Kwik Brain Podcast Episode 17: Breaking Habits that Hold You Back with Dr. BJ Fogg

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I know kung fu. Show me. Welcome back, Quick Brains. So how do you stop or break a habit quickly? And I know the word Break is maybe not the right word, but we got such powerful feedback from our earlier episode on how to form new habits. And many people are asking, well, how do I do the opposite? Right. If you think about a limiting behavior that you'd like to stop, maybe it's to stop smoking or to binge watch Netflix or checking social media or checking your phone first thing in the morning, which I encourage people not to do because they become reactive and they're getting all their dopamine fixes and getting driven to distraction in that way. So how do you do it? Is this just a matter of willpower? So we have back for you Dr. BJ Fogg, Stanford behavioral scientist and researcher, world's leading expert on behavioral change. Thanks for being back with us, Dr. Fogg.

Thanks for having me back.

I love this. And so we had so much positive feedback from people because we know that people create their habits and then their habits create them. And so what we wanted to talk about here was some people have limiting behaviors or limiting habits that's reducing the quality of their life. It's limiting their life, their health, their success, their joy. And so where do we start? Where does somebody start?

First of all, understand that the process of creating a habit is different than the process of stopping or reducing that behavior. One way I like to explain it is, you know, there's what you can plant a tree and it grows in one way. That's like creating habit. But then to take the tree out is an entirely different process. You know, you got to pull it out and get all the little roots out and so on. So it's not just undo or the inverse. My research and my expertise is primarily in bringing new behaviors into your life that you want.

Sure.

But I do have ways of thinking about reducing the frequency of behavior that I think can be helpful. And first of all, the word break.

Yeah.

As you know, we've talked previously. Break, you know, we often say, I want to break this habit. And that word break actually sets up the wrong expectation. For most of these things that people are talking about, like, I want to break the habit of going to Facebook or break the habit of drinking or break the habit of yelling at my kids, it's not a kind of behavior. And so break implies Like if I put in a lot of effort in a single moment, like on this pencil, and I put a lot of effort, boom, it's done, it's over with.

Right.

That's not how it works.

Okay.

With breaking habits. So I actually think maybe that word came from— and I tried, I've tried to find this— maybe it came from breaking a horse. You know, breaking a horse is a process, right? Because I was like, where did— where does that come from? So it's not like break a stick or break a pencil. So I like to think of instead of breaking habits, it's untangling The habit. And usually those habits aren't just a single thing. Let's say somebody says, oh, I wanna break the habit of snacking.

Okay.

So it's really untangling. It's not just one behavior. It's maybe somebody snacks in the morning, they have a snack at lunch, they get up in the night and snack. Those are all different behaviors. And I think a helpful way— now I've not studied this scientifically, but I think it is a helpful way to think about it— is here is this thing that I call snacking, but it's actually a tangle of behaviors. And I need to untangle it. And this is the difference between break sets the wrong expectation, and I think untangle sets a much better one, is I start at the most easily addressed knot and I untangle that.

Okay.

Like maybe breaking the snack, the specific snack in the morning is the easiest one to stop. And then you do the next one and next one, and you don't work on the hardest one first. Just like if you're untangling a big rope or extension cord, You don't try to go to the very middle, I get it. You start with the outside and work in. So I think that sets the right expectation of start with the ones you can actually do first, and it's a process.

Okay.

That's my sense of things.

And I get it. I'm gonna go in a different direction with this. I like this because in the morning, we talk about morning routines. I wanna maybe talk about the difference between a routine and a habit. I know there's a distinction that you have about that. And one of the things that we discourage for our Kwik Brains students is not to touch their phone for the first hour of the day, to really spend the first hour of the day on purpose, right, on self-care, on setting your vision instead of reacting to everybody's firefighting and everything that everyone wants from you and picking up and going onto social media and getting all your dopamine fixes. And I know this might be, I know one of your students was a co-founder of Instagram.

Mm-hmm.

And so when people are getting their likes and their shares and their comments, You know, it could be, in a way, people, it's very compelling for people to reach for their phone because they get that hit. And so how do people reduce that? Let's say somebody wants to, they have a habit of as soon as they wake up, they reach for their phone.

Yeah.

And that's the first thing. They don't meditate, they don't say hi to loved ones, they don't think about their goals or journal. They pick up their phone and they just, they get onto their emails and texts and they get frantic and they get reactive and responsive as opposed to being proactive.

Yeah, well, I have good news and bad news around that. The bad news is that there are some behaviors, some habits that are truly hard to stop, and there's reasons for that.

Mm-hmm.

The good news is there's a systematic way that you can design for to reduce or stop a behavior, and it comes back to the Fogg Behavior Model where behavior happens when motivation, ability, and trigger come together at the same time. So with that model, you can systematically figure out, first of all, what is triggering the behavior? What's reminding or prompting me to the behavior? And if you can remove the trigger, you've solved the problem.

That's perfect. And by the way, we'll put this behavior model and links in our private Facebook group in our show notes so people could see the visual.

Yeah. So if that doesn't work, and sometimes you can't remove the trigger, You know, you're being triggered by, let's say, somebody else who says, hey, you know, let's go to the ice cream parlor. Or just somehow you just, you know, in the morning as soon as you get up, your phone— you look at your phone and seeing the phone is the trigger to launch Facebook. So you can't just throw away your phone, right? So if you can't remove the trigger, then you look at the ability issue. So, you know, MOT, motivation, ability, trigger. And you think, how do I make this harder to do?

Hmm.

