Domino Habits – The Building Blocks Of Identity

“Let my example teach you a lesson. Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its obstacles.” Denis Dideriot

Denis Diderot, the famous french philosopher was the definition of the starving writer who knew nothing but poverty, but in 1765 his financial life was turned upside down by a strange chain of events.

When Diderot was 52 years old, his daughter was about to be married, but Diderot could not afford to come up with the dowry.

Even though Diderot was broke, he was a well-respected member of society due to creating the Encyclopédie, one of the first and more sophisticated encyclopedias of the time.

When Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, learned about Dideriots hardship she proposed to him to buy his library for £1000 GBP, which is approximately $50000 USD in 2020.

Diderot did not only suddenly have enough money for his daughter’s wedding but he also had some spare change for himself – and he used that money to purchase a brand new scarlet robe, little did he know that this purchase would ruin everything for him…

The Diderot Effect

Diderot’s robe was wonderfully elegant, in fact, it was so beautiful that he couldn’t wear it with his other dirty old clothes anymore because it just looked unharmonious.

In his own words, there was “no more coordination, no more unity, no more beauty” between Diderot and his belongings so felt a strong compulsion to unionize the rest of his belongings with his scarlet robe.

Diderot in red gown, by Dmitry Levitzky, 1773

After he got his new robe, he went on and swapped his old dirty rug for an elegant one from Damascus.

After he purchased a new carpet he went on and redesigned his apartment with expensive sculptures.

His old straw chair was also out of place now so he “had to” replace that one with an armchair covered in Moroccan leather.

His old desk was replaced with a new writing table and his formerly beloved paintings were replaced with more costly ones and so on and so on…

The phenomenon that acquiring a new possession that deviates from the consumer’s current goods can trigger a spiraling consumption is called the Diderot effect.

The Diderot effect is based on the human tendency to align their behavior with their identity. 

When Diderot purchased his new robe his entire identity changed and suddenly his old belonging didn’t match his idea of who he was anymore.

Domino Habits – The Building Blocks of Identity

Friend; Yohooo Daniel, its friday, I’m having a party at my place, would you like to come over and get drunk with us?

Daniel; Hey man, didn’t you hear? I’m not a drinker anymore, how about a walk in the park on tuesday?

Friend; Ah sure, that sounds awesome as well. I will give you a call.

If you followed my blog for a while you know that I had my fair share of battles with addiction over the years and the conversational snippet above shows you why I was able to beat that nasty habit for good.

The key to lasting behavioral change can only found in the adoption of an identity that is congruent with the best of you.

Prior to me telling others that I’m not a drinker anymore, I told them that I’m taking a break from booze at the moment which was a big fucking difference because my friends then would then just try to convince me or wait till I’m motivated again.

Once my own idea of who was changed, their idea of who was changed and they stopped pitching me events that were incongruent with who they thought I was.

Similar to Diderot, I formed a new identity, and my old drinking habit was neither in alignment with who I thought I was nor who I wanted to become.

In the picture above you see a visualization of our tendency to align what we do with who we think we are.

The current quality of your life, therefore, comes down to the quality of the story that you tell yourself about yourself.

Read that sentence again, please.

One of the reasons why so few people manage to produce a total life makeover by themselves is because they change their goals but never change their stories about themselves.

Take a look at the two case studies below and guess who has better chances to achieve the outcome; get in shape

Josh – Has the goal of losing 20 Pounds Freddy – Has formed the identity of being an athlete
Josh’s strategy is to get his act together for the next 12 weeks because this is the time until his holiday is due and he wants to look sexy at the beach.

In order to achieve this goal Josh goes on a diet and does cardio every day until he will hit his dream weight.

Freddy changes his entire idea of who thinks he is and forms the identity of being an athlete and a health nut.

With that, he not only changes his habits but more so his lifestyle.

He doesn’t need a diet, he decides that he will learn what it takes to look good all the time.

Once he adopted his new identity his values change and he puts his vitality first.

His entire outfit changes, he gets new clothes and looks fit and young again.

He also can’t hang with his old party friends anymore and instead hangs with his new calisthenics buddies.

He also convinces his girlfriend to do his lifestyle experiment with him so he has plenty of support.

 

Who do you think will get better results in the long run? Agree, I also would put my money on Freddy.

Your habits, thoughts, values, and your living environment are a reflection of the story that you tell yourself about yourself.

If you want your life to change you need to adopt the responsibility of being the narrator of your life so that you can create a network of goal congruent identities.

This narrative process is easy, all you need to do is to;

  1. Figure out what your life should be like
  2. Form a vision congruent identity 
  3. Certify this identity by collecting references

First, you obviously need to know what your life should look like so you need to do a bit of soul searching and really ask yourself what kind of life outcomes you are craving at the moment.

This exercise is part of the behavior architecture coaching program.

Second, you need to form an identity that is going to move you closer towards your ideal future blueprint.

Most people are unsure about who they want to be, but everybody knows to a certain extent what they would like to have and what they do not want to have.

In step two, you need to ask yourself; What kind of identity do I need to have in order to produce this outcome? 

In step three, you have to collect proof in order to make that new identity stick and you do that by action.

An identity is a belief that you have about yourself and all beliefs are conclusions that you made about yourself with the help of memories and references.

A person who accidentally formed the idea of being a loser has attached a great amount of meaning to moments from his/her life where they failed painfully.

In order to make a new belief stick, you need to attach attention and meaning to your new references.

In simpler words; In order to make your new identity stick, you need to prove it to your brain with tiny wins.

When I started this blog, I had the dream of being a digital nomad who could travel around the world and do what he loves.

In order to acquire that identity I actually needed to collect references who prove that I am indeed the person who I was proclaiming to be.

In my case, those references were actions where I acted out my desired storyline and actually traveled around the world and worked in exotic places.

This is me pretending to work in exotic places.

Most people just accepted the narratives that their parents, teachers, friends, or society put on them, but it is possible or even necessary to re-empower yourself to decide for yourself who you want to be.

So; Forming a new identity is a three-stepped translation process of figuring out what you want, creating an identity that is congruent with that vision, and prove that identity to yourself with the help of consistent action.

Here are five examples of how that three-step process looks in real life;

Goal Identity Proof
I want to write a book I am an author Write 20 minutes every day
I want to get in shape I am an athlete Workout 5 times a week
I want to improve my romantic relationship I am a person who puts love first Have 2 dates a week
I want to be smart I am a reader Read one book a week
I want more friends Become a peoples person Meet with 3 friends a week

What are Domino Habits?

A domino habit is an action that has the power to change your identity and cause a ripple effect that goes through your entire life.

Not all habits are created equal, the habit of flushing the toilet isn’t affecting your idea of who you are but other habits such as working out cause a chain of events that often changes the identity and the story of the person entirely.

When a person is working out, they are suddenly also motivated to watch their diet, get enough sleep and they are often more reluctant to self-destructive habits such as getting wasted at the weekend because this would sabotage their gym results.

But this isn’t the end of the domino effect, a person who works out also changes their priorities and sometimes even their tribe and their living environment.

Since they now value health and discipline hanging with a bunch of couch potatoes will feel uncomfortable so they won’t only change their behavioral portfolio but they also will align their living environment and their tribe with their domino habit.

One of the most effective and powerful ways to transforms your life results is to install domino habits on purpose in order to change who you are within a short amount of time.

Below you will see the 3 levels of change that a domino habit can cause;

Below you will find 3 exemplary domino habits who change your life for the better;

Domino habit 1; Habit Journaling

Creating my habit journaling ritual came along with me forming the identity of being the architect of my behavior.

By being empowered to grow healthy habits whenever I wanted I become more confident because I suddenly could make my code of conduct an expression of the best of me.

Domino habit 2; Habit Batching 

Habit batching is a simple technique that revolves around the idea that you can swap your entire morning/night routine within 24 hours by using a cheat sheet on which you will find 10 habits that you picked beforehand.

My habit batching habit gave me the identity of being an ultra learner because I knew that I could align my days with my goals at any given time.

This flexible perception of myself allows me to tackle big challenges because I know that I’m always just one day away from finding and forming another habit batch that is going to produce the outcome that I’m after.

Domino habit 3; Mentor habit 

I believe that success is a team sport, whenever I feel stuck I find somebody who killed that stuck successfully already and I ask that person how he/she did it.

This may not sound like a big habit to have, but knowing that I’m being supported by some of the smartest people in the world empowers me to think highly of myself also.

Who do you want to be?

Up to this point, I haven’t met a single person whose life didn’t change after they changed their perception of who they are.

Most people are desiring a better 2021 (including myself), most of us however will only set new goals but won’t adopt a new identity.

This blog isn’t for most people, this blog is for you and I hope from the bottom of my heart that you find the courage to narrate your own life story again.

I certainly will do so, one new identity I formed this month was the identity of becoming a world changer and I defined for myself that this identity will be realized once I managed to positively touch the lives of one million people.

I’ve given myself 24 months for this dream so I hope that you will take the principles of this article and make your life better with it so that I only have 999999 people left to help.

P.S: Do you want to change your behavior?

If this is the case, schedule your personal 1-1 discovery call with me now by clicking this link.

The behavior strategy calls are very limited due to their high demand and I only have the capacity for 8 strategy calls a week.

This piece of content is seen by thousands of people, so let’s find out quickly how I can help you to help yourself!

The Habit Batching Technique – Use This Simple Hack To Reinvent Yourself Over Night

One of my favorite things to do growing up was to steal the Gameboy of my brother in order to play Megaman for our hours and hours. For you young kids out there, a Gameboy is a grey Nintendo hand console on which you could play all sorts of epic games such as Zelda, Tetris, Chess master, and as said, Megaman.

Megaman’s story takes place in 20XX where mankind created all sorts of robots in order to make life more productive on earth. However, one day with the help of Dr. Wily, an evil scientist who wants to take over the world, the robots go crazy and attack the populace.

Dr. Light, a good scientist, and his helper robot Rock, both have a strong sense of justice and want to fight the evil Dr. Wily, for that matter they transform Rock into a fighting robot, thus Rock becomes Megaman.

One of the things that were so cool about Megaman was that he had a cannon arm out of which he could power beams, but this wasn’t all, over the course of the game it was possible to swap his “Mega Buster” arm for other arms that would give Megaman different abilities.

What I found so interesting was that when Megaman acquired a new arm, it didn’t only give him new powers but sometimes also a new personality, and some of his new powers would even make him go berserk.

Now you might ask yourself – What the fuck does Megaman has to do with behavioral change? 

Good question my friend, here is a freebie for you!

Just like Megaman, we are computational machines who are made up of different building blocks who dictate who we are and how effective and powerful we can become.

Just like Megaman acquires new powers when he changes his transit arm, we acquire new powers when we form new habits.

Just like Megaman undergoes a form of personality change when he finds a new add on, our personality transforms when we change our behavioral subcomponents.

But, we can’t possibly compete with a robot’s potential for instant transformation right?

You bet we can!

If I’ve learned one thing over the years of having a private practice it is that an individual’s greatest power is its freedom to change who they are at any given moment.

While most behavior psychologists advise people to take things slow and change one habit at a time, I believe it’s possible and sometimes necessary to just throw away an entire habit chain and replace it with a more effective chain of rituals.

I call this process habit batching and in this article, I’m going to show you how this simple method enabled me, again and again, to kill my old self in order to invent and give birth to someone new entirely.

Behavior Bootcamp

Where the fuck is Julian again?

This was a question our ward psychologist Mrs. Schmidt asked me almost every morning in April 2016 when I was living inside a psychiatric facility in Hamburg.

Julian was my roommate on Station 10 which means that like him – I was a patient who was “receiving” behavioral treatment with the goal of helping us to end our depressive episode.

I was in a particularly strange situation because I wasn’t only a patient but also a psychology student at the time and I was dreaming day and night about swapping my title of patient for the title of counselor.

So it’s fair to say that besides shame and fear, I also experienced a great sense of meaning and curiosity during that strange chapter of my life.

While studying psychology I was always dissatisfied with the fact that we only learned from papers and books and never from real people… once arrived at Station 10 I found myself with real people who had real-life problems who needed real help.

No more fucking vague untested textbook theories, here everybody either found a way to escape its (often) self-induced misery or perished as a consequence.

I have to confess that I thoroughly enjoyed that climate of seriousness, on Station 10 the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions could make the difference between remission and suicide.

I entered Station 10 with the hope of finding out what it was about me that was producing the result called clinical depression and simultiounsly I felt as if it would be a unique learning opportunity to investigate the mindsets and routines of not only myself but also of my fellow co-patients in order to come up with a “stay the fuck away habit list”.

I made the decision to create file reports about all my fellow misfits in order to identify the habits, beliefs, thoughts, and environmental setups that were responsible for our painful life results.

My first file report was about my roomie and the first thing I wrote down was his nightly routine.

Below you will find his morning and evening routine or as I call – his behavioral batch;

Julians Nightly Habit Batch:

  1. 21.30 going outside to smoke and chat with co patients  (an entire pack of cigarettes)
  2. 21.45 going to the kitchen for a last “snack” (he usually ate 1-3 buns with delicious Nutella)
  3. 21.55-night tee (black)
  4. 22.15 fighting with his girlfriend on the phone
  5. 22.45 watching a series
  6. 23.50 sneaking out for more cigarettes
  7. 00.00 watching another series
  8. 00.45 chatting and social media
  9. 1.45 brushing teeth
  10. 2.00 series watching until asleep

 

Julians Morning Habit Batch: 

  • The alarm goes off at 7:30
  • Snoozing till 7.55
  • put on pants and shirt
  • come late to mandatory breakfast
  • apologize to everybody for being late again

 

Observing Julian’s habit batches was a fascinating experience, he ended his days with avoidance and started it with failure, two big building blocks of the infamous downward spiral.

Over the course of the next seven weeks, I became a behavior detective and investigated the habit batches of almost everybody who was a patient on Station 10 and I discovered that people with broken mindsets apparently also have broken habit batches.

This discovery was a relief for me because it hinted that I didn’t “have” depression but instead that I was “doing” depression.

I was rather alone on Station 10 with that opinion as our psychologists told us that our depressive symptoms solely originated from a broken brain rather than a broken schedule.

My observation however hinted that my dear co-patients weren’t having psychological problems but life problems instead.

Depression to me wasn’t a disease, it was a result that ensued out of broken habits, disempowering beliefs, self-mutilating self-talk, and a toxic living environment.

While interviewing all patients on Station 10 I noticed a commonality: Most patients were fixated on the aspects of their painful lives that they had absolutely no fucking control over

They told me in great lengths why they thought they ended up in Station 10 and I heard all sorts of sad stories about terrible upbringings, disempowering parents, toxic partners, shit jobs, financial struggles, health issues but there wasn’t a single patient who said that ‘I’m here because of me’.

These observations motivated me to ask a question that would ultimately motivate me to create this very blog that you are on right now:

If you change, does your life change with you? 

I wanted to test what happens to a person if they swap a disempowering habit batch for an empowering one so I made up my mind to become my own psychological guinea pig.

While still being in psychiatry I started to research what the hell “successful” people were doing differently in the morning and after identifying patterns from people with whom I would have gladly switched places I started to create my first ever morning habit batch.

A week after I’ve collected enough data and information on how to change my routine I created what I called “the habit cheat sheet” which was basically a sequence of success rituals that I stole from people who came to mind when I thought of the word “outstanding”.

Below you will find the “habit cheat sheet” that I created and implemented during my time in the psychiatry:

Habit Batch Name: The Behavior Bootcamp

Desired Outcome: Stop being a fucking loser

Habit Name
Ritual Recipe
 Habit 1
The Jocko Willink
Get up at 4.33
 Habit 2
The Tony Robbins
6 Phase Meditation for 15 minutes
 Habit 3
The BJ Fogg
After my feet touch the floor I will say:
Today is going to be a good day.
 Habit 4
The William McRaven
Make my Bed and organize my shit
 Habit 5
The Wim Hof
Cold Shower + Power Breaths
 Habit 6
The Dave Asprey
Take vegan protein + supplements
 Habit 7
The Sylvester Stallone
Full body workout + cardio in front of the psychiatry
 Habit 8
The Jordan Peterson
Dress like the person I want to become not like the person that I am today.
 Habit 9
The Tim Ferris
Design my perfect day in my journal
 Habit 10
The Viktor Frankl
Infusing my suffering with meaning by reminding myself that my why is worth the how.

To my surprise, having a cheat sheet actually enabled me to follow through with the entire ritual sequence, all I had to do was to have my habit cheat list at all times in my pocket so that I didn’t have to memorize it at all, this was also the reason why I named my habits, that way I wouldn’t forget them even if I forget my cheat sheet.

Let’s go over my habit batch;

Habit 1: The Jocko Willink (Get up at 4.33)

Desired Life Upgrade: Mental health Dimension

Time Required: none

Habit Recipe: After my vibration alarm goes off I will roll out of bed because starting my day early boosts my mental health.

One of the things that brought me into psychiatry was a lack of discipline and my tendency to avoid things, so I attempted to break this pattern by implementing a discipline habit from the most disciplined guy I knew – Jocko Willink, a retired navy seal and best selling author of the book Extreme Ownership. Jocko is pretty famous for getting up at 4.33 in the morning so I figured that if could learn how to break my snoozing habit I could eventually break my depression.

 

Habit 2: The Tony Robbins (Meditating for 15 minutes)

Desired Life Upgrade: Mental health Dimension

Time Required: 15 minutes

Habit Recipe: After I return from my morning pee I will put in my earplugs and do the Tony Robbins Priming Mediation because it helps me to change my mental state.

One of my biggest problems was that I woke up in a depressed state. No, I don’t mean moody, I mean waking up and not wanting to live anymore. As you can imagine, contemplating whether life is worth the hassle isn’t precisely the kind of morning habit that gets you out of bed but instead makes you hide under your pillow again, so I needed to change that.
Tony Robbins has a great morning ritual where he combines power breaths with a form of guided meditation, the power breaths helped me to leave my depressed state behind and enter what I called back then “Daniel 2.0” a confident version of myself.

 

 

Habit 3: The BJ Fogg

Desired Life Upgrade: Mental health Dimension

Time Required: 5 seconds

Habit Recipe: After my feet touch the floor I will say “today is a perfect day for a perfect day” because this improves my overall attitude.

Professor Bj Fogg from Stanford University has a great way to begin his mornings, the first time his feet touch the floor he says that today is going to be a great day. He calls this the Maui habit. Since I was struggling with my overall attitude I thought that this was a great habit for me to implement.

 

Habit 4: The William McRaven (Make my bed)

Desired Life Upgrade: Career Dimension

Time required: 1 minute

Habit Recipe: After my Maui Habit I will make my bed to the best of my ability because doing the small things right will enable me to do the big things right.

A problem with depression is that one has often very few wins and many many failures. William McRaven an ex-US Navy admiral has had a great speech where he proposed that it’s important to start the day with a simple win such as making one’s bed.
This habit was important for me because task completion euphoria was something that I was missing in my life.

Habit 5: The Wim Hof (5-10 minutes of cold shower)

Desired Life Upgrade: Vitality Dimension

Time required: 5-10 minutes

Habit Recipe: After I enter the shower I will do power breathes and turn on the cold water because this helps me to create a strong body.

One of the biggest problems of my life back then was avoiding things I couldn’t afford to avoid. Whether it was not opening letters, paying bills on time or doing what I had to do, I often made my life worse by not attending my problems because I felt overwhelmed by the number of problems that I had.

I heard about this guy Wim Hof who created a cold therapy program that helped people to solve their mental health problems by creating a stronger body through cold showers.

Since I hated cold showers I figured that this habit was perfect for me, by voluntarily doing something that made me uncomfortable in the morning I felt capable of doing other uncomfortable things later throughout the day.

It’s also impossible to have any disempowering thoughts when your brain thinks you are freezing to death.

 

Habit 6: The Dave Asprey ( Take protein + supplements)

Desired Life Upgrade: Vitality Dimension

Time required: 5-10 minutes

Habit Recipe: After I finish my showering habit I will take my supplements because a strong body will produce a healthy mind.

I knew that me being lethargic and depressed wasn’t only a psychological problem but rather a metabolic problem. Changing my emotional reality was therefore for me also a matter of hacking my biology and what better way to do so than to study the father of biohacking Dave Asprey.

My supplement routine consisted of taking my protein and my anti-depression vitamins (Vitamin D, Vitamin K, 5 Htp, Tryptophan, Magnesium, Zinc, Omegas, amino acids).

 

Habit 7: The Sylvester Stallone

Desired Life Upgrade: Vitality Dimension + Mental Health Dimension

Time required: 5-10 minutes

Habit Recipe: After I take my supplements I will go outside and train my ass off because I want to get in the shape of my life.

Having an exercise routine in the morning helped me to feel like I was making progress and progress towards a valued goal causes us to feel positive emotions.

By doing a bit of cardio and bodyweight workouts in the morning I was becoming stronger and with that I was feeling stronger and more equipped to face my problems and challenges.

 

Habit 8: The Jordan Peterson ( Dress like the person that you want to become)

Desired Life Upgrade: Career Dimension + Mental Health Dimension

Time required: 5-10 minutes

Habit Recipe: After I finish my exercise habit I will dress up because how I look affects how I feel.

Dress like the person you want to become not like the person you are today

One of my favorite life rules from Dr. Peterson is the one where you behave and dress like your future self in order to make your future blueprint a reality. One of my morning rituals was to pick clothes on a daily basis that I would have picked in my ideal future.

This was quite a funny ritual to have in a psychiatry… I often wore dress pants and a shirt to breakfast and earned a lot of weird looks from my patients but this habit helped me to think like the person I wanted to become rather than a person that was stuck in a nuthouse.

Habit 9: The Tim Ferris (Journaling for 5 Minutes)

Desired Life Upgrade:  Mental Health Dimension

Time required: 5 minutes

Habit Recipe: After I finish my dressing habit I will journal for 5 minutes because I am in charge of my days and my life.

Tim Ferris, the famous Podcaster and entrepreneur is a great ambassador of journaling, starting a journaling habit myself made a great difference for me because I started to create days that I actually wanted to have.

Habit 10: The Viktor Frankl (My meaning habit)

Desired Life Upgrade:  Mental Health Dimension

Time required: 1-5 minutes

Habit Recipe: After I journal I will remember my why because this helps me to make it through another day on station 10.

Even though I was motivated as fuck to turn my life around, being stuck in a nuthouse was one of the most painful experiences of my life. I needed to remind myself every morning that my stay on Station 10, as painful as it was, would enable me one day to make my dream of helping others a reality.

What happened next?

What happened next was one of the most bizarre yet exciting adventures of my life and I became known as the craziest guy on Station 10.

Up to this day, I’ve never received so many looks of bewilderment, most of them obviously came from my roommate.

When my alarm rang at 4.33 Julian looked at me with an unsurpassable look of annoyance and it didn’t particularly help our relationship that he had to overhear the loud noises of my power breaths while I was doing cold my shower habit.

My Sylvester Stallone exercise habit was also something to behold, it’s quite something to jump rope while being accompanied by the screams of the schizophrenic patients of station 11 in the morning.

My “dress like the person you want to become habit” also didn’t help me to shake off my reputation of being a weirdo since I was extremely overdressed during my entire stay on Station 10.

