Why You Can't Break Bad Habits — The CIA Trick to Outsmart Your Brain
00:00So your decaf oat milk extra but not piping hot, four pumps of caramel, no sugar, small latte, and a large cup.That will be 10 minutes.No worries.I'm having fun on Playojo.And I keep it fun with all the latest slot and live casino games.Plus I get instant payouts with no minimum withdrawals.Here's your decaf oat milk extra but not piping hot.Ah, thanks. Playtime's over.
00:21Mmm, lovely.Feel the fun.Play Ojo.19 plus Ontario only.Please play responsibly.Concern about your gambling or that is someone close to you.Call 1866-531-2600 to visit connectxontera.ca.CIA taught me that one of the hardest things to do is develop a new habit, to end a bad habit and replace it with something new that's actually going to help you.
00:39And the whole reason that you're bad at developing new habits has nothing to do with you.It doesn't have to do with your self-discipline. It doesn't have to do with your resilience.It has everything to do with a process inside your brain that simply resists new habits and sticks to old habits because of one important indicator that's important to you.your brain and less important to you. My name is Andrew Bustamante and I'm a former CIA intelligenceofficer, New York Times bestselling author, and viral internet voice. I spent seven years living andoperating around the world with CIA's National Clandestine Service and now I teach spy skills that youcan use to break barriers and unlock your peak performance. CIA taught me that to build new habits,you actually have to trick your brain into recognizing one thing that it values more than anything else.
01:28And once you trick it into understanding what that one thing is, every new habit you want to build flows easily.And every bad habit that you want to break just melts away.But for those of you who want to understand the psychology behind why this one thing works and how you can master it to unlock your peak potential,stick with me for the second half of this video.The one thing that your brain values more than anything else is conservation of resources.So if you want to develop a new habit, you have to trick your brain into believers.that that new habit will actually conserve resources at a higher efficiency than the old habitthat you're trying to break. And one of the most important elements to having your brain believe
02:09that it's conserving resources is by having a way to build momentum so that your brain believesthat not only is it conserving resources, but it is actually also building resources at thesame time. Every bad habit that you've ever developed exists because your brain believes that thatbad habit is either conserving resources or increasing your overall resources as they pertain to yourbody. CIA taught me that there are only three sources that the human brain value. Time, energy,and money. Now, money is a very easy resource that we can all recognize and understand the valueof. But when it comes to time and energy, it's much more subjective, meaning the way that you valuetime and energy are really based in your own personal psychology. So when you want to start a new habit,
02:56what you have to do is trick your brain into believing that that new habit will either conserveyour time, energy, or money, or it will increase your time, energy, and money. And as you establishand practice that new habit, your brain will start to build momentum and recognize the actual resourcevalue of the habit you're trying to build. Building the new habit has nothing to do with repeating itfor 30 days or 15 days or 90 days. It has everything to do with your brain believing that that habit is eitherincreasing or conserving the resources that your brain values, time, energy, and money.Let's jump into these three resources and recognize how your brain looks at them and values them,because once you understand how your brain is wired to look at those resources,
03:41you'll be able to build any habit you want to build.As we jump into this, it's important to understand that CIA believes all people are bornwith some kind of natural spy skill.They just don't always know what that skill is.So one of the first things that CIA gives every new recruit is a quiz that helps uncover that individual's natural spy talent.I built a simple three-minute quiz that you can take for yourself if you scan the QR code on your screen here or click on the top link in the description below.To really get the most out of this conversation today, go ahead and scan that QR code or hit the top link in the description below and get started on your quiz.Go ahead and hit pause and I'll be here ready to talk to you later when you have your results.
04:21CIA teaches every new recruit that there are only three resources that matter.And those three resources are very different than what's taught to you in grade school or even by your family.Those three resources are time, energy, and money.Interestingly enough, CIA teaches those resources in that order because that is how your brain also values your resources.It values time first, energy second, and money last.Think about how different that is from the day-to-day life that you live each day, where everybody talks about money and very few people talk about energy.Why is it that there's so much value in society placed on money and so little value placed on time and energy?If anything, as people get older and go through more years of experience, they start to realize what the truly limited resources are.
