Brainhacking 101: New Year, New Habits

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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

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. 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, 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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, 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, 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. 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 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

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

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 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.

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?

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 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,

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

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 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

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,

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

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 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, 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

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