January 7, 2014 • 26 mins
New Habits for a New Year: How long does it take to make or break a habit? Is this really the year you make major changes or learn a new craft? Robert and Julie break down the science of it all in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Featured art: "Head of Gold" by Pavel Tchelitchew Click here for the full image and information on the artist.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Okay, he wasn't a stuff with where
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and Julie Douglas.
You know, Julie. We're in a new year, essentially a
new studio, whole new set of rules and a Since
(00:24):
this new year, everybody is talking about, uh, you know,
what you're gonna change, how this year is going to
be different. Last year, we're just gonna go to write
that one off. But this year, this is the year
it's gonna happen, or this is the year it's not
gonna happen, I swear. Okay, blank slate, Folks, how are
you going to fill it in? What you're gonna do,
what you're gonna change? Yeah, we have an artificial news
(00:46):
start going virtue of the calendar. So so yeah, what
what does it take to change behavior? That's the big question,
And a lot of people have put in the other
two cents on this. A lot of people have sold
their two cents um this to a public that is
ever interested in changing themselves for the better. Well, first
(01:06):
of all, there's that three weak myth that persist, this
idea that in order to change a habit or make
a new one. All you need is twenty one days
consecutive days, and boom, there you go. You are now
going to be a Mandarin expert or some other uh
jiu jitsu warrior of knowledge and something. Yeah, which, of
(01:29):
course is ridiculous when you pair it up with the
with the other addedge, you hear a lot about ten
thousand hours, isn't it? The ten thousand hours towards something?
And you'll be you'll be, you'll be great at it.
Ten thousand hours a good bit longer than twenty one days.
But where does the twenty one days thing come from? Well,
you start trying to track it down, you kind of
lose your path in the in the history. But it
(01:49):
seems to have grown increasingly popular back in the nineteen
seventies due to a self help book called psycho Cybernetics,
which sounds like a good source. Who wouldn't trust the
bettering of their their their their their humanity to a
book called psycho Cybernetics and from the seventies, from the seventies,
which I'm just I haven't looked it up yet, but
(02:10):
I can already imagine that the cover to that book
because I have looked at some nineties books on self help. Yeah,
and again that's where this idea came from. The self
help book said, hey, just twenty one days, that's how
it takes. But as we're going to discuss, it's much
more complex than that, and we'll get to an idea
of what it takes in terms of days the consecutive
amount of time. But before we do that, let's talk
(02:32):
about the habit loop and what's happening inside of our brains.
New York Times business writer Charles Doig says, habit loops
they contain three parts. Okay, First, there's a cue or
a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic
mode and let a behavior unfold. Okay. Second, he says,
there's the routine, which is the behavior itself. And then
(02:56):
the third step, he says, is the reward, something that
your brain likes that helps it to remember that habit
loop in the future. So, like an example of this
would be the trigger. What's setting this off is, oh,
I feel kind of low energy in the afternoon, and
then what should I do? All Right, the automatic behavior
is I should go and have a soda. I'm gonna
have the big sugary grape soda. And then the reward
(03:16):
is I feel at least a temporary boost due to
all that sugar in my body. Right, And if you
keep doing that over and over again, eventually those cues,
those environmental keys will start to work on you. You know,
maybe it's three o'clock and you're tired and you need
that break, and you get that. You look at the
clock and you see that three o'clock, and that becomes
one of the cues that adds up in this database
(03:37):
of I want the soda. Yeah, it's time for the soda.
The soda. Time to to press the hot key on
soda behavior. Now, in part, we can trace habit making
back to the basil ganglia, which also plays a key
role in the development of emotions, memories, and pattern recognition.
So decisions meanwhile, though, they are made in the prefrontal cortex.
(03:58):
And this is really interesting is as a behavior becomes automatic,
the decision making part of your brain goes into a
kind of sleep mode. Yeah, And and in this the
basal gangla is essentially it takes the behavior and turns
it into an automatic routine. It's essentially a hot key,
you know, like like when you're using Photoshop or any
other program, you have that hot key like you know,
it's all control or whatever. I used to have a
(04:19):
bazillion of a memorize when I was using in Design
for a Living and uh, and so you just go
to this automatic behavior, all right, just push these these
quick keys and we'll do some sort of automatic function
on the page you're working on. Uh. And we do
that in our lives. We do that when we as
we're driving to work, as we're trying to navigate the
hallways of our house without you know, busting our elbow
and something. Well, Android says that there's a real boon
(04:43):
to us when we do that, because, in a sense,
your brain starts working less and less, and he says,
the brain can almost completely shut down. And this is
an advantage because it means that you have all of
this mental activity that you can devote to something else.
It's why you can listen to stuff to bow your
mind while walking to the bus stay and while driving
to work, or while doing you know, data entry in
(05:03):
an Excel spreadsheet. Right. So, because it's all this has
become habituated and wrote and routinized, and we need all
this stuff, right, we need this kind of predictability. But
of course the problem becomes when we want to change
that behavior. And he says that if you want to
change it or create a new one, you have to
gain those three aspects. You have to gain that trigger
(05:24):
or that queue and know that it could be boredom
or that you're tired, and acknowledge that that is the reason,
not just at three o'clock and it's time for that soda.
You kind of have to break it down and kind
of goes slow mo with your thinking. Um. He also
said that you have to disrupt the routine and the reward.