We only had 2-3 hours of therapeutic obligations during a day, and most of the patients used the rest of the day to hang out and to play games and stuff, but not me.

Since I’ve sworn myself to leave that hospital as a changed man I used my journaling habit to design one “perfect” day after another and I tried to not waste a single minute of my stay, this newly developed productivity was unseen on that station and eventually, I got kicked out of it because of it.

Once out, I realized that nothing about my shitty life had changed, I still had no real job, no money, no girlfriend, and tons of problems.

Nothing changed but one thing: me.

With time, work, and patience, however, my life, just like myself, became unrecognizable.

Habit Batching – Three Steps For Changing Your Habit Chains

Here is the essence of a habit batching; First, you identify what kind of life outcomes you want to produce.

Next, you find people who are already producing those results and identify the habits that are responsible for their results.

Finally, you identify and name small actions that if acted out will bridge the gap between who are you today and who you want to become in the future.

Here are the three steps you need to follow;

 

Step one: Identify Your Ideal Future 

One of the reasons why so many people are feeling unsatisfied with their life is because they haven’t put up the effort to answer the question: What do I really want?

The sole purpose of your habit batch is to get you from where you are to where you want to go, obviously, for that manner, it would be helpful to know what your ideal life would look like.

Take a moment, close your eyes, and let your mind wander freely to a perfect future scenario, in your life, in 6 months, 3 years, and 5 years from now. The goal is to create a vision that excites and motivates you.

The ideal future blueprinting technique is an expert from my new journal ‘The Behavior Kickstarter‘, feel free to download it whenever you want.

 

Step two: Model Succesful People 

Once you’ve learned what your future should look like, it’s time to identify people who are already producing the results that you are after.

The idea behind the second step is simple; If we want change, we have to change.

The second step of the habit batching building process is therefore a first attempt to answer the crucial question; Who do I have to become? 

In that manner, it’s helpful to identify role models and model their behavior.

I created a simple psychological exercise that will help you to identify your role models, imitate their behavior, and cross-compare their success routines to your current code of conduct, click here to download it.

The following questions will help you to identify who you need to become;

  1. When you think of the word successful, what person comes to mind?
  2. If you would have to change with somebody, who would you like to change places with? Why?
  3. What qualities do they possess?
  4. What habits do they possess?
  5. What habits do they not possess?
  6. What beliefs do they have about themselves, other people, and the world?
  7. How do they deal with temptations like drugs and alcohol?

Step three: Build The Habit Batch

After you identified where you want to go and who you want to become it’s key to create a habit batch that is going to function as the vehicle that is going to transform you into the person who can actually produce the results that you are currently after.

As said, every habit batch should be unique to the individual, meaning that you find a routine that will move you closer to your desires, there I wouldn’t recommend that you simply copy the entire habit batch of someone else.

A habit batch is a set of 10 goal aligned actions that is going to make you more into who you want to become.

Below you will find behavior rules that helped me to create sticky habit batches;

Rule 1:  Pick 10 Habits For Your Batch

Take a look at your ideal future blueprint and your role model investigation notes and ask yourself; what 10 routines will move me closer towards who I want to be and further away from who I not want to be?

The motto here is – choose habits that you actually want to do and stay away from “should” habits.

Also, make sure to create a batch that integrates your strengths and weaknesses, if you create a morning batch and you never have been a morning person you might want to start with a light batch that is actually doable.

Rule 2: Stack The Habits On Top Of Each Other

Habit batching is a technique where each routine serves as the trigger for the next routine. The formula for this is known as an implementation intention or in short – ‘if-then’ strategies.

The formula is simple;

After I {Existing Habit} I will {Sequence Habit} because {Reason for doing this habit}.

Examples;

  1. After I touch my alarm I will meditate for 10 minutes because it helps me stay happy.
  2. After I meditate I will do 10 push-ups because exercise helps me to kickstart my m0rning routine.
  3. After I exercise I will read for 5 minutes because reading is the best preparation for leading.

Rule 3: Start with Mini Habits (30 seconds – 5 minutes)

When I teach my clients this method I usually tell them that they should start with mini habits but later, it’s entirely doable to have a habit batch that consists of batches that are longer.

If it’s your ultimate goal to make exercise a part of your habit batch you might want to consider starting with doing five minutes only instead of thirty. Again, the best habit batch is the one that you actually stick to!

Be realistic, be curious, and find out what works for you and what’s not.

Rule 4: The habit batch should be under 60 minutes (In the beginning, later it can be 120 minutes long)

Most people actually have very little time for themselves, my habit batches tend to be longer because I have absolute autonomy over my schedule so it’s doable for me to have a morning routine that is 2+ hours long.

You should have a morning routine that is at least 30 minutes because you will need a certain amount of time to do actions that will forge you into the person you want to be.

Rule 5: Use Your Habit Cheat Sheet

Habit formation is a memory process, all you want to do is to make a certain set of behaviors automatic, meaning that you do the right thing at the right ti,e.

Your habit cheat sheet is a simple paper or a note on your phone that you have with yourself that helps you to memorize your newly designed morning routine.

Most people fail to create new routines because they forget to set a trigger that is reminding them to act out certain habits, when you cheat and you write down your ENTIRE action sequence on paper it’s pretty hard to forget what you need to do.

There are many habit formation methods that teach you how to memorize habits by yourself, but I feel that writing your perfect habit batches down helps you to form new routines in a short amount of time.

Rule 6: Use a habit tracking system

What’s get measured gets accomplished, when you use a habit tracking system you actually have the opportunity to measure your progress. I myself created a habit journal for exactly that purpose and it helped me to raise my self-awareness and get crystal clear about what habits worked for me and which didn’t.

Other possible habit tracking systems could be;

  • Evernote
  • Wunderlist
  • Apple to-do list
  • plain journal

 

Where to go from here

Habit batching is a simple technique that is built on the assumption that habits are the building blocks of your character and that if you change your character your life changes dramatically.

Planning what you want and building a person who can produce those life results will allow you to be in control of your destiny again, something that very few people can say about themselves.

The goal of habit batching is not simply to help you to identify your perfect morning but rather to motivate you to see each and every day as a chance to make your next 24 hours an expression of the best of you so that ultimately your life will your own unique masterpiece.

Do You Want To Change Your Habits? 

The Habit Matrix – Use This Model To Create Habits That Stick

One of the questions that I often ask my clients in the early stages of their behavioral makeovers is:

To what degree are you in love with the worst of you?

The purpose of that question is to identify the disempowering behavioral patterns, which prevent that particular individual from producing their desired life results.

In simpler words – I want to discover what bad habits that stupid son/daughter of a bitch is clinging on to despite their better knowledge.

Many individuals who want to change their lives have a hard time, in the beginning, to muster up the attention and decisiveness to eradicate tiny bad behaviors for good.

It is easy to underestimate the power of tiny behavioral decisions, after all:

  • One Snickers bar will not make us obese.
  • One beer will not make us an alcoholic.
  • Working longer hours once will not make us a workaholic.
  • Going on 9GAG once will not make us a procrastinator.

However, all disempowering behavioral patterns start with a one-time decision for instant gratification at the cost of long-term happiness and success.

To emphasize the importance of self-awareness and behavioral mastery, I would like to share with you a little story about bad habits that I often tell my clients within their first coaching sessions.

The Wise Habit Gardener

A rich man once asked an old, wise man to help his son change his bad habits. The old man asked his son to take a walk with him through the garden. After taking a few steps, the wise man stopped and asked the young man to pluck a small flower out of the ground.

The young man grabbed the plant with his fingers and easily plucked it out. The wise man nodded, and they resumed walking.

A few seconds later, they stopped again, and the wise man pointed towards another plant, a bit larger than the last. The young man grabbed it with his hand and plucked it out of the ground with a bit of effort. “Now pluck out that one”, the wise man said, pointing towards a bush. The young man grabbed the bush with both of his hands and using all of his strength, barely managed to pluck it out of the ground.

“Now you see that small tree, there? Try and pluck that one”. The young man grabbed the trunk with both hands, pulled as hard as he could but he couldn’t even move it.

“It’s impossible, Master. I can’t do it”.

“You see my boy; it’s the same with our habits. If we let them grow and take root, it becomes harder and harder for us to stop them1”.

The moral of the story is an ancient idea that holds tremendous wisdom – the best way to kill a dragon is to kill it while it is still an egg.

Bad habits, if left unchecked, can ruin even the strongest minded person. I have had to learn this lesson in multiple dimensions of my life.

But how do we change bad habits, and how do we form good ones? This is precisely the question that this article is going to attempt to answer….

What Causes Behaviour Change – The Fogg Model

The problem with frameworks about human behavior is no that there are not any, there are too many, one more confusing than the other.

About seven years ago, a behavior scientist named Professor B.J Fogg from Stanford University developed a model that changed my understanding of habit mechanics forever. *It was also him under whom I studied habit formation personally.

The Fogg model is simple; it shows that three elements have to converge at the same time for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and a Trigger.

 

Before I show you how this model can help you to master your habits, I would like to let Professor Fogg explain his own model to you with his own words:

So, to summarise, for you to form a behavior you need to be:

  1. Reminded to do the behavior. (Trigger Element).
  2. Motivated to do the behavior. (Motivation Element)
  3. Capable of doing the behavior. (Ability Element).

This leaves us with the habit formula:

Let us investigate the three levels that cause behavior change in-depth…

Level One: Motivation

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost anyhow”.
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Dreams don’t work unless you do”. – John C. Maxwell

“If life gives you lemons, make fucking lemon cheesecake”. – Daniel Karim

What all these great thinkers have in common is the idea that willpower is the secret sauce to success.

Is that really true, though? Is Nike correct and we just need to do it? Can we will ourselves towards getting what we want? Or is motivation overrated?

According to Fogg, there are three core motivators, each with a positive and negative form of motivation.

One of my fellow behavior designer colleagues Samuel Walzer did a great job at creating a graphic to display Fogg’s Core Motivators:

1. Sensation

Pain and pleasure are the primary driving forces behind the behavior. Click here to read my article about the subject. 

  • Pleasure: We repeat what is rewarded. If it feels good, we want to feel it again; therefore, we act.
  • Pain: We avoid what is punished. If it hurts, we do not want to feel it again; therefore, we avoid acting.

Summary: If you want to make a behavior stick, add a positive emotion to it. If you want to weaken a bad habit, attach a negative emotion to it.

2. Anticipation

Human beings feel positive emotions if we make progress towards a valued goal. I have created a free technique to help identify your ideal future blueprint. If you are feeling a lot of negative emotions, it could be because you have not put in the time to create a worthy aim for yourself. 

  • Hope: We seek pleasure, and we also seek things that we believe will give us pleasure in the future. Hope motivates us to act because we tap into the power of positive anticipation.
  • Fear: The anticipation of pain is also a powerful motivator to act. Our brain maps the world and is constantly looks for two things: things that will make our life better and for obstacles towards that path. Those obstacles and dangers to our goals are emotionally experienced as painful.

Summary: Hope and fear are the driving motors behind habit formation. In my private practice, I always have my clients create an ideal future blueprint and a nightmare future blueprint because the combination of positive anticipation and fear usually creates a strong pull forwards.

3. Belonging

  • Social Acceptance: The need to belong is one of the greatest motivators there is. From ancient times, it has been beneficial to survival to surround ourselves with a high-quality tribe and a high-quality spouse. It is, therefore, only logical to conclude that we act to receive greater social acceptance, status, love, and belonging.
  • Social Rejection: This one is self-explanatory; social, and romantic exclusion is so painful because of obvious evolutionary reasons. People do almost anything to avoid being rejected; there it is a powerful motivational force as well.

Summary: Belonging is an ancient need of us; we need other people to survive and thrive. We are motivated to engage in behaviors that will uplift us in our local dominance hierarchy, and we do almost anything to avoid being abandoned or rejected.

4. Identity

  • Congruence: We all have a perception of who we are, and we all try consciously or unconsciously to align our behavior with our identity. If you think of yourself as an athlete, it will be easier for you to work out rather than if you pride yourself as being a party animal.
  • Incongruence: We also avoid behaviors that are off character for us. A person who sees themselves as a workaholic will probably have a hard time dating someone who is a couch potato and who does couch potato things.

Summary: True behavior change is an identity change; if we want to use motivation to increase our chances to act, we need to reinvent our idea of who we think we are. If you want to quit smoking, adopt the role of being a health nut. If you want to read more books, adopt the identity of calling yourself a book worm. If you want to lose weight, start thinking about yourself as an athlete.

As shown, if we want to increase or decrease our motivation, we need to tap into one or multiple of these core motivators.

Below, you will find what I call the Motivation Matrix; it is a quick set of questions that will help you to increase your motivation to do certain behaviors.

The Motivation Matrix

Case Study: Exercise Habit

Below, you will find an example of how I increased my motivation to make my exercise habit stick.

Can I make it more pleasurable? If so, how? (Positive Sensation) I hate cardio, but I love podcasts. If I listen to an informative podcast while doing cardio at the gym, then I will probably be more willing to do it.
Can I make it less painful? If so, how? (Negative  Sensation) In the beginning, I will only do exercises that I like, no leg days until the habit routine is sticky.
Can I integrate this habit into my ideal future blueprint? If so, how? (Positive Anticipation) Working out will improve my life tremendously; I will be healthier, happier, and more successful in my business because I have more energy. Working out will definitely bring me closer to my ideal future blueprint.
Can I integrate this habit into my nightmare future blueprint? If so, how ( Negative Anticipation) Not working out will make me sick, lonely, and probably less successful in all other dimensions of my life. My ultimate nightmare is to be left by my girlfriend, she’s a health nut, and I don’t want to risk not being desired by her anymore.
Can I remind myself that this habit will increase my social acceptance and status? If so, how? (Acceptance) It will surely help with my social standing to look like a cover model. I think strangers will instantly see that I care about myself and that I’m quite good at forming new habits which are good for my private practice.
Can I join or create an accountability support group that is going to hold me accountable? If so, how? (Rejection) Yes, my friend Jeff is an ex-professional athlete; if I get him on board, I will surely get and stay in shape.
Can I adopt a new role that will make it easier for me to form this behavior?
(Congruence)
I will start to remind myself that I’m an athlete first; sports is a habit that is essential to who I am today and who I want to be in the future.
Can I adopt a new role that will make it harder for me to form this behavior?
(Incongruence)
I’m a habit coach; how can I expect my clients to follow my lead if I can’t form the routines that I know I should form? Skipping a day at the gym and eating cheesecake will be much harder for me because I know that I would betray the best of me.

Extra Credit: Brain Train

Before we go to Level 2 of the Fogg model, I would like you to think about a habit that you want to form and apply the principles of the motivation matrix to it.

Take another look at the motivational matrix and ask yourself how you can tap into the power of the four core motivators to increase your motivation, to actually make that particular behavior stick!

Great job on reading the first level of behavioral change, I did not want to make it too complicated; however, it was important to me that you learn that motivation is the why behind the behavior and that the sole purpose of motivation is to get us to do hard things.

But what do we do when we do not have the eye of the tiger? Is it possible to stick to our habits even if getting out of our bed is a major win?

It is. Let us move to the second level of behavior change to find out how we can form new habits in record time!

Level Two: Ability

When I was 17 years old, a doctor made me step on a scale: 69 nerdy kilograms, not too much considering I was 2 meters tall.

What I lacked in pounds, I made up for in acne; I had more pimples than the milky way had stars.

I was as fucking far away from being the “cool“ quarterback teenager type as possible, and there was one area in my life where I struggled immensely because of it: Dating.

I just could not muster up the courage to walk in broad daylight towards a member of the other sex and ask them out.

Being the lazy bastard that I am, I started to look for ways that enabled me to get dates without having to approach girls on the streets.

And behold, I found a way to bypass my fear of talking to girls in public: Online dating.

While approaching girls was difficult for me, sending the girls I liked a cool text on dating platforms was within my realm of capabilities.

Mobile device applications like Tinder enabled me to take a habit that was too hard for me (approaching girls in public) and simplify it for me (approaching girls online) so that even a pathetic coward like me could get some dates.

This process of simplification is what I call behavioral rescaling.

Suppose you have a habit that is not really sticky. In that case, you can make it easier to increase the chances that your desired habit becomes automatic.

Desired Behaviour  Mini Behaviours (5 min or less)
Reading a book a week. Read one page a day.
Run 10 miles in the morning. Put on your running shoes.
Meditate daily for 20 minutes. Take ten deep breathes.
Clean your room. Pick up three things.

According to BJ Fogg, there are six ability factors that you can manipulate to form or break a behavior:

The Six Simplicity Factors

1. Time

Time is finite; we all know that. The longer a behavior takes, the less likely it is that it will occur. If you want to increase the chances of a habit happening, make it shorter; if you want to decrease the probability, make it longer.

For forming new habits, ask yourself: Can I make the new behavior shorter? 

2. Money

The concept of money is known to all of us; if your newly formed habit is costly, you will need more motivation to keep it flowing. Tweak the price of a product down, and the sales will go up; increase the price, and the sales will go down. If your desired outcome is to get in shape, you can start a polo habit, but you will need an awful lot of motivation to get the money to feed your damn horse.

When forming new habits, ask yourself: Can I reduce the financial cost of my desired behavior?

3. Physical Effort

We are all lazy creatures by design who want to save as much energy as possible; this is particularly true for habit formation. If you want to increase the chances that you are going to read it, you can, for example, leave a book on your bed so that all you have to do is to open it up and read.

Remember: When you want to form a habit, reduce the physical effort to an absolute minimum; if you want to weaken a bad habit, make the physical effort harder.

When forming new habits, ask yourself: Can I make the behavior physically easier?

4. Brain Cycles

The cost of behavior is also determined by the level of mental effort and focus that is required to act.

If you want to form a Japanese learning routine, you probably need to have more motivation than if you want to create the routine of drinking a glass of water. This does not mean that you cannot learn Japanese, it means that to learn it, you must make it as simple as possible. When I learned Japanese, for example, I started by watching an anime episode with Japanese subtitles; my brain already knew how to watch TV, so all I had to do was to find a stream and enjoy a good episode of Hunter X Hunter.

When forming new habits, ask yourself: Can I reduce the cognitive cost of the habit? 

5. Social Deviance

Social deviance is the behavioral currency that describes how much the behavior aligns with the behaviors of your current group. If your friends are all party animals who drink a lot, ordering water and upsetting the desired group behavior will be harder than if your friends were a bunch of spiritual yogis who never drink at all.

We are the sum of the five people who we spend the most time with; if you want to form a new behavior, create a setting in which social deviance works for and not against you.

When forming new habits, ask yourself: Can you surround yourself with people who will support you and your desired behavioral transformation? 

6. Non‐Routine

Our brain loves to do the same things over and over again; doing something new is taxing for us. We are creatures of habit; if we have to do things that are not habitual, we spend brainpower. You have already encountered this behavioral currency; when you have not worked out in a while, and you have to force yourself to get the first workout behind you. The more often you do things, the more moments you have and the less brainpower that particular behavior requires.

When forming new habits, ask yourself: How can I integrate my new habit into the routines that I already have? 

The Ability Matrix

Case Study: Forming A Reading Habit

Below, you will find an example of how I manipulated the ability element to form a reading habit.

Can I make the new behavior shorter?  Yes, by scaling down my reading time goal; my new target is to read for 5 minutes instead of reading for an hour.
Can I reduce the financial cost of my desired behavior?  Reading many books is expensive; I can also use the internet to read books and articles for free.
Can I make the behavior physically easier? Yes, by manipulating my environment. I will place the book that I want to read on my night shelf so I all I have to do is to read it.
Can I reduce the cognitive cost of the habit?  Yes, I will read during the day and not at night when my will power battery is low.
Can you surround yourself with people who will support you and your desired behavioral transformation? Yes, I will join a book club where I have to present book reviews every month.
How can I integrate my new habit into the routines that I already have? 

I created an upgraded routine right after breakfast; this is a good space for my reading habit because it does not compete with other habits.

Extra Credit: Brain Train

Before we go onto the last level of the Fogg model, I would like you to think about a habit that you want to form and apply the principles of the ability matrix to it.

Remember, if you want to make a good habit stick, you make it simpler; if you want to weaken a bad habit, you try to make it harder.

The matrix will help you to investigate all six simplicity elements so that you can become the architect of your behavior and decide for yourself what habits you want to have and what habits you do not want to have.

Level Three: Trigger

Why did I eat that chocolate bar? I’m on a diet!

Why did I just waste 10 minutes browsing through IG stories? I have to work!

Why did I smoke last night? It tried to quit that bad habit!

If you are a normal human being, you will ask yourself questions like that all the time, and the truth is – if you are not Elon Musk, you probably make behavioral mistakes regularly.

I certainly have…

If you have followed me in my newsletter, you know that for a long time alcohol was to me what Kryptonite was to Superman. I just could not stay sober, no matter how committed I was, I just could not get rid of this pathological habit for good.

Sometimes I managed to say no for a week, sometimes for a month. However, eventually, I found myself hurt and ashamed in bed and saying to myself: “Again, Daniel?”

One day, after a particularly violent relapse, I was in so much pain and self-hate that I made a commitment to get technical about my behavioral problem and beat it for good.

To beat my bad habit, I reached out to some of the best behaviorists in the world. After countless interviews with them, I came to the conclusion that my failed attempts to quit booze were a result of my imperfect understanding of behavior mechanics.

This was liberating news; if my problem were information based and not character-based, I could learn the necessary techniques to contain the worst of me.

One of the behaviorists that I talked to was BJ Fogg, and he gave me one of the best pieces of advice ever for stopping bad habits:

If you can take the trigger away, you’ve solved your riddle, Daniel.”

Remember, according to the Fogg Model, behavior occurs if Trigger, Ability, and Motivation come together. To stop a behavior from happening, we, therefore, need to exclude at least one of the variables from the occasion.

The first step was to identify the trigger, so I asked myself: What triggered my alcohol habit?

External Versus Internal Triggers

To my surprise, I did not have one trigger; I had dozens! So, I started to create a trigger matrix because I figured that if I managed to learn more about the go signs of that bad habit, I could stop myself from pushing the gas pedal all the way through.

My trigger matrix can be separated into two dimensions, internal and external triggers.

For Example, Internal Triggers Can Be:

  • Existing routines
  • Thoughts
  • Memories
  • Emotions
  • Physical sensations

For Example, External Triggers Can Be:

  • Other people
  • Cues in your environment (advertisements for example)
  • Notifications
  • Language

Below you will find my trigger matrix for the bad drinking habit:

Internal Triggers
  • Sadness
  • Loneliness
  • Voices of self-doubt
  • Anxiety
  • Inner cravings for alcohol
  • Cravings for a romantic connection
  • Cravings for adventure
  • Cravings for numbness
  • Memories of me having awesome party nights
External Triggers
  • My roommates
  • Parties in my dorm
  • My friends asking me to drink
  • The weekend
  • Seeing alcohol at the supermarket
  • Being invited to parties
  • Advertisements on the TV

After thinking a lot about my trigger matrix, I realized that my living environment (living in a bachelor’s dorm basically) was not exactly suited to my goal of staying sober.

So, to eliminate my most powerful go signs, I moved out of the apartment. To this day, it was one of the most curative yet painful decisions of my life.

