TJ Walker explains how cues trigger habits through a loop of cue, action, and reward. Advertisements and sensory triggers like smells push you toward fast food and sugary drinks. He controls his environment with audio reminders and avoids tempting locations to stay in charge.
Are you setting up your cues properly? It's well known among people who discuss habits that human beings are pretty much all the same. We may react differently, we may have different behaviors, but at some level, we experience a cue. We look at it, smell it, hear it, something cues us. That creates a reaction, an action, and then we get some reward. So if you look at and smell a nice fresh chocolate chip cookie, that's a visual cue and an olfactory cue, it creates an action. You eat the cookie, you get this tremendous reward because it just tastes so good and you get all this dopamine in your brain. I'm getting excited just thinking about it. Truth be told, one of the joys of my childhood. I don't know if now what we know about nutrition, it's a good idea, but when I came home from school every day as a kid, typically more days than not, my mother had fresh baked chocolate chip cookies for me. And I love them. I still love chocolate chip cookies, but I don't eat them very often. Why? Because it's not a habit that supports larger life goals of mine. It doesn't support my health goals, doesn't support my appearance goals, doesn't support my energy goals because there's not a lot of nutritional value in chocolate chip cookies. But that's the importance of our topic today. Are you doing enough to control your cues? So many habits experts like, we're just still in 2020, kind of tossed out in the jungle and it's totally random as to whether we see a saber toothed tiger and get scared and run, or see some nice tasty fruit and stop and eat it. Well, it's not random. You can in fact control your cues if you decide you want to. Now, most experts give the example of you want to go to the gym more. You set out your gym bag the night before, you have your shoes out, your sneakers, first thing you see when you get out of bed, it's a visual cue to remind you to go to the gym. But unfortunately for most of us, we are bombarded with cues all day long that are not of our choosing. We see ads all day long for McDonald's and Wendy's and Kentucky Fried Chicken. So if you've eaten fast food in the last, not because you made a rational decision that this was the healthiest thing for you or the best thing for you, the most nutritious thing and the thing that would energize you the most or the thing that would make you look your best or feel the best, at some level, you were manipulated because of cues put in front of you. We've all seen thousands of ads in the last month for McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Coca Cola, and Wendy's. Depending on what country you're in. This affects our behavior, and that's a problem. That's how we end up eating fast food for lunch. We all see tons of ads every single day for Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, and a handful of other carbonated beverages. And you may say, well, I don't like Coke. That has no impact on me. I'm above that. What do you drink? Oh, I drink Pepsi. Someone might say, chances are, unless you are a very healthy person and have gotten to the point where you try to just drink water, if you go to a restaurant or a party or any social event and someone says, what do you want to drink? There's a great chance you or at least your friends and family will say, coke, Sprite, Pepsi. Why is that? It's because we have had cues put in front of us all day long in the form of billboards, ads, commercials, radio ads, pop up ads on websites, email ads. We are bombarded with these advertisements and it affects our behavior. We're kidding ourselves if we aren't. We are simply reacting. And that's a huge, huge problem. If you really want to control your life, then you have to proactively get better control over your cues. You have to actively decide what cues to put in front of your eyeballs, what cues to put in front of your ears, what video images to see, what pictures to see, what text to see. Because you have control over your cues, most of us don't exercise it. Most of us just react as the world swirls around us and we're giving up all control. This is a huge, huge problem. I believe that if you want control over your own life, if you want good habits, if you want to control your habits, the starting point has got to be you have to control your cues. What is it that's creating a stimulus to get you to do something in particular? I try to control not all of my cues. No one can do that unless you live in a bubble somewhere or live in a pod. But I try to control as many cues as I can every single day, especially the first couple of hours of the day. And that's why every morning I spend my latest selfie speak program audio where I talk to myself and I cue myself and is only 13 minutes long. I have a new selfie media program and it's less than two minutes long. But it's, it's images, it's photos in a photo album where I look at cues that I want to do for the behavior that I want. And that is what is critical, is you have to be proactive. The other thing I do every single day is I give myself text cues. I actually read right here on my cell phone a list of 100 habits that I'm trying to. I'm using the term habits and routines. 100 habits, routines that I try to do every single day. So I don't just listen to it and say, oh, I got it. I don't just look at pictures that remind me. I also look at the text every single day. Because I want to take control over the cues that go into my eyeballs, go into my brain, go into my ears, go in my nose. I want control over those. Speaking of no's, that's why. And when I'm in the mall and I smell the Cinnabon, I try to walk in the opposite direction. I try to walk at least on the other side because I don't trust willpower. I don't trust myself not to buy Cinnabon. And maybe the Cinnabon isn't as big a competition for me, but those fresh chocolate chip cookies in them all can be. I try to walk further away from it to give myself less exposure to cues. Now, life is random for a lot. There's some things we cannot control. We can't eliminate all the randomness. But for the average person, this person receives thousands and thousands and thousands of cues every single day. Every billboard, every bus, every TV ad, radio ad, the pre roll of every YouTube video. All of these are cues attempting to entice us into taking an action that by and large has nothing to do with what's in our best interest. Everyone else in the whole world is trying to grab our attention, trying to get us with cues to buy something, buy a product, buy a service that makes them richer, but impoverishes our life many times in some way. That's why it's critical you take control over your own cues. You must be proactive. If you don't plan your cues, someone else will, and they're coming after your wallet.
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