You have to figure that out too. You have to say, okay, fine,
(05:46):
this might give me a temporary lift, but how gross
am I going to feel a half hour later when
all that sugar is sitting in my belly? Um. And
then he also said that you can replace that reward,
so instead of having that soda, you can take a
walk exactly. Yeah. And this was really helpful to me
when I quit drinking, actually, because I had noticed that
between hours of six and eight pm at nine that
(06:08):
were sort of my witching hours, and I would go
and work out instead of reaching for a glass of wine. Uh,
and that's replaced that reward for me, and it disrupted
the routine. So it was really helpful. Yeah. I mean
he stress that with a lot of things are related
to behavior. A lot of it is just realizing the
patterns of behavior, being able to look in the mirror
and and be self aware of what's going on. And
(06:29):
you have to remember we've talked about this a lot
before that these are neural pathways that once you did
just have it over and over again, they become really
grooved in your brain. Okay, so that is a pathway
that's easy for those signals to trot upon. So if
you do it less, then it becomes you know, the
strength of those pathways decreases. It will always be there
(06:50):
because you created the pathway. Yeah. And and ultimately it's
creating new behaviors. Forging new pathways, it's easier as opposed
to getting rid of old ones. I mean, you can
think of it, think of it in terms of, all right,
you have a road between two cities, and what are
you gonna do. Are you gonna shut down one road
completely and then build another one that you're gonna You're
gonna build an additional road and then you're gonna sort
(07:10):
of and then and then that new road is going
to replace the old one. If you just cut off
the road, then how are we gonna get where we're going?
How am I going to deal with the the trigger
effect of needing that soda in the afternoon. I like
that idea that there are parallel paths and that's how
you replace the one after a while, and you kind
of put the detour signs on the other one. It
always exists with the detour signs. Yeah. Um. And that's
(07:31):
one of the problems with any sort of habit that
you pick up again a bad habit, is that as
soon as you you engage in that behavior, those pathways go, oh,
I remember this road. I haven't taken it in a
long time. And like you said, the environment is a
big thing. I like if I if I I don't
know why I chose the soda habit. I haven't actually
had a soda in for every but it's a good,
good model because I know a lot of people have
(07:51):
this temptation. Uh So in this case, in this example,
I'm drinking sodas in the office. So the office is
the environment in which this behavior has become ingrained. So
one thing that actually helps is stepping outside of the environment.
That that that that that makes this behavior acceptable. Now,
changing your environment is not a cure all, but it
can disrupt some some of that that routine. And that's
(08:14):
why going on a vacation is often cited as a
good example of a of a time to to try
to break away from a routine. And it's also why
vacations are often really comforting because we're breaking away from
a number of routines, even if they're not necessarily you know,
bad for us. Maybe they're just you know, you're you're
free from some of the change you weren't even aware of.
It was so much easier to slow down in that
(08:34):
automated behavior, look at it and say, oh, why am
I reaching for this? Why am I doing this? You're right,
because you don't have those environmental triggers. Now, there is
a kind of average of days, at least in one
study that shows that there are certain habits that you
can pick up good habits. Let's say and sixty six days. Now,
(08:56):
this is the average of days that it took participants
to have a behavior become automatic. This is a study
led by Philippa Lally and she's a psychologist at University
College London. So we are talking about this length of
time varying anywhere from eighteen days to two hundred and
fifty four. Sixty six was just the average, and some
(09:19):
habits were talking about drinking a bottle of water after
lunch turned out to be a lot stickier, only took
fifty nine days on the average, because that's how difficult
is that? Now you're just tipping the bottle. But what
about doing fifty sit ups each morning? Much harder ninety
one days. So other findings were that missing a single
day did not reduce the chance of forming habits. That's
(09:41):
good news. In a subgroup, it turns out took a
lot longer than the others to form their habits, and
this suggests that some people are habit resistant. And of
course other types of habits may take much longer than
make you know, two fifty four days for instance for me,
the sit ups that would that would be like three
sixty five days for me. So what about you, what
(10:02):
would be the easiest thing and the hardest thing? Like
what would take you eighteen days? And what would take
you two? Well, I guess obviously something I enjoy doing Um,
a lot of people who who write are aware of
this hundred words a day thing where the idea is,
all right, your life is busy, but you really want
to work on you know, that novel, or work on
short stories, or write a little poetry, so you just
(10:22):
make sure you take out time, just carve it just
a sliver of time to do one hundred words, just
you know, open up your your word document, you know,
grab a notebook. One words, then you can move on.
So that would probably be easier for me, just because
obviously the reward, the reward is also in doing it.
It's something that I enjoy doing, and so that would
be something would be easier for me to do. And
you already have a huge writing muscle, yeah, exactly, so
(10:47):
that one would be an easy Also I'll have to
do is open a document or or grab a pet
but uh, one of it would be much harder. And
one that I also would very much like to do
would be, you know, to do yoga on a much
more regular basis these days. But for that, obviously I've
got to carve out a much larger piece of time,
like you know, at least twenty minutes ideally like an hour.
I need to either go to a space where I
(11:09):
can do the yoga or find a space both uh,
both physical and mental in which to do it every
day or a few days a week, and it becomes
increasingly complex. I read that if then statements help with
this because a lot of times we'll say we want
to do this, but when we find reasons not to
do things. And the idea is that instead of finding
those reasons not to do it, you say to yourself,
(11:30):
if it's Monday and it's noon and I have thirty minutes,
I'm going to go to X space and do yoga,
and that that becomes more of an action item in
your brain as opposed to a plan. Really well, it's
like a program, you know, because it reminds me like
the settings in email, if you've ever looked at that,
where you can set things like if this, then that
(11:50):
then X. So yeah, it's like and essentially that's what
we're talking about, reprogramming the self to incorporate new actions
or in some cases a limit other actions or choose
one action over another. Of course, all of this require
self control and will power. And we'll take a quick
break and when we get back, we're gonna talk about
this muscle of self control that we can cultivate for ourselves. Okay,
(12:20):
we're back and you're going to talk about you roll
a self control and will power because of course you
can't just have this um then like moment with your
brain where you slow everything down and you examine how
and why you're doing things. You also have to have
the will to change that habit. Yes, and we've we've
podcasted exclusively on will in some past episodes before and it's, uh,
(12:41):
it's a fascinating topic because it's, like most things in life,
it's not quite what you think it is when you
actually stop and examine. Willpower is not a set level.
