Something You Should Know - What the Government Knows About You & How to Break a Bad Habit

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

The percentage of depressed people who smoke is higher than the general population. Way higher. When you dig a little deeper, it turns out there is an interesting connection between depression and smoking that you’ll find interesting. This episode starts with a brief explanation. https://www.oprah.com/health/quitting-smoking-and-depression Companies are constantly collecting data on you. Everything from what you watch online to what you buy, where you go, your affiliations – all sorts of things. Often that information is sold to data brokers who can then sell that data to other marketers. However, it appears they are also selling it to governments. Government agencies in the U.S and in other countries are acquiring data about you from data brokers. Why would they do that? Should you be worried. That is what Byron Tau is here to discuss. Byron is a journalist based in Washington, D.C., where he writes about law, courts and national security and he is author of the book Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State (https://amzn.to/49gEf5v). We know a lot more about habits than we used to. This information can be very useful if you ever want to break a bad habit or create a new good one. Someone in the forefront of habit research is Dr Gina Cleo. She has a PhD in habit change and is an assistant professor at Bond University in Australia. She is author of the book The Habit Revolution: Simple Steps to Rewire Your Brain for Powerful Habit Change (https://amzn.to/3PZjFQH). Listen as she reveals how you got those habits in the first place, how to ditch them and then how to get better ones.  We all get the concept of second-hand smoke. It is a health risk for sure. Well, so is second-hand television. In other words, having a television turned on somewhere else in the house that you can hear can be bad for your brain and your kids' brains. Listen as I explain how and why. https://www.cnn.com/2012/10/01/health/kids-background-tv/index.html PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Indeed is offering SYSK listeners a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING NerdWallet lets you compare top travel credit cards side-by-side to maximize your spending! Compare & find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, & more https://NerdWallet.com TurboTax Experts make all your moves count — filing with 100% accuracy and getting your max refund, guaranteed! See guarantee details at https://TurboTax.com/Guarantees Dell Technologies and Intel are pushing what technology can do, so great ideas can happen! Find out how to bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com/WelcomeToNow You can get a ticket for texting while driving. Put the phone away or pay! Paid for by NHTSA Listen to TED Talks Daily https://www.ted.com/about/programs-initiatives/ted-talks/ted-talks-daily Wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The search for truth never ends. Introducing June's Journey, a hidden object mobile game with a captivating story. Connect with friends, explore the roaring 20s, and enjoy thrilling activities and challenges while supporting environmental causes. After seven years, the adventure continues with our immersive travels feature. Explore distant cultures and engage in exciting experiences. There's always something new to discover. Are you ready?

Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, the interesting connection between smoking and depression. Then you know that marketers can buy and sell data about you from other marketers. Well, governments can buy and store that data too. The thing I found is that governments often didn't want to talk about the ways in which they were acquiring this data. And I do think the acquisition of data on the global population

raises some civil liberties and privacy questions. Also, you know secondhand smoke is bad. Well, so is secondhand TV. Plus, the best way to get rid of bad habits and create good new ones. When we're wanting to create new habits, we need to attach that habit with some kind of trigger. And so instead of saying, I'm going to exercise more, you really want to say something more like at 7am. So that would be your trigger. I'm going to go for a 30 minute walk. All this today on Something You Should Know.

This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. 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. Hello there. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

I find this really interesting. Hopefully you find it interesting as well. The good news is that smoking in the United States has dropped dramatically. And now it stands at about 11% of Americans smoke cigarettes. But the percentage of people with depression who smoke is much higher. And the percentage of people with bipolar disorder is much, much higher. And the percentage of people with bipolar disorder is much, much higher. And according to research at Harvard, it's not exactly clear what the connection is

between depression and smoking, but there certainly is one. Could it be that smoking cigarettes contributes to those disorders? Or another theory is that people with depression and bipolar disorder smoke because nicotine improves their response to reward. As one researcher said, it kind of makes blue sky bluer. Interestingly, depression seems to make it very hard for people to quit smoking.

