The One You Feed - How to Integrate Behavior Change with Your Values with Spencer Greenberg

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

Spencer Greenberg and Eric discuss how to integrate behavior change with your values. They explore the importance of focusing on the process rather than the end goal and share practice strategies for forming habits that will help you live according to your values. In this episode, you’ll be able to: Identify the underlying values that lead to your decisions, and build a strategy around them Recognize the crucial role regular self-reflection plays in cultivating these improved practices Understand the significance of prioritizing the process, not just the end goal in forming habits Navigate the next steps when facing conflicting values Understand the various frameworks for behavior change and the ten conditions for change To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We've given our Instagram account a new look and we're sharing content there that we don't share anywhere else. Encouraging positive posts with wisdom that support you in feeding your good wolf, as well as some behind-the-scenes video of the show and some of Ginny and I's day-to-day life, which I'm kind of still amazed that anybody would be interested in. It's also a great place for you to give us feedback on the episodes that you like or concepts that you've learned that you think are helpful or any other feedback you'd like to give us. If you're on Instagram, follow us at at one underscore you underscore feed. And those words are all spelled out one underscore you underscore feed to add some nourishing content to your daily scrolling. See you there. The reality is like one person may

have no trouble remembering to do the thing, but they find that they lose motivation. And another person may be really motivated, but they literally are just forgetful and they just keep forgetting. So I would just ask for your own behavior change, what do you find most difficult? And then that's the stuff you need to build a strategy around. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast

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Follow us on the iHeartRadio app,, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Spencer Greenberg, an entrepreneur and mathematician with a focus on improving human wellbeing through social science. He's the founder of clearer thinking.org, which provides more than 70 free tools and training programs related to topics like decision-making and cognitive biases used by hundreds of thousands of people. He's also the founder of SparkWave, a startup foundry that creates novel software products from scratch designed to solve problems in the world. Spencer has been featured by numerous

major media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, The Independent, The New York Times, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Fast Company, and others. Hi, Spencer. Hey, good to see you. Yeah. We are doing this collaborative episode, but we'll start the way I normally start my show with the wolf parable as a way of kind of just jumping into things. So in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with her grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They

think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd love to just know a little bit about how that parable applies to you and your work and your life. You know, it's funny. I expected you might ask that parable because you do it in all your episodes. And I was curious what ChatGPT would say. So I plugged it in and had it generate 10 different interpretations. And then I used that as food for thought as I was thinking, well, which interpretation speaks to me the most?

And I think for me, the interpretation of that parable I like is thinking about what are the underlying values that lead to our decisions, right? So when you're operating, are you operating out of fear? Are you operating out of trying to help others? Are you operating out of trying to make yourself happy? And these underlying values that actually guide our decisions, to me, seem incredibly important and relate of trying to make yourself happy? And these underlying values that actually guide our decisions, to me, seem incredibly important and relate a lot to my own life philosophy. Yeah. I may have to do that to chat GPT myself. How did you phrase the question? I think I just said in the famous parable about which wolf you feed, what are 10 different interpretations you could have? And, you know, just generated them. So. We could probably spend the entire conversation on AI, but I don't think we will.

So you mentioned values and you've got a philosophy you call valuism. And I think values are really interesting because, as you mentioned, we often don't think about them. And then also often they are in conflict with each other. And the other problem I often find with them is that I have too many of them, right? Like I went through and took your values test, right? And, you know, I'm going along fine until it's like, well, pick the most important one out of my list of like 40 and then I'm just stumped, right? And so when you are sort of at that point,

how do you narrow? Yeah, that's a great question. And for anyone interested, we have our intrinsic values test you can take on our website, clearerthinking.org. Yeah, so people tend to have quite a lot of values. If we look at the most important values they have, they usually will have like something

like 10 to 15 of them. Yeah. Which is still quite a decent number. Yeah. But then people might have dozens more that are sort of somewhat important to them. Yeah. One thing that I think about is that are sort of somewhat important to them. Yeah. One thing that I think about is that the values won't all equally be activated in your life.

Like you might find that some of them come up a lot and others maybe don't come up that much. And so one thing that I feel in my life that I'm trying to balance three things a lot of times. One is my own happiness, which is one of my intrinsic values. Yep. Second is the well-being of my loved ones, which is another intrinsic value of mine. And a third is reducing suffering in the world broadly to, you know, all sentient beings. And so, sometimes they come in tension because it's like, well, do I spend another four hours working or do I go relax, you know? Totally. Do I spend more time with my girlfriend or do I, you know, take

on this extra project, right? So, I'm wondering for you, when you think about your own values, do you feel like certain ones come up more for you? Yeah, I think the core tension is the one you've just sort of illustrated, which is I've got certain values around things I want to do in the world. Reducing suffering is one of my top values, just broadly speaking. Obviously, our loved ones. I have a son. I've got my partner, Ginny, good friends, and then wanting to have pleasurable experiences and enjoy my own life. And I find that core tension between what I would call on one hand my time, and then the time that I give to the world is the core tension I feel in values. And I feel like it's just once upon a time, I would have

dreamt of a state where these things get resolved. But I actually think the act of being a human is continuing to be something I have to think about and live into and wonder, is it shifting? Am I too far over? Oh, yeah, I am a little too far over that way. Okay, I need to move back this way. And so, yeah, I think that's my core challenge. Yeah, and I think that's probably one that many people face, work versus self versus family or loved ones. But I think a lot of people also will have additional ones, too. So, for example, I have an additional intrinsic value that's really strong around truth. So whenever there's something where it's like, well, I could lie to protect someone, but then I'm lying, that really bothers me.