It's not like you know, playing Dungeons and Dragons where
you you roll the dice and you have that that
set number that that you may modify with some magical
spells here. And it's it's something that that fluctuates throughout
(13:02):
the day based on where we are, where our attention
is that, what our diet consists of, what kind of
uh stimuli we're exposed to. And the good news is
that it is a behavior and not something that's hardwired,
so it can be changed. In fact, in a two
thousand meta study of self control Mark Moravin and Roy F. Baumeister,
we've heard from him before. They set out to answer
(13:23):
the question does self control resemble a muscle? And yes,
they say, if willpower is like a muscle, and muscles
can get stronger over time training, will power similar can
be trained and strengthened. And they found this and that
meta study. In addition, Australian researchers Megan Otan and Ken
Chang looked at this question and they took a group
of people through a customized two month exercise program. What
(13:46):
do they find. Well, of course the people got stronger,
um they developed more muscles, but they also found that
their behaviors there, their self control, their willpower changed with
the addition of the actual physical muscles. Yeah, this is
pretty amazing and that they throw out the example there's
like a like a pebble in a lake. There's this
ripple effect. You start in selling willpower into one area
(14:09):
of your life and it actually bleeds over into other
areas of your life because the overall willpower level increases.
I was thinking about this in the context of the
bit we found out about how a full bladder can
actually help with willpower at least you know, temporarily, because
if you have a full bladder, your brain is suppressing
(14:31):
the urge to p on yourself essentially, and as a result,
it is suppressing everything else. So not just you over
eating at the buffet, but controlling your bladder and perhaps
not having a cigarette at that very moment. It's why
drinking more water is such a no brainer for for
for New Year's resolutions, because more water good for your body.
(14:54):
You're mostly water anyway, right you can, you can line
up all the health and ifit's there, but your bladder
is going to be more full more of the time,
thus allowing you to better suppress other temptations in your life.
There you go. That's a tip right there. More water,
all right. So let's talk about the specifics of the
study we're talking about again a two month period in
which the participants hit the gym three times a week,
(15:15):
and before, during, and after the exercise, the group was
tested on a visual task that measured will power via
distraction and thought suppression. Now, after two months, the air
rate went down for the group from twenty three to
twelve percent, so, in other words, they were able to
not pay attention to those distractions to be more focused,
and they had that decrease in their brain just sort
(15:38):
of going willy nilly about things. Yeah. And the crazy
thing too, is that when I first started reading some
of those thinking, all right, the other areas they're gonna
be affecting their life, It's going to be like, oh,
well they ate a little more broccoli or something easy
like that. But now the the improvements that they saw
related to stuff like cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption. He'll be eating, exercise,
and household chores. So I mean the fact that cigarettes
(15:59):
and alcohol were also affected things that you often think.
I was having their talents a little deeper into the
psyche um to see to see those areas affected as
well by this ripple effect. It's really encouraged. Yeah, And
the behavior was all over the place. It might be
that someone missed appointments a lot, in which case they
found that a person went from missing an appointment every
(16:20):
day to like once a week, or in the case
the cigarettes down from fourteen cigarettes a day to just three.
That is amazing. Yeah. Alright, So coming back to the
old idea that we talked about at the beginning of
the episode, the idea that I apply X amount of
time towards something, towards a new skill, a new discipline,
a new subject. I can become an expert. I can
(16:40):
make this my own, I can own this content all right.
Because if you think about someone being a master of
their universe, you typically think of like Ben Franklin or
Leonardo de Venture. These are people who were true poly mass,
who could attack new topics, consume them, and by habit
they could do this right now, Some people would say
(17:03):
that that was the dreds. The world was much smaller,
that there are a fewer tones to go through and
become an expert. Now we have so much more knowledge,
so it's a lot more difficult. And you could say
that in some senses are our willpower, our ability to
really concentrate has been deluded by all of this knowledge.
But it remains that if you do something, namely repetition,
(17:25):
that you can still learn new things and you may
even become an expert. And you know that ten thousand
hours that Malcolm Cloud will always talks about, that's a
possibility in there too. But if you just want to
sort of pick up guitar or you know, stop smoking, drinking,
all of these things are available to you. You just
need to document it and uh repeat wash, repeat, yeah,
(17:51):
making making a pattern of it, regularly consuming it, be
at a hundred words a day, be a guitar lessons,
or be it. Hey, here's a good one. You can
listen to a new episode of stuff to blow your
mind every day for a year. I think we have
enough now, oh dear, oh yeah, And you have to
document it. This is the important part. And this is
where we bring up Karen X Chang. Okay, she is
(18:12):
kind of the I think the best example of this
kind of muscle flexing of self control. Now, she not
only was a program manager of Microsoft Excel. At the
same time that she was doing this full time job,
she decided, oh hey, I think I want to teach
myself computer graphics. She did within a six month period,
and then she got a new job as a designer
at Exact, this is a startup in San Francisco. Along
(18:33):
the way, she taught herself all sorts of things like
guitar and she began to realize that she had a
process in place that could allow her to enjoy and
explore all the things that she found fascinating. And she
started a website called give It one dot com and
(18:53):
This is based on her own video that went viral.
Some people may be familiar with this, in which she
taught herself to dance in a year and every day
she documented herself and it's a great video because it
starts out with her doing these sort of awkward popping
looks like I'm doing right now but you can't see,
and then she becomes this beautiful fluid dancer after three
(19:17):
d and sixty five days. So what what did she
give it? A hundred off? Well, the idea is that
one hundred one hundred days is something that a person
can sort of do like that what she did, although
sort of three sixty five light right. So in other words,
you pick a project, you document yourself. Every day you
upload a video. I think there's only like ten to
(19:38):
fifteen seconds of the video that shows on the site,
but you can see real progress after a number of days.
And that's one of the things that she says is
really important in trying to learn something new or do
something that you not just document that you do it
over and over again, but that you can see where
you're going with this. Yeah, and so the YouTube us
(19:58):
of YouTube here achieves that also is a great documentation system. Yeah. So,
I mean, if anybody's interested, I would say check that out. Um. Personally,
I'm playing around with the idea of doing that because
I would love to conquer the accordions are enough playing
around with it, pretending like I'm in some Parisian cafe
(20:18):
entertaining folks and having their ears bleed. Well, what you
need to do is do it on your drive to work.
