Tiny Habits for Happier Living - with BJ Fogg

great to see uh so many thousands of you joining us uh and and already welcoming each other on the chat uh lovely to be with you and this global community again my name is mark williamson and welcome to another action for happiness event and i'm delighted that this evening or whatever time of day it is with you around the world we are joined by bj fogg bj lovely to have you with us mark thank you so much i am delighted to be here well it's it's great to have you here and i'm really excited to be sharing your work um i'm sure lots of people in this community are already aware of what you've been doing but for anyone who isn't bj is a behavior scientist at stanford but as well as being an academic spends a lot of his time working in industry and really turning his research into very practical things and i think we're going to really see that in action this evening where we're going to not only understand the science of habits and behavior but also how we can apply that in our lives so we've called this event tiny habits for happier living tiny habits is bj's fantastic book and work and of course we're all about creating a happier world with action for happiness so it seems like a lovely marriage of two uh sets of thinking and objectives so uh bj i was just gonna say a little bit to the audience about the plans and then i'd love to just dive straight into a conversation so um for those of you who are coming back thank you for being here again for those of you who are new um very warm welcome we'll have a chance to have some interactive stuff during our conversation where you can get involved on the chat and we'll also have a chance to ask some questions to bj so please do use the q a function and if you see another question you like use the upvote feature so you can say that's one i'd love to see answered too and uh in the interim i'll be asking bj a few questions that i've been longing to ask which i really hope are relevant for all of you so bj there's all kinds of ways we could come into this but i guess what's on my mind is habits uh why why do we have habits and why is this area so important yeah i mean one way to think about it is if you have a dog if you have a cat even if you're a careful observer of birds and nature you'll see that all these creatures have habits so it's not a huge surprise that we human beings have habits too and people have written about this this is not my work but other people have written about it and habits make us more efficient uh habits offload the cognitive functions so for things we need to think hard about or make decisions about we have the resources to do that because habits are essentially automated behaviors you don't have to think about how you're going to tie your shoe you don't have to think about which side of the bed you're sleeping on you don't even have to think about how you're going to pronounce words okay i pronounced them one way a lot of people are pronouncing differently those are all types of habits and it allows us rather than me thinking about the words i hopefully i'm thinking about the content so um it really does make us more efficient and it's just part of of nature to have habits so naturally we all haven't got these wonderful habits some of which we're very conscious of some of which are very automatic lots of us would love to create new habits or resist habits that we wish we didn't have and so on so i guess why your work is so relevant is it feels like you've really got into the guts of not only why do we have habits but how can we build a new habit particularly that we might want to encourage but i know there's some misunderstanding about habits and myths that we tend to tell ourselves about why this is hard or what can or can't be done maybe you'd like to sort of remind us of what some of those misconceptions are until that's right yeah and before i hit a couple misconceptions let me lay some groundwork so if you were to draw if i had a white word right here i would draw a big circle and i would write behavior so there's all sorts of behavior types i put a smaller circle inside of that and write habits so habits are a type of behavior the bigger status behavior and habits are the behaviors you do quite automatically without thinking very much and then there's one-time actions and there's stopping and there's temporary behaviors and so on so habit is a type of behavior that's how i see it now that said in english the word habit is ambiguous some people will say oh i make it a habit of being mindful well being mindful is an abstract thing it's not actually a behavior but we use the word in that way to mean something kind of oh i eat healthy or i'm mindful or i take care of myself well those are abstract things they're not actually behaviors but we use the word habit for that so just understand that sometimes when people use the word habit they're not talking about a specific behavior they're talking about a general approach to life perhaps so it's an ambiguous word we're kind of stuck with it the academic research and the tradition around habits has really confused people one of the misconceptions about habits is that they're hard to form they're not hard to form some habits are really easy some habits are really hard and there's a whole bunch in the middle so we're forming habits all the time whether we're designing for them or not and so people that say oh only do one habit at a time that's not true and then so misconception number one is that habits are hard to form misconception number two is you only conform one habit at a time that's not true and misconception number three is the idea that repetition is what creates the habit that's not true if there's there's been some books some very very popular books that promote this myth and a lot of bloggers if you want to look up the research that they cite i'm just going to give you the citation and you can see for yourself that the science doesn't say repetition creates habits look at lolli 2009 so go into your web browser type l-a-l-l-y 2009 you'll find the study that's cited that says 66 days and people are saying 66 days to create a habit that study is not causal it's correlation and so it does not say that repetition creates habits and one of the chapters in my book and i wanted to make it super clear so one of the the chapter titles is emotions create habits so what create habits for us and other creatures is the emotional experience we have when we do that behavior and if it's a feeling of success or more generally a positive feeling and it could also be a feeling of release of anxiety that those are it's emotions that cause behaviors to be more automatic so markle stopped there there's a host of other myths and misleading things about habits out there but those are some of the most common ones i think that's really encouraging bridget and as well as being helpful this idea that we we think it's