Why Habits Don't Work

you are unlucky because the person that will inherit all of your hard work tomorrow will not be you you will wake up you will be a different human being who will spawn into your life they will have a clean kitchen they'll have food in the fridge they'll feel hungry in the morning they'll be well rested that that person is going to reap all the benefits of your hard work and this is where you have to be very careful because as long as you are embracing the struggle you will be fine today we're going to talk

about why having habits don't work now this may sound kind of weird right because here we are we have a bunch of research right that habits are really great and like people who are very successful have good habits and everyone's all about building good habits habits habits habits habits but in my own life as well as with a large fraction of my patients they're just people who are not habit people they're people who who are fundamentally inconsistent right they're not these like farmer types where you wake up every day at the same time you do

the same things every day you go to bed at the same time they're a little bit more like Hunters we're going to wake up early we're going to go out into the environment we're going to see what we we can find they're much more dyamic and the problem is that if you are a dynamic person habits can be very very hard to build and then we have this idea that unless you build habits you will not be successful in life so today we're going to teach youall an alternative to building habits if you're one of

these dynamic dynamic which means inconsistent lack of follow through people like myself there are ways where you can be just as successful or even more successful than someone who builds habits and what we're going to focus on today is the basics so we're not talking about habits that are or we're not talking about goals that are like super ambitious although arguably this could be ambitious but we're going to teach yall today if you're someone who struggles with habit how to do the basics we're talking about exercising meditating eating healthy going to sleep and doing some

amount of admin stuff right so this is all of the crap that is not like enjoyable in life but if you are able to check all of these boxes these are the sandbags that kind of hold you back right so at the end of your week when you've gone to work and you did some of the like you know the important stuff in life there's all the crap that you should do I should exercise I should meditate I should cook at home I should eat healthy I should go through my mail instead of procrastinating on

all this stuff it's all this crap we're going to teach y'all how to do that without necessarily focusing on habits when people hear about our coaching program their first response is usually why would I work with another human being when I can watch YouTube videos all on my own working with a coach is about amplifying your time and effort we're great at wanting things and even making some progress but we usually struggle with follow through or have some kind of setback and that's exactly why working with a coach can help you accomplish particular things in

a fixed amount of time they'll help you set appropriate go goals keep you accountable towards that progress and ultimately even work through the setbacks that you will inevitably face so check out the link in the description below to see if coaching is right for you so the first problem with habits that we don't really consider is that habits promote laziness now you may listen to this and say Dr K what are you talking about the whole point of habit is that you're disciplined right and disciplined is the opposite of lazy no let's understand scientifically what

a habit is a habit isn't automat atic action the habits that you have hello don't require effort right that's what makes them habit they are automatic they don't require a struggle and that's why we love the idea of a habit man I wish I had good habits then I would not have to struggle to exercise and eat healthy my life would be easy if I could turn all the good actions into habits the desire to create a habit fulfilled life is a thirst for laziness a thirst for a lack of struggle I want everything to

happen automatically I don't want to struggle with my stupid head up here I want to wake up and then do everything before I even realize it in the same way that I lose myself in this or lose myself in this or lose myself in this I want all of the special good things to be done that way now this creates a huge problem because the goal of habits is to get rid of laziness but the path to habits is the opposite of laziness it is a struggle every single day because building a habit is very

hard and so if you're a fundamentally lazy person and the appeal to you is that you no longer have to struggle chances are you haven't built the habits now I'm not saying that habits are bad right so B habits are really good there's a lot of great evidence behind them but what I'm saying is that in my clinical experience as a psychiatrist human beings are different and the Habit pathway doesn't really work great for a lot of people so there's a group of people that I've worked with for whom drastic change in a short amount

of time is actually the most successful way forward this is not I'm going to make a 1% change in my life every day for 800 days some of us are like we can't do that bro I can't do anything for 8800 days I've had plenty of patients who will stop using substances by going cold turkey I'm not going to cut back on my cigarettes by 25% every week until I stop it's like I got to stop now oh yeah we have to go through a breakup so like we're going to do this and then we're

