Develop Positive Habits Faster and Easier Than Ever Before - John Assaraf

Hey there and good morning. Welcome to my achieve even more little show here. I hope you're doing amazing. I'm going to be talking about an inner size from my best selling book, the new science to unlock your brain's hidden power. Check out the colors. See the new colors of my office. They match my book. Anyway, I hope you're doing great. We're going to be talking about an inner size to help you formulate new habits. So as always, before I begin, I just want to make sure you can hear me and see me. Let me know that you can hear me, see me. Hit the like or the love button. I'll see that flashing up on my screen. Tell me who you are, where you are from. Bo Dahn, Good afternoon. I guess you can hear me and see me. And again, tell me where you're from. We're going to talk about habits today and how habits are hard to make or hard to break and easy to make. So we'll talk about how to do that. Hi there, Sharon. I'm good, thank you. I've got a headset that I just got that hopefully is coming in loud and clear. I tried it last week and it was great. Hi there, Shannon. We're gonna be talking about habits. Many of you have my new book, Inner size. Look what we did to the wall behind me. See that right there? Started getting the same colors. Gotta get in, get with the fashion. Right? Get with the fashion. Those are the neurogym colors. The purple and the green and the gold. Q Routine reward. Yes, yes, yes. Thank you. David Buffard. Good morning. So here's a question. What's one habit that you wish you could have? What's one habit you wish you could have? I'm going to show you the easiest way to develop a new habit based on the latest neuroscience research. And I'll also talk about what are some ways to stop or eliminate a disempowering habit. All right, so let me say hello to a few of you. Let me know when you, when you sign or you hop on, just hit the like of the love button. Tell me where you're from. All right, so let me just see. My screen is stuck for a second there. Oh, there we go. Shannon. Exercise, consistency. All right. Yeah. The key is how do you get yourself to exercise consistently? Right, that's the key. So what is a habit? Let me know what is a habit from a neuroscience perspective. All right, look at my brain from a neuroscience perspective. What is a habit? Right. Let's think a little bit deeper than the surface Right. And I've talked about this before. Your brain. You were born with 100 billion brain cells. They say there's about 85 billion left after pruning. But when neural connections formulate based on sound that's coming in through your ears, light that's coming in through your eyes, tactile senses that are all integrating and binding, as it's called in the neuroscience world, at different speeds, our brain starts to create these patterns and patterns that we repeat or are repeated for us, we develop this sense of pattern recognition. Now, from a behavioral perspective, we develop certain patterns as a way to conserve energy. And so once habits are developed, thought patterns are habitual patterns, emotional patterns are habitual, behavioral patterns are habitual. And we keep repeating the same patterns over and over again, only to conserve energy. Here's a question for you. Does your brain care whether your habits are positive or negative, empowering you or disempowering? Does your brain, like, really care? The subconscious part of your brain either? Rami. Hi, Deval. Right. Does your brain care. For those who just joined, we're talking about an inner size from my new book, the new Science, unlock your brain's hidden power. My team put a link there. If you want to pick it up, go ahead. There's eight or ten brain training audios that come with it to retrain your brain, and some videos. But from your brain's perspective, does it care whether it's constructive or destructive once the habit is formulated? Most of the habits that we have created, we weren't even aware that we were creating habits. There's very, very, very few humans that deliberately create habits on their own, especially, you know, kids. Now, the adults that train children in sports or music or any type of activity that are getting children to repeat certain behaviors, they actually know that repetition, spaced repetition specifically, is the mother of. Of creating habits. And that's why people, you know, that are teaching young children, for example, cause them to repeat stuff over and over and over again, whether it's a multiplication table, the Alphabet, whether it's gymnastics, whether it's chess, checkers, knitting, piano, guitar. The act of spaced repetition creates this neural network in our brain that goes from conscious effort to unconscious competence. And the four levels that we usually go through are unconscious incompetence, where we don't know that we don't know to conscious incompetence, where we recognize that we don't know to conscious competence if we're doing the right thing. But we can also be consciously competent at the wrong things, and then we become unconsciously Competent at doing whatever the pattern is. And that is a habit, an unconscious, competent neural network that activates without you even being aware of it. It just perpetuates itself and reinforces itself to conserve energy. Does that make sense? And if it makes sense, let me say hello to a few people here. Hi, Debbie from Alaska. Hi, Charlie. Hi, Cheryl. Ladina. Good