#1: How to Optimize your behavior design (B = MAP!!) (Note: Start with Trigger-Prompts!) (#31)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey, guys, what's up? This is Brian Happy. How's it already? Thursday. I'm already two and a half hours into my deep work. Had some fun this morning, but I'm going to learn to take this cap off before I start these videos. My goodness. All right, recommit. It's always day one. Technically, it's day three of our optimized Coach Class three program. We extended the registration. You've got another, like, I don't know, 10 days until, not this Monday, but next Monday to sign up. And the bus is leaving. Next train leaves in 2021. If you've been feeling it, join us. Optimize me Coach. So we've got some data. We've also got Emerson's little sketch on BJ Fogg's tiny habits behavioral model, which happens to be the PNTV today. And it happens to be my number one distinction for this morning. I came to my desk and my computer was on it, which it never is. And we'll talk about that. We'll talk about triggers and how you need to remove a trigger if you want to change your behavior. So yesterday was intense, as was the day before. I both trained hard and I was all in on team stuff. So it's wisely advising me to strive for balance. You were very active yesterday. Yes, I was. I slept better than that. They didn't collect the data quite right. But it's interesting to note my heart rate is 43, which is higher than it tends to be. It's still very happy with it, etc. Heart rate variability, 66. Again, still very good, but not where we were crushing it at the 100 level, which is insane. And it's interesting because this is a PEMF machine on a massage table and I needed to send it in for repairs, right. So now I'm not using the PEMF machine. It's interesting to notice I can just test remove one, confounding the variable and just have the. Thank you, second timer. Just have the nanov working for me. And look, it's interesting, the PEMF machine, I stopped using it, I think around here, right. I think it actually started not working right and they picked it up next day, all that stuff today to fix it. But interesting, my heart rate variability went from just hammer zone. It kind of wasn't always up at 86. 105. What? 91. 124. Crazyville. 134. Wow. 148. Wow. Right? And then it kind of came down after I stopped using the Peff machine. So again, data wise, I'm like, oh, interesting. That might be. It's gonna be fun to get it back and then test again and see if that goes up. Now the heart rate is up and the resting heart rate variability is where it is. 43 and 68. In part because of that. In part because I just hammered it yesterday. I was on all day, did less of my oscillation, still oscillated, but not as focused in my thinking. So this is, again, data, for me, of, wow, interesting. When I have a lot of inputs and a lot of engagement, you just need to recover a little bit more deeply from it. So that's the primary lesson there. But the thing that was cool this morning was, as I said, I went to my desk, the triggers right there. The computer is on my desk. It's never on my desk. It's always in the closet in there, right? Turned off, boom, WI fi is off, etc. But I did my number one late yesterday, so I had to load it, upload it to YouTube. And we live in the country. Satellite Internet is a miracle, and it's not quite fast. So I did it overnight. We usually turn our WI fi off at night, by the way. Unplug it. No need for unnecessary EMFs in your family's household. Again, these are margins. Right? But pay attention to that. And then it was funny because I came in and the computer was on, and guess what I did. Oh, well, YouTube. Interesting. Let's see if I got any interesting comments. I never do that. I never allow inputs in. And that took me a total of 10 seconds, 30 seconds to look at it. But it was so cool for me to notice the trigger was there, the prompt was there. And when you make a trigger present, you tend to take that action. So the fastest way to change your behavior is to deal with what BJ Fogg calls your trigger or prompt. Now, this is Emerson's sketch, BJ Fogg's behavioral model that he kind of copied off of mine. But I'm going to quickly walk you through it. And it's cool, because the PNTV today is BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits. I basically started with some of the most impactful books for pntv. So we relaunched, of course, with Abraham Maslow's Future Visions. So good. One Amazon review. But so good. And then we did why We Sleep. Matthew Walker. Again, if there's one book to read to change your life, read that. One sleep is so fundamental, it's extraordinary. Then the third book that we featured in our PNTV was BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits. This guy BJ Fogg, out of Stanford, is the world's leading. I realize I'm filming into a blank piece of paper here that's like me is the world's leading authority on the science of