Or like, oh, if I said this thing perfectly accurately, it wouldn't be as persuasive, you know, but then that's going to bother my truth value. Like, no, no, I need to say it accurately. So I'm wondering, besides those three, do you see other kind of big intrinsic values for yourself that come up? I think freedom is one that comes up a lot. values yourself that come up? I think freedom is one that comes up a lot. But as I think about freedom, I actually kind of mean it on a couple different levels, which then I just go, well, since I value both of these things, I'll just group it and say freedom is a big value. I mean, one is, you know, the freedom to be autonomous to do the things that I want to do, assuming they don't harm other people. But then more is freedom and internal freedom from being sort of shackled to the ego. The part of me that's very focused on protecting and enhancing Eric as a character,

in a sense. You know, I want freedom from that. In the AA big book, they call it bondage of self. You know, and so that's one for me. It's like, you know, that's an important freedom to me. Could you unpack that? Because it seems like there's a lot there, like freedom from self. What does that mean to you? Well, in the Buddhist tradition, there's an idea that's known as anatta or no self, which posits that this thing that seems really solid in us, Eric, is a collection of all these different things. You know, we're just a collection of processes that are running, right? Being too attached to Eric, and I primarily mean ego-wise,

you know, some of the biggest freedoms I've had in my life have been when all of a sudden, through one mechanism or other, the concern about how I am perceived in the world, about how others see me, about how much myself is being protected. When those have fallen away, I've experienced a great deal of freedom. But also, and you talk about this in your values work, that there's these different things that impinge upon our values, right? Our traumas. And even if we want to talk about lowercase t trauma, like just the conditioning, our families, you know, so some of being freedom of the bondage itself is being free from any of that, that I kind of been dragging around with me. I had an interesting experience where a friend of mine was feeling very depressed. And she had a

sense that it's something to do with her partner, that there was something wrong in her relationship. And she's like, I don't understand. I'm so unhappy, but he's such a great guy. And so we did this little exercise. I had her sit down and I had her list out the ways that he's a great guy. And then I had her list out her own values. And the funny thing is that there was like no overlap. And she was right. He was a great guy, just not a great guy according to her own values. And then I had her write out her parents' values and he was just perfect according to her parents' values. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Such a great point. And I'm curious how you think about this because our values, we want them to be as much ours as we can, but we are just a combination of all the conditioning that we've had before us, right?

Everything we are is a result of past causes and conditions, countless ones. Figuring out the me in all that, like what do I really believe, I find to be an interesting exercise. How do you think about that? Yeah, I don't think we choose our values. I think we have values. Yeah. We can go through this process of understanding them better and,

you know, exploring them. But I think that there's something that sort of is a part of us, like our personality, for example. And I think they come about through a combination of genetics, like, you know, our genes make it possible to have values at all and may make it more likely to have some versus others. And then obviously our upbringing and then our culture and all these things. And I think by the time people reach, you know, mid adulthood, I think their values have often solidified pretty strongly. They could still shift a little bit, but I don't really think of it as like, okay, you're going to go, you know, try to change your values to something else. Right.

Because, well, why would you do that unless you had, maybe you had a meta value of changing your values or something like that. But normally it's more about, okay, let me try to figure out my values and then try to try to live according to them. And this sort of gets to my life philosophy, which I call valuism, which is very simple philosophy, but there's a lot of interesting implications of it. So very simply stated, it says, try to figure out what your intrinsic values are, and then try to live in such a way as to effectively create more of the things that you intrinsically value. And by effectively, I mean using effective methods. And just to add a little clarification here, why do I say intrinsic values? What do I

mean by that rather than just a value? Because I think, you know, value, intrinsic value, it's actually an important distinction. So there are tons of things that we value, for example, like cash. Almost everyone values having cash because you can do a lot of stuff with it. But you don't value cash intrinsically because you wouldn't value it if you couldn't do anything with it. Intrinsic values we value for their own sake, not as a means to an end. Whereas values are just things that we care about for any reason. Just to clarify for the listeners. Yeah.

And I think that's an important distinction because often what we think we value, if we go a couple levels deeper, starts to transform. And I think part of the freedom in that is my partner, Jenny, said it well in relation to food and emotional eating. And she said, you know, if I think that what I want is a cupcake, there's only one answer for that. It's a cupcake. If what I recognize that I really want is not to be bored or not to be sad, or there's a lot of ways to get to that. And I think to your point, if we can get underneath to what the intrinsic value is, there's lots of different strategies there versus being stuck on it's money. Okay. Well, why, you know, oh, it's freedom. Okay.

There are other ways towards freedom, you know? So I think that's a really important point. That's a really great way to say it. And I think that goes to one of the reasons why it can be useful to think about your intrinsic values because they're the underlying kind of why, of why you want the stuff that you want. And then that means that you have the diversity of strategies to get them. And I think it's very common for people to anchor on a particular life strategy. Maybe they learned when they're young, oh, you should, you know, go get a degree because that's the way to have a good life. Or you should, you know, get this type of career because that's respectable or whatever. But it's like, wait, but why are you doing that? Because if you realize why you're doing that, maybe there's a different strategy that gets you even more of what you want.

Yeah. Yeah. And I do think untangling some of our, I'll use the word because you used it, traumas, but we could just say psychological baggage is really helpful because I've been driven in my life a lot of times towards certain things that felt like that's what I wanted more than anything in the world. Heroin being one example of that in my life, right? But it could be women, it could be any number, you know, where that's just the whole focus and it seems so clear and real, you know, but it's being driven out of a wound. I think it can be difficult as we are, And I think we're all on some part of a healing journey to separate those things. You know, what do I really value versus what am I sort of being pushed towards valuing because it makes me feel better, safer.

Yeah. I'm glad that you brought up heroin as an example, because I think it's such an interesting example because people might want to dismiss it and saying, oh, it's completely out of the line with your values. But I think in practice, what's happening is to dismiss it and saying, oh, it's completely out of the line with your values. But I think in practice, what's happening is it's taking one value, like pleasure, or another value, like the alleviation of suffering, of your own suffering, and putting them in front of all your other values. Yeah, yeah. So giving you something you want, it's just destroying everything else in the process,

right? I mean, the value that drugs and alcohol gave me was a value I really have, which was to feel connected to people and the world around me, to have an experience of being alive, of being here, of being present. And that's what drugs and alcohol, at least in the beginning, did, was they brought the world to life for me. It was in the beginning deeply tied to some values of mine. You know, Carl Jung made the point to Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, that isn't it interesting that the word spirits, you know, for alcohol, is the same word we use, spirit, for this deeper, more meaningful connection to something bigger than us. And so, yeah, I think you're right. But then over time, yeah, that crowds out every other value, you know.

And that's a pretty good example of what addiction is. That's really interesting that the motivation was less around pleasure and more around like feeling alive. What was that like for you when you were doing drugs originally and how did that contrast with how you felt not on them? There's a line in an old movie, I think it's called Days of Wine and Roses. I could be wrong about this, but it's a movie and there's two alcoholic lead characters. And one of them goes on to get sober and he's trying to get his wife to do it. And there's just this very memorable scene where she's describing to him and she says, it's like life is in black and white. And when I drink, it turns to color. That's the best way I can describe it. Now, why did I feel that way? I don't know.