But when they do succeed in quitting, it appears to make them feel better and actually eases their depression. And that is something you should know. You are likely aware that a lot of companies collect and keep information about you. For example, companies who sell products online keep in their records who you are, where you live,

what products you purchased, maybe what credit card you used. Who knows what else they keep? And then they can sell that data to data brokers who can then sell it to other companies who may want to try to sell you something as well. But what if it isn't just other companies buying that information? What if it's the government? Not just government agencies in this country, but all around the world.

What could a government agency do with that kind of information about you? Well, that's got some people worried. And someone who's looking into this is Byron Tao. He is an author and journalist based in Washington, D.C., where he writes about law, courts, and national security. He's author of a book called Means of Control, How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government is Creating a New American Surveillance State. Hi, Byron. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me. So first let's talk about the kinds of information that these companies keep on us. What do companies know about me that I might be surprised to know?

Or just in general, what do they know? Addresses and work history and marriage certificates and court records, all the way up through what's being said on social media and Even branching into things like the geolocation of phones and cars Data brokers have all that information in many cases. It's available for sale It's collected for business or commercial purposes and increasingly Governments around the world are seeing data brokers, data that's available for sale as a way to do intelligence, to do public safety, to solve crimes, and to understand the world. What's wrong with that?

It's a good question. reporting on this world is that governments often didn't want to talk about the ways in which they were acquiring this data, that a lot of things were hidden behind non-disclosure agreements or were sort of hush-hush. I do think the acquisition of data on the global population raises some civil liberties and privacy questions that I don't think we as a society are talking about. For example, generally speaking, governments need to go get a search warrant to look through your emails or to listen in on your phone calls. That limits the power of the state, limits the ability of them to acquire information about people, and we believe that's an important privacy protection.

When you can just go out and buy data on the entire population without any sort of suspicions, it definitely changes the civil liberties balance and tilts the power a lot more towards the state and puts a lot more power in the hands of government. So I think it's important that we as a society have this conversation openly about what governments are doing with data and what people give up when they put apps on their phone or sign up for services. Essentially, what you're saying is that the government can, and I assume does, go out and buy information just like any other marketer could buy information about you from somebody that compiles all that.

And that is in itself a problem. Yeah, I think that when corporations collect information, they're generally doing it to sell you things. They're generally, they're trying to do commerce. When governments collect information, it's a different issue. The government has the power to visit a lot of consequences on people. It conducts military strikes. It arrests people.

It can put people on trial. It can really upend their lives. The same data in the hands of a corporation and a government pose very different civil liberties and privacy risks. I don't think that the average consumer is aware that when they give over information to a corporation, that that information can easily find its way into the hands of a government. And not just a government with the rule of law,

like the United States or Western European democracies, but it can find its way to all sorts of governments, including authoritarian governments. So I can certainly see the potential for trouble based on what you just said, but are there any actual cases where this has become reality? I would point you to the case of a Catholic official that was using the gay-themed dating app Grindr. Essentially, Grindr, like almost every other app that serves ads to its users, is actually exposing information about its users to these advertising

companies that are trying to serve targeted ads. And when you have an app like Grindr which relies on geolocation, all of the users of that app are passing this data back to these ad companies. And so when you do that, you make your information available to thousands, if not tens of thousands of parties that are on these ad exchanges and trying to serve ads to people. And so somehow data got from the app Grindr into the hands of data brokers and eventually into the hands of a Catholic blog that wrote that this particular priest was using Grindr and he was removed from his job with the Catholic church for a period.

Data that is available for sale in these shadowy marketplaces can have real personal consequences to people and their privacy. I'd also point you to the use of tracking people on social media that occurred during the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020. Police were often listening in on conversations in social spaces. Granted there were people out there committing crimes. There was vandalism, but there were also people that were just out there protesting and trying to advocate for what they think is right, speech that is protected by the First Amendment.

A lot of activists believe that the police response to those protests was heavy-handed and overly based on things they saw on social media. So there are these potentials for consequences to be visited on individuals based on stuff they say online or the patterns and uses of the devices and services that they use every day. But there is this sense, you hear it all the time, that privacy is dead. That if you're putting things out on the internet that you think are going to stay private, you're an idiot. And that expectation has long since sailed. I think that's fair for some things. I certainly think that's fair for public facing social media sites like Twitter, right?