really hard but actually sometimes maybe what you're saying is we haven't yet found the the type of habit formation that gives us the emotional experience that will make it stick and i if i think back to habits i've formed often as exactly as you say it's been that feels good or i enjoyed that or wow that helped me feel something different has been something that's led to it lasting although i also noticed that some of my changes in habits have come from like a big aha wake up moment of like oh my goodness i see the world differently i will never eat sugar again or i will whatever meditate every day um and some come from little tiny steps like oh if i you know remember to you know put my bike helmet in my work bag i'm more likely to cycle to work so yeah well that feels like there's a whole range of quite big to quite small here where does your work fit in that yeah so i started teaching tiny habits in 2011 in a free five-day course that still existed 18 days later and in the very very first session in 2011 uh i in the instructions i said there's three ways to change your behavior for the long term number one is to have an epiphany you kind of like what you're describing mark but i said then and i say now don't rely on that yes epiphanies happen but you can't make yourself have an epiphany so if you've had one good for you it can help you change that can help you see the world differently but too often people that are trying to their students or their spouses their kids create new habits you try to give them an epiphany and you know that's not very successful so i say take that off the table that leaves you with two others one is to redesign your environment to make good behaviors easy to do and the bad behavior is hard to do and the other is to change an incremental ways and in this case the tiny habits method so really you've got two levers to work with redesigning your environment and an incremental change method baby steps and in this case i'm talking about tiny habits as a method for creating habits so just to say to everyone watching i've already seen people asking the chat is this being recorded yes you'll have access to be able to watch this again afterwards and also some of the things that bj's mentioning here so his book but also this free introductory program we'll make sure you have access to links to those in the follow-ups as well so you can focus on what we're talking about now before we dive into some examples and i love this idea you use of recipes for habit formation bj um just to pick up on that emotions thing again so that makes me feel that when we have created a habit that we'd like to make last it might help to create a positive emotional experience about that you know to celebrate it in some way what what have you learned about how that how to make that work well mark what i learned started out as an accident okay so this is probably about 2010 where my life was really really hard in fact my life was so challenging at that time i don't think i've this is not in my book and i don't think i've even shared this in discussion so this is new in my home office um where i worked mostly i got life-sized pictures of people's heads smiling and i wallpapered all around the top of the office all these smiling faces around me to help uplift my mood i mean that's how tough things were that i was just like i need positivity around me well in playing around with my own behavior and before the tiny habits method all came together and this is the very beginning i was working on flossing and i was like okay just floss one tooth and there was this moment when i flossed one tooth and i looked in the mirror and i was like good for you bj victory if everything else goes wrong today you got this one thing right good for you and i noticed that that had an effect on me and i was like that's odd and so i kept playing around with victory or good for you or smiling fast forward to oh a few months later that became an official technique of tiny habits when you do a new behavior that you want to become a habit you hack your emotion in some way so your brain can pair that you behave positive emotion and in other words you are hacking the speed of habit formation and there's well over 100 ways to do this some are physical some are verbal some are thoughtful you can even think about your life's purpose like how does drinking water help me achieve a really important life purpose so what you're doing in the tiny habits method is you're not leaving that emotional reaction to chance you are self-reinforcing by hacking your own emotion and we call that celebration and there's a bunch of ways to do that it's different for different people i imagine for me in california the kind of celebrations i do will be very different than the people in the uk and i don't just imagine that i know that because i've worked with hundreds hundreds of people from the uk there are ways you can celebrate that don't feel phony and don't feel odd and you just part of the skill of habit formation is finding celebrations that work for you finding ways that on demand you can fire off a positive emotion right well you've talked a lot about this um tiny habits sort of method and system maybe you could give us a few examples of tiny habits and how they can be formed and reinforced yeah so the good news everybody is the tiny habits method is a system and it doesn't require recall it doesn't require willpower or lots of motivation um and what you're essentially doing is you're designing the habits into your life you're not just picking something abstract and forcing it in you're designing it into your life just like you said where should this plant go where should this picture go where do we put this new chair where am i going to store my pins and so on so it's a design opportunity not a willpower challenge i'll say that again with tiny habits it's a design opportunity maybe a design challenge but it's not a willpower thing and it's not a motivation thing so in tiny habits there's a format that i call a recipe and i'm going to read some just out of my book to give you an idea of the recipes and how they sound i'll give you a few classic ones before i read some examples after i brush my teeth i will floss one tooth okay i already brushed my teeth and then flossing i designed to come after brushing um another one that people kind of laugh at but it's true is after i pee i will do two push-ups so yeah i pee throughout the day we all do and then i want to say well where does push-ups fit in my life and oddly enough it fits after i use the toilet when i'm at home when i'm at stanford or traveling that is let me read some other ones um and there's 300 examples in the back of the book uh and i'm just going to turn to gal i'm going to turn to kind of a heavy one and then i'll these are tiny habits for caregivers um after i feed the dog i will read at least one verse from the new testament okay so the new habit