say that don't say Oh thought that you know we tell patients what to do but they don't do that I've never really had that view I've been I felt in that moment I'm clearly not giving him information that he feels is relevant for him in the concepts in his own life and I thought right I'm gonna fix this so I took my jacket off and I said I'm gonna teach you a workout right now I love it that you don't need to join a gym you don't need to buy any equipment and you don't even need to get changed to do nice so what happens he goes away and I say to him I want to do this 5 minute workout in your kitchen twice a week just twice a week because Isum he's awesome just twice a week doc what just 10 minutes that's all I want you two days and then I'll be happy Thanks so he goes away he goes yeah I can do that dog he goes away comes back for his follow-up and I said how you getting on it says doc I love this workouts right I now do it for 10 minutes every day in my kitchen before I had my evening meal yay so this is the chap who we had agreed before the strength training would be good for mm-hmm the conventional way of doing that wasn't working for him when I asked him to only do 10 minutes in his house a week he comes back to me a few weeks later he's doing a 70 minutes that's great strength training every week and I wonder if you could sort of explore that and expand on why is that so successful Wow okay and well let me start with you know his ambition to do this huge workout so when often when people decide that they're gonna change their behavior they're in a high state of motivation so if he's sitting down with you in the clinical setting he's feeling motivated in that moment and in and then he truly believes he can do these hard workouts well what he doesn't and what we as human beings don't account for very well is what's going to happen to our motivation in the future and the motivation goes up and down over time and so you know three days later his motivation sags he's not able to do the hard work out what you did so brilliantly he is then you matched him with a really simple exercise routine that didn't require much time or money or physical effort and you set the bar really low and so if something's really easy to do it doesn't require high levels of motivation motivation can be high or relatively low he can still do it and you were just right on to say just do two two times a week so that was the bar now what he did was he exceeded that and you set him up to succeed not fail you set him up that the bar was low enough he could do it so he felt successful then he did even more so now he's feeling like a superstar he's like the A+ student he's the student in the front row of the class that knows all the answers and so that then helps him wire in the habit and it helps him increase his motivation which means he can do more and harder things and I imagine as he was doing more than five minutes twice a week every time he did it he's like oh my gosh when I go back to the doctor I get to tell him this and so on and then that becomes part of his life and very importantly part of his identity he starts thinking I'm the kind of person that does strength training and more generally I'm the kind of person who can change yeah what you said they were identity really strikes a chord in me really really deeply you know behavior change in so many ways is about identity change I've realized and you know by doing that a succeeding he actually then there was a there was what I call a ripple effects happen after that it it led to more and more healthy behaviors off the back of that one thing that he could do and I think it's because of what you say emotion is key he's feeling good about himself so he he's not the sort of person who fails anymore he's a soul person who succeed right you know in yeah so you I mean in my research I see this week after week in tiny habits week after week about 75% of the people who do tiny habits report doing other behaviors besides the three new habits that they designed at the beginning and this is within one week so they start doing other behaviors about 18% of people do a big change within those five days not one that was planned not that one that was part of the tiny habits program or what they thought they would do but change leads to change and success leads to success and this dynamic you do something and feel successful your identity shifts and then that naturally ripples out and affects other behaviors in your life and I didn't in the first I would say three years of doing tiny habits I saw the data and I was like wow this is really interesting these ripple effects are there I get it but what about these big leap changes that people are making this 18% and I didn't totally understand that until I started asking some other questions in the research and I did see clearly that as people do something and feel successful it shifts their identity in these positive ways and then they naturally start doing other related healthy behaviors yeah and that's just like tamiya´s is like wow okay so you don't have to have people change 40 things at once or do this huge thing you just have to help them feel successful on something really really small and that works and then that has these big effects if you do it right and you did I'm I find it when I teach doctors or teach health coaches which is something I'm doing a lot more of these days is this is a key thing I always say find you know find your leverage won't find the thing of their passion I'll find the thing that actually they can do and start there because it also it all marries it with what your research is which is you know and actually on many levels it's it kind of makes common sense right if we feel good about ourselves we're gonna start doing more things yeah well yes it makes common sense but then you look at the traditional products and programs for behavior change and they don't set you up that way they have you set a very ambitious goal they have you track it daily so you can see evidence that you're failing and then they put you on guilt trips by putting you in groups or having a leaderboard and who's winning and who's not winning all those things are not ways to set people up to feel successful it's just the opposite so you know when you see it from a certain perspective you go WOW is it it's you know kind of it's frustrating that somehow the products and programs decades ago set people up to fail in these ways and some of those things like goal-setting and tracking and keep yourself motivated have become institutionalized and a lot of my work is like saying hey set those things aside if they don't work for you you don't have to set an explicit goal you don't have to track your behavior you can change your behavior perhaps better without doing those things yeah that's incredible and again you were very kid okay I would say if that's not working for you yeah don't do it and and of course there may be people listening as you say actually goal setting does work for me or tracking it doesn't work for me awesome yeah exactly keep going with that you've been running this Tony hunts program now for you know many years you've been teaching as you said thousands