The Jordan Harbinger Show - 64: Sean Young | Changing Your Life for Good with SCIENCE

Episode Date: July 5, 2018

Sean Young (@SeanYoungPhD) is the Executive Director of the University of California Institute for Prediction Technology and the author of Stick with It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life -- for Good. What We Discuss with Sean Young: Archaic strategies for behavior change that almost certainly never work -- even though people every day who should know better act like they never got the memo. The ABCs of behavior: Automatic, Burning, and Common. The SCIENCE model of lasting change: Stepladders, Community, Important, Easy, Neurohacks, Captivating, Engrained Which of these behavior change tools we can apply to each behavior type. How to formulate strategies to uncover, classify, and eradicate bad habits or build good habits -- and make the desired changes stick. And much more... Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger, and as always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DePhilippo. This discussion today includes insights from Sean Young. He's the executive director of the University of California Institute for Prediction Technology, along with other accolades. He's also the author of Stick With It.

He studies digital behavior and prediction technology and helps people and businesses apply this knowledge to change behaviors, like sticking to New Year's resolution. and predicting what people will do in the future, especially in areas like health, medicine, politics, and business. Today, we'll discover the ABCs of behavior, these types of behavior that we do unconsciously, compulsively, or just plain bad behavior that we rationalize when we shouldn't. We'll also explore seven forces of behavior change, each of which can be applied to a different behavior type, and last but not least, we'll learn which of the behavior change tools to apply to each behavior type so we know we're attacking each specific problem with the right

tool. By the end of this show, you'll have a strategy to uncover and classify habits that you don't like or that you want to build as well as have the tools to make those changes stick. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode, which will be especially useful for this one because there's a lot of lists and things like that that you'll have wanted to have taken notes for. But if you're at the Jim, you're driving or just walking around. You can always go grab the worksheet and it'll be done for you. And you can also solidify your understanding of the key takeaways here from Sean Young. The show is free, but the fee I ask is that you share it with friends when you find something useful,

which should be every episode. And the worksheets are how we make sure of that. The link to the worksheets is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now, here's Sean Young. So behavior change, this is one of those, well, habit change and behavior change. Actually, is there a difference between those two things? Because I feel like we use those terms interchangeably. Oh, man, there's so many different terms for behavior.

People say behavior change, behavior transformation. Part of it is, are you talking to a wellness group? Are you talking to an HR group? Are you talking to researchers? So many different ways of calling it. I actually do separate between habit change and behavior change. But, yes, I mean, at a basic level to me, habit change, the real meaning of habit is something that happens unconsciously.

And behavior is more broad. It's things that we do unconsciously and consciously. So behavior change works for me. Habit change works for me as long as we know what we're talking about. I think one of the key distinctions here that maybe scares a lot of us away from habit change or behavior change is we think, well, you know, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, or, oh, I've been doing this for so long. Or I've tried to change other aspects of myself and I can't do it.

But in the book, you discuss that this isn't about changing the person. It's about changing the process. Can you sharpen that distinction for us as well? I've been studying this stuff now for more than 15 years and figured out that there are a lot of problems and reasons why people aren't able to stick with what they want to do. And there's a conventional wisdom that'll say, okay, if you want to change your behavior, then become like someone else. If you want to exercise more, become like some fitness guru. Richard Simmons was the example of look how happy is when he's exercising. If you want to exercise more, become like him.

If you want to become better at business or become a social butterfly so you can sell more, become like someone else. we've learned through our research that, you know, not only is that not true about become like another person and really trying to change yourself, but it's pretty difficult to become a different person. It doesn't stick. And it makes people feel badly about themselves. Also, if I do a lot of work, I'm a medical school professor and do a lot of work with patients and in public health. And if you start telling people that they're not having good health or not having good health behaviors because there's something wrong with them as a person starts to feel pretty bad, starts to make them feel bad and makes ourselves feel bad for when we're in that situation.

So it turns out it's the wrong science. It's not about changing the person. You don't get behaviors to stick by changing the person and becoming someone else. It's actually, I say, don't change the person, change the process. So through small tweaks in the way we do things, through just little changes in our lives and there's a process for doing it that I'll go into, we can be able to get ourselves and others to stick with things. And I think that's a really important point that's been missing for many years. And that's what's one big factor of what's been causing people to just jump to the next book, to the next motivational speaker, to the next thing, and try to figure out how to be like someone else. We can't and shouldn't try to do that.