That's a great idea. Yeah, I think it would work, Okay.
I mean, because things are pretty automated when when it
comes to driving, why not you get you get one
of those those little little little cameras that go on
the dashboard. Uh, turn it your yourself, and then every
(20:39):
morning as you drive to work, you're playing the accordion.
I think that the lawyers of Discovery dot com are
gonna love this. I think they will, and that secretly
they will love it. Um. But but I should also
mention the hundred words a day thing I'm talking about earlier. Now,
I am remembering that in the the official, uh prescribed
version of that, Um, you are keeping track of your
(21:00):
word count, like you're saying, yes, I did I did
a hundred two hundred day before and all that. So
that you. You have some level of accountability too. That's
because presumably somebody is looking at your YouTube videos. Presumably
somebody is looking at the you know the little ticker
that you have at the bottom of your web page
that says how many how many words you're you're pumping out? Yeah,
I don't know about give it one dot com, but
(21:22):
I do know the one hundred words a day. If
you don't write, they will send you an email a
little nasty Graham saying hey, you need to do this,
which is always really helpful. And that's probably a good, good,
good bit of info for me. Though about all this
is because I should if I'm going to do the
hundred words a day, I should maybe do the official
version to where there's a little more accountability and it's
not just though I forgot for three weeks. Yeah, so, um,
(21:42):
you know, as I moved through this year and master
the accordion and then make everybody's ears bleed, have about
in six months time? Should we say six months? We
we all meet back here in six months I'll play
for you guys. Um, as I think about this, I'm
gonna think about that habit loop and those triggers, right,
um and gonna think about my little basil ganglia. I'm
going to ask you to back off. Well, although I
(22:05):
might say, hey, you can go ahead and do this
when I get really good and it becomes an automated behavior,
but I'm also going to think about that repetition, and uh,
we'll see after sixty six days to where I land
on this. If this becomes uh pretty decent in terms
of my ability to play, uh you know, real quick,
I want to come back to Charles do Hig, the
author of the Power of habit Um. He also went
(22:26):
talked about alcoholics anonymous A little bit don't sound very interesting.
He's just talking about that with a A. There's no
scientific basis behind it originally at all. Like apparently there
are twelve steps because there are twelve apostles, So it's
there's a lot of of of of A is wrapped
up in this kind of you know, appealing to a
higher power to help you. But what he says, what
(22:48):
he points out is that that A of course really works,
and it's it has a great tracklate record because it
is essentially a big machine for changing habits around alcohol consumption,
and it gives people a new routine. Uh, other than
going to a bar and then drink or what have you. Uh,
And it's something that doesn't work when people do it
on their own, so it's new routine accountability. UM. I
found that interesting, and that is really interesting. Some people, uh,
(23:11):
that twelve step program doesn't appeal to them or it
doesn't work for them either because they're not sure about
the philosophy behind it. But you're right, there are certain things,
uh that do work in that program, and there are
alternatives to a A but they use the same sort
of ideas of distraction really in creating new routines. Um.
And to that end, I do have a quick email.
(23:33):
Let's see if Arnie can bring that on over. And
this has to do with our three years of Word
Salad episode. This is from Brenda, says hid Lane Robert.
I just want to thank you for your confession, so
to speak, on how the podcast has changed your life
podcast about giving up alcohol. I didn't want to be
presumptuous and imply any labels that you yourself did not apply,
(23:55):
but what you said did resonate with me because my
uncle went through something perhaps similar. I think a lot
of people tend to view alcohol problems as almost kind
of binary. Either you're in terrible shape and have a
serious life ruining problem, or there's no problem at all
in reality, though it's much grayer now. She goes on
to describe how people around her uncle actually doubted his
(24:15):
need to quit drinking simply because he didn't fit a
stereotype of an alcoholic or exhibit wild behavior, and she
says She ends by saying, I don't know if I'm
reading too much into what you said. Maybe you didn't
actually have anything problematic going on. You just didn't like
the idea of what alcohol does as you learned more
about it. I have another friend who has never had
a drinking problem, but doesn't drink simply because he doesn't
(24:36):
like what it does to other people. But either way,
thank you for sharing your situation. I hope it might
help even one person to realize that one doesn't have
to hit rock bottom to make a change like that,
and that not drinking is just as valid a choice
as drinking is. So thinks Brenda, that was really, I
think a very helpful email, because you're right, I was
playing it safe in that episode and not labeling myself
(24:59):
because you know, not drinking is still something that I'm
turning around in my head and trying to figure out
for myself. But I think you make an excellent point
that a lot of people feel like it is a
black and white issue and it is not um and
just being able to explore that as a great idea
is one of the reasons I could get to the
point where I could stop drinking alcohol in the first place,
(25:21):
because for many years I had to find that as
a black and white issue, and it really hindered my
ability to to get where I need to be in
terms of breaking habits. All right, well, there you have it.
Hopefully this podcast will serve as uh, you know, kind
of a pep talk, a little dose of enthusiasm for
whatever you are deciding to change or or tweaked this year.
(25:42):
In so as you continue, as you go on this journey,
we would love to hear from you your thoughts on
the application of this information towards your particular issue, your
thoughts just on the information in general. You can find
us at all the normal places. Stuffable your Mind dot
com is the mothership. That's the main page. Go there.
You've never been there before, Go to it, go check
(26:02):
it out. All the podcast episodes are there, all the
blog posted there. We have videos, we have links out
to our various social media outlets and other web pages
we use, you know, stuff like Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Google Plus, SoundCloud,
you name it. Um. And if you want to try
a more old fashioned method of getting in touch with us, Julie,
what can they do? Can take out this keyboard thing, okay, okay,
(26:25):
and you find an email program and then in the
two field you simply put below the mind at discovery
dot com and let us know what you're thinking. And hey,
if you guys actually have any episode request, let us
know there too. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Okay, he wasn't a stuff with where
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and Julie Douglas.
