2221: Habit Formation for Personal Growth and Development: Building Positive Habits for a Better Life with Charles Duhigg Part 1

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Our great podcasts, visit hartmanmedia.com hey buddy, just wanted to say thanks again for the awesome job you did Friday morning. That was great. Just started out our day perfectly and put a cap on our event. I just thought it was awesome man. You did a great job. But even more than that, just appreciate your spirit in the room, man. Seem like you're just more alive and just more enthusiastic than ever about things you're working on and things the family's doing. So I just want you to know I appreciate you, man. Travel safe. Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome empowered investors and greetings from Denver, Colorado, more specifically Cherry Creek. I have enjoyed staying here for a while while and I am off to Las Vegas to host our collective Mastermind event there and then probably headed over to Southern California before going back to Miami because I've got a speaking engagement in Miami, then Austin. So now you know my travel schedule. If you're in any of these places and you would like to have a one on one session with me live and in person, you can book those. So, so reach out to any of our investment counselors. They can help you get booked for a one on one session and I can always do it in person in one of those cities so we can meet up and maybe even grab a meal together or just work in an office and work on your portfolio and talk about how I can help you take the next step in your real estate investing journey. So there is so much news in the world and I keep thinking wow, I just really want to talk to you about all of these things going on politically, the third assassination attempt against our presidential candidate, all of this crazy stuff. Certainly the hurricanes. Got to talk about that. There's just so much going on. There is not enough time to talk about it on the YouTube videos and on the podcast. So I really want to encourage you to follow me on Instagram and on X or formerly known as Twitter now. Much better managed than Twitter, as we know. Thank you, Elon Musk, for keeping free speech in the public domain, at least for now. But there's just a lot of news to talk about, especially political, politically right now. So do follow me on those channels for more information. But as far as the hurricanes, I wanted to talk about that obviously tragic, tragic news with these successive hurricanes that have just battered people. You know, everybody asks, well, Jason, what about insurance? What about my rental properties? All of this stuff. And you know, I just don't have time to talk about every aspect of this. At our Empowered Investor Pro meeting next month, or I should say this upcoming meeting, we have an insurance specialist coming on who is from Florida and operates a brokerage in Florida that I personally use for some of my properties. She will be coming on to talk about insurance issues in depth. But I do want to say this. Number one damage. What did I experience from the hurricane? Well, you're looking at a picture if you're watching me on video right now. Here's a picture of one of my rental properties that did lose part of a fence. And I own another rental property right around the corner from this one. And I went to, of course, where I went to thumbtack.com, and I sourced a couple of fence tractors. Then I went to taskrabbit.com and sourced a couple more there because I wanted to get some quotes on this. So I said to both of them that went out to the property so far, they just called me on the phone real quick one actually text me and I said, hey, go take a look at the other property I own right around the corner. I haven't heard from the tenants on that property, but maybe they have some damage they probably evacuated for the hurricane. So both of them went to both properties and showed me that both properties sustained some dam to the fences. One of the eaves had a little bit of damage, like a piece was torn off of that eve, maybe two or three feet long. No big deal. So I guess my first point here is, look, if you have newer properties in these areas, these properties likely have little to no damage. Okay? I don't even know that I'll bother filing an insurance claim on this. I'll probably just pay for it out of pocket. I'll see what the quotes come in at. But, you know, again, not a big deal in most cases. If you have Older properties that are built in the flood prone areas that don't have the new codes, they do tend to sustain some damage. But it's fair to ask. I mean, these houses have been standing there for fifty, seventy, even a hundred years sometimes and they've had many, many hurricanes. Right. That those houses have lived through and they're still there. So a lot of this stuff you just have to realize is just totally overblown by the media. The media loves sensationalism, okay? This stuff is never as crazy or as bad as they make it seem. Unless of course, they're trying to cover up for the pathetic presidential administration we have running the country right now and running fema. And that's a whole different story. Right? So, you know, there are multiple things going on here at the same time. But what about insurance rates? Well, folks, they've been going up for years and they've been going up all over the country because think about what insurance really is. What is insurance? At its core, the concept of insurance is the same as the concept of socialism. Okay? We have this big pool of money and we pay out some big claims to some policyholders and we just collect money from the rest of the people. So even if you live or own properties in a non disaster prone area that doesn't have wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods or hurricanes, which by the way, a very large portion of the country is affected by at least one of those things, but you know, say you live in an area that isn't affected by any of those things, which is pretty rare. Your insurance is going up too. Yes, it is. You know it is. It has been because of the socialized nature of insurance. They socialize the losses. That's what insurance is. Okay? And then, you know, I'm at the coffee shop this morning and I open the Wall Street Journal, which when I'm at a hotel, it's nice. I get an actual paper. It's just so pleasant to read an actual newspaper. I don't know why. And there's an article about people are leaving Florida because of the hurricanes. Oh my God, really? Really? You think this is some big thing? No, they found a few people to talk about this that haven't even moved yet that are just probably extremely discouraged. Rightfully so. Right. And so that's what happens. Look, the person who wins the game in life and business and investing is the person who doesn't panic. The person who has a steady hand, who realizes that most of the news is sensationalism, if not all of it, and also realizes that life goes on and people rebuild and things move on and the economy continues. You know, I interviewed and I'll publish this interview soon. I interviewed a friend of mine, a Ukrainian citizen who left Ukraine right before the war broke out because he knew something was up. It's a really interesting interview. You're going to see it soon and hear it soon. And what you realize is that even in a war torn country like Ukraine, right, they have a wartime economy. The economy is still happening there, right? It's always happening. And life goes on. That's my point. So the people that tend to have knee jerk reactions and panic, you know, they're the people who just always kind of lose out in life. Okay, this too will pass. As people say, it's just not