Something You Should Know - Understanding Physical Intelligence & How Small Changes Create New Habits

Episode Date: January 23, 2020

If you breathe through your mouth you are doing it all wrong. This episode begins with a discussion on how to breathe properly and why breathing through your nose is so much better. http://www.breathing.com/articles/nose-breathing.htm Physical intelligence is that thing that allows you to never forget how to ride a bike or allows you to play a musical instrument or a sport. Scott Grafton teaches neuroscience at the University of California Santa Barbara and he is author of the book Physical Intelligence: The Science of How the Body and the Mind Guide Each Other Through Life (https://amzn.to/3aiI4dm). Scott joins me to explain how our physical intelligence helps us navigate the physical world and how our world is actually getting too easy for us to navigate.  No matter what your age is, your posture today is probably not as good as it used to be. Still, good posture is important and I discuss some things you can do (and not do) to improve your posture. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4082990/Don-t-old-tortoise-Want-old-age-head-held-highJust-follow-expert-s-brilliant-tips-fit-flexible-past-40.html#ixzz4UiBJYSuY You’ve probably heard the advice that too make a change you need to break it down into smaller steps. But maybe it would be better to break it down into even smaller – tiny steps. That’s what BJ Fogg says works better for humans. BJ Fogg is a social science research associate at Stanford and founder of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab. He is also author of the book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything (https://amzn.to/2RnpgRl). Listen as he explains how the tiniest of changes can lead to big and lasting changes in your life. This Week's Sponsors -Best Fiends. Download this fun mobile game for free on the Apple App Store or Google Play. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, you might be breathing incorrectly. Lots of people do, so let's fix that. Then, understanding your physical intelligence, why you never forget how to ride a bike, and why you're so good at navigating the physical world. Up until about a thousand years ago, there were no sidewalks, there were no roads. It was a

rough environment that we moved through and that's what we've been really evolved and designed to do. And you put us in those environments and we're a beautiful species. We actually do really really well. Plus why your posture probably isn't as good as it used to be and how the tiniest change in behavior can help people break or start a new habit. As they feel successful, even in the small changes, their identity starts to shift, and they stop thinking of themselves as, I'm a person who can never change, and they start thinking, I'm a person who can change. All this today on Something You Should Know.

Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS

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The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I want to start the podcast today by asking you to take a deep breath.

Now, if you took that deep breath through your mouth, your breathing is all wrong. There are some real benefits to nose breathing, and about 80% of us aren't doing that. Your nose is custom made for breathing. It's equipped with special features that prepare the air to enter your lungs. The nostrils and sinuses filter and warm the air that you're taking in. Mouth breathing bypasses the filter and can worsen symptoms of things like asthma, allergies, and sleep apnea. When we inhale and exhale through the mouth, we're actually over-breathing. The precious oxygen we need is absorbed by the lungs on the exhale.

Because the nostrils are smaller, we exhale through them more efficiently, allowing our lungs to retain more oxygen with each breath. Nose breathing can also increase your awareness and enhance your memory and experience. And it's also important to remember that our brain depends on our sense of smell, even when we don't realize it. And breathing through the mouth reduces Remember that our brain depends on our sense of smell, even when we don't realize it.

And breathing through the mouth reduces or eliminates that subconscious information. And that is something you should know. You have something called physical intelligence. Some people call it muscle memory. So when you learn to ride a bike or play tennis, the next time you do those activities, you don't have to start all over again learning how to ride a bike or play tennis. That ability stuck with you.

That's your physical intelligence. And there's more to it than that. Scott Grafton wrote the book on physical intelligence. In fact, his book is called Physical Intelligence, The Science of How the Body and Mind Guide Each Other Through Life. Scott teaches neuroscience at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he is director of the UCSB Brain Imaging Center. Hi, Scott.

So explain a little more about what you're talking about here with physical intelligence. What I'm talking about has been all the complexity it takes to move in the world. And most of it's stuff we absolutely take for granted. Walking is a big one. Walking on surfaces is a huge issue. It's just how we acquire skills and deftness and coordination and grace and how we actually in our minds calculate efficiency. All these are things that are really intrinsic to physical intelligence and key ingredients. And where does physical intelligence come from? We're sort of a weird species now in that, you know, we came from rough and tumble histories up until about a thousand years ago. There were no sidewalks, there were no roads. It

was a rough environment that we moved through. And that's what we've been really evolved and designed to do is handle complex natural environments. And you put us in those environments, and we're a beautiful species. We actually do really, really well. Any one of us can get up if we don't have a physical injury. Any adult can get up right now, walk out the door, and walk a marathon. They can walk 26, 30 miles nonstop, no problem. That's just, it's built into us. And yet we've sort of forgotten that. Now the only people who we think of as being physically capable are either exercise nuts or elite athletes.