Yeah, moving from book to book to self-help course or video class or whatever. this stuff is ineffective. So what that signals to me is that more education, more advertising, or the latest and greatest sort of habit change trickery material that we absorb passively isn't getting people to stick to their behavior. And it seems like we've found that a lot of these ways are just dead ends, especially if we're not supposed to change ourselves and do a different person to do it, which is a huge relief. So how do we get people to keep doing things? And of course, later, I'll ask you how we stop doing things, but how do we get people to keep doing things if it's not just willpower or grit? Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable. You just said, so it's education alone is not

the answer. Marketing, spending more money is not the answer, but it's unbelievable to me. We've known this stuff for years, actually. I mean, good for me that it allows me to write a book and has me doing business in this area. But we've known for years that just educating people does not change their behavior. Yet, you know, I mentioned examples with doctors. Every day there's a conversation. Okay, well, patients aren't taking their medication and there's a belief that they're not taking it because they don't know that they're supposed to be taking it or they don't know what the medication does for them or even people thinking, let's educate others more about why they shouldn't smoke. And then people will quit smoking. It's not about education. It's not about pumping more money into

something and advertising and marketing that there's very specific research and we know how to do this in psychology. So what I did and stick with it, I put together that research, both the historical research over the past decades of how to get people to change their behavior as well as cutting edge work from our own group and from other friends and colleagues. And really, I narrowed it down to there's a two-step process for getting people to change their behavior. So step one is figure out what type of behavior you're trying to change. There are three types of behaviors or what I call A, B, and C behaviors.

First step is figure out which type of behavior you're trying to change A, B, or C. The second step is there are a different set of tools for, changing A, B, or C behaviors. So the second step is figure out which are the tools or what I call forces needed for changing that type of behavior. And then stick with it. There's a figure that you can look at where it will show A, B, and C behaviors and then what are the tools that you can use for changing it. That's what we've done in the research that I do. You know, it's not just taken, like I said, from decades of research, but I've found this in my own work with, with patients at UCLA, with research participants in public health, in consulting that I do,

and even in my own life, I've applied and found this works. Perfect. Okay. Well, good. Well, we know that habit change is tough because people will often, well, usually even, not make or keep changes, even if their lives literally depend on it. You know, we see addiction and things like that. But even your own cousin, he suffers from Crohn's disease.

And in the book, and stick with it, you say, well, of course, what he did was, he immediately changes his diet and never eats these things again and lives happily ever after, but that wasn't really the case. So, I mean, that brings up something personal. And I got into this, I mean, like most of us, I think, especially in the public health medical field, you get into something because of some kind of personal attachment to it. And in my case, in my case, it was this related to a family member. We were in a band together.

I mean, I was, I'm a musician by training. I was in punk bands and growing up and would play with him. And we played the show while I was in grad school. He came up. I was at Stanford and he came up for us to play this show. And he has Crohn's disease. And he wasn't able to go back home with the rest of the bandmates after the show. And he said, you know, I'm in, Sean, I'm in too much pain.

And so I took him to the hospital. And it turns out that his intestines had burst, which is. really, really serious. He was a couple of minutes, they said, away from dying. They rushed him into emergency surgery, were able to take care of him, saved his life. He spent two or three weeks in the hospital recovering. And during that process, they said, okay, look, you need to change some things around. You need to take medication, you know, possibly for the rest of your life. You need to change the way you exercise and eat and my family were really close my mom was up there our family and we were saying exercise meditate do all these things and he said i'm going to do it i will

i'm going to change my life um and start doing these things but turns out he didn't follow through 100% with doing that and it really freaked me out i was next to him when he almost died and here he is not following through with what needs to be done to prevent this from happening again. And so it started getting me questioning. I had been at the time I was studying psychology. I was studying behavior change. I was working with technologies. And it got me thinking why not only he wasn't following through, but so many of us, pretty much all of us in at least some parts in our lives, don't follow through with things that we plan to do. So why is that? I was finding it. it with students where I was, the students I was teaching, they would wait until the day of the

test and then say, I need an extension. I didn't study for it. Or I was finding it with, with our band and questions like, how do we get people to come to our shows? It was working in the technology industry and finding that some friends of mine were building software that were getting millions of users overnight and getting people to stick with it and others weren't. And so what's, what's the difference? What's driving engagement? So I started studying it pretty systematically, scientifically, and that's where over the past 15, more than 15 years, we've come up with some answers from doing this and doing it in classical psychology studies in a lab to doing it outside in the real world where we work with people who are at risk for HIV, trying to get them to get

tested. We just finished a study with UCLA chronic pain patients who are, on opioids where there's an opioid crisis going on. We're applying this to suicide prevention. You know, so many areas of public health and medicine, but then, you know, it just applies to people's lives in every aspect of it. So you'd mentioned ABC behavior or the types of behavior are A, B, and C. Can you define what these are? Because I think a lot of people think, well, yeah, there's addiction and then there's kind of everything else. Or are there are things we think about doing and then we do them consciously and there's other things that we don't. What types of behavior really are there and how are they different in terms of how we attack