as big a deal as it seems to be on the news. And you know, a lot of people are on low information diets and they really avoid the news. Now, I am not one of these people, but I definitely don't sit there watching tv. I hardly get any news from television number one because I can't stand the commercials and I can't stand the fact that they run the same story over and over again. Okay? So if you watch television, I would highly recommend that you just give up television, okay? It's like the idiots medium. It's the worst medium to get your news. Okay? So that's one thing. Okay, enough of that. Today we have an incredible guest. Charles Duhigg is on the show today. Yes. He's written several books including Super Communicators. And look at this right here on Amazon, right? Super Communicators. How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. His advice is second to none. It's so good. This is an editor's pick on Amazon. Best book so far of 2024 and it's got 1510 ratings with very positive reviews. Look at this one. This is the Power of habit, right from 2012. This has got three 38, 803 ratings. Wow. And on Goodreads, it has 523,000 ratings. It's a New York Times bestseller. More than 3 million copies sold. The Power of Habit, why we do what we do in life and business. And he is our guest today. And you know how I got Charles Duhigg to be on the show? He's a listener. Yeah. He listens to the podcast and watches the YouTube channel. So Charles, thank you for watching first of all and listening. I'm really hon. We do have a few other famous listeners and viewers as well. Glad to have you among them. And he reached out and kind of pitched me for the show. And I'm like, of course you can be on the show. I love your work. I've known about it for a long, long time. So you're really in for a great interview here. So we'll get to that in a moment. I just want to share this with you about real estate here. The average homeowner just gained another 25 grand in equity. I mean, it just keeps on going on no matter what all the doomers say, no matter what all the crash bros say. You know, somehow people keep buying properties and things keep moving on, right? Maine, California, New Jersey led the states with annualized home equity gains, the highest gains according to CoreLogic. So what does that mean? Well, first of all, don't be deceived. Do not be deceived. Because when you see things like now, I don't know much about the real estate market in Maine. I don't think it's terribly expensive, but maybe a little bit expensive. But certainly California and New Jersey are pretty expensive. And you've got to always ask yourself life's most important question. Compared to what? Right, Compared to what? And when you compare the equity gain in dollars to the prices of the properties, the basis, the baseline from which they are starting, of course California is going to have big gains, right? Of course New Jersey is going to have big gains because the prices are already so high there, right? But you really want to look at it always as a percentage. That is the more meaningful statistic because the core idea of a percentage is what it answers. Life's most important question. A percentage always tells you compared to what. And you see that Florida gained $22,000. Georgia $18,000. California, of course, $55,000. Nevada 36,000. Arizona 24,000. So Washington state, a whopping 41,000. So pretty amazing how incredibly comfortable all of the existing homeowners that control over 130 million units. Well, see, what I'm doing there is there's about 140 million total, give or take. But I'm taking out the ones that have sold in the last couple of years. So I take out about 8,9 million out of that, and then I get about 131 million. Now, existing homeowners with high equity, 40% of them or so have no mortgage at all. And 25% of them have a mortgage at or below 3%, 65%, a mortgage at or below 4%. These people ain't selling. They just won't give up those great deals they have. So now we are at the point of a Fed pivot. And we're just going to see all the Crash Bros and all the doomers continue to be wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, some selected areas in the country have given up a little bit, as you can see. Texas gave up $3,000 in that example. And you know, life just goes on. So one more thing about hurricanes that people don't realize, and I have, I did share this with you when I got the calls a couple of years ago where the people were trying to be vulture capitalists in Naples, Fort Myers after the hurricane hit there pretty bad. And they said, jason, now's the time to grab up all the deals at pennies on the dollar. Everybody's gonna be desperate to sell. No, the complete opposite is true. What happens is you have a housing market with certain supply and demand dynamics and then you remove some of the supply because the homes have to be repaired or rebuilt. Okay? So that's less supply, not more supply. Get it? All these people, they just don't understand how this works. And then you take and you have all these insurance claims, thousands and thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands sometimes of insurance claims. So the insurance companies send all these people to these areas and then they have to fix the properties so all these contractors and construction workers and suppliers move into these areas, gobbling up what minimal amount of supply there is. So most people think, oh, now's the time. All these desperate people will just take advantage of them and will steal their houses for pennies on the dollar. The exact opposite is true. There's more of a housing shortage than ever. And the supply demand dynamics are more in favor of owners, not buyers. That's how it pretty much works every time. Okay, now look, that said, there are little pockets, okay, that you could measure here and there where those supply and demand dynamics might look otherwise from what I just told you. But that is the macro trend. It's the macro trend, right? There are little trends along the way. So no one needs to send me a link to some silly little article that says something a little different than what I just said. Okay? I don't need the link. Don't bother. Don't bother making silly dumb comments. Well, actually, I really do appreciate the silly dumb comments from the fools out there. You know why? Because they really improve my ratings. So make all the silly dumb comments you want because the algorithm loves you. Just make any comment, say Jason is a complete idiot. Fine with me. I'd love those comments because I will reply. I'll probably tell you what an idiot you are. But that's what happens. So the algorithm loves your comments. So make all the comments you want. All the haters out there love to hear your comments. Anyway, that's pretty much what happens with these dynamics. So you just got to understand it. But people are incredibly resilient. They rebuild, they move on, everything goes on. I know it's very painful at the time, but when you have the patience to just look at the big macro trend, you know, it's like every downturn that I've ever lived through in the real estate market, and I've been doing this for many decades, folks. Many decades. Okay? Every downturn, if you just wait 18 to 24 months, it's an upturn. You know, it's just amazing how that changes. So being patient is the right thing to be. Being calm, not overreacting, not having knee jerk reactions and not being impatient. That's who wins the game. It's the tortoise and the hare, folks. That's one of the secrets to life for sure. All right, let's get to our guest, Charles Duhigg. You're gonna love this interview. This guy is awesome. And before we go, let's hear an interesting clip of the day.