Although I could not take away internal triggers, just by eliminating my external triggers, I could FINALLY get a hold of my drinking habit by leaving an environment behind that was constantly bringing out the worst in me.

Exercise: Create Your Own Trigger Matrix

One of the most effective ways to weaken an undesired behavior is to reduce the number of triggers that that particular habit has.

Write down behaviors that you want to get rid of, identify the trigger, and attempt to take it out of the exclusion.

Below you will find a few examples of how I used the trigger matrix to get rid of a few of my bad habits.

Undesired Behaviour  Trigger  Trigger Exclusion 
Snacking ice cream in the middle of the night. I open my fridge and see ice cream. I put the ice cream in the back corner of the fridge, so I do not see it anymore.
Social-media procrastination. Notifications on my phone. Turn the notifications off.
Eating McDonald’s on my way home. McDonald’s sign on the street. Take a route where I do not see the trigger.
Compulsive Tindering Tinder app sign on my phone. Delete the app and only use the desktop application.

I decided to share these personal flaws of mine with you because I wanted to show you that what you do, think, feel, and value, all come down to the quality of the external triggers in your environment.

Just think of it this way. Imagine you are shooting a movie, yet you never tell anyone that it exists, how many people do you expect at the premiere?

Probably zero, right? In a way, you can think of triggers as the marketing element of your behavior psychology.

Professor Fogg identified three types of external triggers, which I would like to share with you really quickly:

Spark Triggers

Spark triggers help when you can do a behavior, but are not motivating enough to act out on the trigger.

Example: An advertisement that asks you to buy something that you do not currently want.

Signal Triggers

A signal trigger is a reminder where you are motivated to buy something but are not capable of buying it.

Example: An example here could be the instructions given to you when you set up your new phone.

Facilitator Triggers

Facilitator triggers are the most powerful triggers; they combine both motivation and ability.

Example: You get an advertisement for a new watch that you always wanted to have, and you actually have the money and the technological tool to buy it within a few clicks.

Hot Versus Cold Triggers

One of the reasons why I moved out of my apartment was because I realized that I was surrounded by hot triggers, aka facilitators.

A hot trigger is a reminder that combines both motivation and ability; when my friends asked me to party with them, they know exactly what buttons to push with me to unlock “party Daniel” so I was motivated right away; they also showed me alcohol, so all I had to do was to say yes and forget my sobriety vows.

After I moved out of that apartment, I was still triggered. However, the number of hot triggers in my environment was drastically reduced.

In Germany, it is pretty much impossible to avoid all alcohol triggers. However, for me personally, going to the supermarket and seeing a beer there was a cold trigger because I could buy it. However, I lacked the motivation to do so because my friends were not pitching to me that night to come out partying.

Five Rs Of Behaviour Architecture

Now that we have fought through the entirety of the Fogg behavior model and its different behavioral elements, it is time to become pragmatic and deduct a simple hands-on question catalog that enables us to form and break habits at will or in simpler words – become a behavior architect.

Below you will find both a matrix for building and breaking habits. The five questions below are what I call the five Rs of behavior architecture, and each of them is a question that is derived from one element of the Fogg Behaviour Model.

Five Rs of Behaviour Architecture  Habit Formation 
Remember (Trigger) Have I created a reminder?
Rescale (Ability) Have I simplified the behavior?
Reinforce (Motivation) Have I made the habit attractive enough?
Reshape (Environment) Have I reshaped my environment with my desired new behavior?
Reinvent (Identity) Have I aligned my identity with my new habit?

Case Study: Forming A Language Learning Habit

Five Rs of Behaviour Architecture  – Forming Habits 
Have I created a reminder? Yes, my trigger is the feeling of sitting down in my favorite chair at home.
Have I simplified the behavior? Yes, my starting goal is to just practice 30 seconds in my language learning app to hack the automation behind it, I can scale it up later.
Have I made the habit attractive enough? Yes, it is integrated into my ideal future blueprint. Learning a new language will increase my chances of marrying a hot foreign girl.
Have I reshaped my environment with my desired new behavior? Yes, I downloaded the Duolingo app on my phone.
Have I aligned my identity with my new habit? Yes, I see myself now as an ultra-learner, a guy who learns fast and effectively.

New Habit Formula: After I sit in my favorite chair I will study Spanish on Duolingo for 30 seconds because learning Spanish is part of my ideal future blueprint.

Habit Matrix For Behavior Stop

Case study: Breaking the porn habit

Five Rs of Behaviour Architecture  Habit Stop System 
Remember (Trigger) Can I remove the trigger?
Rescale (Ability) Can I make behavior harder?
Reinforce (Motivation) Can I make the habit less attractive or even painful?
Reshape (Environment) Can I design my environment against my undesired bad habit?
Reinvent (Identity) Can I adopt an identity that would make my bad habit less familiar?

Case Study: Getting Rid Of An Undesired Masturbation Habit

Five Rs of Behaviour Architecture – Habit Stop System 
Can I remove the trigger? Yes, I will download a porn blocker app.
Can I make the behavior harder? Yes, by having the porn blocker app, I cannot watch porn on my phone anymore; now I have to uninstall the app if I want to masturbate and consume porn.
Can I make the habit less attractive or even painful? Yes, every time I break my vow of no fapping, I will give $10 to my best friend.
Can I design my environment against my undesired bad habit? Yes, I ordered a porn addiction book to learn more about my addictive habit.
Can I adopt an identity that would make my bad habit identity incongruent? I can see myself as a good person who is not supporting the online exploitation of women. I do not like the porn business, and I do not want to pay with my clicks anymore and be an accomplice.

New Habit Stop Formula: After I open a porn app, I will pull my no fap rubber band and punish myself a tiny bit because watching porn makes me unhappy in the long run.

Where To Go From Here?

Habit formation is not a science, it is a skill, and just like with any skill, it takes time and practice to form habits that stick.

Once you become fluent in the language of change, everything becomes possible, and failure is not a failure anymore.

Before learning behavior mechanics, I have often blamed myself for my shortcomings. Now, I have swapped self-hate and shame for curiosity, and I suggest that you do the same.

You have learned in this article that habits are the building blocks of your life, the only question left for you to ask is: What kind of life do you want to build?

Do You Want To Change Your Habits? 

 

 

Your Life’s Blueprint – A Psychological Speech By Dr. Marthin Luther King

In this article, you will find Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous speech “Future Blueprint”.

I stumbled over the speech below while I did some research for my upcoming book “The Behaviour Architect“.

Speech Transcript

I want to ask you a question, and that is: what is in your life’s Blueprint?

This is the most important and crucial period of your lives. For what you do now and what you decide now at this age may well determine which way your life shall go.

And whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint. And that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, as the model, for those who are to build the building. And a building is not well erected without a good, sound, and solid blueprint.

Now each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives, and the question is: whether you have a proper, a solid, and a sound blueprint.

And I want to suggest some of the things that should be in your life’s blueprint.

Number 1: Principal of Somebodiness

Number one in your life’s blueprint should be: a deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth and your own somebodies. Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.

Now that means you should not be ashamed of your color. You know, it’s very unfortunate that in so many instances, our society has placed a stigma on the Negro’s color. You know there are some Negros who are ashamed of themselves? Don’t be ashamed of your color. Don’t be ashamed of your biological features.

Somehow you must be able to say in your own lives, and really believe it, “I Am Black But Beautiful!” and believe that in your heart. And therefore you need not be lured into purchasing cosmetics advertised to make you lighter, neither do you need to process your hair to make it appear straight. I have good hair and it is as good as anybody else’s in the world. And we’ve got to believe that.

Now in your life’s blueprint, be sure that you have a principle of somebodiness.

Number 2: Determination to achieve excellence

Secondly, in your life’s blueprint you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. You’re going to be deciding as the days and the years unfold, what you will do in life — what your life’s work will be.

And once you discover what it will be, set out to do it, and to do it well.

And I say to you, my young friends, that doors are opening to each of you — doors of opportunity are opening to each of you that were not open to your mothers and your fathers — and the great challenge facing you is to be ready to enter these doors as they open.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist, said in a lecture back in 1871 that, “If a man can write a better book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

This hadn’t always been true — but it will become increasingly true. And so I would urge you to study hard, to burn the midnight oil. I would say to you, don’t drop out of school. And I understand all of the sociological reasons why we often drop out of school.

But I urge you in spite of your economic plight, in spite of the situation that you are forced to live so often with intolerable conditions, stay in school.

And when you discover what you’re going to be in life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. And just don’t set out to do a good Negro job but do a good job that anybody could do.

Don’t set out to be just a good Negro doctor, a good Negro lawyer, a good Negro school teacher, a good Negro preacher, a good Negro barber, a beautician, a good Negro skilled laborer… for if you set out to do that, you have already flunked your matriculation exam for entrance into the University of Integration.

Set out to do a good job and do that job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn couldn’t do it any better.

If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera, and sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

If you can’t be a pine on the top of the hill,

Be a scrub in the valley but –

be the best little scrub on the side of the hill.

Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.

If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail.

If you can’t be the sun, be a star,

For it isn’t by size that you win or you fail.

Be the best of whatever you are.

We always, we already have some noble examples of Black men and Black women who demonstrated to us that human nature cannot be catalogued. They in their own lives have walked through long and desolate nights of oppression, and yet they’ve risen up and plunged against cloud-filled nights of affliction, new and blazing stars of inspiration.

And so from an old slave cabin of Virginia’s hills, Booker T Washington rose up to be one of America’s great leaders. He lit a torch in Alabama and darkness fled in that setting.

Yes, you should know this because it’s in your own city. From a poverty-stricken area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Marian Anderson rose up to be the world’s greatest contralto so that a Toscanini could say that a voice like this comes only once in a century, and Sibelius of Finland could say my roof is too low for such a voice.

From the Red Hills of Gordon County, Georgia and the arms of a mother who could neither read nor write, Roland Hayes rose up to be one of the world’s great singers and carried his melodious voice into the palaces and mansions of kings and queens.

From crippling circumstances, there came a George Washington Carver to carve for himself an imperishable niche in the annals of science. There was a star in the diplomatic sky, and then came Ralph Bunche, the grandson of a slave preacher, and he reached up and grabbed it and allowed it to shine in his life with all of its scintillating beauty. There was a star in the athletic sky.

And then came Jackie Robinson in his day and Willie Mays in his day with their powerful bats and their calm spirits. Then came Jesse Owens with his fleet and dashing feet. Then came Joe Lewis and Muhammad Ali with their [adjudicated] fists.

All of them came to tell us that we can be somebody and to justify the conviction of the poet:

Fleecy locks, and black complexion

Cannot forfeit nature’s claim.

Skin may differ, but affection

Dwells in black and white the same.

And if I were so tall as to reach the pole,

And to grasp the ocean at a span,

I must be measured by my soul.

The mind is a standard of the man.

Number 3: Commitment to the Eternal Principles

And finally, in your life’s blueprint must be a commitment to the eternal principles of beauty, love, and justice. Don’t allow anybody to pull you so low as to make you hate them.

Don’t allow anybody to cause you to lose your self-respect to the point that you do not struggle for justice. However young you are, you have a responsibility to seek to make your nation a better nation in which to live.

You have a responsibility to seek to make life better for everybody. And so you must be involved in the struggle for freedom and justice.

Now in this struggle for freedom and justice, there are many constructive things that we all can do and that we all must do. And we must not give ourselves to those things which will not solve our problems.

You’ve heard the word “nonviolent” and you’ve heard the word “violent.” I happen to believe in nonviolence. We’ve struggled with this method with young people and adults alike all over the south. And we have won some significant victories. And we’ve got to struggle with it all over the north because the problems are as serious in the north as they are in the south.

But I believe as we struggle with these problems, we’ve got to struggle with them with a method that can be militant but at the same time does not destroy life or property.

And so our slogan must not be “Burn, baby, burn,” it must be “Build, baby, build.” Organize, baby, organize.

Yes, our slogan must be “Learn, baby, learn” so that we can earn, baby, earn.

And with a powerful commitment, I believe that we can transform dark yesterdays of injustice into bright tomorrows of justice and humanity. Let us keep going toward the goal of selfhood, toward the realization of the dream of brotherhood, and toward the realization of the dream of understanding and goodwill. Let nobody stop us.

I close by quoting once more the man that the young lady quoted, that magnificent black bard who is now passed on, Langston Hughes. One day, he wrote a poem entitled, “Mother to Son.” The mother didn’t always have her grammar right, but she uttered words of great symbolic profundity.

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor —

Bare.

But all the time

I’se been a-climbin’ on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now —

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Well, life for none of us has been a crystal stair. But we must keep moving. We must keep going.

If you can’t fly, run.

If you can’t run, walk.

If you can’t walk, crawl,

but by all means, keep moving!”

Do You Want To Change Your Habits? 

The Outcome Investigator: Use This Simple Technique To Find Out Why You Are Failing

In this article, I share with you the Outcome Investigator, a psychological technique that I invented to help you understand and correct your own failures effectively and quickly.

In 2005, the writer David Foster Wallace shared a story at a college commencement speech1, which I often use in my Habit Coaching Programs:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”

The moral of the anecdote is that humans, similar to fish, have their lives primarily determined by invisible forces: Habits, beliefs, cognitive patterns, values, and our living environment all shape the automatic choices that we do every single day.

It is this “water” that we “live” in that affects what we do, what we think, how we perform, and it ultimately adds up to who we become and what our life is going be like.

Suppose a goldfish is stuck in an aquarium with dirty water. In that case, there is a not lot that the fish can do besides getting sick and dying miserably.

The good news is, you are not a fucking goldfish, and you can transcend your dirty pond.

In this article, I am going to share with you the secrets of behavioural transformation so that you can leap out of your dirty water into an ocean of unlimited opportunities.

Translating Outcomes Into Habits

On a Wednesday in 2008, Michael Phelps woke up around 6:30 am in the Olympic Village in Beijing.

He jumped out of bed, put his Olympic sweatpants on and walked down to the cafeteria, eating his regular competition day dinner, which was a bagel with cream cheese, some fruit, and oatmeal, a good slow start of the 6,000 calories that he typically consumes within a day.

Phelps’s race for the day was scheduled for ten o’clock; his pre-race routine starts with stretching his entire body, which is so flexible that he could easily tour in a circus as a snake man.

At 8:30 he starts his warm-up in the pool, 800 meters of mixed styles, 600 meters of kicking, 400 meters of pull, 200 meters of stroke drills, and some sprint laps to get his heart rate up.

Around 9:15 he starts to squeeze into his custom-made race bodysuit, which is so tight that it takes almost half an hour to put on.

It is almost showtime, and Phelps starts to get into “the zone” by putting on his big headphones and listening to some punching hip hop beats.

Michael Phelps finished the race in 50.58 seconds, he won gold, and he broke the Olympic world record; on that day, Michael Phelps became the fastest swimmer of all time.

Or did he?

Michael Phelps certainly succeeded that week in producing his precious desired outcome of winning Olympic gold medals (and sending everybody else home with an ass whooping), but the greatest swimmer of all time was not made in that single day, it all started years earlier.

Phelps excellence was not created in 2008; it all started in 1992 when 9-year-old Michael was driving his family and teachers crazy.

He had too much energy; they figured it would be best to consult a doctor:

I was told by one of his teachers that he couldn’t focus on anything“, said Debbi Phelps, his mother.

Shortly after, 9-year-old Michael was diagnosed with ADHD.

After Michael got into all sorts of trouble at school, Debbie Phelps decided that it was a good idea to put Michael into a swimming course, so that he could channel his extra energy productively.

Michael immediately fell in love with swimming.

His ADHD symptoms and his extreme emotionality were still a problem.

Little Michael hated losing, to the extent that his emotions would often get the best of him, and one time when he came in second, he immediately ripped off his goggles and threw them angrily around.

To counter out Michaels impulsivity, his mother came up with all sorts of habits and techniques to teach Michael how to conduct himself properly:

We came up with a signal that I could give him from the stands; I would form a “C” with my hand, which stood for “compose yourself”.

Every time little Michael was about to lose it, he would look at his mother, and he would see her making a C which reminded him to CONTROL himself and his emotions.

Michael’s mother was not the only one who saw something in him, Bob Bowman, a local swimming coach, immediately realised that little Michael had the right kind of physical preconditions to become a great swimmer.

Giant hands, similar to scuba paddles, long torso, and short legs, and the capability to obsess to a crazy extent about sports.

Phelps loved swimming so much that he would not miss one single swimming practice under Bowman in the first ten years.

Bowman, who believed that little Michael had what it took to become a pro someday, knew from experience, that on a professional level, everybody was talented and obsessive.

Bowman knew that the key to transforming little Michael into a world-class swimmer was by installing into him the right kind of habits.

Bowman designed several pre-race rituals for Michael to get him into the right mindset.

When he was coaching Michael as a teenager, Bowman would tell Michael to go home and “watch the video-tape “.

Watch the video-tape. Watch it before you go to sleep and when you wake up”.

The video-tape was not a physical thing; it was a visualisation exercise of Phelps swimming the perfect race.

From start to finish, picturing in his mind how he would jump from the starting block to the feeling he would have when he touched the end of the swimming pool first.

Once the real race arrived, Bowman would shout “Put on the video-tape!”.

Once given the signal, Phelps would take off, and swim one perfect race after another until he eventually became an Olympic champion and arguably the greatest swimmer who ever lived.

What Is The Moral Of The Phelps Story?

Your current life results are a product of the behavioural systems that were installed around and within you years ago.

The outcome of being a gold medal winner was not produced in a day; it was a collaborative effort by many people who succeeded in creating habits, beliefs, thinking patterns, and a living environment that made world-class success inevitable for Michael Phelps.

Who you are today is an outcome; if you change what you do, think, believe, and who you surround yourself with, you will produce a new outcome, a new you.

We all have things we would like to have.

For some people, those desired outcomes can be passing that pain in the ass math exam, for others it could be to lose 20 pounds to look sexy in their new swimsuit, others would like to make a million dollars, and other people would like to find the love of their life.

All of these outcomes are produced by changing the producer itself – this means that if you want something different, you need to become someone different.

The Outcome Investigator: Use This Simple Technique To Find Out Why You Are Failing

The first step of behavioural transformation is to find out who exactly one should become, and what kind of habits one needs to acquire to produce the desired outcomes.

One of the most effective yet straightforward exercises I ever created is what I call the Outcome Investigator. It is a simple exercise to explore the why behind a desired or undesired outcome. Only by translating our results into causes are we equipped to change the roots of our problems.

The exercise is simple, write down your current life outcomes in the left column, and in the right column, write down how you are producing this outcome.

The outcome could be:

  • A broken relationship
  • An empty bank account
  • Being out of shape
  • Being depressed
  • Being stuck in a meaningless career

The cause could be:

  • A habit
  • A belief
  • A thinking pattern
  • A value system
  • An environmental setup

Below you will find an example of how one of my clients used the behaviour investigator to deconstruct an undesired outcome that he was producing.

Undesired Current Outcome: Broken Relationship

Case Overview: 

Jon: ”My relationship is on its last legs. I’m absolutely certain that my partner and I are going to separate if we don’t manage to find out the why behind our current romantic failures. While I’m absolutely certain that my partner is my dream person, I’m definitively miles away from living my dream relationship. Fuck, if I’m honest, I’m closer to my nightmare relationship. We fight all the time, we don’t have sex anymore, we see the world differently, and I feel that whatever I’m doing, it’s not enough. I’m a guy who needs a woman who has my fucking back unconditionally. I do not have that right now, I feel insecure, and I’m afraid that if I come home, her stuff will be gone, and all I will find is a goodbye letter”.

Possible Causes  
Habits
What behavioural patterns are producing this outcome?
  • We stopped having regular date nights.
  • I don’t surprise her anymore with gestures of unconditional love.
  • We’ve gotten into the habit of fighting anything.
  • We’ve stopped our flirting habits.
  • I don’t take care of myself; before, I used to dress up to impress her, now I just don’t try anymore.
Thinking Patterns
What cognitive patterns are producing this outcome?
  • I often think “here we go again”.
  • I often say to myself “maybe I’m just not enough for this woman”.
  • Black and white thinking.
  • I daydream about going out with others to escape the pain of this relationship.
  • I often say to myself “I’ve tried everything now it’s up to her”.
Beliefs And Stories
What belief structures are producing this outcome?
  • The belief that this relationship is already over.
  • The belief that I’m not lovable.
  • The belief that my girlfriend will leave me anyway, no matter what I do.
  • The belief that I’m just not successful enough to attract someone special.
Environmental Set-Up
What role is my living environment playing in all of this?
  • Most of my friends are bachelors who continuously tell me sentences like “love should be easy”.
  • My girlfriend lives at my place; this sometimes hurts her because she cannot afford her own yet, so she also struggles with opening up about her emotions because she is afraid that conflict will cause her to lose her apartment.
  • My job is also stressing me the fuck out; I don’t feel like I can tolerate as much human stuff as I am supposed to.
Value Systems
Is my current priority system producing this result?
  • For a long time, I’ve been prioritising work over love. In the beginning, when all was going well, I had love as my North Star, this changed when the relationship became harder.

Producing A Different Future With The Outcome Investigating Technique

Once my client realised that he was a co-producer of the result called disconnection, he started to fix the things that he had control over. Surprise surprise – things got better for him and his girlfriend.

This technique is not only effective when it comes to an understanding of your past and current life results; it is a technique that can be used to change your future and manifest your desired outcomes.

Once you adopt the role of being the architect of your behaviour, you can start by outlining a future outcome that you want to produce and implement the habits, beliefs, value systems, environmental setups, and thinking patterns that will produce your desired future results so that your vision will become a reality.

Below you will find an example of how I used the outcome investigator to produce a desired future outcome with one of my clients.

Desired Future Outcome: Financial Freedom

Case Overview: 

Jaqueline: “I’m tired of being broke, I just can’t it anymore, I need to change this dimension of my life, and I need to change it fast. In the future, I want to buy my kids what they want, I want to be able to use my time to do what I love instead of selling my precious hours to somebody else who lets me do a task that I can’t extract any meaning from. I want to travel with my family, and I want to send my kids to the best schools so that they have the best chances to realise their potential. I’ve never been financially independent in my life; my parents taught me that money doesn’t matter; they always said what matters is happiness. Well, I don’t have money, and I’m super depressed about it, and I know that to feel good about myself, I need to install a certain level of financial security around me. Also, I don’t want my kids to grow up thinking that they are poor kids, I don’t want my husband to be our only source of income, I need to slay this monster of a problem; otherwise, I won’t become happy”.

Possible Causes  
Habits
What behavioural patterns can produce this outcome? What patterns will prevent this outcome from happening?
  • I need to install a money management system.
  • I need to install an investing habit.
  • I need to stop my compulsive shopping habits.
  • I need to create a financial education habit where I learn about the art of getting rich.
  • I need to install productivity habits, such as measuring my time.
  • I need a sophisticated goal-setting habit.
Thinking Patterns
What cognitive patterns can produce this outcome? What patterns will prevent this outcome from happening?
  • I need to stop thinking like a poor person.
  • I need to start making financial decisions based on my knowledge and not on my emotions.
  • My internal dialogue can’t be negative all the time; I need to believe in myself and cheer myself on from the inside.
Beliefs And Stories
What belief structures can produce this outcome? What belief structures will prevent this outcome from happening?
  • I need to become a saver and not a spender.
  • I need to become a producer who sells products instead of her time.
  • I need to internalise that financial freedom is achievable for me.
  • I need to divorce the old story that I do not have what it takes to become financially successful.
Environmental Set-Up
What does my environment have to look like to produce my desired outcome?
What it cannot look like?
  • I need to surround myself with people who are already producing the results that I want to have.
  • I need a mentor who I can ask financial questions.
  • I need friends who bring out the best in me.
  • I need to dress like a person who already is financially free.
  • I need to create a library in my apartment.
Value Systems
What do I have to value to make my desired outcome a reality? What values cannot I have any more?
  • I need to make competence and financial freedom my major North Stars.
  • I need to value hard work, sacrifice, and learning.
  • I need to devalue instant gratification.

