**The Science of Making & Breaking Habits — Transcript & Summary | SozAI** Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/the-science-of-making-breaking-habits-transcript/ Explore the science behind habit formation and breaking, focusing on brain mechanisms, habit loops, and practical examples to change behavior. ## Key Takeaways - Habits are automatic neural pathways formed to conserve brain energy. - The habit loop consists of cue, routine, and reward, which reinforces behavior. - Breaking and forming habits requires understanding and working with brain mechanisms, not just motivation. - Repetition strengthens habits through myelination of neural pathways. - Practical examples show how common behaviors fit into the habit loop framework. ## What the video covers - Habits are neural shortcuts stored in the basal ganglia, allowing the brain to save energy by automating repetitive behaviors. - The brain seeks efficiency and automates behaviors regardless of whether habits are good or bad. - Habits form through a three-step loop: cue (trigger), routine (behavior), and reward (payoff), as identified by Charles Duhigg. - Examples include anxiety-triggered social media use, stress-related alcohol consumption, midday sugar cravings, and emotional shopping. - The brain reinforces habits by myelinating neural pathways, which strengthens the behavior loop over time. - Understanding the science of habits helps create effective systems to build positive habits and break negative ones. - Motivation alone is insufficient; structure and understanding of brain mechanisms are essential for lasting change. - The basal ganglia plays a key role in storing habits and freeing cognitive resources for other tasks. - The brain’s high energy consumption drives its preference for automating behaviors to conserve energy. - Behavioral neuroscience research underpins the habit loop model and its practical applications. Answers ## Questions about this video What is a habit, scientifically speaking? A habit is essentially a neural shortcut, a behavior loop stored in the basal ganglia of your brain. This region is responsible for routines, patterns, and repetitive behaviors, and when a behavior is repeated enough, it becomes automatic. Why does the brain create habits? The brain creates habits as a way to save energy. It is constantly looking to automate processes because it is the most energy-consuming organ in the body, using 20% of daily energy despite being only 2% of body weight. What are the three steps to creating a habit? According to research by Charles Duhigg, there is a three-step process to a habit: the cue, the routine, and the reward. The cue is the initial trigger for the habit. ## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown 00:00 Speaker A I want to be real with you for a second. 00:04 Speaker A You don't need more motivation in order to create habits. 00:10 Speaker A More motivation to go and take action and do something. 00:15 Speaker A What you really need is more understanding, more structure and a system to actually put in place to break the habits that are holding you back 00:23 Speaker A and to create the habits that are needed for you to change your life. 00:26 Speaker A and to actually work with your brain, not against it. 00:28 Speaker A I feel like if you know how your brain works and the mechanisms that trigger and habit in your brain to make a habit or to break a habit, it makes it way easier to create them because you understand what's actually happening versus shooting in the dark. 00:41 Speaker A And so when you look at a habit, like what scientifically speaking, what is a habit? 00:45 Speaker A A habit is just basically a neural shortcut. 00:53 Speaker A It's a behavior loop that is stored in a part of your brain that's called the basal ganglia. 01:00 Speaker A It's a region that is responsible for your routines, for your patterns and for all of your repetitive behaviors. 01:06 Speaker A And when a behavior is repeated enough times, it eventually becomes automatic. 01:14 Speaker A Meaning that your brain can offload the energy and attention that is required to do something that you've never done before. 01:22 Speaker A Do something that is not stored as a habit. 