Habits and Routines
FULL TRANSCRIPT by Sean Jackson
Hi and welcome to Brainstorm - the podcast exploring how our minds work, how work affects us and how we can best deal with it.
We are Aidan Cammies (AC) and Damiano Tescaro (DT).
Explorers of the office jungle and mental health aficionados.
Buckle up, because ideas are about to get wild.
Synopsis
DT: So, Aidan, what are we going to talk about?
AC: Today we’re going to go on a massive tangent filled adventure through the wonderful world of habits, accountability and setting goals.
DT: Say no more. No, actually say more, please say more.
AC: We’re going to talk about how to plan the environment around you, making habits easy. The last thing you want to do is force yourself into habits. We want to make habits as easy as possible and as enjoyable as possible. So hopefully in this slightly longer episode you’ll pick up some practical tips that will help you do the stuff that you want to do.
DT: Sounds like a plan, and off we go.
Full episode
DT: Hello Aidan.
AC: Hello Damiano, how are you today?
DT: Very good, and welcome back it feels like only a couple of days ago we were doing the previous episode. Which is kind of true.
AC: It’s quite nice, I could happily do this every week.
DT: I am delighted, we actually had some people reach out and ask if we were going to do a December episode of Brainstorm and the answer is yes and we’re very happy to hear from people who are listening to the episodes. So thank you.
AC: Absolutely, it’s great to be able to put one out. This is episode numero pump [Welsh for five]
DT: We are going to have a special episode in Welsh of course, and one in Italian maybe.
AC: I feel like the quality of the Italian one might be slightly better than my Welsh.
DT: For this episode I love the fact that we don’t have any secrets from our listener. We didn’t decide the topic, but we found the perfect topic to talk about right before the New Year.
AC: That we did. It is a personal favourite of mine, we’ll be chatting about habits and accountability and all the fun things that surround that topic. That is part of the reason I mentioned learning Welsh. Because that’s a habit, people learning things. So people might say as a New Year’s resolution I am going to stop eating chocolate, and become fluent in French. I am going to go to the gym 20 times per week, just non-stop, always in the gym and then two weeks in, it’s all gone. Has there ever been a New Year’s resolution that you have managed to stick to?
DT: I have to be honest with you, I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, hence I have never ever done one. I am very resistant, and I like to brag that I have been saved, it does not stick, it is such a weak link in my brain to habit and I know as a creature of habits, I do love my habits, but I also know that it is very hard for me to build new ones. So I am very curious to hear what you have to say about habits because I feel I need some help.
AC: It is something I love talking about, but it is something I can get better at. There are always going to be ways to improve on this. I am in the same boat as you, I have never failed a New Year’s resolution because I have never tried. And that’s OK. Part of the problem is it is not the time of the year that you set it, it is how you do it.
The way that our brains work, if you have a goal like I’m going to go to the gym every single day for an entire year, that is a big goal that requires a lot of discipline and will power and simply put, our brains are not great at that, they are not designed to be powered by discipline or will power. It can help us along the way and it’s a very cold morning, and it’s six in the morning and you’re in Wales and it’s grey and rainy, you don’t want to go to the gym. You don’t want to do it for just one day, let alone an entire year.
So, we have to use a different technique to do this, and a lot of the time properly setting habits is to have a driving reason, rather than having an arbitrary I want to go to the gym four times a week, which doesn’t mean anything, that’s not something that when it’s cold you’ll think “yay, I want to do this”. But if you have a higher reason behind it like I want to have rippling muscles for that beach bod, or I want to improve my PB, or run or climb a mountain on a trip I’ve got planned. Those are all reasons that in the moment you will think of when you’re asking yourself why you’re doing something.
DT: Aidan, I have to ask, what is a PB?
AC: It’s a Personal Best, so if you’re running or lifting weights, it is specific goal.
DT: Is the distinction between having a generic I am going to go on a diet, without a metric, you can’t quantify what does it mean to be on a diet or going to the gym more often is not something you can quantify, versus giving yourself a goal. Is this the first distinguishing thing you were talking about?
