January 1, 2015 • 25 mins
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 classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
it is a new year, so it's time to build
a new you, to change the way you interact with
the world and hack that brain. Right, that's right. That's
(00:24):
why we have an episode of all sorts of tweaks
that you can make. And before we launch into that,
I wanted to just let you guys know of a
new quick and dirty hack, and it's chewing gum. Huh yeah. Uh.
Forbes has an interesting article called Chew Yourself a Better
Brain by David Dissolvo, and it really talks about increasing
(00:46):
blood flow to the brain, which can have all sorts
of consequences and uh. In the article, Dissolvo outlines these merits,
these consequences of gum chewing. We're talking about boosting memory, mood,
and decreasing anxiety. But it does have its drawbacks, and
the drawbacks have to do with test taking, because it
turns out it's really important to chew that gum about
(01:07):
twenty minutes before you take that test, but spit it
out when you take the test because apparently the chewing
of the gum and the thinking at the same time,
it's too much of an energy drain. Interesting. You know,
I used to chew gum all the time here at
work while I was researching and writing and all. But
then I kind of phased it out about it about
two years ago. Yeah, come um, it just seemed it
(01:29):
seemed like it was getting excessive, Like maybe I shouldn't
be cheering gum all the time. And I think you
gotta talking to you about all that gum underneath your desk, right,
Oh yeah, I mean I couldn't fit my leg I
can only fit my legs under my desk by putting
them into two like tubes that were free of gums. Yeah.
Well that's what happens when you choose bubblicious. Indeed. Indeed,
all right, so here you go. Maybe you didn't have
(01:50):
your brain last year, but here are the recommendations once more.
You know, Julie, we are in a new year, essentially
a new studio, whole new set of rules. In a sense,
its new year. Everybody is talking about, uh, you know
what you're gonna change, How this year is going to
(02:12):
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 new
starting virtue of the calendar. So so yeah, what what
(02:35):
does it take to change behavior? That's the big question.
And a lot of people have put in another two
cents on this. A lot of people have sold their
two cents on this to a public that is ever
interested in changing themselves for the better. Well, first of all,
there's that three week myth that persists, this idea that
in order to change a habit or make a new one,
(02:57):
all you need is twenty one days consecutive of 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 course is
ridiculous when you pair it up with the with the
other addedge, you hear a lot about ten thousand hours,
(03:17):
isn't it 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 seems
to have grown increasingly popular back in the nineteen seventies
due to a self help book called psycho Cybernetics, which
(03:40):
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
I can already imagine that the cover to that book,
because I have looked at some nineteen seventies books on
self help. Yeah, and again that's where this idea came from.
(04:01):
The self help boat said, Hey, just twenty one days,
that's all 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 about the habit loop and what's happening inside
of our brains. New York Times business writer Charles Doig says,
(04:22):
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 the third step, he says, is the reward,
something that your brain likes that helps it to remember
(04:44):
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
where it is I feel at least a temporary boost
due to all that sugar in my body. Right, And
(05:05):
if you keep doing that over and over again, eventually
those cues, those environmental cues 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's three o'clock, and
that becomes one of the cues that adds up in
this database of I want the soda. Yeah, it's time
for the soda. The soda. Time to to press the
(05:25):
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. And this is really interesting. As
soon as a behavior becomes automatic, the decision making part
(05:46):
of your brain goes into a kind of sleep mode. Yeah.
And and in this the basil gangla is the 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 zillion of a memorize when
I was using in design for a living. And uh,
(06:06):
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 because 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, Andrewig says that there's a
real um boon to us when we do that, because
(06:27):
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
about your mind while walking to the bus station, while
driving to work, or while doing you know, data entry
in an Excel spreadsheet. Right, So because it's all this
(06:50):
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 Hagar and he says that if you want
to change it or create a new one, you have
to game those three aspects. So you have to gain
that trigger or that queue and know that it could
be boredom or that you're tired, and acknowledge that that
(07:13):
is the reason, not just that it's three o'clock and
it's time for that soda. You kind of have to
break it down and kind of go 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, this
might give me a temporary lift, but how gross am
(07:33):
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 could take a walk.
And this was really helpful to me when I quit drinking, actually,
because I had noticed that between the hours of six
and eight pm at nine that were sort of my
witching hours, and I would go and work out instead
(07:55):
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 stresses
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 you have to remember,
we've talked about this a lot before. That these are
(08:15):
neural pathways that once you 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 because you created the pathway. Yeah,
and and ultimately it's creating new behaviors. Forging new pathways,
(08:38):
it's easier as opposed to getting rid of old ones.