We eat the food they give us. Vote for one of two people that they tell us to and watch the movies that they show. They take our attention as soon as we reach age five and they never give it back. We go to sleep school for eight hours a day learning what they want us to. They scold us until we obey and then they praise us when we do. They make us form a habit of waking up and spending our entire day in a building that we wouldn't choose so that when we get older, we are willing to do the same. Following orders becomes comfortable when we spend our childhood doing what we're told. So when we're older, we hesitate to stray outside the norm. They tell us that we should do anything we can to attend a university because if we don't, we will fail. They manipulate us into financial dependency at a young age so that we stay liable to the system. They've given us a currency that only has value because they say it does. And we receive it by working at a business that they own. Their millions become billions while the rest of us are forced to sacrifice our time for a minuscule fraction of what our work gains for them. They provide us housing but make it costly so that we struggle to accumulate enough wealth to escape their system. Our supermarkets are full of brands that they possess to the point that it is difficult to find Ones that they don't. Our meals are either purchased from a store that they most likely own or created with ingredients from their brands. They tamper with the food they give us and pump them with toxic and addictive chemicals. They make the most harmful foods the cheapest and most convenient so that it becomes an offer that we can't refuse. Over time, we become addicted in many more ways than one and they bombard us with temptation or on every billboard or commercial. When we get sick from excessive consumption of this insubstantial food, we are forced with almost no other option but to give up financial solidity for the sake of our health. We pay thousands to facilities that they own so that they can prescribe us more harmful chemicals that simply numb the symptom. They revolve society around addictive foods that cause disease and expensive drugs that mask them so that we stay in a forever grasp of their system. We only ever consume content from that they provide. Our news channels are operated by them to persuade us into two opposing perspectives so that we never share a same opinion. Why do you think it's free? They feed us shocking news headlines that provoke emotion and grab our attention away from what's really going on in the world. They've granted us with superficial idols that portray luxurious lifestyles so that we strive to be like them and associate money with happiness. They keep us focused on worldly problems that they've created to keep us zoomed in on our physical reality and detached from our creator. If we keep our attention on what's going on around us, we will never be present and see the truth of God within us. The villain who runs the world knows the truth of our potential. And it's in their best interest to keep us distracted and willing to submit to a system that thrives on fearful compliance. Imagine if every person on this planet believed that we were created for a reason. We would unlock an unbreakable faith within ourselves and reverse the pyramid of power in which society was built. We would see past the lie that we've been living and turn to each other for help rather than depending on our corrupt leaders. Corrupt leaders who have accumulated a discrete monopoly that succeeds in circumventing the eyes of those who are unaware. Through the illusion of choice, the majority of us see the world as it is portrayed. Diverse, coincidental, and plausible. To someone who lives day by day without taking a step back, the world kind of seems to make sense. Then we look behind the curtain and see that it really makes sense. Where there is one lie, there is many. Once we see One lie. We will find ourselves on an endless spiderweb of mass deception. The blindfold tied around us in childhood will loosen and light will be shed on our fabricated reality. Those in charge of us do not have our best interests in mind and never did. It has been a power trip from the start and we have gone along with it since the birth of society and will continue to until we see a reason for change and stop pointing fingers at each other.