AC: Absolutely, this is one of the first things you can take away and immediately make your resolutions better. Because you can answer the questions, did I achieve my resolution. And I think that can swing into one of the things we do, which is that we set too high short term targets. I don’t know if that is the right way of wording it, but often we’ll say something like I want to go to the gym, for 30 minutes, three times per week, for a year. That is better than saying I am going to go to the gym and get really strong. I can say this because I know. I bought an entire year’s gym membership and I used it once. And then I just felt guilty for the rest of the year.
DT: Of course, it backfires, because not only are you not going, you also know that you lost money.
AC: Yeah, and then you’re just beating yourself up about it, which does not make you go to the gym more often.
DT: That is a good point, because it backfires from a motivation standpoint. So if we’re debunking the New Year’s resolution, how can people build habits that are realistic and that they can stick to.
AC: This is something that I’ve said before, it’s something I am really interested in, but also something I am really, really bad at. Because I don’t like doing things that other people tell me to do, I don’t like doing things that the past version of me told me to do and I don’t like doing things that are difficult. Because getting out of bed at 7am to go to the gym is not appealing. I want to lie in bed, or watch TV before starting work.
DT: This is all sounding so relatable.
AC: I know, so many people will tell you that you need discipline and willpower, you need to hustle, but that’s not how our brains work. What you need to do, and there are many different parts to this, and they all help, but when they’re all put together than help you absolutely stick to these habits, and it doesn’t require beating yourself up, because I don’t want to tell people to do that. But there are little things we can do. One of them is make your targets small, which at first your brain might fight. Say you want to do yoga more, I’ve got an app, you click one button and it goes onto the TV, and I have my yoga mat set out. But if I have to do 20 minutes each day, that is difficult, sometimes I will have days when I wake up late or I’m busy, or my knee hurts. And as soon as we don’t do it, our brains goes oh well. So habit change is really powerful. So a way to combat that is make it as easy as possible.
I had a thing where I wanted to do push-ups every single day and I was building up to do 50 push ups every single day, which right now off the bat don’t try to do 50 every day. But I said to myself, I can do one push up every day. Even if it is at the very end of the day, just one. And I can count that as a success. Because so often you’ll find that when you do that one, those five or 10, that no matter how tired, hungry or sick I am, I can do 10 push ups and it becomes habit.
The data is conflicting on this but of you do something like 60-66 days of doing something every single day is how long it takes you to form a habit where you don’t have to consciously think about it and it happens automatically. 66 days of working out every day for an hour is not going to happen, but 66 days of just doing one yoga pose and meditating for two minutes is do-able. And rather than going into the beating yourself up mode, you are happy that you at least did a little bit and you get comfortable with it, and getting comfortable is not a bad thing. It takes away this big terrible scary thing and makes it more realistic.
DT: You know this last thing you said clicked and connected to wires in my brain that I had never really considered. I was about to ask, if you say “just do one push up” my brain immediately goes “ha, one push up, what kind of a weakling does one push up?” My subconscious will trivialise it, and say that one push up is useless, that there’s no point, so why even do it?
But then you said this incredible things about becoming comfortable, this made me think, and this is something that I would tend to say in connection with marketing, the foreground and the background attention, when something goes into our background attention and it becomes comfortable, like driving, you know how to drive, you don’t think how to drive and it frees up attention for other things, so it becomes a habit. And because it becomes effortless, the brain does not perceive it as a chore or something that is painful or bothersome, so it short circuits the brain. I love it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I was not prepared for this, I am genuinely surprised and delighted. Fantastic, thank you Aidan, this was worth it for the entire episode. But please tell us more.
AC: I’m so glad. Well, what you were saying about driving on autopilot. It’s something I do, I don’t drive as much as I used to, but I used to think to myself “I am driving down the road. I am going at 17 mph. My hands are on the steering wheel. My feet are doing stuff. Yet I have been thinking about Pokemon for 20 minutes. I am driving a heavy vehicle. But yeah, your brain going into autopilot.