going to break up 25% and then we're going to break up 50% and then they're going to move out and then I'm going to give them their boxes and then we're going to text this much and then we're going to text a little bit less and then we're going to text a little bit less and then we're going to text a little bit less no it's like get the hell out of my apartment I'm going block you on everything and this is what I've seen with patients so I've had a group of patients who have

joined the military and I know it sounds insane but like I want to say 60 to 70% of the patients that I've worked with who have joined the military think it is a awesome thing to do I'm not advocating for joining the military I think it's an individual choice this is not sponsored by the US Army but I'm telling yall like some people really love that they join the military and why is that it's because it instituted a drastic change in their life it gave them structure they started eating they started exercising they started waking

up every day they started making their bed because they joined the military so I've done a fair amount of Veteran work most of them are pretty happy with joining the military even the ones with PT right they may dislike a particular part of their service they may dislike particular officers or things like that but the majority of people I've worked with could be selection bias are actually pretty happy with it the key thing to understand is that for some people making a drastic change in a short amount of time is actually the path to success

now for many of these people they also stumble down the road right because like okay I can do drastic change for a short amount of time but how do I sustain it and we're going to talk about that too so the first thing that I'm going to say to y'all and another last example I'm going to give youall is diet so when I've worked with people who've made dietary changes it's not like I'm going to cut back on my carbs that doesn't work nearly as well as keto like I'm going keto like we sometimes we'll

have these kinds of things but the majority of people who make drastic dietary changes like I'm going to go on fod map I'm going to start doing keto they don't make it drastic they're like I'm going to toss all of the carbs in my house out I'm going to go to the grocery store I'm going to buy a bunch of protein and vegetables and like now I'm doing keto for 30 days drastic changes work for some people and we as a society do not acknowledge this enough and we do not support these people enough so

let's talk about the basics food sleep exercise meditation admin so the best thing honestly the best thing that works is to speedrun all of this crap the moment that you wake up so if we really look at it what most people do is they wake up in the morning and they grab their cell phone they lounge around for about 45 minutes maybe have a cup of coffee maybe we're chilling a little bit maybe watch little bit of TV end up putting my phone away sit down at my computer have my cup of coffee and open

up the same website that I used this just that again Variety in life oh this is spending so much time on the phone is bad so let's use Reddit on the phone for 45 minutes when we are sitting in bed and scrolling and then when we are ready to be productive we'll make the coffee we'll sit down and then we'll browse now I'm on keyboard and mouse now I'm being productive hour and a half goes like that different if you set your alarm clock and you have to be at work at a particular time but

if you have the time to yourself chances are you'll waste it average human being uses cell phones for about 4 hours and 37 minutes per day so what we're going to do is speedrun all of the crap the moment that you wake up so rule number one don't be anywhere near a device a device should not be within hands reach but what if there's an emergency overnight how am I going to like oh my God like my cell phone is my alarm like oh like all of these challenges so I'm going to I'm I'm a

doctor okay the number of emergencies that I get on my cell phone are probably like two or three a year right when I was in a robust clinical practice that's high Acuity I have this thing called a pager that's a different story but I use my cell phone as my alarm oh my God that's crazy if only there were other ways that you could have an alarm without your cell phone key thing to understand once you start with this it's GG so nowhere near your bed and where you you sleep next thing is for the

first 90 minutes you are going to be your you are it's not going to be easy we're not going to build habits it's going to be a struggle from day one it's going to be a struggle until day 99 until day 19 it's going to be a struggle every day you just accept that it's never going to be easy and what we're going to do is speedrun everything wake up exercise for 30 minutes meditate for 15 minutes spend about 15 minutes doing admin stuff pay your bills go through your mail I don't care what it

is Inbox zero 15 minutes shower 10 minutes get yourself cleaned up if it takes you a little longer it takes you a little longer cook yourself something the basic breakfast that we're going to talk about is a couple slices of toast two eggs and some fruit that takes about 20 minutes to prepare and eat if you guys don't eat eggs if you don't like toast if you're going keto there's all kinds of other things that you can do but there are tons of meals that you can prepare and eat within 20 or 30 minutes that