It is my pleasure to welcome Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of the Power of Habit, as well as a couple of other great books. Charles Duhigg is here with us today and he is a listener to the show. So it's a real pleasure when he reached out, said that he enjoys our show and wanted to come on. And I'm like, absolutely. Of course. We're also going to talk about his latest book, Super Communicators. And Charles, I might even ask you to reference the political environment when it comes to communication. I think that's pretty timely. But Charles Duhigg, welcome. It's great to have you.

Thank you so much for having me. This is such a treat.

Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about the power of habit first, because, you know, it's really just run all of our lives and so many of us are suffering from various addictions. Certainly dopamine addiction, I think would be a fair one. Probably everybody has been affected by that to some extent. But what is a habit? How do we make one? Can we really control this? Let's just take a dive.

And particularly for investors, this is critical, right? Because so much of, of being a good investor, being a good business person is relying on your habits to help you make decisions. So a habit has a very specific definition. A habit is a choice that we made at some point that we stop actively making that decision, but we continue acting on it. We continue the behavior. One of the really critical things to understand about a habit is that every habit has about, has three parts. And about 40 to 45% of what we do every day is a habit. Right? All those things that we think about as decisions, most of them are actually boring without us making a choice. We're just automatically doing it. When you back your car to the driveway, when you order a sandwich for lunch instead of a salad, even though you wanted to eat healthy today, when you're, if you're fast, twitch, looking at investment opportunities, the ones you set aside and the ones you pay attention to. And every single time that happens, there's three things that are occurring. First of all, There's a cue, there's some kind of trigger that causes this automatic behavior that's encoded into your brain to become. To become activated. The second thing that happens is that there's a routine, right? And that routine is the behavior itself. It's me ordering the sandwich or backing my car to the driveway, or taking this portfolio and setting it aside. And the third thing that happens is that when I do that activity, it delivers to me a reward. Now, I'm not. Might not be aware of that reward, right. When I back my car to the driveway, I'm not aware there's not like.

A reward for that.

Yeah, right, exactly. But there actually is inside your brain. Like, if we. If I could see inside your brain, what I would see is, as you're back in the car, out, and you successfully do it, there's a small dopamine reaction, a reward sensation. And the reason why that reward sensation exists is because there's a part of our brain that the basal ganglia that exists in every single animal, and it essentially exists, or every single mammal, and it essentially exists to create habits. Habits are critical to how we evolve, because if you had to decide every single time you took a step whether you should take a step or, you know, you see a rock versus an apple on the ground, you have to decide which one to pick up and eat. You just don't have any time for anything else. So habits allow us to chunk behaviors, make them automatic, and then act on them almost unthinkingly.

Charles, as you say that, you're making me think of my long ago learnings about what's known as the reticular activating system. Right. And this is this filter that is in all of us that filters out all of the extraneous noise stimuli, you know, everything. Is this related to that?

Yeah, very much so. I mean, what you're talking about, that screening tends to be very sensitive specifically. So what's interesting is, like if. If you're in a room full of crowded people talking, and someone says your name, you can hear them say your name.

It's amazing.

Then you can actually hear that, what they're saying to you afterwards. Right. Our brain has this amazing ability to screen out information that it deems unnecessary. And developing habits is certainly part of that because for the exact reason I mentioned that that constant vigilance and constant maintenance is very, very taxing. And our brain is what's known as a cognitive miser. It wants to spend as little energy as possible. And so this reticular screening that you ment or that, or the building of habits that's designed to help us conserve energy.

Yeah, excellent. And so it, as a cognitive miser, because the brain is the biggest energy suck in our bodies. You know, I guess unless you're an athlete and you're really taxing your body a lot, maybe, maybe it's different for them, but for most of us, the brain is like 20 watts. You know, it's a lot of, a lot of energy. You know, there's a good reason we're kind of mentally lazy, isn't there?

Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think anyone, you know, they often say, if you want to get a task done, give it to the smartest, laziest person in your company because they're going to figure out the fastest.

I heard give it to the busiest.

