The Psychology of your 20s - 93. How to build consistency

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

All of us in our 20s have some goal or ambition that we are striving for and whatever that may be, consistency is the key to our success. On this episode we break down how we can use the psychology behind consistency and motivation to help achieve our goals, from microhabits to delayed gratification, self compassion, a monthly routine and incremental reinforcement. We also examine some of the science and social psychology behind productivity and how society has dictated the ways in which we pursue our goals and why we might have it wrong. Join us as we deep dive into the ways we can cultivate consistency in our 20s. Listen now. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world.

Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's TWO. percent on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Look Back at it podcast. From 1979, that was a big moment for me. 84 was big to me.

I'm Sam J. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a year, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors. Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. 84 was a wild year. It was a wild year. I don't think there's a more important year for black people.

Listen to look back at it on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's good, y'all? You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor. It signals to the world that you not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that doesn't. not mean that you need to.

Listen to learn the hard way on the AHA radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian.

Michael Mancini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean.

for our psychology. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here. Back for another episode.

Thank you for tuning in. Today, we're going to talk about consistency. A big question I get is how to build consistency in our 20s. I think during this decade, We all have a lot of really huge visions and ambitions and ideas about our life. It's also the time when we are having to achieve certain goals and milestones such as graduating uni or pursuing our career or being entrepreneurial and all of that comes with a level of consistency that is important for our success.

But the truth is that none of our visions, none of our ideas. ideas about our life are going to come true if we are not consistent and disciplined. We often engage in a lot of fantasy thinking, myself included, but a lot of us then struggle with the follow-through. We struggle with procrastination. We struggle with motivation. It's only natural to feel distracted or to lack motivation. However, when motivation fails, and habits will sustain us. They will step in and keep us on track. They're our safety net if we take the time to build them and work on creating sustainable

habits towards our goals. There is a quote I repeat all the time that relates to this, which is that the secret to success is consistency. And that really applies to anything. It applies to our career. It applies to academia and studying. It applies to our side hustles, but also to things like our relationships and personal goals around things like fitness or our ambitions in really any area. So today, we're going to dive into the psychology behind motivation and staying consistent.

What is the secret ingredient and the science behind consistency? How can we build long-term habits? Why do we sometimes struggle with motivation and procrastination or worst of all, all or nothing thinking, especially in our 20s? And I guess finally, how can we use consistency and how can we harness consistency to prevent burnout and stay focused whilst still enjoying our lives? We have a lot of goals, right? A lot of us want to achieve big things or even small things.

Every one of us, I think even as humans, we all have something that we want to do to make our lives better. But sometimes that can consume us. And particularly in our 20s, we are meant to have fun. This is a decade that we are meant to enjoy and we want to be balanced. So how can we utilize the psychological concepts behind consistency to ensure our cups are full, whilst we are still striving towards our goals. This is the episode to get motivated. This is the episode to sustain us,

to build those habits, to build our consistency. So if there's something, a goal you have in mind, and you're ready to achieve it, you're ready to get there. Let's get into how we can do that and how we can stay consistent.

As always, let's start with the basics. Let's start at the very beginning with the building blocks. So what exactly is consistency? So consistency as it relates to human behavior refers to behaving in the same dependable way. It's an adjective that we can use to describe someone. We can call someone consistent. But it's also a verb because consistency requires action. And it can be really hard to master because I think our world has become full of distractions. And sometimes our goals, as well can be really ambiguous and finding a path forward is quite hard. I think about that in terms of

my own experience with this show. You know, when I first started it, I didn't really have the biggest ambitions for it. It was just kind of something that I found fun. But the further I got into it, the further I fell in love with it, suddenly it became more than just a passion and it became an ambition. And I became a lot more goal directed. But it was hard to kind of, kind of, of understand how I could be consistent in it and how I could sustain this behavior and sustain my passion and my motivation for it. And what I found was that breaking things down and creating sustainable habits was the easiest way to still have fun doing it, but also kind of get shit done. If you want anything in life, the truth is that you do have to be consistent. You have

to be aligned to your purpose in a manner that is steadfast and focused. That doesn't mean having every hour of your day planned out or needing to be robotic. Absolutely not. I think it's more about incremental daily behaviors from which we can achieve our goals. Everyone listening to this has a goal in mind. I want you to sit back and reflect on what that is. We all have something we're striving towards. It's very natural and only natural, I think, as humans to want to be better.