of thousands of people so I guess you will have developed insights maybe in maybe in a similar way to me as a clinician but also in a different way people who are coming here probably are quite engaged too okay BJ is the world's leading expert in this field he's gonna help me start to change some of my own behaviors one is they're coming here with a high level of motivation I'm guessing yeah with all these groups that you've taken through your program what are the common things that people are looking for help with what are the common habits yeah that people are saying I want to do this but I can't yeah cuz I bet you there must be similar to what the listeners of this power absolutely also 2000 mice okay well let me be clear about that there's kind of two different buckets here one is the tiny habits program that's free online it's five days and you and we interact through email and that's the program that I've been running since 2011 and has that I measure week by week and have all this data around and so that and that now I have trained coaches because I can't yeah you know I can't coach everybody personally I mean this is personal coaching where I read the emails and I respond and so on and so that's one the second one is what you're here for now is my boot camp in behavior design which is professionals here that are creating products and services to help people change behavior but like you said people come here even though they come here for professional reasons they're still thinking how do I help my kid do their homework how do i I get my family to eat healthier so the topics are and you probably see this all the time people do care about being fit and looking fit to others them so there's Fitness whether you call it weight loss or whatever and part of that is driven by they want to look at other people at the end of the day we're all kind of vain and we do care about what others think about us I mean frankly we do another piece of that has to do with energy and you've talked about this a lot well I need better energy people need to want to be more productive I don't think that's the number one thing in their mind but it's there more and more these days it's like how do I stay focused the ability to focus in fact some research I did on it was about 60 different aspirations in that particular research people staying focused was the number one item well above weight loss surprisingly and I think this is a moving target right as social media and other things evolve people's concerns shift and certainly parents are thinking about how do I help my child succeed how do I help my child create positive habits that will help them be happier and healthier and more successful and it just seems like parents are of course pretty obsessed with that yeah incredible these are universal themes aren't they that pretty much all of us once in their lives are the specific personal habits that people keep coming back with like you know I would like to meditate every day although you don't trust me you somebody say yes yes I you think it's a hard thing it's a very difficult habit to form yes people do want to meditate you know there's a lot of talk about mindfulness and a lot of emphasis on meditation and I think meditation is a great thing don't get me wrong but it is a hard habit to form and it's hard to form because as people start meditating they do not feel successful they sit there and they recognize how busy their mind is and that's not a feeling of success so not only does it take time and not only do people not have perhaps enough training and meditation those are barriers but if you do something and you don't feel successful that thing is very unlikely to become a habit in your life now there's ways to reframe meditation so people do are not so concerned that they're you know there's like a thousand monkeys in their head chattering that they look at something else for success but I think most people think okay I'm gonna call my mind it's not calming it's not commonly I'm terrible at this oh why I'm just awful at this and for that reason that that's what I would hone in on and identify as the problem with making meditation to habit is it's not helping people feel successful at least in ways that people seem to typically do it yeah I think for me when it shifted my meditation is when I stopped beating myself up for having a busy mind yeah so my sort of to clean there in the past my sort of a type personality it was like you know I want about do something and master it doing well and I was like I can't do this meditation thing and I can't clear my minds and it was almost becoming a stress yeah I couldn't do it but I've I as I studied it more and I talked to more and more teachers I understood that actually it's not about clearing your mind it's about being detached and observing so now when I do it it's about looking at my - some days yeah I hit a zen-like state and I feel great other days I go through my to-do list and I go oh you know you've got a busy line today and it's so for me I've had to reframe it and that really helped but I think but the take-home for me for people listening to this might be maybe if you've tried and you can't get into it maybe it's not the right habit for you at this particular moment and maybe work on some other ones that are quick wins and easy wins that make you feel good right yeah absolutely one powerful way to think about habits in your life is to think about them as plants and so imagine you have this garden and each plant in the garden is a habit now you can just not design the garden and let weeds grow that habits let think just whatever happens happens or you can design the garden and decide what you want here and there and so on and as you know when you garden sometimes a plant just isn't in the right spot it's not gonna it's not gonna flourish there it's the wrong time of year and that's the garden metaphor in habits or the God in analogy and habits is a really really good way to think about it it's like where does this new habit fit naturally in my life and if for some reason it just doesn't take root and the root is like the automaticity how firmly does it become part of your life that's not your fault it's like maybe it's the wrong spot in your life maybe it's the wrong time of year maybe you know three months from now there'll be a perfect time to bring meditation into your life so if it's not working redesign it and if you just can't redesign it and nail it that's fine move on and work on other things you know what you just made me think of something I'm not thought about in a long time and that's with quite a lot of my patients I when they want to make a certain change whether it's a lot of time it's getting more active and sometimes it's you know the UK that states in January and it's dark and it's cold and you know I often say some hey look we work on something else at the moment and you know or in February I say hey why why don't we wait for that one until March or April because it's gonna be spring yeah it's gonna get brighter and I think you're gonna actually want to do that more I think it's gonna be easier for you to do it then well let's figure let's work on something else now