My guess is, if I run it all through psychology and different theories, is that my home environment wasn't a particularly safe place to have feelings or emotions, and so I deadened everything. And while deadening the bad, I deadened the good, everything. You know, by the time I was like nine, I was like a kleptomaniac. And it wasn't because I wanted all these things that I stole. I mean, occasionally I did, sure, but it was, I felt alive. So something in my life, I think it caused me to sort of deaden. And for whatever reason, alcohol and drugs brought it alive. The tragic cycle of addiction is after a certain amount of time, as we said, that alcohol or drugs crowds out all your other values,

you start to feel bad about that. And as you feel bad about that, the only way, you know, to cope with that feeling bad is to drink or get high, which then causes you to crowd out. And that's the downward spiral. So over time, I think it morphed from connection to just deadening pain, the pain of being the person I was So over time, I think it morphed from connection to just deadening pain, the pain of being the person I was at that point of having basically given everything that I had once valued over to getting high, then starts to cause such feelings of self-loathing and shame that you begin to have to medicate those. Yeah. I think this touches on a really useful point, which is that unhelpful behaviors almost always are doing something helpful.

Yeah. And it's like to just treat that behavior as totally pointless or ridiculous is to miss the point. No, you're actually doing it for some reason, very likely. Yeah. And then actually identifying that reason, like if somehow you could identify, oh, wait a minute, drugs are appealing to me because I don't feel alive. Otherwise, I wonder if there's another way to

feel alive, right? And so I'm wondering, does life feel like it's in color now for you? And if so, how did you get there without drugs? I will say that it doesn't feel in color to me the same way that certain drug experiences did. But those were as they, I think when they talk about like, you know, the idea of like, this isn't the right word, superfoods, that's not it. Superstimulus. Yeah, superstimulus. So it was even beyond. But I would say in general, yes, life does feel more alive and I do feel more connected.

But what I realized coming out of addiction was that I think I had depression. And my depression shows up not as sadness, but as deadness. So that's been an ongoing thing that I've worked with throughout my adult life. But yes, I would say that I'm at a point where I'm 15 years sober now, and I had been sober eight years before that. So the vast majority of my adult life and life feels in color enough that I've not felt any need and I'm not tempted to go back there. And how did I do it? I mean, I think I just, to go back to what we're talking about, I think I try to live by my values, you know, and recognize the satisfaction in that. You know, I think we both share an interest in behavior change, right?

And I think one thing that really helps in behavior change, the maintenance of it, is to recognize that the behavior feels good. You know, whether it's the direct result of the behavior or the way you feel about yourself because you're doing what you said you were going to do, there's a quiet satisfaction to that that I think I got better at tuning into. And then I've just learned that, you know, things like creating art make me feel alive. Being around art and beauty makes me feel alive. So I found the places that it's there for me and learned to tolerate better the periods where it doesn't feel that way so much. You know, where a depressive mood or episode comes in and I just don't react to it. And I just go, all right, well, for whatever reason, they seem to come from time to time. I think it's going to pass, you know, not making such a big deal out of it, not making it worse, I guess would be the way to say it.

This reminds me of something I've observed. And I wonder if you've observed the same thing, where if one of your really important values is not getting satisfied, it tends to pull more strongly. It can become almost like overpowering because it's sort of missing. Whereas if you kind of get enough of it, then it kind of will shut up. It will be satiated. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm curious to hear your experience around that. Well, maybe I'll put that back to you a little bit, which is like it seems to me that that phenomenon is very real. And what can happen, what I've seen happen in others and in myself is this big pendulum swing.

So it gets overprioritized and the pendulum swings way over. And then the other swings way over. And then the other one and it swings back. And I think for me, a lot of it has been like, how do I not have that pendulum swinging so much, you know, from one extreme to the other extreme of my values, but that I'm honoring them all a little bit. And that's one of your key strategies that you talk about is like, you got to keep them all in mind and you got to recognize where the conflicts are. And I think that's often what we miss. We aren't conscious of the value conflict that's coming up. We're not making it explicit enough in our own minds so that we can sort of take it head on. Yeah. I've been using this technique a lot lately, both in my own life,

as well as like when a friend brings a problem that they're grappling with and ask my thoughts on it is try to just sit down and say, well, what are the values at stake here? Yeah. Right? And then once you've figured out the values at stake, and they have to be the values for that person, right? Because different people have different intrinsic values. So, once you figure out the values for that person that are at stake, then you can say, okay, so really this choice you're making is a trade-off between value A and B versus value C and D. And I found doing that for myself and others, it can be incredibly clarifying. It's like, oh, wait, that's why this is such a hard

decision. Because I actually really care about both of those, you know, sets of things. So, an example of this would be a friend of mine came with a challenge she was having with a friend of hers. And basically, she could either help that friend with a project, which she wanted to do, because, you know, she cares about her friend, she wants her friend to succeed. But in doing so, it would kind of be giving up on one of her own goals that she cares about. And then it's like, oh, yeah, of course, that's a hard decision, because you genuinely really value both of those things. And then that doesn't mean that the decision is automatically made, but at least now, you know, it's at stake, you've really clearly identified it. And now you can say, well,

in this particular case, which of these do you value more on the margin? How do you in your own life and in people that you're talking to then go about trying to resolve that conflict? Because even after clarifying it, it's still like, I don't know. Well, the first thing I like to try to do is say, hmm, could there be some third option that's missing that actually satisfies both sets of values at stake? Maybe there's not as much of a trade-off as it seems, right? And we've actually done some research on this. We run a lot of psychology studies. And we were building this tool called the Decision Advisor. It's a tool on our website where you can walk you through a difficult life decision.

And in developing it, we ran some studies. And one of those studies, we asked half of the people to just use the tool as normal. And we asked the other half to come up with an extra option for what they could do in their decision that they had never thought of before. And we just kind of said, you're not allowed to proceed until you've come up with more options. And something like, it was a small study, so I wouldn't generalize too much, but something like 20 or 25% of the people ended up choosing that new option as their preferred one. And it just really got me thinking, wow, we often just get stuck on our first two options we're considering. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I talk about this in the Spiritual Habits program, but I talk about two scenarios

in my life where a third option was the right choice. And the first was when I wanted to start a solar energy company, but I still worked full time in the software business. And I felt like my options were either start the solar energy company or give up that dream and stay in the software business, right? Neither of those choices felt palatable to me. You know, the third way was like, okay, I'm going to just have to find a way to kind of do both, which is going to have its own set of sacrifices and challenges, but it was a path forward for me. Whereas before that, I got stuck in that dichotomy, in that apparent only

one or two choices and always defaulted to the choice that there was the most pressure on me to do, which was to sort of stay in the job. Right. But then the other thing was in a really difficult marriage, I was so fixated on go or stay, go or stay. What we eventually did, and I don't have the foggiest idea quite how we got here. I feel extraordinarily fortunate. We got to a point where we said, you know what? We value the home we have for our kids, her son and my son who are, you know, we value this home. They're in high school and we want them to get through high school. So we're going to remain as a family unit, but we're not going to be a couple anymore. Right. And I'm not saying everybody can do that.

