Kwik Brain Episode 15: How To Create New Habits Fast with Dr. Fogg

Welcome to Kwik Brain, bite-sized brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. I'm your coach, Jim Kwik. Free your mind. Let's imagine if we could access 100% of our brain's capacity.

I wasn't high, wasn't wired, just clear. I knew what I needed to do and how to do it.

I know kung fu. Show me. How do you form new habits quickly? Think of a new habit that you'd like to adopt, But have been unsuccessful to this point. Maybe it's to work out, maybe it's to meditate, maybe it's to read 20 minutes a day or write in a journal, or maybe it's to complete one of our Kwik Learning courses or listen each week to the Kwik Brain Podcast. You know it's good for you, you want it, you need it. Now I know there's a distinction between wanting and needing.

Mm-hmm.

But for some reason you can't get yourself to be consistent. Now your success is tied to a large part to your ability to create new behaviors, new routines. As you've heard before, first you create your habits, then your habits create you. So to help Kwik Brains do this fast, I'm sitting here with the world's leading expert on behavioral change and habits, Stanford behavioral scientist Dr. BJ Fogg. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to talk with you.

No, this is— I've been looking forward to this, BJ. Our listeners and our students, they want to make a behavioral change. So how does behavioral change, like habit design formation, how does that work? And where do they start? I mean, is it just, you know, most people, they don't have a default. It's like they just have to try harder, they have to use willpower.

Yeah, which, as you know, that's the wrong approach.

Right.

If you're relying primarily on willpower to create a habit, you're actually approaching it wrong, at least for most types of habits. And the way I see it, the starting point is to pick a new behavior that you actually want to have in your life. Too often people pick something that feels like a should Or something that they feel guilty about that they don't really want to bring into their life. And they think that through some magical way they're going to be able to get themselves to do something they don't want to do. So step 1 is really like, you know, match yourself with something that you want to do.

And a want is different than a need then?

To some regard. I mean, we all have needs that we may not really want to do, whereas a want is that at least some part of you— yeah, we have conflicting wants and things that, uh, but you know, If it's reading more, meditating more, or spending more time with your kids, yeah. But again, the mistake is for people, and often this happens in the new year, is they pick something that they think they should be doing and they work on it and it doesn't work and they get discouraged. So starting point, pick something you already want to do.

Okay, so let's say somebody wants to just they want to read 15, 20 minutes a day because something positive, something empowering for them because they wanna read more. Maybe they want that. I know that's a big goal for a lot of our Kwik Brains. So what would step 2 be?

So I've created a model called the FOG Behavior Model, and just using that model, it will help us understand how to create habits. And the model essentially says behavior happens when, behavior can be a habit, or it can be a one-time behavior. When there's motivation to do the behavior, there's ability, it can't be impossible, and there's a trigger. So that's called like the BMAT model. And so the behavior needs to be specific.

Mm-hmm.

So read more is more of an aspiration than an actual behavior. So think, what is it exactly? What's the precise behavior? Is it 15 minutes a day? Great. Well, I can even get more precise. Is it 15 minutes a day reading this particular book? Great, that's even better. And you might even go as far as to say, it's 15 minutes a day reading this book at this time in this particular chair. There seems to be something powerful about getting very specific. Specificity, in some cases, can change behavior.

Hmm.

So that's, you know, getting clear in your mind, what is the specific behavior? Then after that, there's the issue around motivation. And that's why I said earlier, pick something you already want to do, because then you don't have to find some strange way to motivate yourself and so on. So hopefully that's built into the actual behavior itself right there.

Now, is there other ways— let's say that people— let's go to the example of reading. Are there ways of increasing that inherent motivation somebody has?

Well, you might, yeah, pick a topic you want to read about, right?

Right.