Where To Go From Here?

The purpose of this article is to stress the fact that what is happening in your life is connected to what you do, think, believe, value, and surround yourself with.

Of course, life has a certain element of randomness to it. However, up to this day, I have never met a person whose life did not get better after they changed the things that they had control over.

One of the most therapeutic habits that I ever formed was what I call the outcome investigation habit; it is quite simple.

Whenever the world is not manifesting itself to me in the way I want it to, I ask myself this question;

Am I the producer of this undesired outcome?

If the answer to this question is yes, I immediately start an outcome investigation to find out how I am currently fucking up my life, so that I can swap my patterns of self-sabotage for success rituals.

Getting into the habit of becoming an outcome investigator will empower you to translate unpleasant realities into action steps, which has the potential of changing life results that you are producing effectively.

This mindset will help you to become a confident architect of your life, who is capable of producing successful outcomes in all of the relevant life dimensions; yes, this means that you can have it all if you want it badly enough.

Before I end this article, I would like to give you one last piece of warning:

Adopt your responsibilities intelligently, sometimes life is a bitch, and you must integrate random, undeserved suffering and misery into your equation of the world and life itself.

The best communication habits will not save your relationship if you are stuck with an asshole.

The best nutritional habits are sometimes not enough to prevent you from getting sick.

The most effective business rituals, sometimes, will not be successful in keeping your dream project alive.

But I can tell you something out of the experience; failure feels a lot less painful when you have done everything you can to prevent it.

Thank you for reading, now go and build your personal masterpiece of a life.

Do You Want To Change Your Habits? 

“This is Water” Habit Speech By David Foster Wallace

In this article, you will find David Foster Wallace’s famous speech “This Is Water”.

I stumbled over the speech below by David Foster Wallace1 while I did some research for my upcoming book “The Behaviour Architect“.

Speech Transcript

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

If, at this moment, you are worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please do not be. I am not a wise old fish. The primary point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, and important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude – but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole or abstract nonsense. So, let us get concrete…

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here is one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the most real, most vivid and important person in existence.

We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it is so socially repulsive. However, it is pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you have had that you were not at the absolute centre of.

The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your T.V., or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow. However, your own feelings are so immediate, urgent, real – you get the idea. But please do not worry that I am getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called “virtues”. This is not a matter of virtue – it is a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centred, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

By way of example, let us say it is an average day. You get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours. At the end of the day, you are tired, and you are stressed out. All you want to do is go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours, and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there is no food at home – you have not had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job – and so now after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It is the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should. When you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course, it is the time of day when all of the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. The store’s hideously, fluorescently lit and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop. It is pretty much the last place you want to be, but you cannot just get in and out quickly.

You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all of these other tired, hurried people with carts. Of course, there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle. You have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by. Eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there are not enough checkout lanes open even though it is the end-of-the-day rush. Hence, the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. However, you cannot take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything does not fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home. Then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV- intensive rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et cetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I do not make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I am going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food shop because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like these are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue, and my desire just to get home. It is going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid. Cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I have worked really hard all day, and I am starved and tired, and I cannot even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.

Or, of course, if I am in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all of the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas. I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam. I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all of the future’s fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth…

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do – except that, thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic, it does not have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It is the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I am operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is, is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It is not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he is trying to rush to the hospital, and he is in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am – it is actually I who is in his way. And so on.

Again, please do not think that I am giving you moral advice, or that I am saying you are “supposed to” think this way, or that anyone expects you just automatically to do it; because it is hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you are like me, some days you will not be able to do it, or you just flat-out will not want to. But most days, if you are aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line – maybe she is not usually like this; perhaps she has been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who is dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is a low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Department. The latter just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it is also not impossible – it just depends on what you want to consider. Suppose you are automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important – if you want to operate on your default-setting – then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that are not pointless and annoying. But if you have really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true: The only thing that is, is the capital T in “True”, and that you get to decide how you are going to try to see it. You get to decide what has meaning and what does not consciously. You get to decide what to worship…

Because here is something else that is true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism there is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then, you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It is the truth.

Worship your own body, beauty, and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. When time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already – it has been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, and parables: The skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up – upfront in your daily consciousness. Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need even more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, and always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They are the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that is what you are doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course, there are all different kinds of freedom and the most precious kind you will not hear talked about much in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, awareness, discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in a myriad of petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably does not sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, as far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please do not dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital T in Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness – awareness of what is so real and essential, hidden in plain sight all around us, so that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water”.

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: Your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Implementation Intentions – Use This Simple Formula To Build New Habits Quickly

Millions of people in the world make New Year’s resolutions each year. Still, only a tiny fraction of the people manage to keep them.

Through my habit coaching practice, I have identified five common mistakes people make when they are trying to form a new habit:

  1. They do not make the behaviour specific enough.
  2. They choose habits that are too difficult.
  3. They do not create trigger systems.
  4. They create “should habits” and not “want habits”.
  5. They do not align their environment or identity with their desired new habit.

Most people assume that people who follow through with their resolutions do so because they have more willpower or motivation, but that does not seem to be the case.

In today’s article, I am going to share with you a fun study, which reveals that motivation is not the most crucial variable in the habit loop.

I am also going to introduce you to an idiot-proof technique that will help you to stick to your resolutions and form new habits effectively and quickly.

Motivation Is Overrated

“You have it easy Daniel, you just naturally have a lot of willpower… My genetics are what they are, I’m just not an athlete like you, there isn’t a whole lot that I can do about it,” a client of mine recently said to me.

In my private practice, I stumble over disempowering beliefs like that a lot. The most toxic beliefs, however, crumble if one takes the effort of investigating the validity of the claim.

My client did not have any intel about the quality of his genetics or mine for that matter. It was an unhelpful assumption by them to conclude that they have different fitness results because I was born with more willpower or better genetics.

Of course, this could be the case, but it could easily be the case that my health and fitness habits were just superior.

While willpower and genetics are important, there is something more important…

The Power Of Implementation Intentions

In 2001, scientists from England conducted a study with 248 individuals who wanted to build better habits1.

The first group was simply advised to track their habits and write down how often they exercised.

The second group was called the “motivation” group. They were also asked to write down how often they exercised. But they were given reading material about the benefits of working out. The reading material also included the negative consequences of not working out, so they tried to tap both into hope and fear for motivation.

The third group was the most interesting; they received the same reading material as the “motivation” group but were also asked to create tiny behavioural strategies – implementation intentions.

They all had to complete the sentence: “During the next week, I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on {Day} at {Time} in {Place}2“.

Implementation Intentions Habits

The Results: Strategy > Motivation

In the first two groups, 35 to 38% of the people worked out at least once per week.

Surprisingly, 91% of the group who had to articulate the behavioural strategies actually worked out at least once a week.

Fascinating, isn’t it? Simply strategically writing down your goals leads to a significant increase in the probability that the behaviour is actually going to occur.

What is even more mind-blowing is that the motivation group and control group performed the same, the research even went so far as to say:

Motivation… had no significant effect on the exercise’s behaviour.

Compare these discoveries to my client, who claimed that they could not work out due to their shortage of willpower.

One of the things that I learned while deconstructing some of the most successful people in the world on my Podcast was that outstanding people do not necessarily have outstanding talent. But, they all had an outstanding standard of behavioural execution.

The study suggests that it is indeed not only the size of our dreams that matters but also the quality of our execution.

The Habit Formula

The behavioural strategy that group three used is what psychologists call implementation intentions or in short – if-then plans.

If you have read my last articles about the anatomy of behaviour, then you already know a lot about habit loops. What the researchers did was to let the members of the group create a reminder. This go sign enabled the participants of the study to act after the command.

The reminder is the first ingredient of the habit formula. This reminder can be an external alarm, an internal feeling, another habit, a thought, another person telling you what to do, or even the smell of a Dorito bag.

The second ingredient of the formula is a specific routine. The simpler and more clearly defined the habit, the higher the chances that the individual actually follows through with them.

Another reason why people fail with their resolutions is that they confuse habit bundles for specific behaviours.

Going to the gym, for example, is not a single habit, it is a stack of different behaviours, including putting on shoes, showering, lifting weights, driving to the gym, etc.

The more specific your habit recipe is, the simpler it will be to investigate whether or not you have chosen the right place in your schedule for your desired new habit.

Many people underestimate the complexity of their habits and try to squeeze big rituals into tiny time slots, only to be surprised that they never find the “time” to do what they want to do.

Example: If you want to work out, you have to find a spot in your schedule that also has space for the surrounding habits of your exercise routine (driving to the gym, showering, cool off time, flexing in the mirror, protein drink, recovery). Working out might only cost you forty minutes. But, if you take everything into consideration, it is more like an hour at least.

The third and last ingredient of the habit formula is the why behind the behaviour, we are all lazy creatures who need a reason to act.

At the moment of action, we have to believe that our behavioural Investment will give us the result that we want to have.

Example: We exercise because we value the goal of being in shape.

The easiest way to form new habits can, therefore, be condensed into this habit formula3:

After I {Reminder}, I will {Routine} because {Reason}.

Yup that is it. It does not look too complicated, right? That is because it is not. Understanding the anatomy of behaviour is easy, mastering the art of habit formation still takes time and effort though.

Think of it this way. Just because you understand the rules of basketball, does not mean that you can score a basket in an actual basketball game.

Based on this truth, I will now share with you three stories from behaviour architects who managed to create new habits with the help of the habit formula.

Habit Formation In The Real World

Josh: How I Managed To Read A Book A Week 

“Before I discovered the habit formula, I relied on my motivation to perform new habits. For years I wanted to become a speed reader, but I never managed to make the reading habit stick. My motivation is a bit like a wave, sometimes I’m hyper-motivated, and I actually manage to sit my ass down and read 50+ pages a night. And sometimes I just don’t feel like it. Because of this pattern, I lost my reading routine every time I was stuck in a motivational valley. What helped me was to create an action plan that integrated all three habit ingredients – Reminder – Routine – Reason.

My habit formula was simple –

“After my butt touches my bed sheets at night, I will pick up the book next to my bed because reading books will help me to become who I want to be.”

In the beginning, my habit was only to pick up the book, that by itself was a success. After all, it’s about hacking the automation behind the behaviour, right? After four days of doing it, it became habitual for my brain to touch my books once I came home from work. What helped me to make the habit stick was the combination of forming a reminder and saying out loud why this behavioural investment is worth it.

It’s been 6 months now since I formed this habit and I feel much more competent in my work and also in my overall life.

Susanne: How I Managed To Improve My Relationship In Record Time 

“When I got my new promotion, I felt that I was going to be so happy. Finally, more money and more status. I worked hard and long for that outcome, and when it happened, I immediately promised to over-deliver. I lived for my job, everything else wasn’t a priority. As you can imagine, my relationship went down the toilet. My boyfriend wasn’t happy anymore and nearly broke up with me. I realised that I have to live a more balanced life to keep my favourite human in my life. I started to investigate episodes of our relationship where things were doing great, which allowed me to create my own relationship success recipe.

This recipe showed me that my boyfriend was ok with me working a lot, what he wasn’t ok with was feeling like he doesn’t have a place in my life anymore.

To counter this painful outcome, I formed a new relationship habit:

After I leave the house, I will leave my boyfriend a voice message where I tell him how much I love him because this will show him that he still is my favourite human in the world.

This daily ritual deepened our bond, and with time, both he and I learned to always make room for each other in our busy lives. I love him, and I will marry him soon.

Mario: How I Managed To Beat My Shopping Compulsion 

“I don’t know where it comes from, but damn, no matter how much money I make, I find a way to spend all of it within the first two weeks. This pattern hurts my partner and me. I make good money, and there is absolutely no reason for me to constantly put myself in painful financial situations because of my shopping sprees. Sometimes it’s a new camera, other times it’s a new home entertainment set… I never stick to my budget. After a particularly painful month where I couldn’t buy my partner a gift she wanted, I decided to make a shift and form a new habit against my shopping addiction. Whenever I would think about buying something, I would do the following habit:

After I want to buy something, I will ask myself whether or not I really need this because turning a blind eye to my finances hurts me very much.

Most of my shopping urges go away that way. The combination of having a counter habit, and simultaneously reminding myself that this habit is hurting me helps me to skip it most of the time entirely. Fuck, I would even go so far as to call me a minimalist now. When I didn’t buy new stuff for a month, I feel like a financial wizard. This habit gives me confidence and helps me to become more of who I want to be.

Where To Go From Here?

Learning about habit formation is a skill that will enable you to transform yourself from who you are today into who you need to become, to give birth to a newer, better version of yourself.

Every habit, no matter how tiny, mundane, or insignificant moves you either closer or further away from becoming the person who is capable of producing the life results that you are after.

Implementation intentions like the habit formula are great because they give you the means to change the course of your life one habit at a time, and the only question that is left for you to ask is:

Where Do You Want To Go And What Habits Will Bring You There?

Do You Want To Change Your Habits? 

 

The Behavior Detective – A Simple Technique To Spot Bad Patterns Right Away

In this article, you will learn about a simple technique I have invented to help you spot bad habits sooner and end them before they end up ending you.

When I was 28 years old, I was sleeping in the waiting room of an ugly hospital right outside of Hamburg.

My dreams were interrupted by an elderly Polish nurse who came into the room and shouted at me:

“Ey! wake up. Your father wants to see you, and for god’s sake, put your shoes on and take your bloody books with you, this is a hospital and not your damn living room!”

I got up, collected my psychology books, smiled at the nurse, and said: “Thank you”.

Paulina (the nurse) and I danced this routine for a couple of days in a row; she was the only nurse in the hospital that went above and beyond to keep my bat shit crazy father alive. I liked her.

I followed her through a couple of doors that opened by themselves by motion sensors.

“You know where he is“, she said while giving me one last angry look.

My dad’s room was at the end of the corridor of the cardiology ward.

I stopped for a second to take a deep breath and to pull my shoulders back – ”Don’t go soft now, Daniel”, I said to myself.

I hear two people cursing around the corner, and I see two nurses, a doctor, and a fat guy on a stretcher rush by me towards the emergency room.

I went on my way, speaking to myself about how very much I dislike hospitals.

I finally arrive at the doorstep. The door has a small, prisonescque glass window; I open the heavy door.

I see my old man lying in bed, next to him are big machines that are connected to him with tubes that go into his arms and up his nose.

“Oh, look prince busy gave himself the honours, what took you so long asshole?”, my father said jokingly.

“Shut up you old fart; you should be glad that I came all the way just to kick your ass in backgammon”, I responded.

He pulled out the backgammon game, but before we start, I take his hand and tell him that he is going to be all right.

His hand was ice cold, and I nearly cracked because it was apparent that the shadow of death was over him that day.

While playing, he explained to me the technical procedures of the heart surgery that he was going to have the next day.

He tells me that I do not have to worry and that if he does not wake up, at least, he does not have to eat his wife’s disgusting food anymore.

We both burst into laughter.

After I “let” my dad win at backgammon, I went outside to get some snacks for what could be our last time hanging out.

The second the door closes, I feel my eyes tear up, and I move through the yellowish, stinky corridors of the hospital.

Before I went to organise the snacks, I needed a minute for myself.

Just outside of the hospital was a spot in which I enjoyed taking a break from putting on the show of the tough, unphased son.

I looked up into the sky and saw that there was not a single cloud that night; above me was an ocean of stars with a crescent moon.

I see a guy walking from the hospital towards me, in his hand is a small plastic bag.

I knew him.

Earlier that day, we had chatted in the cafeteria; his wife delivered a baby prematurely, and both his wife and the baby had to stay in the hospital for the week.

We chatted a little, and I saw what was inside his bag: A litre of Coca-Cola, chips, and a box of cigarettes.

Without much thinking, he took the pack of cigarettes removed the plastic, and snips with his finger against the bottom of the box in a cool manner.

A cigarette appeared, and he says: “Want some?”

I just stare at him without saying anything; obviously, he does not know that my dad’s year-long smoking ritual caused his heart disease.

The guy was in his mid-thirties.

My father started smoking in his mid-thirties; twenty years later, he was at risk of leaving earth prematurely because of one bad habit.

I was fascinated by the situation; it felt as if I had travelled back in time and could see the root cause of my father’s heart disease.

As I was sitting there, I could not stop thinking about the potential unnecessary suffering that would befall this guy and his family in the future for this one bad habit.

I opened up my journal and made the first behavioural analysis of my life:

 

Pattern

What is the pattern?

Payoff

What is this pattern giving him?

Price

What is this pattern costing him?

Smoking Relaxation 6 Euro a pack…

Yellow teeth…

Heart problems…

Erectile dysfunction…

Possible loss of limbs…

Cancer…

Pain for this family if he dies…

A loss for his company if he cannot work anymore…

I was dumbfounded by the shittiness of the behavioural investment that this young father was about to make.

I ripped out the page from my journal and gave it to him before I left.

I do not know what he did with it, maybe he stopped smoking for a night, perhaps he used the page to light himself another cigarette, who the fuck knows…

On that night, however, I learned that the quality of our lives comes down to the quality of our behavioural investments.

When my father decided to become a smoker thirty years ago, he also decided to accept the potential future price of that behaviour.

In the case of smoking, this behavioural price is life itself.

The problem with bad habits is that we do them automatically; when the father purchased a bag of chips, cola, and cigarettes, he did not analyse his behavioural decision strategically, he just got the stuff that he always got; he acted out of habit, or so I believed.

One of the most significant challenges of behaviour architecture is to make invisible habits visible again.

Self-awareness is the enemy of disempowering behavioural patterns. Read that sentence again.

The only way that we can maintain harmful behavioural patterns is by turning a blind eye to the long-term consequences of our bad habits.

My father’s heart disease did not sneak up on him; he worked on it diligently for thirty years by sucking on cancer sticks eight times a day.

To prevent painful wake-up moments, we need a simple tool that allows us to identify our current disempowering patterns to save our future from ourselves.

This tool is the Behaviour Detective, a simple psychological technique I built that has helped me to identify patterns of self-destruction within myself and my clients.

The Behaviour Detective – A Technique To Spot Bad Patterns Right Away

Now that you have learned that one bad habit can be enough to take out a man, you might ask yourself: What can I do to spot disempowering patterns before they turn my life into a big pile of horse shit? 

For that manner, I have developed a simple behaviour exercise that I call The Behaviour Detective1.

The exercise is quite simple; take a habit, a thought, a belief, or an environmental set-up and investigate:

  1. What is this pattern giving you?
  2. What is this pattern costing you?
  3. Whether or not this behavioural investment is good (+) bad (-) or neutral (=).

Behavioural patterns are the building blocks of your life. If you are in doubt whether or not a habit, a thought, a belief, or an environmental set-up is good or bad for you, simply ask yourself;

Is this pattern turning me more into who I want to become, or is this pattern moving me away from becoming the hero of my own story2?

The Behaviour Detective is a simple method that I use within all of my behavioural architecture coaching programs, because it helps individuals to gain mastery in the most crucial field there is, which is knowing ourselves.

Everything we do is a decision whether we like it or not; nothing is ever truly neutral. Nothing.

When we decide to go out on a Friday night to get smashed, we simultaneously decide to be in pain on Saturday.

When we decide to stay longer at the office, we, at the same time, prioritise work over the connections, and we are going to pay the price for that behavioural decision.

Each Netflix and ice cream binge (as fun as they are) is a step away from your desired beach body.

If you only take one idea away from this article, then let it be this one: The quality of your daily decisions determines the quality of your life. 

Below, you will find an example of how I used the Behaviour Detective this week to investigate the price of my habits. You will find a free downloadable worksheet at the end of the article, but I figured I would show you some of my flaws so that you can be open about yours as well.

 

Pattern (Habit, Thought, Belief, Environmental Set-Up) What Is This Pattern Giving Me?
(Today, In 6 Months, In 3 Years)
What Is This Pattern Costing Me?
(Today, In 6 Months, In 3 Years)
Good (+)Bad (-)Neutral (=) What Will You Do About It?
Snoozing for 25 minutes. Today: Bit of comfort, a delay of my morning routine.
In the future, this isn’t giving me a whole lot, to be honest.
Today: This habit fucks up my entire morning routine. I feel as if I’m starting the day as a failure, and this feeling accompanies me through the day.
In the future, this habit can literally be one of the reasons why I won’t become the person I know I could be. High-performance people don’t have this habit; they don’t start the day like that.
BAD HABIT! (-) I will ask my roomie to knock on my door so that I will get up in time.
Ruminating about my ex-girlfriend. As a romantic, it sometimes feels good to play the “What if game” and relive past experiences that felt good at the time. This cognitive habit hurts me psychologically because it reopens my old wounds.
In the future, this habit, for once, could make me bitter, resentful, and depressed. It could possibly ruin my chances of meeting my future soulmate because I’m still stuck in one of my self-created grieving loops.
BAD HABIT! (-) Whenever the depressed entity  within me reminds me of my loss, I will say, “This memory is hurting me, let’s look forward shall we Daniel?”
Compulsive protein bar snacking. Protein bars are delicious, and they give me, as the name says – a lot of protein. I like being a muscle giant, and those bars give me the feeling of growing into a strong person. Eating one bar would be fine, but I sometimes eat 3-5 within a day. This is $10 a day, which compounds to $300 a month.
Additionally, to the financial downside, it’s almost impossible for me now to hit my caloric sweet spot, which means that I gain weight and fat because I snack 400 calorie bars all the time. So, in the future, this habit will not only not give me my dream body; it will actually move me away from it.
BAD HABIT! (-) I will establish a policy of eating only 2 bars per day; one in the morning and one after my workout.

Other snacks will be veggies.

What Is Next?

I do not intend to promote flawless behaviour, mistakes are fun – and necessary, but I feel that you should always be aware of the consequences of your actions so that you can decide whether or not you proceed with your current course of conduct.

People within my private counselling practice often reach out to me after they have had rude awakenings.

I had a client who overworked for years and wondered why his wife divorced him.

Another one of my clients never managed to contain her procrastinative habits and cannot understand why she never got the promotion that she felt she deserved.

A friend of mine recently was diagnosed with HIV because he never managed to eradicate his bad habit of having unprotected sex.

Bad habits have a few things in common:

  1. They sacrifice the future for the present.
  2. They start small.
  3. They have positive emotions attached to them.
  4. You turn a blind eye to the negative consequences.

As I teach my clients in my habit coaching practice – it is your responsibility to become a behaviour detective and investigate your behavioural investment portfolio and kick out the deals that are costing you more than they are giving you.

As a wise behavioural investor, it is your job to bring your life to fruition and make your time on earth your personal masterpiece.

Do You Want To Change Your Habits? 