And that doesn't have to be something large and intense like being a millionaire or owning a Lamborghini or becoming president. It can be something as simple as drinking more water or doing your dishes every day. Goals are so subjective, but I think the formula to achieving them is very much the same. From a psychological perspective, struggling with consistency is a universal experience. So much can get in our way and can jeopardize our goals. There are things like distractions, I think, especially our phones, captivate so much more of our attention these days.

There is procrastination, which we know is linked with perfectionism and an inability to start a task or concern about an outcome that means we can't even begin. and then there's also a lack of motivation. Motivation is very fickle. And there's a lot of science that explains why that is the case. Our brains have limited time, limited and limited resources essentially at the end of the day. When you think about your brain and your mind,

it really can only hold so much information. And when we are incredibly focused on a goal, that is going to take up a lot more brains. space than the rest of the things that we have going on in our lives. However, those things are still important. So I think about this in terms of studying for your final exams. That is a massive goal for a lot of us that we want to do well academically. And when we're focused on that, that takes up like 50% of our brain capacity, spending time at the library, staying up to date with coursework, going through the motions. But that motivation can be hard to sustain,

because other things are going to come up and take up more space. Say a member of your family gets sick or you need to work. You're struggling financially. That is going to come in and carve out the mental space that we had devoted to our goal so that we can repurpose it and devote it to the other things that are important to us. So that is why I think motivation can sometimes be very hard to get a handle on. and in those situations in which you have a lot going on in which there are so many things demanding your attention such that your motivation can fail you.

Consistency and positive habits are what's going to sustain you. And I think a lot of us are looking for a cheat sheet or a shortcut to our ambitions, but the secret ingredient is actually not that secret. It's hard work and it's consistency. and when we employ certain habits and methods, that hard work doesn't need to feel so burdensome. So I want to focus on five key pieces of advice around building consistency that I use on an almost daily basis. And whatever goal you have in mind, I promise one, if not all of these things, is going to

help you. The first one is micro habits. micro habits are so valuable in everyone's life. Essentially what they are, and as the name suggests, they are small, daily things that are almost negligible that build to bigger, deeper, sustained, life-changing habits. The term micro, meaning small,

is the crucial component of this idea. And essentially, the idea goes that if you start small, and build up to those bigger, larger goals, you are going to ensure long-term success, you are going to retain those behaviours, but you're also going to prevent burnout. And they're really easy to integrate. So a micro habit around getting healthier, around treating your body better, might be something like, I want to have a glass of water the moment that I wake up in the morning because I'm worried about my hydration. Or at least once a day I want to eat a piece of fruit. Or I just want to walk to the train station every morning rather than getting an Uber. Or I want to walk

to work rather than getting the train. These habits are things that are not going to interrupt our life to the point that they cause us discomfort or to the point where they force us to change things rapidly. I think when we go after a goal, our tendency is to start really big. Say, for example, you want to run a marathon. Often, what we do is we go out and we try and run as fast and as hard and as long as we possibly can. We start off day one with like a 10K and then the next day we are exhausted and we're so tired and we give up because it's painful. But the idea behind me, micro habits is that you can get to that goal. Perhaps it's going to take you longer than if you went all out, but it will be more sustainable if you slowly build up based on these daily

micro behaviours and actions that you can take. The next tip and the next kind of piece of advice I have to give is around short term versus long term goals. You need a mix of both. Like I said before, when we set out to achieve something, we often only ever think about the end goal or the finish line. And that can be incredibly dangerous. I'm sure you've heard this before, but all good things in life should be approached as a marathon, not a sprint, because life is not all about the huge successes, the massive celebrations and the huge rushes of dopamine that they bring us. And if we solely rely on reaching our big goals and our massive ambitions as our source of motivation, not only are we going to lose that consistency, not only are we going to lose motivation,

but we'll probably be seriously disappointed. So the secret to building consistency in this domain is to utilize the power of incremental short-term goals, delayed gratification, and delayed reinforcement. We are used to receiving instant gratification from a lot of things in our life. And when I talk about instant gratification, what I mean is a very immediate dopamine hit. The example I give is social media. When you turn on your phone, you can immediately go on to Instagram and go on to TikTok and you will receive pleasant feelings from that. It will give you dopamine because it is making you, it is entertaining you essentially and it's giving you something to look at and it's fun and it's enjoyable and so you get your fix almost immediately.