is reading from the new testament and this caregiver already feeds the dog after i see my partner has made me breakfast i will give him a big hug before sitting down and eating um and see after i give mom a medication i will note it in my care journal so i specifically wanted to suggest some tiny habit recipes for caregivers um here we go i'm going to flip to another page tiny habits for reducing stress uh after i wake up in the morning i will open a window and take a few deep breaths and i'll skim down after i run my bath i will put in a few drops of essential oils after i get in bed i will close my eyes and chant om okay so there's a whole bunch of ways that you can change your behavior but using this recipe format so you are designing it into your life make sure i understand this um dj it seems to me that you're saying pick a thing that you know you already do that's really concrete and specific that's part of your life already and then bring in a new thing that you would like to do directly next to it is that kind of the imagination right it comes right after it and that to me i've given a ted talk on this insight that i had that was not obvious to me but as i was playing around with my own behavior when i had all those faces around me in my home office it came to me uh that the secret is after what does this new habit naturally come after and so you create this recipe if it's like after i feed my dog i'll read from the new testament if that doesn't work that's okay redesign and say well where else would be a good time for me to read from the new testament and it might be after i put my kid down for a nap i will so you take if it doesn't fit after feeding the dog then you say well where does it fit just like if you buy a new chair and you're like where does it fit in our home and you put it here and it doesn't work but you don't beat yourself up you don't say i lack willpower motivation you just redesign and that's part of the tiny habits method is you design and you redesign so iterating is part of the method where you're designing it so it fits really naturally into your life this is great so what i'd love us to do is invite everyone who's part of this event this evening uh to maybe think about coming up with our own little tiny habit recipe using that approach so i guess bj is this is the starting point to think of a a habit you would love to cultivate first and then once you've got that in mind then think about an existing behavior that you can hook it on to is that the right way around to approach it yeah there's actually two starting points mark earlier you you um explained one you can just pick a very very reliable routine in your life like starting the coffee maker or putting on your shoes or saying goodbye to your spouse and then say what new habit would come naturally after that so you start with your routine that's one way and in some ways that's the easiest the other approach is to take any new habits you want make it super tiny and then say where does this fit naturally in my life so you're starting with a habit rather than the routine either way works great so why don't we try this out folks i can see a couple of people have already done this in the chat so i would love to see some people's suggestions this could be things you already do if you do this sort of habit bundling approach or it could be something that you've been inspired by so you know either either thinking of an existing thing you do and what you'd like to add to it or thinking of a habit you'd love to cultivate and which of your existing behaviors you can attach it to and we'll just see a few so please feel free to share in the chat if you'd like i'm i'm seeing some great recipes here in the chat i mean you guys are doing great uh what we're hoping is i'll find some recipes that i can help you fine-tune but let me call out some of the good ones aisha says and i'm going to change wind to after after i get in bed i will think of three things that i'm grateful for that's a terrific habit now aisha on that one i might scale it back to one so after i get in bed i'll think of one thing i'm grateful for and if you want to think of two more that's great count that as extra credit so in the tiny habits method you set the bar as low as possible so don't set it higher with three things that you're going to be grateful just one and if you want to do more that's extra credit just like for me the push-ups two push-ups but i almost always do more and i've done this for years now and i don't raise the bar so in the tiny habits method you set the bar low one expression of gratitude two push-ups and then you allow yourself to do more when you want to which includes the very first day the very first day if you want to do 10 push-ups knock yourself out but you don't raise the bar on yourself you keep it low that's one of the hacks in this on the same on a similar theme to your push-ups uh susan i said after i start in the microwave for my breakfast i will lift my hand weights while the microwave is running that one has a very very good chance of working if you put the hand weights right by the microwave okay so take your hand it's put them by the microwave and i call this a meanwhile habit because meanwhile while you're waiting for the microwave you can be using the hand weights and so these kinds of fixed maybe that's like two or three minutes are excellent opportunities for habits one of mine like that is after i turn on the shower i think of one thing about my body for which i'm grateful because i'm waiting for the water to warm up for about 15 seconds it's a perfect little window of time for me to think about something new or something different about my body for which i'm grateful and that day after day can have a really powerful effect just like lifting hand weights uh a little bit while the microwave is running can not only have effects on you there but it's going to have ripple effects you're going to start doing other behaviors along those lines naturally i love it i've seen a couple of others andy said after i enter my bedroom i will take five deep breaths that that that that's a good one and andy you may want to you may if you enter your bedroom 10 or 15 times a day that ends up not being i i know from coaching thousands of people personally in tiny habits um if you go into your bedrooms like 10 times a day so 10 times a day you're taking five breaths your brain will go no no that's not tiny that's big so what you might do is after i take uh the bed off the bed at night i'll take five deep breaths okay so then you're just doing it once and your brain's not like adding it all up it's like oh five breaths that's easy to do and you might even scale it back to three which is simpler than five and then the times you want to do five or more go for it so you're you're exactly you're right on track and i'm just kind of fine-tuning it a little bit for you so it feels to me that being really