6 Habits That Are Secretly Making You Miserable

Six habits that are secretly making you miserable. Hey everyone, this is Nir Eyal from the near and Far Podcast and with me as always, is Nick Gray to read through one of my latest articles. How you doing, Nick?

I'm doing great. I'm excited to talk about this. I just told you that I'm doing a fast right now and so I'm curious. What, what these six habits that are probably digital habits, I'm guessing. Yeah.

Yeah. One of them is not fasting though. How's the fast going? Let's share with everyone. How's it, how's it going so far? You're on day three, you said?

Yes, I'm on day three of doing like this fast mimicking diet. My sleep is amazing and I gotta be honest, I fell into a bad habit of eating very late at night where I was eating at like 10pm, I'm ashamed to admit. And then I go to sleep and I really noticed that now that I'm obviously eating much less, my sleep is so much better.

I've actually been struggling with the exact same thing. I totally get the munchies around 9pm, 10pm and it is the worst. Cause I wear this Oura ring and I track through an Apple health app and man, it totally affects your heart rate. It affects your heart rate variability. So I've really been trying to not eat past 7 o'.

Clock.

But how do you do it? How do you make sure? I mean, I know you're on this fast right now, but normally when you're not on the fast, do you have any tricks for how to make sure you don't snack at night?

I don't have any tricks. And you know what I was doing was I was letting my productivity and focus because I'm a bit of a night owl. I would work and I wouldn't want to eat because I get tired after working. And I think it's just so I don't have an answer of how I'm gonna change that going forward, but I think I'm going to. Maybe I'll time block it and maybe I will do that and I will time block it in my calendar and try to have my food time and really to stick to it. But I can say that this fast has been an interesting reevaluation of my food because every, because it's like limited on the number of calories. I'm scraping every last piece of food. I'm licking the bowl. I'm just savoring and enjoying every calorie I can get. I'm Planning my meals when I come out of it. And in the past, you know, I was just very mindless. You know, just watch YouTube while I eat. And now I'm like, I can't wait. I appreciate it so much more. Nice.

Very cool. Yeah, the only, the only thing I figured out so far that's worked for me for not snacking is to make a pre commitment. So I made a bet with a friend of mine about this topic and so far it works. So far it works, but it's, it's a temporary bet so I have to figure out other long term solutions. By the way, for anyone listening, if you have struggled with this problem, I would love to hear about it. If you can either email me at near and far.com or if you want to just leave a comment in the reviews on whatever podcast listening service you're using, itunes or Spotify, if you leave a comment in the reviews, I would love to know how you solve this problem of late night snacking. I need to write an article about this because it's definitely a problem that I'm facing and I know a lot of other people face as well. And man, when I don't snack at night, huge, huge difference. I sleep better. I mean, I know it's not, it's not just a subjective fact. It's. I objectively feel better and all my metrics look better if I don't eat at night. But man, is it a struggle. I know the first step is, you know, following taking my own medicine and following the steps from indistractable around dealing with the internal triggers of those munchies. But I'm looking for other creative ways. So if you have any ideas, please let me know.

One thing that I did, I actually threw away. I had a bunch of junk food. And it's one of the reasons I wanted to do this fast. And I'm not doing it to lose weight, by the way. It's not about the weight loss for me. It's about reducing the inflammation and just breaking my bad habits. But I had a lot of potato chips and I'm a sucker for salty, crunchy things. And I threw those potato chips away yesterday because I realized they're just around my eyesight. They're in my cabinet, they're out, they're easy, they're so tasty. And so I had to throw them away. We'll see if I stick with that because I enjoy them. But for me, that was a first step at least. Yeah. Yeah.