Right. anymore. Right. And I'm not saying everybody can do that. Right. But we were able to, and it turned out to be an incredible solution that got me out of the stay or go, which we had been mired in for years because we didn't see that there was any other option. Yeah. That's such a good example. Cause I think we have most people wouldn't even consider that, right. Cause it's so standard, like you're either with the person or you're not with the person. Yeah. It turned out great. We got the kids through high school and everybody did well. And then we completely separated and went on with our lives. And the boys are good.

We're good. Again, I don't quite know how we made that happen. It feels very fortunate. But it was a way of getting out of what had been a very stuck place for a number of years. Yeah. And so coming up with a third option, obviously, that can a great approach and I think people underuse it. But another interesting approach is that you could say, well, in this particular case, maybe I will sacrifice some of one of my values for another, but there's a larger game here. Maybe I can promote that other value in

a different way in my life. Right. So you can kind of view it as part of a bigger picture. It's not just, you know, this is the only decision in my life. Right. Yeah. Yeah. As I was looking through your writings on valuism in this conflict, that was one of the things that struck me was, you know, taking a longer view of it, because in the moment there may not be a resolution right here. There may be a resolution down the road, you know? So for me, eventually the problem went away between solar company and job or podcast and job where, you know, for now it's the podcast and I can do that full time. That went away, but it took a while of doing that sort of third thing. So one of the things I admire about

the work that you do is you are very good at categorizing things. We were talking about this before the interview. You've chosen to take this applied mathematics background, PhD, and apply it to psychology. And so on the topic of values, you know, you've got your intrinsic values test. There's a lot of different ways that people propose going about finding out what your values are. are. Did you, when you created that test, go out and look at a lot of the different ways that people do and kind of try and boil it down? You know, what's salient about trying to figure out our values? Because there are lots of different ways in there. Yeah. So we started that project looking at the ways that values have been categorized before. So we looked at the way philosophers have categorized them because they think about them with regard to ethics. We looked at the way political scientists have done it. They think about it in terms of, well, different countries have different values that they tend to promote.

We looked at how even human resources and career counselors categorize them, because they want to think, well, what job would you be appropriate for based on what you care about? So we looked at all of these, and we kind of tried to merge them together, and then we ran our own study. And the way it worked is we put people through a little mini-module that explained to them what is an intrinsic value, how does it differ from an instrumental value. And then we said, okay, just generate some of your values. Just write them down. And then we went through and we ended up with like 3,000. And we duplicated them.

So we tried to find ones that were unique. And then we started trying to categorize them and say, well, how many different categories of them are there? And we came up with 22 categories. So it's a lot. It's a little, it's hard, you know, it's not the sort of thing you can just say, you know, in the soundbite, but, but yeah, so we have 22 categories and everything from caring about like longevity, like living a long time to pleasure, to justice, to quality and so on. So there really are a lot of things that the humans value. And it really helped me appreciate just what a wide range of different sorts of people there are in the world,

because for any one of these, there are people where that is their big, most dominant value. Yeah. You've got a values wheel on the website and I didn't feel like there were 22 categories. Oh, there are. There are 22 on there. Yeah. There's 22 values, but you actually then further categorize them into like preserve or... Ah, yeah, yeah. So we do like a hierarchical categorization. So I think if I recall correctly, there's sort of four meta-level categories. Yeah.

Then there's 22 categories. And then in each category, there can be multiple different intrinsic values. Like take the value of longevity. You might care about yourself living a long time, but you also might care about your loved ones living a long time and so on. So you can apply that value to different things. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

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or wherever you get your podcasts. This happens to me every time I try and do values, is I get a really big list. And this is entirely coherent with my personality. Like if you ask me to take any test, I just tend to fall right in the middle. Like it just seems to be, I encompass a lot of different things. And so longevity came up as one for me. But then I started thinking that that can be an intrinsic value. But I started reflecting on what about longevity feels important? Is it the chance to experience more pleasure?

Right. Which would then be back to sort of the value of pleasure. Is it to relieve more suffering in the world? Well, in that case, it's more. So even thinking about it in that way caused me to sort of dial deeper into even what is an intrinsic value to try and understand a little bit more about what about that feels important. Yeah, it's a great point because while longevity might be an intrinsic value for some people, it might be instrumental for others. Like they only care about it because

it gets them more pleasure. Well, then it's not intrinsic. It's just a means to an end to get pleasure. So then pleasure would be the intrinsic value. It can be tricky to think about the difference between what our own instrumental values are versus intrinsic because that's not the way our brain naturally codes them. And there's this idea that I like to think of a value trap, which is when you pursue an instrumental value as though it's an intrinsic value. Classic example would be someone just pursuing money mindlessly because it was sort of rewarding and they thought of it as like how they get ahead and so on. And they pursue it way past the point where it's like giving them the things they care about,

because now they're wealthy and, but their family life is shit and they have no friends and you know, whatever, all these other parts of their life are not working the way they would want. So I think that is useful clarification. Yeah. I think you're pointing to something there, which is interesting, which is we often get our values sort of, I don't want to say set because it's not even that conscious, but that we sort of get on a track and we just sort of, I don't want to say set because it's not even that conscious, but that we sort of get on a track and we just sort of stay on that track. You know, living a values-based life or valuism, as you say, I think does take a certain amount of consistent and ongoing reflection about what really matters. Do you find that true for you?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it does take a lot of reflection to really parse out your values. We created the intrinsic values test to try to make it a bit easier. But yeah, reflection is definitely a big part of it. And you can get into subtle situations. You're like, hmm, but do I really care about that thing? Like you were dealing with longevity. Do I really care about longevity? Or do I just care about it as a means to an end? Yeah, there's no way around it. I think a lot of self-understanding can only happen through this kind of deep reflection. Do you think that values change over time? I think they can shift. So sometimes they shift due to changes about our beliefs. So for example, someone who's deeply spiritual, let's say they one day become an

atheist, like that can cause a sudden change in their values because they had different beliefs about the nature of reality. So sometimes that causes it. Sometimes I think that social forces can change our values kind of slowly over time. So let's say you were like isolated on desert island with people who all like, you know, deeply cared about equality. And that was like the one thing they all cared about. Maybe after 10 years, maybe you would find that had seeped into your value system, even if you didn't start caring about equality. So. So I suspect that we kind of like will observe them. And when we're young, we observe them a lot. I think as we get older, we become more impervious to other people's values.

