The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 49 - How To Form Habits That Actually Stick: Professor Steve Peters

Episode Date: March 18, 2022

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this one, I’m taking a section from Steve Peters, a doctor, psychiatrist, professor and mental coach for the world's top athletes and business leaders. Here he shares his wisdom about how we can form healthy habits and ways in which to maintain them. He explains that habits can be formed both consciously, based on our belief system, and unconsciously, the ones we aren’t knowingly thinking about. When we look to battle those good habits from the bad, it is not straightforward, and they need to be subdivided. Steve is the author of “The Chimp Paradox”, which has sold millions of copies worldwide and put forward the groundbreaking ‘Chimp model’ for understanding how our brains work. The model focuses on the 3 parts of the brain and he talks briefly about one of them here. The ‘Chimp’ which is our desire to be irrational, emotional, impulsive and short-term. Basing habits on our beliefs and experiences is letting the Chimp make those decisions, and sometimes we need to connect the other parts of our brain; the ‘Human’ and the ‘Computer’ to manage and control the interaction they have with habits. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/wyvTqTz7sob Steve - https://chimpmanagement.com/professor-steve-peters/ Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. Steve's invented this groundbreaking concept called the chimp model and it focuses on how there's these kind of three parts to our brain the first part is called the chimp which is our sort of desire to be impulsive and irrational and emotional and short term the second part is what he calls the human which is logical and rational and thinks in terms of facts and thinks things

through in the long term. And the third part is what he calls the computer, which is our set of core values and beliefs. Steve's work focuses on how we can manage and control the interaction between these three parts of our brain. One of the things you talk about extensively is about forming habits. And a lot of people in my life recently, including myself, have tried to form habits, especially during the lockdown when so much of our lives was um our habits were broken our cycles were broken because we were all trapped in our houses so whether we you know had formed a habit of going to the starbucks then the gym in the morning or whatever we had our habits broken so i spent a lot of time thinking about how i could form healthier habits in my life one of them was

working out every day um but i and one of the sort of i guess popular narratives is that if you do something for 21 days it becomes a habit what is the truth about habits and how we form them i mean there's a lot of research on this and they're a little bit contradictory so read and believe what you like but i mean the general feel is that if you look at why we form a habit it's either consciously done with a belief system under, or it's unconsciously done. We aren't thinking about it. A common one, for example, a poor habit is, and I use this a lot when I do keynote speeches, to say to people, when you go home, if you're with a partner that you love, how do you present to them when you arrive?

And it's amazing how most people mourn which you know they've not thought that what they don't want to see somebody mourning you don't meet someone and say you could have this every day of your life i'll come back and see you know so what you do is you walk in and think what habit would you like and the belief then is if i go in mourning they could leave me yeah this could damage now that's going to shift your habit so once you've turned the belief around this, you're unconsciously doing it without thinking this is damaging. And so if you actually sit down and work that out and put it in your computer system, then when the chimp gets through

the door, it's not going to mourn because what the chimp has to do scientifically is consult the computer before it does anything. It all happens in a tiny fraction of a second, but it's a computer's program to say, don't forget. It will unconsciously remind the chimp, you need to be in a good place when you walk in because that's what they're going to decide on whether they're there the next night. So you start to recognize that being someone who moans all the time or complains when you first meet someone isn't ideal. So we have these unconscious habits which we're not aware of, which we can bring to conscious by starting to look at our life and say, is this how I want to be? But you have to ask the question. Or we have habits like we eat too much.

Now these are different because the first one wasn't based on a drive, it's just based on a behaviour that we've got into a pattern. The eating habits much more complex because now you've got not only a behavior that we've got into like eating too much or eating the wrong things, we're driven with an incredibly powerful survival drive to eat. So now we have to deal with two aspects. One is what is it the habit that we want to get and what are the beliefs we're going to underpin with it and how we're going to manage what are the beliefs we're going to underpin with this? And how are we going to manage this drive? How are we going to fulfill the drive in a way that our chimp's happy,

that it's got its drive fulfilled and we're happy? So now you really have to look at that. So that's a big battle. That's not an easy battle, but it can be won. It can be won. So again, habits are not straightforward. They need to be subdivided and say, let's look at unconscious, conscious,

whether they're linked to drives or they're linked to some really bad experience. Sometimes we have a habit because we've got a bad experience. It's like you explained that you went through a really bad time with this girl. If it got repeated, God forbid, if it got repeated three or four times, you can see how your habit would be to distrust. And it would become a habit because your belief is that these women are not trustworthy.

And suddenly your trip generalizes, all women are like this. And you hear guys saying this. And clearly that's just so untrue, you know. And so with you, I'd be looking and saying, when you meet this, what are you looking for in the girl? Are you looking at physical looks? Are you looking at, do they make me this, what are you looking for in the girl? Are you looking at physical looks? Are you looking at, do they make me laugh? Or are you looking at their values?

So we can actually start looking at how you're choosing your partners. And that might help you to avoid the behavior, the habit of picking up what you might then define as the wrong person. And worse even to blame yourself then instead of saying right let's analyze this so again there's habits there where it's based on um your belief of what you've experienced or you're letting your chimp make decisions instead of your human saying hang on can i make decisions from a more rational basis then just keep deciding on an emotional basis.