So, but let's say it's like, let's say it's school and you're in a class, you don't like the content, there's a quiz coming or whatever, and you're reading content you don't like. No, there's no magical way to make that a habit. It's very hard to create habits around something that you don't want to do or something that's painful or distasteful in some way. You might be able to make it a routine, But I don't think that ever becomes a true habit. In other words, habit, it's kind of a messy word actually. But I think when we talk about habit and the way I conceptualize it, it's how automatic is the behavior. It's the level of automaticity. So how, you know, so many of us, we, you know, if you drive to work, you probably drive to work in the same way every day. You don't think about it. It's quite automatic. Deciding on where to go on a family vacation, that's not automatic. You're on the opposite side of the spectrum and you're making a decision. So what I'm saying here is that if you are like forcing yourself to read material you don't like, you may find ways of getting yourself to do it reliably, but it's unlikely that that is going to become an automatic behavior.

Right, because the motivation we talk about in— for memory training, we talk about information combined with emotion becomes more of a long-term memory. And so that motivation is charged with emotion, right? Because one of the challenges what we overcome in traditional education is this rote memory where people have to repeat something to themselves over and over again, frequency, or they have to study longer for duration. But if you have enough intensity, then you could shortcut that.

Yeah.

Because I think there's a myth, and correct me if I'm wrong, people always hear about the law of 21, and it says something has to take 21 or 66 days or 30 days. I mean, is that true?

Yeah, well, yeah, I do think it's a myth and it's not a helpful way to think about habits because it implies that on day 20 this was not a habit and suddenly on day 21 it was. It's a matter of degree, you know, how the level of automaticity— and that's a continuous variable, you know, it's not like, you know, there's not this threshold where it suddenly becomes a habit. Now, one of the things— this is in the Tiny Habits book— method that I teach and my sister trains coaches in is there's a way to hack that automaticity. And that's to fire off a positive emotion inside yourself as you do the behavior or immediately after. So you're not waiting for like, you know, eating the candy to make you happy and that becomes— you have a way and this is a skill you can develop to make yourself feel this positive emotion on demand, and that's a way to make the behavior become automatic quite quickly, much faster than 21 days.

Right, because again, it's like instead of the challenge with frequency or durations, it takes time. But if you add intensity to it, a level of emotion, yeah, it becomes more, more permanent.

Exactly. And the more intense the emotion, the faster the habit forms. So again, Not everybody can do this out of the gate. And so in the Tiny Habits method, we call it celebration.

Mm-hmm.

That may not be the perfect word, but that's what we call it. And it's this thing that you do, whether it's internal or physical or a song you think in your head where you're saying, good for me, good job, or whatever it is that fires— and it's different for different people. The better you are at firing off that positive emotion in connection with that new behavior, the faster it becomes automatic. In other words, you can kind of get superpowers in creating new habits if you're good at firing off that positive emotion.

I love that so much. So you have the, you have the specific behavior, you have the motivation, and then so what, what is A?

A is ability. It's like how hard or easy is it to do. And the easier the behavior is, The more likely you are to do it in the face of motivation going up and down. So it's just human nature. It's natural that our motivation goes up and down over time. It shifts during the day, it shifts during the week. And even though you really may want to read this content, at times a competing motivation will come up in that moment that may swamp out the, the earlier motivation. So So if you make the behavior really simple, then it doesn't require a lot of motivation to do. Now, if the behavior's hard, then it does. And so let's say meditating 30 minutes a day, that is a hard behavior. Not only is it 30 minutes, but also meditation tends to be, you know—

For a lot of people.

Yeah, it's not like watching TV, right? So it's possible to get yourself to do that every day.

If the motivation is behind it.

But it's gonna be very, The performance of the behavior is going to be dependent on your ability to keep motivation high, and that's quite hard to do. So the easier you can make the behavior, the better. So you might say, okay, what's the shortest period of reading that would really work for me? Is that, you know, in the Tiny Habits method, you scale it way, way, way back, which is—

Like, like read one sentence?

Yeah, or even open the book.

Right, right.

Okay, but which may not be what, um, The listeners are looking for. But, you know, if you take it to this extreme, it's just like all you do is the smallest behavior and then you grow the habit over time.