and I guess that really I like it because it marries it with your with your garden and your plants analogy is there is a different time for different things and I guess the more we can tune into that the more likely what there is to success exactly right on and people think of that analogy you know in your garden you don't plant something and want to you know expect it to be there for years and years and years you want to evolve it and that's just like our set of habit just because you started a habit and if you get tired of it it doesn't do you much good you can remove it and put something else in its place and so people tend to have this very rigid thinking about habits like oh yeah I'm gonna set a goal I'm gonna walk every day for 60 minutes and I must stick to that because at one moment in time I said that down is what I was going to do that's not the right way to think about it it's sort of like here's this thing I can design I'll try something here and if it works I'll keep going and if it doesn't I'll shift and try something else and spot and so on and so there's kind of a playfulness that really helps when it comes to behavior change like you're exploring you're goofing around you're designing you're redesigning you know you're not going to be perfect you're not even trying to be perfect you're exploring to find what fits really well what's the perfect garden for you in that moment knowing that plants will die and move on you'll replace them you'll evolve it your taste will change your capability will change the seasons will change and you just keep evolving it in ways that make you happy and healthy and that are fun really well that's let's dive into creating new habits because curry is something we're all working on at various times in our life no matter what state of health or well-being we have there's generally always something where we're trying to introduce with with varying degrees of success so you know to be blunt how do you create a new habit yeah it's easier than people think there's basically three steps you take whatever behavior you want and you scale it down so it's super tiny so you did this well for your patient rather than having him think 40 minutes you scaled it back to five minutes and tiny habits method you go even more extreme it's like what it's just like two push-ups or two squats super super simple so you scale it back to be really tiny and then you find where it fits naturally in your routine what does it come after so for example if you want to floss your teeth you don't floss all your teeth you floss just one you scale it way back I know that sounds ridiculous but there's a difference between to thin all your teeth and then you find what it comes after well it naturally comes after brushing so then it's called the recipe and tiny omits the recipe is after I brush I will floss one tooth or it could be things like after I feed the dog I'll get out my journal and start writing you know and not write a page you just get out the journal and open it so you find where this you scale it back you still it's like you're starting a little seed so let's go back to the garden analogy you had you don't start out a huge plant and try to transplant it you started out really small you find where it fits naturally in your routine and then when you do that new behavior you help yourself feel good about it and tiny habits we have a technique called celebration which allows you to feel a positive emotion in the moment which then rewires your brain so your brain goes well I just felt really good what just happened oh I did this and this and I floss that tooth and I felt really happy I'm gonna wow I'm gonna do that again in the future so it's the feeling it's that emotion that signals to your brain how something just happened I need to pay attention and I need to do that again in the future now once you see I mean this is this is going against the tradition in a huge way because people have said for decades it's repetition that greats habit it's a repetition it's not repetition correlates with habit formation but it doesn't create the habits its emotions that create the habit and I loved that I thought this is so much - so much to expand on in there is this the method you used I think was a press-up she used this to do yeah yeah yeah so in the u.s. we called push-ups yeah yeah so man I have created of course you know goofing around with this create hundreds of habits and you know one of mine is you know after I pee I do two push-ups so when I'm at home I don't do it at Stanford I don't do it in public restrooms and but let me let me use that call it a pattern that you do naturally and people should really understand as you've lost one tooth or as you do the five-minute kitchen workout or as you do two push-ups and you're succeeding you can do more if you want but you don't have to so one of the key mindsets in tiny habits is you don't raise the bar on yourself you don't go oh this week I do too that means next week I have to do five then I have to do ten than I do to 15 if you raise the bar on yourself you're headed in the wrong direction now you can do 15 or 20 but you should count those as extra credit just like your patient did more than five and you rightly didn't say okay now go to 15 or 20 or whatever because then you'd be setting them up to fail and feel unsuccessful so all he has to do is 5 anything beyond that is extra credit and he can feel I'm a superstar and that's that's counterintuitive it's not the tradition of how people are taught to change but what I found on my research engines working with thousands of people in tiny habits is you set the bar really low and you keep it low I don't want to sound like a broken record but I I I find it's so fascinating that the research you've done is marrying up with what I found and I've got patients who actually for meditation yes I agree as it can be very hard habit to create so I've got many patients who I've made a deal with before they've said all meditation is not for me mm-hmm I've tried it before doctor I can't do it okay what do you think you can do like is that you know what's an amount of meditation you think you can do every day can you do 10 minutes yeah probably it's a key to fine yeah maybe I said okay and I remember one patient in particular we made a deal that she would do one minute a day I said okay son we're gonna be one minute a day I said okay so you're gonna need 1 min a day fine when are you gonna do it and we try to figure out and I said hey look you you put your kettle on yeah every morning so make a cup of tea so why not when the kettle goes on all right at that moment you do one minute meditation event she's like what difference is that gonna make shall I did I said that's all they wanted to do that will have incredibly powerful benefits and so she said ok one minute was pretty easy so she goes and does it and what I found is that those 1 minutes make you feel good right so that one minute becomes 2 minutes becomes 5 minutes a few weeks months later that five minutes become 10 minutes but when I would start saying look I think about 15 minutes of meditation a day is great mm-hmm they go away yeah for the first three days whilst