When in fact, this is sort of, these are ingredients that are all of us. We're all actually incredibly physically intelligent. Any of us can learn to play a musical instrument pretty well. Same with a lot of sports, craftsmanship skills, things like that. We're all pretty good at that. We're also really good at unlearning things. We're really good forgetters physically. And if you don't believe me, if you're living in an icy environment every winter that first day when there's ice on the sidewalk everybody forgets the number of arm fractures skyrockets everybody's falling down left and right as soon as the weather gets bad so we're always doing this learning we're always doing this forgetting

and that's really important if you're going to plan strategies for healthy aging and healthy fitness. You know, we're in a culture now where we think that health comes from a treadmill or a stationary bicycle. And granted, that's better than nothing right but that's not really what we evolved to do nobody evolved to jog on a treadmill we we as a species we're really designed for complex physical engagement so when i think of when i think of physical intelligence what immediately came to mind when i saw this topic was riding a bike. Because when you learn to ride a bike, you never forget pretty much how to ride a bike. Is that physical intelligence? Oh, absolutely. And there's multiple levels. There's the basic program for riding a bike.

And that never goes away. But the reality is, if you haven't been on a bike for 10 years, at a sort of a more subtle level if you look carefully there is some physical intelligence that does require relearning you got to tune yourself up a little bit to fit that bike to sort of match what it it needs you to do and so even though you remember motor programs and skills i always need to tune them up a little bit. Even our walking, you know, each time you take steps, you are sort of micromanaging your cadence, your stride length, so you can be maximally efficient in each of your movements. So you know how to walk, but at the same time, you're always adjusting. It's the same with the bicycle.

Why do you think this is important to talk about? I mean it's interesting but it is what it is. Why is physical intelligence a topic for discussion? We're in a society right now where we're really focused on a fear of dementia and forgetting but if you actually look at disability that patients have, it's overwhelmingly dominated by inabilities to move. And so anything we can do to recognize the intelligence that creates movement and the strategies we can adopt to preserve movement become really important. And that's no matter how old you are, whether it's a little kid with a muscular dystrophy or an old person with a stroke. So that's sort of the disease perspective. And then in the health perspective, for those of us who are just trying to stay healthy and strong, physicality, especially in complex environments, is incredibly beneficial for our mind, emotion, and well-being.

And so this is a big question right now. Why is it that a walk on the beach through a bumpy terrain is a thousand times more satisfying than a walk on a concrete sidewalk through a suburb? If we can't explain both the pleasure and the mental health benefits you get from those natural environments we are where we are allowed to be our normal physical selves you know we're kind of missing something you sometimes hear trainers physical trainers talk about muscle memory is that the same thing as physical intelligence the muscles have no memory and so they're being really sloppy in their terminology.

And it's a shorthand. And it confuses people because your muscles are as dumb as a brick. I mean, they'll get stronger and they'll get quicker, but they don't remember movement. Your brain and your spinal cord are where you remember your movements. And what they're really talking about

is kinds of movements that your brain has programs for that are incredibly automatic. So riding a bicycle is a motor memory, right? I don't need to engage my cognition, my thinking mind to really manage that. What happens is your brain is designed in a clever way in that you've kind of set up these firewalls so that your mind actually doesn't have, your conscious mind doesn't have very good access to a lot of your movements, doesn't have access to your control of blood pressure either, or heart rate. If it did, you might accidentally kill yourself tinkering around just by thinking too much. So we protect ourselves in some ways with these firewalls.

And the other thing it does is it allows us to walk and think at the same time, right? That's a beautiful thing. I can stroll down the street and have a conversation and not have to micromanage what my legs are doing. So that's all in the realm of muscle memory. And athletes and trainers are always trying to essentially improve the fluidity and grace and precision that's inherent to whatever motor program they're interested in. Is there any sense that a championship golfer who has this great golf swing?