will satisfy these requirements the way that we do this stuff is drastic ially and right at the beginning and this is where you're going to say like your mind if you're not careful your mind is going to say all kinds of things but I don't I don't have 90 minutes in the morning oh really you could set your alarm clock a little bit earlier but then I'll be tired good that will help you with sleep later tonight these are all positive things drastic changes right when you get up and from the moment that you get

up till 90 minutes into your day you will have done it all but then you say Dr K what about consistency excellent question so now we're going going to teach you about spawn points so this is something that we don't quite understand but every day when you wake up you spawn into your life right so there's like past you and there's future you and the basic problem with life is that past you has no problem screwing over future you right the reason you want habits is because you're lazy you don't want to struggle and if

that is your ethos then what you will do is leave the dishes in the sink the night before future you can deal with it oh we'll go through the mail tomorrow future you can deal with it and then what happens is you wake up when you wake up in the morning you have all of these things hanging over your head oh God I have to do the dishes I have to go through the mail all the stuff piles up and then we experience negative emotions it's too much to deal with first thing in the morning

and when it's too much to deal with do we deal with the little part that we can deal with of course not because once we cross the the threshold from okay to deal with to too much to deal with we do none of it oh my God it's so much work oh too much to deal with so do none of it so recognize that every day you control your spawn point for tomorrow every day you have a choice where do I want to wake up tomorrow what is the condition that I want to wake up

in tomorrow do I want to wake up tomorrow and have a clean sink or a sink full of dirty dishes do I want to wake up tomorrow and have have some amount of meal prep done do I want to go ahead and boil 12 eggs tonight so that I have boiled eggs tomorrow morning because I don't have time for EG to make eggs in the morning or I like boiled eggs or whatever the key thing to understand is that if you want to stick with this right we're not quite necessarily talking about habits but we'll

maybe get there who knows maybe we're lucky the key thing to understand is you create the spawn point for tomorrow and the problem is that anytime we are faced with doing a task why do we procrastinate because of the struggle and what does your mind tell you your mind tells you oh if you do it you can just do it tomorrow and your mind makes a critical critical miscalculation which is it says that if you do it today and if you do it tomorrow the cost is going to be the same this is incorrect the

cost increases every moment you wait and youall may say but Dr K hold on a second how is that true because going through 10 pieces of mail is going through 10 pieces of mail no it's not y'all know this I know this when you procrastinate things get worse right when you take out the trash today not that big of a deal when you wait 2 days it stinks more that's not that big of a deal what about working on your term paper what about letting your boss know that you need some time off and we

procrastinate procrastinate procrastinate because we don't want them to think we're lazy we don't want to ask for an extension and then you wait until the last minute you wait until after the last minute and then you ask for an extension sorry I know the paper is due today but my grandfather died 2 weeks ago when we procrastinate things get worse your mind will try to trick you into telling you it'll be the same amount of work in the future give you all a very simple example renewing something is way less work than reapplying for it

if it is if it has expired completely different amount of work so be careful when your mind tells you oh we can do it tomorrow it's not going to be the same it will be worse every day that goes by it gets worse and you know it so be prepared to pay the cost set yourself up for for a better tomorrow control your spawn point what you need to protect against is yourself protect against you and help yourself out this is what controlling the spawn point is so on any given day when you are faced

with procrastination remember we're going to do drastic changes today tomorrow we'll worry about tomorrow because the reason that we don't do any of this crap is because we allow tomorrow to be where the solution is I'll take care of it tomorrow and then you spawn in tomorrow and you like look around and you're like I don't want to do any of this stuff I'll do it tomorrow I'll do it over the weekend Oh I'll start on Monday and so no habits ever form and they're not going to form don't worry about it so focus on

today this all the time you have drastic change join the military in your mind practically what does this mean practically this means get your ass to the grocery store or whatever your equivalent is as best as you can right buy food that is healthy do not buy food that is unhealthy it becomes way easier to eat unhealthy food when it is available the food that goes into your body the number one thing that determines what goes into your body is what is available that's like a fact of physics it's not even biology if I'm stuck

on a boat and the only thing that's available is hard tack and water that's the only thing that I can eat I cannot physically eat food that does not exist and then some of y'all may say okay but Dr k i buy healthy food but then I end up ordering Uber Eats anyway fair enough because you're avoiding the struggle so set yourself up for a future A Better Tomorrow set yourself up for the spawn point of tomorrow so we want to buy food and the moment that you feel like oh my God I don't feel