their motivation is high they do the 15 minutes and what happens one day but get up a bit late they've got to get kids ready but you know I got no time for it today I'll miss it out and then they feel you know it's not for me I can't create that home ends you know I tried it for three days I'll go and tell the doctor you know I tried it but I couldn't actually do it and I found that when you set the bar really low people meet it they feel good and that leads to the bar naturally going higher because they want to make it higher yes not because I told my dad and then they feel like I'm not I'm not just doing what the doctor told me I'm exceeding it right so you're totally setting that and they've got no control over their life right who wants to do something really because they've been told by another human being to do it long-term I just don't get I don't I don't feel that people wants people want autonomy in their lives and they want to feel that they're in control yeah so yeah I love that and I mean are you still doing the push-ups now oh yeah yeah okay let's when they start nice oh man probably seven years ago seven years getting started off doing one push to push up every time you have appe yeah in your home yes and and milli right here my dog has seen me do thousands and thousands and thousands of push ups and and so what difference have you felt my god you know if yes absolutely so I mean and other people have done this to it somehow for some people push-ups seems to be the gateway change or exercise that opens them up to doing other things so there'll be times if I'm really busy or stressed or not feeling well I just do too and I go good for me I got it done right there's other times I'll do twelve or twenty or even thirty I'll push it up to thirty and I can even surprisingly do fifty if I have to I couldn't I haven't so I'm 50 something 56 I haven't been able to do 50 pushups since college and now I can't it's it's hard and it's not what I do every morning but if I want to get there I can so it certainly helped me get stronger but there's something also about push-ups that I think about 45 seconds later a minute later there's something you probably know what this is there is a shift and it gives you some mojo yeah I think this really ties is what you were saying a little bit before which is this whole idea that it's got to make you feel good right so if there's some sort of positive feeling with it then it sort of wires yeah yeah they're likely to do it again and Ivan sorts of my patients about this for bad habits I say look you know when you feel low and you're feeling a bit down a bit stress and you go for that chocolate bar or that bag of sweets and we'd call there bagging candy you feel good yeah so then that is wiring in some sort of pattern so that next time you feel low oh I know when I buy a chocolate bar I'm gonna feel better right so let's use that process to help create good habits instead exact hard why those bad exactly yeah you know the way the brain was good habits and bad habits or what we say as you know as a culture like eating chocolate cake at 3:00 in the morning is not a great thing to do and he didn't hold bag of chips while watching football is not us well our brain doesn't distinguish between good and bad all habits form in the same way it could have it's in bad habits and it's this dynamic you do a behavior and you have a net gain and positive emotions if I want to be geeky about it you know you do a behaving you feel successful feel good that behavior becomes more automatic and that's what I have it is is something you do quite automatically without thinking very much so what is the difference between a habit and a routine good question both words are ambiguous and fuzzy neither word is a great technical word we're kind of stuck with those words neither word is precise and accurate part of my work will be to further refine those words so they're specific I think most people can use the word habit and routine interchangeably and it works but we need a better technical vocabulary than what we have habit is can often people use the word habit to mean something that's just high-level and aspirational like oh I want to be more productive I want productivity habit well that's just an abstract generalization if somebody says I want to look at my to-do list every morning then that's a specific habit so I don't know if this is very interesting to your listeners but even the language of behavior change is a little messed up whereas the word habit means lots of things people talk about breaking bad habits and that's not how it works you don't just put in force and break it and you're done so I talked about in tiny habits my book I talk about untangling bad habits rather than breaking so you know breaking sets up the wrong expectation so there's a lot of things that have been the tradition in behavior change programs or how we talk about behavior change that really set us up either to fail or think about it in the wrong way and it's important to help people see it in the right way and it's fun too because once people see it they're like yeah of course you don't break a bad habit you know by putting in a lot of force in one moment you untangle it and that's sets up the right expectation you know I love that and it's something I've been reflecting on a lot over the past few years is this whole idea that the language we use matters not you know you can expand this out beyond habits you know relationships the way we talk to ourselves all of these things the language we use I think it's on a on a very deep sort of primal level it's it really influences our actions and how we feel about ourselves and I have you can tell a lot about someone by the language they use yeah yeah well so I have a degree in English a master's degree in English which is really linguistics and sociolinguistics and the power of language is the thing that really got me thinking about how one of these days computers will use rhetoric essentially to influence our attitudes and behaviors and that's what led me to create this research program around how might this happen and so on but yeah language and even analogy so let's go back to the plant analogy if people can look at their set of habits as plants and and let's take the example turning on the kettle let's go back to that when I hear that what I'm understanding from it is she has a limited period of time to meditate I don't know how long a kettle takes cuz I don't do the kettle but is it a couple minutes yeah minutes you imagine I mean depending on how much water is in so let's say she creates a meditation habit there and it wires in she feels good she feels successful she's ready to do more she can then transplant that habit to another part of her life it's almost like the kettle on the stove is the greenhouse it's the incubator for the habit and once she dials it in and feels successful on that small behavior it's ready for something bigger and she can move it out and Transplant it to a space where she can go to 15 or 20 minutes so the the language we use the analogies the metaphors can all be helpful or unhelpful and I really like sharing the helpful ways of talking about behavior