But what this has done to our brains is seriously disrupt our systems for the distribution and release of dopamine. In the past, from an evolutionary standpoint, our brains were not used to receiving dopamine that quickly and that immediately and without such little effort. And now we become so used to getting that hit instantly that when things require consistency and when things are requiring long-term motivation and you may not receive that dopamine for some time, it becomes a lot harder for us to sustain the behaviors that will contribute to that. And long-term goals, any long-term goal that you have in mind, it will require delayed gratification. And what this refers to is the ability to delay an impulse for an immediate reward, such as going on your phone,

to receive a more favorable reward later on. So if you're trying to finish an essay, you could go on your phone every five minutes and get a little dopamine hit. But what that's going to mean is that your essay is probably going to do. take a lot longer. And therefore, the kind of enjoyment you get from finishing it is going to not be as fun because it's going to have taken up more of your time and more of your effort. But if you delayed those immediate hits of dopamine from allowing yourself to be distracted or to go online, the gratification you're going to get when you complete the essay sooner, when it's better quality, is going to be much more profound. Psychologists discover this idea of

delayed gratification in something known as the marshmallow experiment. So essentially in this experiment, they put participants in the room. The first round of this experiment was actually done with children. So they put these children in a room and in front of them they put a marshmallow. And they said to them, please do not eat this marshmallow. I'm going to leave the room. If you do not eat this marshmallow whilst I'm away, I'll give you two marshmallows. And then they would leave the room and they would see what the children would do.

And what they found was that a lot of the children would just eat the marshmallow. It didn't matter that if they waited and they held off on that immediate impulse, they would get two marshmallows, which is more favorable than one. They could not delay that gratification. And this experiment showed how delayed gratification grows over time and is often not fully developed in children, but it also has been adapted to show how us, this generation, humans nowadays, are also a lot worse at this experiment now.

A lot of us are really struggling to delay gratification. We want to eat the marshmallow. We don't want to wait for the bigger payoff. We want to feel that dopamine hit. We want to enjoy our rewards straight away. So the reality is, though, that we do need delayed gratification to sustain us. There are going to be times in your life where you're not going to get the outputs and you're not going to get the reward immediately. So we need to compromise and we need to find a way to sustain our behavior despite wanting that immediate dopamine hit.

And that is the role of incremental gratification and setting up small, achievable, short-term goals that put us on the path towards long-term success. This is how you stay consistent. Instead of just giving yourself one goal, like I want to get an A on this course, you need to break it down into smaller incremental goals. For example, I want to get 80% on this quiz and I want to get an A plus on my literature review and I want to spend three hours a day revising my content before the exam. When you do these things, you tick off these small goals. that give you a sense of gratification and give you a sense of joy and happiness and allow your behavior to be sustained towards the big goal,

the end goal in sight being that great. We need to practice delayed gratification more often as well. And this can look something like waiting two minutes after you're thirsty before taking a sip of water or when you have an impulse to do something, practice delaying your fulfillment of that impulse. and this will translate to your ability to maintain daily consistency, to maintain your micro habits, and you'll see a big change by bringing in this idea of incremental gratification and delayed gratification into your daily life. My third tip is to not to get caught up in your failures.

That can be quite hard, but when we allow ourselves to only represent our self-worth based on what we haven't achieved and based on our perceived failures, that can really cause us to self-sabotage. And it jeopardizes our self-esteem, which is the foundation of all our behaviors and all of our consistent habits. If we only focus on the negatives, we kind of get lost in the weeds. And it really sabotages and derails our efforts to stay consistent. I think about it in this way. If one small setback is going to define our journey.

journey, that journey is not going to last very long because everyone is going to experience setbacks. And if you fall over the first hurdle and don't get back up again, you're kind of never going to finish the race. So you need to switch your mindset to one that is pro failure. You have to remind yourself that there is no such thing as failure only lessons. Any long-term goal, like I said, is going to come with setbacks. And it's going to come with hard work and it's going to come with sacrifices. But if you only focus on the negative side of things, it's very easy to give up quite quickly. So I adopt this practice of celebrating my failures and I saw someone doing this the other day and it made me so proud and so happy. And essentially, what it does is it makes you feel that