Right, right. It's the same basic thing, right. You give it to someone who, like, who doesn't, who, you know, is going to figure out how to streamline this, how to make this efficient, how to do this as fast as possible and pay attention to the right details. And so I think what's important there is to recognize that we build habits all the time and there's no such thing as a good habit versus a bad habit. Right. We decide that a habit is something we like or something we want to discourage. But to our brain, all habits are exactly the same thing. It's just a routinization of a cue, routine and reward so that that behavior becomes easier the next time.

But we have to more logically decide outside of that loop what is a good or a bad habit.

Yeah, we have to, we have to step in and make decisions. Right. Because a habit that involves going for a jog every morning where it gets easier and easier and easier and I think about it less and less, that's a great habit. A habit where I eat a jelly donut on the way to work every single morning, that's a less good habit. And so I have to decide which habits I wish to encourage and which ones I w to discourage. And in doing so, I have to pay attention to those cues and rewards because that's where my leverage is. That's where I can fiddle with the gears.

How is it then? This sounds so simple, it sounds so easy to just understand this loop of the three, the three elements, right. And then just manipulate that to change a habit. But this is life threatening, life destructive for many people. In bigger or smaller ways, these habits just run us.

Just because something is simple doesn't mean it's easy. Right. I mean, we all know how to be in better shape, right? Spend more time, exercise. It's not, it's not like I've told you something in like. But we walk past it, we're like, I really want some dessert. That ice cream looks really, really good. So what are the things that make it easier? Well, first of all, focusing on those cues and rewards, right? Because when we tend to think about habits and changing our habits, we tend to focus on the behavior. But if we don't recognize the cue and the reward that's driving it, then we're putting ourself at a disadvantage. And there's something known as the golden rule of habit change, which says rather than trying to extinguish a habit, what you ought to do is change that habit by choosing a new routine that corresponds to that old cue and that delivers an old reward. A great example of this is when I was writing the Power Habit. I got into this pattern where every afternoon I'd like, go get a cookie at the cafeteria at the New York Times where I worked at the time.

And that sounds like I would just add a coffee to that.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so I would actually put like post its on my monitor saying no more cookies. And yet it, you know, in the afternoon I would sort of manage to ignore that and go up and get a cookie. And so, so I talked to researchers about it. They said, okay, look, let's figure out what's the cue and what' the reward. Most cues fall into one of five buckets. It's usually a time of day, a particular place, a certain emotion, the presence of certain other people, or a preceding behavior that's become ritualized. And so whenever I felt the cookie urge, I would just write down those five things. And it was pretty clear that the cookie urge, the thing that was consistent from day to day was that the cookie urge always hit at like 3:15 to 3:45 in the afternoon. Like, it was pretty time specific. So my cue was a time of day. And then I had to figure out what the reward was. Was. Now, you might think that the reward of buying and eating a cookie is the cookie, but that's actually a cookie is like a bundle of like 15 different rewards in one little package. So the question is, was it the taste sensation that I was craving? In which case just actually taking some Splenda and putting it on my tongue should have satisfied that was it that I needed to get up and stretch my legs, in which case going for a walk around the block rather than going up to the cafeteria might Work just as well. Right. Was it that the cookie provided me with like a burst of energy because they're sugar and in it, in which case, having a coffee should do the trick. And so every day when I got. Got up and I felt this cookie urge, I'd do something different to see if it satisfied that urge. And what I figured out pretty quickly was when I was going up to the cafeteria, I'd buy a cookie, and then inevitably I would see a friend sitting in the cafeteria and I would go over and I would.

It was a social experience for you.

Exactly. It was a social experience. And that was the reward for me was the social. Sociality. So once I know the cue and the reward, now I can say, okay, I'm gonna set my alarm at 3:15 in the afternoon. I'm gonna stand up, I'm gonna look around for someone to go gossip with, I'm gonna go talk to them for 10 or 15 minutes, and then I'm going to go back to my desk. And when I did that, the cookie urge basically disappeared.

Right.

But it's only because I diagnosed the.

Cue and the reward in, in that example, though, I mean, I think you're telling us to replace one habit with another. Am I correct on that?

That's right. To change the habit. Yeah. To change the routine, the behavior.

Right, but with that example you just mentioned, with the cookie, you didn't really replace the habit. You just sort of unbundled one thing, and that was the cookie. You still.

That's exactly right.

You know, should you have literally replaced the cookie else and also socialized?

No, no, because. Because I think that the. The reward was tied to the socialization. So the cookie was actually not the habit. The habit was going up to the cafeteria and talking to people. The cookie was like a free writer on that. Right. Once I recognize that, then I could just change the routine a little bit to say, instead of going up to the cafeteria to see people, I'll walk across the room to see people. And then the cookie won't be within reach. And so I won't. I won't crave it.