change in thinking about behavior change and that's a big part of behavior design a model is a way of thinking and an analogy or a turn of phrase like untangle a bad habit is a way of thinking so even that simple phrase is a type of model because it's just how you think about things how do you untangle these bad habits then you know everybody can just think about you have like an extension cord or Christmas lights that are all tangled up how do you untangle it well you don't just yank on it and you don't go for the hardest snarl in the middle you start with the easiest one on the outside and you undo it and then you go to the next easiest one and so on so it's the same process the analogy I think really helps people understand like let's say you're trying to stop smoking and you smoke say 14 times a day or whatever it is you don't go to the hardest most ingrained smoking action of the day you go to the one that's the easiest untangles like okay so I smoke on when I Drive home from work okay that's the easiest one to untangle and stuff let me just stop that one for now boom got that down let me go to the next easiest one and so on and what often happens is if you get enough of the tangles undone the rest of them will just fall away or they won't matter very much just like with a tangled you know set of Christmas lights yeah so it's a more helpful way of thinking about it because people understand it's a process you don't tackle the hardest thing first you go with for the easiest things and you learn little by little how to do it better and better yeah a big theme coming through what you're describing and and your work is to make it easy yeah absolutely right and it's I think that's such a powerful message with people listening to this podcast is you want to change something right make it easy mm-hmm and you know you were teaching us yesterday about this very powerful relationship between motivation and ability to do something you know motivation and ease and how that motivation does come in wave so you can't really rely on motivation long term right because I think most public health messaging you know kind of relies on that relies on sort of we're going to give you information we're gonna tell you how bad this is how important it is to do this and we're hoping by giving you that information it's gonna motivate you to consistently make these choices yet we know that it's frankly not working because all this information we're giving people is not leading to a change in action so what if you could just expand on you know this motivation wave and yeah how important is to understand that and be aware that our motivation and I guess our willpower will run out yeah you know what's interesting about the academic work on motivation as far as I can tell and I've looked really hard at it the research about how motivation works and the fact that it shifts up and down over time that was not studied or published until 2007 and it came out in two separate fields that year before that time I can find no academic work that talks about motivation shifting day by day hour by hour even moment by moment so it's not been part of the academic tradition but you know I know everyone knows motivation shifts over time it's really high at the beginning of the year it's higher on Sundays for some things it's higher days for other things motivation shifts around and so that somehow that just hadn't become part of the academic work the understanding that motivation shifts now one of the boot camps a number of years ago I was explaining this concept I didn't have a word for it yet but it's like yeah motivation will go up and it will peak and it's at those moments when it's high we can get ourselves to do hard things or other people that are hard things but it's gonna come down because that's how it works and I said let's name this and one of the guys at the boot camp and he's a doctor dr. David Sobel a friend of mine an MD was there a GP he's like let's call it motivation and wave and I was like thank you David it's perfect cuz it's like a wave goes up but you know it's coming back down some waves are bigger than others some are little ripples it's and so that's what that's what it's called in behavior design is the motivation wave and I guess that really feeds into this whole idea of helping people feel successful because if you know that your motivation will go down and that's the natural course of motivation then maybe hopefully people will stop beating themselves up when their motivations wane because I think I can't do it you know I'm just not motivated and if I don't have the willpower to do this and actually maybe again the language has been used in an unhelpful way because actually that is normal for most patients to come and go so in in the new program I've got out in feel better in five where every single health intervention takes five minutes max that's great awesome and you want to do more you can do more better thing you get the credit if you've done your five minutes and I save like when your motivation is high when you bought the book right use it to learn one of these I mean there's many things in the book but one of them are workouts you used your motivation to learn how to do this particular workouts right right so you learn it when you're most patients high but then after a few days of doing it you will know it you won't need to refer to the book you won't need to look at the video and so when your motivations low you're not gonna have to you know you're not gonna have to always come back and how do I do that because as soon as we add those steps the more steps we add the hot the easier is to say no to do that behavior and that's why I'm asking them to do do the same workout every day at the same time yeah yeah there's another 10 workouts in the book choose one mm-hmm that stick to it because then you're using what your research and science shows you're using you know all of these factors that you describe willpower motivation ease you know all the science fine how you create a new habit I think it's all in there it's sort of it's all built into the design of that program yeah I you know I'm excited to hear how it goes for your readers these five-minute workouts I think it's right on it's setting people up to succeed they choose the ones that they want to do and hopefully they keep the bar low they don't say oh I did five now I have to do 10 yeah you can do 10 or 15 you can knock it out of the park the days you're feeling motivated so from my research I draw general principles out of it and one of them is that behavior change is a skill it's a set of skills just like playing the piano or the guitar so you could say oh I have the skill of playing the piano well it's fingering it's instant its phrasing it is rhythm and so on people should look at behavior change in the same way it's a set of skills I map it into five categories and one of those skills is knowing when to push yourself further like do more than the two push-ups or more than five minutes and knowing when not to write because if you're just not into it you're busy you're sick just do the minimum congratulate yourself and move on but other times you'll want to push it and this