You know, Julie. We're in a new year, essentially a
new studio, whole new set of rules and a Since
(00:24):
this new year, everybody is talking about, uh, you know,
what you're gonna change, how this year is going to
be different. Last year, we're just gonna go to write
that one off. But this year, this is the year
it's gonna happen, or this is the year it's not
gonna happen, I swear. Okay, blank slate, Folks, how are
you going to fill it in? What you're gonna do,
what you're gonna change? Yeah, we have an artificial news
(00:46):
start going virtue of the calendar. So so yeah, what
what does it take to change behavior? That's the big question,
And a lot of people have put in the other
two cents on this. A lot of people have sold
their two cents um this to a public that is
ever interested in changing themselves for the better. Well, first
(01:06):
of all, there's that three weak myth that persist, this
idea that in order to change a habit or make
a new one. All you need is twenty one days
consecutive days, and boom, there you go. You are now
going to be a Mandarin expert or some other uh
jiu jitsu warrior of knowledge and something. Yeah, which, of
(01:29):
course is ridiculous when you pair it up with the
with the other addedge, you hear a lot about ten
thousand hours, isn't it? The ten thousand hours towards something?
And you'll be you'll be, you'll be great at it.
Ten thousand hours a good bit longer than twenty one days.
But where does the twenty one days thing come from? Well,
you start trying to track it down, you kind of
lose your path in the in the history. But it
(01:49):
seems to have grown increasingly popular back in the nineteen
seventies due to a self help book called psycho Cybernetics,
which sounds like a good source. Who wouldn't trust the
bettering of their their their their their humanity to a
book called psycho Cybernetics and from the seventies, from the seventies,
which I'm just I haven't looked it up yet, but
(02:10):
I can already imagine that the cover to that book
because I have looked at some nineties books on self help. Yeah,
and again that's where this idea came from. The self
help book said, hey, just twenty one days, that's how
it takes. But as we're going to discuss, it's much
more complex than that, and we'll get to an idea
of what it takes in terms of days the consecutive
amount of time. But before we do that, let's talk
(02:32):
about the habit loop and what's happening inside of our brains.
New York Times business writer Charles Doig says, habit loops
they contain three parts. Okay, First, there's a cue or
a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic
mode and let a behavior unfold. Okay. Second, he says,
there's the routine, which is the behavior itself. And then
(02:56):
the third step, he says, is the reward, something that
your brain likes that helps it to remember that habit
loop in the future. So, like an example of this
would be the trigger. What's setting this off is, oh,
I feel kind of low energy in the afternoon, and
then what should I do? All Right, the automatic behavior
is I should go and have a soda. I'm gonna
have the big sugary grape soda. And then the reward
(03:16):
is I feel at least a temporary boost due to
all that sugar in my body. Right, And if you
keep doing that over and over again, eventually those cues,
those environmental keys will start to work on you. You know,
maybe it's three o'clock and you're tired and you need
that break, and you get that. You look at the
clock and you see that three o'clock, and that becomes
one of the cues that adds up in this database
(03:37):
of I want the soda. Yeah, it's time for the soda.
The soda. Time to to press the hot key on
soda behavior. Now, in part, we can trace habit making
back to the basil ganglia, which also plays a key
role in the development of emotions, memories, and pattern recognition.
So decisions meanwhile, though, they are made in the prefrontal cortex.
(03:58):
And this is really interesting is as a behavior becomes automatic,
the decision making part of your brain goes into a
kind of sleep mode. Yeah, And and in this the
basal gangla is essentially it takes the behavior and turns
it into an automatic routine. It's essentially a hot key,
you know, like like when you're using Photoshop or any
other program, you have that hot key like you know,
it's all control or whatever. I used to have a
(04:19):
bazillion of a memorize when I was using in Design
for a Living and uh, and so you just go
to this automatic behavior, all right, just push these these
quick keys and we'll do some sort of automatic function
on the page you're working on. Uh. And we do
that in our lives. We do that when we as
we're driving to work, as we're trying to navigate the
hallways of our house without you know, busting our elbow
and something. Well, Android says that there's a real boon
(04:43):
to us when we do that, because, in a sense,
your brain starts working less and less, and he says,
the brain can almost completely shut down. And this is
an advantage because it means that you have all of
this mental activity that you can devote to something else.
It's why you can listen to stuff to bow your
mind while walking to the bus stay and while driving
to work, or while doing you know, data entry in
(05:03):
an Excel spreadsheet. Right. So, because it's all this has
become habituated and wrote and routinized, and we need all
this stuff, right, we need this kind of predictability. But
of course the problem becomes when we want to change
that behavior. And he says that if you want to
change it or create a new one, you have to
gain those three aspects. You have to gain that trigger
(05:24):
or that queue and know that it could be boredom
or that you're tired, and acknowledge that that is the reason,
not just at three o'clock and it's time for that soda.
You kind of have to break it down and kind
of goes slow mo with your thinking. Um. He also
said that you have to disrupt the routine and the reward.
