Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Ru Anderson on How to Master Your Habits (and Thus Your Life)

Episode Date: March 4, 2016

In this podcast, I interview author, coach, and fellow podcaster Ru Anderson on how we can gain control of our habits and then our fitness and ultimately our lives. 4:56 - The power of good (and bad) habits. 10:50 - Triggers, habits, and positive vs negative feedback. 15:32 - The 4 keys to forming new habits. 21:30 - The road to successful habits. 27:55 - Avoiding temptation vs. using willpower. 35:35 - Habits and long term success. 39:59 - Your first 5 steps to forming a new habit. RU'S WEBSITE: http://exceednutrition.com/ Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hey, it's Mike, and this podcast is brought to you by my books. Seriously, though, it actually is. I make my living as a writer, so as long as I keep selling books, I can keep writing articles over at Muscle for Life and Legion and recording podcasts and videos like this and all that fun stuff. Now, I have several books, but the place to start is Bigger Leaner Stronger if you're a guy and Thinner Leaner Stronger if you're a girl. Now, these books, they basically teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build

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Now, as you probably know, I'm not a fan of the supplement industry. I mean, I've wasted who knows how many thousands of dollars over the years on worthless supplements that really do nothing. And I've always had trouble finding products that I actually thought were worth buying and recommending. And well, basically I had been complaining about this for years and I decided to finally do something about it and start making my own products. And not just any products, but really the exact products that I myself have always wanted. So a few of the things that make my supplements unique are one, they're a hundred percent naturally sweetened and flavored. Two, all ingredients are backed by peer-reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself because

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about my supplements at www.legionathletics.com. And if you like what you see and you want to buy something, use the coupon code podcast, P O D C A S T, and you'll save 10% on your order. All right. Thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast and let's get to the show. Hey, this is Mike. And in this episode of the podcast, I have a guest. I know, a big surprise, right? His name is Rumi Anderson, and he is a nutritionist. This is really what he hones in on.

And he's an author and speaker. He does seminars, and he has some online coaching services and so forth. And he also has a popular health and fitness podcast, which I was on maybe a year ago or so now. And he reached out to me about coming on my show to talk about habits and how to build good habits, how to undo bad habits and so forth. And this is something that I've written about a little bit here and there, and I've spoken about a little bit here and there, but I don't think I've done a specific podcast episode on it. So that's what this one is about. Let's get to it. Hey, Ru, thanks for coming on the show.

What's up, Mike? How's it going? All is good over here. How are you doing? I am very well, not too bad. I have moved home since we last spoke. You were on my podcast, well, it was a while ago, maybe a year ago or so but i've moved home from uh not so sunny england to not so sunny amsterdam so uh yeah on the move for next year i think just doing a bit of traveling get some experience in but uh yeah it's good to connect again man yeah totally and yeah we were talking about previously uh it's fun to fund that you're gonna like paris i think yeah that's the plan next after here. So hitting all the big European cities and just getting a bit, soaking a bit of culture up as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did

a bit of that when I was in my 20s and my wife's from Germany. So I used to go over there fairly frequently when we were dating because we did long distance for about two years. And so I'd go over and we would go around and it was fun. It was good. I was glad I did it. Yeah, I think it's an experience. If you can get the opportunity to do it, then, you know, get away, make it happen. And I think, you know, both with, with us as, you know, working online and things like that and doing the coaching, why not? Why not? Totally. Yeah, I totally agree. Okay. So, uh, in this podcast, just so everybody knows what we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about more of the, the psychological aspect of getting fit and, uh, kind of honing in on, on habits in particular,

because really, I mean, and this, this, this extends beyond fitness. I mean, I'm, I'm very much a habit oriented person. Like my friends always joke that I'm just a robot. Cause I always just do the same shit every day, eat the same food every day. And there are reasons for that. I mean, it's a, it's a conscious choice. I wasn't always like that. When I was younger, I was, you know, I wasn't like, I was never really kind of out of control. But yeah, it wasn't, my life wasn't as structured as it is now. And so I think this is an important topic to talk about because it's not, I guess, you know, if you look at the health and fitness advice space as a whole, the vast majority of the information focuses on the physical, you know, how to eat, how to train, what to do physically. But there isn't all that much information on the psychological side of things, you know, related to motivation. related to motivation. Also, how to really make it a part of your life and how to adopt it as a lifestyle as opposed to something that you have to force yourself to do for short periods of time

or maybe longer periods of time if you have particularly good self-discipline, but then where it all just kind of falls apart. And so as opposed to, cause that, that kind of leads to the constant rollercoaster type of experience where you get, you get going and you're, you're making progress and then, you know, you, you hit the dip and you lose it, you lose, you know, whatever progress you made and you feel like shit. And then you finally get back to on, on the, on the right path and then rinse repeat rinse repeat and it could be a just a demotivating frustrating experience on the whole so how do you how do you go from that to something where yeah sure you have ups and downs but where

it's everything is on a steady uh steady rise you know yeah i couldn't agree more with you hit it on the nail uh head on the nails right away there, Mike, because I wasn't actually overly surprised that you said that you like habits and you like routine because I'm exactly the same. I thrive on routine unless that's, you know, my habits and my entire day is kind of like this collection of habits that I do every single day. And I believe that, you know, my, my, my success from in terms of my health and my nutrition and my training and the goals that I've set over the years from that have all stemmed from the habits, the habits that I've created. You know, I decide to get myself to the gym. I decide to, you know, eat healthily. But obviously there's more going on there.