the problem? Yeah, I narrowed it down to three types of behavior and stick with it. So there's A, which stands for automatic behaviors. Automatic behaviors are things that we do automatically. We're not even aware of what we're doing. So we're having a conversation. And if I kept interrupting you while you were talking, then I probably, wouldn't even be aware that I was doing that. That would be something that was happening automatically,

and that's in A behavior. Then there are B behaviors, which stands for burning behaviors. Burning behaviors are things where, so unlike A behaviors where we're not aware of it, B behaviors were aware of it, but we feel like we can't stop ourselves from doing it. So the common one is people wake up in the morning, and the first thing that they do is they'll check their phone for messages or they'll check email or if they get a ding on their phone they'll want to check a message. Digital, you know, what we call digital addiction is a common one. And so these are burning behaviors. And then C behaviors are or common behaviors, these are the most common of all behaviors. That's why it's common behaviors. These are things that are more due to motivation. So we're

aware of what we should be doing. We're aware of what we want to be doing, but other things get in the way. So I want to go for a run later on today or I want to go read a book, whatever I want to do. But I've got work to do. I've got friends of mine come over and say, hey, let's go for dinner. Let's grab some drinks. Things get in the way. And that stops me from being able to follow through with what I plan to do, even though I'm aware of it. That's, a C behavior. And the reason why it matters, so that's step one, figure out if something's an A, B, or C behavior. But this matters these three types of behaviors, because there are different tools that you can use for address them based upon if it's an A.B. or C behavior.

You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Sean Young. Stick around and we'll get right back to the show after these brief messages. Thank you for listening and supporting the Jordan Harbinger Show. To learn more about our sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash advertisements. advertisers. And don't forget to check out our Alexa skill. Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash Alexa or search for Jordan Harbinger in the Alexa app and enjoy us every day with your morning briefing. Now let's get back to Jordan and Sean Young. Okay, so A is automatic. That's like, oh crap, I've been reading for an hour and I just realized I'm chewing on my thumbnail or something like this, right? And burning behavior is I know I should not turn on the TV when I get home,

but I really, really wanted... I'll just play one round of, I don't know, wee tennis. I just want, just one. And then it's 2 o'clock in the morning and we're like, I didn't do anything, I didn't cook dinner, I didn't talk to my wife, what's going on? That's sort of this addiction.

And then, can you give us a clear example of common behavior? Because I feel like that's the confusing one. It's like, well, wait a minute. You know, a lot of people chew their nails without thinking, oh, wait, that's automatic. Or a lot of people watch too much TV or play too many video games. But wait, is that burning behavior? what's common behavior as opposed to these other two?

Yeah, yeah. So, and with burning behavior, we can just in the way colloquially, we can call it addiction, but there's a clinical definition for addiction. So I use it pretty much in the way people talk about addiction, where you feel like you can't stop doing something like you mentioned, but just need to bring up that it's different than a clinical definition of addiction. So with C behavior, if let's say I want to be able to exercise, more, but I don't really want to exercise more that much. I'm not that motivated so that I'd rather

just sit and watch Netflix shows instead of running. That's the C behavior. I know as I'm about to turn on TV or turn on a show or turn on a ballgame, I'm looking at my shoes, I'm looking at my running shoes, I'm looking at my gym clothes, but saying, no, I'm just going to stay here and grab a drink and watch TV. That's a C behavior. We're aware of it, but we decide we're not going to do it. Okay. So it's more of a conscious decision that we wish we could do, maybe like going to the gym. I wish I could do more of this or less of this theoretically, like maybe eating junk food,

but I'm going to rationalize the behavior instead. Yeah, exactly. People sign up for a gym membership. You know, you give the gym example. People sign up for a gym membership. They expect to be going. They're paying for it. But then different things get in the way.

that they don't end up going. It's not that they're, it's not that they just, oh, I completely forgot to go to the gym, usually, you know, it can be, but usually it's, no, I don't, I'll go tomorrow. So how do we decide if something is A, automatic, B, burning, or C, common? Obviously, we can evaluate this through sort of a common sense filter, but automatic, we really have to be unaware of it. So we find out because you go, oh, my fingers bleeding, because I've been chewing on it. Dang, I wish I could stop doing that. but you don't have that conscious moment. All right, so we find that automatic behavior like that,

usually by looking at the outcome of the behavior, right? But with burning behavior, how do we separate that a true addiction, a true compulsion from something we just sort of feel like doing? Yeah, burning behavior, that it is something that you feel like you've got to do. There's a small distinction. I think B and C are closer to each other than A and B. A B behavior, like you said, if you find your, just playing video games and I'm in a time warp, that's probably closer to a B behavior