I agree that when I think about doing one push up per day, my brain will think “what’s the point”, but then you flip it over and think what’s better doing 100 push ups on one day or five push ups for 100 days, that second option is going to do a lot more. Not just for the habit itself, but for building up your muscles, building up your mental approach and when you get to the point of thinking, is there any point just doing one push up? It sounds stupid, but one push up is better than zero push ups.
DT: That is a very good point. When you have the inner voice that questions the effectiveness of one push up, what is the best approach to quieten the voice down, is it replying to the voice, is it waiting a month to see the results? What makes that voice weaker and weaker over time?
AC: There is an excellent book by James Clear called Atomic Habits.
DT: Which is sadly not sponsoring this episode of the podcast. Yet.
AC: No, not yet, but I will definitely drop him a message. The book itself was great at providing an explicit framework to a lot of this stuff, and four of the areas that he talks about are these, almost scales from one side to the other and overall that is from habits being difficult to habits being effortless and the four things he talks about are the obvious to invisible scale, attractive to unattractive, easy to hard and satisfying to unsatisfying.
Some things like making it obvious, so I chatted a bit about me and my yoga. I had my yoga mat already laid out on the floor in the lounge. It is pretty obvious, so when I walk into the room, I am literally walking on the yoga mat. It is difficult to ignore it when it’s there. It’s easy, I don’t need to unroll the yoga mat, lay it out, find the YouTube channel. I’ve made it so that on my phone an alarm goes off at a specific time, which opens up an app. I then click one button which shares it to my TV screen and the yoga mat is already there.
I’ve got a specific time of day, making it attractive, and I have a reason for doing it. I know that I spend a lot of time sitting at a desk, I’ve always had a bad back and I know that yoga helps. Focusing on those things and setting up the environment beforehand helps you before you get to the inner voice that tells you “oh you’re s failure because you have not done this thing”. You’re making it as easy as possible.
You don’t want to beat yourself up, you want it to be there and be natural, you want to send yourself notifications and reminders on your phone, you want a higher reason for doing this.
DT: I have now a very practical example and I would like your thoughts on why this is failing at the moment. I started to meditate using an app. It was the Waking Up with Sam Harris and this is someone I admire for his work on meditation. So I did the 30 days introductory course, but I did not build The Habit, so I put a notification on my phone that as soon as I wake up, I have a notification to meditate then a second one to read right after that. So the whole idea is that before I start work in the morning I should have at least 20 minutes of meditation and reading. Yet I have literally never once done it. Every day the alarm goes off on my phone and very diligently, I dismiss them. What do you think is behind this? Do you think maybe I am not fine tuning it, or is it just the methodology wrong.
AC: Well, although I am chatting about some great theory behind habits, and there are some habits that I’ve stuck to, like religiously writing in my journal, every single day for two years now. But I too have an alarm that goes off at 8:30 which says “Open up Waking Up app and meditate” and how many times have I clicked on that notification and actually done it? Twice? Three times maybe.
The reason I wanted to shout about this today was because for the past two weeks I went back to this book and shared with an external coach about how I could do this differently. And now rather than success being, did I do the 10 minutes on the Waking Up app, it is now, did I meditate for one minute. And over the past week, I’ve done at least one minute every single day and the day after I did two minutes and then last night I did five minutes.
The amount of times I will be sitting and think “I’ve done it for a minute, I managed to survive, there were no emergencies, OK maybe I’ll open up the app for 10 minutes” Our brain just builds up a feeling that everything is terrible and you can’t do it, and instead you crave notifications on social media. A lot of these habits that we do are not instantly gratifying.
And there is a flip side of habits which are bad habits. I too have an ideal morning routine where I wake up, do yoga, meditate, have a cold shower. I set my intentions for the day. What happens most days, I wake up, I walk into the lounge, I snooze the alarm, I go back to bed for 10 minutes, I repeat that three or four times. I get up, I check my phone for ‘five’ minutes, an hour and half later, I’m sitting in the bath on my phone scrolling through Instagram before realising I have a meeting in 10 minutes.