morning from Colorado. Hi, Kumiko. Jill. Hello, Jill. And Shelley and Renee and Dave and Nurit. Shalom Dadra and Daval Bodhan. I already said hello to you. So from the brain's perspective, we have these neural networks that have been reinforced, that we've developed these habits. Now, somebody earlier mentioned the parts of the brain that operate in an automatic fashion called automaticity, is the subconscious. So our habits are subconscious in nature. So we develop these habits, and I've always said they're constructive or destructive, empowering or disempowering, inspiring us or expiring us. Now, the key is, how do we understand the habit better? So now that we can understand a little bit more about the neural networks and what fires these circuits off automatically, we know that every habit, based on some of the work that BJ Fogg did, we start to talk about the Habit Loop and several other books. Actually, I don't know if it was BJ that talked about the habit loop, but some of the things that we need to understand about habits is every habit has a trigger. So, for example, on page I think it's 90 in the book, I talk about the coffee example. Let me just see. Yeah, so here it is right here on page 90. Right. So every habit has a trigger, the behavior and the reward. The trigger, the behavior and the reward. So, for example, when you wake up, if you're a coffee drinker, you know, waking up usually sets off a cue to go into the kitchen and have your coffee. And the association that you have with coffee is that it gives you a little bit of energy, it wakes you up, it tastes good for some people. Some people just, you know, really enjoy the. The aroma and the smell of coffee. So the waking up is the trigger. The behavior. Again, the trigger is the same as the cue. The behavior is that you go and you create the coffee. You make the coffee, or you drink the coffee, and then the reward is the caffeine and the dopamine that's released that causes your brain to feel good and you to feel good. That's called the habit loop. A trigger, a behavior and a reward. And so if you're looking to stop a behavior or start a behavior it makes logical sense, I think, to understand, okay, how do I use the way the brain works with trigger behavior and reward to stop something that I don't want. So if my behavior is preceded before I need to find out what is the trigger that's causing me to behave a certain way. So let's say we have a disempowering negative behavior that we want to stop. How do you reverse engineer what is triggering that behavior? Think about that. So how do you figure out what is triggering that behavior? So a trigger could be a person. A trigger could be a time of day when I used to drink way too much alcohol. I haven't had a drink in over 10 years because I used to drink too much. And I've shared this openly in many, many cases, around 5, 30, 6 o' clock every night, I'd want my glass of wine or a cocktail. And so it was at that time after work where I felt, you know, I want to have a glass of wine. And a glass of wine led to three or four glasses of wine. And so I realized, oh my God, every day after work, you know, I am in this habit of, of having wine. And so I realized that as soon as I got home, that was my trigger. Get home, have a glass of wine, calm down, right? Take the stress off the day. And so what I realized was that my trigger was after work, going home as soon as I opened the door, you know, say hi to my wife, give kids a kiss, and then I would go pour myself a glass of wine as we started to make dinner. And so my trigger was, was walking in the front door. And so if you can interrupt the behavior enough times, you start to interrupt the neural network and pattern. So what I started to do every day is I recognized that when I came home, for example, I was wanting to go get a glass of wine. I said, no, I'm going to interrupt the pattern. I'm going to go and get a glass of water. That simple shift of being aware of the trigger and changing the behavior. And here is the key. I want to share something with you. You want to make a commitment to changing a behavior by being aware of the cue first for at least 30 days to create a new pattern, but then you need to reinforce it for at least another, I say 70 days. I teach all of my students that if you want to change a habitual pattern, something that's automatic, automaticity in the brain, something that has the trigger, the behavior reward, over and over and over again, make a commitment to 30 days to doing everything possible to alter that behavior by being aware of the cue first the trigger, first alter the behavior and then figure out how to reinforce it for another 70 days. 100 days is the minimum amount of time that it takes to have a reinforced pattern in the brain that starts to operate on itself. All of the latest research, always neuroscience research on the science of habits, is that it takes about 66 days on the like, the early end to create a new neural network in your brain. Think of a neural network, okay, I'm going to give you a visual. And if this is making sense, hit the like or the love button so I can get some feedback because I'm doing a lot, a long stretch of teaching right now. Imagine you plant a seed in the ground, right? Imagine you plant a seed in the ground. You don't dig up the seed to see how the roots start to take hold, right? So different seeds take a different amount of time to develop a root system