I think everyone should understand that if they say something on Twitter, that's viewable to pretty much the entire world, assuming your settings are set to public. But when you're talking about things like using an app or renting a car that has an easy pass in it or some of these ordinary things we do every day. I don't think the average consumer has really thought through how much data they're generating and where it goes after it leaves their car or their device or the online service that they've logged into. Well, but you had said in the beginning that one of the things that governments could use this for would be to solve crimes. Well, I'm all for that. Let's solve some crimes. You know, I think that's a fair point and that, you know, nowhere am I calling for governments to stop acquiring all sorts of data. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for governments to acquire data, even sometimes

bulk data. But I think that that needs to be done openly. I think it needs to be done thoughtfully. And I do think that consumers and voters need to be bought in to the ways in which the state is allowed to use data. And so, you know, this is important to have this conversation as a society because a lot of what I found in delving into this world is that much of it was hidden from voters and from citizens. And I don't necessarily think that's the right way to operate in a democratic country.

So how would that look? What would that look like to do it in a way that's open? And what would that be? Well, I mean, part of it is just journalists and civil society talking in general about the ways in which corporate data is collected and the ways in which governments use this kind of data. For example, let's take geolocation data. Geolocation data comes off of cell phones. It is sometimes available for purchase. And in my

reporting, I found that agencies like the Department of Homeland Security were using it to look for border crossings where there shouldn't be border crossings or round up unlawful immigrants. Generally speaking in the United States, if the police want to use your cell phone location data, for example, they need to go to a judge and get a warrant. But the availability of data out there for purchase means that they can circumvent that requirement. Generally speaking, DHS did not want to talk in depth about these programs because they were afraid that people would use their devices differently or they might disable the location settings on the apps that they were collecting this data from. I think that's the crux of the issue, right? That on the one hand, these government agencies have made the argument that this is data that's

available for sale, that in theory consumers have clicked I accept somewhere or I agree somewhere and allowed whatever parties to collect it. But they also don't want to talk about the ways openly in which they're using this kind of data for public safety or for national security or for border security. And I just don't think it can be both, right? I don't think they can say on the one hand that people have consented to its collection and that there's no privacy problem here. And on the other hand, say that we don't want to talk about it. It's a sensitive source and method. And, you know, it's it's we can't discuss it openly with journalists and civil society that are interested in these issues. We're talking about how government agencies may be collecting data

about you and how they might be using it. My guest is Byron Tao. He's author of a book called Means of Control, how the hidden alliance of Tech and Government is Creating a New American Surveillance State. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store, or online at bestbuy.ca.

Exclusions apply. For those who embrace the impossible, the Defender 110 is up for the adventure. This iconic, award-winning vehicle has been redefined with a distinctive, modern design. A reimagined exterior features compelling proportions and precise detailing. Built with integrity and purpose, the interior boasts robust, durable materials. Whether it's the all-terrain capability, ample cargo capacity, or innovative camera technology, the Defender 110 lets you go further and do more. And with seating for up to seven, everyone can enjoy the journey. Learn more at LandRover.ca. So Byron, the government keeps secrets, but it's not necessarily

they're keeping secrets because they're operating illegally or they don't want people to know what they're doing for some nefarious reason. They have to keep secrets because they have to protect people's identities. They they don't want to tip their hand necessarily if they're investigating a crime. There are legitimate reasons for the government to keep secrets. It's a balance, right? Obviously, government agencies are allowed to keep secrets in some areas. They're allowed to keep the identity of informants secret, for example, or intelligence agencies that, by the way, mostly operate abroad, are allowed to keep the names of their

secret agents or their foreign recruits or their foreign spies secret. Those are reasonable secrets that the government is allowed to keep. On the other hand, in a criminal case, the government actually generally does have to tell the defendant how they obtained this evidence. They have to allow the person to challenge the evidence. They generally need a search warrant to get certain kinds of evidence, including electronic communication. And so we do put barriers on what the government can acquire, and we do require them to disclose much of what they've done in an investigation in an open proceeding like a court. And so when you're talking about government

data that's available for sale, suddenly there's a whole different set of rules that applies to that. And governments have tried to keep secret or at the very least not talk openly about all the ways in which they're acquiring bulk data, large scale data sets on not just specific individuals suspected of crimes and where they went and got a search warrant signed by a judge, but the population at large. And I do think that's where the power tilts more towards government and away from citizens. But are they acquiring this information in a way we don't know? Are they acquiring it in a way that's legal and it's because it's for sale?