That all happens because negative habits are a thing too. So when I chatted earlier about the sliding scales of obvious to unobvious and attractive to unattractive, for negative habits you need to flip them over. If you get distracted by Pokemon Go turn the notification off and make it invisible. On my phone I’ve got a focus mode from 8-5, meaning notifications from friends show up out of work hours, but during work hours I need to enter a code, and that extra barrier makes it more difficult and I am less likely to open up and click.
DT: That is super interesting. You briefly mentioned your personal coach. How did you arrive at the decision to hire a coach? How is it working out? Would you recommend it?
AC: The big part that helps with habits and goal setting and tasks is accountability. So when I was living in a previous house with old housemates and it was cold outside, knowing that I had agreed the night before that I was going to go to the gym at 8am with my two housemates. And because we didn’t want to let anyone down, that would work.
Right now, I’m working with a personal trainer and that has removed some of the barrier to entry at a gym, which was imposter syndrome, where I thought everyone else was really muscly and scary and knew what they were doing and would be looking at me and judging me. In reality that does not happen, no one is looking at you, they’re all too worried about that other people think of them. When I go, I don’t know what exercises to do, and I don’t know what time to go. But having a coach to tell you what days and exercises to do makes it a lot easier.
I went to the gym this morning, I am very glad that you can’t smell through podcasts because I’ve been on back to back calls since coming back from the gym. I was five minutes late because Taylor Swift released a new album last night, so I was busy having a little cry to that, but the important thing is I still went.
My life coach is Kate Wiltshire one of my close friends’ mum who has recently got into life coaching, so having a group of people who you are accountable to, like I have a group colleagues fellow grads and we have a Telegram group called #Goals and at the start of the week we put in our intentions for the week. And then on Friday we do checklist style what did we achieve and not achieve, and just having that level of accountability, knowing what you’ve got people you are going to do and you are regularly going to check and see how much people achieved, and no one is going to judge you. Most of the time it is not external accountability, although that is strong. But it gives you space to talk, think and express these things in a different way.
When it’s just up in your head that you need to go to the gym, you forget it seven seconds after having that thought, but the process of writing it down, telling someone else make it become a thing. And it’s really great to have someone to bounce ideas off.
DT: So you find in this case that the life coach is an official accountability buddy or are there strategies she uses? Is this something a friend could do? If this is something people are struggling with would a professional life coach help?
AC: You’re right in that life coaches do so much more, it’s not just someone who I can share my goals with and these are the things I’m sticking with. We chat about all sorts. It’s all the things I like to chat about, so combining strategies for working better, and also I get to talk about me. I enjoy the cognitive side of talking, but for accountability, like I say I’ve had that group with my peers for over a year now and we’ve stuck to it nearly every single week. Even if it doesn’t work all the time, but it is important and this year especially, recognising when good enough is good enough.
You don’t need to be doing 3000 push ups a week, if you’re doing three per day for a long period of time, it is sustainable and it will get you better results in the long term. Life coaching is definitely an interesting thing to chat about.
DT: I think we might come back in a couple of episodes to find out how this is going. I think most people are going to be interested in that, but maybe there’s a bit of resistance because you might not want to ask your friends for it. I think it is interesting to see in the long run, the drip effect. Drop after drop it all builds up.
There was one thing you mentioned earlier, I think it was habit pairing?
AC: Yes, this is something I really like. The idea where you link two things together. You can do this for habits that you might not enjoy, but you can also do this when pairing a good thing with something you find difficult. So for example, I stopped drinking coffee because caffeine and me disagree now. When I used to drink it, I’d make it in the morning and I’d have my housemate’s fancy V60 dripper and it takes five minutes for it to drip through and pour, so I know I have those five minutes every single morning, so why not pair that time with something like doing push ups? Because I know that every single day I will have five minutes and I know I can do 10, 15, 20 push ups. Because realistically what else will I do in those five minutes? Scrolling through bad memes again.