But why do you think that is? You know, why do you think we as we get older, sort of the term I often use is calcify, which is one of the things about getting older that I feel to talk about values feels important to me, which is to not sort of calcify, to remain in a state where life can influence and change me and that I can evolve. Yeah. And I mean, that's something I care about deeply as well. And actually, one of the more common intrinsic values we found when we surveyed people is values around continuing to learn and grow. Like that's really common in the US, especially as a value. I mean, I think I go back to biology and evolution here. I mean, I think evolutionarily, you know, if you're a baby, there's just an incredible amount of stuff you need to learn in order to not die.

And then as you get more and more of that knowledge, there's less incremental value in learning relative to doing stuff in the world. And so we, you know, go from a baby that's learning constantly and doing almost nothing to a child who's, you know, learning a lot and doing a little bit. And then eventually we're an adult who's learning a little bit and doing a lot. And, you know, from the point of view of the survival of our genes, that probably makes sense. But from our personal fulfillment, I think there's a great deal of value in continuing to learn and grow and not necessarily changing our values, because I don't think that's something you should purposely trying to do. But in terms of learning about the world learning about yourself like deepening your self-understanding so on yep I heard somebody once say and I'm just curious

what you think of this general idea I'm not going to attribute it to anyone because I think I know who said it but I'm not going to attribute it because I'm not sure said basically like self-development is about learning to want better things. I think I can interpret it on a couple levels. On the level that we've been talking about, I think it means that I'm getting clearer on what my real values are. And I'm seeing through the values trap. I'm seeing the conflicts. I'm reflecting more deeply on what really matters. I'm not on autopilot, right?

I'm not grasping for what's the most easy and satisfying thing necessarily. So that over time, I'm beginning to, you know, want better things. So like for me with addiction, right? It was that process of going from, well, I want heroin to what do I really want? And then, you know, trying to aim at that. What do you think? Yeah, it's interesting. I don't like the phrasing, want better things, because I worry people get confused and think, oh, want better things. Like, I want the highest things in life or the, you know, I want the fancy things or something.

Yeah, I think they would mean it more along a more moral, deeper sense of things. Right. You want the sort of things that you more fundamentally care about, not the things you kind of superficially care about. Yeah. And from that point of view, I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, one thing we haven't touched on, which I think is quite interesting, is the difference between values and principles. And I've been thinking about this recently because we actually, for our website, clearerthing.org, we made a new module where you can explore your principles. Ah, I would love to hear the difference. Yeah. And so I think of it as a principle is like a rule of thumb or like a decision-making strategy. Okay. Whereas the intrinsic values are like the thing that you're ultimately seeking. Okay. Right. For example, one thing that I might be, you know, fundamentally seeking is like helping people and a strategy to do that might be that I always tell

the truth or something like that. Right. So the principle would be always tell the truth. It's like a heuristic, but there's an intrinsic value I'm trying to get under that, which is like try to help people and not harm them or something like that. So, I think it's interesting thinking about what principles you have. Essentially, they're things you've pre-decided, right? So, you could go about your life and every decision you could like from first principles try to figure out, well, what am I going to do? But it's a lot easier if you sort of have a preset set of principles that are like ah well these are rules of thumb how i live my life and so some examples which i think can help clarify you know one principle i have is that insofar as i'm able i should always be trying to help the world right and so that's

just like something that i'm like that's just a life principle i try to live by yeah or another example would be that i try to always tell the truth unless i think that it's going to bump up against my other values too much right like because you know i don't infinitely care about the truth at some point it would destroy my other values too much but insofar as it's not bumping up my other against my other values i always try to tell the truth so i'm curious if you have other sort of principles that you try to live by, sort of rules of thumb for living. That's interesting because I don't think up till now I made that distinction. I would have thought of principles and values as sort of two ways of saying the same thing. But interestingly, like, so a principle I generally live by is, it sounds so kindergartenish,

but I try and leave each situation, person, or place that I encounter better than when I found it. That's a great principle. You know, and there's almost always some way to at least make that attempt. I don't think it always happens. Like, have I made Gotham Production Studios better for being here this week? I've been friendly. I've been kind, you know. Did I make it better? I don't know, but I tried. You know, I was oriented in that way. I'm trying to think of other principles. That's really interesting. Other rules of thumb. Yeah. And they're essentially decision-making strategies so that rather than having to deal with all the details and complexity, you can just say, well, my principles do this. So

they allow you to make your decisions faster, but they also actually can often make it easier to live by your values. So for example, if you have a principle like don't lie, then, well, that's going to support your value of like honesty, right? Yeah. And then when you're in a situation, you're like, hmm, should I lie? No, I don't lie. That's right. Right.

So, you're trying to pre-decide. Yep. So, that temptation and all these other factors don't push you over into doing something that's not aligned with your own values. Yeah. That makes sense. So values are, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about it and that living according to your values is really important. And the way that we live out many things in our life is through our behavior, right? And so oftentimes we may have a value that we haven't yet figured out how to live into. I may value physical health, but I haven't figured out how to exercise regularly, right? So that sort of leads us into another area that you and I both are really interested in, which is

behavior change. Talk to me about what got you interested in behavior change. Yeah. So as I thought about the kind of effects I want to have in the world, like the kind of values I have of trying to increase happiness, reduce suffering, I started to realize that so many of those values actually have to do with behavior. Whether it's mental health, which is something that I've worked in, or it's reducing cognitive biases and irrationality. So many of these things are actually fundamentally behavioral. And then I started thinking, well, changing human behavior, that's really hard. People,

you know, want to go to the gym, and then they don't do it. People, you know, want to spend more time with their family, and then they don't do it, and so on. So many challenges we face in our life are because we, like, can't get ourselves to act the way we want to act. So then I started really systematically investigating this. And so we ended up looking at 16 different behavior change frameworks that are out there, studied them, tried to really understand them. And then we said, OK, where do we see a gap here? And what we realized is that we tended to find a few different types of behavior change frameworks out there. They're really simplified ones, which can be really useful to provide some basic guidelines, but they're not trying to be comprehensive. So the hook framework would be an example of this. So the idea that you're trying to make a behavior change,

well, here's two things to keep in mind, or here's three things to keep in mind. So that's on the one hand. The other hand, we found these academic frameworks that are much more comprehensive, but they're hard to apply in the step-by-step fashion. So it's like, how do you use this? So what we wanted to do is try to create a framework that was comprehensive. So all behavior change strategies can fit in it somewhere, but also gives a step-by-step process that you can go through. And so we created this framework. We call it the 10 Conditions for Change. You can find it on our

website. But basically, the general idea is it's trying to identify 10 conditions where if they're all met, a behavior change is very likely to occur. So, you know, you get the 10 conditions in place, the behavior change is likely. Well, what that means is if the behavior change is not happening, if the person is not engaging in that behavior, then one or more of the conditions is not met. And therefore, you can go kind of use it as a... Diagnostic. Diagnostic. Exactly.