And the same goes for, as you've said, it goes well beyond just eating better or training a bit harder. It extends right into all corners of our lives. That's why I'm such a big fan of habits and educating people on habits. And really, that's where I'm spending a lot of my time now, looking at that side of things and getting people to truly understand that this is why you'll see success or this is why you won't see success when you're trying to make changes, particularly obviously as a, as a nutrition coach in that area of space. Okay. And you know, I, I love the fact that our habits are essential, really important to a healthy and lean body and all of those areas. And you know, I really help people with those most essential

nutrition habits that they should be doing every day. And we can, by all means, touch on them as well if you like. Sure, sure. I think another common thing with habits is that people maybe perhaps think this is really basic, particularly maybe it's, oh, you need to make a habit of getting to the gym or you need to make a habit of putting some vegetables on your plate. Yeah, they are habits that absolutely if you aren't doing them you need to build in but ultimately i feel habits are as as we've already compared you know yourself and i that we believe that habits are a huge part of our day already and i would suggest and you would probably say so too mike that we're probably pretty advanced with what we're doing here with our nutrition and training, right? And I know you are, right? And therefore, you know, if that habit is doing more advanced stuff, like maybe,

you know, hitting your sort of caloric intake or dialing in your macronutrient and food logging and stuff like that, that's all habits. Food logging is a habit and making sure that you do it. So I really think that, you know, any of the listeners that are tuning in here might think, okay, well, is this for me? I definitely do think that that's the case. And then at the flip side of that, then some people aren't quite ready to, you know, really push through all of that customization information into their diets or stuff like that. And you can leave that to a side for later and really focus on these habits and review them as well. And really, you know, it doesn't have to be about, and review them as well.

And really, it doesn't have to be about, well, I've been applying these sort of habit-based coaching to hundreds of clients for many, many years now. I've been testing them and experimenting with them and modifying them until I could really get a bit of a system together and to help people truly get results from it. And I think you touched on it there as well, Mike, that if we can learn

how to effectively form a new habit, we can really create or change anything that we want in our life. Would you agree? Totally. Yeah. Because I mean, in many ways, people have habits, good and bad. And so really what we're talking about is if you're talking about making a change in your life, chances are you're talking about changing from your existing habits to healthier or better habits. I don't know anybody that could say that they truly have no habits, that every day they wake up and every action they take is a new, completely randomly decided and determined action. Not at all. Everybody, you know, we all have our routines and we have our habits and some of our routines and habits are more conducive to happy and healthy living than others. Well, yeah, yeah, exactly. And this is why everyone can relate to it and actually work with this type of system. And like you said, you know, the habits, we're all doing habits. Habits are formed really when actions are tied to a trigger by that sort of consistent repetition. So when that trigger is happening, we have that automatic urge to carry out the action.

So everyone could maybe relate to these examples. Like, I don't know, maybe when we wake up, which would be like a trigger, we go and brush our teeth and that's a habit, right? That's something I do every day. And then when you maybe get to work, that's a trigger or whatever you do, you go and grab a coffee. That's a habit. And it happens every single time you do this. Or maybe linking it back to like our diets and stuff like that. Maybe when you get stressed out, that can be a trigger as well. It doesn't have to be something, you know, obvious like that. You eat junk food and then there's the habit. That's a popular one. You probably see it in your clients and people. Or out in social settings. If if you're you know you if you're out at a at a dinner with friends or whatever it's a trigger for eating all kinds of foods and whatever yeah yeah you just lose it

completely right so every day we're constantly going through this constant straight of triggers followed by habits and they happen then without us even noticing and i believe then when people find themselves in a real tricky situation with their diets, with their nutrition, with their training and general lifestyles, that that's where they're going to have to really just take a step back and assess. So how do we do it? Well, I think there's a couple of key cornerstones. The first one is understanding how the habits form. Obviously, I've already touched on that's through constant repetition over many, many years. It doesn't just happen in a week of habit. And again, that's a difficulty with, you know, forming new ones or breaking bad ones. And then a second one is at first they were

actually conscious efforts. You wake up, you're like, you know what, I better go and brush my teeth because, you know, I have to do that. But with time, they're going to become more automatic and less conscious. And what we have to study then in terms of looking what's going on in the inside of this is that there's a feedback loop is probably the best way of putting it. And that's encouraged us to repeat the habit for a good length of time. So I touched on that previous example that I said. So if you feel like stressed out and you go and eat junk food, which is the classic one, you might feel short-term pleasure or satisfaction. That's what happens, right? Junk food tastes good. Chocolate cake is quite nice. And that's when you get that positive feedback. But if you're stressed and you actually say, right,