where you are so distracted by it. You're so into it and you're convincing yourself, I'm just going to play one game, just one game, and then I'll be fine. That's more of a B behavior. But they're similar and oftentimes it's difficult to tell the difference and we need to, I need to talk with people or we need to kind of coach them on figuring out what the difference is. Okay. So when we're looking at this types of behavior, this matters, right? Because in order to figure out what elements of your science acronym we apply, the behavioral change techniques we apply, we have to know whether it's burning or common, because if we get it wrong, we apply the wrong elements for change and then it fails. as it goes from A to B to C, you gradually need more of the tools for fixing C behaviors. In other words, you could say it's more difficult to fix a C behavior than a B behavior and a behavior. And that's probably one of the reasons why we have so many C behaviors we're trying to fix all the time,

like going to the gym and exercising and trying to work harder, read more. We have so many procrastination. So if you just kind of default to it's a C behavior, you'll be more likely to fixing it anyway because there's a lot more that it takes to be able to fix a C behavior. But you're right. I think if we are just trying something

and trying the tools for C behavior, it might not be as effective as if then I'll have that with people where then they'll meet with me and I'll say, you really got to focus on making it easy, which we'll talk about in a minute, which that is important. important for fixing B behaviors. Perfect. Okay. I'm finding it surprising that it's actually harder to change a common behavior

than a burning or addictive behavior. Why do you think that is? Yeah. It's, it's, well, we'll get into it. I'll get into it when I explain what the different tools are and then I think it will make more sense. Sure. But part of it is just the mind is a, our brains are crazy things and we can convince ourselves of all kinds of things. We can rationalize things. And so when something's unconscious, it's almost like, A behaviors are almost animalistic. We just act without thinking. And it's a lot easier to train a dog or an animal than it is to train a person because we just do all kinds of mind tricks on ourselves and others. In the book, stick with it. Then you have come up with the framework and the acronym Science to remember these seven tools or seven forces of behavior change.

take us through each one of these because this I thought was interesting and I love of course I'm a sucker for acronyms especially when they actually make sense and so these forces for habit change not all of them apply to each type of behavior so to give people sort of an overview of this automatic behavior isn't changed using each one of these burning behavior or addictive behavior not change using each one of these common behavior same thing we pick and choose the forces that were the tools that we're going to use based on the type of behavior so let's outline the tools first, and then we'll talk about how to match the tool to the type of behavior. Yeah, so the science framework, like you said, so each one of the letters of science, it's an

acronym, each one of the letters of the word science is a different one of these seven tools or forces. It's not called science because you need to be a scientist or you need to be a doctor to know them, but just so that you remember, it's rooted in decades of scientific research on this topic. And I kind of became in writing this book, I became a sucker for acronyms like you're saying. This was actually, I've got to give the credit in creating an acronym, the idea behind it to my buddy, Jonah Berger, who wrote a book called Contagious. Jonah and I used to, we taught together at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and he had showed me using acronyms for business people there. And then in his book, Contagious, he did the same thing with something, a steps acronym framework. And so I thought, I got to have one too.

And it just worked out that science, that all the letters in science were able to be an acronym for these seven tools. So first one, the S in science stands for step ladders. Step ladders is the idea that we do things. We need to do things in small incremental steps in order for them to be more likely to last. oftentimes we pick things that are way too difficult, too much for us to be able to do, and then we fail at it. And there's an example. There was a guy that I ran into at the market, ran into someone at the market who was,

he had been a cross-country runner in high school. Then he went off and he went to the military, was trained in military intelligence. And then he went to Afghanistan and served our country there. and spent time there and then came back. And he was telling me how he had just tried to run a marathon. And he tried to run a marathon, but he had failed. And this is a guy where we would think, and this guy has everything that he'd run a marathon.

He ran cross-country in high school. He's smart. He went to the Language Institute and learned different languages and Army intelligence. He is dedicated and diligent. He was in the military, went through that routine, process every day. But then he comes back and he can't finish a marathon. So what the hell happened? He got to mile 19 and then he just collapsed. Well, the answer is he didn't train for

the marathon. He just thought, I have willpower. I have the energy. I have the knowledge of how to do this. And I ran cross country. I know how to do this. I can run this marathon. But he didn't go through the day-to-day training that we need for it. And when I started telling people that I talked to a couple of people about this and they said, you know, that makes a lot of sense. It's pretty obvious. But even though that's obvious to us, we all do things like that in our own lives. We all plan things that are much more difficult than we actually need to or should. So we might say we plan New Year's resolutions or summer's coming up. And people say, okay, the summer's coming up.