So, for example, if you're on social media a lot and you don't want to do that, maybe you bury the app somewhere on the phone so it's actually harder to get to. Maybe you just remove the app entirely from your mobile phone, right? So you make it harder to do or impossible. In my own life, one of the things that I've worked on successfully Is how much popcorn I eat. And I know people are going to say that's not, you know, and it's super healthy popcorn, but still, I was eating a lot of popcorn. A lot. And so what did I do? Well, I threw away the popcorn popper. I took all the popcorn out of the house. I just made it hard to cook any popcorn. And so by making it harder to do or impossible, then guess what? You don't do the behavior. In our home, we We've banned ice cream. We love ice cream. We banned cheese and we banned bread. Why? Because if it's in the home, at some point I'm probably gonna eat the ice cream. Maybe not just one scoop, maybe all of it. So by having no ice cream and cheese and bread in the home, we don't eat that anymore.

And it's the same thing at a restaurant. I'll do the same. I have this very similar palate. At the restaurant, when they bring bread, I'll say no bread. And that's the thing, I only have to say no once, but if I leave it there, I have to say no to myself like 20 times because it's just sitting there.

Exactly, so that bread triggers you. So the one thing, and you're taking control of your environment, is say no bread. Chips at Mexican food, I say no chips, please. And you just in that one moment say no, and then you're not tempted the rest of the night. So first, can you stop the trigger? If not, Can you make it harder to do?

Ability.

Ability. And if not, can you somehow demotivate the behavior?

So how does that work?

Well, it's harder than the other 2, and that's why I say it's systematic. So you leave that for the end. And in that case, then you're in the world of how do I demotivate myself to eat popcorn, for example? I mean, and for most of the behaviors that people are thinking of, there's something very compelling about the behavior. For me and popcorn, I'll just reveal this. I think in my family growing up, popcorn was sort of a signifier that we're relaxing and we're spending family time. I mean, I came from a family that was all about working, like, pretty much all the time. And so, but popcorn's like this moment of we're just relaxing and being together. So there's a lot of sort of emotional, positive emotional stuff tied up with popcorn.

Sure.

So how do I demotivate that? Well, I can be thinking about my dentist, and this is true, where she's like, BJ, you're— the popcorn's not helping your teeth at all, right? I could think of that. I could think of why it's not good and so on. But that's the hardest one.

And you're changing it internally, like this internal idea where, like, for example, if you asked yourself on a scale of 0 to 10, how motivated are you to eat popcorn? And somebody says, oh, it's about an 8. Could you in your mind say like, oh, well, what if I wanted to make it from an 8 to a 6? Yeah, what would you have to think differently about it?

Or—

because it's different than a reward, like rewarding yourself externally for saying, okay, if I don't eat popcorn for X amount of time, I'm going to get this external benefit.

Yeah, there's a gratification for eating popcorn or other behaviors that are already there. I don't know of a fast and awesome technique for demotivating something that is wired into you from childhood and so on. So that's why I'm a huge fan of Of making it harder to do.

The trigger.

Or seeing if you can remove the trigger, right? So you work there. Now, if you get to that point and you can't find a way to demotivate yourself for that behavior, then what the other way to look at it is, is what other behavior can I do that also scratches the itch? It's a swapping strategy.

And is that true that, like, if— can somebody just stop doing something, or do they have to replace it with something else?

It can go both ways.

Like somebody, let's say they smoke. Do they have to not just stop smoking, they have to replace it with something else?

I think it can be both. I've not studied this scientifically, but certainly you can just stop doing a behavior. Like, we're gonna stop eating ice cream. It doesn't have to be replaced. But in this case, and this is actually true, and this goes to the point, rather than ice cream, we started eating yogurt. Plain yogurt. And I actually like plain yogurt. But we would put apples in it and some cinnamon. So instead of the ice cream behavior—

Interesting.

So notice now we're not working on triggers, ability, or motivation. Now we're swapping what's a different behavior that's a reasonable alternative for the ice cream. So plain yogurt with apples and some cinnamon in it scratches the itch, serves the purpose, satisfies, and you move on. So you Then look for a behavior that's a reasonable alternative.

I love that. And then just to be clear, just when we're talking about the difference between a routine and a habit, there's, there's a distinction between stopping a poor routine or starting a poor routine. I encourage everyone to listen to our prior episode also in terms of forming behaviors and habits. What would you say the difference is between a routine and a habit?

Well, the way I think about it is habits are something you do automatically without thinking. at least to some degree of high automaticity. It just, you know, as soon as, for example, me, as soon as I put my plate, breakfast plate in the sink, I automatically go and get out my vitamins. Whereas a routine, and that may not be the perfect word, but there's a kind of behavior we do that's not automatic, but we do it reliably.

Mm-hmm.

So like right now in my life, Working out is not a habit. I don't do it automatically because, you know, I'm traveling and different things are happening. There's no way to do it automatically.

Right.

But I have a way to do it every day. So it's a— so I call that a routine. And you can design for routines. And as long as I get the workout in in the day, fine. As long as you get the reading in, fine. As long as you, you know, manage the email from my students, fine. And it doesn't have to be a habit.

Right.

So routine, of course, comes down to the same elements, you know, motivation to do the behavior, ability to do it, and trigger. And in the case of routine, then you've got to be pretty explicit about what's going to prompt or remind me to do this thing.

That's really key.

So then it comes down to trigger design.

That's fantastic. I'll end with this. I mean, we've all heard the quote, I think it's miscredited to Aristotle, but we are what we repeat. repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit. And I want to thank you so much for, for sharing your expertise with all our Kwik Brains.

Yeah, it's great to be here. And I'll add one last thing: habit formation is a skill. In fact, behavior change in general is a skill. The more you practice, the better you get, and you can get to where you're feeling like you're having superpowers about determining the future of your life.

Oh, I love that. The ability, the superpower to be able to create new habits.

Yeah, go where you want to go. But it won't happen instantly, but when you practice, you can get better and better.

I love it. Thank you, Dr. Fogg.

Thanks for having me.

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