I mean, you can think of a think of it
in terms of art. You have a road between two cities.
At 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 of and then 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
(09:00):
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 those detour signs. On the other one,
it always exists with the detour signs. Yeah. Um. And
that's 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
(09:22):
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 forever, but it's a
good good model because I know a lot of people
have 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
(09:44):
one thing that actually helps is stepping outside of the environment.
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 why
going on a vacation is often side. It is a
good example of a of a time to to try
to break away from a routine. And it's also whining.
(10:04):
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
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
(10:28):
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,
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
(10:51):
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
habits we're 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 I mean,
how difficult is that you're just tipping the bottle. But
(11:14):
what about doing fifty sit ups each morning? Much harder
to do nine one days. So other findings were that
missing a single day did not reduce the chance of
forming habits. That's good news. And 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
(11:34):
of course other types of habits may take much longer
than make you know, two 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
would be the easiest thing and the hardest thing? Like
what would take you eighteen days? And what would take
you well, I guess obviously something I enjoy doing. Um,
A lot of people who who right are aware of
(11:56):
this hundred words a day thing where the idea is
all right, life busy, but you really want to work
on you know, that novel or work on short stories,
to write a little poetry. So you just make sure
you take out time, just carve with just a sliver
of time to do one hundred words, just you know,
open up your your word document, you know, grab a
notebook on words and then you can move on. So
that would probably be easier for me, just because obviously
(12:19):
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 that
one would be easy. Also I'll have to do is
open a document or or grab a pet. But uh,
one of the would be much harder, and one that
I also would very much like to do would be,
(12:39):
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 can do
the yoga or find a space both uh, both physical
and mental in which to do it every day or
(12:59):
a few days a week, and it becomes increasingly complex.
I read that if then statements help with us 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, 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
(13:21):
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 and
email if you've ever looked at that, where you can
set things like if this, then that then X. So yeah,
it's like and essentially that's what we're talking about, reprogramming
the self to incorporate new actions or to in some
(13:42):
cases eliminate other actions or choose one action over another.
Of course, all of this requires 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, we're back, and we're
(14:03):
going to talk about the role of self control and
willpower 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, it's a fascinating topic because it's,
(14:25):
like most things in life, it's not quite what you
think it is when you actually stop and examine. Willpower
is not a 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 there. It's
it's something that that fluctuates throughout the day based on
where we are, where our attention is at, what our
(14:47):
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 the question does self control
resemble a muscle? And yes, they say if willpower is
(15:09):
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 do they find. Well, of course
the people get stronger, um they developed more muscles, but
(15:32):
they also found that their behaviors, their their self control,
their willpower changed with the addition of the actual physical muscles. Yeah,
this is pretty amazing, and that they threw out the example.
There's like a like a pebble in a lake, there's
this ripple effect. You start in stelling willpower into one
area of your life, and it actually bleeds over into
(15:54):
other areas of your life because the overall willpower level increases.
I was thinking about us in the context of the
bit we found out about how a full bladder can
actually help with will power at least, you know, temporarily,
because if you have a full bladder, your brain is
suppressing the urge to p on yourself essentially, and as
(16:16):
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 New Year's resolutions, because more water good for
your body. You're mostly water anyway, right, you can you
(16:38):
can line up all the health and if it'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, and before, during, and after the
(16:59):
exercise that grew group was tested on a visual task
that measured willpower via distraction and thought suppression. Now, after
two months, the air rate went down for the group
from tree 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
(17:19):
brain just sort 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 going to 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, held be eating, exercise, and household chore. So
I mean the fact that cigarettes and alcohol were also
(17:42):
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 is 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 purse
and went from missing an appointment every day to like
once a week, or in the case of the cigarettes,
(18:05):
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 make this my own,
I can own this content. So yes and no. Alright,
(18:27):
Because if you think about someone being a master of
their universe, you typically think of like then Franklin or
Leonardo Adventure. These are people who were true polymus who
could attack new topics, consume them and by habit they
could do this right now. Some people would say that
that was the hundreds of the world was much smaller.
There are fewer tones to go through and become an expert.
(18:51):
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, that you can
still learn new things, and you may even become an
(19:11):
expert on you know that ten thousand hours that Malcolm
Cloud will always talked 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, making making a
(19:33):
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, yeah, 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 kind of then, I think the best example
(19:55):
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 the way, she taught herself all sorts of things
(20:18):
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 this is based on her own video that went viral.
