The Key To Sustainable Change And Lasting Motivation | Jim Kwik & Michelle Segar

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. I'm your brain coach and your host of the Kwik Brain Podcast. My name is Jim Kwik, and the question for today is something that's come up a lot in our private Facebook group, in our app, and that is around motivation and really sustaining behavioral change. And what is the key to lasting motivation? I'm really looking forward to this conversation because I've been a fan and a follower of our guest's work because a lot of people talk about that they want to make a change. They want to eat right. They want to exercise. They want to read each day, or they want to be able to meditate. And so many people are not very successful in terms of following through. There's a difference between attaining something and sustaining it over time. So our guest here today is Dr. Michelle Sieger. She is an award-winning motivation scientist and researcher at the University of Michigan, author of No Sweat, and author of a brand new book called The Joy Choice: How to Finally Achieve Lasting Change Eating and in Exercise. Thanks for being on our show, Michelle.

It's so great to be here. Thank you.

We were talking about before we started recording that our audience loves the topic of motivation and motivation specifically to make changes, right? And when people— I believe that you change your brain, you could change your life, you could change your personal world. When we're talking about this, and I really enjoyed your book, I want to first start by the myths around habits. You talk about how sometimes it's maybe oversimplified or maybe outdated. Maybe we could discuss and unpack that a little bit. What are common held paradigms around habits and routines that maybe we want to give a little bit more color. And then we want to talk about your model for creating lasting change and sustained motivation.

Sure. Well, thank you. Well, first of all, the idea that we can automate our choices is amazing, right? We depend on that multiple times during our day, whether we're driving to work or specifically a simple behavior like flossing, right? It's habit formation, which refers to Putting our choices and decision-making around something on autopilot so we don't have to exert cognitive control or willpower. The problem is, as lovely as the strategy is for many things in our life, I'm contending that it's been overgeneralized as a valuable strategy for more complex behaviors that have multiple steps and even multiple phases, like eating and cooking. You have to go to the grocery store, you have to prepare things, you have to follow through, et cetera, et cetera. And so here's the situation is that there hasn't been a lot of research, surprisingly, showing that putting our choices on automatic pilot through habit formation actually does produce sustainable changes, number one. And the research that exists on habit formation has mostly been done on animals and in lab-based studies, um, using populations like students and already active gym members. So while the habit story is very popular, there isn't a lot of evidence to back up the fact that it can help us promote complex behaviors like physical activity and exercise and healthy eating.

Okay. And so let's talk about that because in our podcast and our courses, we talk a lot about how that's key for brain health and brain fitness, right? As your body moves, your brain grooves. We know that when you exercise, you create brain-derived neurotrophic factors. What's good for your heart is good for your head. You have oxygen flow, you have a change in mood. stress relief. Eating obviously is really key to good brain health. Whole area of neuro nutrition where there's— your brain is only 2% of your body mass, requires 20% of nutrients. But so many people learn these things in a podcast, but when it comes to implementing them, maybe they sustain it for a day or two and then they go back and they revert to their own patterns. So what would you say is your approach? Because in the model maybe that you're referring to when we're talking about habit loops, you're talking about something like a prompt, right?

Yes.

And it leads to— maybe we could explain that. And then you're right, it's a very complex activity. It's also a very complex world where we're traveling and there's children involved and there's world events. And you're not in your routine where you might not even have those prompts if you're in a hotel room or somewhere else. And then you default to an old pattern.

That's right. It's that the habit strategy, to a great extent, is focused on promoting how to form a habit. And let's talk about that. But I just want to say, in perfect world conditions, when in fact, Most of us don't live in perfect world conditions, and that's one of the presumptions, if you will, of very popular approaches to habit formation. So, let's talk about how habits are formed. And I'm not talking about doing a behavior regularly. I'm talking about this automaticity that happens when cue— this is step 1— cue, you brush. That leads to part step 2, floss. That's the behavior. That leads to step 3, which is the reward, which— Could be anything from a clean mouth to a sense of satisfaction. And the way our brains work is that our brains learn to want what we like. And that is what, when we do it again and again, it forms relationships within our brain that want us to keep doing it. Now, again, for simple behavior like flossing in the bathroom where there tend not to be too many disruptions, that habit loop is gonna stay healthy pretty much, right?

Right.

But once we step outside of the bathroom and enter our crazy world where we might have a kid who needs something urgent at school and maybe our cat puked over there in the living room, all these unexpected things happen and those types of unanticipated things just derail the automaticity that the cue needs to stay stable. And so, I can tell you There's a really interesting, I think, next-generation, more nuanced conversation happening in the habit literature right now, where people are starting to question, is habit formation actually the best way to think about helping people form lasting, create lasting changes in behavior when it comes to complex behaviors? We need to have a more nuanced conversation because the number of steps And then ergo, the number of challenges that potentially arise to those steps are so much more vast than happen when someone is developing the mechanical habits of making coffee or flossing their teeth.