And I like that. I mean, the example that I've heard you use is like flossing your teeth.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah. If you're, you know, and the thing is you already know how to floss all your teeth. So flossing all your teeth is not the problem. What you don't have yet is doing it automatically. So you take the behavior scale way back So the motivation doesn't matter so much, and then you work on the automaticity. In other words, how do you wire it into your brain to remember to do it? And that happens through the celebration piece.

Right. And then so, and just with the tiny habits, it'd be starting with just one tooth.

Yeah.

Or opening the book, something that's very small that they could develop some kind of momentum and consistency. Yeah.

And what happens over time is behaviors will naturally grow, and there's 2 reasons for that. The more you do a behavior, the easier it gets.

Mm-hmm.

For a variety of reasons. In flossing, you know, you get, you get better at wrapping the floss around your fingers, your fingers toughen up, your gums toughen up, and so on. That just gets easier over time. And you also, let's say something like reading, you start learning to carve out a space in your day for that, and you can expand that more and more. Now, not every habit has to start out tiny. However, that is a very reliable method for doing it. You can work on habits that are bigger than the Tiny Habit Method implies, but that would mean to make sure— so making it easier to do would be make sure that you have in your schedule, you've blocked out whatever that time is.

Yeah.

Make sure the resource is there for you. The book is right there so you don't have to go finding the book. Make sure you know exactly where you're going to start. So think through all the, what I call simplicity factors. Things can be difficult if you don't have the time, so make sure you have the time. They can be difficult if you don't have the money. In this case, money doesn't apply really to reading, I guess. How much you have to think about something, like what am I reading, where do I start, so have that ready to go, as well as how much effort it takes. So you don't want the book to be in the attic and you want to read in your office basement. Just try to make it as simple as you can.

Because you're setting up the environment.

Yes, exactly.

So it's conducive.

Exactly. So at the beginning of the effort, it's like, okay, you put some time and energy into setting up the environment, and if what you do at the beginning doesn't work, change it. You know, then redesign the environment. A huge part— I don't know what percent exactly— but often we can change our our behavior simply by redesigning our environment. And I think the right way to think about it is, and if it doesn't work, redesign it again. Just like in this room, that chair over in the corner, if it's not working there, great, let's just put it in a new place and try it again. And important, don't get down on yourself that we didn't put the chair in the right place. It's just unnatural.

Mm-hmm.

So if you think about habit formation as a design process, And not a willpower process, then you're exactly on the right road.

I like that so much. And then so finally, the T then in your, in your BMAT?

Yeah, so that is trigger, and by that what I mean is the prompt or the cue. What's going to remind you to do the behavior? Now there are 3 sources of where triggers can come from. They can come from our environment, like a Post-it note or alarm or somebody reminding you. They can come from internal where you suddenly remember. Now that one's not a great one, right? 'Cause don't just— but so many innovators think, oh, they're just gonna remember to go to my website or like something.

Right.

It doesn't work well. The third source of trigger is to have an action or routine you already do be the reminder. And that's what the Tiny Habits method does. Yeah, you can do the first method, like, here's a Post-it, here's a, an alarm, or— but I don't think it scales very well. So if you're trying to create a lot of habits at once, which you can do— I don't buy at all the one habit at a time idea.

Okay.

You know, Post-its everywhere, alarms going off, it doesn't scale well. But it is a way that you can remind yourself. In the Tiny Habits method, the hack is— and I think this is a great method for your listeners— is where does this new behavior, reading, Where does it fit naturally in my day? What does it come naturally after? And get very clear in your mind. As soon as I sit down on the train on my commute, that's when I open my book.

That's the trigger. Yeah.

So the sitting down then becomes the trigger, the reminder, the cue to open the book and start reading.

Or if it's somebody who's journaling, for example, that they're in bed. They lie down in bed and they just journal their thoughts before they go to bed. That could be the trigger.