behavioral change, right? So a lot of the guys who talk about mini habits, tiny habits, atomic habits, are basing their wisdom on BJ Fogg's model. So here's his model. He says behavior equals motivation times ability times prompt, B equals map, behavior equals motivation, ability, and prompt. Three variables. He says you can break down positive and negative behaviors into these three variables. So let's map them out on his handy dandy little grid. First, we have motivation on the Y axis that can be either low or it can be high. Then we have your ability to do the action, which is, he could have said, you know, is it hard or is it easy? Right? If it's hard, then it's. It's. Your ability is low. If it's easy, then your ability is high. That's our second variable. Motivation low or high. Ability low or high. Then we draw in what he calls his action line. And again we go off on this in our Mastery series for optimized coach program. This is how you change your life. You change your behaviors. And I go off on all the different books on behavioral change. And we lean into BJ Fogg's model for one simple reason. It works. So we spend a month helping you operationalize behavioral change. High level discussion. We call it algorithms. Could be called Self Mastery 101. You want to change your life? Get really, really good at installing and deleting habits. And we walk you through how to install the number one habit that can most change your life and how to delete the number one habit that's destroying your life. Which is why we get the results. We get people who actually put this stuff into practice. It works. It's not complicated. And as BJ Fogg says, if you have issues changing behavior, it's not a character flaw per se, it's a design flaw. You haven't figured out behavioral design. So again, motivation, ability, action line. Then we have the third and most important variable, which is your prompt. So the prompt is your trigger. Charles Duhigg and James Clear call it your cue. For me, this morning was my computer out on my desk. That's a cue. That's a trigger that triggers certain behaviors. I talk a lot about smartphones. You leave your smartphone out. Why I use an ipod, this little janky ipod for my aura score is I don't want to use my smartphone. It triggers me to do behaviors I don't want to engage in in the morning. So I bought an ipod, and the only thing it's used for is I do the aura score in the morning, and then Emerson uses it for audible books. The. That's it. Boom. Simple. Doesn't trigger anything other than aura for me. Mastering your environment, knowing how to manipulate your triggers is huge. You don't want to use your smartphone. Boom. Get it out of your sight, get it out of your touch, and you won't be triggered. You don't want to drink alcohol. Well, then quit buying it. Get rid of everything in your house. The triggers not there now all of a sudden, the trigger is gone. And then you got to. It's harder for you to do. You got to go out to drive to the liquor store or whatever. You got some time to think about it. Same thing with bad food. All the teachers tell you if you want to change your diet, whether it's moving to vegan or paleo or anything in between or outside of that, you start by raiding your pantry. Get rid of all the triggers, the bad cues. Make yourself have to work to go get the food you don't want to eat. So anyway, you've got a prompt. This is your action line. I guess I could have written this ability so you can see it. Motivation, right? This is your action line. BJ says if the prompt shows up above this action line, you're going to do the behavior. If your prompt shows up below the action line, then you won't do the behavior. So the number one thing you can do prompt to change your behavior is to make the prompt really obvious if you want to do the behavior. So that's my meditation cushion. I've had it for, like 15 years. When I went to a Zen place in Santa Monica, I needed like 20 cushions. The first time I sat down, my body was so inflexible. I said in the Heroes, puzzling every day that's there in my office every single day. Again, my. My ipod with the aura. School with the aura. Thing is, is I put supplements on top of it, so I remember to take the supplement. I. I got triggers all day, every day, everywhere. For the things I want to do, they're obvious. For the things I don't want to do, I make them invisible. As I just discussed with the smartphone, we're going to go long today. I was encouraged to go long when it's flowing, this one's flowing, so we're going long. If I want to get rid of a habit, I make it invisible. Obvious prompt, invisible prompt, install, delete. Then you want to make things super easy. So BJ Fogg is known as, you know, the tiny habits guy, because that's who he is. So the whole idea there is if you want to meditate, you put your meditation cushion in some obvious way, you trip over it. You want to go on a workout in the morning, trip over your