In your work, there was one of the impetuses, I think it was in 1994, you were running an experiment. Maybe you could share the insight in terms of why this is something that you dedicated your your career too.

Sure. So in, in 1994, we were conducting a clinical trial with cancer survivors who, they were living normal lives. They were past their treatment and we randomized one group of people to get exercise and the other group not. And we were looking to see if exercise could benefit people through reducing their anxiety and depression. And we found that it did. But part of our study design was to call people back. This was in 1994. So we're talking almost 30 years ago and I was getting a master's degree in kinesiology at the time. The participants sat around and smiled and talked about exercise, but we were to learn that almost everyone had stopped.

Wow.

When our study ended, they stopped. And I asked people, shockingly, with the findings that we had, why would you stop exercising given all the benefits you're getting? And they were like, Michelle, do you have all day? I have a family. I have a job. I have aging parents. I have this, that, and the other. And it became very clear to me that these people felt comfortable committing to exercise for us, the researchers, but not for themselves. And it was my light bulb moment because I thought if people who faced a life-threatening illness didn't feel comfortable and have the skillset and the required belief system to sustain a self-care behavior like exercise, then we would— we have a real problem in society. And that's what I dedicated myself to solving.

Wow. So during the time they were committed, they were compliant, they were consistent for the study. The length of the study, but shortly afterwards, they went back to their own patterns.

And that gets back to your original, your earlier question is what's wrong? And what's wrong is people initiate a behavior change in a motivation bubble when things are idyllic and their view of what's successful is idyllic too. But once we leave the first 2, 3 weeks that might reflect those ideal circumstances, as soon as that unanticipated challenge hits us, we haven't learned how to think about that situation in an adaptive way so that we can successfully pivot and navigate it, harnessing our executive functioning, you know, this amazing system that is native to our brain to help us learn how to navigate what I call the choice point so that people can stick with it over time.

And I want to get to the choice point because it's interesting because people— so some people listening would say to themselves, that's not even logical. You know, these or individuals had health challenges, you would think they would prioritize this. So motivation is not always logical. It's, you would say it's more emotional, 'cause we are not logical, we are biological.

That's right.

Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. And so what's missing? What role does emotion play in sustained motivation?

Well, motivation is such a clinical term.

Yes.

And what it really refers to is drive. And, you know, there are really important theories like self-determination theory that have decades of research showing that Our motivation matters. You know, some people disagree with that fact, but I've seen it in my work again and again. We've been socialized to come at exercise and healthy eating, not as these amazing choices that are gonna fuel us, you know, helping our brains function as effectively as possible, helping our mood, mood be as high as possible, but as shoulds and things we're supposed to do according to the ways other people, experts are telling us we should do it. And that creates a negative type of emotion, which weighs down motivation. But I, I've come to the belief that while motivation is very important, despite— and I, and I would, I would, you know, love to debate people who disagree with that fact. We do need to help people understand what is going to be the most adaptive way to think about it. And I think feeling desire for doing something, do you want to do something or don't you wanna do it? Or does it feel like a chore and a gift? And as you know, from reading No Sweat, that's a key question. And it's a diagnostic because what we wanna do to help people understand why they don't desire to exercise or to eat in a certain way is we want to understand what's their underlying reason for initiating it and whether that feels like something they're supposed to be doing or whether it's something they deeply wanna do that they find compelling as a compelling way to help them actualize who they yearn to be as a person and live the life that they want to have.

For us, we teach accelerated learning, speed reading, memory improvement, creativity, critical thinking skills in our platform. And, you know, I notice in terms that we have a lot of data because we have students in every country in the world and completion rates. And we noticed that also that when people anecdotally, when we share people that follow through, they had some reason because with that reason they had a result, meaning they had purpose. And so for behavioral change, it's kind of like you could look at it like learning. Right? It's a process of learning, like treat it maybe as even a learning project.

I think we should actually throw away behavior change and call it learning change because that, you know, whether we're talking about habit learning, automated learning in the brain, or more conscious skill-based learning, or harnessing our— using our executive functioning in the moment when we have to make a new choice and then evaluate it to see Did that give me the adaptive outcome that I want? So yes, we absolutely— this is a process of learning. And doesn't that change the whole meaning of it away from something that we should be changing to something that we're going to grow from?

Yeah, it feels like a sense of play, a sense of experimentation. You know, you were saying that awareness and that feedback, it implies some, some level of metacognition also as well.