crystal clear about the trigger and the behavior but also really simplifying is what helps make this last is that right yeah and let me explain why mark and this is one of the hacks and the tiny habits method you make it as tiny as possible but it still needs to have some meaning and tiny means it's easy to do and when the behavior is easy to do then your motivation doesn't have to be high or even middle it can be quite low and you can still do the two push-ups or still lift the hand weights or still take three breaths so one of the hacks of tiny habits is you design for consistency now our motivation is not consistent it goes up and it goes down and so on and when your motivation is low you cannot do hard things but you can still do tiny things so that's what you're doing by making it so simple is you are doing an end run or you're getting around the fact that our motivation fluctuates and you're designing for yourself in your hardest moments or when you're the busiest or when you're the most stressed you can still do the habit just even the tiny version three breasts two push-ups etc but anytime you want to do more you can do more and that's the tiny habits method gives you lots of flexibility so it's about consistency but anytime you want to do 10 push-ups or 20 push-ups or lift your hand weights for 15 minutes rather than two go for it but again you don't raise the bar you don't think oh now my new level's up here no no no that's not the tiny habits method you set the bar low and you keep it low and you allow yourself to succeed every day on that so there's another one here from justine which i really love because it's something i really struggle with personally i suspect lots of us do which is good intentions and good habits are all well and good the hardest time though is when we're in a difficult emotional state and and justine's word of this in a really i think really helpful way said when i feel triggered i guess when using your language after something has happened that has triggered an emotional response for me i will take three deep breaths before speaking or reacting now i love that and i would love to be able to commit to that but i find it incredible unlike a behavior like waking up turning on the coffee machine whatever you don't quite know when it's going to come up and actually when it does happen and you feel triggered and you feel angry your brain's caught up in that moment not necessarily remembering your habits so i i totally love to be able to do what justine has said here but i would imagine i would find it really hard to remember that in that moment of anger or fear or anxiety yeah well there's a way to to help yourself on this and i think it was justine right um what you're talking about is a more advanced technique and tiny habits um what we've talked about at this point are very concrete specific things like feed the after i feed the dog after i brush my teeth after i start the coffee maker you know when those things happen you push the button on the coffee maker but you can use emotions it's a more advanced technique but you can use emotions after i feel discouraged after i feel angry i will now it's a harder technique because sometimes we don't notice right away that we're frustrated or angry and so on um i'll just share one from my life after i'm feeling stressed out i will go outside and walk around in nature all right so that's become super wired in um if so design the tiny habit recipe and figure out you know after i get upset i will take three deep breaths i will put on a happy music playlist whatever and if that doesn't happen reliably you can revise it and you or you can also rehearse the sequence and i know this is going to sound crazy to people but what you can do to help habits form quickly is you rehearse them over and over just like people rehearse shooting basketball free throws or putting or you know swimming starts i mean adam peaty the awesome awesome breaststroker the best stroker ever in the history of i'm a breast joker and oh my gosh i have been just so admiring how many times since he practiced his starts and turns so he's practiced it so in that moment in the olympics he doesn't have to think what he's doing is automatic i bring the same idea into habits now with the case of after i feel angry i will take three breaths you can't you know make yourself feel angry so you kind of have to pretend in that case after i feel angry i will do this and you rehearse it maybe take three or four minutes rehearse it over and over seven to ten times and then later when you get angry watch what happens and i will wager there's a good chance that you will go back to that sequence that you practiced now there's other types of habits that are physical like after i start the microwave i'll lift my hand weights well you can rehearse that you can start the microwave lift the hand weights reset it do it again reset it again i know it sounds crazy but this helps why inhabit if you celebrate after each time so i lift the hand aways and go good for me or whatever your celebration is so those of you that have rehearsed whether it's music or sports or drama bring that same concept into habits and rehearse your habits drill on them especially these more challenging ones with the motions so you get your brain connecting wow after i get angry i'm going to take three deep breaths and then i'm gonna feel good all right so that's what you want your brain to recognize so the next time you're angry it will go into that mode now if it doesn't happen the next time rehearse it a bit more and so that's a more advanced technique is using emotions the rehearsal aspect of habits is something that you could do at the beginning honestly most people don't and the tiny habits coaches in fact at least one of our coaches is here in the audience today i'm richard and others um usually we will use that when somebody is having trouble remembering the habit then we say okay now rehearse it you know do drill over and over with celebration to help wire it in to your brain so bj this is this is really helpful um as you know in our work with action for happiness we have a framework called the ten keys to happier living it comes from a whole range of science and insight and it has these you know great categories where we can take action to be happier to help others whether that's about our relationships our resilience our sense of meaning and purpose and they're all fantastic in a general sense but actually what you're showing us i think is that in terms of building those kind of ideas into our daily lives we need to make them specific and also personal to us so i wonder if we can perhaps look at some of the quite commonly uh focused on happiness areas and maybe think about what some examples of tiny habits might be so one that's always really close to my heart is giving like we know that when we do things for others it's also great for our happiness as well as the