I need to look good. I'm going to exercise every day for the next four weeks so that I can hit the beach. But the past three months, six months, 12 months, maybe they exercised once a month. It's not realistic to say I'm going to exercise every day if you've been doing it once a month. And so we need to plan. plan steps that are small steps in order for us to continue doing things. And so in this case, training for a marathon or doing things in small steps is really important. But then there's a question, how do you know, what does small step actually mean? And so in Stick with it, I created a figure

called steps, goals, and dreams, which helps to quantify what a small step is by saying a dream. What I call a dream is something that takes three months or longer to achieve. So for me, running a marathon would be a dream because it's something I would have to train for a few months to be able to achieve. Goals are something that take about one month. And then a step is something that we can do today or definitely within a week. If I exercise once a month or less than that or not very much, then maybe just getting a pair of running shoes is a first step for me. And that's what we need to focus on that model of steps, goals, and dreams, because that will keep us on point. It will keep us on track to be able to stick with things we want to do.

So that's the idea of step ladders. Right. So we plan these small steps towards our goal, which might be, and I think the problem that a lot of people have with this is these small steps are maybe a little bit less exciting, but they're more realistic. Right. So we go, all right, I've got to go and get a pair of shoes. and then I got to do this couch to 5K running plan where I'm running for 60 seconds, walking for 60 seconds, and I got to do that for a week.

And it's pretty lame because I'm only going like half a mile, but I really just want to run a marathon. But this is how you get there, right? It's that how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time kind of thing? And you mention in stick with it that big dreams can really have a reverse effect and end up demotivating you. How does that work? So if we come up with a grandiose idea,

how could that demotivate us? Because you see a lot of advice online, like, all right, if you're going to start a business, write your big, hairy, audacious goal on a whiteboard and leave it in your office, you know, that you hear that all the time. Yeah, that's the dominant thing people say. The conventional wisdom says,

I always wanted to be a rock star, and I just focused every day. I thought about all the parties I would go do and being up on stage and all the girls I would get. And that's what kept me on track. track to being a rock star. But that's not what the science supports. You know, it's definitely it's good to have that dream. It's good to have that vision. It definitely motivates us. But that's not the kind of thing that's going to allow us to stick to the day-to-day problems that come up because, you know,

that there's not always going for a musician, and I know this for Stan, you're not always going to have concerts where thousands of people are coming to your shows. So what do you do when, when you're focusing on that and you play a show and there are two people in the audience and they're checking their phones. You need something, you need to focus on the small steps in order to get you through it and keep you on track. So how small is small when we're talking about these steps? You know, you'd mention these small digestible steps, small concrete goals that make us less likely to quit. What are we looking at here? And why does this work? Why do these small steps work other than that they're easier to accomplish? So and stick with it, I get into,

some of, there's, there are a bunch of reasons why it works. I mean, I get into some of the neuroscience behind it. If you think about every time you succeed at doing something, or every time you, you feel like you succeed at something, your brain rewards you for it. Every time when you feel good, you get a rush of chemicals in your brain. And when you accomplish something, you get that rush of chemicals. Well, if we're setting our sights, if we're focusing all of our time thinking about that end goal. Let's say it's I want to run a marathon. If I'm thinking about running a marathon, then I'm not going to get that rush into my brain until I run the marathon. I'm going to have to wait a really long time. But if we can get ourselves to focus on the day-to-day

steps, and this is the tough part, but the steps literally means things that take one day or less than a week to achieve. But if we can focus on those and really ultimately, after we do them reflect and say good job to ourselves or somehow reward ourselves for achieving what we did today, then we'll be able to get that rush to our brain more frequently and it will keep us on track and continue rewarding us. That's one way. And there are a bunch of other ways that I talk about and stick with it. But I think that's an important one because we need those brain chemicals to keep ourselves on track and keep doing things. And so we need to divide things up into small steps

so that we can do it frequently. Hey, we'll be right back with more from Sean Young after these extremely brief announcements. Thanks for listening and supporting the Jordan Harbinger Show. Your support keeps us on the air. And for a list of all the discounts from our amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash advertisers. And if you would be, as so kind,

please drop us a nice rating and review in iTunes or your podcast player of choice. It helps us out and helps other people find the show. If you want some tips on how to do that, just head on over to jordanharbinger.com slash subscribe. Now for the conclusion of our interview with Sean Young. Yeah, the steplatters process for me was really interesting. Not only in stick with it,

but looking at things in my own life where I've created habit change, steplatters have been crucial. And I never really thought about the fact that it works in reinforcing consistent dopamine release. I just thought, oh, it's easier to put on my shoes first if that's my goal and then go out and run. But really, there is something about going, yeah, I released a bunch of dopamine into my brain by putting on my shoes and then making it to the gym and then doing one set of one thing. And now, you know, you get momentum not just physically or emotionally, but your brain is literally getting a nice feel good bath of chemicals that says you like running, Jordan. Keep doing it.