01:26 Speaker A Habits are very simply your brain's way of saving energy. 01:31 Speaker A Now, why does that matter? 01:34 Speaker A Because your brain is always looking to automate. 01:38 Speaker A It doesn't care if a habit is good, it doesn't care if a habit is bad. 01:44 Speaker A It cares if it is efficient. 01:46 Speaker A Because the most energy consuming organ in your body is your brain. 01:52 Speaker A It only weighs about 2% of your body weight, but it takes up 20% of your energy throughout the day. 01:58 Speaker A And critical thinking uses a lot of energy, so it wants to store stuff as habits. 02:04 Speaker A It actually wants you to store as habits. 02:07 Speaker A You know, if you look at a chess player, on average, a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day playing chess. 02:13 Speaker A They really like barely move their bodies, they're sitting the entire time. 02:18 Speaker A The average person burns about 1500 to 2,000 calories. 02:22 Speaker A They burn 6,000 just because of the way that they're thinking. 02:25 Speaker A And so habits save energy in your brain. 02:30 Speaker A How are habits made? 02:32 Speaker A How are habits created? 02:33 Speaker A It's very simple, there's a guy named Charles Duhigg who found this. 02:37 Speaker A There's basically a three-step process to a habit. 02:42 Speaker A It's the cue, it's the routine, and it's the reward. 02:45 Speaker A And um, this is coming from research and behavioral neuroscience, all of this. 02:49 Speaker A So the cue is the first part of it. 02:54 Speaker A It is the thing that triggers, it's a signal or some sort of context in your life that prompts a behavior. 03:02 Speaker A So that's the first thing. 03:04 Speaker A It's you feel a certain way, you think a certain thing, you're in a certain location. 03:09 Speaker A It could be uh, a time, a place, an emotion, a thought, a uh, preceding event in some sort of way. 03:15 Speaker A So you have a cue, which is the trigger. 03:17 Speaker A You have the routine, which is the behavior. 03:22 Speaker A That's basically the action that you take that you're wanting to turn into a habit. 03:28 Speaker A If you're trying to create them. 03:30 Speaker A Or the one that you're trying to break. 03:32 Speaker A If you're trying to break a habit. 03:33 Speaker A So that's the routine. 03:34 Speaker A And then the reward is the payoff for your brain. 03:40 Speaker A The feeling or benefit that your brain receives from doing the routine. 03:47 Speaker A And it closes the loop of the cue, routine, reward. 03:52 Speaker A It closes the loop and now your brain is done with it. 03:55 Speaker A And so, let me give you some context. 03:59 Speaker A Let me make it, you know, real. 04:01 Speaker A I'll give you some examples in your life, right? 04:03 Speaker A Cue, maybe you feel anxious. 04:06 Speaker A You have anxiety. 04:07 Speaker A You start to feel the feelings of like shortness of breath, your your heart's starting to race, maybe you're starting to sweat a little bit. 04:15 Speaker A You feel anxious in some sort of way. 04:17 Speaker A Who knows why, you're thinking of something. 04:20 Speaker A Something happened before. 04:21 Speaker A You feel anxious. 04:22 Speaker A That's the cue. 04:23 Speaker A Routine, you take out your phone and you scroll on Instagram. 04:27 Speaker A The reward is you tempo you you feel temporarily distracted. 04:33 Speaker A And your brain says, okay, this is awesome. 04:36 Speaker A I'm going to do this every time we're anxious. 04:38 Speaker A Because you're not thinking about the thing that's making you anxious. 04:42 Speaker A So that's the cue, the routine and the reward. 04:46 Speaker A I think this is one of the main reasons why so many people are addicted to social media and their phones. 04:53 Speaker A Is because they're trying to distract themselves from all of the anxiety that they have in their own lives. 04:57 Speaker A What's another example? 04:59 Speaker A Let's say that you uh, your cue is you come home from work. 05:05 Speaker A And you're stressed out about work. 05:07 Speaker A And maybe you're or maybe you're stressed out at parenting and it's 6:00 p.m. 05:13 Speaker A You're like, ah, okay. 05:14 Speaker A It's been a stressful day, I'm going to pour a glass of wine. 05:18 Speaker A Okay, so the routine is pouring a glass of wine or two or three. 