Hey, how's it going? Jeff Lerner here and in this video we are talking about
breaking bad habits and creating space for new good habits to emerge in our
life.
all right, so in this video we're talking about breaking bad habits so
that we can create the space for new good habits and basically be more
intentional and directional and proactive about where our life is
headed. If this is the first video of mine that you've seen, let me just kind
of set the stage. So all of my content, my entire channel is devoted to having
an awesome life. I own a company Entre that is an awesome life education
company. We teach anything related to that and my channel just gives you tons
and tons of videos about strategies, tips, tools, and tactics that I have
discovered in my unrelenting quest to have an awesome life. That said, an
awesome life in my experience should be, must be, comprised essentially of habits
of awesomeness, right? Your life is really nothing more than the aggregate
of your habits and what you do every single day.
One of the most powerful books I've ever read. A book that didn't just inform me
but really changed me. Changed the direction of my life, was a book called
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. We'll make sure there's a link below to
that book. But basically this book and most of the study in general that I've
done of habits and behavioral psychology and sort of human performance, distills
habits into kind of a core framework and they use different words for it.
Sometimes you'll hear it a trigger or a cue, and then you have the routine or
the behavior and then you have the reward or the payoff or you know, the
dope hit, like whatever, right? There's a cue, something that that sets up the
pattern. Then there's a routine, some sequence of steps that you go through
that are somewhat mechanized.
They don't require deliberate thought, you know, think of like backing out of
your driveway. You don't have to really think about each step of what you're
doing. Turn the wheel here, check the mirror here, push the pedal here. You
just kind of go, right? It's always going to be a routine and there's always
going to be some sort of emotional or sensory payoff to the habit. Our entire
life is really a series of these habits that are occasionally broken up by
conscientious or mindful behavior. That's basically your entire life other
than sleeping, which is even its own set of habits. Your entire life is being
queued to engage in a routine for a reward or occasionally, maybe a few
times a day. I mean, I guess more or less depending on your level of
conscientiousness. Occasionally we will have mindful awareness of what we're
actually doing and that's our entire life.
So when you frame it in those terms, it makes sense that like, Whoa, if I can
get ahold of my habits, if I can actually, A be more mindful and more
self aware of what's happening habitually through my life, and then
ultimately try to change and re-engineer them, that's it. That's going to change
my entire life. And in fact, you look at really successful people and as they
say, success leaves clues. Like when you look at successful people and you decode
their life, and what's amazing is thankfully really successful people
either write about themselves or are often written about, so there's
autobiographies and biographies you can use, you can get your hands on to
actually study really successful people and in fact there's sort of what I call
meta biographical books out there that are not individual studies of individual
people, but that are analyses of successful people in general.
There's so much information, so much literature you can really get to the
bottom of habits. What are the habits of successful people? And what you find is
successful people are always a function of successful habits. Or as I say, an
awesome life is always a function of awesome habits. If we can upgrade our
habits, we can upgrade our life. In fact, the only way to consistently and
predictably upgrade our life is to upgrade our habits. That's why I'm
shooting this video. That's why I do a self habit analysis on a regular basis
to say, Hey, what do I need to tweak? Trying to go through life and be smart
enough or quick enough or clever enough or energetic enough or aware enough to
always be making the right decision in the moment is exhausting. There's a
principle called ego depletion that I won't go into great depth on in this
video, but in psychology, ego depletion is basically the concept that your ego
gets tired.
And when we say ego, we don't mean the like, you know Hottie I'm a bad ass ego
like we think of in traditional sense. In psychology, your ego is basically the
moderator between your kind of basic underlying instincts that may or may not
actually be in your own best interest which is called your id, and your
superego, which is your idealized most moral and ethical self, your value based
self. And then your ego is like the moderator who's constantly trying to get
your id to stay in check and your superego to do a little more, but your
ego gets tired. That tug of war is exhausting. That's why you're more
likely to make bad decisions, whether it's to slip on food or to not get work
done, or to miss a deadline or to snap at your spouse or to snap at your kids.