Is any different than anybody else? He just has managed to just figure this out or I mean are people different or does everybody have the same? potential of physical intelligence I Like to joke that everybody can get everybody can get a B plus in any physical activity if they work at it hard enough. To get an A or an A plus, you're usually then hoping you've got big lungs if you're a bicyclist or strong hands if you're a climber or what have you, right? Or you're tall, play basketball.

There's some things that are clearly going to be genetic. But that doesn't mean the rest of us cannot do that activity. All of us can learn to play basketball, and most of us can learn to play it pretty well. You know, okay. That's the neat thing about us as a species. It's not, again, it's not the elite athletes that create physical intelligence. It's the fact that all of us have this incredible capacity to learn physical skills

up to a pretty good level. And then you hope you've got the genes if you want to do a sport to take you the last, you know, nine yards. I'm speaking with Scott Grafton, who teaches neuroscience at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And'm speaking with Scott Grafton, who teaches neuroscience at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and he's author of the book, Physical Intelligence, the science of how the body and the mind guide each other through life. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining,

a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast

that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to, called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for.

Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Scott, I have two boys and they both play hockey. So they skate. And so I started skating. And I'm not very good at it. And every time I go on the ice, it takes me a while. It just takes a while to get back in the groove.

But it doesn't take them a while. They step on the ice and off they go. They're also, don't be fooled, they're also warming up a little bit. They just get there quicker because they're younger. There's a, there's a really neat, one of my favorite studies that looks at sort of this idea of tuning up comes from a foot race in the Swiss Alps where they, it's a five day foot race around Mount Blanc. It was a crazy distance, 270 kilometers or something like this. And these guys had a great idea. These scientists, they recorded people's running efficiency at the start of the race. So they had a treadmill

and oxygen measuring systems and everything. And they sort out how efficient their running is. They run for five days. At the end of the five days, they put them back on the treadmill and they measure their efficiency again. And even though they just ran five days straight, they're actually more efficient at the end. And these are already elite runners. They're already the best runners you could imagine. But even they are always getting a little bit better, right?

It's really a neat observation. Since you've looked pretty deep into this whole idea of physical intelligence, what lessons can we learn? What can we do different? What can we do with this in life? What's the takeaway? The one thing I really came away with after working through this idea was that simple learning isn't good enough. We are really built to take on complex physical problems.

That's what we're designed for, and that's where we learn the best. And so if a person does want to try something new, they should complexify it at any level, at any skill level. So it's not just about practicing and learning to play one song on a new musical instrument. It's learning to play it in varied ways or playing varied songs or playing with varied instruments. It's not just about taking a simple walk in the park on a paved path. It's about taking that unusual shortcut through the woods, where suddenly now you've got to navigate a little bit. Your

whole sense of awareness in the environment changes. Your ability to duck under branches is now in demand. You've got to step over boulders. All that complexity that you find in nature is incredibly valuable for you to stay flexible, to stay strong, and to stay sort of physically adept in whatever you're going to do. That's interesting, because usually you think, well, the best way to learn anything is to simplify it not complicate it and we know that's that's not true in the laboratory there's there's a beautiful example it's called the contextual interference effect was just jargon but um if i have you let's say uh learn if you go to the batting cages with the baseball bat, and I say, okay, I want you to learn to hit sliders, fastballs, and change-ups.

And I can control the pitching machine either of two ways. The first way, I give you all the sliders, and then I give you all the fastballs, and then I give you all the change-ups. At the end of each of those blocks, you're going to be really good at hitting each of those versus a pitching machine where you don't know what's coming on each throw. You get the same number of total pitches and same proportions, but it's random, right? At the end of that practice section, you're really frustrated. You don't do very well. It doesn't look like you're very good at hitting any of them.

And the learner goes away very frustrated and so the coaches will tend to have people train under what we call block conditions we'll just give you the sliders first then the change-ups and so forth because everybody's happier at the end of that training session but wait come back the next day and let's just have you hit against any of those three pitches and we'll tell you what the pitch is going to be right doesn't matter you can do it blocked or random well the people who practiced under random conditions are going to be much much better at hitting those balls so the varied practice is incredibly frustrating that the complex hard practice torments us, but that's where the learning, the real learning that stays, that sticks, it's really a really strong effect.