other person yeah many of us find that hard i mean some people are natural givers constantly but some of some people and i've struggled with this at times in a busy day of things you need to do we often miss the chance to to give to help to look out for others what's the tiny hamburgers approach to giving and helping i'm so excited i'm giving you three quick ones because first of all i love the 10 categories this is brilliant work and i know you've broken it down to make it more specific in the category of giving one of mine so i do i do a bunch of phone calls every week with free phone calls 15 minutes people creating products and i've done this for years i've done about 5 000 of these so one of my tiny habits is after they say hello i say how can i help you that's always the first thing i say how can i help you number one next example um let's say you're at a family reunion and somebody says something the way i think you give to them is you say that's interesting tell me more so you're giving them attention i just got off a week of vacation and memory reunions and that is so powerful to let them tell more you're giving them the spotlight basically and the third example that i really like is and i think of it i do this when i'm checking out at a store the person that's helping me i try to i look at the person that's helping me i try to tell them something positive and true about them whether it's how what they're doing what they're wearing whatever so i give a compliment to the person that's helping me and that just that makes my day in some ways because i know for some people it might be the only positive thing they hear all day so it could be a literal gift but it also could be attention or it could just be recognizing somebody who's helping you and calling that out quite deliberately i feel such a warm glow after hearing all three of those bj that's so nice to have and how can i help you tell me more about that but also that authentic compliment that's just a lovely embodiment of i think what lots of us in this community stand for but also incredibly practical and simple so that's that's about love for others if you like another thing lots of us struggle with is self-love you know we have an inner critic we have a harsh voice one of the keys to happy living that we talk about is acceptance that sort of ability to be okay with yourself as you are which is quite easy to say but very hard to do in a world especially of social comparison on social media and seeing these other people's perfect lives so quite a lot of that goes on in our heads it's almost like a habit of talking to ourselves i mean i i was shocked to find how rude i can be to myself you effing idiot and all these sort of things i say to myself are there little tiny habits approaches to sort of being kinder to ourselves as well as others yes yes absolutely and i have some tiny habits coaches who have specialized in this how to use tiny habits to calm the inner critic to stop that chatter inside your head one of the habits that i've done for years is after i've underperformed after i feel like i've underperformed i will say everybody does the best they can nobody tries to screw up so i just i say that not in the first person like i'm doing the best i can i don't try to screw up i don't know why saying it in more the third person works better for me like everyone does the best they can nobody tries to screw up that just helps me go yeah i did the best code i didn't try to screw up and that helps me now i also use that with other people that i get frustrated with whether they're driving irrationally or they're making me wait to get off the plane or whatever like i just flew back you know i'm flying stressful and somebody's in your way and it seems like they're not really trying to get off the plane rather than get upset it's just inside your head say everyone does the best they can nobody tries to scrub that works for me now there's a bunch of other ways to do that and give yourself um compassion and understanding um so there's a lot more there but um that that's one of those one from the chat louise has just written something which i think very much echoes what you said a moment ago she says after i make a mistake i say to myself i love you anyway which i think is lovely i'm gonna try that thank you and and this is why this is why i love these examples here so tiny habits the book is how to create habits but it doesn't tell you exactly what habits to form because i didn't feel like it was my role to say here are the habits you should have so i tell you how but you gotta find the what like what habits and hearing these and seeing those in the chat are excellent and and what you've done with these ten areas and the specifics is really guiding people toward the what whereas tiny habits is the how so with the what to do to be happy now you have the how to make them habits and putting them together which is why talking to you and talking to everybody is a big deal for me we're bringing both of the pieces together well in a moment bj i want to come on to some of these great questions that people have been posting uh or indeed voting up on other people's questions but i just before we leave this what's been a fascinating thread um it feels to me from what i've seen of you saying is is that this is sort of about experimentation in that you find things you do anyway and you find things you want to do and you try piecing them together but you observe and it's a sort of self-awareness project really because you find what does work but you also notice what doesn't work and you what i've loved is hearing you riff off people's comments in the chat and thinking oh i'll try that myself it shows that you're still very much treating this like an ongoing project for yourself too is that right is this about sort of revising as we go along and keeping on experimenting yeah from probably week one or two in 2011 when i was teaching the five-day email course again which still exists you can join that um practice and revise i kept telling people practice and revise in other words just dive in do it and if it doesn't work revise and i would say revision is part of the method revision in fact mark the title of my book almost almost was going to be the change lab to emphasize this everything you're experimenting on yourself we decided to call it tiny habits instead but what i like about the idea and the practice uh is part of the method it means you don't have to be perfect in fact almost nobody is perfect in doing this you will perform in ways that are suboptimal and that's okay that's normal but you just it's just like a baby learning to walk no baby just suddenly walks right the baby takes little steps and stumbles put the baby back up it's gonna be with your habits you'll take little steps and you'll stumble but then you just get back up and you keep going and that's that's exactly right that's how the method works well