How Long Does It Take To Change Your Habits?

In this article, you will learn how long it ACTUALLY takes to form a new habit.

Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon in the 1950s who noticed a strange pattern among his patients1.

Almost whenever Dr Maltz would operate – like amputating an arm or a leg, he found that the patients would sense a phantom limb for about 21 days before adjusting to the new situation.

The same was true for other operations, such as when he would give other patients a nose job; two of the patients would also take roughly 21 days getting used to their new face.

These observations motivated Dr Maltz to investigate his own adjustment periods, and he noticed that it took him 21 days to form a new habit.

Maltz wrote about these discoveries:

“These, and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell”.

In the sixties, Maltz’s published his observations and thoughts on behaviour formation in his book Psycho-Cybernetics. That book became a cult classic, which sold more than 30 million times.

What followed was an avalanche of “personal development” gurus like Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, or Brian Tracy. Brian took his discovery, butchered his quote, and promoted the idea that it takes 21 days to form a new habit.

And this is where the shit show began…

First of all, Dr Maltz was not making an axiomatic statement of fact. He was simply describing his observation, and he made bloody sure to add the word “minimum” to it.

In the end, people kept throwing the number 21 around until it was widely regarded as the truth, even though it was not.

This is one of the reasons we all have to be careful with opinion-based mental health professionals on the internet; just because something sounds right, does not mean it is right.

But what is the real answer? If Dr Maxwell was wrong, who was right? How many days does it take to form a habit?

How Long Does It Actually Take To Grow A New Habit? (According To Science)

Phillippa Lally, a researcher at the University College London, conducted an experiment which gives a more scientific answer to the question: How long does it take to form a habit?3

She investigated the routines of 96 people over four months. Each person chooses a habit to keep for four months, and they reported back each day whether or not they did the habit, and if it felt automatic.

Some participants choose easy habits, such as “drinking a bottle of water with lunch”. In contrast, others preferred more demanding tasks, such as “running for 15 minutes before dinner”. By the end of the study, the researchers analysed the data and concluded:

On average, it takes two months before a new behaviour becomes automatic – 66 days to be precise.

In Lally’s study, it took anywhere from 18 days to 254 days for people to form a new habit.

A surprising discovery from her study was that “missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour did not materially affect the habit formation process”.

This means that the changes are less important than you make them out to be. If your goal is it to make it a habit of hitting the gym a routine, it is completely fine if you take a rest day here and there.

Instant Transformation

66 days is a long fucking time to change, right? Before your lazy ass gets disheartened, I would like to share with you three case studies that challenge the findings of Lally and her colleagues. They are personal anecdotes from either my life or the life of my clients; I am sharing them with you to show you that positive and negative transformation can happen in an instant.

Case One: Becoming A Health Nut Over Night

I once had a friend named Donovan, who had all sorts of bad nutritional habits, including overeating. I have once seen this dude get kicked out of an all you can eat restaurant because he got into a fight with the waiter because they ran out of ice cream (you can guess whose fault it was that they had no more ice cream, to begin with!!).

As a consequence of his compulsive eating habits, my friend developed a couple of nasty physical symptoms, none of them, however, seemed to bother him. In fact, he seemed to be getting happier the fatter he got.

He was proud of his behavioural insufficiencies and felt that his laid-back code of conduct was the reason he was so happy.

Things changed one day when his doctor ran a blood test and informed him that he had diabetes. At first, he was unphased, but when the doctor told him about the possible side effects, my friend’s eyes began to widen. One symptom, in particular, scared the crap out of him: Erectile dysfunction.

The moment he learned that his “manhood” was in danger, was the moment where he went away from romanticising his bad habits and moved towards the complete demonisation of everything that could potentially move him closer to the loss of his libido.

A week after he got this diagnosis, I met my friend at the gym where he did the stair masters like a possessed maniac. By the end of it, I learned that he had wrapped himself with transparent film in order to sweat more.

From one day to another, Donovan became obsessed with “health” habits, and he lost 40 pounds within four months. It took him exactly one moment of clarity to alter his entire behavioural course.

Why? Because Donovan attached MASSIVE PAIN to his former lifestyle. He formed new routines in record time because change became a must for him.

Emotions create habits. If you want to change your behaviour, adjust the intensity of the emotions that you attach to your habits.

Read that sentence again.

Suppose your brain realises that by doing behaviour X it will move you closer to your personal version of hell. In that case, it will be much harder for you to engage in acts of self-destruction. I have developed an effective worksheet to kick you into action, click here to get the FREE Hell Blueprinting Technique.

Case Two: Forming A Meditation Habit in 72 Hours

In early 2020, I had a client who successfully formed a meditation habit in only 72 hours. Before working with a behaviour architect, she had tried to develop the routine by herself but failed over and over again.

What worked for her was to RADICALLY scale down the behaviour, and make her meditation habit tiny so that she did not have any excuse for not doing the meditation habit.

What we did was to agree that the routine was not the problem; the problem was that she could not hack the automatism behind the routine.

Originally she wanted to meditate every morning for 30 minutes. However, she never could get herself to sit down because 30 minutes was too much of an investment for her.

We transformed her goal of meditating for 30 minutes a day into meditating for 3 minutes in the morning.

She was a busy person, but she always had 3 minutes.

This was the right behavioural hack for her, and the routine stuck immediately.

Another way to shorten the memory curve of learning new habits is by making the behaviours simpler.

Here are a few examples of behavioural downscaling:

  • Running for 30 minutes becomes putting on your running shoes.
  • Reading a book a week becomes reading a page a day.
  • Writing a book a month becomes writing one shitty page a day.

Case Three: Forming A Cheese Cake Habit in 48 Hours

Not only can good habits be formed quickly, but we can also develop bad habits in record time. In 2019, I was living as a digital nomad in Bali, and my team and I only worked out of hipsterish coffee shops.

One of the things most coffee shops had in common was that they all had spectacular cheesecakes. One day, they had Oreo cheesecake, the next day they had caramel cheesecake, the next they had lemon cheesecake… Needless to say – I “tried” them all.

Within 48 hours, I developed the habit of ordering a cheesecake after each meal. I only managed to break this bad chain by telling the waiters that they should stop selling me cheesecake even if I beg them to do it.

Another way to form a habit quicker is by changing your environment.

Who and what is around you determines the quality of your behavioural output more than your motivation.

If you want to change for the better, find a setting in which your desired habits are seen as normal.

Behavioural change is a double-edged sword; however, if you enter a disempowering environment, you are also more susceptible to the bad habits of that particular social setting.

Hammer this into your brain: If you want to change, change the things that are around you.

Below are examples of how to apply this life rule:

Desired Behavioural Change Environmental Modification
Become a better public speaker Join Toastmasters
Get in shape Get a personal coach
Stop drinking alcohol Go to AA meetings
Learn a new language Move to the country where they speak that language.

Where To Go From Here

Whether it takes you 66 days, 21 days, or 72 hours to form a new habit, all forms of change start with a decision to become more than you were a moment ago.

Habit formation is a skill like any other, the more you practice, the better you get.

No matter what hand life dealt you, you can ALWAYS fix the things that you do every day.

If you are not where you want to be in life, start now to take control of the things you actually have control over. I promise you that you will alter the trajectory of your life for the better.

Do You Want To Change?

Suppose you want to learn more about the science of breaking bad habits and creating good ones. In that case, I recommend that you jump on a free discovery call with me to discuss how habit coaching can help you to live a richer life.

 

The Anatomy Of Behaviour – How The Habit Loop Works

In this article, you will learn about the anatomy of behaviour and how you can change your life.

I have a shameful secret. Most of my readers do not know about it – in fact, no one I have met this year knows about it. But I am willing to confess it to you right now:

I used to have a cocaine problem.

Yes, I knew the health risks when I started; to be honest, that was half the fun. The first time I tried cocaine was when I was travelling through Columbia. Somebody offered it to me for free, and being the young, stupid, manic, wild man that I was – I said yes, and surprise, surprise – I fucking loved it.

In my mid-twenties, I was a notorious party animal who never said no to anything, including inhuman amounts of alcohol. When I discovered cocaine, I felt invincible because now I could drink as much as I wanted without turning into a drunken idiot who could not talk anymore.

There was only one “tiny” downside to this habit, whenever my drug-induced mania ended (I usually stayed awake for 2-3 days straight), I found myself in a state of absolute depression.

No, I do not mean hungover, I mean hating my guts to the degree where I made actual plans of finding a high bridge and doing a backflip off it.

After a couple of years of this self-mutilating dance routine, I made up my mind to stop being the architect of my own misfortune.

So, I set a goal to quit. Again… and again… and again.

Picture by Shimon Oskteyn

Each time it would last for a few weeks. But all my sobriety attempts failed, and I had to admit something to myself that changed my life forever: My mind cannot solve a problem that my mind produced.

I have felt that either I end this bad habit, or this bad habit is going to end me.

One of the first steps I made was to go to Amazon and order every fucking book that I could get my hands on, which could help me to save my soul. One of the first building blocks of that autodidactic journey was to order Charles Duhigg’s “The Power of Habit“.

Reading this book moved me away from the disempowering belief of “being broken”, and towards the belief of “having broken habits”. That is a big fucking difference.

The following article is going to attempt to give you a similar “aha” moment, where you divorce your self-worth from your current bad habits.

In my coaching practice, I often use a metaphor where I compare the brain to an iPhone.

Some people use their smartphone to play CandyCrush and procrastinate meaninglessly on social media or binge-watch Russian fail videos on YouTube, and other’s use their smartphone to listen to the greatest minds in the world via podcasts, teach themselves new languages with Duolingo, and biohack their way towards success with fitness apps.

Now, imagine your habits as apps. Your bad habits are apps that move you away from who you want to be, while your good apps are habits that make you happier, smarter, and stronger. Good habits turn you into who you want to become.

If you were to find a phone on the street that had bad apps on it, would you throw the phone away? Obviously not, you would find a way to align the software with your needs and use the smartphone in a manner that serves you.

Understanding that I accidentally installed some disempowering apps onto my brain-computer helped me to move away from guilt, shame, and self-pity, and towards self-efficacy, self-love, and freedom of mind.

The following article will introduce you to Charles Duhigg’s famous Habit Loop Model; this model is, from my point of view, the best starting point to understanding the science of habit formation.

The Habit Loop

The human brain is somewhat similar to an onion, in that it is composed of layers of cells. Most “human” thinking happens at the outermost layers of the onion. Without that layer, you would not understand this article. (If you cannot understand this article, it could be that my outer layer is not intact anymore).

On the evolutionary timescale, the layer that you use for complex thinking is the “youngest”, and if you go deeper into the brain, you will find a golf ball-sized bit of tissue called the basal ganglia. Its job is it to store your automatic patterns – your habits.

Since the basal ganglia is a super old primitive structure, it can also be found in the brain of a rat. To study the functions of the basal ganglia, scientists from MIT did an experiment with rats. The researchers opened the skull of the rats and put probes inside the brain to measure the activity of the basal ganglia. They then put them in a T-shaped maze with chocolate at the end of it. When the rat went looking for the chocolate, the researchers measured the brain activity of the rats.

The maze was structured so that each rat was positioned behind a partition that opened when a loud click sounded. Initially, when a rat heard the click and saw the partition disappear, it would usually wander up and down the center aisle, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate, but couldn’t figure out how to find it. When it reached the top of the T, it often turned to the right, away from the chocolate, and then wandered left, sometimes pausing for no obvious reason. Eventually, most animals discovered the reward. But there was no discernible pattern in their meanderings. It seemed as if each rat was taking a leisurely, unthinking stroll. The probes in the rats’ heads, however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain — and in particular, its basal ganglia — worked furiously. Each time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, its brain exploded with activity, as if analyzing each new scent, sight, and sound. The rat was processing information the entire time it meandered. — The Power Of Habit1

The scientists repeated this experiment several times and measured the brain activity of the rats. For the first few trials, the rat had an awful lot of activity in its brain, and this is reflected in the left image below. Now – check out the other image on the right side; there is at first, a lot of brain activity when the click happens – then there is nothing. There is activity again because the rat finds the chocolate. In between those two spikes in the right image is a gap because this is where the basal ganglia takes over, and the rat acts automatically to get through the maze to the chocolate. It operates out of habit. The purpose of habit formation is to save energy; when you go to the toilet, and you finish your business there, you do not have to think about wiping your behind, this happens out of habit, or to be more precise, your basal ganglia runs you through the motions so that you can think about other more important stuff.

By running through the maze over and over again, the rat created a habit, or as Duhigg would say – the rat formed a habit loop.

Each habit has three parts, according to this study.

A Cue (Reminder) that initiates the habit, for the rat, the cue was the click sound. The cue turns on the basal ganglia and lets the rat begin the automatic routine subconsciously. The second ingredient is the Routine, for the rat, this would be the habit of searching for the chocolate. The third and final step of habit formation is getting the Reward, which for the rats is to find and eat the delicious chocolate.

This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: Over time, this loop— cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward— becomes more and more automatic. — Charles Duhigg

Pavlovian Association

Wolfram Schultz, a Professor of neuroscience, identified a fourth variable of the habit loop – cravings2.

He discovered this ingredient by experimenting with a monkey named Julio. He positioned Julio, the monkey, in front of a monitor. Julio’s job was to touch a lever whenever a specific shaped/coloured object appeared on the monitor. If Julio touched the lever when the correct shape appeared, he would be rewarded with a drop of delicious juice. After repeating this experiment a couple of times, Julio developed a juice habit.

During the experiment, Schultz measured Julio’s brain activity and discovered something interesting. Take a look at the left image below. During the first few rounds of this experiment, Julio’s brain activity spiked when he was rewarded with the delicious juice. As the experiment continues, Julio has increased brain activity BEFORE he is given the reward. Psychologists call this pavlovian effect association; we call it craving.

To sum this up, a habit loop consists of the following four components:

The Cue

The cue is the stimulus that triggers the behaviour. It could be an external stimulus, such as something you see, hear, or smell. It could also be an internal stimulus, such as a drop in blood sugar, an emotion, or a thought.

The Routine

This is the habitual behaviour or routine that we execute in response to the cue. It could be reaching out for a piece of chocolate in response to a drop in our blood sugar, reaching out for a drink in response to a higher stress level at the end of the day, or going to the gym first thing every morning.

The Reward

Ultimately, this is the reason for performing the habitual routine. It could be the good feeling that a rise in blood sugar brings about or the “high” that results from an intense workout at the gym.

The Craving

This is the Reward Anticipation Signal generated by our brain in response to the cue, and in anticipation of the expected reward. In fact, our brain memorises the satisfying sensation or feeling that results from the reward. We desire to experience this pleasurable sensation or feeling that motivates us to execute the behaviour in response to the cue.

This is how new habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop. Take, for instance, smoking. When a smoker sees a cue— say, a pack of Marlboros— her brain starts anticipating a hit of nicotine. Just the sight of cigarettes is enough for the brain to crave a nicotine rush. If it doesn’t arrive, the craving grows until the smoker reaches, unthinkingly, for a Marlboro. Or take email. When a computer chime or a smartphone vibrates with a new message, the brain starts anticipating the momentary distraction that opening an email provides. That expectation, if unsatisfied, can build until a meeting is filled with antsy executives checking their buzzing BlackBerrys under the table, even if they know it’s probably only their latest fantasy football results. — Charles Duhigg

Habit Loop Example

My Old Cocaine Habit Loop

Remember the beginning of this article where I confessed that I had a cocaine problem? This is going to be our habit loop example for today…

Behavioural Analysis:

My cue for my alcohol/cocaine habit was pain based; I was living an unhappy life deprived of real connection, love, a meaningful career, and friends who wanted the best for the best part of me. When I developed my cocaine and alcohol routine, it was as if I had discovered a pause button for my life, and for the pain that ensued out of it. My reward for my cocaine/alcohol habit was that for a brief time, I found myself surrounded by people again. Obviously, it was the wrong kind of people, but I was somewhat in a bad group that was better than no group at all. The craving behind my drug habit loop was multidimensional. For once, I was craving happiness since my everyday life was not rich in positive emotion, so learning that I could cheat my way to temporary pleasure was addicting by itself to me. Doing drugs was also a short relief for my depressed symptoms of melancholia, loneliness, and self-hate. So, when I did drugs, I was again able to communicate with people excessively and present to them the fake image of a person who is high on life rather than high on drugs.

The Golden Rule Of Habit Formation

My road to sobriety was an adventure in itself, which deserves its own book. However, I would like to share with you right now a simple method that helped me to control my brain when it asks me to engage in acts of self-mutilation and self-betrayal.

Once I learned the anatomy of behaviour, I was empowered to translate my brains craving into what they really were – reminders that I was disconnected from the things that make life liveable, such as a meaningful career, a romantic relationship that is embedded in the truth, friends who want the best for the best part of me, growth, community, and adventures.

This discovery allowed me to identify the underlying craving behind my bad cocaine habit, and it enabled me to swap it for another habit that satisfied the same need without damaging my biology and spirit.

To defeat my bad habit, I had to ask myself one straight forward question:

What behaviours can I learn that will satisfy my need for connection without corrupting my character?

Since I was not really in love with cocaine, but with connections, I could implement new habits that would give me the feeling of being connected without having to sacrifice my mental and physical health.

While priorly, I was using drugs to satisfy my need for connections, now, I installed counter habits which were giving me similar positive experience, such as:

  • Meeting friends when I need relief.
  • Playing basketball when I need to shut off my brain.
  • Have road trips with my friends to exotic places when I was craving adventure.
  • Interview strangers on the streets and chat with them about life.
  • Use Tinder to meet girls instead of flirting at parties.
  • Chat with people from my co-working space.

 My Upgraded “Cocaine” Habit Loop

One of the simplest ways to swap your bad habits is to identify the ingredients of your habit loop and switch your disempowering behaviours for better behaviours.

Easy, right? Congratulations, you have just learned Charles Duhigg’s Golden Rule Of Habit Change, which can be summarised into one axiomatic behavioural rule:

“Keep the cue, provide the same reward, insert a new routine.” – Charles Duhigg

The Anti Craving Technique

One of the exercises that have helped me to swap all sorts of disempowering habits for empowering habits was an exercise that I call the Anti Craving Technique.

I used this psychological exercise a lot when I was in danger of breaking my sobriety. Although I am much more equipped to handle my addictive urges, to this day, I still have drug cravings. I will probably have them for the rest of my life.

The exercise is simple: when your brain is craving a bad habit, deconstruct the neurological call, and find a better habit that will also give you what you need.

Below, you will find an example of three disempowering cravings that I successfully managed recently. Read through those examples, and create your own table in your journal.

 

Craving 1 Craving 2 Craving 3
Cocaine craving Eating McDonald’s Oversleeping
What do I really crave? Company…Fun…Recognition…Adventure… A lot of food. A break from the world…
How do I feel about this? It’s challenging; I feel I would love to kick it with my boys tonight. Stupid, I ate enough today. Not good, my life is fine, my brain is lying again.
Do I need this? I need company, but I don’t need to hurt myself this weekend. I have things to do that demand my full powers. No. Fuck no.
What if I wait? It won’t go away; I need a connection. I will feel awesome. It will get worst.
Is there a different behaviour that would give me the same reward? If so, then what? Yes, my friend Pawel asked me to do a hiking trip with him tomorrow. I could join him and have my own sober adventure. I can make myself an awesome salmon salad at home. Meditation for twenty minutes.
What was my cue? I overworked, now I crave connection. Seeing a McDonald’s sign on my way home. Getting a reminder from my co-working office that the rent is due.

Do You Want To Change Your Habits? 

The 1% Habit – The Surprising Power Of Incremental Improvements

In this article, I write about the surprising power of tiny changes, and you will be given a free psychological exercise that will help you to identify your bad habits.

In 2019, I was fully emerged in writing my first book about Habit Formation. This endeavour was terribly difficult for me.

Writing has never come easy for me, so being the lazy bastard that I am, I started by googling “best habit books in the world “. After ordering most of them, I wrote every single author an email to deepen my knowledge about behaviour psychology and more importantly – ask them how in the world they managed to finish a book that taught individuals the power of habit formation.

One of the first world changers that answered my podcast request was Jay Papasan, the author of the international bestseller The One Thing.

In this interview, Jay shared with me a metaphor about the power of tiny habit formation that I would like to share with you…

The Surprising Power Of The Domino Effect

On November 13, 2009, in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, Weijers Domino Productions broke the world record for lining up 4, 491,863 dominos in a spectacular fashion. A single domino was set into motion and unleashed 94,000 joules of energy, which is as much energy as it takes for a grown male to do 500+ push-ups1.

Each standing domino represents a small amount of potential energy, and the more dominos you put in a line. Thus, more potential energy can be generated.

Enough small domino in a row can produce a staggering amount of energy.

The same seems to be true for life; setting the right things in motion can produce massive energy and change.

In 1993, Loran Whitehead, a Professor of physics, discovered that domino falls could topple not only many things but also massive things.

He articulated that a single domino is capable of bringing down another domino that is 50 % bigger.

In 2001, a physicist from San Francisco reproduced Whitehead’s experiment by creating eid dominoes out of wood, each 50% bigger than the one before.

Fascinating, isn’t it? A tiny nudge in the right spot could produce massive energy; now imagine if this kept going.

If a regular domino fall is a linear progression, Whitehead’s would be described as geometric progression.

Let us do the math…

If we start with a regular domino, the 10th domino would be almost as tall as me (I am 2 meterish). By the 18th, you are looking at a domino that would be as tall as the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The 23rd domino would be as big as the Eiffel Tower, and the 31st domino would be as tall as Mount Everest at almost 3,000 feet. At number 57, the domino would touch the moon.

The 1% Habit

Clients who see me in my private practice are often hungry for a quick fix, the one aha moment, or the monumental epiphany that is going to transform them overnight into who they want to be. It has turned out to be a significant struggle to convince them to trust in the power of micro improvements.

To utilise the power of incremental improvement, I often show my clients a funny video that I found on YouTube that perfectly displays the truth that small, strategic behavioural changes can add up and produce massive differences in your quality of life.

Many people go through life and never discover that behavioural modifications are the steering wheel of our lives. Suppose you add a new habit, belief, or reshape your environment purposefully. In that case, you will inevitably alter the trajectory of your life for the better.

When I invented my first habit journal – The Behaviour Kickstarter – I wanted to make sure that people tapped into the power of incremental improvement. This is why everybody who purchased this behaviour technology has to ask themselves by the end of the day a simple question: What can you do to be 1% better tomorrow?

Thought Experiment

Imagine three versions of yourself, six months, three years, and five years into the future.

What would your life look like if you were to continue to repeat your disempowering habits every day?

Now, think the other way around, if you were to actually stick to your resolutions and positive habits, who could you be in three years?

We may not recognise the effects that habits have on our lives. However, each behavioural decision is a vote to who we become and what our life is going to be like.

Hitting the gym once might not transform you into a supermodel. However, if you keep going, after a year, your body will be unrecognisable.

The same is true for bad habits, of course.

Drinking a glass of red wine will not transform you into an alcoholic. However, with enough repetition and excessiveness, your body will fall apart sooner or later.

Now, let us do the math; What would happen if you were to improve yourself daily by only one measly percentage?2

If you succeed in getting 1% better each day for one year, you will be thirty-seven times better by the time the year is over.