like cooking in that moment I'm going to order some takeout that's where you have to embrace the struggle how do you want to set yourself up for tomorrow it's not even about today today's going to suck except that today is going to suck except that there's nothing you can do you I mean you can make today better but making today better will come at the cost of Tomorrow how do you want to wake up tomorrow do you want to have eaten some of the food do you want to have more rotting vegetables in your fridge

that you have to throw out a week from now cuz wow there's something really cool you can do to avoid throwing out rotten vegetables you can eat them before they rot but instead we order food the vegetables rot and of course we have leftovers and so then those sit in our fridge and then tomorrow what happens I've got these leftovers that I can heat up or I have this broccoli that's like maybe going bad well let me eat the leftovers because if I make the broccoli now leftovers will be more leftover tomorrow and then they

won't even be edible and then I'll have to throw them out so let me eat this let me eat the unhealthy leftovers so I can throw out the healthy broccoli we're screwing ourselves over you have to protect yourself against yourself you're the one who is not controlling the spawn point properly right so when we spend the first 90 minutes of the day doing this kind of stuff everything going forward becomes easier because when I eat breakfast in the morning I don't have this like 2:00 p.m. incredibly hungry where now now my like my gin and

leptin levels are all messed up so I'm craving very calorie dense food because I haven't gotten any calories since 10: p.m. last night so the more that you wait between eating Windows the more unhealthy food you will crave because your body is like hey we can't broccoli is not going to cut it we're at a 12200 calorie deficit get me a burrito son you screw yourself in the future by skipping breakfast I don't need a huge breakfast doesn't work for everyone principle still stands right eat something I usually have a banana so set yourself up

for a better tomorrow embrace the struggle for today if you exercise if you meditate and if you eat a good breakfast then it will be easier to eat a good lunch if you eat a good breakfast in a lunch you will not be calorically deficit at dinner and you won't eat a gigantic pile of food now the problem with eating a gigantic pile of food is that it will trigger an insulin response you'll get really really sleepy you'll kind of sleep it off and then you will wake up again at 10:30 and then it'll be

hard for you to go to sleep the sleep that you get tonight is determined by how you spent your day everyone's like how do I go to sleep on like how do I have a healthy sleep schedule it's not about a schedule it's about the way that you spent your day so on days that I work out for like an hour and I'm like sweating and dizzy and nauseous because that's sometimes how I work out when you push yourself to the absolute limit sleep becomes very easy when you eat the right food sleep becomes easy

when you go to bed at night and you're beating yourself up for all this crap that you C oh I spent another day binge watching this show I spent another 6 hours playing this video game deadlock is my poison of choice at the moment fantastic game you will screw up tomorrow you and if you don't sleep properly that's the easiest way to screw up proper you so the problem with putting together your life is that we want to do it 1% at a time and there's a very good argument for doing that right people will

say oh habits have changed my life habits have changed my life I'll be the first to say it and they don't work for everyone in the same way your mileage may vary what about those people who struggle to form habits here's the crazy thing the reason that you struggle to form habits is because your cognitive fingerprint is not habit oriented you are more Dynamic you're go big or go home and the best points in your life are probably the times where you made drastic changes broke up with my girlfriend broke up with my boyfriend got

a gym membership started eating healthy started crushing it at work I'm no longer going to be that person embrace the suck don't lure yourself into oh life will be easy Once I build all the right habits then I can be the lazy MF that I am and I'm going to be in shape and I'm going to be eating healthy I'm going making so much money I'm going to still get to be a lazy MF let's go it's not about 1% sometimes it's about drastic changes and the cool thing about SP shaping your spawning environment is

like that's literally what you're doing and the cool thing is if you shape your spawn environment things will become easy the other cool thing about Dr IC changes over time is that they're synergistic here's the reason why it's so hard to break bad habits one% at a time because they're synergistic getting high is fun playing video games is fun having sex with your partner who doesn't really push you forward in life and keeps you relatively stuck you guys know what I'm talking about the comfortable relationship where y'all are just kind of existing and both of