I set a rule for myself that I can eat that Stuff, but only outside the house. So I didn't say no. You know, this happens. I think we read an article together a long time ago around these minimal, enjoyable actions. The things that you can get out of your life forever with no big deal. Oh, no. It was about progressive extremism. That's what it was, progressive extremism. Whereas, you know, I did this with soda. I used to drink so much soda, and we all know, like, it's one of the worst things you can do for your health is to drink these sugary sodas. So I didn't go immediately from like, oh, I'm going to, you know, drink. I don't know how many cans of Coke I was drinking every day, probably like six or seven to nothing. I didn't go straight to water. I said, I'm just not going to drink Coke in the house. Okay, no more sugary, carbonated beverages in the house. But I can have as much as I want outside the house, but forever and ever. And then from there I went to, okay, now I'm gonna only allow myself to have diet, whatever, soda, and then from there not have that in the house. So, like, I went step by step by step, but eliminated it forever and ever. And that made a really, really big difference. And so it's similar in terms of, like, getting rid of all those, what I call external triggers. The problem is with the late night snacking is that it's not as easy to do as getting rid of a particular food group. Like saying, okay, I'm just never gonna have chips in the house, but I can have them outside, whatever the case might be. Because I find for that late night snacking, I will literally eat anything, like, even healthy stuff to excess, you know, so I'll eat like, you know, seven pieces of fruit, which is normally like, okay, that's fruit is healthy. Yeah. But if you eat like six pounds of fruit, that's probably a bad idea, you know, right before bed. And so that's what I found, is that when I have those munchies, like, it doesn't matter what's in the way. Like the other day, dark chocolate, right? We have the super dark chocolate. It's supposed to be healthier for you and, you know, it's more bang for the buck. But, yeah, if you eat the whole bar of chocolate, that's a problem. So I'm looking for the solution.

That's really good. Well, we'll see how it goes. For those of you that have been listening to the last few episodes of our podcast, NIR and I work in that I read his articles and then Nir's going to give some comments about them. So I'm going to start to read this latest issue, which is six habits that are secretly making you miserable Uncover the real sources behind six habits secretly causing misery and learn simple ways to break them for a happier life. You wake up in the morning irritable and groggy, but determined to be productive. Yesterday didn't go well. It always seems as if there are not enough hours in the day. You didn't complete even the one big priority project that would have taken just a couple of hours if you'd focus. Still, you spent all day on the computer, even leaving your partner to handle dinner time alone and canceling pickleball with friends. And for what? Guiltily you remember checking your phone each time you started to work on that big project. Scrolling through LinkedIn, you saw a post from a former coworker whose career has taken off in a way that yours hasn't, probably because you can't even finish the task in front of you. To make up for the time you frittered away, you worked late into the evening without much to show for it. When you finally went to bed feeling guilty about your procrastination, stressed that tomorrow would be challenging, worried you just might be a wage slave, and annoyed that you made things harder on yourself, sleep didn't come for at least an hour. Does this sound painfully familiar to you? Many people experience days similar to this one because of these six habits that secretly make us miserable. But they don't have to. Habit number one Constantly checking your phone. Our phones are always with us, ready to offer a distraction to escape the pain of doing whatever we don't want to do. The constant notifications and urge to check our phones disrupt our focus, drawing out the time needed to finish a task to an excruciating number of hours. We then feel dissatisfied that we gave in to distraction and didn't do what we were supposed to do. The Social Dilemma documentary would have us believe that our phones and the social media apps on them are hijacking our brains. But humans aren't robots wired to obey every suggestion. We have the power to control what we give our attention to. Hack back your phone distractions so those external triggers don't prompt you to pick up your phone. When you feel tempted to peek at your phone, close your eyes and take a breath to surf the urge. Tell yourself that you can check your phone in 10 minutes if you still want to. Nir, I have questions for a second. What's that idea of surf the urge. Yeah.