Or how are they getting it? Yeah. So in general, government agencies are purchasing this data through data brokers. But the way that that's disclosed to the public often isn't overt. It's often buried in some contracting documents. Sometimes it's not revealed at all. And it takes reporters or civil society groups like the ACLU or the EFF to really dig into exactly what governments are doing with this data. And yes, generally speaking, there's a contractual relationship they have with a data broker

and that data broker sells the data and government analysts or agents or officers query the data for whatever question they're interested in. But it's a very opaque world, right? Because some of these data brokers just exist to cater to the government market. And it's not being openly discussed or talked about to the population whose data they're acquiring. Must it? Should it? Why? I mean, why does it have to be that way?

Well, as I think I've said, in a democratic society, I think it's important that people understand what their government is doing and also what their technology is doing. And so I'm trying to shed a light on the ways in which both advertisers and data brokers and tech companies are acquiring data and the ways in which all parties in society are using it. But then isn't that the system working? You and others in the ACLU are on one side and keeping your eye on these other people, and that's just exactly how it's supposed to work. Sure. I think that's a fair point. But, you know, this has been a difficult reporting journey, as I've said, because many of these agencies do not want to discuss it openly, nor do many of these data brokers. So I have found a world in which neither tech companies, data brokers, or governments particularly want to discuss it. So where do you think this is going? Because clearly more and more

data is being collected on all of us and more and more people seem to have access to it. Where's this headed? I do think there is an increasing awareness of privacy among consumers and regulators. I do think the trends are changing. And I think we've even seen the US government start to realize that the data that the US population generates may be useful for US intelligence agencies or police officers or whoever needs it to do things that they think are beneficial, but could potentially be dangerous in the hands of an adversary. We saw President Biden recently sign an executive order that would clamp down on data transfers

to countries of concern, including China and Russia and North Korea and others. And I do think consumers are becoming more aware of these issues and are taking steps to limit the amount of data that flows to both corporations and governments. But, you know, I do think the trends in the big picture are that data is becoming very important to companies like AI companies to train their models, and it's becoming important to corporations to do targeted advertising and make business decisions. And so getting the balance right between lawful commercial and governmental use of data and protecting individual privacy is going to be a very difficult thing that I think our society is going to muddle through over the next 10 or 20 years. is people don't really have a sense of, okay, so if the North Korean government has information on me, so what could they possibly do with it?

If Canada has information, I mean, what possibly could they do with it? It just doesn't seem like a big threat to me. And I think that's how a lot of people feel. Yeah, I mean, I think perhaps not for the average American that has no interactions with North Korea. But, you know, there are people in the West who are dissidents who speak out against authoritarian regimes, who have family in these countries who may be dissidents. And the data available on them could potentially pose a threat. In addition, we have lots of people in the United States who serve in the military or are police officers or deploy overseas on behalf of our government. The data that their devices generate could be a threat to the operations of the United

States when they go somewhere in the military or on behalf of the government. Governments have found that their own employees, in some instances, are generating data that an adversary can take advantage of. Because of the way that consumer technology is so ubiquitous and collects so much data, it's very difficult to solve that problem. Trevor Burrus And lastly, I mean, we talk about data and

information, but what kind of information? What are they collecting about me that maybe I'm not aware of? David Schoenbrod Sure. So it could be anything from your entire address history. It could be things like your neighbors and your spouse and your children, your relatives. It could be things about your consumer preferences. That could be based on what you buy at the store, or it could be based on what you search for on the internet.

Your physical movements around the world are often bought and sold by data brokers based on apps you put on your phone or technologies that are embedded in your car. All of the social data that you've put on social media sites is often available to data brokers, even closed social media sites like Instagram or Facebook, that data could be available. And then all sorts of weird esoteric data is increasingly becoming commercially available. There are data brokers out there that go around the world and scan where all the Wi-Fi networks are, where the base stations of those Wi-Fi networks are located. There are data brokers out there that are collecting Bluetooth headphones or other Bluetooth devices.