y'all want something more but you just kind of enable each other's bad behavior because you don't judge each other and you you don't judge them because if you judge them they're going to start judging you so you let their bad behavior slide and they let you your bad behavior slide and y'all are kind of comfortable but unhappy the negative behaviors in our life are synergistic we understand this in Psychiatry we have this process called dual diagnosis when someone has a mood disorder and an addiction you can't treat one at a time it becomes impossible I

feel depressed because I feel depressed I drink I cannot treat depression with something like an anti-depressant medication as long as someone is drinking medication doesn't work you have to do both you have to do everything all at the same time it's a vicious cycle bad habits are synergistic so are good habits if I start exercising I will crave different foods I've never heard of anyone like going to the gym and sweating to the point of nauseous and be like oh my God can someone get me a Frappuccino with six shots of cream and piles of

whipped cream oh my God I need an ice cream shake so bad after running a marathon on what I want more than anything else is an ice cream shake tubal Ard ice cream is not what people want when they finish running get me water create the signals in your body to move you in the right direction good habits synergize when I exercise I want water when I want water it's going to help my mood it's going to help my energy level when I exercise and I eat the right food and I don't go into this

food coma insulin coma followed by this glucagon Spike afterward that wakes me up at 10:30 I eat this gigantic meal at 8:00 I'm kind of like like until 10:30 and suddenly I have trouble going to sleep yeah that's because all the insulin's gone you overcorrected there's some weird physiology there when you get a big in Big Sugar Spike big insulin Spike insulin makes you speaky uh sleepy big insulin Spike now your sugar drops and it drops too much now you're at a negative sugar balance because your insulin level was so high once you get into

that negative sugar balance your glucagon spikes once your glucagon spikes it first of all wakes you up and secondly causes you to Crave food so it's weird right you can eat a thousand calories of chips and Mountain Dew and you can feel hungry to hours later so set yourself up for a better tomorrow start to synergize all of these things and a beautiful thing will happen if you make drastic change the two or three things that we're shooting for first of all is activating those synergies the more that you do this stuff now that you've

slept a good night when you wake up in the morning you will feel more refreshed if you exercise the day before to the point of nausea you will feel hungry when you wake up it will be easier to eat breakfast and this is where you have to be very careful because as long as you are embracing the struggle you will be fine this is going to be difficult but the second that you slip back into this you're screwed all the bad stuff happens together all the good stuff happens together and sometimes the bad stuff is

very hard to eliminate 1% at a time I don't think I've seen a single case of someone reducing a toxic relationship 1% at a time it's almost always like a Band-Aid right off and way later than it should have been because you're hoping it'll be easier so protect against your future protect your future self against your current self set your spawn point up for tomorrow what is the world that you want to spawn into tomorrow and this is so subtle do you want to spawn into a world where your phone is within Arms Reach do

you want to spawn into a world where there are eggs in the fridge do you want to spawn into a world where your kitchen is clean do you want to spawn into a world where you feel hungry in the morning do you want to spawn into a world where you've slept for 8 and 1/2 hours because you were so tired at night because you exercised hard and then you wake up at 6:30 in the morning on on your own or do you want to spawn into a world where your alarm goes off at 7:30 and

you've only been asleep for 5 and 1/2 hours where you got leftovers sitting in your fridge you don't quite feel hungry you don't know what's going on you're drinking too much caffeine that crashes eight hours later and now you have no energy it feels hard to exercise you can't exercise because you've got no energy of course you can but you're going to build habits because then it'll be easy Once you have a habit of exercise oh then you won't whether you feel tired or not won't matter it'll be easy because it's a habit it'll happen

automatically and you go on chasing this fantasy so drastic change set yourself up for a better tomorrow you are unlucky because the person that will inherit all of your hard work tomorrow will not be you you will wake up you will be a different human being who will spawn into your life they will have a clean kitchen they'll have food in the fridge they'll feel hungry in the morning they'll be well rested that that person is going to reap all the benefits of your hard work you will get nothing the moment that you adopt this

attitude drastic change will happen the moment that you start synergizing your life will be easier may even be autopilot someday oh [Music]