So surfing the urge is a concept that comes from acceptance and commitment therapy. And it acknowledges that these uncomfortable sensations are like waves. They crest and then they subside. So. And that's not how most people think about these uncomfortable sensations. So when we feel boredom or loneliness or fatigue or stress or anxiety, we feel like we're always going to feel that way. And so what the brain does is it puts us into this mode where we feel like we have to escape that discomfort with something, whether it's checking social media, whether it's turning on the television, whether it's late night snacking, as we were talking about earlier. When we feel that internal trigger of that uncomfortable emotional state, we look for a way to escape it as easily and as quickly as possible. So one technique that's been shown to be very effective, and I use every single day when it comes to digital distractions, is simply surfing the urge is helping your psyche kind of calm down from that emotional state, realizing that it will always be temporary, that that feeling of boredom or anxiety or whatever it might be is like a wave. So your job is to simply surf that urgent, like a surfer on a surfboard, until it subsides.

You also mentioned to hack back your phone distractions, and I think that's about like removing the number of notifications. Is that the gist of it?

Yeah. So hacking back the external triggers, you know, we have external triggers and we have internal triggers. The internal triggers are the much more important and harder ones to, to control because they occur on the inside. Right. You can't turn them off the way you can the external triggers. And studies find that about 90% of our distractions begin from within, but that still leaves the 10% that start from outside of us. So the external triggers are all the pings, the dings, the rings, all those things in our outside environment that can lead us towards distraction. But those are much easier to take care of. And it's kind of a shame that most people don't start there with simply changing their notification settings. We know that two thirds of people with a smartphone never change their notification settings, which is crazy, right? So just taking a few minutes and making sure that only the most important reasons can get through through. To hack back your environment is very, very important. And that, you know, indistractable. I show you how to do this. In about 30 minutes or less, you can create a distraction free, indistractable device with just making sure you know how to use it properly.

I'm going to move on to the second habit. Habit number two Procrastination. Putting things off until the last minute increases stress and makes us discontent with ourselves. Yet people procrastinate because they don't want to deal with the discomfort they associate with doing the project, such as anxiety, uncertainty or boredom. Time and again, I've heard people label themselves as hopeless procrastinators. But procrastination is not an inherent human trait, it's an emotion regulation problem. The vast majority of us can learn to regulate our emotions better. When you feel an internal trigger like anxiety, uncertainty or boredom, try this Identify what you are feeling and write it down. Then explore the emotion with curiosity rather than contempt. Don't shut out the feeling by deliberately avoiding specific thoughts, they become more persistent and a phenomenon called ironic processing. You can also use timeboxing to schedule your daily tasks in a calendar, which is a far more effective time management technique than a to do list. When your agenda shows it's time to tackle a task, it's important that you follow through. You will feel better for focusing on and completing the task rather than extending the discomfort of not doing it. Habit number three Comparing yourself to Others We've all experienced envy and inadequacy by comparing ourselves to others. Feeling jealousy when watching highlight reels of others lives on social media can exacerbate our fomo. The fear of missing out. FOMO is an internal trigger that can drive us to distraction. Feeling that someone else is having a better time or leading a more exciting life can keep us from appreciating what we have and working towards improving ourselves. It can also make us strive for things others want, like fancy possessions. That kind of motivation is extrinsic. It relies upon factors outside ourselves, and it's not always the best motivator. Conspicuous consumption makes us feel good for a while, but that feeling always fades. Extrinsic motivation may even influence us to pursue jobs or goals we don't actually want. Intrinsic motivation is the desire to do something for its own sake. The action is its reward. Instead of fixating on other people's successes and their approval of you, focus on yourself. Find intrinsic motivation on your own actions.