I want to eat well, I'm on a healthy diet regime or whatever it might be, and you stop yourself from eating that junk, you might remain stressed. And therefore, you're actually going to get naturally negative feedback from your body. Or you might even feel more stressed because you just fought with yourself and you won the fight, but you depleted yourself of a bit more willpower or whatever. Exactly right. And you're just kind of like digging your own grave here. And that's because ultimately, the body likes to take the path of least resistance. So it's going to consistently aim for that positive feedback and causing us then to really repeatedly carry out an action whenever that trigger occurs. So ultimately then this is why

improving our diets or our exercise routines or lifestyle consistently proves so difficult for people as well. And that's why the health and fitness industry has such a high failure rate. Because if your diet is boring and bland, and that's like the classic approach to eating healthy, it's like, yeah, I'm going to slap on a boring chicken breast and some boring broccoli on the side. That is going to be unpleasant to follow. Negative feedback comes in there. So when you give up and you eat your favorite foods again, whatever that might be, you enjoy it. You're getting a lot of positive feedback. Yeah, it'd be like going celibate for whatever, some period of time. And then once you finally

have sex and you're like, I am never doing that again. That was the worst idea ever. That's it. That's the way people are, Mike, with their nutrition and stuff like that, right? And again, I believe that's because they aren't understanding the psychology behind it, or at least being educated on to expect that this is what's going to happen. So if you're currently, you know, listening in, you think, feeling that any of these changes you're making towards improving your diet or your lifestyle, then that feedback loop is going to be affecting you as well. It normally ensures that we don't stick to these changes for very long. So it's also clear, I believe then, that this same feedback loop is actually creating bad habits too. As we're

continually repeating certain behaviors, whether that's eating the cake, going out for meals, or skipping exercise, sleeping in, whatever it could be, that's often going to become habits in time. And fortunately, then we can actually, we can look at reversing that feedback loop in terms of how I help people understand habits a little bit more. All right, so really, there's kind of four real key components to kind of reversing that feedback loop in terms of we were talking about positive feedback and negative feedback. So the first one then is we actually want to create positive feedback for habits that you want to actually form. And by this then, I mean, it's important to start with habits that you're going to enjoy. Absolutely. No question

about it. If you hate eating spinach, don't tell yourself that I'm going to eat spinach with every single meal. You know, you want to really easily really easily focus although ironically you can uh who was it i forget his name there was a guy i think was it a book or was it a documentary i saw this a while ago something like the man who ate everything or something like that he was a chef and uh he was just kind of like a little a fun life experiment for him because as a chef uh he knew that he was limited in certain ways that because of the foods he didn't like to eat, like if he hated shrimp, for instance, I don't remember that was one that he hated, that he just didn't feel he'd ever really be able to make great shrimp dishes because he just didn't like shrimp. So he went and he basically made a long list of all these foods that he hated.

And he set up, I think it was over the course of a year, his schedule. So he would end up eating each one of these foods eight times or multiple times. And the significance of the eight, though, was in the end, he found that at about the eighth time, he actually started to enjoy many of these foods. So it's worth mentioning because a lot of people, they just like we get a lot of meal plan. We do a lot of custom meal plans for people. And there are quite a few people that will specify no vegetables at all i hate all vegetables and like so there's a point where you you know you can that's bad like all right well let's learn to like some vegetables i mean if you want to like not get diseases and die let's learn to like some vegetables

here yeah i get it i get. All right. So, yeah, do habits that you enjoy, but come a little bit out of your comfortable zone and it might have to be, you know, stuff that you previously didn't overly love. Right. Right. All right. Cool. All right. So the next part of that then is, OK, if we're doing something to enjoy, we're going to get a bit more positive feedback from it as well. But then what we want to do then is make sure that you're creating negative feedback for not doing the habit as well. And therefore, if you don't complete your new habit that day, or I tend to say, you know, you should be doing a habit every single day, there should be like a small consequence for actually not doing so. Now, obviously, you know,

when I'm working with clients or stuff like that, I'm the kind of that accountability factor. I'm the negative. I mean, the fact that they have to talk to you and say, no, I didn't do it. Yeah, that's it, right? But maybe if you don't have a coach or friends that's maybe doing this with you, one of my favorite ones is to basically go and print out a calendar, a 30-day calendar, which has kind of got a box for maybe every day of the month. And then what you can find then is when you do that habit,

you just put a big tick in it. Simple as that. And what I really find very effective with this is, say you've done and completed that habit for 14 days, so a couple of weeks, and you've got all those nice big ticks in the boxes. And then one day you go, I can't be asked to do this habit today.

And then you think, okay, well, you look at your tracker list or your sheet, your calendar, and then you've got well you look at your your tracker list or your sheet your calendar and then you've got to put that big red x in that calendar and you don't want to do it so it's a great way of just helping people you know even without a coach or a friend or an app or anything like that just to be able to get started with this and yeah there's research on that too just as a uh consistency mechanism that psychologically you just don't want to break your chain so the psychological pain of of not not keeping it going can be greater than than doing it yeah hugely powerful i love it i love it you probably know about stick too right s

t i uh 2k stick with 2ks yes yeah yeah probably something that's worth mentioning because like setting up the financial incentive of not not you know not just losing money but set it up so where if you don't do it that you know you're going to donate x dollars to the kkk or something like that like to a group that you despise that i think that's pretty clever yeah it's really clever isn't it yeah it's one of them ones why didn't i think of that um all right so that's our first couple our our third one really to really really reinforce this is to reduce negative feedback for doing that habit. By this then I mean your initial habit changes not only must be something that you're actually enjoying, but also should be very easy to accomplish.