It works for problem solving. It works for language learning. It works for over, there's probably over 100 experiments with different kinds of physical skills that show this effect. So it's sort of a universal feature of skill learning. The varied practice is enormously better. How does this idea of complicating things, that practicing things in a more complicated way is better, how does that fit in with the theory that Malcolm Gladwell popularized in his book that you need to put in 10,000 hours, that to get good at anything, you have to put in 10,000 hours? A colleague and I want to write a chapter called How to Practice 10,000 Hours and Never Get Better. The idea being, you know, there's smart practice and there's dumb practice.

And if you look at professional musicians and you look at how they practice, they don't practice any of the easy stuff. They only practice the stuff that's really frustrating. They're smart. And all of us need to sort of remember that when we're learning new skills. But does practicing the hard stuff, if you're a musician, for example, and you're trying to learn hard stuff, does it make the easy stuff easier? Oh, yeah. And it's sort of nested. What you're learning in the hard stuff is the phrasing and the tempo and the intricacies. That spills. Again, it's this idea of generalization. It'll generalize into more rudimentary kind of movements.

But obviously you have to put in the time. You've got to put in some time, and the more time the better, right? Yeah, you have to do something. You have to put some time into it, and you have to put a lot of time into it, but there's nothing magical about 10,000 hours. And obviously 5,000 hours of smart practice is going to be better than 2,000 hours of smart practice. You're going to get even farther along in what you're trying to accomplish. But there's nothing magical about 10,000 hours, I don't think. You said in the beginning that we've evolved to live in kind of a rough and tumble world

and that a walk on the beach or a hike in the mountains is more satisfying than a walk on a treadmill because we're designed to do it in a more difficult way. But that's not the way things are going. Our technology is making life easier and easier. We're moving into a period in our evolution where we're more and more in mega cities and man-made environments that are incredibly smooth and incredibly easy to navigate in from a physical standpoint. And it's the antithesis of sort of what we evolved to be able to do. And I think it's an interesting experiment to see whether we're going to be really healthy in these kinds of environments or not. It's going to be a real challenge. There's nothing in the

virtual technologies right now that's even close to emulating what we do in natural environments. And so we're putting ourselves at great risk from a health standpoint in the kinds of environments we've created for ourselves and our kids. Because it's too easy. It's too easy. That's right. Well, think about that because you look back at civilization, and it's all been about making it easier, making it more convenient. Technology, that's what technology is. Yeah, and that's great. It's great for saving time. But if one of your interests is your own health and well-being, that's working against you.

But how do we know that? What's an example of that in real life? You know, we're starting to think about that from an aging perspective. A good example is in early phase studies coming out of Europe, we now know that if you're in a nursing home, and that nursing home is next to a park that has undeveloped pathways on it, you're going to live longer than if your nursing home has lots of nice city streets and sidewalks to walk on. There's something about the natural environment and the roughness that actually provides health benefit. That's the hypothesis. Now, we've got to lock this down with better studies, but that's the basic idea that's being chased right now.

Well, I like this discussion because this whole world of physical intelligence really operates under the radar. We don't think about it. We just do it, and it's interesting to understand how it works, why we do it, and how to do it better. Scott Grafton has been my guest. He teaches neuroscience at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He's director of the UCSB Brain Imaging Center, and he's author of the book Physical Intelligence, the Science of How the Body and Mind Guide Each Other Through Life.

There's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Scott. Thanks. This has been a pleasure and a great opportunity to talk with you. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle.

On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks, and me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows.

In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Every year, people vow to make changes,

often in the form of New Year's resolutions. And those changes are often big ones. Lose weight, be on time, eat healthier, start exercising. And odds are, the changes won't stick. And maybe they don't stick because

it's just too big of a change to make all at once. Maybe there's a better way, a smaller way, to make lasting change. There is, according to B.J. Fogg. B.J. is a social science research associate at Stanford and director of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab. He is author of the book Tiny Habits, The Small Changes That Change Everything. Hi, BJ, welcome. Hey, thank you for inviting me. Happy to be here. So people often say that change is hard, yet every year people make New Year's resolutions to change, and often those resolutions fail, which is probably why people say change is hard.

But I've always thought that maybe it's because that kind of change is hard. I mean, I don't make New Year's resolutions just because it's almost like you're setting yourself up to fail. You know, it's a new year. I'm going to make this big change. And within a few weeks, it often just falls apart. Well, I'm sorry about the resolutions not working out for you, but that is true for most people. That's not going to be a surprise to you or anybody listening to this. The way we're typically set up to do resolutions or to change more generally sets us up for failure, and that's a problem. I myself don't do resolutions. I haven't done them probably for 10 years or so because I change my habits whenever I need to.

