On January 1, "I'm going spinning four times a week this year in the gym!"
And you know what? You do it for a week, you do it for two weeks,
but when motivation falls, as it always does, suddenly you'll no longer do it.
Somehow, when we talk about human behaviour change, particularly health,
we think it's gotta be hard, it's gotta be about deprivation, it's gotta be about punishment.
It can't be easy, how can it be easy? So we make it hard.
So we say on January 1, I'm going spinning four times a week this year in the gym!"
And you know what? You do it for a week, you do it for two weeks,
but when motivation falls, as it always does, suddenly you'll no longer do it.
And I know you've had BJ on the show and I think it's always worth a recap.
Why making something easy is so important? It's because we overly rely on motivation,
we think motivation will last forever. We make our health plans,
what we do, Drew, is that we don't understand the motivation, and BJ calls it a "motivation wave."
So, motivation comes up, motivation comes down. We make our health plans at the peak
of the motivation wave, but I would say you
should make them at the trough of the wave. Because then, on those days when you're busy,
when you're stressed out, when you don't have time, when your motivation is right down,
you will still do a behaviour if it is easy to do. When your motivation is up, you'll do anything.
If you're super motivated to make change, yeah, you'll go running 45 minutes a day, fine.
The problem is when motivation runs out, you'll stop doing it.
So, I think rule number one is you gotta start small. And I've seen that over and over again.
Rule number two is where do you put that habit in the day.
And a lot of you don't think about the placement of that habit, they think, "oh, I'll do it,"
“oh, I heard a podcast," "I heard a Broken Brain show about meditation,"
so they get inspired. They go, "alright, I'm gonna meditate!"
But they don't have a system. They think, A - they make it too hard sometimes.
They say, "I'm gonna meditate for half an hour a day" which again,
is unrealistic for most beginners. But then,
they don't spend any time thinking about, "where is this gonna go in my day?"
And where you put that habit in your day is very important.
So, every single human behaviour needs a trigger to do the behaviour.
We're having a conversation right now, to do that we needed a trigger.
Now, the trigger might have been our memory. "Oh, I must remember to call Drew at
the time that we've agreed." "I must remember to meditate."
Now that works, it just happens to be a very unreliable trigger.
So, if you are relying on that to do your health behaviour,
it's probably not gonna work for a lot of the time.
The next form of trigger is a notification or a reminder,
like a post-it note on the fridge or a pop-up on your phone,
very much like, "oh, on my Google Calendar it came up saying,
'hey, in 20 minutes, you've got a conversation with Drew'."
Okay, that also works as a reminder. But the very best form of trigger
is when you stick on your new behaviour onto an existing behaviour that you are
already doing without thinking about it. So you stick on the new behaviour
onto a habit that you already have. So, for me for example Drew, I workout
for five minutes every morning. And I don't think I've
missed a day for about three years. Why? Because every morning I make myself a coffee.
I don't need a reminder on my phone to say, "make a coffee."
I don't need my PA to phone me to say, "Ragan you must remember to make your coffee today."
I'm gonna do that, that's a habit. That's imprinted in.
So, when I weigh out my coffee beans and I put them in the French press,
and I put a timer on for four or five minutes whilst it's brewing,
I don't go on Instagram, I don't go on e-mail,
I do a five-minute bodyweight workout. In my kitchen, in my pajamas.