It shouldn't be a huge hurdle. You're not going to go from sitting on the couch all day to entering your first powerlifting competition in three weeks. So really, ideally, you can achieve it with just a few minutes effort a day. That's what I'm talking about. You know, simple, easy habits. Maybe it's... Mini habits is the concept, right? Definitely. I think mini habits are the way to go. So in my opinion, that's maybe eating more protein with every meal. Maybe it's, you know, drinking an extra liter of water to get hydrated every day. Maybe it's adding an extra gym session every week to your or even before before a gym session i mean if depending on where the someone's at it could be just waking up and and doing 50

push-ups not necessarily in a row just you have to be on the floor until you've done 50 push-ups or 30 push-ups even you know what i mean yeah complete 50 push-ups an entire day that could be something as well definitely yeah it could be anything and this is why i love about it so it's so it could be personalized lastly then is you want to reduce positive feedback for not doing the habit so if you don't complete your new habit that day don't allow yourself maybe to do other pleasurable things and that's going to reduce that that positive feedback so i don't know i mean again we could go anywhere with this in terms of what you might stop yourself in terms of pleasurable things. And that's going to reduce that positive feedback. So I don't know. I mean, again, we could go anywhere with this in terms of what you might stop yourself in terms of pleasurable things. Again, that's going to be highly individual. TV watching is probably the

most common thing, right? That's the perfect example. Yeah. If you don't do your habit that day, yeah, you don't get to watch Game of Thrones. Simple as that. Yeah. So that's really a kind of a four stage sort of system. I like to help people really get their head around that sort of psychology, really, of what's going on with habits. And from there, then, I've kind of put together a bit of a system which stems a little bit further from that. And really, it's what I use with my own clients and in my coaching programs and stuff like that. So, I can break that down if you wanted to as well. Yeah, yeah, let's talk about it. All right. So it's kind of like a habit method or a habit system. So now that we, I suppose we've got that understanding of habits and how they're really taking a hold of us every single day. I believe then we've touched on this, Mike, that the first point of call, if you're thinking, you know what, this makes a lot of sense, this guy speaking a bit of sense, is to make sure that you're going to have success with it. And the biggest problem I see with habits and with taking this approach,

and nutrition and health and fitness in general, is that people try and change their habits overnight. They try and have a complete overhaul of everything in terms of they go from, you know, maybe not creating any home-cooked meals they're not making many single ingredient foods or healthy foods and then they try it's like it's like when you go into the grocery store and you're you're super hungry and you just end up buying way too much stuff same kind like you get you get so fed up with yourself that you're so hungry for change that it's time to change everything yeah it's time to overhaul your entire life that that doesn't work for a large majority of time uh for a large story with people

because it's just too much as we've read i wouldn't even try that personally and i and i think i'm pretty good in this regard and but there are areas of my life like you know we all delude ourselves in different ways and tell ourselves stories to justify our existence. And but I try to at least be kind of self aware in their areas of my life that I'm working on improving, but I'm the same way where it's like, I know that if I try to change too much in too fast in this, it's, it's just not going to stick. And you know, that's just the way it is. And I just accept it. I don't really think that it's a deficiency. It just is what it is. Yeah. And because we've just looked at why that is, you're going to get a lot of negative feedback coming through, even if you are working on it, like we've just talked about. And all of that's

just going to build up and build up and build up until you've got a surefire recipe for failure. So pick one at a time and achieve it. Just simply do that. Go and tick that sheet off every day for 30 days and achieve one habit at a time. And as I've said, it's very individual. It could be food logging. It could be eating more protein. It could be doing five body weight squats a day. It could be anything. But from there then, I highly recommend, and I'm sure you'll agree, is to have a plan.

Basically, know what the heck you want to do. Take some time to think about your current triggers and your habits and those associated feedback loops. So what I mean a little bit more is I could touch on triggers as well in a couple of minutes if you want, because these are really interesting things are triggers that are actually leading to all of the things that we do. But think about how this new small habit can actually follow a certain existing trigger and how you're going to overcome obstacles. Because one of the key things about the triggers or creating a new habit, I should say, is a lot of people say, all right, I'm going to drink an extra liter of water a day, but they don't actually plan for

when that's going to take place. And therefore that's where the triggers come in. So like I've said, if you wake up, you go and brush your teeth. You need to create a trigger that goes before drinking that extra liter of water or doing that five press-ups. And just to throw it in, so one of my things, like I wake up, the first thing I do is I drink about two cups of water. Snap. A good place to start then if you're trying to drink more water. Like, okay, cool. That's easy. You wake up.