So I do it throughout the year, day by day or week by week or whenever I need to make a change, I just do it. Because with tiny habits, I've found that it's simple and it's fast and it's even fun. So there's no reason to wait for a special time of the year. And so when you say tiny habits what does that mean give me an example yeah so tiny habits when i say that i'm talking really about a method that i created through research and years of testing and i started doing it in 2010 started teaching it to others in 2011 and testing and iterating and measuring. And the method basically goes like this. You take any habit that you want and then you make it as small as you can. So rather than

say you want to read more and you take a very small version of that, you read not even a chapter, maybe just one paragraph. So you shrink it down. If you want to even floss your teeth, you don't focus on flossing all your teeth. You just focus on flossing one. I know that sounds crazy, but this is important and we can talk about it later. So you take it, make it very small, and then you find where that fits naturally in your existing routine. And in tiny habits, you look for what does it come after? Where, where do you slot this in to the course of your day? Where will it fit naturally? Philosophy is an easy one.

For most people, it comes right after brushing. Whereas something like reading, it depends on people's existing routine. Some people sit down on the bus every day on the commute to work. So as soon as they sit down, that might be a great place for them to open a book and read a paragraph.

So if I'm wanting to do this, great place for them to open a book and read a paragraph so if I'm Wanting to do this if I'm wanting to make a change I mean, I think that that most resolutions people are basically trying to change something and do something That they haven't been able to do before and so there's probably not much reason to think they're going to be able to do it now because they haven't been able to do it up till now and So what's the magic? What's the secret? What's the method to do it now because they haven't been able to do it up till now. And so what's the magic? What's the secret? What's the method to do it? I would wager in almost all cases, they haven't been able to do it because they haven't taken the right approach. And that's not their fault. And

that's, this isn't answering your question. I'll touch quickly on this. When people try to change and they don't succeed, they should not blame themselves. But that's too often what people do. And that's not helpful. They just haven't been given the right approach yet. With tiny habits, they can take some aspiration that they've had, exercise more, sleep better, build your relationships. And through a step-by-step process, they can achieve those aspirations. And one of the key things that happens is people break it down and make these tiny changes. And this is really important. As they feel successful, even in the small changes, their identity starts to shift. And they stop thinking of themselves as, I'm a person who can never change. And they start thinking, I'm a person who can change. And maybe more specifically, oh, I'm a person who can never change and they start thinking I'm a person

who can change and maybe more specifically oh I'm a person who can't resist tempting snacks to a person who now thinks of themselves as I'm a person who eats right on my game plan you know I'm a person who eats healthy snacks and makes healthy nutrition part of my life. And so what's the process what's how do you begin this? How do you get your head in the game and actually start to do it? Take any habit you want and you break it down so it's very simple and very small. If you want to read more, that's a general aspiration that you can't turn that into habit, but you can make it much tinier, like read one paragraph. That's step one. Step two, you find where it fits naturally in your life. We talked

about that. If you find it doesn't fit after you sit down on the subway, you look for another opportunity. Maybe as soon as you walk out the door at work to your break, you go to a bench and sit down and open a book. So part of it is a design and discovery method about where does this fit naturally in your life. You use an existing routine to remind you. And then you wire in the habit. You make it stick by doing a technique called celebration. And with celebration, it's a behavior you do. And sometimes it's a thought you have.

And it's unique. It's different for different people. But what celebration does is it creates a positive emotion. A celebration that works for many people is a fist pump and say, awesome. Other people raise their hands up and go, way to go. The reason that matters is it's the emotions create habits. When you do a behavior and your brain connects a positive emotion to the behavior, and that's what you're doing with celebration is you're creating a positive emotion. So your brain goes, wow, every time I floss, I feel great. And so your brain takes note and it encodes that behavior sequence. And so the next time you brush your brain and say, hey, you need to floss,