You go through and you try to pinpoint, well, which of the conditions are not met. So that's the basic concept. Yeah. Hold that for a second. I want to jump back to something you just said a minute ago, which was that your values around increasing happiness and reducing suffering. Do you see those as the same thing? You know, I don't necessarily. I think that some people care a lot more about reducing suffering. For example, they view it as very charitable to try to help

alleviate pain of people who have disabilities, right? But they wouldn't necessarily view it as very charitable to try to help alleviate pain of people who have disabilities. But they wouldn't necessarily view it as that important to take people who are neutral and make them really happy. They just view it as, oh, yeah, that's not as motivating for me. I think I'm genuinely motivated by both. I'm really motivated by when someone's suffering and it's really bad and I think it's really good to help them not suffer. But I also am really motivated by, okay, someone's doing okay, but they could be really joyful I think it's really good to help them not suffer but I also am really motivated by okay someone's doing okay but they could be really joyful and that's really inspiring to me too so I think I care about both of those things and not everyone does sometimes people just care about one more than the other yeah it's interesting I would have

said earlier in my life I was more on the reducing suffering side having been an addict that was where I spent a lot of my early time was with other people who were sort of at the low levels of human functioning, you know, life's sort of burned to the ground, you know. But then as I've gotten healthier, you know, I've started to broaden that to also like, okay, well, how do we also increase happiness? So like you, I feel like I value them both. I've tried to tweeze apart. Do I value one more than the other? And I end up sort of in a place where I'm like, I think I value them fairly equally. Yeah. Yeah. There really are just a huge number of people who are doing okay, but they're not flourishing. And that seems to me like a very important problem. I mean,

I'm not saying it's more important than preventing basic disease or poverty or, you know, really bad things that are causing a lot of suffering. I don't think it's more important than that, but I do think it's important. Yeah. I want to ask a more fundamental question about behavior change and tie it back to values. We said that one of the things that can be problematic is when our values are kind of in conflict with each other. So I value health and going to the gym, but I also value the time I spend with my kids in the morning. So in your framework for behavior change, I'm assuming there's a way of recognizing that tension between values and trying to figure out which you want to prioritize.

So we approach behavior change in the framework, not starting with values, but starting with the behavior. Right. So it's sort of like, okay, you've decided that this behavior is good according to your values. You'll be better off living with it. Now what? Right. So that's sort of the starting point.

I think of it as like sort of coming in stages. There's like, okay, figuring out what you value and then figuring out what you want to do based on what you value. And then getting yourself to do the thing or, you know, actually creating the behavior. And so this is sort of the latter step where it's like you figure out out your values you figure out what you want to do and how you want to behave based on the values and now but you're not living up to them yeah now we get into the behavior component I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

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When I look at your framework, and I don't have it in front of me, there were, in the early phases of it, there was clarification around why this is important to me, right? And clarification around intention, which seems like it is a little bit of the reflection on values. Because I do think that a lot of behavior change problems are competing commitment idea, which could be said competing value idea. And like we've said earlier, I think the more we can surface that, the better off we are are because they're often unstated, unknown, ununderstood, but they exert a tremendous pull. Right. And I think one of the points of tension here is that our framework can be used sort of at the societal level. Like, oh, how do we help people exercise more who want to exercise more? Or it can be applied at the individual level. And I think you're coming from where the individual level is self-applied.

But I'm also keeping in my mind of the societal level level. It's like, you're trying to create positive outcomes in society. But as you point out, values does come into it indirectly because if we kind of go for the beginning of the framework, the framework divides behavior change into three phases. The first phase is about the decision to engage in behavior. The second phase is about taking a series of actions over time. And the third phase is about maintenance, like keeping up with the conditions and not letting them lapse. In the decision phase, when you're deciding to engage in behavior,

let's say, you know, going to the gym five days a week, let's say that's the behavior in question. The first condition is, have you considered it, right? If you've literally never considered going to the gym, you're almost certainly not going to do it, right? The second condition though is desiring it. And that's where now you're starting to get values coming into play.

If you don't desire to go to the gym, of course you're not going to do it. Okay, but well, what kinds of desire are there? And now we unpack that into two types of desire. We've got intuitive desire, like I want to eat that cupcake, it looks delicious, and reflective desire, like, oh, I've weighed the pros and cons and decided I really should do this thing because it's good for me. And so that's where a lot of the value stuff will come into that second condition, the desires condition. So an example of why someone might not go to the gym is that they actually just don't desire it. And then there'd be an exploration there of like, well, but do you desire being healthy? And you know, you could start to unpack that and like, and reflect on that. And it's like, well, maybe if you really desire being healthy,

and you also believe that going to the gym will make you healthy, and you won't be healthy otherwise, like, maybe that could stoke that desire desire and now you have a desire to go to the gym. Yep. And I think that, you know, for me, part of maintenance particularly, and I'm jumping ahead to maintenance a little bit of a behavior though, is, is there a way to shift that from entirely reflective to also being sort of intuitive? So for me, a huge shift in my ability to stay consistent with exercise was when I realized the very short-term benefit of my own mental health and my moods. When I made that connection really solidly, exercise went from reflective, it's good for me down the road, it's going to prevent these conditions, da-da-da-da-da, to intuitive, I want to feel better now.

This actually works to do that. Yeah, that's such a great point. And the way we think about this is you really need the desire condition to be met. There's two types, intuitive and reflective. It's really best to have both, right? That's the best. Yeah. There's two types, intuitive and reflective. It's really best to have both, right? That's the best. So an example is if you're going to go exercise and you don't like going to the gym, pick a different type of exercise. Pick the type of exercise that gives you the most immediate reward.