Absolutely. And, you know, metacognition, I love that term. And it also means Awareness and being an observer. You know, metacognition is a term from the learning field. And, you know, then we have mind being mindful and aware in other fields. And so whichever term we use, the goal is we can't learn lasting change unless we develop that metacognitive self-awareness that lets us understand what is actually getting in our way. So that we can become more tactical and strategic and learn how to either avoid it or successfully pivot and navigate past it.

So maybe we can walk people through an example where let's say one of our listeners, you know, we've done 300-something, 300 episodes roughly, and people want to implement a behavioral change. They want to meditate or they want to journal. They want to prioritize their sleep, which, you know, maybe it's a number of tasks that build up that they need to stack, and that's very complex. And I highly recommend everybody also— we'll put links to the book, you know, and to your, your, some of your key videos that I really think people could go deep, deep, deep dive. And also No Sweat. How would you approach it? Maybe you can give people an overview or an example of the different stages.

Sure. You know, there's a bigger part of the conversation that I'm not going to focus on now that we already kind of talked about, which is that we're going into the conversation about how to set people up for lasting success with the assumption that people's reason for wanting to change the behavior or learn the change is deeply compelling on a personal level. So, let's just assume that and put it aside. Let's jump into an example. A client, David, used to be a gym member with his wife, and they would go to the gym, but they had some equipment in the basement, and they decided to invest in a rowing machine, which he loved to use at the gym. And he used regularly, but You know, part of their strategy for getting, you know, the $2,000 rowing machine was to drop their gym membership and save money. So, it's in the basement which is their home gym and he's been using it for a couple weeks. So, he's still kind of— he's exiting the motivation bubble that we talked about. We start out strong, motivated, I'm gonna do it, I've got this beautiful new machine. He's starting to descend into the basement and he starts to feel meh.

Meh.

I don't really want to do it. This is very common. People buy equipment all the time and they are really motivated to do it, but he starts to notice he doesn't want to do it. So he tells himself, I'm only going to do 10 minutes because that's part of— that is part of the solution, is that people need to learn that they can flex what they had originally planned to do. And that's what the choice point is, right? We need to see it for what it is, whether it's An unexpected, immediate urgent need from our boss, or coming to a point of our exercise plan and feeling unmotivated. That's a choice point. And this is where we need metacognition to say, okay, wait a sec. What's going on here? Hmm. I'm noticing I don't feel motivated despite just investing $2,000 in this beautiful machine. What are my options here? So, people say, okay, it's not black and white. We need to break out of all-or-nothing thinking and saying, I have options here. And that's one of the things That's part of the old story of behavior change is unfortunately many people still believe that if they can't do the perfect plan or what they hope to do, it's not worth doing anything. And the opposite is true. Research shows that doing anything will help reinforce what you're doing as an ident— as your identity and is a key part of a successful path of lasting change. So let's go back to David. So he forced himself a couple times. to do the rowing machine. Third time that week, he's like, I'm not gonna do it. I can't. Okay, here's my— open up my options and I'm gonna play with the possibilities. Okay, I could go down for 5 minutes only, or I could walk outside for 40 minutes. Huh, it's a beautiful day outside. I think I'm gonna try that. So, part of the phases in the plan that David is exemplifying and the metacognition and self-awareness is To understand he's not motivated and there's another option he's gonna try. And what wound up happening is that he discovered that even though he loved rowing in the gym with big windows, he really hates being in the basement. It's very uninspiring. It's kind of demotivating and depressing. And so, while thankfully his wife gets to harness their investment in the rowing machine because she likes it, he's discovered that walking outside is his go-to and is what is going to work for him on most days. But he had to have that self-awareness at that choice point to understand what else could I do and to experiment and learn and then later evaluate, use metacognition to go, okay, did that work? What did I learn from it? And that doesn't mean that he never went down and did a 5-minute rowing session because on any given day he might've needed that stress reduction. But I think one of the things that people haven't been taught in society is to Create a menu of possible options. And just like a menu in a restaurant where there's appetizers, very smaller pieces, and you've got a whole bunch of those, and then there's mid-sized plates, and then there's the large full meal, we should be picking different things all the time because that's what we have to do in other complex areas of our lives. We don't say the same thing to our kids every day at every single point. We assume and we presume that we have to do and say things differently on any given day based on the circumstances. I wanna pause there. I do wanna say one thing though, that people easily and understandably get concerned and they say, but Michelle, isn't this gonna just cause bad habits and lead people to not do anything if you, you know, open the floodgates to, you know, something is better than nothing?

Mm-hmm.