Okay, so let's, let's take this into the example of more serious things. I mean, actually a cookie is pretty serious if you get diabetes and, you know, obesity and all that, which is a huge problem, sadly, in this country. But let's take like a drug addiction or something, you know, more serious that is really disrupting someone's life. Alcohol, whatever.

Yeah.

What do you do there? And I know you gave an example about aa In.

Yeah, in the book.

But I'm not sure I really understood that fully.

So there are some addictions that are actual physical addictions. Opioids is a great example where your body becomes dependent on them. We also tend to think of, for instance, as nicotine as a physical addiction. And it is. But what's interesting is you are no longer addicted to nicotine a hundred hours after your last cigarette. Like all the nicotine has cleared itself out of your system at that point. And yet we all know people who, five or ten years after they gave up smoking, they crave a cigarette in the morning. That is not a physical addiction. After 10 years of no exposure to nicotine, you don't have a physical addiction to it anymore. What it is is it's a habit dysfunction. And in fact, the dsm, which is the guide that they use for psychological diagnoses, categorizes addiction as a habit dysfunction. The fact that it's a habit dysfunction as opposed to a physical addiction doesn't make it feel any different. Right? Because the parts of our brains that react to physical addictions and to habit habits are very, very close together and very closely tied to each other. So it feels like a physical addiction. But AA is a great example. So what does AA do to help people quit drinking? Drinking? Well, what it does is it recognizes that you have a habit in your life. There's a cue, you're feeling some stress, and there's a routine. I'm going to go to the bar because I know if I have a drink, it's going to relax me a little bit. But also I'm going to see other people, I'm going to be able to socialize. I'm going to be able to think about things besides work or whatever stressing me out. And there's the reward, right, that it's providing to me. And AA says we are going to create that exact same cue and that exact same reward and just change the routine. So now, if you're having a really bad day, if you're stressed, rather than going to the bar, come to an aa. And what happens at the AA meeting? You're going to see a whole bunch of other people. You're going to social communities, you're going to talk to them, you're going to stand up and you're going to talk about your own story, right? That's what happens at an AA meeting. You stand up, say, I am an alcoholic. Here's my story. And that's actually a sort of cathartic experience. It feels very relaxing. Very relieving to be able to share that. So it's the same basic reward that the bar is providing, except that you're doing it in a place without alcohol.

Alcohol.

Now, does that mean that, you know, you go to one A meeting and you never have a craving for another drink? No, because what happens in our brain when we have that Q routine reward is that the neural pathways that connect the cue, the routine and the reward become thicker and thicker, so it's much easier for an electrical pulse to travel down them. What we're trying to do is we're trying to slightly rewire that to a different behavior, a different routine. And the first time you do it, it's going to be tough, right, because you're building a new neural circuit in your brain. Fine. But the 10th time you do it, the hundredth time you do it, it's going to get easier and easier and easier. And eventually you're going to get to a place where you feel stressed. You're like, oh man, I'm going to go, I'm going to go to a meeting. And you're not even going to notice that you didn't even think about going to a bar. Change happens slowly.

Okay. Okay. So. So there's a great long standing organization for alcohol problems, but opioids, heroin, you know, really, like really serious things.

Well, I mean, first of all, you have to get off the physical addiction to them, right? And that, that can be very painful. And so usually a medical intervention helpful in getting through, ridding your system of the drug itself. But then it's basically the same thing. If you go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, if you go to a rehab therapy or a rehab center, they're doing the same basic thing. They're saying, look, what is the thing that triggered you to do drugs? Well, I would feel bad about myself, or I'd feel bored, or I'd feel anxious. Okay, what's a new behavior that we can, that we can link to that cue? And what was the drugs providing as a reward? Well, it was letting me, like, just stop thinking about things like I just basically turned my brain off. Okay, so what are other behaviors that help you turn your brain off? Well, meditation, exercise, et cetera. It's not, it's not a coincidence that many people who have drug addictions and recover become, for instance, endurance athletes, particularly endurance runners. And it's because they're looking for something that delivers a similar sensation to do drugs.

Runners high, the endorphins.

It's not just the runner's high. It's also the distractors, right. That oftentimes, like I'm turning to drugs because I'm so stressed about my work. And when I'm running, what we know is that I feel endorphins and endocannaboids and those, the, the runner side that we talked about. And one of the things that happens when I'm running is that I, it's really hard to think about work. I don't have work in front of me. My mind just wanders and I think about other things. So it. Again, just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy. Yeah, but understanding how your own habits work gives you the tools to start changing them.