I just go straight to water. I go straight to water as well. Don't you feel like a different person after a glass of water on the morning yeah i mean because you know you're parched and it's it's i don't know where i picked that up randomly it was like i like that idea even though i actually drink quite a bit of water but you know just drinking first thing has become something that is uh for whatever for some something simple it's enjoyable yeah i do as well it's one of my favorite little tips people maybe ask for you. Like, what's your best tip to give away?

I just say, have a glass of water straight away when you wake up. It's awesome. Yeah. All right. So next one then is to really understand, like I've said, do that habit immediately

after the trigger for 30 days. There's a bit of, well, there's different information out there on how long it actually takes to form a habit. You'll read sometimes it takes, what, a few days to a month to maybe even you know six months yeah from my understanding from my experience i believe 30 day mark is just a really good place for the large majority of people particularly when it comes to our diets and our nutrition and things like that

and therefore i think building in a reminder maybe such as an alarm or a calendar notice, and try to never skip it as well. So the more consistent that you are, the stronger the habit will be. So people say, do I have to do this every single day, seven days a week? Yeah, I really do recommend you do that. At the least, maybe six out of the seven,

you can give yourself a bit of a leeway on there, maybe one day a week. So it's not about being perfect but it's about being consistent to as well and i suppose another tip really here is to to try and stay accountable you know there everyone needs some support and accountability and even if you've just set yourself this small habit change you think you know what i can tackle this i can this should be easy you know something you need to think about is there are people there that can help you. There's social groups.

They have built-in positive feedback. They provide motivation. You get accountability. There's lots of great habit apps out there as well that you can literally then, if you don't want to use a sheet, you're a bit more technology. Do you have any one or two or three or whatever that you like particularly? I actually use one with my coaching guys. It's called habitry.com.

Okay. You can have a look at that. But I'm not sure if that's available to the public or it's just to coaches who are coaching clients with habits. I think it could be. I think you can get different options on there. But I think it's habitry.com. Okay. And then the next one is test, measure, and tweak.

Last sort of recommendation for that there is that always be open to making, you know, some ongoing adjustments to your new habit as well. It's not always going to be right from the first time around. Maybe, you know, 50 press-ups every day was just too much for you. Maybe three liters of water was too much for you.

And assess your progress with it, and it's okay to feel. Get changed and make it success next time around. And it's, it's okay to feel, get changed and make it success next time around. So that's kind of a, you know, four or five strategy sort of system that I really like to help my clients with there, Mike. Yeah, that's great. And now on triggers, I want to, I admit a note here. So talking about triggers, I think there's something to be said for the environment and how much that can trigger your behavior. So if somebody is stuck in habits they don't like right now, or the habits they want to change, I think that it can be very

profitable to look over your environment and with an eye to those triggers. And in my opinion, it's easier to avoid temptation than it is to use willpower to overcome it. There's a quote that I recently read a biography on John Rockefeller Sr., the guy who started the whole Standard Oil Empire, blah, blah, blah. And he had quipped in there that the reason why he had never become an alcoholic is because he never took the first drink. And he was joking, but he actually was a teetotaler. He was serious, but he was like kind of joking. But I think there's some wisdom in that, in that it's going to be much harder to, you know, let's say change, if you're trying to change your nutrition habits, if your environment is full of triggers that lead you to eating poorly. So again,

those can be social situations, those can be social situations. Those can be, you know, it could be at work, it could be your friends. And that can apply to any area in life. I know quite a few people that I mean, I've seen this, of course, with working with a lot of people in the health nutrition, the sphere of health nutrition, but also just in life in general, people that are having trouble building careers and building businesses and making money. And, uh, when, when, when you kind of look over their environment and look at their, their triggers between their friends and between their routines and whatever, I mean, they're just, they just waste so much time on, on, on pretty pointless shit. Um, so I'm sure you've come across that in terms of like sometimes you have to make it's the easiest thing is to make a change in what trigger, what are you exposing yourself to on a daily basis and how does that affect you?

And if you know that something is a bad trigger, that it's very hard for you to resist that, it's much smarter to just avoid it completely. Yeah, you're very, you're right on that one, particularly with that sort of overall environment. And when people find themselves in those bad places with their nutrition or their lifestyles or all of that sort of side of things, a simple one could be, oh, you end up in the pub after the, or in the bar, whatever you guys call it, in the bar after work. And you're having that beer and you're like, why am I in the pub having this beer again? I seem to end up here every day. Then it's like, okay, well, I'm going to stop going to the pub.

Again, that's maybe a bit of a bad habit. Or maybe it's even a person. Maybe it's the person on the way out that you see it. If it's an individual that is always trying to get you to do that, you have to avoid that person. I'm also a big believer in, I mean, I'm very picky with the people that I allow into my life because as much as I like to think that I'm pretty independent and pretty strong willed, but no matter who you are, you are definitely subjected to the influence of the people around you.