(20:39):
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 up 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
and sixty five days. So what what did she give it?
(21:02):
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 fifteen
seconds of the video that shows on the site, but
(21:23):
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. Yeah, and so the YouTube
us of YouTube here achieves that but also is a
great documentation system. Yeah. So, I mean, if anybody's interested,
(21:46):
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
a pretending like I'm in some Parisian cafe entertaining folks
and having their ears bleed. Well, what you need to
do is do it on your drive to work. That's
(22:07):
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 uh those little uh little cameras that going
to dashboard, uh, turn it your yourself, and then every
morning is 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
(22:29):
they will love it. Um. But but I should also
mention the hundred words a day thing. I was talking
a bit earlier. Now I am remembering that in the
the official uh prescribed version of that, um, you are
keeping track of your word count, like you're saying, yes
I did, I did a hundred fifty day, I did
two d the day before and all that, so that
you you have some level of accountability too. That's because
(22:51):
presumably somebody is looking at your YouTube videos. Presumably somebody
is looking at 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
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,
(23:13):
good bit of info for me. Though. About all this
is because I should if I'm gonna 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 so I forgot for three weeks. Yeah, so, um,
you know, as I moved through this year and master
the accordion and then make everybody's ears bleed, how about
in six months time? Should we say six months we
we all meet back here in six months I'll play
(23:34):
for you guys. Um, as I think about this, I'm
gonna think about that habit loop and those triggers, right um,
and I'm gonna think about my little basil ganglia. I'm
going to ask it to back off, although I might say, hey,
you can go ahead and do this when I get
really good it becomes an automated behavior. But I'm also
going to think about that repetition and uh, we'll see
(23:54):
after sixty six days to where I land on this
if this becomes pretty decent terms of my ability to play.
All right, guys, thanks for listening. Hope that this episode
helped your bring good, all nice and shiny for the
new year. Indeed, and hey, if you need some other tips,
(24:15):
we let your head on over to stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com because that's where you will find
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(24:38):
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thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
it is a new year, so it's time to build
a new you, to change the way you interact with
the world and hack that brain. Right, that's right. That's
(00:24):
why we have an episode of all sorts of tweaks
that you can make. And before we launch into that,
I wanted to just let you guys know of a
new quick and dirty hack, and it's chewing gum. Huh yeah. Uh.
Forbes has an interesting article called Chew Yourself a Better
Brain by David Dissolvo, and it really talks about increasing
(00:46):
blood flow to the brain, which can have all sorts
of consequences and uh. In the article, Dissolvo outlines these merits,
these consequences of gum chewing. We're talking about boosting memory, mood,
and decreasing anxiety. But it does have its drawbacks, and
the drawbacks have to do with test taking, because it
turns out it's really important to chew that gum about
(01:07):
twenty minutes before you take that test, but spit it
out when you take the test because apparently the chewing
of the gum and the thinking at the same time,
it's too much of an energy drain. Interesting. You know,
I used to chew gum all the time here at
work while I was researching and writing and all. But
then I kind of phased it out about it about
two years ago. Yeah, come um, it just seemed it
(01:29):
seemed like it was getting excessive, Like maybe I shouldn't
be cheering gum all the time. And I think you
gotta talking to you about all that gum underneath your desk, right,
Oh yeah, I mean I couldn't fit my leg I
can only fit my legs under my desk by putting
them into two like tubes that were free of gums. Yeah.
Well that's what happens when you choose bubblicious. Indeed. Indeed,
all right, so here you go. Maybe you didn't have
(01:50):
your brain last year, but here are the recommendations once more.
You know, Julie, we are in a new year, essentially
a new studio, whole new set of rules. In a sense,
its new year. Everybody is talking about, uh, you know
what you're gonna change, How this year is going to
(02:12):
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 new
starting virtue of the calendar. So so yeah, what what
(02:35):
does it take to change behavior? That's the big question.
And a lot of people have put in another two
cents on this. A lot of people have sold their
two cents on this to a public that is ever
interested in changing themselves for the better. Well, first of all,
there's that three week myth that persists, this idea that
in order to change a habit or make a new one,
(02:57):
all you need is twenty one days consecutive of 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 course is
ridiculous when you pair it up with the with the
other addedge, you hear a lot about ten thousand hours,
(03:17):
isn't it 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 seems
to have grown increasingly popular back in the nineteen seventies
due to a self help book called psycho Cybernetics, which
(03:40):
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
I can already imagine that the cover to that book,
because I have looked at some nineteen seventies books on
self help. Yeah, and again that's where this idea came from.