and to develop some strength underneath the soil. Well, what if you thought of a new habit in your brain as a seed? The seed is the new habit. What if you started thinking, I'm going to take care of the soil right underneath that I cannot see for 100 days? So here is the key. When you're looking to develop a new habit or interrupt a disempowering habit, you have to create the environment, the soil, for it to be easy, not hard. And so whenever you're looking to make any changes around a disempowering habit, you have to create the environment that makes it easy for you to do it for at least 30 days. So what do you need to do, whether it's in your home or your office or at work, in order to create the environment that they'll support the decision, the seed. That's the way you need to be thinking about having. Because if you can interrupt it for 30 days, it's going to be hard for two weeks because it takes energy to start or stop a new habit. And your brain wants to conserve energy. And so if you say, okay, I'm going to eliminate the things that might be causing this destructive behavior and the destructive results that I don't want if it's a negative habit. But I'm also going to create the environment if I want to create a new habit that reinforces the new habit that I want. So if you want to start to exercise, can you make a commitment either when you wake up or when you get home from work or at lunchtime to go and walk for one minute for 30 days? Can you do that. Can you start? All right. Can you start by creating a pattern? Whatever the trigger is, it could be a time, it could be a person that you connect with. Whatever you're trying to start or stop, there has to be an environment and new triggers that activate the behavior or the stopping of a behavior. Does that make sense? I see there's a whole bunch of new people that just joined over here. I'm talking about the new science, unlock your brain's hidden power. My new best selling book, I'm on page 90 right now, talking about habits. The habit loop, the trigger, the behavior and the reward, how it works in the brain, and how all habits are based in your subconscious, based on things that you've repeated for years and years and years and years and years. I'm giving you the best tools on how to stop it. And there's tons of killer content in the book. How many of you have read the book already? My team is putting up a link. Just so you know. I have 8 brain training audits I'm giving away for free worth $197 with the book and some video training as well. So if you want to read some of the best stuff on using your brain, better habits is just one of the topics that's really, really critical. Pick up the book. It's like 12 bucks on Amazon and the link and all the gifts are there. So let me see some of your comments over here. Yeah, this is the large edition. Sorry, there's the. If you order it, that's the one you're gonna get. This is like the school version right now that we're using. So when we're talking about creating habits, there's a term that I like to use and it's called reduce it to the ridiculous. Maybe somebody could type that in for me. Reduce it to the ridiculous. So if you are looking to, let's say, release weight and keep it off, I don't like to use the term lose weight and keep it off because we always go and find what we lose. So release weight is just about energy. What is one tiny shift you can make? One tiny shift you can make to release weight. So a lot of people say, well, I'm going to exercise, I'm going to diet. They try to do five, six, seven, eight things, and that's too many changes for the beginner's brain. What do I mean by the beginner's brain? The beginner's brain. The person who doesn't understand how their brain works. The person who doesn't understand how their emotions Control them. The person doesn't understand the habit loop. The person doesn't understand, you know, the complexities of their brain will try to do everything, not realizing that when you make huge shifts, okay, diet, exercise, sleep, etc. Your brain goes, okay, I'll do this for a day. I'll do this for, you know, five days, a week, two weeks. But within very short order, little mechanisms in your brain based on habitual loops are going to take over and cause you to start doing the things that you shouldn't be doing or don't want to do. Again, why? Because it's easier. And so how do you trick your brain, right? How do you hack your brain? And the answer is by doing small incremental changes over 30 days and then habit stacking. So if you want to release weight and keep it off, if you want to make more money, if you want to have a better relationship, if you want to be more mindful or aware and meditate, don't do 10 different things. Do one thing differently for 30 days and then reinforce it for 70 more days, giving you a total of 100. And then after 30 days, add one more thing, and then add one more thing. And the reason is our brain is looking for inconsistencies in our habitual patterns and any inconsistencies that it finds, it recalibrates and reorganizes in order to maintain automaticity, conservation of energy, repeating these habit loops over and over and over again. The reason most people fail at changing habits or creating new ones isn't because they can't. It's because their process is broken. So in the absence of understanding the brain and habit loops, their process is wrong. And so here's what you want to be doing is what's one little thing