You have to figure that out too. You have to say, okay, fine,
(05:46):
this might give me a temporary lift, but how gross
am I going to feel a half hour later when
all that sugar is sitting in my belly? Um. And
then he also said that you can replace that reward,
so instead of having that soda, you can take a
walk exactly. Yeah. And this was really helpful to me
when I quit drinking, actually, because I had noticed that
between hours of six and eight pm at nine that
(06:08):
were sort of my witching hours, and I would go
and work out instead of reaching for a glass of wine. Uh,
and that's replaced that reward for me, and it disrupted
the routine. So it was really helpful. Yeah. I mean
he stress that with a lot of things are related
to behavior. A lot of it is just realizing the
patterns of behavior, being able to look in the mirror
and and be self aware of what's going on. And
(06:29):
you have to remember we've talked about this a lot
before that these are neural pathways that once you did
just have it over and over again, they become really
grooved in your brain. Okay, so that is a pathway
that's easy for those signals to trot upon. So if
you do it less, then it becomes you know, the
strength of those pathways decreases. It will always be there
(06:50):
because you created the pathway. Yeah. And and ultimately it's
creating new behaviors. Forging new pathways, it's easier as opposed
to getting rid of old ones. I mean, you can
think of it, think of it in terms of, all right,
you have a road between two cities, and what are
you gonna do. Are you gonna shut down one road
completely and then build another one that you're gonna You're
gonna build an additional road and then you're gonna sort
(07:10):
of and then and then that new road is going
to replace the old one. If you just cut off
the road, then how are we gonna get where we're going?
How am I going to deal with the the trigger
effect of needing that soda in the afternoon. I like
that idea that there are parallel paths and that's how
you replace the one after a while, and you kind
of put the detour signs on the other one. It
always exists with the detour signs. Yeah. Um. And that's
(07:31):
one of the problems with any sort of habit that
you pick up again a bad habit, is that as
soon as you you engage in that behavior, those pathways go, oh,
I remember this road. I haven't taken it in a
long time. And like you said, the environment is a
big thing. I like if I if I I don't
know why I chose the soda habit. I haven't actually
had a soda in for every but it's a good,
good model because I know a lot of people have
(07:51):
this temptation. Uh So in this case, in this example,
I'm drinking sodas in the office. So the office is
the environment in which this behavior has become ingrained. So
one thing that actually helps is stepping outside of the environment.
That that that that that makes this behavior acceptable. Now,
changing your environment is not a cure all, but it
can disrupt some some of that that routine. And that's
(08:14):
why going on a vacation is often cited as a
good example of a of a time to to try
to break away from a routine. And it's also why
vacations are often really comforting because we're breaking away from
a number of routines, even if they're not necessarily you know,
bad for us. Maybe they're just you know, you're you're
free from some of the change you weren't even aware of.
It was so much easier to slow down in that
(08:34):
automated behavior, look at it and say, oh, why am
I reaching for this? Why am I doing this? You're right,
because you don't have those environmental triggers. Now, there is
a kind of average of days, at least in one
study that shows that there are certain habits that you
can pick up good habits. Let's say and sixty six days. Now,
(08:56):
this is the average of days that it took participants
to have a behavior become automatic. This is a study
led by Philippa Lally and she's a psychologist at University
College London. So we are talking about this length of
time varying anywhere from eighteen days to two hundred and
fifty four. Sixty six was just the average, and some
(09:19):
habits were talking about drinking a bottle of water after
lunch turned out to be a lot stickier, only took
fifty nine days on the average, because that's how difficult
is that? Now you're just tipping the bottle. But what
about doing fifty sit ups each morning? Much harder ninety
one days. So other findings were that missing a single
day did not reduce the chance of forming habits. That's
(09:41):
good news. In a subgroup, it turns out took a
lot longer than the others to form their habits, and
this suggests that some people are habit resistant. And of
course other types of habits may take much longer than
make you know, two fifty four days for instance for me,
the sit ups that would that would be like three
sixty five days for me. So what about you, what
(10:02):
would be the easiest thing and the hardest thing? Like
what would take you eighteen days? And what would take
you two? Well, I guess obviously something I enjoy doing Um,
a lot of people who who write are aware of
this hundred words a day thing where the idea is,
all right, your life is busy, but you really want
to work on you know, that novel, or work on
short stories, or write a little poetry, so you just
(10:22):
make sure you take out time, just carve it just
a sliver of time to do one hundred words, just
you know, open up your your word document, you know,
grab a notebook. One words, then you can move on.
So that would probably be easier for me, just because
obviously the reward, the reward is also in doing it.
It's something that I enjoy doing, and so that would
be something would be easier for me to do. And
you already have a huge writing muscle, yeah, exactly, so
(10:47):
that one would be an easy Also I'll have to
do is open a document or or grab a pet
but uh, one of it would be much harder. And
one that I also would very much like to do
would be, you know, to do yoga on a much
more regular basis these days. But for that, obviously I've
got to carve out a much larger piece of time,
like you know, at least twenty minutes ideally like an hour.
I need to either go to a space where I
(11:09):
can do the yoga or find a space both uh,
both physical and mental in which to do it every
day or a few days a week, and it becomes
increasingly complex. I read that if then statements help with
this because a lot of times we'll say we want
to do this, but when we find reasons not to
do things. And the idea is that instead of finding
those reasons not to do it, you say to yourself,
(11:30):
if it's Monday and it's noon and I have thirty minutes,
I'm going to go to X space and do yoga,
and that that becomes more of an action item in
your brain as opposed to a plan. Really well, it's
like a program, you know, because it reminds me like
the settings in email, if you've ever looked at that,
where you can set things like if this, then that
(11:50):
then X. So yeah, it's like and essentially that's what
we're talking about, reprogramming the self to incorporate new actions
or in some cases a limit other actions or choose
one action over another. Of course, all of this require
self control and will power. And we'll take a quick
break and when we get back, we're gonna talk about
this muscle of self control that we can cultivate for ourselves. Okay,
(12:20):
we're back and you're going to talk about you roll
a self control and will power because of course you
can't just have this um then like moment with your
brain where you slow everything down and you examine how
and why you're doing things. You also have to have
the will to change that habit. Yes, and we've we've
podcasted exclusively on will in some past episodes before and it's, uh,
(12:41):
it's a fascinating topic because it's, like most things in life,
it's not quite what you think it is when you
actually stop and examine. Willpower is not a set level.