They are scanning the environment around phones, millions of phones around the world, and logging where they see some Bluetooth headphone or some Apple Watch. The amount of data that's being collected is growing and, you know, is this is an area where it's completely unregulated, at least in the United States, in terms of collecting it, selling it and buying it. So people hear this and wonder, you know, so what can I do? So give me an example of what I could do. You can be much more careful with the apps you download. You can not share your GPS location with any app that you put on your phone. Sometimes people grant, you know, 24-7 location permission to a weather app when it doesn't need to know your location 24-7, right?

It only needs to know your location when you open the app and check your weather. Or maybe it doesn't need to know your location at all. Maybe you can just type the city you're in and save the setting that way. And so sometimes people are overly willing to trade their data for two or three seconds of inconvenience when they open a weather app. Well, I always wonder what would happen if people like you and other journalists and other activists weren't keeping their eye on this, that, you know, how how wacky would it get? So I appreciate what you have to say and the fact that you're out there beating the bushes. I've been talking with Byron Tao. He's an author and journalist based in Washington, and he is author of a book called Means of Control, How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government is Creating a New

American Surveillance State. And if you'd like to read that book, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for coming on today, Byron. Well, thank you so much for having me. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit FlyPorter.com and actually enjoy economy. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress.

Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. I imagine that you have, or did have, a habit that you wanted to change. And by their nature, habits are hard to change, whether you want to stop a bad habit or create a good new habit. Why are habits so difficult to change? Is there a better process to change habits other than just willpower and winging it? Yeah, according to Dr. Gina Cleo,

she is at the forefront of habit research and behavioral change. She has a Ph.D. in habit change. She is an assistant professor at Bond University in Australia, and she's author of a book called The Habit Revolution, Simple Steps to Rewire Your Brain for Powerful Habit Change. Hi, Gina rewire your brain for powerful habit change. Hi Gina, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here with you. So first, let's define what a habit is. And the reason I ask is because, you know, like you hear people say, you know, smoking cigarettes is a bad habit, but people would

say, well, that's really more of an addiction. So help me understand what a habit is. Yeah, it's such a good question. And it's actually not that easy to explain. But a habit is essentially a behavior that we've done repeatedly in the same context. And our brain has associated it with that context, and it's made it automatic. So it's a subconscious behavior. It's something that we do very efficiently and mostly mindlessly. And when I mean context, I'm talking about a trigger. So it could be the time of day or the place you're in or your emotional state, just like sitting in the car is the context for the habit of putting your seatbelt on. But that's different than say you get up in the morning because every

morning you have a cup of coffee. Is that a habit or is that just more of an addiction because you're hooked on caffeine? Well, it could actually be either. So the difference between habits and addictions, and although they share very similar characteristics, is that habits are these routines that we have that are subconscious. Addictions, on the other hand, feel more like compulsions. They feel like we don't have a lot of control over them in our life. And where habits can be negative or positive or neutral, addictions are almost always harmful to a person's life since habits are not a compulsion since you don't feel compelled to do them it seems like they would

be easy to change because why wouldn't they be because there's nothing compelling you to do them but obviously there must be there definitely is yes But we do have more control over them and we just need some awareness, mindfulness, and a really strong intention to change our habits. Our brains are constantly rewiring. We're creating new neural connections. We're breaking old ones. So any habit we have, we absolutely can break. Addictions are a bit harder though, because addictions hijack the reward system in our brain. And it almost tells our brain that we need this substance or this behavior in order to survive. Habits on the other hand, give us a reward. It could be something like dopamine or the comfort in the familiarity of

what we're doing. But with enough will and intention, we absolutely can break them. So is breaking a bad habit the same process as creating a good one? Or is it all, I mean, are those two different processes? Yes, they are different processes. They do include similar, I guess, steps, but they are very different. How so? And it would seem that if you wanted to break a bad habit, creating a new habit to take the place of the old one would make sense, but I don't know, maybe not. No, spot on. And really, whenever we're breaking an old habit, we're simultaneously creating a new one. Even if the new habit is doing nothing, that's still something different to what we were doing before. And in the same way, when we're