Okay, so I want to, I want to talk about two more kind of negative things, if you will. And then I want to talk about how to use this to just be more productive on a daily basis. You know, you're not struggling with any big addictions, any big problems, just how to be just better. Right. So, so we'll get to that in a moment. But the negative things I want to ask you about is two very common addictive behaviors that are really affecting society. I, I, you know, of course, the food thing we already talked about. But if it's women, especially younger, I think social media addiction is a serious, serious problem. And sadly, companies are just making bank off of our addictive behaviors. And they're, you know, they're catering to them and they're, they're hiring teams of psychologists to make us more addicted. Right. You know, that's a gambling psychology and so forth. And then for men, pornography. Right. So, you know, both of those things. Right. Are common. And I think they're not looked upon as very serious as, and I don't know, maybe they're not too serious, but.

It seems it's up to people if they're serious, if they feel like it's serious. Right. Like, if, if it's a behavior that you don't feel like is interfering with the things you care about, then it's not a negative habit. Right. I know lots of people who check social media and you know, they're like, oh, this is kind of fun. It's a way to, like, spend some time when I'm standing in line. But let's say, let's say you think that it is a problem that you feel like it's affecting.

I mean, it's just, it's not, it's not neither of those to negative. What I call negative addictions are real life, right. They're, they're not real life. They're not engaging with people. They're not having like the traditional interactions that we have evolved to have. Right. They're sure.

And for. They're not inherently bad.

Right, Right.

Like there's, there's nothing inherently bad about pornography or social media.

Okay.

If, if, if people don't feel like it's negatively impacting them, then they should continue doing it. It's not like it's hurting society or hurting them. Them. But let's say that they feel like.

Well, and it may be an outlet too. It may be a pressure release valve too, either, either one of those. So, you know, that may be perhaps.

Or perhaps they just enjoy it. Right. Like, do you ever check social media?

Yep, of course.

Do you feel like you have a problem with it? Like, is it like, like you're, you're not able to, like, I don't know.

Sometimes, you know, I'll be laying in bed trying to go to sleep and it's like, you know, another hour just went by, I could have been sleeping.

Okay, so there's a moment that's a specific, specific case where we say you are falling into this trap of a habit around social media that you'd like to change. Okay, so what's the most effective way to change it? I mean, you could do the whole thing where you figure out like, what's the cue and what's the reward and that would probably be useful. Or you could just not take your phone into your bedroom.

Right. And that's, that's, that's what my ex girlfriend does. She leaves her phone, she charges it in a whole nother room.

So do I. Yeah, that's exactly what I do. I don't think that's what, that's what most people recommend. It's.

It.

There's never going to be anything that's so important that you have to have your phone right next to your bed. If it's really important, they'll call you and you'll hear the phone and you can get up and go check the ringing. But equally, in addition to not having my phone inside my room, I also have close by most of the time apples. So that if I do feel like that urge for a cookie and I'm hungry, rather than going and getting something unhealthy to eat, I just grab an apple because it's literally right there. Sometimes oranges, because I like oranges too.

Okay.

So, so for these things that are, for instance, social media, pornography, probably my first piece, bit of advice would be create more barriers to easily fulfilling that behavior. Right. And there's like, there's like literally thousands of options that can do this for you. You can uninstall the apps from your phone. There's a program called Freedom that you can download onto your computer that basically limits when you're allowed to use the Internet for anything that's not work related. Related. And the key is another one is.

Put your phone on grayscale. I've heard that one.

Yeah, sure.

But you know, there's lots of things interesting if it's not in color.

But the point here is just because you're doing something and maybe society says, oh, nowadays you shouldn't do that thing, that doesn't mean it's actually a bad habit. It's a bad habit if you feel like you're powerless over it, if you feel like it's intruding on the things you care about. And for understanding the cues and rewards that drive that is helpful. But the easiest step is literally just don't sleep with your phone next to your bed.

Yeah.

And again, there's literally no reason on earth you need your phone next to your bed. Like people survived for thousands and thousands of years without having a phone next to the bed.

Yeah. You're reminding me of Stephen Covey's famous line, you know, the main thing is to keep the main thing. The main thing. Yeah. And so I think that's the point. Yeah.

And here's the other, other thing I would point out is if this really is something you feel like is not is a negative part of your life, if you go to sleep with your phone next to your bed tonight, it's because you don't actually believe yourself. Like, you might tell me, like, I really wish I went to bed, you know, an hour earlier instead of spending all that time on social media. But within psychology, there's a thing known as stated preferences versus revealed preferences. Your stated preference is that you wish you weren't spending time on social media. Your revealed preferences is that there's a really easy solution to it and you're not availing yourself of it. And so the revealed preference is this is actually not a priority for you. And again, that's fine.

That's a really good distinction. I'm glad you mentioned that. Yeah, yeah.

You just have to decide like, is this actually a priority or am I saying it's a priority? Because like, I'd love to have a, you know, a six pack abs.