It's not like you know, playing Dungeons and Dragons where
you you roll the dice and you have that that
set number that that you may modify with some magical
spells here. And it's it's something that that fluctuates throughout
(13:02):
the day based on where we are, where our attention
is that, what our diet consists of, what kind of
uh stimuli we're exposed to. And the good news is
that it is a behavior and not something that's hardwired,
so it can be changed. In fact, in a two
thousand meta study of self control Mark Moravin and Roy F. Baumeister,
we've heard from him before. They set out to answer
(13:23):
the question does self control resemble a muscle? And yes,
they say, if willpower is like a muscle, and muscles
can get stronger over time training, will power similar can
be trained and strengthened. And they found this and that
meta study. In addition, Australian researchers Megan Otan and Ken
Chang looked at this question and they took a group
of people through a customized two month exercise program. What
(13:46):
do they find. Well, of course the people got stronger,
um they developed more muscles, but they also found that
their behaviors there, their self control, their willpower changed with
the addition of the actual physical muscles. Yeah, this is
pretty amazing and that they throw out the example there's
like a like a pebble in a lake. There's this
ripple effect. You start in selling willpower into one area
(14:09):
of your life and it actually bleeds over into other
areas of your life because the overall willpower level increases.
I was thinking about this in the context of the
bit we found out about how a full bladder can
actually help with willpower at least you know, temporarily, because
if you have a full bladder, your brain is suppressing
(14:31):
the urge to p on yourself essentially, and as a result,
it is suppressing everything else. So not just you over
eating at the buffet, but controlling your bladder and perhaps
not having a cigarette at that very moment. It's why
drinking more water is such a no brainer for for
for New Year's resolutions, because more water good for your body.
(14:54):
You're mostly water anyway, right you can, you can line
up all the health and ifit's there, but your bladder
is going to be more full more of the time,
thus allowing you to better suppress other temptations in your life.
There you go. That's a tip right there. More water,
all right. So let's talk about the specifics of the
study we're talking about again a two month period in
which the participants hit the gym three times a week,
(15:15):
and before, during, and after the exercise, the group was
tested on a visual task that measured will power via
distraction and thought suppression. Now, after two months, the air
rate went down for the group from twenty three to
twelve percent, so, in other words, they were able to
not pay attention to those distractions to be more focused,
and they had that decrease in their brain just sort
(15:38):
of going willy nilly about things. Yeah. And the crazy
thing too, is that when I first started reading some
of those thinking, all right, the other areas they're gonna
be affecting their life, It's going to be like, oh,
well they ate a little more broccoli or something easy
like that. But now the the improvements that they saw
related to stuff like cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption. He'll be eating, exercise,
and household chores. So I mean the fact that cigarettes
(15:59):
and alcohol were also affected things that you often think.
I was having their talents a little deeper into the
psyche um to see to see those areas affected as
well by this ripple effect. It's really encouraged. Yeah, And
the behavior was all over the place. It might be
that someone missed appointments a lot, in which case they
found that a person went from missing an appointment every
(16:20):
day to like once a week, or in the case
the cigarettes down from fourteen cigarettes a day to just three.
That is amazing. Yeah. Alright, So coming back to the
old idea that we talked about at the beginning of
the episode, the idea that I apply X amount of
time towards something, towards a new skill, a new discipline,
a new subject. I can become an expert. I can
(16:40):
make this my own, I can own this content all right.
Because if you think about someone being a master of
their universe, you typically think of like Ben Franklin or
Leonardo de Venture. These are people who were true poly mass,
who could attack new topics, consume them, and by habit
they could do this right now, Some people would say
(17:03):
that that was the dreds. The world was much smaller,
that there are a fewer tones to go through and
become an expert. Now we have so much more knowledge,
so it's a lot more difficult. And you could say
that in some senses are our willpower, our ability to
really concentrate has been deluded by all of this knowledge.
But it remains that if you do something, namely repetition,
(17:25):
that you can still learn new things and you may
even become an expert. And you know that ten thousand
hours that Malcolm Cloud will always talks about, that's a
possibility in there too. But if you just want to
sort of pick up guitar or you know, stop smoking, drinking,
all of these things are available to you. You just
need to document it and uh repeat wash, repeat, yeah,
(17:51):
making making a pattern of it, regularly consuming it, be
at a hundred words a day, be a guitar lessons,
or be it. Hey, here's a good one. You can
listen to a new episode of stuff to blow your
mind every day for a year. I think we have
enough now, oh dear, oh yeah, And you have to
document it. This is the important part. And this is
where we bring up Karen X Chang. Okay, she is
(18:12):
kind of the I think the best example of this
kind of muscle flexing of self control. Now, she not
only was a program manager of Microsoft Excel. At the
same time that she was doing this full time job,
she decided, oh hey, I think I want to teach
myself computer graphics. She did within a six month period,
and then she got a new job as a designer
at Exact, this is a startup in San Francisco. Along
(18:33):
the way, she taught herself all sorts of things like
guitar and she began to realize that she had a
process in place that could allow her to enjoy and
explore all the things that she found fascinating. And she
started a website called give It one dot com and
(18:53):
This is based on her own video that went viral.
Some people may be familiar with this, in which she
taught herself to dance in a year and every day
she documented herself and it's a great video because it
starts out with her doing these sort of awkward popping
looks like I'm doing right now but you can't see,
and then she becomes this beautiful fluid dancer after three
(19:17):
d and sixty five days. So what what did she
give it? A hundred off? Well, the idea is that
one hundred one hundred days is something that a person
can sort of do like that what she did, although
sort of three sixty five light right. So in other words,
you pick a project, you document yourself. Every day you
upload a video. I think there's only like ten to
(19:38):
fifteen seconds of the video that shows on the site,
but you can see real progress after a number of days.
And that's one of the things that she says is
really important in trying to learn something new or do
something that you not just document that you do it
over and over again, but that you can see where
you're going with this. Yeah, and so the YouTube us
(19:58):
of YouTube here achieves that also is a great documentation system. Yeah. So,
I mean, if anybody's interested, I would say check that out. Um. Personally,
I'm playing around with the idea of doing that because
I would love to conquer the accordions are enough playing
around with it, pretending like I'm in some Parisian cafe
(20:18):
entertaining folks and having their ears bleed. Well, what you
need to do is do it on your drive to work.
