Brian Johnson distinguishes daimons, your positive inner guides, from demons, your destructive impulses. Feed daimons with memories of your best self. Bad habits are like pickles: you can't unpickle them, so remove the triggers instead.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. In our last plus one, we talked about the fact that demon comes from the same root as Daimon. In ancient Greek, it basically meant the lesser or evil spirit. Where do both of those guys hang out? Within each of us, of course. We also talked about the demon from Fablehaven named Olich the Glutton. Once that guy gets fed, he he's on an unstoppable mission to consume everything in his path en route to consuming the person who made the mistake of feeding him. Lesson again, don't feed the demon. Now, we actually used this wonderful demon character and his metaphorical mission in one of our sessions in the mastery phase of our Optimize coach program, Part three of module five on algorithms, how to delete bad habits. As we discussed in a one on Pilot Copilot Autopilot, the whole algorithms module was framed in the context of being a good co pilot, following our daimon pilot's instructions long enough that good behaviors run on autopilot. Now, in the context of dealing with our bad habits, I suggested that it's as if the daimon pilot gets replaced by the demon pilot. Then, rather than smoothly flying to our optimist best destination, we fly ourselves straight into the side of a mountain. Oops. So today we're going to talk about what demons and Daimons like to eat. Daimons. They do really well on hero bars. Remember that? Plus one. Check it out. We want to feed them memories of and visions of us at our absolute best, pretty much all day, every day. Demons. Those guys really like to feast on pickles. Remember them? Got a plus one on that, too. Recall that once we engage in a bad habit long enough, it's as if our brains in relationship to that particular bad habit go from being a cucumber to being a pickle. Cucumber, pickle. Today's +1. Two things to know. Number one, we can't unpickle a pickle. Once we've grooved certain negative neural pathways, those bad habits are always sitting there, ready to come back to life. Which leads us back to Fablehaven and the sign we need to hang right where we can see it. Number two, don't feed the demon. When you're feeling tired and cranky and overwhelmed and all that, your little inner demon is going to try to take over the airwaves. And you know what? He's going to try to smooth talk you into feeding him pickles. All your little bad habits. So one more time, remember, don't feed the demon. Once you do, he'll bite you, then consume everything in his path until he consumes all of you. That's today's plus one. Let's have a stack of hero bars ready to feast on so we can keep our daimons nice and well nourished. And let's follow atomic habits. Rule number one of deleting bad habits. And make the triggers invisible. Let's make sure we hide those pickles. Some are hard to find.
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