You're more likely to do those things later in the day, not because you're
physically tired, but because your ego is depleted. The moderator in your mind
is depleted between your lesser and your better self. That's why we can't
typically fix our life through willpower. We can't typically fix our
life by saying I resolve to make better decisions day in and day out and do
better. We have to understand the habits that underlie most of our behavior. It's
kind of like doing surgery. You go in and you fix something at a granular
level and then give it time to heal and to blossom and to flower in your life.
The habits are the little micro tears that you can go in and fix that can grow
into healthier tissue in your life. So let's talk about how to actually fix or
break bad habits.
And again, I've already given the clue and that is mindfulness or
conscientiousness. There's a really good Ted Talk by a guy named Judson Brewer
and it's only even like half the length of a normal Ted Talk. Ted Talks usually
cap at 18 minutes. This one's like 9 or 10 minutes. And in it he sees a
psychologist and he studies behavior and habits and does a lot of work with
mindfulness and self awareness. And what he does is he takes people through
things like he'll bring in a room full of smokers and he'll say, Hey, smoke.
Smoke. We're not here to stop you from doing what you want to do. We're here to
give you a better perspective on what it is that you're doing. And so he'll have
people smoke and say, okay, now just describe to me what's going on.
Like, you know, feel free to smoke if that's your gig. But tell me about it.
You know, become highly self-aware inside of your habit loop. Right? And
they'll describe the sensations of smoking and they'll describe it in
pretty nasty terms because you know, fundamentally it's a pretty nasty habit.
You're burning stuff, chemicals and plants and breathing it into your lungs
and it creates a bad smell and it creates physical decay and it creates a
sensation. But actually the sensation isn't even really one that's that
pleasurable. It's the loop. It's the habit that's been created that actually
creates the neurological reward. It's not the actual cigarette. And so the
more mindful he gets people in the context of their habit and the more they
describe it, the more empowered they sort of get to say, Hey, I don't
actually want to be doing this. Not I'm physically trying to stop myself from
doing it.
Cause then you know, there's all this data that supports the reactivity of
when somebody is either trying to stop themselves or is being stopped from
doing something it actually makes them want to do it more. Anyway. So
mindfulness is really the key. It's to become as self-aware as possible.
Buddhism talks a lot about this, and I do think it's important to make a
disclaimer. I'm not a Buddhist. I actually read a pretty interesting
article the other day that was talking about how a lot of people conflate
Buddhism and meditation and mindfulness meditation as a therapeutic tool and
they kind of mix the two. And the point of Buddhism isn't mental health. And the
point of therapy isn't enlightenment. And it's an important distinction to
make because you know, a lot of people, A, I think they resist mindfulness and
meditative approaches because they view it as almost like a religious observance
and they go, Oh, that's not me.
It feels weird or woo woo or something. Or they have a certain attitude that's
informed by you know, Eastern philosophical or religious practice that
actually steers them only in that direction when it comes to the very
practical mental health benefits of mindfulness meditation. And there's what
I call mindfulness meditation. And again, it's not the technical term, but
mind emptiness, meditation, there really are two types of meditation. One is
total self-awareness. And the other is to completely minimize conscious
awareness in terms of distracted focus. But this isn't a video about the
different types of meditation, but anybody who's like a meditation guru
that's watching this is going to go, Oh, he's painting all meditation with the
same brush. So I make that distinction because it's a valid one. But anyway, so
you know, whatever your feelings are about it, maybe you don't even use the
term meditation, just focus on the term mindfulness.
It's about heightened self-awareness in the moment. And it is actually the key
to breaking habits. Breaking bad habits. So this is how I like to look at our
mind. And again, you know, I've pretty intentionally and purposefully tried to
become a student of, I guess for lack of better terms, practical psychology. Like
I'm not a clinician, I'm not an academic, I don't have a degree, but I'm
a human and we all live with the same brain. And frankly, we all have access
to the same information and literature. I mean, I guess there's a few medical
journals you technically have to be subscribed to. But I've started from the
premise of like, the better I can understand myself, the better I think I
can make my life because I know that my life is just an outgrowth of all the
things that I do.