gym shoes on the way out of bed, your prompt is obvious. But then don't make it hard. Wait, I did this. Yeah, don't make it hard. Don't make yourself have to work out for 60 minutes in order to pass your test of awesome. Or meditate for 60 minutes. That's hard. Your ability is very low on that. Right. So even if you trip over your meditation cushion, you're going to say to yourself, oh, I got to do it for an hour. I don't feel like it. Right. My motivation is low today, and it's hard. Then guess what? It doesn't matter how many meditation cushions you trip over. You had a flaw in your behavioral design. What you want to do is make it easy. Make it such that the it's like, well, easy. Yes. Make it so that it's like one minute, one breath. I say you got to meditate for one breath. Boom. You hit the meditation cushion, sit down, meditate for one breath. It's easy. Even if you're not motivated, your prompt shows up above the action line. If you're super motivated, will it go you even easier for you to do. Then if you feel like it, add some more to it. Do it for three minutes or five minutes or 11 minutes, but don't make yourself do it for 60 minutes. Even if you're super motivated, you're still barely going to be able to do it. So again, we want to make things super easy, such that on the days that we're not that motivated, we can still take action. And again, you can break any habit you have into a tiny chunk. You want to do more deep work. Perfect. Don't make yourself have to do 90 minutes of deep work. Pre inputs that would be here. Make yourself have to do one minute of deep work before you turn on inputs. Do you realize how that would change your life? If you currently immediately check your phone, like 90% of the world, the moment you roll out of bed, you're going to be enervated and you have anxiety. That's just a reality. Good luck not having that. But if you can discipline yourself to just do one minute of deep work. Keep your prompts off. Remove the smartphone from your bedroom. That's how you remove that trigger, right? And then do whatever you're going to do. Bust out your journal. Do some journaling. You know, my journal this morning looked the way I don't even show you. It looks exactly like it looks every morning. Boom. One minute is what you would do for deep work and reflection. One breath for meditation. Make it easy so your motivation isn't what's driving the show. You don't want to design your behavior for high motivation days. You want to design it for low motivation days. That's the mistake most people make. They go to a workshop or they do something inspiring and they're like, oh, gosh, I'm going to do something amazing. I'm feeling super motivated. Not a good idea. You want to plan your habitual behavioral changes for the habits you want to install for the days when you have no motivation Again. And I'll wrap this up in a moment. BJ uses the example of two push ups. He wanted to get in shape. Two pushups. So then after he. And he, he's got the ABCs, check out the PNTV, check out the note, etc. He's got. After I do, after I go to the bathroom while I'm working from home, I'm going to do two push ups. So he's got an anchor, a behavior, and then he celebrates it, right? Anyway, starting to ramble now. There you go. Triggers. What trigger do you need to remove from your life to change a behavior? Or what trigger do you need to add your life? And how can you tiny fight to make it easy? Remembering the map. B equals map. And by the way, again, this is Emerson's. He basically took this and did this. I taught him, this is how you change your behavior, bud. Boom, boom, boom. B equals map. Prompt, prompt. Hard, easy, motivation, High, low. And we talked about it because I used my smartphone one night and he said, daddy, you said you didn't want to use. I'd actually used his mom's smartphone. Daddy, you said you didn't want to use your smartphone after you stopped working. I said, you're right, buddy. And he said, you know what I can do? I can put it into a drawer, then I can lock the drawer. Then you couldn't get it. I said, dude, that's a brilliant idea. Because what you would do is you would remove the prompt and you'd make it hard for me. That's exactly how you change behavior. And then that's when I use this as an example to teach him how he just effectively could have modified my behavior. Pretty powerful stuff. Let's master ourselves so we can serve heroically and empower others to do the same. When is it a good day to do that? Today. Make today an awesome day. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See you. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that Number One quick note, if you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, et cetera, and 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimize ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach if you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same. Have a great day. See you tomorrow.