That's a great idea. Yeah, I think it would work, Okay.
I mean, because things are pretty automated when when it
comes to driving, why not you get you get one
of those those little little little cameras that go on
the dashboard. Uh, turn it your yourself, and then every
(20:39):
morning as you drive to work, you're playing the accordion.
I think that the lawyers of Discovery dot com are
gonna love this. I think they will, and that secretly
they will love it. Um. But but I should also
mention the hundred words a day thing I'm talking about earlier. Now,
I am remembering that in the the official, uh prescribed
version of that, Um, you are keeping track of your
(21:00):
word count, like you're saying, yes, I did I did
a hundred two hundred day before and all that. So
that you. You have some level of accountability too. That's
because presumably somebody is looking at your YouTube videos. Presumably
somebody is looking at the you know the little ticker
that you have at the bottom of your web page
that says how many how many words you're you're pumping out? Yeah,
I don't know about give it one dot com, but
(21:22):
I do know the one hundred words a day. If
you don't write, they will send you an email a
little nasty Graham saying hey, you need to do this,
which is always really helpful. And that's probably a good, good,
good bit of info for me. Though about all this
is because I should if I'm going to do the
hundred words a day, I should maybe do the official
version to where there's a little more accountability and it's
not just though I forgot for three weeks. Yeah, so, um,
(21:42):
you know, as I moved through this year and master
the accordion and then make everybody's ears bleed, have about
in six months time? Should we say six months? We
we all meet back here in six months I'll play
for you guys. Um, as I think about this, I'm
gonna think about that habit loop and those triggers, right,
um and gonna think about my little basil ganglia. I'm
going to ask you to back off. Well, although I
(22:05):
might say, hey, you can go ahead and do this
when I get really good and it becomes an automated behavior,
but I'm also going to think about that repetition, and uh,
we'll see after sixty six days to where I land
on this. If this becomes uh pretty decent in terms
of my ability to play, uh you know, real quick,
I want to come back to Charles do Hig, the
author of the Power of habit Um. He also went
(22:26):
talked about alcoholics anonymous A little bit don't sound very interesting.
He's just talking about that with a A. There's no
scientific basis behind it originally at all. Like apparently there
are twelve steps because there are twelve apostles, So it's
there's a lot of of of of A is wrapped
up in this kind of you know, appealing to a
higher power to help you. But what he says, what
(22:48):
he points out is that that A of course really works,
and it's it has a great tracklate record because it
is essentially a big machine for changing habits around alcohol consumption,
and it gives people a new routine. Uh, other than
going to a bar and then drink or what have you. Uh,
And it's something that doesn't work when people do it
on their own, so it's new routine accountability. UM. I
found that interesting, and that is really interesting. Some people, uh,
(23:11):
that twelve step program doesn't appeal to them or it
doesn't work for them either because they're not sure about
the philosophy behind it. But you're right, there are certain things,
uh that do work in that program, and there are
alternatives to a A but they use the same sort
of ideas of distraction really in creating new routines. Um.
And to that end, I do have a quick email.
(23:33):
Let's see if Arnie can bring that on over. And
this has to do with our three years of Word
Salad episode. This is from Brenda, says hid Lane Robert.
I just want to thank you for your confession, so
to speak, on how the podcast has changed your life
podcast about giving up alcohol. I didn't want to be
presumptuous and imply any labels that you yourself did not apply,
(23:55):
but what you said did resonate with me because my
uncle went through something perhaps similar. I think a lot
of people tend to view alcohol problems as almost kind
of binary. Either you're in terrible shape and have a
serious life ruining problem, or there's no problem at all
in reality, though it's much grayer now. She goes on
to describe how people around her uncle actually doubted his
(24:15):
need to quit drinking simply because he didn't fit a
stereotype of an alcoholic or exhibit wild behavior, and she
says She ends by saying, I don't know if I'm
reading too much into what you said. Maybe you didn't
actually have anything problematic going on. You just didn't like
the idea of what alcohol does as you learned more
about it. I have another friend who has never had
a drinking problem, but doesn't drink simply because he doesn't
(24:36):
like what it does to other people. But either way,
thank you for sharing your situation. I hope it might
help even one person to realize that one doesn't have
to hit rock bottom to make a change like that,
and that not drinking is just as valid a choice
as drinking is. So thinks Brenda, that was really, I
think a very helpful email, because you're right, I was
playing it safe in that episode and not labeling myself
(24:59):
because you know, not drinking is still something that I'm
turning around in my head and trying to figure out
for myself. But I think you make an excellent point
that a lot of people feel like it is a
black and white issue and it is not um and
just being able to explore that as a great idea
is one of the reasons I could get to the
point where I could stop drinking alcohol in the first place,
(25:21):
because for many years I had to find that as
a black and white issue, and it really hindered my
ability to to get where I need to be in
terms of breaking habits. All right, well, there you have it.
Hopefully this podcast will serve as uh, you know, kind
of a pep talk, a little dose of enthusiasm for
whatever you are deciding to change or or tweaked this year.
(25:42):
In so as you continue, as you go on this journey,
we would love to hear from you your thoughts on
the application of this information towards your particular issue, your
thoughts just on the information in general. You can find
us at all the normal places. Stuffable your Mind dot
com is the mothership. That's the main page. Go there.
You've never been there before, Go to it, go check
(26:02):
it out. All the podcast episodes are there, all the
blog posted there. We have videos, we have links out
to our various social media outlets and other web pages
we use, you know, stuff like Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Google Plus, SoundCloud,
you name it. Um. And if you want to try
a more old fashioned method of getting in touch with us, Julie,
what can they do? Can take out this keyboard thing, okay, okay,
(26:25):
and you find an email program and then in the
two field you simply put below the mind at discovery
dot com and let us know what you're thinking. And hey,
if you guys actually have any episode request, let us
know there too. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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