Reflection is a really big part of this. a lot of what people don't do is that they don't congratulate themselves enough and they don't realize that it's actually a pretty big task to do things that they think are pretty small. So someone, you know, someone will come up to me and they'll say, I want to be able to exercise is a really common one. I want to be able to exercise more. They'll tell me they don't really exercise much at all. And I'll say, okay, go out and just take a 15 minute walk today. And then text me when you're done and let me know. Just from doing that and when they come tell me and we talk about it afterward, they don't realize how taking just that 15 minute walk as a first

step is getting started with things and that they should actually congratulate themselves and reflect on it and feel good about that. Don't just muddle it out and don't just pass it over and say, okay, it was 15 minute walk. That was nothing. But people really need to plan out what they're going to do, plan out the small steps. And then once they do it, congratulate themselves. I mean, I'm a sucker for having task lists and just checking off, okay, I did this, I did that, I did that. And that's the kind of thing where going through that process of checking something off and realizing I did this, reflect on it, let yourself feel good. And that's what helps give that rush and keep it going. What about the community aspect, the accountability, the see in science? Yeah. So I just mentioned,

you know, I'll tell someone, go take a 15-minute walk and then text me. Why do I tell them to text me? That gets into community. Community is the idea that if we get other people involved or if we're doing things with other people, we'll be more likely to stick with it. And there's part of it is sometimes social support, part of its competition. It depends on the person and it depends on what you're trying to do. But general idea is that we are more motivated to do things if other people are doing them too. And the E, easy. This one's sort of self-explanatory, right? We want to keep it as simple as possible and we don't go, all right, first, what you got to do is redesign your entire diet so that you don't have any gluten in there. It's like, oh, gosh, it's like cleaning the basement.

I'm not doing that tomorrow, right? Yeah, and we skip the I. I is for important, which is, this one's pretty easy or obvious one, which is things that are important to people, they'll keep doing. If I care about something, if I'm motivated to do it, then I'll keep doing it. But the interesting thing about important is that most people think, if I'm not motivated to do something, if it's not important to me, I'm not going to do it. we've actually found in a bunch of studies, you can still get people to do things and we can get

ourselves to do things even if they're not important to us, even if we don't care about them. E stands for easy. And easy is, it's a pretty easy concept to understand, but it's really difficult for us to implement in our lives often. So easy is the idea that things that are easy for us to do, we'll keep doing. I used to go to the gym. I used to go for runs a lot. I was exercising a lot.

and then I stopped going after a certain period of time. I just wasn't going as frequently. And if most people had seen or heard that that happened, they would say, okay, he got lazy or, you know, Sean turned old, and now he won't exercise it. You know, he's just tired of doing it. But that wasn't what it is. What happened was I was working on campus at UCLA,

and I switched and I moved to work about a mile south of campus. in a medical school place off campus. So now the gym that I would go to on campus was about a mile away. I had to walk, you know, a 40-minute walk just to get there. She can't really bike or get through there. And it was just a lot more difficult for me to now be able to keep exercising. So what I did, I switched. I moved to a gym that's across street from my work. And every day when I go to work, I bring a gym bag with me, a backpack so that, I have to, when I'm walking back to my car, when I'm walking back from work, I have to pass the gym and I've carrying my gym bag. It's almost harder for me to keep walking than it is for me

to just walk into the gym with my bag. That's how you leverage easy for being able to stick with things. Right. So we maybe limit our choices so that we go down the path of least resistance, which is going to the gym or something like that. We create, we remove those barriers. And last but not least control the environment. We spoke with Benjamin Hardy about willpower doesn't work and about controlling the environment. And yeah, if you are already in the habit of getting dressed for work or getting dressed to work from home, but your daily wear on days where you're supposed to go to the gym is your shoes and gym clothing, you know, because that was what was laid out right in front of you when you woke up that morning. That's an example of, I think, keeping things easy. Because instead of going,

I got to change and then go to the gym, you go, well, I'm already my gym close, and I happen to be on my way to that area because I have a meeting or lunch there. You really try to have the path of least resistance lead you towards your goals. What about N? Nerohacks. It's a little vague. Can you tell us what that even means? Yeah, neurohacks is one of those where I said I created this acronym. So I created the science framework, and then I had to figure out where do I fit this idea. And so I came up with, I just called it neurohacks so it fit. And neurohacks is the idea that there are tricks that we can do with our brain to get ourselves to stick with things, that there are mental shortcuts that can get us to stick with things that we were never able to do before.