(04:01):
The self help boat said, Hey, just twenty one days,
that's all 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 about the habit loop and what's happening inside
of our brains. New York Times business writer Charles Doig says,
(04:22):
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 the third step, he says, is the reward,
something that your brain likes that helps it to remember
(04:44):
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
where it is I feel at least a temporary boost
due to all that sugar in my body. Right, And
(05:05):
if you keep doing that over and over again, eventually
those cues, those environmental cues 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's three o'clock, and
that becomes one of the cues that adds up in
this database of I want the soda. Yeah, it's time
for the soda. The soda. Time to to press the
(05:25):
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. And this is really interesting. As
soon as a behavior becomes automatic, the decision making part
(05:46):
of your brain goes into a kind of sleep mode. Yeah.
And and in this the basil gangla is the 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 zillion of a memorize when
I was using in design for a living. And uh,
(06:06):
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 because 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, Andrewig says that there's a
real um boon to us when we do that, because
(06:27):
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
about your mind while walking to the bus station, while
driving to work, or while doing you know, data entry
in an Excel spreadsheet. Right, So because it's all this
(06:50):
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 Hagar and he says that if you want
to change it or create a new one, you have
to game those three aspects. So you have to gain
that trigger or that queue and know that it could
be boredom or that you're tired, and acknowledge that that
(07:13):
is the reason, not just that it's three o'clock and
it's time for that soda. You kind of have to
break it down and kind of go 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, this
might give me a temporary lift, but how gross am
(07:33):
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 could take a walk.
And this was really helpful to me when I quit drinking, actually,
because I had noticed that between the hours of six
and eight pm at nine that were sort of my
witching hours, and I would go and work out instead
(07:55):
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 stresses
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 you have to remember,
we've talked about this a lot before. That these are
(08:15):
neural pathways that once you 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 because you created the pathway. Yeah,
and and ultimately it's creating new behaviors. Forging new pathways,
(08:38):
it's easier as opposed to getting rid of old ones.
I mean, you can think of a think of it
in terms of art. You have a road between two cities.
At 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 of and then 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
(09:00):
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 those detour signs. On the other one,
it always exists with the detour signs. Yeah. Um. And
that's 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
(09:22):
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 forever, but it's a
good good model because I know a lot of people
have 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
(09:44):
one thing that actually helps is stepping outside of the environment.
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 why
going on a vacation is often side. It is a
good example of a of a time to to try
to break away from a routine. And it's also whining.
(10:04):
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
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
(10:28):
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,
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
(10:51):
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
habits we're 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 I mean,
how difficult is that you're just tipping the bottle. But
(11:14):
what about doing fifty sit ups each morning? Much harder
to do nine one days. So other findings were that
missing a single day did not reduce the chance of
forming habits. That's good news. And 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
(11:34):
of course other types of habits may take much longer
than make you know, two 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
would be the easiest thing and the hardest thing? Like
what would take you eighteen days? And what would take
you well, I guess obviously something I enjoy doing. Um,
A lot of people who who right are aware of
(11:56):
this hundred words a day thing where the idea is
all right, life busy, but you really want to work
on you know, that novel or work on short stories,
to write a little poetry. So you just make sure
you take out time, just carve with just a sliver
of time to do one hundred words, just you know,
open up your your word document, you know, grab a
notebook on words and then you can move on. So
that would probably be easier for me, just because obviously
(12:19):
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 that
one would be easy. Also I'll have to do is
open a document or or grab a pet. But uh,
one of the would be much harder, and one that
I also would very much like to do would be,
(12:39):
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 can do
the yoga or find a space both uh, both physical
and mental in which to do it every day or
(12:59):
a few days a week, and it becomes increasingly complex.
I read that if then statements help with us 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, 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
(13:21):
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 and
email if you've ever looked at that, where you can
set things like if this, then that then X. So yeah,
it's like and essentially that's what we're talking about, reprogramming
the self to incorporate new actions or to in some
(13:42):
cases eliminate other actions or choose one action over another.