And there are quite a few different characteristics that I would not want to kind of, you know, get through osmosis through other people. Yeah, that's what I was. That's what I'm really looking at here as well, is that most people would say, oh, I need to stop that bad habit. I need to stop going to the bar. I need to stop going for a beer. But really, like you've just said, you've got to actually look before that look at the events the consequences the people the triggers they're actually triggering you to end up in the bar having a beer instead of going to the gym yeah and like you said it could be someone at work who just says it could be social media you know that when people with how sitting on instagram and looking at everyone else's fake image crafted lives and sitting

there and stewing and jealousy and envy and anger. And, and then it just puts you down, which there's research on this, that people that spend the majority, people, people spend the most time on social media are also the unhappiest. And, you know, so that's another example of a trigger that I've seen and I've spoken to people I know about it and they just don't, I don't know, they don't even disagree, but they can't stop. Like they just are obsessed with comparing themselves to other people. I don't know. Yeah.

Social media is a habit. A habit. I, you know, I speak to a lot of people and you and I are very similar, Mike. It's scary. I can't stand social media. I hate social media. I spend no time on it outside of work. I can't stand social media.

I hate social media. I hate it. I spend no time on it outside of work. I use it to communicate with people, with people from a work capacity, like fans and readers and followers and stuff. I think it's fine for that. And I do use it a little bit to promote things, but personally, I don't use it at all.

Yeah, same as me. I've got my pages on there, and if someone reaches out to me, I'll get it. I'll see it. I'll respond to it. But you won't see me flicking through my newsfeed on any of those social media platforms. You won't find any social media icon on my phone. You won't see push notifications coming through on any of the platforms. I just think it's such, aside from, like you've said, just a bad habit and comparing people's highlight reels, it's just a time suck. It's not a productive place to be, to spend your time in. And yeah, like I said. It's not even productive from the viewpoint of relaxing or, you know, because unwinding, there's decompressing, there's a value in that.

But in many ways, it just winds people up even more oh yeah it does it does i i speak to people and they say the first thing i do on a morning when my lawn goes off is i open up my social media and i flick through them the last thing i do at night when i go to bed is flick through my social media and i'm like that is one of the the worst habits that you've probably got yourself into. And therefore, that should be one of, you know, a focus area for you to, you know, just free yourself from that and to greatly improve your health. And, you know, that's what I do. I spend a lot of time helping people with their health. And, you know, it's not always eating more protein or counting macros. It's it is simple things like that.

So, yeah, it's funny that you think. And I think when it comes then to forming those habits or breaking old ones, it has to be done consistently. It's not just, oh, I did that last night, but I still want to go on social media or I still want to go to the pub. That's always going to happen. And I think if you already know what habit you wish to really form or you want to actually break down that we've discussed, it's time to really look at that trigger or to add a trigger to it as well, definitely. And when you want to carry out this habit, it's a real critical aspect to finding the right trigger, in my opinion, and deciding which time of the day, like we've said, is best for you. And ideally, here's a key point

with the triggers, that it's already ingrained into your daily routine. So that trigger is something that will happen every day already um something that you do every day about the same time without feel so obviously we've already said some examples mike like waking up and brushing your teeth or taking a shower eating breakfast commuting commuting to work commuting home cooking dinner all of those little things they're all sort of triggers that you want to attach your new habits to and you know there's many many more examples, of course, and your own routines will highlight those as well. But, you know, match that trigger to your new habit, make sure that they're

both happening consistently. And that's where you're going to see the best success with it as well. And, you know, if you want to conduct, I don't know, 20 minutes exercise in the morning, then perhaps do it straight after brushing your teeth every day. If you want to, you know, prep some new meals for the working day ahead, then do it straight after you get home from the day before. So follow your habit after the trigger. And I think you will really see a lot more success. Yeah, I agree. I think there's also something to be said for, because what we're talking about here is looking at the the bigger picture and going you know we have delayed gratification here to to to achieve something in the future and you know there's quite a bit of research on uh us as humans we're just bad at this we're bad at at uh really working

towards something that is going to pay off you you know, a year from now, two years from now, whatever. And we're much more just hardwired. It seems to gravitate toward instant gratification. What's going to make me feel good right now. And I think there's value in working to break that. I mean, I wouldn't say it's a, it's just a, it's a, it's a flaw. I mean, it just is, it's just a, I wouldn't say it's a, it's just a, it's a, it's a flaw. I mean, it just is, it's just a, maybe it, maybe it's also just tied into modern living and our brains are just not made for, you know, look at, look at, look at how much, uh, our lifestyles have changed just in the last couple of hundred years and a couple of hundred years in terms of, you know, the bigger picture revolution where we've come from is nothing. So now we have this world that is full

of distractions. It's full of just instant push button dopamine. And you know, you have to be aware of that and you have to watch out for that. And it's, it has become a rarer and rarer to find people that have that mentality and that are going to say, well, maybe I would, there's something in me that wants to do this other, that wants to just sit on social media for the next hour and flick through Instagram and, you know, think a bunch of nasty thoughts about people. Uh, but I'm going to ignore that because I'm working toward this thing over here, which, you know, yes, it's going to require, uh, you know, I'm not going to be there for a year but i'm going to be much happier when i get there you know what i mean yeah i definitely do mate yeah and again i

could sit in front of social media all day and kill my day or i could decide to give you a message and say how about we hook up again and do a podcast and get some great information out to people and help people and get more meaning in our lives and you know see a return on that as well and i think some people mike i don't know if you would agree i think some people are happy with maybe sitting on social media all day and doing that side of things i don't know if they're happy i mean i don't i personally don't know anyone that i would say is happy i'd say that i know people that have sunk into a kind of numbness a kind of a general apathy in life, or they're just like, quote, unquote, don't care about anything. But that's not I mean, that's not happy. And that's not happy. I mean,