creating a new habit, we're breaking an old habit, whatever it was that we were doing before this new habit. So every habit has three key ingredients, and this plays into both creating new habits and breaking old ones. And the three key ingredients are a trigger, the habit itself, and then a reward. When we're wanting to create new habits, we need to attach that habit that we want to create with some kind of trigger. So it might be, say you want to do some more exercise. And so instead of saying, I'm going to exercise more, you really want to say something more like at 7am, so that would be your trigger. I'm going to go for a 30 minute walk. That way, 7am, as you repeat that behavior, your brain associates 7am with exercise. And then the more

you repeat it, the more automatic it becomes until eventually 7am just triggers you to exercise without really having to think too much about it. When we're breaking old habits, you want to reverse the process. So you want to see the habits that are in your life that you're wanting to break. So you want to be really mindful of what they are and then notice the triggers. Where are you? What time of day is it? What have you just done beforehand? What are you feeling or who are you around? And that's really going to help you to identify what the trigger is. And then instead of focusing on trying to, instead of focusing on saying, I'm not going to do this anymore, you really want to try to change the trigger so that you're not triggered to do that

habit. Without triggers, we don't have habits. When you say a trigger though, doesn't it get to the point when you have a habit, like you just do it to do it, right? I mean, if you bite your fingernails, for example, is there always a trigger or it's just because you're bored? Or maybe that's the trigger exactly boredom is the trigger so there's five habit triggers and all our habits are triggered so the triggers are the time of day the place that you're in what you've just done beforehand so your preceding event or action how you're feeling and then the people that you're around those are our five habit triggers and every trigger will fall into one of these five and every habit

is triggered by one or more of them. It seems that in order to change a habit, to either break a bad one or start a good one, there's got to be a lot of motivation behind it. You've got to really want to do this. You do, especially breaking old habits. There's research to show that the greater our intention or our motivation, the weaker the strength of the habit is. And the same way, I guess, for the habits that we want to break, but then the stronger our intention and motivation, the stronger our habits can be because we really, really want it. I've worked with people that have broken habits that they've had their whole life and they've done it overnight because they really

wanted to break it and they were ready to break it. The great thing about habits though is we only need motivation at the very start of say forming a new habit because our habits don't need motivation. No matter how unmotivated you're feeling, you'll always put your seatbelt on in the car because it's a habit. It's something that you always do no matter what. So the motivation really is only necessary at the very start, like when don't put your seatbelt on, it starts to go bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. So it forces you to create that habit. And if you slip up, you're reminded that you need to. And there's kind of no way out because you can't put up with a ding, ding, ding, ding all for the rest of your drive. It's very true. That's right. Yes. And cars have actually become more and more intuitive. I know that my car, if I'm reversing, it'll turn the music right down. And that's because when we're driving, most of the time, it can be a fairly automatic thing. When we first learned to drive

a car, if you remember what that was like, Mike, I certainly remember it was, I felt like I was using every single brain cell to do this activity of knowing how to drive this car without crashing into anybody on the road. Now, I sometimes get to places and think, how did I even get here? I don't remember driving. And that's because driving is really switched into this automatic part of our brain. It's become muchly habitual. But when there's something like a hazard on the road or we're reversing in a tight spot, we're having to engage the prefrontal cortex or the logical or thinking part of our brain. So we're less habitual, more in that thinking part.

And that doesn't like distraction, which is why, you know, my car and certainly many other cars, when we're reversing, it'll turn the music right down because it knows we need to focus. I've heard so many times, and the number in this thing changes from depending on who you hear it from, but that it takes 17 times, it takes 30 times to form a new habit. Is there any truth to any of these numbers or it takes you as long as it takes you? It's different for every person. And I hate giving this response. I wish there was a number that I could give you because it would make it so much easier to work towards it. But there are various factors that will impact how long it's going to take you to develop a new habit or break an old one.