is how habits that begin tiny can expand push-ups is pretty easy to understand so you do more push-ups to a point where it just barely starts hurting but not to the point where you hate it and so you learn how do you go to the edge and by going to the edge you expand your capacity and you expand your understanding oh I'm gonna push myself on push-ups oh I'm gonna go this far awesome but not so far that it really hurts now if you do push yourself into pain then if you celebrate extra hard if you go yeah my muscles are burning but good for me look how many I did and look what I did I then that seems to offset the the pain that would have caused the roots of the habit to shrivel so all this is to say that behavior change is a set of skills some people there's about 26 of them some people are better at others than the individual skills but one of them is knowing how to feel good about doing something really really small that's how mindsets go one of them is knowing when to push yourself and when not to I think this is incredibly empowering BJ because I don't think we've looked at behavior change or habit formation as a skill before I think people feel they've either got that ability or they don't and actually on many levels it is ugly the most important skill to learn because our behaviors impacts yes our health but our professional life our personal life our well-being our relationships it all comes on the back of human behavior ultimately everything is a downstream consequence of our behaviors and so if it is a trainable skill why are we not being taught how to do it well I don't know the answer that but in my work in tiny habits and other things coming out I'm mapping out those skills and helping people learn that understanding what the skills are and then learning to make them part of their life and you're so right you know why why isn't this taught to every ten-year-old yeah you know here the here are the skills of change and we're going to teach you we're gonna work on these three this quarter and next quarter we're gonna work on these three and and you're gonna learn just like you learn math or writing or a language we're gonna learn the skills of change I would love to see that yeah well I think you're pioneering work means that actually this is likely to happen because I think what was striking for me when studying your research but also at day one a boot camp yesterday and I'm looking forward to today to today a lot of fitness is common sense it's not common sense in the sense that you know who said that phrase the thing about common sense is not that common it's not necessarily common sense but it's it makes sense when you hear it you think yeah yeah I get that but nobody's really mapped it and the way they see what I think you're doing for me is providing a structure and a framework to start looking at this and then it can be taught then it can be scaled thank you and I also think you are incredibly modest about the impacts of your work because yes we mentioned Instagram at the start I know people from all kinds of tech giants have trained with you and use these skills for the you know for their own products you know I know James Claire came on the Tony have you know Joe yeah years ago when he's written a book atomic habits on you know again on how you create these habits and so I think you know to give you your due I think you are leading this field and I think you know I think you've inspired a lot of people to actually go on do some great things in the world but I think that would be a lovely thing in the future if these skills did get taught yeah yeah I mean I'm certainly gonna be thinking on my flight home how can i how can I teach my nine-year-old boy in my six-year-old girl some of these themes you know that will help them yeah yeah well and not just kids but doctors too you know what if what if physicians were trained in skills of change and so they could now what what happens just like learning the piano or guitar or whatever if you have a good coach or guide that person can take on some of the skills for you like when you're learning to play the piano choosing the right songs to practice is a skill and at the beginning a teacher does that for you same thing with habits you know picking the right habits for you is a skill and at the beginning you may want a doctor or coach to help you connect with the right habits over time you'll want to learn how to pick your own like what's the right habit for me another skill is how to troubleshoot a behavior that's not happening so if you intended to let's say text your mom every morning and it's not happening there's a systematic way to troubleshoot that and that's a skill and you first well what you don't do is beat your self up and say oh I like my devotion motivation I'm flaky you start with looking at what I call a prompt did you have anything to remind you to text your mom and if not then set up some prompt that reminds you if you are being reminded to do it and you still aren't doing then you still don't go to motivation you look at ability it's like oh is this too hard and you make it easier to do and then if you're being prompted and it's super easy at that point then you know it's a motivation problem and the best thing to do therefore have it you're creating for yourself is oh I really don't want this habit okay pick something out yeah so you just you match yourself as something else now why somebody wouldn't want to text their mom I don't know maybe that wasn't the best example but the point is there is a systematic way to troubleshoot and that is a skill and it's pretty easy to learn that skill is it is this skill something you teach in your books ah yes yes it's in tiny habits yes yeah so people who feel inspired by this and get right I want to learn that skill they can buy the book and they can actually learn how to do this not only for their health but probably for all kinds of different things in their life I'm guessing but in and it includes like your children people at work and so on let's say you want and one of your colleagues at work to do a behavior whether it's a habit or a one-time behavior and they're not doing it often people will just get upset which is a motivational strategy that's the wrong place to start you first go wow did that person have a prompt if not make sure there was something that prompted them or reminded them they still don't do it it's like oh maybe it's too hard to do so yeah you apply it to yourself but once you know the skills of change you can help other people more effectively now you've been just brilliant and I think intuitively gifted at helping people change and now you're seeing there's a system behind it and and that's a delight for me to see you connect what you've learned through your practice and you just being gifted in that way to say wow there's this is why this works this is why this works here's what the structure and system looks like you like a gifted singer or gifted chef have been able to be successful even without like hairlessness system and you know go from system my work is really about putting it out there and saying this is the system and this is how we apply it in positive ways and this is