I think it's hard to maybe define what happiness is. But I think happiness is a an outgrowth of pursuing goals that matter to you that have meaning to you making progress, you know, kind of going back to the idea of of flow where you are spending your time doing things that are challenging you that you're getting immediate feedback on you know you can see your progress and you you lose yourself in and you don't that you just don't get that experience watching youtube videos all day no what gets me out of bed in the morning is being able to create something and be able to pass that on. That's what, that's what gets me out of bed and it's not social media or anything like that. So, and I suspect most people, I think most people that listen to podcasts are

people who are a bit more proactive with their lives and with their careers and stuff like that. So that's why I love podcasting. I do. Because I listen to podcasts every day. I don't know about you, Mike. I don't listen to much podcasts. I listen to audiobooks more than I listen to podcasts. But I have like a whole kind of – I do audiobooks with Kindle. Sometimes they're synced, sometimes they're not. But like so if I'm driving, I'm listening to an audiobook.

If I'm making food, I'm listening to – if I'm walking my dogs. But I do, my podcast, it's kind of random. Like there are certain, if I come across certain people who I find interesting, then I'll look for interviews. But yeah, I've just, I'm more into audio books personally. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Again, you can get a lot of different suggestions. There's a lot of stuff, you know,

conflicting information around podcasts, particularly if you're to-ing and fro-ing with them. So yeah, you could end up in a lot of stuff you know conflicting information around podcasts particularly if you're toing and froing with them so yeah you could end up in a bit of a overwhelmed uh conflicted state with listening to too many podcasts particularly around nutrition and stuff right and health just stick to Mike's and mine Mike shall we quickly uh I've got like a five-step system I think that maybe your listeners might be interested in if they've enjoyed this stuff that they could get started with and basically go right i can i've got like a little system i can get involved with here to really review their own steps to actually creating some awesome habits and swapping the bad ones for the good

yeah let's uh let's go over it all right so the first one is really looking towards reviewing that's what i'm that's where I'm at. And that's why I recommend everyone starts with. So have a big review, take a step back. And that's sometimes the hardest bit. A lot of people, like we've said, just talked about, they don't want to take that step back. But I reckon your listeners do. And have a look at your current situation. And many people just want to start making, like we said, taking action right away and jumping into big changes. So miss this important step entirely. Or our daily habits maybe have become so ingrained and second nature that we're going to totally miss out on realizing what bad habits they are or we actually have.

So right at the start then, if you're thinking, yes, I want to take some action on this, you should list out all of your daily habits, the things you find yourself doing every single day. I've done this lately and it's fascinating. It's incredible because I am a routinely guy. I can map it out pretty quickly. And, you know, I even mapped out, you know, both the good and the bad. And I suggest you do as well. And, you know, this could include things right from brushing your teeth, maybe even mindlessly snacking between meals. And this is what this whole process is here to pull out. And being aware of your current habits is that first step to really enable you to personalize the changes that you're going to make. So write it down, put it down. And then the reason why I recommend getting it down onto paper is then the second step I suggest you take is now you've got that list, it's time to look at its contents in a lot more detail

and this is where i recommend that you identify basically the good and the bad the winners from the losers and if you can create like i suppose two simple columns two basic columns a four sheet whatever you've got and write down the habits and practices that you're already doing and that's going to support you achieving your goals in the next three six and twelve months whatever it might be and then in the other one the habits that you're doing that's not going to support you in achieving your goals in the next three, six, and 12 months, whatever it might be. And then in the other one, the habits that you're doing, that's not going to support your goals. And now you've got this really distinctive two categories. And from there, I recommend that you look at why you do each of them. So for every habit on that list, you should work through each of them and ask yourself, why do I do this every single day? Yeah. And you might have to actually ask yourself that why question several times to

really get to the core of why you do it. Yeah, this is something that I wanted to touch on. Definitely, Mike. Yeah. Because for example, you may because you're probably the first answer is going to be your diluted answer that you've been giving yourself. Yes, the first one's a bullshit answer. Absolutely. You've got to dig deeper. So maybe an example, like I said, what was it? Mindlessly snacking. Yeah, maybe you're mindlessly snacking in between meals or classic ones on an evening, which could be good or bad. I don't know. But ask yourself what the motivation is for actually doing that. Now, like Mike's just said, right, you've got to dig deep because perhaps you decide first time when you go, why you think it's because you're skipping lunch at work most days

and you're super hungry by the evening, then you should dig a little bit deeper to understand the core reason why you skip lunch at work. So perhaps you just aren't prepared enough. That's actually the reason you're lazy or you just have nothing with you to eat and or maybe actually you just feel too busy to stop and eat people just you know think they've got too much on they haven't made time in it as well and and therefore you know like i'm saying you're peeling back a few of your layers about that why and getting a little bit deeper with it and from there then you really want to focus on replacing so you should now that, obviously that detailed list of your daily habits and why ultimately you're doing them.