05:11And if you talk to any retiree, they will tell you that the thing they regret the most from their life is what they did with that.their time and very few people will tell you that they regret what they've done with their money.CIA just takes every new recruit and puts them on a shortcut to understanding the true valueof each of those resource. And when you understand those resources, it gives you an incredibleadvantage in how you build and maintain new habits, especially recognizing that your braindoesn't like to build new habits. It likes to stick with old habits. And let's talk about why that is.If you're considering building a new habit, it's most likely a habit that you intentionally want to build and a habit that you know will be good for you.The problem is that a habit that's good for your body isn't always recognized as a habit that's good for your brain.
06:00And the reason for that is because your brain is always looking at these three resources and how much those three resources will be required in any given moment.And very likely when you're looking at building a new habit for your body, you already know that that new habit will require an invent.an investment of time, energy, or money, and possibly some combination of all three.So right away, you can understand why your desire to build a new habit is at odds with yourbrain's desire to conserve resource. And it's because of that contention that your new habitsso often fail and your old bad habits so often continue. Let's start by looking at old habitsfirst. And old habits are very often bad habits. And the reason that we call them bad habits,habits is because they are destructive in the long run, but they are also easy in the short term.
06:52And that's exactly why your brain sticks to these old habits. The reason you keep smoking,the reason you keep eating fast food, the reason you keep staying up late and falling asleep infront of the TV, these are all tied to old bad habits that your brain interprets as beingvery efficient in terms of resource consumption. Because drinking a cup of coffee brings youenergy. Eating a bunch of processed sugar brings you a dopamine hit. Staying up late and watching TVuntil you fall asleep saves you the energy of trying to stick to a routine that helps you gettired, reading books and moving something before bed, or even going through some sort of meditativeprocess, all of which require you to direct your energy, where watching TV is something
07:36passive that you just get to sit back and do until you naturally fall asleep. So your brainbelieves that all of these existing old habits, all of these bad habits that have built up over theyears, are actually helpful to you because they either conserve your resources, like the exampleof falling asleep in front of the TB, or they increase your resources, like the example ofeating too much sugar or drinking an extra cup of coffee in the afternoon. Your brain believes that itmight be building up energy or saving time to carry out these old habits. And your brain certainlybelieves that any monetary investment that goes into that old habit is an effective investmentbecause it's conserving your overall resource. The human brain still relies very much on what's
08:20known as survival instinct. The same processes that existed in caveman days still exist todaybecause society has grown faster than evolution has actually grown. So while you and I live in aworld of AI and smartphones, our brain still lives in a world of sticks and rocks. And as a result ofthat it continues to calculate its opportunities based on these very short windows of time.In essence, your primal brain doesn't have the vision for the future that your cognitive braincarry with you. So while you know what you want in a year or two years or five years, your primalbrain is still very much focused on what it needs today and in the next two minutes and in thenext 30 minutes. That's why it's so focused on these three critical resources. Because it doesn't
09:05actually realize that those three resources can be used over time.to have a greater return on investment.But your cognitive brain does.We call this the prefrontal cortex versus the paleo-mammalian brain, your front brain versusyour back brain.Your back brain believes that it has to conserve resources.Your front brain believes that you can invest long term to gain a better return oninvestment over time.
09:30It's your front brain that makes you want to develop a new habit.It's your back brain that fights your ability to develop that new habit and continuefalls back on old habits and bad habits. So let's talk about how you trick your back brain anduse your front brain to be able to build the new habits that you want to build. CIA taught me a three-stepprocess to building new habits. And that three-step process follows a framework called set,repeat, review. And the reason that you have this three-step format is because your brain can't betrusted on its own to simply understand the value of a new habit. Because every day, every time thatyou carry out that habit, your brain, your back brain, your paleo-mammalian brain,
10:13is actually going to see that habit as something harmful because it's going to see thatyou're putting time and energy and money into that new habit with no immediate return on investment.And that sends up warning bells in your paleo-mammalian brain.That's a challenge to your survival instinct.Because in your caveman days, you didn't do anything with your energy or your time that didn'tyield an immediate benefit, some sort of immediate return on investment.something that made you safer, something that made you warmer, something that fed you,something that connected you more with some sort of tribe. Your brain is still very much wired to look
10:48for that immediate gratification that satisfies its survival instinct. The benefit of a three-stepframework set, repeat, and review is that it creates enough space and time for you to fight thatinstinct, that survival instinct, so that you can let your prefrontal cortex, your front brain,prove to your back brain that there is, in fact, a return on investment that's coming from the newhabit. And once your back brain recognizes the benefit of your new habit, all of a sudden yournew habit becomes an old habit and that process runs like clockwork. In the same way that youmight drink too much coffee now or have one too many drinks at night now or stay up too late now,your new habit will replace the old habit because your brain will recognize the conservation and
11:34the return on investment that's coming from your new habit, replacing the bad old habit with a newold habit. And that habit will stick with you moving on. Let's break down this three-step framework.First, the word set. Set means that you are setting a new habit. Whether that new habit is what youeat for breakfast or when you go to the gym or maybe it's calling your mom on the weekends. You have toset a new intentional habit. And then you have to use your front brain, your prefrontal cortex, tocreate consistency with that new habit.Now, there's no timeline to what that consistency looks like,whether it's seven days or seven weeks or seven hours.