And also, you know, remind yourself that this is making you healthy so you can spend time with your grandkids, right? You want both the reflection pulling on it and the intuition pulling on it. You want both the reflection pulling on it and the intuition pulling on it. Because with just the reflection, well, maybe I don't feel like going to the gym today. And it's, you know, maybe you're just not going to do it. There were a couple of psychological studies, and I'm not going to be able to quote them or reference them. And maybe you've heard of this or maybe you haven't. But I've always wondered about them ever since I heard them, which was that multiple motivations in doing something could actually weaken your overall desire to do it. And that has always

felt deeply counterintuitive to me. What do you think about that? Have you ever heard of that sort of research? And if so, what do you think? And if not, what do you think? Well, so it does remind me of something I think is true, which is that if someone's trying to convince you of something and they give you like the 10 reasons why they're right and you should do this thing, that can often be weaker than if they just focus on sort of the two most persuasive reasons and really hone on those. So I think in an interpersonal communication, we're talking about motivating another person. But this is more internal. Their point was that if you suddenly go to the gym because it helps your mental health, it contributes to your long-term health, it makes

you look better. When you start layering those on top of each other, you actually end up with a weaker case than if you were just very solidly motivated by one thing. And again, to me, that's always felt deeply counterintuitive. So let's say, you know, you've got five reasons to go to the gym. The first one is a 10 out of 10, and the other ones are 1 out of 10 in importance. I don't think having those extra 1 out of 10s is going to make you less likely to go to the gym, as long as you've got the 10 out of 10 there. But if we're talking about comparing one 10 out of 10 versus, you know, 10, 1 out of 10, well, maybe the one 10 out of 10 will get you to the gym more.

Yeah, yeah. So one really strong reason might be better than a lot of weak reasons. Right. But I don't think adding extra weak reasons is going to demotivate you. Yeah. Because I've always just found that, like you said, there's these two types of desires, right? I think that's the term you used, you know, the intuitive and reflective. I've just found that, like, on different days, I need to pull on different reasons.

Like one day, it might be the fact that like, for whatever reason, I've been to the doctor recently, and I've seen my cholesterol levels, and all of a sudden, I'm more motivated than I normally am by long term health. That's one that sort of drives me and I can pull on that. And then there are other days where I'm like, well, doesn't even seem to matter right now. I mean, I know it does, but I don't feel it. But knowing that I'll feel better in an hour does matter. And so I've always found having a menu of them more helpful. Yeah, I agree with you. So there's the decisional. Yeah. And maybe I should just mention the third condition,

the third and final condition, the decision phase, which is intending to engage in the behavior. Yeah. And this was a really interesting one. And it comes up, I think, a lot in addiction as well. So you might think, oh, well, if someone's considered a behavior change and they desire it, they're going to do it. Not so. Not so. People often have considered something and desire it, but don't actually intend to do it. And, you know, why am I not they intend? Well, I'm so busy right now. I'll get that next month. Or, hmm, I don't know where to start. And so, they just never, you know, take that first step. Yeah. So, the intention part is when it

goes from just an abstract idea to a concrete, oh, I'm going to start this on Monday, or I'm going to go to this particular gym. Yeah. I often, in talking with people about behavior change, you'll say you're not even at the point where you're procrastinating yet because you haven't actually decided what you're going to do. Like to your point, you say that you want to exercise more, that that's a value, but we've gotten nowhere near an actual plan yet. So I wouldn't even say you're procrastinating on an activity because you're still in, as you would say, that intention setting phase where I get specific about what I'm actually

going to do. And that's one of the things I find so helpful about that specificity, at least in the beginning of Monday morning, I'm doing this and I'm doing it for this long. It pushes us to that point where we have to make an actual choice. Yeah. And on the negative side, in cases where a behavior is harmful, we could take suicide where people start to get really concerned when someone says it has a suicide plan. Right. Right.

It's like a lot of people have just thought about suicide. Almost everyone has thought about it at some point. But what's scary is when someone's like, no, no, I have I have a plan to do it. I'm going to do it on Monday. Okay, that's when you really need to be concerned. Yes. Okay, so we get through the decisional phase. Now we're into the action phase. Right. So now you've decided you're going to go to the gym, you're going to start on Monday and so on. Now you have to take a series of actions across time. You've got to get that gym membership. You got to go on Monday. You got to go on Tuesday. You got to go on Wednesday and so on. And there's a whole bunch of conditions here that are important to meet to make the behavior change likely. And so the first is you have to remember to do the action. Very simple.

But if you literally, Monday comes around, you literally don't think about going to the gym, you know, you're not going to go. The problem of forgetting. Exactly. And it's a really common problem. Fortunately, they're really simple solutions. Everything from get a buddy who's also going and then you're not going to forget, you know going to call you like, where are you? Write a reminder to yourself, stick it on your computer, set up an alarm and so on. So a lot of very basic strategies, but about when you're trying to, so this isn't exactly behavior change. This is where it sort of morphs, but let's say that what you want is to be more self-compassionate towards yourself, right? It's funny. I was, we're making a self-compassion module and I was literally just editing it this morning. So it's very top of mind. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, in the spiritual habits program, what I talk about is basically what you're saying here, we need some sort of trigger

to actually remember to be self-compassionate. Now the ideal trigger is sort of what I would refer to as like an emotional trigger, right? Like when I find myself being hard on myself, I remember to be self-compassionate, but that feels like a more advanced one, right? Whereas if every time I go in the kitchen for the next two weeks, I reflect on self-compassion, it's more likely that it's going to be top of mind when I kind of need it. So it's a way of sort of trying to thread ideas or reflections into our day. Yeah, no, it's a really interesting point. So it reminds me of this idea of implementation intentions, which is, so the concept is you're making a plan that when a certain thing occurs, you're going to take a certain action. So the next time I, you know, being hard on myself,

I'm going to then think the following thought that, you know, you are a worthwhile person or whatever. And there've been a lot of studies on them that found them helpful, but as you point out, they can be quite difficult to create. So we ran a study where what we did is we had people pick an object in their home environment, like a mirror or something like that. And then whenever they pass that thing, they would have to take a certain action. So they'd be mindful or have gratitude. And actually, we studied them for three days. We found that people actually were happier after three days of doing this relative to a control group that was just asked to kind of count how many times they saw that object. And so, yeah, I think this really can work

as a basic starter plan. And then as you say, you can do more advanced ones that are more situational. Right. Because I think ultimately what we want is I'll call an emotional based trigger. You might have a more precise word for it than that. And we almost always have them. They just tend to be for the negative and they tend to be unconscious. When I get bored, I grab my phone. You know, there is an unspoken implementation intention in there that generally leads us in a direction we don't want to go. And so I think it's learning to catch that moment, bored, and then how actually do I want to respond when I feel that. Yeah. And I think this actually speaks to another important point we haven't touched on,

which is that it's often easier to replace a habit than to just erase something, right? So it's like if you find that you're engaging in an unhealthy habit, like constantly checking social media even though it's not bringing you joy, it's like, well, maybe you can't get yourself to stop, but can you replace that with something? Like, oh, next time you have a really strong temptation to do it, go pet your dog, you know, or go take a walk outside. And that's often actually a more effective strategy. Certainly, you know, with addiction, that is a big piece of what we have to learn to do, right? Because the trigger isn't going to go away, at least not for a while, right? The trigger of I want to drink is just going to continue to return for a while.