And it's a logical thing to be concerned about, but the first The first thing, the first kind of fact is that the alternative, which is all or nothing thinking, if I can't do it right, I'm not gonna do it at all, has been the predominant belief system in our culture for like 40 years. And it doesn't work for most people. It doesn't work in healthcare. It doesn't work in organizations. It doesn't work in fitness clubs. So that's the first answer. And, and the second answer is that the emerging science suggests that having a more flexible instead of rigid strategy when we come to our choice points is actually more adaptive when it comes to behavior change.

In game theory, when those who have the most options and the most behavioral flexibility will often be the ones that win. Let me ask you a question. This is very interesting to me. How important when people are taking those small, simple steps and they're at that choice point, where they have the rowing machine and they could either use it, or for most people it becomes like a clothing rack. How important is it for people to feel joy in the process? You know, in terms of a lot of times people reward themselves after the fact, but when people are doing the behavior, the desired behavior, how important is it for them to choose to bring joy into the process? And is that even possible?

It is possible. And, you know, joy is one word, enjoy is another, positivity is another word, stress reduction is another. So Whatever the positive experience is, I can tell you the state of the literature right now suggests that in fact, the reward after exercising, the feel-good positivity that people feel isn't what drives ongoing participation. It is how people feel while they're exercising. And so that takes us in a whole nother direction that I don't think there's probably time to go into. But the deal is, is that we can help people select physical activities that if they're not pleasurable, at least they're palatable. And because that is one of the, the most important things we know about ongoing physical activity is that people need to feel good while they're moving rather than afterwards. It's not that they can't feel good afterwards too, but it's the during movement that creates the memories in our brain that our brain brings back to us right before we're about to exercise. And if it feels punitive or punishing, you know, and again, you know, from reading The Joy Choice that I talk about new theories that are just about exercising and just about eating that have to do with how our brain reconstitutes our memories and how that determines what, you know, what we decide in the next moment.

And just like your, your client, you know, who had to in a way resort to willpower those first few times, it's not very sustainable, you know, but if you could make it less friction and, you know, and, and find the joy and find the fun. My last question for you is your, your book, right? The Joy Choice. Who did you write it for and what would you want your reader to get out of it?

Gosh, I wrote it for people and professionals. I wrote it for people who have not been successful to date, that they keep cycling on trajectories of starting and stopping and starting and stopping, but not sustaining. So for people who just can't figure out what's getting in their way and for professionals who work with them to better understand how the old story of behavior change continues to derail people's change, but what the new science and new story says can help people be more successful. And, you know, it's called The Joy Choice for a very specific reason. The strategy that, you know, helps people redefine success so they can remain successful is this positive, playful, joy-infused strategy That doesn't just create desire. Yeah, who doesn't want to make the joy choice, but also supports our executive functioning in the process? So, you know, that's what I'm hoping. I'm hoping people have fun reading it. There's a lot of fun graphics in it, a little tongue-in-cheek ones too. And I had fun doing it.

So there are wonderful inspiring stories, very relatable, the anecdotes. And I love that it's again brain-based and also very practical at the same time. Because some people could be inspired, but they won't know what to do. If a work was just purely instructional, they know what to do, but they're not inspired to implement it. There's a quote in my book Limitless from a French philosopher that says, life is the C between B and D. Life is C between B and D. B stands for birth, D stands for death, and life, C, is choice. And so, we always have this choice. And I love this book because it reminds people of their own agency. And I hope people make the choice to purchase a copy for themselves and also a copy for a friend or a family member or a team member. Where can people get the book? Or where can people go to connect with you or get more information?

Thank you. And thank you for those sentiments. That is, that is so lovely. People can get the book in any place where they buy their books, you know, places like Amazon or their independent bookstore, or they can go to my website and there's a book section for The Joy Choice where there's also a quiz about decision traps people can take and different sellers with, and also they can see the reviews. So yeah, my website, which is just my name.

Wonderful. And on social media, is there a place on Twitter or someplace you'd like people to follow you?

Sure. It's— I'm @MichelleSieger at Twitter, and I'm on LinkedIn too. Those are the 2 best places.

Dr. Michelle Sieger, thank you so much for being on the Kwik Brain Podcast. I want to encourage everyone also, a reminder, readers are leaders, right? You read to succeed. Michelle has decades of experience, 30 years in this field, and she put it into a book, and you could download decades of wisdom in today's, you know, and that's why books are, I think, one of the— it's an unfair advantage. It's a wonderful way to complement and accelerate your own achievements. So I recommend everyone, I really enjoyed the book. Make sure you follow Michelle on LinkedIn and on Twitter. And for show notes, where we'll put links to her book and everything else, at jimkwik.com/notes. So please share this episode, leave a review. And Michelle, thank you so much again for being on our show.

Thank you so much.