There are ways of turning on or off a light switch in your brain so that we can be able to stick with things. So an example of this, there was someone who I had, who was in Stick with it who I talked about. His name's Mauricio. He had just come out of a tough relationship. And he was, he had just gotten divorced and he's feeling down. He's a designer by by trade. But he didn't really want to be working. He didn't want to be designing things. He didn't know what to do. He's just feeling depressed, focused on his ex-wife. And so he decides, I'm going to, he's sitting at his computer and he gets this, the flash on the screen that you get where it's Okay, it's time to change your password. And he says, I'm going to use my password to change everything

in my life here. And so he changes his password and he changes it to four, number four, give her, forgive her. Pretty simple statement, simple idea. But every day now when he'd come in and he'd have to enter in his password, now he has to think of this idea of forgive her. And when he first, started doing it, it was pretty tough because it would remind him of her and he was angry. But over time, he realized, I can continue typing this password. I don't have to change the password to something else and continue doing it. And it's actually getting easier for me to type this forgiver. So we realized this act of just the simple thing of typing forgive her was changing his brain and getting himself to actually forgive her. And it worked. And he's, you know,

moved on and got remarried. And then he actually wanted to apply that to a different area. He was smoking. And he said, I'm going to use this to stop smoking. So he changed his password to, I think it was quit smoking forever and, or quit smoking. And he, at the date of when I had last talked to him was, I think five years later, he had continued quitting smoking just overnight. That's power of neurohacks. So we've formed these habits because the brain wants to be efficient, right? Our brain wants to be an automatic mode, like a computer storing a username and password, for example. So the downside to some of this stuff is, of course, addiction. And the upside is that lasting change is really possible. And so I can see the narrow hacks working in that way. Do you have some exercises where people

can come up with their own narrow hacks that are different than just retyping a password? Because for me, I never have to type a password in the first place. So what other types of neural hacks are there that we can use to our advantage? Yeah. So some basic ones, which go along with what we've talked about already with things like step ladders, is, you know, let's say I want to learn how to play guitar. By doing it every day, by setting aside, I'm going to practice for 15 minutes or an hour or whatever it is, we reflect back on our behavior.

and that creates a neurohack. I wasn't someone who practiced guitar before, but now when I look back for the past week, two weeks, one month, I've been practicing guitar every day. That fundamentally resets our brains and gets us to realize I'm capable of doing this. And in fact, I must be a guitar player. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing this every day.

So I have a dog named Nora Jones, and she's a lab shepherd mix. And when she was a puppy, she was just kind of a nutball like other puppies like that. She would run around and eat things and break everything. And I'd come home and she'd run up to me and just, you know, run up and jump all over me. And what I did is I noticed that when she was really submissive, she had these huge, she has these huge satellite German Shepherd style ears. And when she was submissive, she would sit and she would sit and she would.

her ears would fall back and her eyes would kind of go down, she would look down. And so when I'd come home and she'd start jumping on me, I wouldn't just say sit or try to put her down. I would actually push her ears back. So I'd get her to sit and then push her ears back. And the rest of her body would just turn into submissive mode. Like she was used to these ears controlling her and remembering that when her ears go back, that's time for her to be submissive. and that just continued to work in training her to not jump on me and not be as crazy. Next, we have C, which is captivating, and this one was interesting for me, because I don't, and I'm not even sure I understand this, but somehow David George has PTSD and Tetris was able to solve the problem.

How can Tetris work as a cognitive vaccine? There's a research study of Tetris being able to be used to prevent PTSD. And, you know, it's uncertain what actually is happening. I mean, my guess is it's a distraction. What they found is that so people who've recently experienced some kind of psychological event that could lead to PTSD or commonly does by having them play Tetris, it reduces likelihood of that. And that's, I think it's probably due to distraction.

Again, this hasn't been studied, but my guess is if some, someone is about to have some idea that's wired in their brain. Like they experience something that's really scary that causes their brain to encode it as this is a tragic, traumatic event. But if you get distracted, then possibly the brain stops that from actually happening. And that's what Tetris is maybe doing. The idea of captivating those. So captivating is the idea that we need

not just any reward. So the idea of if you want people to keep doing things, you should reward them. That's pretty common sense nowadays, but people misinterpreted. It was based on research that was originally done on animals, on cats and rats, and that if you reward them, then they'll follow what you want them to do, getting out of their cage or whatever you want them to do. But people generalized it to say, okay, if you give people a reward, then that'll keep them motivated. If you give them points or badges for doing something, then they'll keep on coming to your website or using your app or doing whatever you want them to do. But the idea of captivating is it's not just any reward. You can't, not everyone cares about points or badges or they don't care about it all the time. You can't just use any reward.

just like for the initial studies that were done on animals, on cats and rats, they were given food. They were in a cage and they were allowed to come out of the cage and get some food. That's a pretty big reward. That was literally a captivating reward. And so we need, if we want to get ourselves or others to be motivated, you can't just give people any reward. It's got to be something that's what I call captivating, almost the equivalent or, you know, as close as possible, the equivalent of that cat or rat getting the food. And the name captivating came from.