that's actually a nice lead into what's been our most popular and upvoted question so far from georgina who asks what's your advice to reboot yourself when you're lacking motivation or you fail to maintain habits i guess you know it's always lovely to look at the easy examples but sometimes we try and use all these systems and and still find that we've that life's got in the way so how do we how do we reboot when we're in that situation i'll give you two very different answers and it's going to be different for different people the one i like the best if i have the time is i go out into nature for me nature is rejuvenating restorative it helps me reprioritize i live in california by a river i deliberately moved here out of silicon valley so i could be by a river and all the wildlife and in maui i live by the ocean so i know that can't be true for everybody but find a way that you can connect with nature at least for me that's very restorative and it rejuvenates me that's one approach now i'm going to give you a totally different approach a different approach when you're lagging motivation on something is to get a timer and i'll get my timer out of here oh i took it in the other room where i teach i have this little timer i can just use apple watch and i'll say you know set a timer for two minutes and what i will do is just say just work on this project for two minutes and when two minutes is up you can quit sometimes it's five sometimes it's seven so the tiny habit recipe becomes after i feel discouraged or after i find myself procrastinating i will set a timer and just do that period of time while there's two five one but you will find much of the time that when the timer goes off you've regained momentum you've regained some motivation for the project so again two very different approaches nature more of a deeper regenerate and the other one is really tactical just get yourself to do the next step and if you want to stop working after the timer goes off stop but most of the time you'll keep going you've gotten yourself to get through that rough patch uh as you're talking about timers in time i just wanted to bring in a question that didn't come from the q a but i saw in the chat um from heidi who said how can i go to bed earlier i've tried so many ways setting alarms setting three alarms with kind messages to myself it seems at that point i don't see the problem but in the morning that i do and i imagine there's a few of us who deal with late yeah which i certainly have done i'll i'll give you my personal opinion again tiny habits in my work is about the how to create habits but then when it gets down to financial behaviors and going to bed that's sort of what's in the techniques um so stay tuned for how people have hacked that um one way i think my partner he wants to go to bed like 7 30 okay so we go to bed really early but then we get up at like 4 30 without an alarm so one way is you can marry or partner with somebody who loves to go to bed early and they're like let's go to bed um another way is to just start your nighttime routine and and this has worked for a lot of people um you know after i finish let's say let's say you watch the office you watch one the uk version of the office one episode after i finish watching one episode i will start my nightly routine just start your routine and if you don't want to continue it if you want to stay up that's okay i mean in the tiny habits way you take the first step which often cascades to other steps this getting yourself to go to bed earlier is a very personal kind of thing i've not had to struggle with that personally and i've not done academic research on it so i want to be clear that i'm just sharing some personal experiences and what i've heard some of the habiteers but keep exploring options i want to be clear about what i know for sure and where i'm just drawing off some experience but not deep research and this going to bed earlier i've not done academic studies on that my personal experience on this one is that i was always a night owl sort of staying up late and and my wife also goes to bed slightly earlier than me and i found that when i stopped to notice how effective i felt in the morning on nights when i got to bed late as opposed to going to bed early i realized i i saw the difference and that was the motivator that then said right well i'll i'll bring that to mind when i'm coming towards that time again the following day but easiest have been done well mark here's one that i have done in my life and and i can stand behind this there are times in the middle of night that i want to get up because i'm just feeling restless and so what i do is i that tiny habit recipe is after i want to get up so let's say i'm sitting on the edge of the bed i will lay back down for 15 seconds and if i still want to get up i do but most of the time after i lay down i'm like oh this is so great so maybe try that just like you know find a point get in bed but if you feel like you want to get back out then do it a lot of these habits if you design this what we call the starter step in tiny habits the starter step for exercise is putting on your exercise shoes the starter step for eating a healthy lunch might be just getting out the components for a salad the starter step for paying your bills might just be getting out your checkbook and your bills so you get yourself to do the first step and if that's all you do that's fine but a lot of the times when you do that first step you put on your walking shoes in fact one of my friends posted this to facebook she's like well i put on my walking shoes i'm gonna go walking and so she's now she's local and she's not a close friend but she apparently just discovered my work and she's posting it on facebook she is running more and more making progress and she's getting back to what she could do 20 years ago which delights me but her tiny habit recipe was simply about putting on her running shoes which then has opened the door to all these other things for her katie's asked a really interesting question how do you create a positive experience around a habit that's a necessary evil i.e something you really need to do but you don't enjoy that's a tough one that's there's no perfect whale start there mostly with tiny habits you pick behaviors you want or habits you want not the shoulds but there are cases where you have the shoulds and i call those queen bee behaviors i won't go to all the reasons those are called queen b the best thing you can do is make it as easy as possible so focus on how do i make this super super easy if it's a medication make it really easy to take that medication if it's some sort of um biometric measure that you have to do like measure your blood pressure have the blood pressure cuff out and ready to go so first of all make it really really easy find where does this fit naturally in your life and i will suggest this as you're doing let's say it's measuring