With developing new habits, it's going to depend on how consistent you are with doing the habit. Obviously, the more consistent you are, the stronger your neural pathways become, and the quicker the habit develops, how habitual you are as a person, the complexity of the habit that you're trying to create. So there's a recent study showed that participants who were asked to just wash their hands took about two weeks to make that a habitual thing. Compared with participants who were asked to go to the gym every day, they took between four to seven months to make that into a habit because there's a lot more steps required to getting to the gym compared with washing your hands. So simpler habits will

develop much quicker than more complex habits. Well, also, there's also a lot of like, I don't know how else to say it, but baggage with going to the gym. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of steps to it, but it sounds painful and it sounds like something you don't want to really do. And there's a lot of like mental effort because it's just burdened down with all this negative stuff. Yeah, that's true. And that's another factor as well is how much reward you get from it. You know, there are many mornings I get up and I don't feel like exercising, but I remember that when I do train, my mental health is better that day. I concentrate better. I'm in a better mood. And that motivates me so much. If I just think of it as, you know, I'm going for aesthetics or I'm going because

it's just good for me, that's not enough of a motivator. So we have to find our own value. What is it that drives you? It's not about what anyone else is doing or saying. You have to find your own intrinsic motivation to do something. And that is going to make that motivation so much easier and the behavior so much easier to do. So given that is going to make that motivation so much easier and the behavior so much easier to do. So given that it takes everybody different amounts of time and different amounts of attempts to form a new habit, but is it the case that if your number is, let's say, 20, you're going to have to go to the gym 20 times before it starts to feel like something you want to do. Is it zero to 20? Or is the 10th one a little easier than the first one? Or in other words, is it gradually get better

or one day it just kicks in? Oh, I love this question. It doesn't just kick in one day. The more you repeat your habit, the stronger it becomes and the more automatic it'll feel. It's not just going to be one day. So when you think of every time you decide to do your habit, you're not just gaining the benefit of doing that habit that day. You're actually making it even easier for yourself tomorrow and the day after that. And the same way with breaking our old habits, the less you do it. So if you bite your nails one less time, or you have one less, you know, cigarette or drink, you're not just benefiting yourself in that moment. You're making it easier for yourself to not do it moving forward. Every habit, you know, every decision we make matters.

Our brains are either creating new neural pathways, they're making our current pathways stronger or weaker, depending on the behaviors that we're doing. But if you had to give a number or a sense of time or the number of attempts or something, can you give me a ballpark? Some research shows that the average time it takes to develop a new habit, and that's very average, is around 66 days or 10 weeks. But again, there's that big range, anywhere from two weeks to up to 10 months.

And I imagine, too, it depends on how motivated you are to make the change. Yeah, how badly you want it. That's right. Change is hard. motivated you are to make the change. Yeah, how badly you want it. That's right. Change is hard. Our brains don't really like change because we're making 35,000 decisions every single day. And if we had to make each one of those consciously, we'd be completely exhausted, which is why our brain creates habits. They're like shortcuts in our brain. They're automations. So when we're making a change, we're having to get out of this automated state and we're having to think about something new and different.

And that takes effort. It takes energy. It takes time. So our brain's really comfortable just doing what it's always done. It's comfortable even if our routines aren't serving us in other ways. Our brain loves routines. What are the habits that people struggle with or want to change the most? We're talking about habits in the abstract, but what specifically are the things? So the most commonly reported unwanted habits are scrolling too much on our phone,

snoozing our alarm in the morning, staying up too late at night, snacking when we're not hungry, and procrastinating. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah. With the phone scrolling, it used to be just the millennials. It used to be sort of younger generations, but now we're seeing that it's the unwanted habit across all generations. When you want to change a habit, does it help to do it with somebody else? What are some of the ways you can support yourself so it works? The best way is actually to create an environment that's going to support you. So say, for example, you don't want to scroll on your phone first thing in the morning.