We did this study at UCLA on chronic pain patients who are on opioids. And we have an online community. So we leverage the force of community that I had mentioned. There was one individual in this study who said, just damn, this is so captivating being in this online community, hearing the other people like me talking about their chronic pain, their addiction risk and all these things. He couldn't get himself up from the device, from looking at these conversations. And that's the way we want to build our technologies. That's the way we want to build programs to

get people to stick with it. So just quickly, the last one, E stands for ingrained. And that's the idea of if you do something over and over, if you do it routinely, then it will be. become ingrained in your brain and it will be easy to do. Engrained is important. This gets into your question of how do we now figure out what's important for A, B, and C, behaviors. Ingrained, by making something routine, we can turn it into a habit. We can turn it into something that's unconscious, possibly. And so, behaviors that are A behaviors are typically already ingrained in our brain. We're not aware of it. And so we need to use that same process of trying to make something ingrained to undo behaviors we want to change. If I'm not standing up straight or I'm walking across the street

and checking email while I'm walking across the street, that may be something I'm not even aware that I'm doing. And then we need to use that tool of ingrained to ingrain a different type of behavior. Another one that we need for both A and B behaviors is easy. So easy is one of those things where if we can be able to make it easy for us to do something else, we'll no longer do it. And so then it doesn't matter if you're conscious of it or not. And the reason why we need to know the difference between A, B, and C behaviors is that, like I gave the example earlier on, of interrupting. Interrupting is often an A behavior. And for C behaviors, all of the seven forces, all of those seven tools are helpful for changing

C behaviors. Community is especially helpful. So that's why we use community and many of our social interventions. But for A behaviors, something like step ladders isn't important. And the reason why step ladders doesn't matter for an A behavior is. is if I'm interrupting you and I'm not even aware that I'm interrupting you, then I can't say, okay, I'm going to gradually interrupt you less. I'm going to just interrupt you for, you know, part of a time now.

And then it just doesn't even make sense in the context of something we're not aware of what we're doing. Doing something in small steps doesn't even make sense. So that's why applying something like step ladders to an A behavior, It's not going to hurt it, but it's not going to solve the problem. For A behaviors, we would use easy and ingrained are the most important, but we'll also use neurohacks and have captivating rewards. For B behaviors, B are pretty similar to automatic behaviors in that we use easy and ingrained and captivating rewards and neurohacks are also a little important.

And for burning behaviors, we can use, step ladders, community, and important, but those are not the most important. The most important ones are easy and ingrained. Then for common behaviors, community is the most important, and neurohacks is the least important, but step ladders, important, easy, captivating, and ingrained are in the middle. They're also kind of important. So for the worksheets for this episode, we'll have that guide to which tools to use for each type of behavior so that you can match these tools to the type of behavior that are actually

trying to eliminate. Sean, thank you so much. I love the idea that we can break our behavior down into three different types and then use the science tools, these seven tools, to attack and change those types of behaviors. I think it's really powerful, and I love that somebody is researching the science behind this and not just spreading wives' tales, and that's what we're all about here. Jason, I found it interesting that you could classify behavior types. I mean, I just guess I've always tried to attack the problems in the same way, not really thinking that, yeah, unconscious behavior, compulsive behavior, and just plain bad behavior that I rationalize is actually different. So of course it would require a different tool to solve the problem and make the change.

So what are you going to change after this episode? Well, I'll have to think about that. Slash, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it. But now I have the tools to do it. I'm going to fill it out in the worksheet. That's what the worksheets are for. Great big thank you to Sean Young.

the book title is Stick with it. And if you enjoyed this, don't forget to thank Sean on Twitter. That'll be linked up in the show notes for this episode, which can be found at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And also tweet at me your number one takeaway here from Sean Young. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. And don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you heard from Sean Young, make sure you go grab the worksheets also in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com

slash podcast. This episode was produced and edited by Jason DePhilippo. Show Notes by Robert Fogarty. Booking, Back Office, and Last Minute Miracles by Jen Harbinger. And I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Throw us in iTunes review. Those are always helpful. And don't forget to pay that fee. And share the show with those you love and even those you don't. We've got a lot more in the pipeline. We're excited to bring it to you. And in the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by What Was That Like Podcast? If you're looking for a new show to add to your rotation, something that'll make you stop mid-dishwashing and go, wait, what, that actually happened?

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