that you can do to build a new habit stack? Or what's one little thing you do to interrupt a current habit? If you interrupt a current habit one time, you've just changed the neural network of that habit. If you do that seven times, 21 times, 50 times, 100 times, the very nature of the neural network in your brain has changed, which means the habit loop is no longer the same. And if you repeat the new pattern 30 days, 60 days, 100 days, that new patterns becomes something known. And somebody write this down as a part of your default mode network. So what's your default mode network? The default mode network is the default way that you and I operate. It's the identity, the self, and the habitual way that you and I are every single day. And so when we Interrupt that pattern a little bit, a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. Then we interrupt the habitual pattern of being ourselves. And now we are this newer, better version of ourselves with a habit pattern that we want or maybe a habit pattern that we do not want. Does this make sense? Let me say hello to all of you. Hi there, Christine. Hi there, Susie. Thank you, Christine. Hi there, Cheryl again. Right. Hey there, Chaff. Chaff. Tiny shift. Tiny, tiny habits. Tiny, tiny habits. You want to start flossing your teeth every day? Just floss one tooth. Floss one tooth, one second. And then do it again tomorrow. Then do it again tomorrow. The next day. The next day. The next day. The next day, the next day. All right. Thank you, Cheryl. Yes, the Inner Size book has got over $200 in inner sizes. It's a phenomenal little gift that we put together. So in every chapter, I share stories of clients of ours that have retrained their brain using some of our methodologies and technologies. I'm giving you actually some of our brain training audios to listen to, to help give you more focus, more awareness, more mindfulness, and to master your emotions better. Right. So how many of you have read the book? Hi there, Alma. Hi there, Hector. Hi there, Lily. How many of you have read the book Inner Size? I'm curious, does this make sense? We've talked about. Let me just see. I always have my show notes, right. Of stuff I want to talk to you about. So let's do this. Some of you know this about 13 months ago, I started, I do little tests to be able to master habit change. I started brushing my teeth with my left hand instead of my right hand. And I initially did it as a 30 day test and I made it a three month test and I went to six months and I completed a year on January 7th. And I haven't stopped. I keep brushing my teeth with my left hand. And even though it was extremely uncomfortable, I still notice it a year later. Now, you might think, how is it that you notice it a year later? You know, if you've done it, you know, twice a day for, you know, almost 800 days. And the answer is at 58 years old, I've probably brushing my teeth for what, 55 years. So 55 years times 365 days, times twice a day created this massive neural pattern in my head just around brushing my teeth on my right hand versus my left hand. And still every morning when I get up to brush my teeth, I have to remind myself it's the left hand that I want to brush my teeth with to reinforce it. As simple as that sounds. It's a way to be aware of how hard change is. If you want a couple of little inner sizes, take your toilet paper roll in your bathroom, and if you have the paper coming down over the top, flip it around so the paper comes from the bottom. If you have it from the bottom, put it up to the top. I know that even saying this for some of you say, oh, no, I don't like the toilet paper on the top or the bottom. It. It's too uncomfortable. That is your brain not liking change. The only human that likes change is a wet baby. But when it comes to our habits, your habits are what drives 97, 98% of all of your behaviors every day. And your behaviors obviously create your results. So we have behaviors that are constructive and help us achieve our goals and dreams. And we certainly have behaviors that are destructive and don't help us achieve our dreams. They detract from achieving our goals. So why not become a master of habit formation or habit elimination? Right? Because you and I are operating automatically, without thought. And so the idea of change is to understand what is the habit loop. How can I master the habit loop? It starts with awareness. What is triggering me to behave or not behave in a certain way. And when you do that, now you're back in control. And you're not a creature of habit. You are the creator or the eliminator of habits. And that is something that is critical if you want to achieve the success that you want. I want you to think about this. Every one of your results in health, wealth, relationship, career, business, the choices that you make, every one of your results are because of the actions or behaviors you take or don't take. Would you agree with that? If you agree with that, hit the like or the love button. Every action you take or don't take, okay. Are causing your results. Agree or disagree. Right. If you agree, hit the like or love button. So many of you are agreeing, okay? And so if your habits are driving your behaviors or you not taking action, if your habits are driving those, doesn't it make sense that as a skill of being human, it makes total sense that you should learn how to master your habits? And when I say master your habits, I mean master