how we help people be happier and healthier so for me it's a delight to create the models and I do think a lot of the models and methods are like riddles once you see the answer it's obvious but until then it's a it's a puzzle hey it's impossible we both talk about simplicity don't we in terms of how important that is yeah in anything and I felt and I was chatting so some of my colleagues yesterday after the course finish and saying there's a such a deceptive simplicity in how you teach but there are so much complexity behind it but ultimately the way you deliver it is simple and I think simplicity is absolutely critical to get ideas across it is something I you know I know you work harder at something certainly as a with patients but also when writing these books I've been really have you sort of been wracking my head a thing how do you make this simpler had you been simpler and but I think when you really know something you can make it that simple I don't think you know as I call it deceptive simplicity well the the people I admire so you know influences Mozart Calder Picasso Charles Schulz all of those people took stuff and made really simple melodies or really simple line art or in the case of Charles Schulz cartoons that are deceptively simple they're very sophisticated psychologically so I look at people who have and I actually have a word for it I call it the feather principle it's the simplest thing with the biggest impact and I admire that music and art and in my own work I'm constantly pushing for that what's the simplest thing that will have the biggest impact and when I create a model if the model is complicated it's like it's not done yet it's not done yet it's a work in progress until there's an elegance that comes out of the model and once bam I hit where it's elegant meaning both simple and powerful then it's done if it's complicated it means it's a work in progress and I haven't solved the riddle yet and I see that over and over and the work that I do yes it reminds me that if but I talked about this four pillar approached a lot these four core areas of our health that I think have the most impact on how we feel but also we've got a high degree of control over food movements and realization it was the subjects of my very first book and after it came out a lot of people said oh you missed this fifth pillar or the sixth pillar what's really interesting is that if you've seen the kind of notes I made when great new book is they were all there yeah and it was just a it was trying to marry up effectiveness with simplicity yeah and so although people said oh you missed the pillar one connection I'm thinking well actually no I absorb that into the relaxation pillar with a few of the interventions but I purposely kept it at four because I felt once I get to five six seven it starts to become too complex to actually be practical in real life and it's there is something about simplicity I think but it's the same when creating a new habit right yeah yeah well let me let me give a it was probably about 2001 I'm at Stanford I'm at my research lab and this guy walks up to me I didn't know very well I knew who he was because it's kind of famous Patrick soubise he walks up to me and it's he said it's not about having the biggest most complicated ideas it's about making them actionable just out of the blue rock then he walks up to me and says it's about making your stuff actionable it's like okay first of all I don't even think he knows my work and why is he telling me this but it stuck with me at the same time you know my work I was looking at what's happening with technology and what would take off and I clearly saw the pattern in late 90s that the only things that really took off were drop dead simple so I was this huge fan of simplicity even before I had my behavior model and then Patrick sufis comes up and tells me this and I was like okay is my work actionable alone not so much and that really so I got obsessed with simplicity I mean it was natural anyway I mean I'm kind of that kind of guy and then that understanding of simplicity then Oh the door to creating the behavior model so I knew that is the factor I now call it ability but its simplicity or ease or capacity that's one of three factors that comprise a behavior and so with that as a stake in the ground the next day well there has to be motivation BAM that's the next factor and then third it was like prompt there has to be something that says do this now and there's only three things so every behavior is comprised of those three things and if you want to start a behavior or habit you have to make sure all three things are present some motivation you have to be able to do it and has to be a prompt if you want to stop a behavior you remove motivation or you make it harder to do your move ability or you take away the prompt it's the same set of the same components for any behavior whether you're starting it or stopping it whether it's a habit whether it's a one-time so once you see it that way that's kind of the Wow is it really that simple and the answer is yeah it is it always comes back to those three things yeah incredible and you're right you can literally apply that to every behavior so I've been seeing yesterday and through through your teachings yesterday I'll be thinking yeah you can pretty much applies to everything it really does marry up look be dumb I'm sort of conscious of your time and there is so much more I want to talk about but I know boot camp is starting relatively soon so yeah let's just quickly knock off a few things if we can research out there some suggest it takes 21 days to create a new habit some says 66 days I'm not convinced what is your view no that's that's they're looking at old paradigms of change they're looking at the idea that repetition it's not repetition it's emotions there are some things and I'm gonna push on this harder to help make it clear there are some things that are instant habits let's say I buy a new car and I really like that car how long does it take to drive that new car as my habit rather than the old car no time right immediately how long does it take a teenager to carry her mobile phone around you you give your teenage daughter mobile phone how long does that have a date no it doesn't so it's not it's not repetition it's the emotional experience that people have as they do the behavior and so yeah that whole thing about 21 days six six day that's just it's people that haven't looked at it from the right perspective that are pushing that forward another question you're pinned sweets at the moment Oh which I really really like I see if I can get it up because I can't remember it at the top of my head's I really liked this and how has it gone now here we go a company asks on my 2020 prediction here it is please don't be offended a movement to be post digital will emerge in 2020 we will start to realize that being chained to your mobile phone is a low status behavior similar to smoking no you have proven your track record in the past predicting what is gonna happen in technology why did you make that sweets I'm really hoping right so as I agree yeah yeah I'm really hoping so post digital probably isn't the right