DT: So it’s like a sandwich technique almost where you squeeze a relatively less enjoyable habit in between a nicer habit. Like an ice cream biscuit but with not your favourite flavour in the middle.
AC: Yeah, an ice cream sandwich with a bit of cucumber or onion, yeah ice cream and onion sandwich.
DT: Well you could get used to it, I suppose. I think of the coffee and my brain thinks, ah this will never work because we are so special and different from everybody else. I remember you mentioned the habit pairing and the coffee specifically, it reminded me of video games, for example I would have a very good window of opportunity with video games because there are loading screens all the time and sometimes they might take a couple of minutes and as you said, if one or five push ups is all it takes to build a habit that could be a very good time to squeeze them in. It’s a very good point.
AC: Yes, just little things like, every time you lose a life in a game, do a push up. When you were talking about loading screens, I was thinking, well I’ve now got 3600 MHz RAM, so I don’t know what loading screens are. That has been my lockdown obsession, let’s make the computer shiny and new again. But yes, the core idea is spot on. Just find something that you already do, or for me I do the at least one minute of yoga and I usually end the yoga with a pose that ends up with me lying flat on my back, and so them I just go into the meditation. The opportunity is there, it is more difficult for me to get up, make food and then go back to meditation. I’m already lying on the ground so I might as well do two minutes of meditation.
DT: Of course there are a tonne of things that we, and by we I mean me, needs to try and talk about and for the millions of listeners to the podcast, one thing I wanted to cover was cold showers. I was professing my absolute dislike for cold showers, there is no way I am ever going to enjoy them, but you were giving me as good technique on how to approach them.
AC: So this is a technique that I’ve been using since I was about 12. I remember reading an article and for whatever reason it just stuck with me. Because there will be times when we need that little bit of discipline and willpower, like getting up early in the morning for the gym, in the long term you might be ok with it, but for now it is difficult. So, cold showers work for me, they wake me up, they’re good for my skin. I don’t spend too long in the shower because it’s not very nice, but afterwards when you step out of the cold shower everything feels warm.
But stepping under the cold stream is a horrible experience and for things like that, this technique is very simple. It just involves counting down from 10. This builds on something I need to chat about called the chain rule or habit tracking. Every single time, you count down from 10, when you hit zero, you do the thing. Whatever it is, you have to do the thing, and this is a difficult thing to start. But once you start making that thing a habit in its own right, every single time for the past… what 12/13 years ago since I started doing it, every time I’ve counted down from 10, I have done the thing on or before zero.
For whatever reason, I don’t know how it trips my brain, I’m like well every time I have counted down from 10 in the past, I have done the thing and I am not going to break it now. It I do break it, I think everything in my life will crumble down around me. But so far, little things like having the shower, big things like having to start a presentation or run an extra five K or something like that, just having that as a back up technique for whatever reason, short circuits my brain and says, we’re going to do the thing now.
We spend so much time going, what about this, what about that, we have these arguments with our inner voice. But counting down from 10 all of a sudden removes the thinking time about having to make a decision.
DT: Twelve years is like a lifetime of practice and it clearly works. If you’re able to withstand a cold shower, which is one of the worst things humankind has ever invented. The thing that scares me, and I guess this is the resistance that most people feel that as soon as you are under the cold water stream, you are going to feel really uncomfortable, and there is a very strong negative reinforcement there. How does this play with your 10 seconds rule, do they neutralise each other, do they come oner after the other?
AC: If you’re having a cold shower for the first time, I think it would be a different thing, but because I’ve been having cold showers for quite a few years now, I know that the worst part is the first few seconds and I know that I can survive a few seconds, and then when you’re under there, it’s not great but you wake up and your body is like ‘endorphins! Dopamine! Let’s go!’ and that’s the same for a lot of things like starting meditating or starting doing yoga, it is the initial act of resistance but then when you do the thing, there is as great psychological effect that is similar to the chain rule, where once you start doing something, your brain doesn’t want to stop doing it, it is always that resistance to starting that is the strongest.