05:23 Speaker A That's the routine and the reward that your brain and your body feel, temporary relief, numbing, not thinking about anything that you were thinking about. 05:31 Speaker A Your nervous system gets a little bit of a shift. 05:34 Speaker A You go from sympathetic activation in your sympathetic nervous system, which is the one that's fight or flight to parasympathetic, which is, I can finally breathe. 05:41 Speaker A Right? 05:42 Speaker A So people say, I want to take an edge off. 05:44 Speaker A My question always is, why is there an edge? 05:46 Speaker A And so your brain over time starts to associate alcohol with relief. 05:53 Speaker A Eventually craves the shortcut even on low stress days. 05:59 Speaker A So maybe you did have a stressful day. 06:01 Speaker A Maybe it's Saturday. 06:02 Speaker A Ah, you know what, it'd be nice just to relax a little bit. 06:05 Speaker A Oh, boom, now you go to a glass of wine again. 06:07 Speaker A What's another example? 06:09 Speaker A Maybe you have like midday junk food cravings. 06:12 Speaker A So maybe your your cue is between 2:00 and 3:00 on average. 06:17 Speaker A You have a an energy dip. 06:18 Speaker A So that's your cue. 06:20 Speaker A Your routine is you grab sugar or some sort of like a cookie or soda or candy bar. 06:26 Speaker A The reward is that your blood sugar spikes, it gives you temporary energy. 06:32 Speaker A It gives you a dopamine boost. 06:34 Speaker A And so over time your body starts to learn, okay, low energy. 06:40 Speaker A I need to go to get a sugar fix. 06:43 Speaker A And eventually your body starts to anticipate that reward before the energy crash even starts to happen. 06:48 Speaker A And let me give you one more example. 06:50 Speaker A So we can kind of get this, right? 06:51 Speaker A One of the things that I've seen with a lot of people that's not really talked about a whole lot is is is like spending money and buying stuff online. 07:00 Speaker A Or just shopping online in period. 07:02 Speaker A And so the cue could be you're bored, you've had a long day, you're exhausted, you have this uh, emotional emptiness. 07:13 Speaker A You have a job that you don't love and a boss that you hate and you're, you know, thinking about, well, I can't be doing this for the rest of my life. 07:19 Speaker A I don't even enjoy any part of this. 07:21 Speaker A So you feel empty inside in some sort of way. 07:23 Speaker A That's the cue. 07:24 Speaker A Your routine is you go online or you just go walk around Target just because that's your routine. 07:29 Speaker A And so you buy something, the reward is the dopamine rush of novelty, of short-term emotional lift. 07:38 Speaker A And so shopping becomes emotional self-soothing. 07:44 Speaker A And your brain wires consumption to mean comfort in some sort of way. 07:49 Speaker A And the loop repeats. 07:51 Speaker A And this neural pathway gets stronger literally. 07:56 Speaker A And I'll explain to you how it actually gets stronger. 07:59 Speaker A I hate when people use the word literal when they're not actually saying, when it's not actually literally. 08:04 Speaker A But this is an actual literal example, right? 08:07 Speaker A This is how it works. 08:08 Speaker A Your brain, how it works on habits is this. 08:12 Speaker A Is there's a thing that's in your brain called myelin. 08:15 Speaker A And myelin is really important. 08:18 Speaker A When you repeat a habit over and over again, you myelinate that neural pathway. 08:23 Speaker A Myelin is an electrical insulation around your brain wires, basically, if you want to think about it that way. 08:30 Speaker A Just to make it easy to understand. 08:32 Speaker A It's the same way that if you look at your phone charger, right? 08:35 Speaker A And you plug in your phone. 08:37 Speaker A The phone charger might be white. 08:39 Speaker A But that is just the rubber that's on the outside. 08:43 Speaker A On the inside of that is a copper wire. 08:47 Speaker A And the copper wire is actually where the electrical signal is sent from your wall to your phone. 