Exactly. So again, it's a design process. It's like, okay, here's this new behavior I want, journaling. How do you design it into your existing routine so it fits naturally? And get really clear. I mean, don't leave it to chance. And if you try a spot and it doesn't work, like when you get into bed, that's okay. Don't get down on yourself. Look for a different spot.

And that's important also because even when people procrastinate, sometimes they put things off and they have this guilt trip and they beat themselves up. No, not helpful.

Doesn't help.

No, no, no, not helpful.

You know, when we coach people and train coaches in tiny habits, you acknowledge and you feel good about when it worked well. And when it doesn't, you don't get down on yourself, just like the chair being in the wrong spot. It's just like, oh, let's redesign and try this other thing.

And that's a perfect way to also conclude this because, you know, it's not gonna be perfect the first time out. And that we're human. And I think that in the research I've done on self-compassion and, you know, kind— being kind to yourself is much better. In terms of, it's more reinforcing to be able to complete doing the things that you need to do as opposed to beating yourself up and just saying, hey, I'm only human and this happens, but I'm looking for progress and not perfection. So just to repeat then, you start with a specific behavior.

That you hopefully want to do.

That you wanna do, 'cause you're motivated. And then the A stands for?

Make it really easy, ability. So make it really easy to do, and that could be In terms of physical effort, cognitive effort, uh, how much time, and so on.

Fantastic. And finally, the T is the trigger that sets all of that in motion.

Yeah, and the hack there is to have an existing routine in your life be the trigger to do the new behavior.

That's wonderful. Dr. Fogg, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

On Kwik Brain. Okay, here's what you could do right now. I want you to go in our private Facebook group and check out the show notes of this episode. Not only are we going to add the highlights there, but I'm also going to include a graphic Of the BMAD. And so it'll make the process absolutely crystal clear. The other thing is I read recently in a Duke University study saying your daily habits comprise of 40% of your behaviors. 40% of your daily behaviors are from habits. So it's so important. So what I want you to do so the whole community can get behind you on this is I want you to share the new habit you'd like to adopt. I'd like you to share it on social media so we can cheer you on. Tag Dr. Fogg, tag me @JimKwik, #KwikBrain. Also, let me know what you thought of this episode and any other questions you have. I suspect that a lot of people want more of Dr. Fogg, so if you'd like me to bring him back, let me know and we can bring him back to discuss the opposite of adding new habits, which is breaking your old limiting habits. Want to double your brain speed and memory power? If you'd like to learn rapidly and get ahead faster, I'd like to give you my brand new Quick Brain Accelerator program. You will discover exactly what I teach my clients to learn, read, and remember anything in half the time. There is no charge. It's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers. That's kwikbrain.com, or simply text the word podcast to 916-822- 916-82-BRAIN. Growing up struggling with learning challenges from a childhood brain injury, it's been my life's mission to help you have your very best brain so you can win more every single day. Now, want more Kwik Brain? Here are 4 ways to fast-track your results and lock in what you just learned into your long-term memory. Remember FAST. F is for focus. The F stands for Facebook. You're not alone on this journey. I invite you to join our free private online group. There you can connect with me, your fellow brain lovers, links to resources, and even submit your questions for me to answer in future episodes. Go to kwikbrain.com. That's kwikbrain.com. The A stands for Apply. Act on what you learned today. Remember, knowledge is not power It's potential power. It only becomes power when you use it. So use what you just learned. The S stands for subscribe. Don't miss the next episode and other free brain training. And finally, the T stands for teach. You want to learn faster now? The key is to lock it in right away by teaching it to someone else. When you teach something, you get to learn it twice. Here's a simple way to do that. Leave a review on iTunes. Leave a review with your biggest takeaway from this episode. You could also post and share this podcast on your social media. It helps us spread our mission of building better, brighter brains. And of course, tag us so our team can properly thank you. #KwikBrain, K-W-I-K Brain. Mine is @JimKwik, K-W-I-K, on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. So what does FAST stand for? Facebook, apply, subscribe, teach. I'll see you in our next episode of Quick Brain. Until then, remember, you are faster and smarter than you think.