So it's what do I do then? You know, what should I do now? Oh, I'm going to do this. And I thought I was going to do that. Like we almost just need like that implementation instruction, a very simple when this, then that. Absolutely. And it's also ideal if that new behavior satisfies the same goals of the original behavior, right? So if you're trying to avoid boredom, then whatever you're replacing that with should avoid boredom, right?

Otherwise, you're just kind of forcing something, but it's not actually hitting the underlying need. We're getting near the end of time, so I'd like to maybe move to the end of your framework, which is maintain. Because this is a phase I'm really interested in because for some people, getting started is really hard and there are lots of ways to do that. And I actually find that an easier problem to solve with clients that I've worked with, like getting started. The long-term maintenance seems to often be the challenge.

What have you found and codified into your framework that helps us do that? Yeah. So the way that we think about this is that each of those 10 conditions, and we've gone through a few of them, but there's 10 in total, they can disappear. So they can be met and then stop being met. And so the analysis I do is I think about, well, which of these is most likely to stop being met? Is it that you were remembering to go to the gym, but then you're going to start forgetting because you moved somewhere else and now your schedule is all different? Or is it that you used to desire the thing, but you actually lost the desire and you need

to reconnect with the sort of reason that you care about it? And so that's the lens to which I do the analysis of which condition is going to fall away. And then how do we boost that back up to make sure that it doesn't disappear? That's interesting because as I recall from the trans-theoretical model of behavior change, there was an idea that you do the actions that are right for the category, you know, the stage that you're in. And I felt like at least what I took from it, and you've probably read it much more closely than I have given your nature, was that like at a certain point, you aren't stoking motivation, you know, but it sounds like you're saying all of these 10 things

need to be kind of up to date. It's a really good point. What can happen over time is certain of them can become unnecessary because of, for example, habit. Let's say brushing your teeth, right? You know, maybe when you're a child, like your mother needs to remind you, your father needs to remind you to brush your teeth. But then once you've done it like 100 times, now you're just like doing it without thinking about it. So the memory thing is no

longer a problem, right? Because it just gets locked in place. So some of them will get locked in place. But other things could then disrupt that. So you know, maybe with tooth brushing, that's not gonna be a problem. But suppose you had an oral surgery, and you weren't able to brush your teeth for three weeks. And then it's like, well, I haven't brushed my teeth in three weeks. Maybe you actually will now need to like actually remember again what you haven't done since childhood, right? You know, where I find so many people and myself to get off track is when something significant changes. We're going along great with my daily exercise habit or my daily meditation habit or whatever

it is. And then I go on vacation. And when I come back, it's like, well, seems to have just sort of faded away, you know, or the school year starts or any number of different things. And there's certain ideas around behavior change that I think get oversimplified into pick the thing you're going to do, get specific about when, what you're going to do, and then just stay with it. Right. But I think that ignores the complexity of most people's lives. Right. And the reality is that forming habits is a never ending thing we

have to do because our habits always will get eventually disrupted, whether you have kids or you move or you change jobs, your schedule changes. So it's like the skill of recreating the habit is actually incredibly important. You're never going to just get it once and be done for life, right? Yeah. I think part of the reason that habits is such an alluring thing to people is they feel like they could just make this thing automatic and never have to think about it again. And I found that for most complex behaviors,

things that take a significant amount of time or energy, like going to the gym, that like you said, it's more a matter of a constant recreation than it is like you just get this thing locked in and it's not a problem. Now, there does seem to be something of momentum, right? There does seem to be something like when I've been going to the gym pretty much every day, it's much easier to go than it is if I haven't been going at all. But I wouldn't go so far as to say it's exactly a habit, particularly if it has to be very varied. You know, I travel enough with different things that like nothing ever gets baked into stone enough that it's just

like, I mean, besides brushing my teeth, you know, maybe as an example, all the rest of it, I kind of have to keep figuring out. Yeah. It's such a good point. I totally agree. So is there anything else from your 10 conditions for change that you feel like we might want to hit with our last couple of minutes here? Yeah. So just to kind of give an overview of the way I think about it, basically you've got this decision phase, action phase, and then the maintenance phase. And then in any given behavior change situation for any given person, which conditions are going to be the key ones are going to differ. So the thing that I would ask people to reflect on is like, for you, what's

mostly easy to get you to not engage the behavior or to stop. And I think that a thing that can often happen is people try to take a one size fits all approach. But the reality is like one person may have no trouble remembering to do the thing, but they find that they lose motivation. And another person may be really motivated, but they literally are just forgetful and they just keep forgetting. And it's like the strategy is going to be really different. So I would just ask for your own behavior change, what do you find most difficult? And then that's the stuff you need to build a strategy around, right? Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's a big part of, you know, when I've done coaching with people is we get through this very great plan, what we're going to do on it. And then it's like, all right, well, what's going to go wrong here? Like, let's think about historically what's gone wrong. But I've also heard you say you can also reflect on what's gone right. Like what has worked for you before is also a very useful reflection when we talk about behavior change. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because we ran a study on habit formation where we

randomized some people to be in the control group and some people to get habit interventions. And one of the interventions we found particularly good, very simple, it's you think about a habit you've done in the past. You think about what you did that helped you succeed at that habit. And then you write down how to apply that to the current habit. We call it habit reflection. And it's essentially saying, well, what worked for me? And then how do I adapt it to this situation? And so I think that's an especially good strategy. That's like very simple. It takes two minutes, but can help you. Excellent. Well, I think that's a good place to wrap up. I feel like we could do this another

couple hours, but we are at the end of our time. But it's been really fun to talk with you and get to know you. And so thank you. It's been really great. Thanks so much, Eric. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join.

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