08:52 Speaker A The wire, the the white that's on the outside of the wire, the rubber insulates the electrical signal. 08:59 Speaker A Which allows the electrical signal to send more efficiently. 09:02 Speaker A The myelin in your brain that you build from doing something over and over again is the equivalent of that white little wire. 09:10 Speaker A And so over time the more you do something, the more myelin that you build around that actual wire in your brain. 09:15 Speaker A And the more myelin that you build, the faster the signals work. 09:20 Speaker A The more efficiently they work. 09:22 Speaker A And the more automatic the behavior becomes. 09:25 Speaker A It means that every repetition that you have towards something, good or bad, any action, strengthens that behavior on a biological level. 09:32 Speaker A And so when you look at that, 09:35 Speaker A Okay, now we kind of understand how the brain works. 09:41 Speaker A How do we tactically step by step actually start to break habits? 09:47 Speaker A And then I'm going to talk about how to, I'm sorry. 09:50 Speaker A How to build habits first. 09:52 Speaker A And then I'm going to talk about how to break habits second. 09:53 Speaker A Okay? 09:54 Speaker A So the first thing you're going to want to do is you're going to want to have an actual structure. 10:00 Speaker A And structure your habit in this form. 10:04 Speaker A So this this format. 10:05 Speaker A And it is I will blank at blank in blank. 10:10 Speaker A So this is the way it works. 10:11 Speaker A I will behavior at a time in location. 10:15 Speaker A So I will stretch if you want to start stretching. 10:18 Speaker A Because you're you're getting old like we all are and things are starting to hurt, right? 10:23 Speaker A I will stretch for two minutes at 7:00 a.m. in the living room. 10:28 Speaker A See how you're actually putting structure to it. 10:32 Speaker A Your brain likes structure and it likes context. 10:34 Speaker A Likes to know the environment that it's going to be in. 10:36 Speaker A I will stretch for two minutes at 7:00 a.m. in the living room. 10:40 Speaker A Cool. 10:41 Speaker A That's a really good one. 10:43 Speaker A That's one way that you can help yourself build habits. 10:45 Speaker A Another way that you can help yourself build habits is to stack it on top of an existing habit. 10:50 Speaker A This is called habit stacking. 10:52 Speaker A Um, I believe that BJ Fogg, uh, who's a doctor. 10:58 Speaker A Um, in some sort of way. 11:00 Speaker A Uh, came up with this. 11:03 Speaker A It's either Charles Duhigg or BJ Fogg. 11:04 Speaker A But habit stacking is when you take one habit that's already a habit and you stack the new habit on top of it. 11:09 Speaker A And so if you say, you know, I want to do 100 pushups a day. 11:13 Speaker A Then what you could say is, okay, while my coffee maker is going and creating coffee. 11:19 Speaker A I'm going to do 100 pushups. 11:21 Speaker A And I won't have my coffee until the 100 pushups are done. 11:23 Speaker A If you have coffee every single morning, well, now you're attaching the 100 pushups to the back end of it. 11:26 Speaker A Great. 11:27 Speaker A If you want to do, you know, uh, let's say five minutes of meditation. 11:33 Speaker A Okay, well then after I I'll do it five minutes of meditation in the morning and in the evening. 11:38 Speaker A After I brush my teeth in the morning and in the evening, I will go to my couch that is, you know, at the end of my bed. 11:45 Speaker A And uh, I will do a five-minute breathing and meditation routine. 11:49 Speaker A So you're taking a habit, you're putting another habit on the back end of it. 11:53 Speaker A This taps into your brain's desire for predictability. 11:56 Speaker A Our brain's really want predictable. 11:58 Speaker A And so you're using one habit to basically birth another. 12:03 Speaker A Okay? 12:04 Speaker A Another thing that you want to try to do is try to use sensory anchors. 12:07 Speaker A And so make it visual. 12:10 Speaker A And and have it out so you can see it. 12:12 Speaker A So if you want to start journaling more, well then I want you to have your journal on the island in your house next to where your coffee is. 12:20 Speaker A So that therefore when you're drinking your coffee in the morning, you give yourself five minutes. 