word but a backlash against always having your mobile phone out always taking a selfie being at dinner pulling out your phone that more and more I'm predicting will become something that people like no that's bad etiquette that's not what you do and even you know you know I spend half my time in Maui and I go to the beach a lot and it just drives me crazy when people are one of the most beautiful places on earth and there they are on there I don't know what they're doing on their mobile phone it's like look out you see Wells you see Turtles and so the idea that doing this people will more and more understand that this is not like being cool to do this this is a low status behavior and I hope with that new framing and understanding that people will then not be so compelled to do it and then when they do do it they will kind of go like oh I need to step out and check my phone just like people do that around smoking and so I do think that will happen I think we can help accelerate that no I love that yeah I love that I agree with it and I think that is coming final question then is we are in your house behind us and for those of you watching it on YouTube I know most people listen to it there's a as ukuleles as guitars as piano there's this gorgeous what's that device called again it's called a vast drum posture I mean just absolutely yeah absolutely incredible we're probably now time to really unpack this but you were saying at the start that learning a musical instruments super important yeah why is that well for me you know life can be really hard it's hard for everybody even if you see somebody think they have their act together they still have hard things and so for me what totally helps me is being in nature and playing musical instruments I know that I was sort of forced to play piano growing up because my mom super Musical and I did it to be a dutiful son but I think that training was really helpful for me lots of ways cuz you're a musician you know this that you're not gonna be perfect you have a new song you're not gonna be you're gonna make tons of mistakes and that's helpful in behavior change you're not going to be perfect you're gonna make mistakes and that's okay and it's part of the process you're gonna get better if you practice in the right way and so on so I think the skills and the insights that you get from learning to play an instrument or learning to do anything you can then apply those same skills or ways of thinking toward behavior change once you recognize the behavior change is yes exactly yeah well look BJ I really want to thank you again for the incredible work you have done you are again changing the lives of many many people around the globe many people will have been influenced by your work and frankly will not be aware that they've been influenced by your work I think people should go out and buy your book Tony habits I think it's an incredible insight into how you create a new behavior and it's gonna help me a lot of people this podcast is called feel better live more it's again deceptively simple and so when you feel better in yourself you get more out of life I always like to leave my listeners with some top actionable tips simple things that they can think about applying into their own life immediately you have a wealth of experience of well technology do you have a few simple tips you can share you probably already mention them yeah but just to inspire them to take action yeah let me give three and top-of-mind one start every day that as soon as your feet hit the floor in the morning as soon as you're standing up say it's going to be a great des and I know that sounds hokey like a California woowoo hit the affirmation thing but try it and what that habit does is it starts your day in the best possible way in my book there's only one habit I tell people how to create any habit they want but there's only one habit I prescribe it's that one I call it the Maui habit and you say it's going to be a great day and if you don't believe it's going to be a great day still I mean there's days where I'm like ah is gonna be so hard I say it's going to be a great day somehow but I say it one do that number two when you're frustrated with somebody well there's somebody that's driving or somebody to check out a line or your spouse or your child let that be your prompt to think everybody's doing the best they can nobody tries to screw up and I find that in my life that is so helpful to have empathy and patience with people's like nobody tries to scroat they're doing the best they can given what's going on with them so I find that helpful really tactical and very specific one habit it's similar to the tea kettle one you recommended is as soon as you turn on the shower have that be your reminder to think of one positive thing about your body so I shower at night most people maybe wear the night or morning doesn't matter but as soon as you turn it on you gotta wait for a few seconds for it to get warm unless you're in cold showers I don't love cold showers while you're waiting use that I call it a meanwhile habit use that time to think of one positive thing about your body whether it's oh I have a cut at heel there my skin is flexible or I really like you know whatever it is you know my fingernails well think find one new thing every time it's easy to do and what I think the bigger effect is I know I haven't studied this directly but I would wager the bigger effect then is you then start appreciating this marvelous thing that is your body and you start appreciating in new ways and every day you're looking at it from a different angle so those would be three things I love them BJ that brilliance hips I'm supposed to feel bored with them that's simple that easy I would encourage people to choose at least one of them go away I'm gonna commit to doing that video there's so much I wanted to talk to you about what you did out of time for today maybe when you are in London and a few guys come in to promote your book maybe we can get together again and let them maybe continue this or maybe even do a live event together let's see if we can hook something up but thank you for the what you're doing thank you for making time and thank you for coming on the podcast thank you press subscribe to get more inspiration and ideas on how to feel better so you can get more out of life and if you have a moment why not check out this conversation that I've picked out as a perfect follower remember lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better you've lived more

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 54,370

Keywords: The Four Pillar Plan, NHS, GP, Four Pillar Plan, lifestyle medicine, the stress solution, feel better in 5, feel better live more, fblm, health, paleo, wellness, drchatterjee, rangan chatterjee, how to make disease disappear, low carb, vegan, keto, podcast, apple podcast, obesity, type 2 diabetes, joe rogan, sleep, jay shetty, health advice, richroll, therichrollpodcast, habits, routine, motivation, behaviour change, BJ Fogg, Professor BJ Fogg, human behaviour, success, pandemic, coronavirus

Id: ql5z5-FLdCw

Length: 76min 5sec (4565 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020