Yes, thirty-seven fucking times better, you read that right.

Let that sink in for a second and ask yourself: What kind of life results could I produce if my personal powers were to increase thirty-seven-fold?

The Power Of Habit Compounding

What do you think would happen to you if you were the captain of a cruise ship and you changed the course of your ship by just 3.5 degrees? At first, not a lot, right? But after a week or two, for better or worse, you would end up somewhere totally different.

Just as the course of a boat shifts radically when you alter the course by 1-2%, your life trajectory will be different if you make one or two behavioural modifications.

James Clear put it best when he said:

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.”

Incremental behavioural improvements appear to be mundane and trivial at first. However, the right change at the right time will change everything for you.

Similar to the course change of a ship, your future will be altered if you change your habits, beliefs, and your living environment.

Of course, the first gains that you will produce will be barely noticeable:

  • Going to the gym once will not change your body an awful lot.
  • Studying for an hour will not make you pass the exam.
  • Bringing your partner flowers once will not make you Mr/Ms Right.
  • Putting a dollar into your investment account will not make you a millionaire.
  • Reading a book once will not make you a genius.
  • Helping your friend move once will not make you the best friend of someone.

BUT, if those one-time actions become habitual, if they become a part of who you are as a person, you will become:

  • A sexy beast.
  • A straight-A student.
  • Mr/Ms Right.
  • A millionaire.
  • A genius.
  • A friend that other people can count on.

One of the sentences that I try to hammer into my client’s heads is that their current life outcomes were produced by the habits, beliefs, thoughts, and environment of their former selves.

Repeat after me:

MY life is a product of MY patterns.

MY life is a product of MY patterns.

MY life is a product of MY patterns.

One of the simplest ways to predict someone’s future is to investigate their behavioural patterns and calculate where they will end up if they continue to be who they are, instead of behaving like the person they want to become.

Fulfilment, success, loving relationships, mental, and physical health are all results that are produced by the individual3.

Behavioural compounding goes both ways; however, if you have bad habits in your psychological portfolio, they will, of course, also compound over time, and you will pay for it big time.

Below, you will find a couple of examples of pattern compounding that I have noticed in my life:

Empowering Compounding  Disempowering Compounding 
Intimacy Compounding: Having one date night will not save your marriage, but making love a priority and reserving two days a week for your soulmate can make your bond indestructible. Procrastination Compounding: Scrolling once through social media will not make you a bad worker, but continuously wasting your time will kill your chances to perform at a high level in any professional domain.
Virtuosity Compounding: Doing the right thing once will not make you a hero, but if you continuously attempt to act nobly, this is what you are going to become. Depression Compounding: Ignoring your conscience once will not make you miserable. However, if you live a life of self-deception, self-sabotage, and egoism, your body will start to say no to you.
Mastery Compounding: Reading one book will not make you a genius, reading a book a week will. Overwork Compounding: Working long hours a week will not give you burnout, but if this becomes a pattern, you will perform poorly in all other areas of your life.

The Behaviour Detective – A Technique To Spot Disempowering Patterns Right Away

Now that we have come to understand that patterns compound into outcomes, it is time to address the elephant in the room: What can we do to spot bad habits early before they compound and turn our lives into a big pile of horse shit? 

For that manner, I have developed a simple behaviour exercise that I call The Behaviour Detective 4.

The exercise is quite simple; take a habit, a thought, a belief, or an environmental set-up and investigate:

  1. What is this pattern giving you?
  2. What is this pattern costing you?
  3. Whether or not this behavioural investment is good (+) bad (-) or neutral (=).

Behavioural patterns are the building blocks of your life, and if you are in doubt whether or not a habit, a thought, a belief, or an environmental set-up is good or bad for you, simply ask yourself;

Is this pattern turning me more into who I want to become, or is this pattern moving me away from becoming the hero of my own story?

The Behaviour Detective is a simple method that I use within all of my behavioural architecture coaching programs because it helps people to gain mastery in the most crucial field there is, which is knowing ourselves.

Everything we do is a decision whether we like it or not; nothing is neutral. Nothing. When we decide to go out on a Friday night to get smashed, we simultaneously decide to be in pain on Saturday.

When we decide to stay longer at the office, we, at the same time, prioritise work over our connections, and we are going to pay the price for that behavioural decision.

Each Netflix binge and ice cream (as fun as it is) is a step away from your desired beach body.

If you only take one idea away from this article, let it be this one: The quality of your daily decisions determines the quality of your life. 

Below, you will find an example of how I used the Behaviour Detective this week to investigate the price of my habits. You will find a Free Downloadable Worksheet at the end of the article, but I figured I would show you some of my flaws so that you can be open about yours as well:

 

Pattern (Habit, Thought, Belief, Environmental Set-Up) What Is This Pattern Giving Me?
(Today, In 6 Months, In 3 Years)
What Is This Pattern Costing Me?
(Today, In 6 Months, In 3 Years)
Good (+)Bad (-)Neutral (=) What Will You Do About It?
Snoozing for 25 minutes. Today: Bit of comfort, a delay of my morning routine.
In the future, this is not giving me a whole lot, to be honest.
Today: This habit fucks up my entire morning routine. I feel as if I am starting the day as a failure, and this feeling accompanies me through the day.
In the future, this habit can literally be one of the reasons why I will not become the person I know I can be. High-performance people do not have this habit; they do not start the day like that.
BAD HABIT! (-) I will ask my roomie to knock on my door so that I will get up in time.
Ruminating about my ex-girlfriend. As a romantic, it sometimes feels good to play the “what if game” and relive past experiences that felt good at the time. This cognitive habit hurts me psychologically because it reopens my old wounds.
In the future, this habit, for once, could make me bitter, resentful, and depressed. It could possibly ruin my chances of meeting my future soulmate because I am still stuck in one of my self-created grieving loops.
BAD HABIT! (-) Whenever the depressed entity  within me reminds me of my loss, I will say “This memory is hurting me, let’s look forward shall we Daniel?”
Compulsive protein bar snacking. Protein bars are delicious, and they give me, as the name says – a lot of protein. I like being a muscle giant, and those bars give me the feeling of growing into a strong person. Eating one bar would be fine, but I sometimes eat 3-5 within a day. This is $10 a day, which compounds to $300 a month.
Additionally, the financial downside, it’s almost impossible for me now to hit my caloric sweet spot, which means that I gain weight and fat because I snack 400 calorie bars all the time. So, in the future, this habit will not only not give me my dream body; it will actually move me away from it.
BAD HABIT! (-) I will establish a policy of eating only 2 bars per day, one in the morning and one after my workout.

Other snacks will be veggies.

Do You Want To Change Your Habits? 

An Iron Bar Through The Eye – Phineas Gage and The Four Root Causes Of Bad Habits

In this article, you are going to learn about the four causes of bad habits and the curious case of Phineas Gage, the man who got his head pierced by a giant iron bar.

On September 13, 1848, near Cavendish in Vermont, Phineas Gage, a sophisticated, respected railway worker became the luckiest, unlucky person in the world.

Gage packed explosives with a tempting iron to blast apart a rock lying in the path of the railroad.

He placed the iron bar near the rock and ignited the dynamite.

There was an explosion, and the 3-foot-7-inch-long iron bar was catapulted through the air, piercing Gage’s skull and brain, and flew another 20 meters, where it was found full of the blood and brain matter of the 25-year-old.

Gage was thrown onto his back by the force of the iron bar piercing his eye, but was by some miracle, able to get up just a few minutes later…

He did not only survive the injury, but he was able to speak and walk to a nearby cart, which drove him to town to see a doctor.

http://Source: http://www.sketchyscience.com/2015/10/phineas-gage-living-halloween-costume.html

Dr Edward H. Williams, the first physician to respond to Gage, later described what he found:

“I first noticed the wound upon the head before I alighted from my carriage, the pulsations of the brain being very distinct. Mr Gage, during the time I was examining his wound, was relating the manner in which he was injured to the bystanders. I did not believe Mr Gage’s statement at that time but thought he was deceived. Mr Gage persisted in saying that the bar went through his head… Mr G. got up and vomited; the effort of vomiting pressed out about half a teacupful of the brain, which fell upon the floor”.

Several days later, his wound became infected, and he fell into a semi-comatose state.

Everybody expected Phineas to die within days; his family even prepared a coffin in advance. However, Phineas Gage said ”not today“ to the god of death and recovered fully by January 1849. *Sorry, I re-watched Game of Thrones recently.

Phineas Gage returned to the home of his parents to recover, but besides losing vision in the eye that was pierced by the iron, Gage was in good physical health.

Gage started working again, but something about him was very different.

Post-accident reports depicted him as a changed man; many suggested that his injury transformed him into an impulsive, aggressive, surly, drunkard who was unable to hold down his job.

Harlow noticed the change as well:

“[Gage] is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was previously not his custom) manifesting little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity, he has the animal passions of a strong man.

Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard, his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was ‘no longer Gage’”.

Harlow suggests that his injury led to a loss of social inhibition, or in simpler words – he became a kind of an asshole.

WTF Happened To Phineas’ Brain?

In 2012, new research estimated that the iron destroyed up to 11% of the white matter in Gage’s frontal lobe1.

If you have never seen a human brain before, it looks like two boxing gloves sewn together on the pinkie side of the gloves.

The surface, however, is everything else but smooth, because it has a series of humps and ridges on it, a bit like an old albino avocado.

Broadly speaking, each side of your brain can be divided into four regions; physicians call them lobes, and they do so because they have tiny wieners and want to sound smart (talking to you Max).

The thumbs of the boxing glove house are the temporal lobe, which is mainly responsible for hearing and speech.

The back of your brain (the open part of the boxing glove) is the occipital lobe; this part is responsible for processing visual information. If this part gets damaged, you can go blind.

The front of your brain (the part where your fingers would enter the glove) is called the frontal lobe; it carries out higher mental processes like thinking, decision making, and planning.

Between your frontal lobe and the occipital lobe is the parietal lobe, it is associated with sensory information, such as taste, temperature, and touch.

Your brain is made up of many different kinds of cells; the most important ones are your neurons; they send electrical signals from one part of the brain to the other.

Your neurons look like normal cells, but with antennas on them.

They send critical information to other cells by extending a tube, which is called their axon; this allows your neurons to influence other areas of your brain.

To do so, they use chemicals, and these chemicals cause electrical changes inside your cells. When this electrical change gets big enough, your neuron sends another electrical signal down its antenna. Think of these antennas as the storehouse of other chemicals. This dance of electrical charges and the released chemicals are the reason your brain is so expensive to operate.

The surface of your brain is grey. Physicians, in all their creativity, have named this grey matter.

Most of the neurons in the grey matter have very short antennas; they use their chemicals to communicate with neurons which are very close by.

When neurons have to communicate with more distant areas, they go deeper into the brain.

To make sure that the signals do not get lost, your neurons have an isolator around them; pretty much like the cables we use.

Most of your deeper brain cells are white; anatomists have, therefore, named them white matter (yes, really).

One way of explaining Gage’s radical behavioural change is because the iron bar pierced his frontal lobe; his cerebral cortex, the part we mostly associate with personality, consciousness, and abstract thinking.

Neuroscientist Paul MacLean has developed one of the most well-known and easiest models for brain structuring in the 60s, which helps to understand Gage’s loss of humanness; The Triune Brain.

The Triune Brain

This model is highly simplified, but it provides an explanation to the organisation of your brain and lets you understand what happened to Phineas Gage:

So, there are three brains:

  1. The Lizard Brain 

The primal region does a lot of regulatory stuff, like when your body temperature drops you start to shiver, your body temperature rises, and it signals for you to start sweating. It is also monitoring your glucose, and it is essential for everyday survival on the most basic level.

  1. The Mammal Brain

The limbic system surrounds the lizard brain. This part of the brain is very much a mammalian speciality because as you can imagine, lizards are not very emotional creatures. This part of the brain is responsible for you acting like an emo all the time; it manages fear, lust, and aggression.

  1. The Human Brain 

The third layer of the brain that MacLean identified is relatively fresh – 40.000 years fresh.

It is called the neocortex, and this structure is only found in higher mammals, such as monkeys or dolphins.

This part of the brain is there for things such as imagination, creativity, problem-solving, speech, and reasoning.

You are using this part of your brain to read this article right now.

The Four Fs – The Root Causes Of All Bad Habits

Your primary reptilian concern is to make you survive. Therefore, it is in charge of four major tasks:

  1. Feeding 
  2. Fighting
  3. Fleeing
  4. And Fucking

The reptilian brain basically tells us four things that are supposed to ensure our survival.

  1. Eat everything you can find and remember where you found it.
  2. Fight and kill everybody who is threatening you.
  3. Avoid everything that is causing you pain.
  4. Have sex with everything and everybody.

Those are the Four Rules that have served us well in the past, but in an age of excess and unlimited resources, those mental programs have caused us more harm than good.

Cause Number 1: Eat Everything You Can Find And Remember Where You Found It

In ancient times, it made a lot of sense for humans to eat everything that was in sight. If one of our forefathers were to find something high with calories and fat, it was a brilliant idea back then to eat all of it, because they did not know when their next meal would be.

The leading cause of death for our ancestors was starvation, so for them, it was an intelligent strategic move to eat everything in sight and remember where it was.

For us, things are a little bit different…

While our ancestors had to go to great lengths to acquire food that was high caloric, all we have to do is to open our fridge. We have an endless supply of food that we can stuff into our faces until we fall over.

Our environment has changed; our behavioural drives have not.

Obesity is one of the major causes of death in the western world, and I, myself, have had family members who lost their health and happiness because of disempowering nutritional habits.

Exemplary Bad Habits: 

  1. Eating too much
  2. Eating sugary stuff
  3. Drinking sugary stuff
  4. Bing attacks
  5. Night snacking

Cause Number 2: Fight Everything That Is Hurting You

The second instinct that we all have is the urge to fight everything that is out to hurt us.

Again – in an age where humans got chased by all sorts of sabre toothy animals, this was quite a good habit to have. Today, we are often slaves to our emotional systems. If we remain untrained, we hurt the ones we love by our poor anger management habits.

One of the things that I have in common with Michael Jordan is that I take everything personally… only in a bad way (shoutout to all my ex-girlfriends who I annoyed with my thin skin).

Have you ever had a fight with someone you cared for, and they pushed your buttons the right way, and you lost your shit? Yeah, me too.

Human beings are vicious, aggressive, nasty creatures by design. It takes an incredible amount of psychological education to master one’s emotional systems to the degree that we can control our anger instead of having our anger control us.

Exemplary Bad Habits: 

  1. Lashing out at your partner/kids/friends
  2. Ghosting
  3. Screaming
  4. Cursing
  5. Gaslighting

Cause Number 3: Run From Everything That Causes You Pain

We are hard-wired to run away from discomfort.

Again, this mechanism was essential for our species to survive. If you think about it, it makes a whole lot of sense to avoid all sources of discomfort to save energy for the next time a tiger is chasing you in the jungle.

Nowadays, all tigers belong to the creepy bitch from the documentary Tiger King, meaning that we enjoy an unprecedented amount of societal security.

This behavioural instinct is, therefore, obviously problematic if you take into consideration that nearly all good things in life require effort, pain, and sacrifice.

While you should be afraid of a man in the dark who is chasing you with a knife, you should not be scared to ask your dream girl out, call that company who can give you your dream job, or learn public speaking skills to bring your business to the next level.

Exemplary Bad Habits: 

  1. Freezing
  2. Ghosting
  3. Screaming
  4. Procrastination
  5. Avoiding

Cause Number 4: Fuck Everything That You Can

Arguably one of our strongest behavioural urges is to reproduce and make sure that this whole weird human thing goes on forever.

Through technology, we have become hyper-effective at satisfying our sexual needs.

In an age where organising a date costs only the swipe of a thumb, it has become quite challenging for many people to stay with one person, after all, if things get tough, it is easier to magically thumb up a new relationship instead of working on the “old one”.

For many guys, the swiping of the thumb for a date is still too much effort; they prefer to use their fingertips to google their weirdest kinks and masturbate until their dicks fall off.

Our reproduction drivers developed thousands of years before there was anything like online dating and internet porn, and it is essential to understand that the underlying root cause of compulsive sexual habits is our need to eternalise ourselves.

Exemplary Bad Habits: 

  1. Commitment phobic behaviour
  2. Porn addiction
  3. Tinder compulsion
  4. Excessive social media use

Moral Of This Article

If you take only one thing away from this article, let it be this: YOUR BRAIN NEEDS AN UPGRADE.

We live in a society that has become extremely effective at exploiting the bugs within our behavioural software. To live a rich and successful life, it is vital that you learn skills that will help you to control your emotional systems so that they do not end up controlling you.

Although challenging, it is essential that you make a declaration of total behavioural ownership and remind yourself daily that you are the architect of your life.

Success is not something that is achieved; it is a result that ensues when you plant the right habits into the right soil so that you can grow into a person who is capable of producing the life results that you are after.

Thank you for reading!

Do You Want To Change Your Habits? 

How To Get Away With Murder – The Two Rules Of Behavior Architecture

In July 2008, Brian Thomas, a retired steelworker from South Wales, called the authorities to report an emergency, and to report a crime:

“What have I done? I’ve been trying to wake her. I think I’ve killed my wife. Oh, my God. I thought someone had broken in. I was fighting with those boys, but it was Christine. I must have been dreaming or something. What have I done?…“¹

The police arrived minutes later and found Brian Thomas crying next to his camper van, which he and his wife had rented earlier for their west-coast vacation.

He explained that the previous night, he and his beloved wife were sleeping when he woke up to the picture of a man in jeans and a black fleece lying on top of his wife.

He screamed his lungs out and grabbed the intruder by the throat to throw him off his wife.

The harder the intruder struggled; the harder Brian squeezed.

The intruder fought back with all they had, scratched him, kicked him, screamed at him, but Thomas choked harder and harder until they stopped moving.

At that moment, Thomas came back to his senses and realised his hands were not around the neck of an intruder; it was the neck of his wife that he was holding in his hands.

In horror, he immediately let go of her fragile body, trying to wake her gently, repeatedly asking her if she was all right.

She would never move again. Brian Thomas realised that he had killed his wife with his own hands.

At first, the police were sceptical, and it all sounded like cold-blooded murder. However, friends and relatives told the authorities that they were a loving couple.

Thomas spent the next ten months in prison, waiting for his murder trial.

It later turned out that Thomas had a long history of sleepwalking; as a child, Thomas would wake up, get out of bed, and play with toys, and when he was older, he cooked himself dinners.

Sometimes, he would even get out of the house in the middle of the night and wander around his neighbour’s yard.

His mother described his behaviour as automatic and habitual.

One time, he even swam in a canal without waking up. Once married, his wife became weary, and she would regularly lock the door and sleep with the keys under her pillow.

At a certain point, the two of them agreed that Thomas needed his own bed so that his wife could sleep in peace while Thomas had his nightly adventures.

Brian Thomas is not a unique case; his form of sleepwalking is called night terrors.

Experts assume that about 2% of the population in the UK suffers from this condition.

Sleepwalking is a scary but also powerful example that habits are very real.

In the course of Brian Thomas’s trial,  sleep expert Chris Idzikowski was called as a witness.

Dr Idzikowski was allowed to monitor Thomas’ sleep behaviour in prison.

After measuring his breathing rhythm, brain waves, eye movements, and limb movements, it was clear that Brian Thomas was indeed a sleepwalker, and he was acquitted because he was acting out of automatism.

The fact that some habits are so deeply burned into the anatomy of our brain that we act them out even if we sleep, opens up an important question about whether or not free will actually exist.

In the last few years, our understanding of behaviour and cognitive psychology has grown exponentially, and it has revealed significant problems with the world that we live in today.

In the face of new neurological discoveries, we have collectively agreed, as a society, that some habits are so powerful that they have the strength to overwrite our logical thinking and draw us into horrible decisions that we, under normal circumstances, would never make.

In the case of Brian Thomas, it seems apparent that he is not responsible for his behaviour… but what about other behavioural hijackings of the brain, such as alcoholism, gambling, social media compulsion, substance abuse, or avoidant depressive patterns?

One question arises:

Do We Choose Our Habits?

At first glance, this might seem like a no-brainer, yes, of course, we do; otherwise, people would not be responsible for their behaviour, right?

Well, it is complicated, let me tell you another more personal story…

1992 was a challenging year for my father. He was let go of his job, diagnosed with diabetes, and the marriage that he had with my mother ended in an extremely dirty way.

Over the course of a year, he had lost his health, his job, and his family.

Studies have shown that just one of those big guns is enough to take a man out.

To cope with the suffering of his existence, he visited a local gambling hall, and he became extremely unlucky: The first time he went gambling, he won big time.

Although divorced, my dad still had a room in our little two-bedroom apartment. After playing all night in the casino, he would come home with pockets full of cash, about 1700 Mark (the German currency at that time).

For us, this was a fortune. My dad immediately went downstairs to pay the landlord the late rent, took us all to dinner, and replaced our old broken fridge with a new one.

I still remember that fridge vividly, it had an ice cube dispenser, we loved it.

Since he could not tell us where the money came from, he lied and said to us that his business had a new customer.

Since my dad was only away during the nights, nobody was suspicious.

For a brief period, my father reconquered the role of the provider, a role that was very important to him.

Unfortunately, the episode was short-lived, and a couple of months later, my dad became addicted to the degree by which he started to gamble with money that was not his. From that point on, things began to spiral down fast.

It all came crashing down when on a particular morning, the light switch in our apartment would not work anymore because the electricity bills were not paid.

By 1993, my dad was going to the casino every day.

Where, before, we were a family with little resources, we now found ourselves in a full-fletched financial crisis.

What happened?

How did something that started as a coping ritual mutate into a fully-fletched gambling addiction?

One night, I was worried because my dad was not sleeping on the couch as usual, and so I went out to look for him.

We had a local billiard pub where he would often take me to play, and I knew he liked to smoke cigars there so this was the first place I went.

Across the street of that pub was a gambling hall, and on that day, the door was slightly open, and I saw my dad sitting in front of a shining slot machine.

He was just sitting there, numb, detached from the world, pushing buttons that had flashy lights.

The image confused me to no end.

I did not understand how my strong father could stuff our last $10 bill into this noisy box, knowing that we did not have food at home.

I did not know much about behaviour psychology back then. However, I realised that this box contributed, in some strange manner, to my father becoming a zombie.

Up until to that point, I viewed addicts as weak people who did not have enough will power and failed because of it.

I felt as if this hypothesis had to be wrong; my dad was many things, but he was not a person who had a weak mind.

My dad is a former commando, who worked 18 hours a day for the majority of his life, so I would not think of him as a person who did not have the mental fortitude to say no to something, something was up…

About ten years later, I found a puzzle piece that helped me to understand the behavioural pathology of my dad’s gambling compulsion…

Pavlov’s Dogs – The Power Of Classical Conditioning

During the 1890s, Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physician, studied the secretory activity of the digestion.

Pavlov first performed a small operation on the dogs to relocate their salivary glands to the outside of their cheeks, where the drops of saliva could be measured.

The dogs, who were deprived of food, were then put into an apparatus that you are going to see in the video below.

Periodically, Pavlov rang a bell, followed shortly by the meat being placed in front of the dog’s hungry mouth.