12:24 Speaker A And you actually journal. 12:25 Speaker A But make it so you can see it. 12:27 Speaker A So visual is a part of it. 12:29 Speaker A Auditory is another part of it. 12:31 Speaker A You know, when you do deep work. 12:33 Speaker A This is something that I do. 12:35 Speaker A When I sit down to work for for a good two hours straight. 12:38 Speaker A If you've listened to this podcast for a while, you've heard me say this over and over again. 12:43 Speaker A I listen to the same song every time I work. 12:49 Speaker A I literally did it as I was creating this episode for the past five years. 12:53 Speaker A I'm training my brain to basically know, hey, we're about to work right now. 12:59 Speaker A So you can do visual. 13:01 Speaker A You can do auditory. 13:02 Speaker A Whatever it is that kind of anchors it in the real world for your brain to go, oh, it's time to do that thing. 13:10 Speaker A Oh, there's my cue, I need to end up doing the the routine. 13:13 Speaker A Okay? 13:14 Speaker A So that's the first part. 13:16 Speaker A The second part, step two is to make your routine stupidly small. 13:20 Speaker A Like don't try to be heroic. 13:23 Speaker A Try to be repeatable. 13:25 Speaker A And this is where a lot of people go wrong. 13:30 Speaker A They're like, well, I want to just really just. 13:33 Speaker A I'm going to work out for two hours every single day. 13:36 Speaker A And I'm like, no, just just put your workout clothes on. 13:38 Speaker A Like that's what I want you to do. 13:40 Speaker A I'm going to wake up in the morning and I'm going to do a uh. 13:44 Speaker A 74 things on my checklist for my morning routine. 13:50 Speaker A And I'm like, no, just have your feet hit the floor. 13:52 Speaker A Like make it so small. 13:55 Speaker A Make it so repeatable. 13:58 Speaker A And where most people go wrong is they build routines for who they want to become. 14:04 Speaker A Like in the future, a year from today or 10 years from today. 14:08 Speaker A And they go, I'm going to do what that person would do. 14:10 Speaker A I say though you should do is you should build routines for who you are right now. 14:14 Speaker A You know, it's like going into the gym and trying to lift, you know, squat 400 pounds. 14:20 Speaker A When you've never been to the gym before. 14:22 Speaker A No, when you go to the gym, the way that a muscle grows and you get better at something is you lift a little bit more than you can right now. 14:30 Speaker A It's in your capacity, but it's just on the edge of your capacity. 14:33 Speaker A The reason why this is really important is because when when you actually have to sit down. 14:39 Speaker A And the the science behind it is the the prefrontal cortex is involved in decisions. 14:45 Speaker A And the decisions require effort. 14:49 Speaker A But your your prefrontal cortex, the decision-making part of your brain fatigues very easily. 14:54 Speaker A And so when you start small, it kind of passes that prefrontal filter. 14:59 Speaker A Avoiding this cognitive resistance that you might have. 15:02 Speaker A And so you want to kind of shrink it into the point of as little resistance as possible. 15:08 Speaker A And so what you would ask yourself to your I'm going to create this habit. 15:12 Speaker A And then you ask yourself this question. 15:15 Speaker A What would the version of me do if I had the flu? 15:18 Speaker A So, you know, if if you had the flu, it wouldn't be I would go to the gym. 15:25 Speaker A It would be I would just put on my gym clothes. 15:27 Speaker A Okay. 15:28 Speaker A That's the first step. 15:31 Speaker A That right there is the cue for the routine to start in some sort of way. 15:33 Speaker A All right, well, you put your gym clothes on, but you you might as well just move around a little bit, right? 15:36 Speaker A Maybe you could do some yoga. 15:37 Speaker A Maybe you could do some squats. 15:38 Speaker A Maybe you go for a walk. 15:39 Speaker A Right, what would the the sick version of you do? 15:42 Speaker A Probably not write an entire blog post. 15:45 Speaker A Maybe they would they could sit down and they could write one sentence. 