because the brain knows right after that, you're going to feel good. So what you're doing the tiny habits method, and this is very unlike any other method, you're hacking your brain to wire in the habit by firing off a positive emotion on demand. And the way you do that, that technique, we call it celebration. And so how do we know this works other than anecdotal people say it works? But I mean, has this been proven? Has this been run through the rigors here? Yes, I've since 2011, when I taught this to thousands of people each year, week by week, I assess how it's working. And the data strongly suggests that Tiny Habits works. It builds their confidence. It helps them wire in habits quickly. And the method has ripple effects. They create other

habits that are related to the habits that they're doing. And on top of that, people report, most people report that their identity shifts. They start thinking of themselves as the kind of person who can change. When this doesn't work, why typically doesn't it work? Is it the wrong habit to change? What goes wrong? I love this question. When it doesn't work, problem number one is that people haven't made the new habit tiny enough. They might think, oh, I want to do push-ups. I'll do 10 every morning. That's too big. 10 is not tiny.

10 takes effort. It should be more like one or two wall push-ups. You need to make it so small that it doesn't take effort. So that would be problem number one, is people being too optimistic and not following guidance, where you've got to make it so tiny. It's not floss all so tiny. It's not floss all your teeth, it's floss one. Next, the problem would be they didn't find yet where it

fits naturally in their day. People might think, oh, I'm going to meditate as soon as I get home from work. After I walk in the door from work, I'll sit down and take three calming breaths, not 30 minutes, just three breaths. But as they put it into practice, it's like, no, they've got too much going on. The kids are asking questions. They need to do something about dinner. So in tiny habits, when that doesn't work, you just revise and find a place. But if people aren't open to revision, then they may get stuck and say it didn't work. Well, it didn't work in that particular part of your day. Just try another part.

And then the third reason is they look at the celebration technique and they think, oh, that's not for me or that's optional. But celebration is not optional. That's what wires in the habit. So it's sort of like, oh, I'm going to try to cook something in the oven and I'm not going to turn the oven on. Oh, the oven didn't work, or it didn't work. Well, it didn't.

That's what forms the habit of celebration. And one of the biggest challenges in teaching this since 2011 is to help people understand that celebration, that the emotion piece of it, is really important. It's not optional. That's what creates the habit. I would imagine, though, people would hear this and say, well, wait a minute. How is doing one push-up going to do anything? How is flossing one tooth going to do anything? Well, what it does, once you have a habit wired in, flossing one tooth, you can easily expand it

to the rest of your teeth. Once you're doing one push-up, you can easily expand it to the rest of your teeth. Once you're doing one push-up, you can easily expand to five or 10 or 15. Once you're reading one paragraph, you can read the whole chapter. And in the tiny habits method, that's how it works. In the research, over 70% of people report that their habit expanded, that it had ripple effects. So with tiny habits, and like I said, it's an unusual way. It's not the old-fashioned way. It's a new way. You focus on getting the tiny version of the habit wired in, and then from there the habit can grow.

But it can only grow if you make it grow. So do you then go into this deliberately saying, and tomorrow I'll do two push-ups, or tomorrow I'll floss two teeth, and the next day I'll do three, or do you just commit to one and hope that you do more? Well, what happens is it naturally grows, just like a plant naturally grows. So somebody who has the habit of reading one paragraph will, not every day, but on some days read more than that. Once you get started, you do more. And most everybody who has the habit of flossing one tooth naturally

expands to all their teeth. So part of the process and part of the breakthrough in tiny habits is even though the habit is tiny, it will naturally grow to do more. And there's two reasons it does that. Number one, the more you do a behavior, the easier it gets to do. So you can do more of the behavior with the same amount of effort. Number two, if you feel successful doing the behavior, your motivation to do more increases over time. So with increased motivation, you're capable of doing more of the behavior, whether it's more reading or more flossing or more push-ups. Does it matter whether or not, does the game change whether you're trying to do something versus trying to stop doing something? Yes, that's an excellent question. Yes, both starting a habit and stopping habit, they all come back to three things, motivation, ability, and prompt. And that's my behavior model. But the way you do it is different. The way that you start a habit, and tiny habits is especially good at that, you know, make it small, that increases your ability and so on. The way you stop a habit depends on the type of habit. And in many cases, when people

talk about breaking a habit, they're really talking about a tangle of behaviors. So for example, if somebody talks about, wow, I really want to break the habit of social media, it's not just one behavior they do. They're probably scrolling in bed in the morning before they get up. They're probably scrolling through social media at breakfast, at their lunch break at work, and so on. So it's a collection of habits that they clump under one label. A better way to talk about it is to untangle these bad habits. And so with social media, you would look at all those specific uses of social media as like a big knot with all these tangles. And what you do to resolve it is you don't start with the hardest one. You start with the easiest one and you get rid of that. And you can use tiny