12:13It's important that you use your front brain,your prefrontal cortex,to exercise that new habit with consistency over time,which leads us to the second step of the framework, repeat.After you set the new habit,you want to repeat that new habit,and you want to repeat that habitwith as much consistency as possible
12:33because it takes time and reference.repetition to do two things. First, time and repetition will actually decrease the amount ofenergy that you have to put into that new habit. While it can be very difficult to wake up earlyand deal with the fuzzy head and force yourself to go to the gym the first time, every time you goto the gym each morning after that, it gets a little bit easier. And what that does to your back brainis demonstrate that the overall investment in the new habit is actually decreasing over time. But it takesyour front brain forcing yourself to go to the gym for those first seven, ten,15 days before your back brain recognizes that the overall investment of resources continues to
13:13decline. The second reason repetition is important is because with each new repetition,you're actually building a little bit more momentum with the new habit. Momentum is somethingthat is specifically tied to an increase in ROI over time. Very different than the question ofconserving resources, the question of building momentum is a question of efficiency.Your back brain is obsessed with these two things simultaneously, conserving resources and havinga higher return on investment for the resources that are spent. Repetition answers both ofthese core concerns in the back brain because repetition both decreases the amount ofresources that are needed with each repetition and builds momentum and consistency that
13:58increases the return on investment with each repetition.So the three-step framework of set, repeat, review allows you to set the new habit that youwant using your prefrontal cortex, whether that new habit is drinking less coffee,having fewer drinks, going to the gym more often, running on the weekends, or callingyour mom, whatever the new habit is, it's your front brain that sets that new habit.And then it's your front brain that allows you to repeat that habit numerous times,maybe seven times, maybe 15 times, maybe 30 times. And with each repetition, it's your back brainthat recognizes the overall amount of energy and time needed for that new habit decreases,
14:37and simultaneously the return on investment goes up because you start to sleep better,you start to feel better, you start to lose weight, you start to gain strength, you start to run faster.And when that momentum really sets in, your back brain pays attention. And your back brain startsto see the benefit and the efficiency of the new habit. And that's how a good friend of minestopped drinking seven red bulls a day and started drinking green tea instead, because the brainstarted to recognize that the old habit that it believed was efficient was less efficient thanthe new model. That's all it takes to defeat a bad habit, is just to trick your brain into believingthat it gets a better return on investment from a new habit. But you do need to use your
15:25prefrontal cortex, you do need to use your front brain to actually choose what the habit isthat will ultimately win over that back brain. The third step in our framework is something calledreview. After you set the new habit, after you repeat the new habit, you have to review the resultsof that new habit. You have to check to see whether or not the new habit is actually serving you,if the new habit is actually fitting into your lifestyle, or if the new habit is actually costing youunexpected new resources because your back brain is doing the same thing all the time.Your back brain is always running a secret audit of its own to determine whether or notthe resources that you're spending are actually decreasing and whether or not that
16:08return on investment is actually increasing. For that reason, it's very difficult to trick yourback brain about what's happening in the long run. You can full it for a few weeks, but you can'ttrick it for a few months. It will eventually recognize if your new habit is not actually reducingand conserving resources. That's why the review step is so important in your set, repeat, reviewframework. When you look at your new habit, whether it's the gym or whether it's a change in yourdiet or whether it's a change in your approach to dating, you have to actually look at whether or notthat new habit is serving you in the long run. Is that new habit something that's getting easier,something that's requiring less resources, less time, less energy and less money over time? Is it something
16:51that is actually increasing your own return on investment, meaning it's creating more time, energy,or money on the other end. You need to review these things objectively and then make changes to yourhabit if you really want your habit to stick. For example, some people want to start working out,and they believe that the best time to do that is by going to the gym first thing in the morning.I live in a military town. When I go to the gym at 6 o'clock in the morning, it's packed full of people.I have to wait in line to use certain machines. A work.that should take me 45 minutes can easily take me an hour and 15 minutes.So my back brain is doing the calculation every time I go to the gym first thing in the
17:30morning and it's saying to itself, this is taking a lot of energy, this is taking a lot of time.And it's very frustrating to this back brain when it recognizes that it's sacrificing sleepin exchange for this frustrating experience at the gym.So during my three-step framework of set repeat review, the review step is what shows me thatgoing to the gym at 6 o'clock in the morning may not be thebest use of the resources I have.So I started going to the gym at 10 a.m. instead.Because at 10 a.m., my gym is a ghost town.