15:47 Speaker A That's what I mean by stupid simple, like stupid small. 15:50 Speaker A One sentence. 15:51 Speaker A Okay, well then just write one sentence. 15:52 Speaker A When you get done with that one, guess what you might do? 15:54 Speaker A You might keep going. 15:55 Speaker A You're trying to start and initiate the habit, not take this huge thing that you need to do. 15:59 Speaker A You don't sit down to write a book, you sit down to write one sentence and see if the book keeps coming out of you. 16:03 Speaker A That's how habits are made. 16:04 Speaker A You use this thing that's called the two-minute rule. 16:06 Speaker A Okay, if it takes less than two minutes, it qualifies as the gateway behavior. 16:11 Speaker A The cue that you're looking for and the the beginning of the routine. 16:14 Speaker A You know, two minutes of yoga is still yoga. 16:16 Speaker A And after you do two minutes, you're like, yeah, you know what? 16:19 Speaker A I'll probably keep going. 16:20 Speaker A I don't want you to focus and this is a big part of habits, right? 16:24 Speaker A I don't want you to focus on progress. 16:26 Speaker A Which is really interesting to think about, right? 16:28 Speaker A I don't want you to focus on progress. 16:29 Speaker A I want you to track consistency. 16:31 Speaker A Right? 16:33 Speaker A You're not building a body. 16:35 Speaker A You're building a pattern in some way. 16:37 Speaker A And this is why I think a lot of people mess up where they're like, why I need to go to the gym every single day. 16:42 Speaker A And this is my exact routine. 16:44 Speaker A That's good. 16:45 Speaker A But really what it comes down to is like, I just want you to walk in the gym every single day. 16:49 Speaker A And instead of thinking about I need to build, I need to lose 50 pounds of fat. 16:54 Speaker A And I need to do this. 16:55 Speaker A No, no, no, I'm trying to build a pattern. 16:58 Speaker A And the pattern is I walk into the gym every single day. 17:00 Speaker A And usually when you walk into the gym, guess what you do? 17:03 Speaker A You decide to do some form of movement. 17:06 Speaker A Which is better than not showing up to the gym at all. 17:08 Speaker A So you really just track. 17:10 Speaker A Did I do it? 17:11 Speaker A Okay, so that's step number two. 17:13 Speaker A Step number three is to repeat until this thing is automatic. 17:17 Speaker A And then you can worry about optimizing. 17:19 Speaker A Repetition isn't boring. 17:22 Speaker A People are like, oh my God, repetition is so boring. 17:24 Speaker A No, repetition is rewiring. 17:26 Speaker A Is really what it is. 17:27 Speaker A Repetition is the mother of all skill. 17:29 Speaker A And so when you look at it, repetition actually strengthens the synaptic connections between neurons. 17:34 Speaker A So I want to be as repeatable as I possibly can. 17:37 Speaker A And so your cerebellum, which is a part of your brain that the cerebellum fine tunes and coordinates movements. 17:46 Speaker A It helps your body perform actions smoothly and accurately. 17:50 Speaker A Then the other thing it does is it also plays a really key role in making repeated behaviors automatic. 17:56 Speaker A So you don't have to think about it anymore. 17:58 Speaker A It's essentially it's turning the conscious effort into unconscious habits. 18:02 Speaker A And so your cerebellum takes over automated routines once all of this is encoded. 18:07 Speaker A And they say on average it takes about 66 days to create a new habit. 18:13 Speaker A But it can take anywhere between, you know, the science has found 18 to 250 days. 18:19 Speaker A Depending on the complexity of the habit. 18:21 Speaker A Which is why I say make it as simple as possible. 18:22 Speaker A What I say, commit to 100 days. 18:24 Speaker A Of just doing the same thing over and over again. 18:27 Speaker A Right, your brain codes patterns. 18:29 Speaker A So if you keep switching context, it won't stick very well. 18:32 Speaker A So try to have the same trigger, try to have the same time, try to have the same environment. 