habits to remove the prompt or to make it harder to do. For example, let's say it would be really easy for you to not use social media. The easiest one is don't use social media during my morning break. You could use tiny habits for that by as soon as you arrive at work, turn off notifications for social media or even better, create a really hard password that you don't store. So making it harder to do to log in. So there's dozens of other ways to do it. That's just a quick example. Key takeaway here, though, is that rather than thinking about breaking a bad habit,

it's better to think about untangling. It's a process. And you start with the easiest tangle first, and then you go to the next one and the next one. I was surprised to see that you said that a very common habit that people want to break is to stop yelling at their children, because I would never think of that as a habit you would want to break. I hear that a lot. It's like, oh, I want to be more patient with my kid. I want to stop getting upset with my kid. Yeah, that's common. And how do you do that? Well, one woman, what she did was she created the habit of whenever she felt frustrated with her child, she would then, instead of getting upset with her child, she would find a compliment on the fly that she could tell her

child. So instead of reacting negatively, she would react positively. And that served pretty quickly to change the relationship with the child. It didn't mean the child stopped annoying her, but her response to it wasn't so negative. And that's consistent with the tiny method? Yeah, it would go like, after I feel frustrated with my child, I will give her a compliment immediately. So that would be the tiny habit recipe. So where does it fit in her day? When she feels frustrated, what does she do? She just gives a simple compliment immediately. So that would be the response to that frustration. And in fact, that's a special kind of tiny habit, and it's called a pearl habit. A pearl habit is a subset

of tiny habits where you take something that's annoying you, whether it's a child frustrating you or somebody in the grocery line who's taken up your time or somebody cuts you off in traffic. And you use something annoying to prompt you to do something positive. So in other words, from an irritation, you create something good. Oh, I like that. I like that idea because when you get frustrated with the guy at the grocery store, or at least when I do, I always feel bad later, but it doesn't stop me from doing it again the next time. Well, let me give you my own on this. feel frustrated at somebody else in the home or waiting in the, I don't know why it always feels like I'm waiting in a line and I'm just frustrated at somebody up there who's taking time. But it sounds like you share that with me. I say to myself, everyone does the best they can. No one

tries to screw up. And I just say that inside my head and it helps me have empathy, it helps resolve some of the frustration. And it helps me just get over that negative feeling I had from somebody cutting me off, or what I felt like was wasting my time in the grocery store. One of the things that I've heard, in terms of making changes, like habits and things is, you have to do it because you really want to do it. You can't do it because somebody else wants you to do it, or you can't do it because you think that's what you should do. You have to really believe it. Does this still apply? Yes. Yeah. Yes. That's on target with my research and, you know, all the feedback I'm getting from all the people I coach and the

coaches I've trained. What doesn't work is taking a should like, oh, I really should go to the gym for an hour a day and turning that into a true habit. Yes, for a limited period of time, you can make yourself do it, but it's not a reliable way to create habits. So you need to pick habits that you want. And when it comes to things like productivity and relationships and fitness and everything, there's a whole bunch of different habits you could do to reach those aspirations. And so pick a habit, knows how hard it is to do it all at once. And this idea of tiny habits certainly sounds like something worth trying for anybody who wants to make a change. My guest has been B.J. Fogg. He is a social science research associate at Stanford. He is also the director of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab,

and he's author of the book Tiny Habits, The Small Changes That Change Everything. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. As you get older, your natural standing posture gets worse. You tend to slump forward over time. To prevent that from happening, it helps to be conscious of your posture and stand or sit up straight. But more specifically, never stand with your arms folded because that pulls your spine forward. Imagine the crown of your head is attached to a string, pulling it upward, making sure that the crown of your head and not your forehead is always the highest point of your body.

Beware of looking at your phone as you walk. Every inch that your head is ahead of the true vertical line of your body increases the weight that your neck muscles have to hold by 10 pounds. So if you persist in looking at your phone, your head will eventually be permanently poking forward. And that is something you should know. Take a moment and share this podcast with someone you know. I'm sure they'll appreciate it. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new

thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn

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And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run. 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're

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