Right.

And so I'd say, yeah, that's a preference. That's a stated preference. But, but I Don't do any. Like, I don't do many crunches every single day. So my reveal preference is, is it's a kind of fantasy stated preference. I don't really care that much.

Yeah. So how do we use this throughout the day just to be better people, to be more productive, to be more successful?

You know, I think the first thing to do is an inventory. Right. Just pay attention to yourself. Like what are the things that I'm doing habitually every day? Are those things that are helpful towards me achieving my goals or do they detract from achieving my goals? This isn't hard. Like literally everyone who's listening, if I ask them what's two good habits you have and two bad habits, they would know them off the top of their head. Head. And then the things that they want to change, just start analyzing. What are those cues and those rewards if they want to create a brand new habit. Right. Create a good new habit. I want to go running in the morning. So the first thing you got to do is you got to figure out what's the cue. Okay, I'm going to put my running clothes next to my bed so I see them when I wake up and I put them on right away. Or I'm going to plan on meeting my friend Matt and we're going to go for a run on Wednesday night at 6:00'. Clock. Okay. I'm creating a deliberate queue. And then when you're done running, give yourself a reward. Let yourself have a nice long shower or a smoothie or give yourself, you know, a cookie. Something that, something that tells your brain this is a behavior I want to reinforce. I want to make this behavior easier. And when we do that, that is when we begin to create new habits. When we deliberately pair a behavior with a cue and root and a reward, it becomes easier and easier and easier to do.

How about getting the work done? You know, if, if anybody listening who's in sales of some sort, and everybody's in sales of some sort, really at the end of the day, okay, you know, or an entrepreneur, you know, you need to be the rainmaker. You need to prospect, you need to do outreach. Cold call, let's say there's a tremendous call reluctance, like they won't pick up the phone and call someone or so.

I'd say two things. First of all, if you do have that call reluctance, like it's okay to be have that call reluctance, it just means you might be in the wrong job. So you need to think about that. But the second thing is again, you need to give yourself rewards. If I make 30 phone calls in a row and I know that I'm going to get blown off off on 29 of them, I know that there's going to basically be a negative reward there. So I need to have a positive reward. Every single time I do a call, I give myself a chocolate chip. Or every single time I do five calls, I give myself 10 minutes to go watch YouTube or whatever it is. I'm creating rewards for myself because the be the behavior itself is not delivering the rewards that I'm looking for. So I'm going to create rewards for myself. And again, it'll get easier and easier and easier.

Easier.

The thing is, our brain turns off when we're in the grip of a habit. And so the whole goal is to just make it easy to, like, dial that next number and have the phone call. Because I know once I do five of them, I'm going to be able to watch that TV show that I'm like, halfway through.

Yeah, that's a good point because I. I've always noticed, and I spent a lot of my career training salespeople, that there's this type of salesperson that's always sort of getting ready to get ready, and they're never doing. Right. They're not doing the thing. They're always getting ready to do the thing. And they rationalize that as though, oh, I'm going to do this great thing because I've got all this infrastructure set up right, where you just gotta pick up the phone. It's not.

Well. And my guess is that they are rewarding themselves for building that infrastructure. They are rewarding themselves for getting ready to get ready. Right. I get, I feel a sense of accomplishment. I set up my desk, I cleaned off my desk. I feel a sense of accomplishment from that. But I know when I pick up a telephone. Yeah. When I pick up that telephone and someone's like, buzz off, Never call me again. It's not going to be as satisfying as when I just organized my desk and I felt a sense of accomplishment. So I need to say, every time I make a call, I'm going to make a check mark for myself, myself. And that's going to be my sense of accomplishment. It doesn't matter whether they say yes or no on the phone. The thing is that I want to fill up this entire row with check marks. And once I do that, I'm going to feel like I'm awesome.

That check mark is, like, on social media. It's a, it's a dopamine hit. Right. Yeah.

I mean, it's the same thing with. With people who. Again, my wife is an endurance runner, and so I sort of watch her do this. But when people begin exercising, they tend to have a calendar. Right. They check off each day that they've gone to the gym.

Yeah.

And the check becomes a manifestation of a reward.

And back to AA that we talked about earlier. They do. They count the days of being. Right. Yeah, exactly. Like, I remember, I had a. A lady in. In my office years ago that was an alcoholic, and her license plate said, you know, 7-72. And I'm like, what. What is this on your license plate? And she says, well, that's the day I. I became sober. And, yeah, that was many years ago, obviously.

So the key is to manufacture those celebrations for yourself, manufacture the rewards if the behavior itself is not delivering it, because your brain needs those rewards.

Yeah, that's. That's a really good point. And also, that became, in her example, kind of her identity. Right. She saw it every day. Her license plate.

Yeah.

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