Everybody knows that when dogs see a delicious piece of meat, they produce saliva.

But the ringing of the bell by itself did not.

The dog’s salvation to meat was an unconditioned reflex. It is in-born; they did not have to learn this behaviour.

After some time, hearing the bell alone, even without seeing the meat was enough for the dog to salivate.

This phenomenon is known as Pavlovian conditioning or classical conditioning.

In 1904, Pavlov received the Nobel Prize for physiology for his work on digestive secretions.

Can Pigeons Read? – Reinforcement Schedules

Forty-four years later in 1948, Professor Skinner from Harvard University conducted an experiment that would change our understanding of behaviour forever: The Skinner Box, which was also known as the Operant Conditioning Chamber.

Skinner would put rats or pigeons, who were starved down to 75% of their capacity, into a box that contained one button which the animal could press. If they did so, an automatic food dispenser in the box would drop a little bit of food.

Once the animal hit the lever by accident, they were rewarded with food. The rats quickly learned that the consequence of pushing the lever would result in food.

This learning phenomenon is called positive reinforcement, and Skinner used it to teach his animals all sorts of shenanigans (He even taught his pigeons to operate a rocket launching system).

What do rats and pigeons have to do with anything?

Think of a routine that you want to form right now that is not sticking yet; let us say going to the gym.

Now, imagine that someone was to give you $1,000 every time you went lifting weights. Do you not think that this external reward is going to help you to form a habit rather quickly?

Of course, it would, and knowing that – you now understand one of the major principles of Behaviour Architecture, which is:

Behaviour that is reinforced will be repeated.

Skinner’s Box showed that with a stimulus (light) and a positive consequence, you could make almost any behaviour stick, or in simpler words – add pleasure to a neutral behaviour, and it has the potential to become a habit.

Skinner could get his animals to do almost anything; he even trained pigeons to read to some extent.

But this is only one half of the coin, what about the ultimate antagonist of pleasure — Pain?

To test the effects of pain on behaviour formation, Skinner equipped his box with a metal floor, which was capable of delivering electroshocks to the animals (yeah, he was dick like Pavlov).

Imagine you are somebody who likes going to the gym, now imagine that every time you want to go to the gym, somebody waits for you and kicks you in the balls/ovaries, what would happen to your gym routine?

Right, it would cease to exist!

The second lesson of Behaviour Architecture is, therefore:

Behaviour that is punished will be suppressed.

We have all had an experience like that, where something that we formerly associated with pleasure was transformed into a punishment overnight…

Maybe you had food poisoning, and you cannot eat certain foods anymore, or you had the worst hangover of your life, and just the smell of Tequila gives you nightmares… (that is me right there).

The harder the punishment, the more likely it is that the behavioural framework gets obliterated out of existence. So, if you want to decrease a habit, the quickest (and most painful way) is it to add a strong negative consequence to your undesired behaviour.

Little Albert – The Power Of Punishment

To give you a visual example of how our mind works, let us look at the curious case of little Albert, arguably the cruellest experiment in the history of behavioural psychology.

In the year 1920, John Watson, along with his future wife, Rosalind Rayner, deliberately attempted to instil certain phobias into a young baby.

Watson assumed that fear was learnable.

The experiments began by placing ‘little Albert’ on a mattress and encouraging him to play with neutral objects (such as cotton wool or a white bunny rabbit).

The experimenter would then hit a metal bar with a hammer every time the baby touched the play object.

Little Albert showed stress and started to cry and attempted to crawl away at the sudden loud noise.

Very quickly, anything white and fluffy would put fear into the heart of little Albert, even if Watson did not slam the hammer on the metal.

This proved that phobias could be instilled with conditioning.

Watson had planned to remove Albert’s phobias but reportedly did not have time to do so. (Like Skinner and Pavlov, Watson was also an asshole).

Skinner, however, assumed that we do not forget behaviour, we just suppress it.

So, it is entirely possible that Little Albert had this form of trauma stored in his brain for life…

Slot Machines: Addiction By Design?

Our brain is continually trying to guide us away from fear, and towards pleasure, and we must take control of this process because otherwise, it will take control of us.

Read that sentence again, please.

But what have some starving rats, hungry dogs, and fat babies got to do with my father and slot machines?

Skinner discovered something very interesting:

The most potent way of conditioning is NOT always to reward the subject, but only sometimes. 

When the ratio of reinforcement was randomised, the rats went nuts. They pushed the lever over and over again like maniacs.

I think you see where this is going…

My father was not sitting in front of a slot machine, my father was sitting in front of a Skinner Box, and he was the fucking rat doing what the box asked him to do.

Everyone knows rationally that when you play a slot machine, the odds are stacked against you; all machines are designed to pay out less than they take it in, yet my dad’s reasoning was overwritten.

My dad and the starved down rats in Skinners Box were not so different either; both had their human needs unmet.

The slot machine sold my old man the dream of always being one pull away from solving all of his fucking problems and getting his life back together.

Another factor that made gambling so compelling for my father was that he was in a significant life crisis; meaning that every time he played, he was on a little holiday from all of his problems. One of the commonalities of all addictions is that the addicts are stuck in lives that are too painful to bear for the user.

Skinner called this negative punishment; taking the pain away is just as motivating as it is to add pleasure.

Below, you will find all forms of conditioning:

But gambling is even more complex…

Every time my dad put his last dollar into a slot machine, he was not only buying a ticket to numbing himself, but he was also buying hope.

Having a 0.1% chance at winning a million dollars feels a hell of a lot better than having a 0% chance, right?

Next time you pass a casino, take a good look at a slot machine. The colourful lights, the music, the celebrations of people who win, but what you actually are seeing is the shameless exploitation of a bug in our mental software.

A bug we all have. A bug to which the weakest members of our society are particularly vulnerable too because they do not have anything to combat the pathological promise of a better future.

Slot machines and Skinner Boxes prove that devices are capable of teaching starved animals (and depressed humans) new behaviours.

We, as a society, have become too good at pushing our own buttons. Alcohol addiction, compulsive gambling, smartphone addiction, and excessive shopping are all phenomena that can be explained with the two basic rules of Behaviour Architecture, do not forget them:

  1. We repeat what is rewarded.
  2. We avoid what is punished.

Moral Of This Article

Knowing that we are susceptible to external behavioural control does not make us immune against habit-forming technologies, but acknowledging our own vulnerability empowers us to act and always to investigate our behaviour for potential pathological patterns that are corrupting our well-being.

One habit can ruin your life and the life of your loved ones, so, if you are going to suffer in the future (and believe me you will) make sure that you bear your burden wisely and remember:

The quality of your life comes down to the quality of your coping habits. 

I sometimes wonder how very different my upbringing would have been if somebody had taught my dad anatomy behaviour so that he could have protected himself better against himself.

It is too late for my old man, but it is not too late for you.

Thank you for reading.

PS

I have added some homework to the end of this article. Working on those exercises will help you to align your behaviour with your current goals.

Are You In Need Of A Behavioural Makeover? 

What Are You And How Many?

“Jump!“

“Do it!“

“DO IT!“

Those were the words I heard on an ordinary afternoon while sitting on top of Table Mountain in the winter of 2018.

The internal voices were followed by a sudden and uncontrolled rush of tension in my legs – they were getting ready to catapult myself into the abyss.

This was not the first time this had happened to me, and I knew what to do.

I immediately grabbed the handrail, took a few deep breaths, cramped my hand up and did not let go of it until my shadow possession was over.

“…Fck off Tristan, not today“ I mumbled to myself.

I looked around to see if anybody noticed.

This is a picture of me in South-Africa

One of the friends I travelled with did, “You good bro?“

“Of course, I will catch up with you guys in a minute.“

As I took a couple of deep breaths, my muscles eased up, and I started to walk slowly again.

The voices were getting quieter and quieter until they finally faded out:

“You are not enough, and you never will be”.

”Your family will be better off without you”.

” You are making a fool out of yourself”.

”You are unlovable”.

”Nobody wants you”.

Possessed By Sadness

Luckily for me, I discovered many years before that incident in Capetown that I was not one thing but many.

”Tristan the loud one” was the name I choose for the depressed entity within myself.

The name Tristan, contrary to ordinary belief has nothing to do with the French word triste, which means sadness.  The name Tristan was originally derived from the Celtic language, and it means ”noise”.

I figured that this name was appropriate because this fragment of my soul kept whispering little toxic lies to myself over a great many years.

Painting by Aj Giel

While I hated every single visit of my inner critic, I have learned to live with him and to understand what I can to do keep this ”part” of myself in check.

Now, you might ask yourself: What the hell Daniel, are you suggesting that we all have multiple personality disorder?

Precisely, follow me into the rabbit hole…

The Composition Of The Psyche

What are you?

To answer this question, I would like to introduce you to today’s teacher:

Sigismund Schlomo Freud (1856-1939), arguably the most famous person in the history of psychology.

Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, the theory that states that our behaviour is driven by biological forces of which we are mostly unaware of are nowadays deeply entrenched in the world of psychiatry, at his time, it was a revolutionary idea.

Before Freud came along, people thought about the mind in predominantly philosophical terms.

The idea was that a human being is what they are aware of (think of Descartes quote – I think therefore I am).

It was furthermore assumed that we have control over ourselves.

Freud questioned those ideas.

Rather than seeing the mind as one thing, he acknowledged that there are invisible forces under the surface of the mind that govern our behavior.1

The idea that we possess a significantly smaller amount of self-regulation than we would like to have is indeed scary, but I believe that deep down we all know this to be true.

You have encountered this principle before; do you remember seeing the famous snickers commercial ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’?

In those commercials, you have a series of masculine men whom all transform into histrionic women because they are possessed by their hunger.

This idea that your hunger, your lust, your sadness, and your anger are autonomous entities who reside within you and who have the power to overrule you to get what they want is a Freudian idea.2

Did you ever have a moment where somebody you cared about violated your boundaries, and you found yourself possessed by anger and you said or did something for which later, once you regained control you had to apologise?

Let me tell you how I learned about anger…

Possessed By Anger

The first time I noticed that in certain social settings, invisible behavioural drivers could be awakened was when one of my classmates tried to kill me.

I was in the sixth grade of a bad school in a bad neighbourhood.

After I had been bullied for quite some time, and I learned that becoming a bully is indeed much better than being bullied.

Myself (left) scuffling around with one of my classmates

Since I wanted to be left in peace by other aggressive kids in my class, I occasionally had to ”prove” myself to establish my standing in the school dominance hierarchy – meaning that I had to pick on somebody else.

My choice was clear- Steven, a kid who I was sure I could pick on without immediate consequences.

After a couple of word fights between Steven and me, it got physical.

He threw a swinger at me but missed; I did not miss with mine.

After my punch successfully landed on his nose, I managed to put him in a headlock and choked him until we were separated by a teacher.

What then followed was something that I am never going to forget in my life.

I expected the scuffle to end.

I assumed that Steven would accept his defeat and I figured that since everybody witnessed my ”victory”, the other tough kids would think twice before picking on me.

I was as wrong.

Steven just stood there, staring at his hand that was covered with his own nose blood.

After regaining his breath, he tilted his head in my direction, and his stare hit me.

There was something about Stevens’s eyes that changed after he saw his own blood.

After what felt like an eternity Steven smirked and opened his mouth,

I’m going to kill you”.

Steven proceeded by pushing our teacher out of the way as if she was made out of cotton.

She fell on the floor.

He walked right over her and grabbed the big scissors that were placed on her desk.

There he was, a chubby kid with glasses, pulsating skin, fletching teeth, eyes focused on me and only with one mission in mind: Stab him.

I ran as fast as I ever did in my life.

I did not return to school for a week.

I had nightmares for months, where I would see Steven’s facial expression over and over again.

Painting by Leah Justyce

My young and naive brain just could not contemplate what it had seen.

At that time, my mother always told me that human beings are good and pure at their core, but that look, those eyes, that smile, those weird movements did not fit into my understanding of the human condition.

What I saw was not Steven, that was not my classmate.

But if it was not him, who was it?

Freud and other psychoanalytical thinkers believed that rather than being one thing, we are a house in which many spirits live, and he made the terrifying notion that we are not the undisputed ruler of that house.

The ego is not master in its own house”.― Sigmund Freud

The thing that I could not understand about Steven’s transformation was that it did not fit my understanding of how emotions were supposed to work.

Growing up, I was taught that we have emotions, but in Steven’s case, it was different, it seemed to me that his emotions had him.

He was not angry; he was anger.

Steven was not transformed at that moment; it seemed to me as if something else within him, something that was already there got activated and overruled him.

That “Steven“ had a different body posture, he had different values, after all, he was not one bit concerned with his well-being in the long run, what he cared about was eliminating the source of the threat, and he willingly accepted the possibility of ruining his life for that satisfaction.

Behavioural Orchestra

Two years ago, I had lunch with a mentor of mine Peter, a systematic family therapist and his son Till, a business psychologist who also happens to be my best friend.

While eating oysters and drinking red wine, Peter eventually opened up about his counselling philosophy

When I start interviewing a client, I like to learn about their behavioural orchestra.

Most counselling approaches focus on the individual and the individual alone; a family therapist who is worth his gold will not ignore the fact that human beings are systematic creatures.

Learning about the different forces that shape the behaviour of the client helps me to draw better conclusions about the situation that is at hand.

With children, I often use an orchestra analogy.

What are the children’s parents like?  What kind of friends does the kid have?  Is the child surrounded by high-quality teachers?

By learning about the external drivers of the client, I can counsel them emphatically because I can vaguely understand what it is like to be in their shoes”.

I loved the metaphor of the behavioural orchestra, but I believed it was missing something, don’t we all have an internal orchestra as well?

I could not put it in words on that day, but to me, it seemed that we are a subset of different modes of beings.  This ecosystem consists of external and internal drivers who all affect us behaviourally, emotionally, socially, and cognitively.

 

2013 Seb Eriksson

Modern consciousness researches have concluded that rather than being one thing, the human psyche seems to be composed of various “ego-states”.

The concept of the ego was first written about between AD 397 and 400 by Augustine of Hippo in his masterpiece “Confessions“.

Saint Augustine of Hippo

Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage.  Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are”.  ― Augustine of Hippo

The word ego is Greek, and it simply means – “self“.

Many modern therapists confirm the theory that rather than having a unitary personality, we are a house with many rooms, and in those rooms live different “selves“.

Each of those “selves“ is distinct in its character and is equipped with a full range of emotions, desires, habits, values, beliefs, and even genders, sexual orientations or talents.3

From that idea we can make a terrifying derivation: We are conflicted by nature.

What if two sub-modalities want something different at the same time?

We go to war with ourselves…

Possessed By Pleasure

In 2019, my friends and I travelled for a month through Europe in a van.

After almost five thousand kilometres on the road we received the exciting news that another friend of ours, Richard, an actor, wanted to join us on our adventure, all we had to do was to drive to Venice and pick him up.

In our euphoria about the imminent arrival of our dear friend, we somehow managed to arrive an entire day too early in Venice.

But it was not any other day; it was a Saturday.

Once we arrived in the city, we immediately armed ourselves with enough wine bottles to take out a wild Rhino.

After some drunk strolling through the most beautiful city in the world, we finally found a relatively undisturbed little bridge where we could marvel at the stars and philosophise about life.

Photo by Massimo Adami

Venice has a special meaning for me; years ago I travelled here with my girlfriend at the time.

It was the first cities where I told a girl that I loved her and meant it.

So, it is fair to say that my heart was in turmoil on that day.

After another bottle of red wine, my friends had to take a leak.

That conversational break was welcomed by me, I had a short moment for myself to dwell into memories and mourn… or at least this is what I thought.

My melancholia was interrupted by a loud “SPLASH“.

My friend Chrissi had slipped and fallen into the canal.

I am not sure if I had ever laughed this hard in my life.

While holding my belly, I saw that it was not only the disgusting water of Venice that was dripping down my friend’s hand; it was also blood.

My friend Till and I were instantly sobered up by that scene, so it was time to head back to the bar street of Venice because our friend clearly needed some first aid and more importantly, we needed to get ourselves drunk again.

Cup by cup, I became less and less Daniel and transformed slowly but surely into a two-meter tall ravaging drunk.

I talked to every person, made all of the jokes, danced on every table, and ordered all of the drinks.

As the last bar kicked us out, my friend Till suggested that it is time to go home.

I was not too fond of the idea, I somehow managed to befriend a local Italian cocaine dealer, and he proposed to me the idea that we should not go home but to go with him to an underground party where we could continue to intoxicate ourselves.

I tried to convince Till that this plan is indeed far superior to going home, but my pitch remained unsuccessful.

After five minutes of debating, I just decided to go with my “new friend“ to the rave.

Till saw this and jumped in front of me and told me with a parental voice  “Jaques it’s time to go home“.

Jaques was the nickname my friends picked years earlier for my intoxicated persona.

While “Daniel“ is in love with books, people, and his future, “Jaques“ can only be described as a playful idiot who worships the moment and chooses endless excess no matter the cost.

Artist: Jeremy Wilson

It was not only my friend who stood in front of me, but it was also reason itself, and “Jaques“ did not want to have any part of it, he simply did not want his mania to end just yet.

My friend, however, would not budge down, so he pushed me and said again fiercely “Jaques time to go home“.

Another thing “Jaques“ is not a fan of is someone telling him what to do, so “he“ took a swing at my friend.

My friend went down.

He got back up, walked right past me and whispered: “go and have your misery, you stupid son of a bitch“.

The fight sobered me up and scared my new Italian “friend“ away, and I found myself alone at night in the middle of Venice.

My regained senses could not help themselves but be endlessly intrigued by the depths of my own shadow.

I remember mumbling to myself “Did I just punch my best friend because he wanted to protect myself from drugs and bad people?“.

My mania had ended… time to go home.

Or so I thought…

I have little to no orientation skills even when I am sober, but finding my way drunk out of Venice was a lost cause from the start.

After wandering around aimlessly for hours, I surrendered to the maze of the old town.

Luckily, I met what seemed to be the last person awake in Venice, an old tattooed Vaporetto captain.

After some desperate negotiation, he agreed to give me a ride home in his boat.

Just as the sun started to kiss Venice awake, I found myself in the backseat of a luxurious- mahogany-speed-boatish-water taxi heading with god speed towards the camping ground where our van was parked.

(If you ever get drunk and lost in Venice, do not forget to bring enough cash to get a water taxi home.  The water taxis do not take credit cards.)

The very first thing I did the next morning was to write in my journal and rip the entire page out and handed it to Till, the letter said:

Good friends go to war with you.

Best friends go to war against you, if necessary.

I am sorry.

Yours

Daniel“

He forgave me at that moment, we hugged, and I shed a tear of gratitude because I realised that my friend wants the best for the best part in me.

The next day came, our friend Richard arrived, but nobody partied that night, we all had enough…

In the video above, you will see my hungover friends and myself finally catching up with our friend Richard.  See the bandage on my friend’s right hand?  Yes, he really fell in the canal the day before and injured himself mildly while doing so…and I will forever roasting him for it…

Do You Hear Voices?  Yes, Me Too

Dr Richard Schwartz, one of the most eminent thinkers in the field of Internal Family Systems Therapy, noticed something strange in the early 1980s while working with clients who had severe eating disorders.

During that time, many family therapists believed that the origins of psychological disorders were caused by dysfunctional structures in the family.  This means that if you want to change the behaviour of the client, you must change the organisation of the family itself.

He soon discovered that his “textbook family therapy techniques” of reorganising the family structure proved to be ineffective, most of his clients kept binging and purging.4

Art by Tanja Silvestrini

Out of frustration, Dr Schwartz began to ask what was happening inside his clients.5

His clients would then open up and tell him about the extensive conversations they had with what they called different “parts” of themselves.

At first, Dr Schwartz thought that these conversations where metaphors for their feelings, but his clients all described these “parts” as distinct personalities who made them do things.

Dr Schwartz first wondered if his clients had multiple personality disorder, but then he had a terrifying discovery:

I have those voices too”.

One of his clients, Diane, told him, for example, about a pessimistic voice that she was hearing who always told her that everything was hopeless.

Dr Schwartz approached that “part” of Diane as if it was a distinct person and much to his surprise the voice responded to him and confessed that if she prevented Diane from taking any risks, she would not get hurt.

That “part” of Diane was trying to protect her.

Dr Schwartz was ecstatic, if this inner pessimist was driven by a benign intent, then Diane might be able to negotiate a different role for it.

But Diane did not want to have anything to do with this “part” of herself; in fact, she hated her inner pessimist.

I asked her why she was so rude to the pessimist, and she went on a long dialogue, describing how that voice had made every step she took in life a major hurdle”.

Dr Schwartz realised something even more bizarre; he was not talking to Diane; he was talking to the “part” of her that was at war with the inner pessimist.

There was one “part” in her who was cracking the whip to drive her towards achievement while another “part” of herself was trying to protect Diane from the pain of failure while concurrently being sorry for her because she had to work so very hard.

Dr Schwartz stepped in and told Diane to focus on the voice that was at war with the pessimist and ask it to stop interfering in her negotiations with the inner pessimist.

To Dr Schwartz’s amazement, that “part” of Diane agreed to “step back”.

He again asked Diane how she felt about her inner pessimist:

In a calm, caring voice, Diane said she was grateful for her inner pessimist for trying to protect her and felt sorry that it had to work so hard”.

From that point, negotiations with her inner pessimists were easy, and Diane ultimately healed.

Encounters like the one with Diane led Dr Schwarz to create a new therapy approach where he acknowledges the existence of those “parts“ in his clients and even in himself.

One could say that it is really the job of the therapist to get all of these different “parts“ to talk to each other and negotiate the physical and psychological health of all of the “parts“ of the client.

This form of spiritual integration and mediation seems to be crucial for the therapeutic betterment of the client.

The opinion of other eminent thinkers confirms this assertion.  Let me cite some examples:

Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by the integration of the contraries”.

― Carl Gustav Jung

“A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow”.
― Djuna Barnes

“The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own”.
― Sigmund Freud

“Confront the dark parts of yourself and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness.  Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing”.

― August Wilson

Two decades after Dr Schwartz’s discovery that the human psyche is not unitary but composed of ”parts” has led him to restructure his psychotherapeutic approach entirely.

While in Diane’s case, he discovered that he could mediate the different ”parts” of his clients, he now understood that he had to mediate his own ”parts” as well to be successful in providing curative therapy.

You will see in the following case study how Dr Schwartz integrates and acknowledges both of his own ”selves” and the ”selves” of the client:

I am meeting for the first time with an anorexic client, Margie, in a residential treatment centre where I am a consultant.  She has fought with her anorexia for 19 years and has found that whenever she starts feeling better about herself, she stops eating.  Before the session, I focus on my internal world – to centre myself.  I hear a familiar voice of fear saying that she is obviously very fragile and I should not do anything to upset her.  I tell that part of me that I will be sensitive to her condition, and ask that it trust me and let my heart open again.  I focus on my heart and sense the protective crust that had enveloped it as I approached the time of the session melt away.  I can feel more sensation now in my chest and abdomen, with vibrating energy running through my limbs.  I feel calm and confident as Margie enters the office and sits down.