18:36 Speaker A And your brain starts to code it that way. 18:38 Speaker A And then you can track it in some sort of way, like have a a tracker where you track every single day that you do it. 18:42 Speaker A And then when you screw up, which you will screw up 100%, life happens. 18:48 Speaker A You'll miss a day. 18:49 Speaker A Don't spiral. 18:50 Speaker A Use it as data. 18:51 Speaker A Okay, I screwed up, I was supposed to I went to the gym 16 days in a row. 18:55 Speaker A Today 17, I screwed it up. 18:56 Speaker A You know what, I forgot to put in my schedule, X, Y and Z. 18:59 Speaker A I'm going to make sure I don't do it again. 19:00 Speaker A Don't beat yourself up. 19:02 Speaker A Because then you're not going to show up tomorrow if you make yourself feel like shit. 19:04 Speaker A Okay? 19:05 Speaker A So that's how you create a habit. 19:07 Speaker A Let's talk about how to break a habit really quick. 19:09 Speaker A So, you know, if you look at it, you're you're thinking cue, routine, reward. 19:13 Speaker A The first thing you want to do is you want to disrupt the cue. 19:16 Speaker A Make the trigger, the cue, invisible or irrelevant. 19:20 Speaker A So if you want to stop uh, eating crappy food around your house. 19:25 Speaker A Take all of the snacks and throw them away. 19:28 Speaker A You can't do it. 19:29 Speaker A If you're scrolling on the couch, take all of the cushions off the couch whenever you wake up in the morning and throw them in another room. 19:35 Speaker A You're not going to lay on a couch that doesn't have cushions. 19:37 Speaker A You're watching too much TV. 19:40 Speaker A Take the TV off of the wall for three months. 19:43 Speaker A You're spending too much time on social media. 19:45 Speaker A Delete the apps. 19:46 Speaker A You want to make the triggers invisible or irrelevant in some sort of way. 19:50 Speaker A The other thing you want to do is you want to add friction to the routine in some sort of way. 19:53 Speaker A Put barriers in place. 19:54 Speaker A Whenever you get done on Instagram, log out of Instagram. 19:57 Speaker A And therefore you have to give, oh, I'm going to get up and I'm going to have to put the password in, screw it. 20:03 Speaker A I don't want to do that. 20:04 Speaker A That little bit of friction will make most people not get on social media. 20:07 Speaker A You know, you can also take your phone and leave it in a drawer in the kitchen if you work from home. 20:13 Speaker A Or if you work from an office, you know, put it in your car. 20:16 Speaker A So that you can't use it. 20:17 Speaker A Or the couch cushions are put away, or your TV. 20:21 Speaker A You'd have to take your TV out of your closet just to watch it. 20:25 Speaker A Screw it, I'll read a book instead. 20:27 Speaker A Right, and so it's not about becoming perfect, it's about trying to get as chain as many as possible in a row. 20:32 Speaker A And when you screw up, continue to keep doing it the next day. 20:34 Speaker A You know, like my favorite quote around this is James Clear and he says, every action that you take is a vote for the person that you wish to become. 20:39 Speaker A And so every repetition that you have is a neural imprint of your future self. 20:44 Speaker A So you don't want to be perfect, you want to be consistent. 20:47 Speaker A You don't want to be big, you want to make it inevitable. 20:49 Speaker A And so find one thing that you can do every single day. 20:53 Speaker A Choose one habit. 20:54 Speaker A Anchor it to an existing habit that you already have, an existing cue. 20:58 Speaker A Make it stupid small. 20:59 Speaker A And then celebrate yourself when you get it done. 21:01 Speaker A Because neurons don't care how sexy your goal is. 21:05 Speaker A They care if it's repeated. 21:10 Speaker A Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. 21:12 Speaker A YouTube thinks out of all of the stuff you've been watching recently that this one right here is going to connect with you the most. 21:19 Speaker A You should watch this. 21:20 Speaker A It's perfectly crafted for you. 21:21 Speaker A And if you want to make sure you subscribe and not miss any more videos, click that link right there. 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