your blood pressure as you're measuring your blood pressure focus on what high very important purpose in your life is that fulfilling so in other words even though you don't love the squeezing of the blood pressure cuff on your arm or the time it takes if your brain can associate that behavior with something that's very important to you so you're aligning the habit with an aspiration or a dream or your life's mission um that can help make the behavior more automatic and help you understand why you might have to endure a little bit of discomfort from that habit but you have honed in on one of the challenging areas of habit formation shoulds rarely become habits and things that are painful or awkward are really hard to put into habits so make it really really simple find where it fits and then celebrate really hard by focusing on what higher purpose or what very important outcome is this helping you achieve so so it's sort of turning the should into a something that is meaningful to you and that gives you a sense of fulfillment even if it isn't enjoyable in a conventional pleasure sense yeah that's really wise thank you now there's a sort of elephant in the room here bj which is we've talked a lot about habit formation and i know that you know you're really focused on the idea of performing positive new habits but as i'm sure you often encounter in these sessions there's no no end of people asking some version of this question from melissa what's the key for breaking unhelpful habits so i think i should request that as well in general the key is to not use the word break and say untangle the bad habit so that and i talk about this in my book but that shift in wording will set you up for success much better than breaking like breaking is like in one moment with a lot of effort and energy you're done it's broken that's not how it works you know that's not how it works whereas if you think of it as untangling an unwanted habit let's say snacking unhealthy snacking that's not just probably one behavior there's probably different kinds of snacking you do during the day and so in the book i give a step by oh by the way the book has in the back they wouldn't let me put it in the book itself like flow charts and diagrams and all of this is a system people and my editors didn't want me to put flowcharts in the book itself so in the appendices you will find a flowchart exactly for this how do you untangle an unwanted habit and once you figure out what those different tangles are you work on the easiest one first not the hardest the easiest one first just like if my phone cord were all tangled up i don't go to the hardest angle i go to the easiest one then the next easiest one and so on so it's a process which is why i like untangle now that said if there is a habit that is life-threatening like some sort of an addiction that's damaging your life get professional help that you need absolutely i mean i just don't want to pretend like tiny habits or any book i mean there's no proven way to break bad habits there's a very popular book that says it on the cover that is not true there's no proven way there's different ways to approach it but there's no one proven way forming habits is relatively simple compared to breaking habits and a more sophisticated ways to think about it as untangling and it's different for different types of habits and again if it's life-threatening or harming your life find the professional who specializes in that kind of thing i can't say that enough i lost a nephew about 10 years ago to an accidental drug overdose and when that happened in our family we resolved that we would never keep that secret i mean there's some there was some stigma less so but still stigma around that but it has made me take the issue very very seriously this was before i was working very much on habits and certainly i wasn't working on breaking habits but these things can be really serious and life-threatening so so invest the time and effort that's needed and that often includes bringing in the right kind of professional to help you or help a loved one so you don't have a devastating outcome like we had years ago in my family well i'm really sorry for your loss but i'm really grateful you've shared that and i think that's very wise advice bj um i just wanted to pause and and uh offer gratitude to justine in the chat who in the subject of habits and helpful things she's just said i use the action happiness app best app i've ever downloaded highly recommended um so thank you for that justine uh anyone who's not come across the app which you can find by searching on all the app stores in the normal way it sends out daily nudges and ideas but most importantly and i think this is key to habit formation or one part of it it's got a really supportive community so when people share what they're doing others come in and say that's wonderful and it creates a lot of that celebration that emotional experience particularly in connection to others so not only do you say i went for this walk today but a lot of people come and say that looks beautiful well done where are you going tomorrow and i think that that is one of the lovely things i love about this community of people supporting each other in that way um clifford's got a great question which i feel is particularly aimed at me so my wife would joke and say that when i have a habit i get obsessive about it whether it's like a change to my diet or deciding i want to cycle every day for a week or you know i get a little bit over the top and clifford's question is how do you avoid habits either good or bad drifting too far and becoming addictions or ocd is that a problem no i honestly don't know um so i want to be clear about what i know and what i don't i haven't studied that um what i would do clifford if i were with you in person i would say give me an example right because that's always because you may be thinking one thing and i answer it this way so maybe clifford can type in the example in the meantime let me say this view your habits as like a garden of flowers and plants and trees and different habits are different sizes and they will have different lifespans and positions just like a garden wheel and you don't always want your habit garden to be exactly the same okay the traditional way of habits is you write down a goal and you have to do exactly that that's not tiny habits think of it as an evolving thing your set of habits will evolve over time as your life changes and as this seasons change and as your needs change and as you discover other things behind me i have some recorders so i was playing slide whistle until my partner told me how much he hated it and then i shipped it to the recorder and he didn't like it so i went to a bigger one and now i have a huge recorder that he loves and it's actually replacing the meditation what's that you want me to play it yeah let's see it yeah so this actually has replaced my meditation