So if there is an email I have to send and I don’t want to send it, or it will be difficult, just opening it up and writing someone’s name in the ‘to’ column, then writing Dear Person’s Name and Love from Aidan, or yours sincerely Aidan, the amount I’ve put Love From in a professional email is too many times for some people’s tastes, but the important thing is to add the things you know you need to add anyway, and when you’re doing that you brain goes ‘Oh, I need to talk about this and I need to talk about that’ and if you’ve cleared out all of the other distractions then you tend to follow up with that.
There is a thing called habit tracking, and there’s an app for your phone that has a really simple layout with weekly and monthly views and dots, and each dot is a day. For me, I’ve got meditation, yoga, duo lingo, writing in my diary, setting intentions. Every day that I do one of those, I click on the dot and it fills it in and I can see the past progress.
For meditation at the moment I can see there are two weeks of consecutive dots, and now I don’t want to break that, because your brain once you start doing it really doesn’t want to break that. And again, if it was 11pm and I still didn’t have the exercise box ticked, I don’t want to do a half hour workout, but I want to do one push up.
The important thing is even if it doesn’t feel like much, you need to think long term. When the inner voice says “this is pointless” you may feel like that time is pointless, but do you feel like the habit itself is pointless, no otherwise you would not have done it, or if you do feel like the habit or new year’s resolution is pointless, then don’t do it, it’s OK, don’t beat yourself up for changing that rule.
There is another rule, but this has not worked for me, it is if you do have to skip a day for any reason, and there are always good reasons, like if you injure your knee, don’t allow yourself to break more than one day.
Some people say it is OK to miss more than one day, but don’t miss two days, because as soon as you miss two days it is very difficult to get it back on track. But just missing one day and carrying on is OK. It takes between 20-66 days to form a habit.
And the final thing, rather than telling people that you run every day, making it an identity thing, I am a runner, even if you don’t feel like a runner, or a meditator, if you tell people that you’re a meditator it does something weird to your brain, in that all of a sudden it becomes and identity trigger.
There’s lots of research around this with David Rock and his SCARF model, where we don’t like things that disagree with our identity and that includes ourselves. So if I say that I am a meditator who meditates every day, when I get to the end of the day and I have not meditated. All of a sudden you break away from all of these individual things.
Rather than saying I am going to go to the gym twice a week, saying I a person who cares about my body opens the door to considering how much protein you take on, what vegan meal replacements do I need, rather than just focusing on that one tiny habit, it starts to become a big identity change in your life.
DT: That is wonderful and super powerful. I feel like this is an episode that I hope people will take notes and taking actions. If anyone out there has taken notes or has started a habit please let us know. I certainly want to try some of these techniques and it would be nice to catch up in a few episodes and see how we go.
AC: I have a challenge linked to accountability which is do you want to try 30 days of mindfulness, so meditate every day for 30 days?
DT: Are you publicly challenging me on the podcast to do this?
AC: I am publicly challenging you and myself (and anyone else who is listening) to try it out. It doesn’t have to be meditating. But set it small, 30 seconds counts as a win. Thirty seconds for 30 days, do you reckon you can do that.
DT: Absolutely, let’s do this.
AC: There are plenty of free YouTube videos or apps that can help, or just set an egg timer or timer on your phone.
DT: It sounds like a plan. I have to say that this episode has helped activate so much information in my brain, I feel so grateful for this Aidan. Thank you so much as always. The challenge is on 100%. We hope to hear from other people if they are taking up the challenge or trying something else. We’d love to keep the conversation going. If you want to send an email or anything, we always love to hear from you. So with this, thank you Aidan so much.
AC: Thank you Damiano, and thank you to everyone at home. 2020 has been a weird year. I was going to say it’s not selfish to be selfish, but it’s OK to put yourself first. And we look forward to seeing you back here next year.
DT: And remember, it’s OK.
AC: Not to be OK.
DT&AC: Take care everyone.