She looks like a cadaver and has a feeding tube in her nose.  Her movements are controlled and rigid.  She eyes me warily.  At once, I feel great compassion for her and respect for the parts of her that do not trust me.  And may not want to work with me.  I am not invested in a certain outcome for this session.  I would like to help her, but I will be fine if she chooses not to let me in.  I am curious about what her anorexia has been up to all these years, yet I am certain that it has good reasons for doing this to her.  I feel the energy in my body, extending nonverbally through my heart toward her, and trust that at some level, she can sense it.  I am confident that, if I can remain in this state, whatever is supposed to happen will – I do not have to make anything happen.

I introduce myself and tell her that I am good at helping people with the parts of them that make them not eat.  I ask Margie where she finds that voice of anorexia in her body and how she feels toward it.  She closes her eyes and says it is in her stomach, and she is angry at it.  She says that it tells her that it is going to kill her and that there is nothing she can do about it.  I feel a jolt of fear clenching my gut and hear a familiar inner voice saying, “it’s determined to kill her and is succeeding.  What if you say something that makes it even more determined!” Again, I quickly reassure the fear with words like, “Trust me.  Remember that if I stay present something good always happens”.  My abdomen immediately relaxes, and the soft, flowing energy returns to my body.

In a calm, confident voice, I tell Margie, “It makes sense that you’re angry with the eating disorder part because its avowed purpose is to screw up your life or even kill you.  But right now, we just want to get to know it a little better, and it’s hard to do that when you’re so angry with it.  We’re not going to give it more power by doing that – just get to know more about why it wants to kill you.  So see if the part of you that’s so angry with it is willing to trust you and me for a few minutes.  See if it’s willing to relax to watch maybe as we try to get to know the eating disorder part”.  She says okay, and when I ask how she feels toward the eating disorder now, she says she’s tired of battling with it.  I have her ask that part to relax and step back too, and then another part that was very confused by the disorder.  Remarkably for someone in her condition, each time she asks a part to step back, it does.  Finally, in response to my question of “how do you feel toward the eating disorder now?” she says in a compassionate voice, “Like, I want to help it”.

— Dr Richard Schwartz

No matter how often I read the story above, every time I get to the point where Margie shows some form of emphatic understanding and love for the anorexic ”part” in herself I get goosebumps and teary eyes.

Painting by Gloria Perez Herrero

Margie’s superego, the punishing sub-modality within herself expanded to a point where it told her that she does not deserve to eat anymore.  To show some kind of compassion for that “part“ of herself that nearly punished her out of existence deeply moved me.

The Dissociative Table

While I have never been anorexic and thank god for that, I decided to go full soul striptease mode in this article to show you that I know what it is like to be tormented by my spirits.  I think that if you are honest with yourself,  you also have some “parts” within you that you are at war with.

One of the reasons why I was depressed for years was because I was living in a constant state of playing tug of war with my inner ”parts”.

Rather than accepting, negotiating, and integrating my different ”parts” I hated everything about me that was not virtuous.

The moment I stopped my attempts to eradicate my ”weak” or ”ugly” ”parts” and instead started to converse with them was when I started to heal and stopped living in a tyrannical relationship with myself.

Jay Early, a psychotherapist, put it best when he said:

The human mind is not a unitary thing that sometimes has irrational feelings.  It is a complex system of interacting parts, each with a mind of its own.  It is like an internal family — with wounded children, impulsive teenagers, rigid adults, hypercritical parents, caring friends, nurturing relatives, and so on”.6

Each ”part” of yourself, even the ”parts” that you do not like, were once born to protect you, and most of them have a time and place where they still can be useful to you.

Some of your ”parts” are friendly and perfectly socially acceptable, while others were born to protect you against yourself or external threats.

What I am trying to say is: Being a human being is an internal team sport.

If you are not everything you could be, it could be helpful to call an ”internal team meeting”.

A perfect technique for that occasion is The Dissociative Table developed by George Fraser in 1991.7

The technique consists of inviting all of your ”inner people”, ”parts”, ” alter” or ”ego-selves”, or whatever you like to call them, to gather around an internal table and sit down and talk.

The goal of that technique is to get to know your different “parts” and discuss what an optimal pathway through life could look like for you.

The purpose of this exercise is to move away from internal conflict and towards psychological fusion.

Illustration by Ayan Mukherjee

There are three ways you can mediate this internal gathering:

  1. You do this with a therapist.
  2. You close your eyes and meditate with this exercise.
  3. You write about this internal conversation.

For me personally, I prefer to use writing and meditation for this technique because I was not successful so far in finding a therapist who is familiar with ego states.

Here is how I used Fraser’s dissociative table technique for myself:

Mediation

  • Do some deep breathing exercises or something that helps you to relax (no alcohol allowed).
  • Close your eyes.
  • Picture yourself sitting in a secure and safe room with a beautiful oval table.
  • One after another, you see people sitting at the table, those people are your different ”parts”.
  • What do your sub-modalities look like?  How many are they?
  • Allow each of your ”parts” to introduce themselves to you.
  • Interview them and ask them what they want and what they think is best for you.
  • Some questions that I like to ask my ”parts” are:
    • The name of the ”part”
    • When and why the ”part” was created
    • What does the ”part” look like
    • What does the ”part” want
    • How does the ”part” talk
    • What does this ”part” feel like and when do you feel it
    • How does this ”part” make you behave
    • How does this ”part” make you see the world
    • How can you integrate this ”part” into your life
    • What pain has this ”part” caused you
    • What pain has this ”part” protected you from
    • What benefits will you gain if you make this ”part” an ally of yourself
  • When you want to end the conversation make sure to thank all of your ”parts” for coming, remind them that you are all in this together and that all ”parts” should work together to make this adventure everything it can be.
  • Open your eyes.

While meditating about your ”parts” can be curative by itself, I had the most success in writing about the different sub-modalities that reside within myself.

Unknown artist

While my modes of being are distinctive and unique to me, schema therapists have found that people often have very similar ”parts” in themselves.8

Below, you will find a couple of ”parts” that my coaching clients have identified within themselves:

The Workaholic

The workaholic equals their productivity with their self-worth.  They love to be busy, and they willingly ignore the host’s basic human needs for play, love, balance, and recovery.

They love being admired and praised for the long hours they put in and is more concerned with their projects than with their own physical and psychological well-being.

They neglect the people around them and is often confused about the origins of their unhappiness.  Their primary way of coping with pain is to drown themselves in work.

Painting by Eric Chow

Symptoms: Exhaustion, relationship problems, isolation, feelings of meaninglessness, ignorance of human core needs, feelings of inadequacy, loneliness.

Example: “My way of showing love for my family is by putting in the work to create a better future for them, to give them opportunities I did not have”.

Yes, this means that I will not make it to my kid’s baseball games and yes this means that I cannot go to the movies with my wife, but that is my role, that is who I am, that is what being a man means.  We work.

Tired?  In my line of work, there is no tired; there is no sick; there are results, and results do not come from anything else but from putting in the hours.  Of course, I feel lonely and unhappy, but success has a cost, and I am willing to pay for it“.

The Depressed Self

The depressed self is a mode that gets activated when one person thinks they are defeated by life.  The depressed self gets activated when a person has their human core needs not met and is not operating on a sufficient level on their eight dimensions of life.

The depressed self feels that the current life path is only bringing more misery towards the host, so they feel that the proper course of action is to protect themselves from everything by freezing, hiding, and numbing the host.

The depressed self is concerned with detecting the immediate threats in the world and are ignoring any positive signs because they are focused on survival, and they do not care about happiness.

Artwork by Shawn Coss

Symptoms: Lethargy, constant pain, avoidance, fighting with the partner, feeling tired, hopelessness, melancholia, numbness, behavioural paralysis, short term thinking, bad coping habits, self-mutilation, suicidal voices, anxiety.

Example: “When I’m in a depressed state, it’s hard for me to get out of bed.  Showering becomes a victory.  Leaving the house becomes a miracle.  All I want to do is sleep.

I feel strong feelings of hate and disgust towards myself, and it is impossible to trust the people around because let us be honest, who stays with a miserable person like me.

Being around other people is a drain, I often do a bad job of hiding my misery, this is why I choose to be alone for now, so I do not pull other people down with my horsecrap.

I know I am not enough, and sometimes I worry if ever will be“.

The Drug Abuser

The drug abuser is a “part“ that is concerned with instant gratification and instant pain mitigation.  They are concerned with the now and willingly throws away health and prosperity in the future for their anxiety and responsibility liberation.

They turn a blind eye to the long-term consequences of their toxic behaviour and accepts negative consequences for their physical and psychological health.

The drug abuser uses unhealthy habits to ease their existential anxiety, and they often have very intelligent ways of rationalising and even romanticising their pathological conduct.

Painting by Valerie Patterson

Symptoms: Drug use, overeating, lying, rationalising, self- medication,  having toxic relationships around him, procrastination, freezing, mania, unprotected sex, financial mismanagement.

Example: “When I drink, I’m a different person.  Normally, I’m quite introverted, and there are few people whom I click with naturally when I drink, I feel that I’m funnier and people are attracted to me.

I do not have much joy in my job and do not get me started on my relationship… but when its Friday night, I am the heart of the party, and I am…like somebody else.  I talk differently, dress different, and I make different decisions.  Of course, there is a price, I am often hungover and in a bad state at the end of the weekend.  But hey, we all have that right?”

The Ashamed Fourteen-Year-Old

We all have times where we were hurt, where we encountered malevolence, and where our perception of who we thought we were was damaged or even shattered.

Traumatic and psychological catastrophes often give birth to new “parts“ whose job it is to protect us in the future from that traumatic source of danger.

While it is helpful to create a coping persona to help us survive being mobbed in preschool or something similar, this “part“ should probably not be the primary decision maker for the rest of our life.

Painting by Annie Ravi

Symptoms: You still dream about painful experiences that are more than eighteen months old, compulsiveness, snapping at your partner, drug use,  avoidance, nightmares, black and white thinking.

Example: “Just the thought about my upcoming talk scares the living daylights out of me.  When I was fourteen, I was stuttering very badly, and I remember Mrs Jones, my English teacher forcing me to talk in front of the entire school.  I was so so afraid that I stuttered horribly.

Dozens of kids pointed at me and laughed at my expense.

To this day, when I talk in front of a group of people, I sweat like crazy.

I avoid situations like that every time I can.

Filters Of Life

So why does all of this matter?

Why did I choose to share with you the weird composition of my psyche?

Why did I tell you about the mental makeup of my murderous classmate or the psychology of anorexic girls?

I decided to write this article because I believe that the quality of your inner dialogue either makes or breaks you.

Another reason I wrote this article: NOBODY EVER TOLD ME THIS SHIT.

I have had to learn very painfully over the years that each of my psychic “parts” has a place and a purpose.

Not knowing that there are spirits that need to be governed makes you a slave to your emotional entities because you never even realise that you are entangled in a constant war for the steering wheel of your life.

If you are currently not happy with how the world manifests itself to you, it might be the case that your brain is currently governed by one of your ”parts” who is seeing the world in a way that is unhelpful to you.

Unknown artist

Just like we use filters for Instagram to make our pictures look a certain way, each of our ”parts” has a unique perception that allows you to see things that are relevant to the goals of that mode of being.

I am sure you have experienced this:

  • When your inner critic had the steering wheel, and all you could see was what was wrong with you.
  • When your inner hero had the steering wheel, and you could not help yourself but see all of your problems as possibilities for growth.
  • When your inner drug abuser had the steering wheel, and all you cared about was losing yourself in the night as if there would not be a tomorrow.

Being aware of who it is that governs your behaviour can be a matter of life and death.

And, nobody knows this better than Kevin Hines, the man who survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge because his inner terrorist convinced him to do so.

The moment you start to meet and view your undesired psychic parts with compassion, understanding, and curiosity is the moment when you will heal and unlock your potential.

Success is not a one-man game, align your “parts“, and work together to make your life everything it can be.

Thank you for reading,

Yours

Daniel (and all the other “parts” that reside within me)

 

Charles Duhigg`s The Power Of Habit {Book Review}

When I learned about habits under Professor BJ Fogg from Stanford University, I realised that to become better at behaviour psychology, and in particular, in habit formation, I needed to read every piece of relevant literature that I could get my hands on.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhig was the one I started with.  When you want to learn about habits, this book is a good starting point.

The books simplicity and its case studies are really perfect to learn about behaviour.  No psychology background needed.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.  We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly.  We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.  Aristotle

We are what we repeatedly do.  This quote really hits the nail on the head.  When you want to achieve any dream in your life, or want to change yourself, or design for a life according to your true values, you start with you.  With your habits.

A couple of years ago, I made a decision to change my life for the better, but where do you start?  When you are getting the same undesired result over and over, what do you change?

I believe you start with your habits.

What Is Charles Duhiggs The Power Of Habit About?

In The Power of Habit, Charles examines why some people and companies struggle to change despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight.  This book depicts Charles’ exploratory journey of discovering habit formation in individuals, companies, and societies.

He visits laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work, and wherein our brain they reside.  He writes about the right habits that were crucial for Michael Phelps to become the best swimmer in history.

The book has three chapters.

In the first chapter, he explains with numerous impressive case studies how habits work in individuals, and how we can form new habits and break undesired behaviours.

In the second part, he dissects the habits of successful organisations.  This part is highly entertaining if you are into big business.  He deconstructs what habits big managers implant in companies, such as Us Steel or Ford, that separated them from their competitors.

In the third part of the book, he talks about how habits can change entire societies and cultures and discusses if free will exists at all if we are all controlled by the automated habits that we do each day.

What Are Habits?

What was the first thing you did this morning after you got up?  Did you check your phone?  Did you hop in the shower, checked your mail?  Did you grab a banana or a doughnut from your kitchen table?  Before you left your house to go to your work or university, did you brush your teeth before you took a shower or after?  What was the route you took to your destination?  When you arrived at your desk, did you first chat with your co-worker?  Did you recheck your phone?  Are you eating a kebab for lunch or a salad?  When you get home, where did you put your jacket?  What did you do with your shoes?  Did you hit the light switch with your left or your right hand?  Did you walk straight to your fridge or to your couch?  Where did you put your keys?  Back into your pocket or on a shelf?

When you took a dump, did you have to think a lot about what to do next?  No, right?  You automatically reach for the toilet paper, and after you go to the sink, you do not have to think about washing your hands, it is automatic.  Ingrained in you, or as I prefer to say; you act out of habit.

All of the behaviour above are done without a lot of thought.  They are habits.  According to a study in 2006, researchers at Duke University found out that more than 40% of the behaviour we perform each day, is not actually as a result of us deciding consciously, but of habit.(1)

This means that almost half of our life is lived on autopilot.  Crazy right!

It seems that habits emerge because the brain is continually looking for ways to save effort.  Think of your brain like a lazy bastard.  It wants to save as much effort as possible, so we have more energy for important tasks.

Our character is basically a composite of our habits.  Because they often consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily express our character“.  Stephan Covey

Habits are the routines and behaviours that we do automatically.  We actually need habits to carry out necessary activities such as brushing our teeth, washing our hands after peeing, getting dressed for university, or following the same route to work every day without having to think about it.

This fantastic feature allows us to focus on more complex and vital tasks, such as deciding consciously, where your next vacation is going to be!

Your brain has only limited ram, so, it has to save memory as much as it can pretty much like your phone.

I believe that we humans are basically habit machines.

Think of your brain as a smartphone.  Habits are the apps on your phone.  Think of the possibilities of a smartphone for a second.

Person A uses their smartphone to play candy crush, flappy bird, and Facebook, or binge on Netflix or YouTube.

Person B uses downloaded Evernote, Duolingo, Trello, and Telegram, and uses their smartphone to thrive.

Both phones are capable of the same feats, but the first person installed lousy software on their brains, and Person B has chosen its brain programmes a bit wiser.  Their results, however, are like day and night.

I believe that mastering the essential mechanisms of behavioural psychology and habit formation, allows you to download brain software and delete bad habit apps from your brain.

I believe that there are only two kinds of habits: Positive Habits and Negative Habits.  A negative habit, for me, is a reoccurring behaviour that is not aligning with your true values and is keeping you from living according to your desired life design.  A typical example would be smoking.

Therefore, it is essential to learn how to form positive habits and to learn how to break bad habits and replace them with positive habits.

Mastering habit formation is really a superpower, in my opinion, and it gives you the freedom to decide who you really want to be.

Who is Charles Duhigg?

Charles Duhigg is a reporter for the New York Times and for the magazine.  Charles is a graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale University.  Before becoming a journalist, Charles worked in private equity.

Charles is the author of The Power of Habit, which is about habit formation in individuals, companies, and societies, and Smarter Faster Better, about the science of productivity.

He won a Pulitzer and contributed to other award-winning series such as Golden Opportunities, The Reckoning, and Toxic Waters.

Who Recommended It?

Among many others, Jim Collins, and various big magazines.

Few [books] become essential manuals for business and living.

The Power of Habit is an exception.

Charles Duhigg not only explains how habits are formed but how to kick bad ones and hang on to the good”.Financial Times

4 Important Concepts In The Power Of Habit

1) The Habit Loop

Charles created a formula for how behaviour works that is actually pretty simple and easy to understand.

Any behaviour, habit, or routine can be analysed in three parts according to Duhigg: the Reminder, the Routine, and the Reward.

The reminder is also often known as the cue or trigger.  The cue acts as the signal, it triggers the automated routine, which leads to a reward.  So, the process of forming new habits is a three-step loop:

  1. Reminder – a trigger that signals your brain to go into automatic mode, and which habit it has to use.
  2. Routine – this is the actual behaviour; it can be physical or mental. If you do something, there was a trigger beforehand.
  3. Reward – that is the thing that you get from doing the habit. Your brain needs rewards to figure out what behaviour and what loops are worth remembering for the future.

Example: you check your social media feed while you are studying.

Story from me: I used to procrastinate a lot while studying.

Let us say I had a seminar about statistics, something which to this day bores the heck out of me.  As soon as I saw my professor, I yawned.  The Statistic Professor was my cue.  As soon as he would turn around, I would get out my phone and start checking my Facebook or Instagram.  This was the routine/behaviour.  The reward was that I got distracted and that I had some little spike of dopamine in my brain from hearing a funny stupid joke from my friends.  Also, for me, statistics was pain.  Getting a temporary stop from pain is the same as getting a reward.

I was satisfying my short-term gratification.  This, of course, did not help me in the long term at all because statistics gets infinitely more boring and more painful if you suck at it.  So, this small habit of procrastinating contributed to me falling more and more behind.

So, although a habit has a reward that protects you temporarily, it often hurts you in the long term.  This is how you can often detect bad habits.  A recurring behaviour that is good for you in the short term, but has tremendously negative consequences for you in the long term.

Again, for me, a bad habit is a habit that temporarily gives you something, but is hurting you in a crazy way long term.  Smoking gives you stress reduction, but also cancer.  So that is a bad habit cost equation.

2. The Golden Rule Of Habit Change

Now that you know how habits are formed, how can you change them?!

We have all failed at changing or forming new habits.  Maybe you made some new year’s resolutions about changing your weight, or that you want to stop smoking, or finally learn a new language.

But where do you start?

The good news is that habit formation is a skill, and Charles Duhigg and many others have found great ways to break this down for us normal people.

In the Power of Habit, Charles presents a very simple model that aims at habit substitution.

The core of the idea of habit substitution, or habit swapping, is that you look for different ways to get the same emotional reward.  For example, you are triggered to have a smoke because you crave the reward of stress reduction.  Now, instead of putting a cancer stick in your mouth, you do a breathing exercise or meditate to reduce your stress.

The idea is that you become creative and find better ways to satisfy your needs.

3) Habits Are Formed Through Emotions

Our behaviour is motivated by emotional rewards.  When you look at the habit loop, it is powered by the reward.  All we do in life is to either avoid pain or to seek pleasure.
To change your habits, it is key that you understand the return of a behaviour.  Each behaviour is motivated by the return, reward, or the positive emotion at the end of the habit loop.

We can use this knowledge to form new habits and get rid of the old ones.  If you want to make a new habit stick, let us say a workout routine in the morning, you must pair it with a positive emotion.  Loving what you do enables you to trick your brain into craving that behaviour.

Habits are really formed through positive reinforcement.  Where humans excel, in my opinion, is that we all are constantly learning whether we like this or not.  Everything that is rewarded is repeated.  We are hard-wired to repeat everything that gives us pleasure and avoid anything that gives us discomfort and pain.  Everything we do is really to get a certain emotion.

I believe that everything we desire, actions, things, other humans, trips, acknowledgements, and goals all have in common that we really do not seek the subject itself, but the emotion behind it.  We do not want to get rich; we believe that we feel amazing when we will be rich, we do not crave money, but the promised emotion behind money.

Taking control of this process will put you in charge.  If you want to form a new behaviour, you link massive pleasure to that behaviour or subject.  People who are successful in forming the right kind of habits are very aware of this process.

If you immediately reinforce a behaviour, you are more likely to repeat it because your brain will want to re-experience that pleasureful emotion.

The same goes for the opposite emotion: pain.

If we link strong discomfort, and pain to a behaviour, we are hard-wired not to repeat that behaviour.

If you loved sushi for years, but you ate bad sushi once, and you got severe food poisoning, you may very well never have fun with sushi again.

Ever had such a bad hangover from an alcoholic beverage that just the smell of it gives you the shivers?  For me, it is tequila.  It gives me the shivers to just write about.  I accidentally conditioned myself that when I drink tequila, bad stuff happens.

What I am saying is that we humans can learn extremely fast.

What I Learned From The Power Of Habit

I love the simplicity of Charles Duhiggs, The Power of Habit.  The thing that I internalised the most was that there is a rewarding emotion behind every habit.

And bad habits, in particular, are a treasure trove of information about our true needs.  I looked at some of my bad habits and evaluated very honestly why this behaviour was important to me, and why I  had trouble just stopping that habit.

For years I had trouble getting out of bed in the morning.  I eventually just thought that I am not a morning person, but then I started to deconstruct this habit.

What was this habit giving me?  It turned out that I was not happy during that time, and I linked pain to the job that I had during.  So, having a delay of 20 minutes was my emotional reward.

To hack this, I substituted the habit of snoozing with meditation.  It also gave me a buffer of 20 minutes, but it made me happier at the same time.  It shifted the focus to me and made me realise that the shitty job that I had at that time was giving me the money to go after my dream and travel to South America.

This helped me to link less pain in getting up, and snoozing was less attractive to me.

So, if you have bad habits in your life, like smoking, drinking, distracting yourself, or procrastinating, ask yourself if there is a less harmful way to give yourself the reward.

Understanding why we do things gives us the means to alter the course of our behaviour, and I believe that changing our behaviour will put us in a place of power.  The power to decide what person we want to be, and with it, the power to decide what life we want to have.

This, to me, is the Power of Habit.

What Did I Not Like?

In The Power of Habit, Charles does a poor job of emphasising that it is an emotion that powers the habit loop, not rewards.  Rewards make it sound like the bonus at the end of a working year is motivating behaviour.  Again, it is an immediate reinforcement that makes us learn new behaviour.

I had the privilege to study habits under Professor BJ Fogg from Stanford University, who is the world-leading expert in habit formation, and this was one of the biggest differences between their two psychological philosophies.

But, I think The Power of Habit does a great job at explaining behaviour psychology for people who are not familiar with the topic.

And, the best model, in my opinion, is the model that people understand.

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