Instead of having your phone next to your bed where you can reach it and trying to use your willpower to be like, no, I'm not going to scroll on my phone. You're better off just not having your phone there altogether. Change the environment so that you're not having to use your self-control or willpower. Your environment supports you. It's the same with, you know, if you're a snacky person and you've got all these sweets in the house, put them in a really hard to reach location. It could be the very top shelf of your pantry or your cupboard where you have to get a step ladder to get up and grab them. You're not restricting yourself from it, but creating that barrier makes, you know, allows you time to have a bit of mindfulness. It gives you time to think, is this actually something I want to do? We like the path of

least resistance. So you might find that a lot of the times you actually won't reach for those things that you don't want to do. What else do you find that people either don't quite understand about this or make it harder for themselves perhaps than it has to be? I think people have depended on willpower as being the dominant paradigm for change. But there's so many myths around willpower. You know, action is actually a prerequisite for willpower. Oftentimes we don't feel like doing something and it's not until we actually do it anyway, then we feel that

motivation to do it. A lot of people say to me, and I certainly experienced the same thing, like, I don't really want to work out. And it's only when you're sort of five or 10 minutes into your workout that you're like, oh, I'm so glad I'm here. This feels great. So not depending on our willpower to make those changes is so, so, so important. I'm sure it depends on the habit that we're talking about. But if a habit has risen to the level that someone is considering doing something about it and making a commitment to do something about it, does it often take more than one attempt? I don't mean, you know, the little day-to-day failures, but like the big, okay, I'm really going to do this and fail.

You know, like smokers will often say, you know, I've tried five times, ten times to quit smoking, and finally on the tenth try. Is it the same with habits that it takes a few hard commitments before it actually holds? Oftentimes it is a process of two steps forward, one step back. Absolutely. There are people, you know, that can change their habits overnight, especially breaking unwanted ones overnight.

But most of the time it is two steps forward, one step back. And it's part of the process, which is why when I talk about changing habits, one of the really important topics I have to bring in with it is setbacks. How do we navigate setbacks? It's not if you have a setback, it's generally going to be when you have a setback. And the most successful people aren't the ones that don't have setbacks because we all have them. They're actually the ones that can get up from that setback and have some self-compassion and keep going, not wait for Monday or the new year or your birthday, you know, get up now and do whatever you can in the moment. Yeah, because it's setbacks can be so demoralizing when you fail, when you feel like

you've failed once. You've done it five times, but the sixth time you failed, then you feel like, oh, throw in the towel. Yeah. And what's really hard about that is the number one predictor of success is self-efficacy, which is the belief in our own ability to achieve a task. And when we have setbacks that we haven't framed well, and what I mean by that is if we see ourselves as a failure, or we have negative self-talk around it, what happens is that we reduce our self-efficacy. We say to ourselves, oh, I can't do this. I don't have enough willpower or discipline or self-control. And that then impacts our ability to achieve future tasks because now we've reduced our self-efficacy. So really

bouncing back from a setback, a big part of it is self-compassion and it's expecting a setback to happen rather than being surprised by it. Everyone, I imagine, has faced this challenge of wanting to change a habit and struggled with it and wondered if they could even do it. And it's interesting to hear the science behind how habits form and how best to change it. I've been talking with Dr. Gina Cleo. She's an assistant professor at Bond University in Australia and author of the book, The Habit Revolution, Simple Steps to Rewire Your Brain for Powerful Habit Change. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Gina. This was really enlightening. My absolute pleasure, Mike. Thanks so much for having me. I'm sure you've heard that secondhand smoke can be bad for you.

Well, it may also be true that secondhand TV could be bad for you. You see, millions of Americans leave a TV on even though nobody is watching. And the journal Pediatrics says there is a problem with unattended TVs. They say that it could be to blame for some attention issues. Young children have a particularly hard time tuning out some of those distant noises coming from that television in the other room. Voices and sounds grab their attention

and can interrupt the thought process. Experiments showed that children who play within earshot of a TV spend less time with individual toys they're playing with and shift their attention more quickly from one activity to another compared to when the TV is off. Distant TVs can have the same effect on adults, although to a lesser degree, because the developing brains of young children are not yet familiar to the sounds of the world,

and they have a harder time identifying or tuning them out. And that is something you should know. As you might imagine, if you did a podcast, you would want as many people to listen as you could possibly find. And one way for us to find new listeners is for listeners like you to tell others to give this show a listen. So the next time you're with someone and the subject of podcasts come up, mention this one. I'm Mike Kerr Brothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? 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. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed.

I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures? You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada.

I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-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 Lightning,

a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today.

Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.