So you can clearly see the ones that should be progressing you and your goals and obviously the ones that are holding you back. And they're likely to be the things that you may have wished to eliminate for many, many years. So you've now got that opportunity and particularly from the information we've shared earlier on,

get this right and get it going the right way for a long time so for example perhaps you decided that you want to eliminate that mindless snacking on an evening or during the day or whatever it might be you therefore look to swap that bad habit with a good one something that will be truly supportive that you can do daily like we've said so if you're skipping lunch every day because you're not prepared then your new and supportive habit should be to ensure that you always, always make a lunch on the morning or evening before. Simple as that. Or maybe if you've decided you're too busy to stop and eat lunch, then your new habit is to block out all other distractions and appointments to ensure you have enough time each day for a lunch break. Sometimes that's one

of the best tips I give people is like, I skipped lunch, I didn each day for a lunch break. Sometimes that's one of the best tips I give people is like, I skipped lunch, I didn't have time for lunch today. I'm like, make time, make that a habit and do it every day. And we start to see a lot of progress. So now you've got a personalized approach to really changing those habits and a deeper understanding of your triggers and the good and the bad. And of course, you can now start. I mean, another example could be, I mean, if you're skipping lunch that, you know, if that's the, if the skipped lunch is the trigger and the, and the response is mindlessly snacking instead, a better response would be a larger dinner that you are accounting for. You know what I mean? So like if, if you normally would have

eaten 500 calories for, for lunch, let's just say whatever. If you are not going to eat lunch, then instead of response of, well, then I'm just going to, you know, I can now eat a bunch of random snacks, is you take those 500 calories and shift them to dinner. Now, maybe that would be considered a little bit quote unquote advanced, but that's something that once you get more familiar, once you get more comfortable, you know, with your routines, and when you have everything kind of moving in the right direction, that there's nothing wrong with that. Like I do that. I mean, I don't skip lunch, because I just kind of like to eat lunch. But like, that's what I would do personally, for example.

Yeah, yeah. Again, you can you can personalize it to you where you are right now. It doesn't have to be there's probably a lot of listeners who go, I never miss my personalize it to you, where you are right now. It doesn't have to be, there's probably a lot of listeners who go, Ru, I never miss my lunch, but like you, Mike, I like it too much. But it's just an example, absolutely. And if you're more advanced and you're progressing in your weight training

and you've got your progression system in there or your calorie cycling or anything like that, then yeah, all of that could come in, definitely. Okay, great. Well, we've covered a lot. Let's just let's wrap up with where can people find you and find your work? And how can they reach out to you? Yeah, thanks, man. Hopefully, it's been of help, obviously, to your listeners. I hope it has. It's been interesting and picked up some new stuff.

I have a couple of podcasts of my own. I'm a big podcast fan, as you know. Obviously, if you tune into podcasts, you can come and check that out. It's called the High Performance Living Podcast, or you can just search Rui Anderson. Or if you are obviously a personal trainer or working in the health and fitness industry and want a bit more nitty gritty information about the industry and how to make it a success you can also check out my podcast fit pro master class podcast as well so i got a couple of podcasts love just getting on a microphone and putting out some great information like mike does every week as well or if you want to just head straight over to my website get learn a bit about me what i get

up to and i've got some cool sort of giveaways on there as well and ebooks is exceed nutrition.com as well so exced nutrition.com great and social media yeah social media yeah of course i'm on there yeah i know me too i i joked i'm just bad at social media like i i with instagram and stuff i just i'm not narcissistic enough to like do the standard fitness thing where every day it's just a selfie from a different angle or something and then my life is too boring so i can't i can't really you know give the vicarious voyeuristic type of thrill because again my life is the exact same thing every day here's me getting up here's me drinking water here's me going to the bathroom here's me taking a pre-workout here's me

getting in my car driving the gym here's me driving to the office here's me standing at my desk for the next 10 hours here's me driving home here's me eating food here's me sitting on my chair on the computer for the next three hours here's me going to sleep thanks bye yeah yeah that was my life before i left for at least you're traveling at least you have like at least you could take a picture now and be like hey here's something other than uh the same road that i see every day for forever yeah my my my social media mic's hotting up right now it's getting good actually i've got some ideas again all right so then where can they find you uh basically obviously facebook i've got a page on there they can pump in uh rue anderson obviously in there i've got a page just called that's

probably the best place to connect with me on facebook and obviously rue anderson basically across all the networks really is probably the easiest one on twitter and instagram but i think if you want some of the the best stuff is to head on to my Facebook page and see stuff there. Well, thanks for taking the time, Roo. And I'm sure everybody got some value from this discussion because this is a subject that I've written a little bit about and I've spoken a little bit about. But I don't think I've done a real in-depth kind of analysis of it. Yeah, it's been cool. I've loved it.

I could talk all day about this. So thank you. Yeah, thanks again.