Yeah, so a lot here. So by the way folks, as you're listening to this and if there's a lot of terms that aren't familiar to you, like ironic processing or extrinsic motivation, there are links to all these terms. Back on the site nearandfar.com, you can see my latest article on my blog and each one of those terms that you may not be familiar with has a whole blog post that I've written about those terms and there's some really powerful stuff here. We're condensing a lot of psychology research into one blog post and one episode here. I think ironic processing is probably one of the most important things we need to learn when it comes to personal productivity. Ironic processing says that when we try and not think about something, we become more likely to think about it. So the classic experiment that was done was when a study asked people to not think about a white bear. Well, of course, guess what? You're going to think about nothing but that white bear. If I tell you, don't think about a white bear. And so the same thing happens when we tell ourselves not to do something, right? Don't check social media or, you know, don't smoke that cigarette or don't eat that late night snack as we talked about earlier. And so the right way to deal with it is not telling yourself not to do it, but it's to disarm that internal trigger by starting with acknowledging that sensation, writing it down now. It's so funny. You know, I'm so glad we read this article because it's interesting how you can apply a technique to one area of your life and forget to apply it to other technique, other areas of your life. So for me, I've made a lot of progress for myself around digital distraction and that's kind of the core of my book. Indistractable. But it's funny because I didn't think about how I can apply these techniques, these specific techniques around ironic processing and writing down the sensation around other distractions. Like for example, what we talked about earlier, my problem with late night snacking. I'm going to start doing that because until now I've said, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. Which only makes me want to snack more. What I'm going to start doing is just take a step back, take a post it note. I know where I keep the post it notes in my kitchen. I'm going to take out the post it note. I'm just going to write down that sensation and do exactly what I do when it comes to managing digital distractions. To try and manage these distractions around food cravings and, and write down that sensation and surf the urge a bit. As we talked about earlier, maybe time box. As you were saying, Nick, around when you're going to have your snacking time. So it's cool to see that I'll be very vulnerable here. That I still struggle with these distractions in various areas of my life and for some reason I didn't think to apply these same techniques to other distractions.

I think that's one of the reasons why you want to do this podcast and have these comments and we have these dialogues around it. As a reminder, a small plug, we will be doing another Ask Me Anything with Near Eyal. If you have something that you want him to answer, please send him an email. You can send that to nearandfar.com or right back to one of his email newsletters with your question. We will answer it on our next Ask Me Anything. Well, moving on to Habit Number four Focusing on the Negatives Humans have a propensity for focusing on the negative. We have a negativity bias, a phenomenon in which negative events are more salient and demand attention more powerfully than neutral or positive events. And we ruminate over bad experiences. These two psychological factors help us learn from past experiences. Still on the flip side, dwelling on negative thoughts and experiences can lead to a negative mindset. For example, if you have a day of low productivity, the least productive thing you can do to recover is shame yourself. It's a mental trap. The shame will only drive you to distraction, perpetuating a vicious cycle. Practicing introspection to reach self awareness is a powerful tool for dealing with negative thoughts. Introspection accesses your thoughts and feelings. Self reflection lets you process them and the resulting insights can be acted upon. By becoming self aware, you boost your ability to control your emotions. That not only helps you fight distraction, but also reduces stress and anxiety and causes a greater sense of well being. Habit 5 not setting boundaries Failing to set boundaries with work, friends and family can lead to burnout and a depletion of energy, creativity and motivation. Think of your life in three domains. You, your work, and your relationships. Within each life domain are the values or attributes of the person we want to be. All life domains should get space in your calendar. If they don't, you'll feel unbalanced and out of whack because failing to live in line with our values disrupts the trajectory of our lives. Once you've identified your values and don't lie to yourself, you can turn them into time by timeboxing the activities that fulfill them. A timeboxed calendar visualizes your days and forces you to be realistic about how much time you have. It compels you to make decisions and implement boundaries. For example, every Saturday morning is reserved for your family, and work related tasks only occur between 7am and and 6pm Monday through Friday. Before we get to the last one, I'll see if NIR has anything you want to add on those two.

No, that's not top of mind. Anything come up for you?

I think let's just give a brief refresher of the time box, just in 30 seconds or less. It is such a core concept of you and your work, and I know other people have written about it, but that thing comes up again and again. For somebody who maybe has read about it, heard about it, what's just a refresher for them?