And the things that I do are an outgrowth of the things that I think and
the things that I feel. And I'm trying to avoid to go down too many
psychological rabbit holes here or educational rabbit holes, but Adlerian
psychology, or probably Albert Ellis, I would say Albert Ellis, Google "Ellis
Paradigm" or Google "rational emotive behavior therapy" Google "cognitive
behavior therapy," and just go down these rabbit holes. Like those are three
rabbit holes, Ellis Paradigm, cognitive behavioral therapy, and rational emotive
behavioral therapy that will bear massive amounts of fruit for the rest of
your life. Or at the very least, finish this video. So here's how I understand
the human mind. I had a hard time in high school, so I like to relate things
to high school. So basically you have the prefrontal cortex, right? Which is
the newest, it's the youngest part of the human brain.
It was the last part of the brain to evolve. And the brain, which sort of
most uniquely sets us apart as human in terms of our cognition. The prefrontal
cortex is basically like a nerdy kid who gets bullied a lot in school. Like it's
actually the smart kid. It's actually the conscientious kid. It's actually the
empathetic kid. It's the kid that like gets it, but it gets bullied so it
doesn't get listened to. Right? And the bully is your id or your lizard brain or
your brainstem or whatever you want to call it, which is like the primal,
instinctive, I must eat, I must kill. I must fornicate, i must dominate to
survive. It's like your Darwinian survival instinct part of your brain.
Right? And that's like the bully who goes around like a big cretin just
beating up on the nerds.
Right? And the nerds are like, but I'm smarter and I know better and the
bully's like I don't care cause I'm scared and I need you to feel small. And
then in the middle you have like the emo kids, right that are like, man, can't we
just all get along? And I kind of keep to myself because like, you know, nerds
are boring and bullies are mean. So I kind of just do my own thing but I feel
deeply and like I just want peace and love and happiness and like the emo kids
are actually the ones that like if you take the time to get to know them, they
have like real depth a lot of times, right? And they kind of put up like this
superficial front to avoid having to connect because connection is painful
when you're vulnerable and sensitive and emotionally intelligent connection with
either a bully or a nerd can be kind of painful and awkward, right?
What we want to do in our own life is like empower the emo kid, empower the
part of us that feels deeply. That's hyper aware, hypersensitive and in tune
and in touch with how we feel. When we talk about the power of vulnerability.
Brenae Brown has a great Ted Talk called the power of vulnerability. I think in
simplified terms we can say what she's saying is like, empower the emo kid in
your life. Boost him or her up so that he's not scared of the bullies and he's
not bored by the nerds. That's honestly how you break bad habits is you get so
conditioned to feeling to lots and lots of feeling that whenever you engage in
your habit loops, you feel the feelings. You do it with awareness and what you'll
realize is, I don't actually like the way this makes me feel. This cheesecake,
yeah, there's some like stimulation on my taste buds, but all the shame, all
the guilt, all the baggage that I carry with it. I don't like the way this is
making me feel because I'm allowing myself to feel the feelings because I've
empowered the emo kid in the high school of my life. I'm not going to be bullied
anymore and I'm not going to think nerds are so boring and uncool anymore. I'll
actually listen to the wisdom that's already in my own mind and that happens
when you let yourself feel all the feelings. It's crazy that really the key
to life and the key to success and the key to an awesome life is to just feel
all the feelings because then you'll naturally do the things that lead you in
the longterm direction you want to go because it feels good to do them.
Anyway, I'm about out of time. I hope that's helpful for you. Let's break some
bad habits. Let's make it an awesome life. If you're into this kind of stuff,
I would ask you to subscribe to my channel. Click the button below. Make
sure when you do that, that you click the little bell that allows you to be
notified as new videos come out because am committed to you having an awesome
life. And I'm going to keep bringing you content in that direction, but you got
to get the videos to get it. So thanks for your time. I'll see you on the next
video.