creating them, but also master eliminating them. Right? I shared earlier that I used to drink too much wine, and I gave up wine and alcohol. And then I started drinking. I started Eating way too much sugar. So for whatever reason, you know, too much sugar. So you know, on and off sugar for years and years and years. And right now, in all of last year, I was off sugar until December and then I had a couple pieces of cake or cookies and then I had, you know, two and a half weeks of cakes and cookies. And then beginning of January, I eliminated all refined sugar again. How? By focusing on mastering that habit loop. And so right now, second week of February, I haven't had any refined sugar since the beginning of the year. Not because I'm any more, maybe I am more skilled than a lot of people, but I understand the habit loop and I mastered the habit loop and that's what I want you to do. So if you want to know how to do more of this, take more control, pick up the book. It comes with a bunch of inner sizes audios that are about $197. I'm giving them as a gift, some videos as well to help you. The book is chock full of amazing content and I hope you understand now the habit loop, the trigger, the behavior, the reward, how to master that so you can eliminate disempowering habits and create empowering ones. Alright, have an awesome day. If you enjoyed this, do me a favor and hit the share button. And if there's any topics that you want me to talk about in upcoming shows, if you can just type them in right now. I'll read some right now and see which one. What do you want me to talk about? What do you need the most help with? All right. And pick up the book as well. 12 bucks, you get yourself an incredible toolbox so you can master your your brain, master your life, master your emotions, your focus, your energy, your attention and your behavior. All right, so let's see. Thanks Michael. Thank you Cheryl, for sharing. Cheryl. The large editions not for sale. Felicia. Hi there. Let's see who else. Hi there. Evan Carroll. Yolanda or Yolanda Ramesh. Hello. So what topics do you want me to talk about? Type it in. And thank you for hitting the like and the love button. I love when I see the likes of the Loves coming up. What do you like? Alejandra? You're welcome. Mannix, you are so welcome. Yeah, if you. Good morning. Lis Diaz. Denise. Awesome. Glad you're ordering now. Leave me messages once you once you read it. For those you've already read the book, leave some comments for everybody on here as well. Cheryl? Yes, I was just skiing for the last four days up in Utah. Amazing. Just bought the book about A week ago on Amazon. Thank you, Adam. Glad you're gonna. You're gonna love it. Can I talk about the top habits of billionaires? Okay, so let's just see. Helping our kids. Lara. Hi there. Zamar from London. Hi there. Lara Flint. Helping our kids. Thank you. Keep hitting that Like. Or the love button. I love that. Hector Abreu. Great book. Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it. So, about kids. Somebody asked me about kids the other day. Jandra. Debating audible versus paperback now. Want to read the book? Yeah. The audio is great. The book is also great. Thank you. You got the book for your nephew's Christmas gift. Also, see if you can give it to him early so he can enjoy it. Aria, leave me. What do you want me to talk about in next shows? For those of you, by the way, that don't know this, I have a private Facebook page called Achieve Even More and you can join it for free on Facebook. And if you also want some more material from me, I have an Instagram account that I post stuff every day. Twitter account. My YouTube channel's got tons of videos, so lots of stuff. So lease. Daily affirmations, self talk. Great inner sizing for kids and college students. Seriously. Thank you, Debbie. Okay, great. So a lot of great stuff that you like. All right. Keep giving me ideas of what. What you want me to talk about. I love saying hello to you. Hello there, Valentino. And let's see who else is. Leticia. Hello. All right, Michael? Yeah, hop on. To Achieve Even More, it's free. Just ask to join and my team will approve you. And I do some stuff on there as well. We have a lot of good stuff going there as well. All right, have a great day. Thank you so much. If you enjoy my work, please share it. Hit the share button. And if there's stuff you want me to teach you, share with you, I'd be more than happy to. I love to share the stuff that's helped me achieve some successes in my life. I've had lots of failures like everybody else. And just a matter of how do you frame a failure? And it's feedback. That's how it is. All right, so Hector says, how do you get over stage frights? You're not afraid of being on stage, Hector. You're afraid of being embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, or judged. That's a self image issue. All right, Lachandria, just look up Achieve Even More on Facebook. It's there. Ajit. Hello, Jugraj. Hello. Good morning, Christine. Bye. Great day to you. All right, everyone, have an amazing. Day or night, depending where you are in the world. I appreciate you. See you next Tuesday right here on this channel for my achieve even more show. And again, if you just joined, we've been talking about inner size, the new science unlock your brain's hidden power. Available on Amazon, including all of the video trainings and audio trainings I give away for free. All right. Okay, bye now.