Yeah, the idea is that you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. So if you have an empty calendar, or for that matter any empty time on your calendar, don't be surprised if you end up doing something you didn't intend to do, because what did you get distracted from? So the only way to know what is distraction is to know what is traction. Right? Traction and distraction are opposites. So traction is anything you plan to do in advance, which by the way, doesn't just have to be productive stuff. Right. You can plan traction in watching Netflix or playing a video game or whatever it is you want to do with your time and attention. The idea is that you're planning that time in advance. That's the definition of traction. And then anything that is not that is a distraction. So timeboxing is simply planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it, and measuring yourself by your ability to follow through on what you said you were going to do. Because that is truly the only way we can live out our values is putting them on our calendar. I know we talked about before that the way to know someone's actual values, not just what they say, but what their real value is to look at how they spend their money and how they spend their time. So we need to start looking at our time as a non renewable resource. Right? You can always make more money, you can't make more time. And so we have to be stingy with our time. I would say generous with our money and planning out that time to make sure we're not just giving it to whoever asked for it, but rather being judicious to make sure we can live out our values by planning our time in advance.

That's great. Habit number six, neglecting self care. Failing to take care of our physical and mental health leads to feelings of exhaustion and unhappiness, AKA burnout. Yet taking care of yourself is at the core of the three life domains. Because the other two depend on your health and wellness. If you're not taking care of yourself, your relationships suffer and your work isn't the best. Exercising, sleeping, eating healthy meals and spending time on a hobby like reading, knitting or gardening or are all ways to invest in ourselves. Don't be miserable. Here's more advice on how to kick these irritating habits to the curb. And there's a link on this article that goes to Near's article on bad habits. You can find that at www.nearandfar.com bad-habits Nir I think it's so neat that you mentioned about spending time on a hobby. I've been experimenting with something at my events where I'm asking people on their name tags to write their name and then a hobby or an activity that they like beneath their name as a built in sort of icebreaker at these large networking events. And you'd be surprised how many people say they don't have any hobbies. And I wonder what that says. I'm just noting it. Some people oh, what somebody said was hobby makes me feel guilty. The word hobby makes me feel guilty that I don't spend enough time on it. So while I may like to go swimming, I can't say it's a hobby because I actually don't spend time. And so I just, it's just interesting thing I'm playing around with.

Yeah, no, it is interesting. I mean, I think we kind of underrate hobbies, especially for people who feel like their time at work is not their own. I think it's very important to have segments of our time schedule for something that we truly control. We know that one of the most important things for our psychological well being is, is a sense of agency, having mastery over something. And so when you look at the principle of self determination theory, which is kind of the most widely accepted theory of human flourishing and well being, it emphasizes competency, autonomy and relatedness. This is the work of Desi and Ryan. It's 50 year old research, it's very well known and we don't find that in all aspects of our life. So for people who, some people really do find all three of those things, competency, autonomy and relatedness at work. But for many folks, they don't, right? They, they, they have a job because they need to pay the bills. So it's important for those folks to make sure that there are are outlets in their life, whether it's a hobby, whether it's a faith based community, something in their life that provides them these three critical psychological nutrients of competency, autonomy and related relatedness somewhere in their lives.

Really fascinating. Well, this has been a reading of six habits that are secretly making you miserable. Nir Eyal is the best selling author of how to build habit forming products and also how to control your attention and choose your life. Hey, you may have recently received an email from Nir on his newsletter. If you're not subscribed already, you have to subscribe. He has a weekly newsletter filled with science backed strategies for designing healthy habits that your customers will love. If you are subscribed right back to the last one that you got with one of your questions for our next Ask me anything and if you're not subscribed, what are you doing? Comment Go right now to www.nearandfar that's spelled n I R and a N D far far f a r com nearandfar.com and sign up today because it's a great newsletter. We will see you next week. Thank you for listening to near and Far Business Behavior and the Brain.