Of course, all of this requires 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, we're back, and we're
(14:03):
going to talk about the role of self control and
willpower 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, it's a fascinating topic because it's,
(14:25):
like most things in life, it's not quite what you
think it is when you actually stop and examine. Willpower
is not a 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 there. It's
it's something that that fluctuates throughout the day based on
where we are, where our attention is at, what our
(14:47):
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 the question does self control
resemble a muscle? And yes, they say if willpower is
(15:09):
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 do they find. Well, of course
the people get stronger, um they developed more muscles, but
(15:32):
they also found that their behaviors, their their self control,
their willpower changed with the addition of the actual physical muscles. Yeah,
this is pretty amazing, and that they threw out the example.
There's like a like a pebble in a lake, there's
this ripple effect. You start in stelling willpower into one
area of your life, and it actually bleeds over into
(15:54):
other areas of your life because the overall willpower level increases.
I was thinking about us in the context of the
bit we found out about how a full bladder can
actually help with will power at least, you know, temporarily,
because if you have a full bladder, your brain is
suppressing the urge to p on yourself essentially, and as
(16:16):
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 New Year's resolutions, because more water good for
your body. You're mostly water anyway, right, you can you
(16:38):
can line up all the health and if it'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, and before, during, and after the
(16:59):
exercise that grew group was tested on a visual task
that measured willpower via distraction and thought suppression. Now, after
two months, the air rate went down for the group
from tree 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
(17:19):
brain just sort 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 going to 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, held be eating, exercise, and household chore. So
I mean the fact that cigarettes and alcohol were also
(17:42):
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 is 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 purse
and went from missing an appointment every day to like
once a week, or in the case of the cigarettes,
(18:05):
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 make this my own,
I can own this content. So yes and no. Alright,
(18:27):
Because if you think about someone being a master of
their universe, you typically think of like then Franklin or
Leonardo Adventure. These are people who were true polymus who
could attack new topics, consume them and by habit they
could do this right now. Some people would say that
that was the hundreds of the world was much smaller.
There are fewer tones to go through and become an expert.
(18:51):
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, that you can
still learn new things, and you may even become an
(19:11):
expert on you know that ten thousand hours that Malcolm
Cloud will always talked 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, making making a
(19:33):
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, yeah, 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 kind of then, I think the best example
(19:55):
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 the way, she taught herself all sorts of things
(20:18):
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 this is based on her own video that went viral.
(20:39):
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 up 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
and sixty five days. So what what did she give it?
(21:02):
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 fifteen
seconds of the video that shows on the site, but
(21:23):
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. Yeah, and so the YouTube
us of YouTube here achieves that but also is a
great documentation system. Yeah. So, I mean, if anybody's interested,
(21:46):
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
a pretending like I'm in some Parisian cafe entertaining folks
and having their ears bleed. Well, what you need to
do is do it on your drive to work. That's
(22:07):
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 uh those little uh little cameras that going
to dashboard, uh, turn it your yourself, and then every
morning is 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
(22:29):
they will love it. Um. But but I should also
mention the hundred words a day thing. I was talking
a bit earlier. Now I am remembering that in the
the official uh prescribed version of that, um, you are
keeping track of your word count, like you're saying, yes
I did, I did a hundred fifty day, I did
two d the day before and all that, so that
you you have some level of accountability too. That's because
(22:51):
presumably somebody is looking at your YouTube videos. Presumably somebody
is looking at 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
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,
(23:13):
good bit of info for me. Though. About all this
is because I should if I'm gonna 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 so I forgot for three weeks. Yeah, so, um,
you know, as I moved through this year and master
the accordion and then make everybody's ears bleed, how about
in six months time? Should we say six months we
we all meet back here in six months I'll play
(23:34):
for you guys. Um, as I think about this, I'm
gonna think about that habit loop and those triggers, right um,
and I'm gonna think about my little basil ganglia. I'm
going to ask it to back off, although I might say, hey,
you can go ahead and do this when I get
really good it becomes an automated behavior. But I'm also
going to think about that repetition and uh, we'll see
(23:54):
after sixty six days to where I land on this
if this becomes pretty decent terms of my ability to play.
All right, guys, thanks for listening. Hope that this episode
helped your bring good, all nice and shiny for the
new year. Indeed, and hey, if you need some other tips,
(24:15):
we let your head on over to stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com because that's where you will find
all the podcast episodes, all the videos, all the blog
posts we've ever done. There's a nice search bar at
the top, and you can just top, you know, pop
something in, pop in brain, pop in self help, pop
in uh, you know, memory, and to see what you find.
You might have pop in fully clothed naked men, and
(24:38):
you'll see what you get men with clothes on. All right, Um,
if you wanted to send us your thoughts, you can
do so by emailing us that blow the Mind at
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thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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