17:59Everybody's at work because they're all tied to a military schedule.I don't have to wait for anything.My 45-minute workout can take 45 minutes, and I can go right next door and get a smoothie,and there's no line there either.So my back brain very quickly starts to understand that it costs fewer resources and has ahigher return on investment for me when I start a new habit of going to the gym at 10a.m. instead of at 6 a.m. If I kept forcing myself to go to the gym every day at 6 a.m., maybe I would be good for7 days. Maybe I would be good for 14 days. Maybe I would be good for 30 days. But my back brain would
18:34always be fighting against me because I'm not building momentum. I'm not building that increased ROI in exchange forthe resources that actually go into that habit. Another great example is when you try to change your food or yourdietary habit. It's very easy to believe that reducing the amount of sugar or reducing your carbs overis something that's going to be a habit that you can maintain. But the truth is that yourback brain has come to rely on the extra sugar and rely on the extra carbs as tools that satisfyyour hunger and give you energy overall. And when you have that increased energy, you can use itto get more done with the same amount of time. So your back brain is a big fan of your overeatingand your dependency on sugars and carbs. That means your back brain is a big fan of your
19:18over dependence on sugar and carbohydrate. So when you try to change,your diet to eat more vegetables or eat more lean meats. Your brain actually feels a reductionin energy as if the resources itself are being pulled away. And then your brain starts to worry abouthow you're going to get the same amount done that you used to get done. Which is why for everybodywho's tried to start a new diet, you know that feeling, that craving that you have to eat more,even if you're not hungry, to put a little extra jam on your toast or to go back and have anotherserving of pancake. You know what that draw is like because part of it is physiological,but part of it is also tied to that paleo-mammalian brain. It's afraid that if you don't eat that
19:59sugar, if you don't consume those carbohydrates, you won't have the energy that you need toaccomplish what you've always accomplished in the past. You have to use that repetition to proveto your back brain using your front brain that there are other alternates to tap into additionalenergy. And those of you who have successfully started a diet know that at a certain point in timeyour body switches from relying on external sources of energy, like carbohydrates and sugar, to internalsources of energy, specifically your fat reserves. Once your body starts consuming its own fatreserves, then your back brain starts to realize that you have plenty of energy. And on topof that, you're also getting fitter, you're also sleeping better, you're also having less joint pain
20:42because your overall body weight is coming down.And just like that, your new diet becomes an old habitthat your brain automatically sticks to and stops fighting.Your days of feeling trapped by your old bad habits are over.Any new habit that you want to create,you can set in motion using this simple CIA brain hack.You can outsmart your back brain by rememberingthat it cares about three resources, time, energy, and money.
21:08So to create a new habit, all you have to do is get that back brainto understand that the new habit is actually better in conserving and increasing the threeresources it cares about. And you can use the three-step framework of set repeat review to reinforceyour front brain to build the consistency and momentum that's required to actually changeyour back brain. To prove to your back brain that your new habit is good at conservingresources and also good at increasing the return on investments for the resource investmentthat's required.If you learned something new for me today, don't keep it to yourself.
21:44Hit that subscribe button right now.Leave a comment, share this video with a friend.And if you haven't taken your three minutes spy quiz,go ahead and scan the QR code on your screen right nowor click the top link in the description below to get started.And I'll see you on the other side.So your decaf oat milk extra but not piping hot,four pumps of caramel, no sugar, small latte, and a large cup.
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