habit it's it's a big vase recorder and so instead of meditating in the mornings i i played the recorders now i play this one because it has a really nice quality [Music] so the fact that my habit has changed and i'm not doing formal meditation but i'm playing this in a meditative way that's great that's not a weakness that's a strength so look at the habits you have whether it's doing push-ups after you pee like there's times when i did squats instead of push-ups and then maybe i go back to push-ups so think of your habits as flexible as something that when a habit no longer serves you then swap it out now for the question of becoming obsessed with it man i don't know if it's something like tidiness or healthy eating i'm not sure that's not been acting in this case clifford has come back in the chat and actually again it's quite similar to something i do and again has driven loved ones of mine a little bit mad at times cliff has just had a specific diet eating at the same time every day using the same process in the same place which you know i can personally see you know if it's something that works for you health wise and you enjoy i quite like that um consistency but i also find that others around me don't respond to it in such positive ways necessarily yeah well i think one thing everybody has to find in their own life is the balance between habits and spontaneity i am naturally a person that loves spontaneity and improvisation i love that so the fact that i focused on habits is kind of ironic right because i never teach the same class at stanford i never give the same keynote i i would find that boring so i love spontaneity but habits having things i don't have to think about allows me to have more spontaneity other people want to routinize a lot more than i would and have less spontaneity and other people shift the other direction so i think it's really a personal style issue about what do you create into habits so you don't have to think about them and what things do you allow yourself to be flexible for example my breakfast is always the same i have exactly the same breakfast i've dialed it in it's perfect it's exactly right for me but my lunches are always different and that's what works great for me and maybe this is coming back to your point about emotion because i think if the same meal brings a sense of mundane repetition joylessness that's obviously not working but if it's a sense of comfort and an emotional boost and then maybe that's to your point of emotion that's a really helpful hook so i want us to keep in mind that that really key point you shared that it's about an emotional experience um bj we're rapidly running out of time and you've mentioned loads of great resources people can use we will share links tomorrow to your book to the the five-day introductory program which i'm doing at the moment and really enjoying um and you've mentioned to me that there's a recipe maker i love this idea of habit recipes do you want to say a little bit about what that is because i think that's freely available as well isn't it the fastest simplest way to get into tiny habits yes there's a five day program that takes 35 minutes in total you can get going even faster at tiny habits.com slash recipes so this is software where you mix and match match the habits anchors and it works best on mobile phones and tablets so i got it designed you can do it in a web browser but that's like a three minute experience to create tiny habit recipes so if i were to level you up it's like go to tiny habits.com recipes goof around with the recipe maker create your tiny habit recipes the next level up from there is a free five-day program that's about a 35-minute commitment the next step up from there is maybe doing the five-day program again and the next step up from there is the book which is a substantial step and then the step up from there is to certify in tiny habits and become a certified tiny habit which is another big step but in two or three minutes you can get started with recipe maker at tiny habits dot com slash recipes that's great to know we'll definitely share a link to that as well so a habit i am building and i will try and word it now in in your format which is after i have had the pleasure of engaging with a brilliant speaker on one of these events i will offer thanks to a range of people so first of all to you bj that's been an amazing time together really learned so much and really grateful for all the work you've done and sharing that in such an interactive way with our community and i'm also really grateful to all of you who've been involved in this all the great things you've been sharing all those fantastic questions and the sense i think of enthusiasm for getting involved in this great world of tiny habits also huge thanks to everyone who donated to be part of this event this evening we're a small charity those donations help us continue to do our work um so if you've done that thank you if you like to contribute having got something out of this and there'll be again a link in our follow-up email tomorrow if you'd like to contribute but bj i wanted to sort of and allow you to have the final word is there any sort of summary thought you'd like to leave us with before we part yeah i mean it's good news the good news is habits can be really easy to form and the more you practice creating habits in the right way the better you get it's a skill it's a set of skills like driving you know driving once probably seemed very scary and intimidating but as you practiced those skills became automatic and simple that's how habit formation can be for you and that's what my work's about the books about the tiny habits coaching is about is to make it really easy and straightforward to change your life in almost any way that you want so it's it's like good news it's not like this hard thing and it's not a thing that requires willpower or tons of motivation there is this new way to create habits in your life and even the small ones can then be transformative and we didn't get into how that happens but we see and i've seen this for 10 years in the data week after week after week for 10 years the vast majority of people who do these habits in these small ways report other changes in their life change leads to change there's this ripple effect that happens so that is to me really exciting and i think it's just wonderful good news that change is easier than you think and you don't have to wait till you're super motivated to get started because it's simple so just dive in and have fun with it don't get up tight have fun play around um see it as a a a fun journey of discovery bj thank you so much for your a real time being with you today and we're so grateful keep up the great work and thank you everyone thanks

Channel: Action for Happiness

Views: 19,023

Keywords:

Id: UKTtmnPXXtw

Length: 58min 15sec (3495 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021