your failures are just as important as your successes. So for example, if something doesn't go right instead of feeling ashamed by that instead of feeling this like sense of stigma and this sense of anxiety what you do is you celebrate the lesson that that contained maybe that involves having a glass of wine and saying oh my gosh look at me i got 60% on that quiz and you know what that means it means that i'm learned so much from what i did wrong there and i can adapt my i can adapt my studying habits, I can adapt my mindset and my outlook, and next time it's going to be even better. And I can avoid a greater pain later on during the semester, or it really does apply to everything. You need to celebrate your failures and treat them with the same amount of success

and excitement as your successes, essentially. And what that does is it allows you to no longer get caught up in what is going wrong and caught up in what you're doing wrong, which will allow you to stop self-sabotaging your own journey. My next tip to building consistency seems counterintuitive, but it's rest. You need to rest. We can become so consumed by an ambition or a goal that we have in mind that we lose all semblance of balance. And all that is going to do is derail your ambitions and derail your success. You need a diversity of experiences and a diversity of stimulation to keep you sustained. If you want to be consistent towards a goal or an area in your life, you cannot purely be devoted to that goal because what's going to happen is you're going

to hit a wall, you're going to become burnt out and you're going to quit. So what I always always recommend is kind of the 80-20 rule. And I've spoken about this before, but how it relates to building consistency is that 80% of your time should be devoted to the work. It should be devoted to your habits. But there is always got to be that 20% that is devoted to the things that make you happy beyond the context of striving towards your goals. What that allows for is your brain to receive stimulation and break up the day so that its motivation is sustained. So what that means is instead of spending all day in the library and then going home exhausted at 11 p.m., go and see a friend for dinner and break up your day, or go for a walk in the morning, or do something that you actually like to do

that's going to make it easier for you to return to the tasks at hand. And that really relates to anything. It relates to any goal. I know I'm using the academia example quite a bit. but I do think it's because it's so relevant in our 20s, but back to that one about drinking more water. If 80% of your day is focused on staying hydrated, let the other 20% be focused on having a nice can of Coke or a juice instead. You're allowed to give yourself rest days from your goals and they are just as important as those action-packed focused days as well. My final major tip is to create a reasonable routine. I am someone who has always struggled with routine. I find it really hard to stick to a certain schedule. I'm very much a go with the flow person.

But one of my friends said it this way and I think that it's really valuable how she presented it to me. And that is to start, instead of jumping straight into a daily routine, start with a monthly routine. What are the things that you want to get done on a monthly basis and when do you need them to be scheduled in throughout the month? Once you have accomplished that, then you move to a week by week basis. So say, for example, on a weekly basis, you want to work out three times a week in order to achieve some kind of health or fitness goal you have. You can schedule those in the week where best suits you and try your best to follow that. And why? And why? And why? You can schedule those in the week. And Once you feel that you have a good handle over your monthly schedule and then your weekly schedule,

move on to your daily schedule. It's about starting small, as we were talking about with the micro habits. The worst, well, I guess the easiest way to derail any goal that you have is to go all in too quickly and to exhaust yourself and completely change your life. That's going to feel really unnatural. our brains and our minds and our bodies like comfort. They like what is known. They do not like novel new experiences that kind of shake our core and our sense of

kind of convenience and comfort. So if you immediately have the school in mind and you change everything about your life, it's not going to be sustainable. So starting small and building up to the big is an incredible way to ensure that you are consistent with regards to your goals. Also set reminders for yourself as well. If you've got something in mind that you want to achieve, one of the best ways to keep your brain engaged in that long-term goal

and to stay consistent in the habits that are required for its success is to remind yourself as often as possible your reasons for being invested in this and your vision. When I was at school, actually, one of my teachers told me to print out pictures of my dream university and the literal numbers of the grades that I wanted and place them around my desk. And I thought that was a little bit insane. I was like, that is, I do not want to be consumed by this goal. But what it actually did was allow me to stay more motivated because I had a visual cue and a visual reminder as to why I was pursuing a certain set of habits and a certain goal. And so on those days when it was harder to really get

out of bed and it was harder to not give in to that instant gratification and go on my phone, that visual reminder acted as a safety net for my lack of motivation and it was incredibly powerful. I also think that it's important to surround yourself with people who have similar goals and that will inspire you. This was advice that was given to me by the wonderful Violet Benson. She hosts the podcast Almost Adalting. And she told me that the easiest way for us to fall off the bandwagon and to give up on our goals is to be surrounded by people who don't believe in them and to be surrounded by people who don't believe enough in their own goals.

That is one of the worst things you can do because we have to remind ourselves that we are an amalgamation of our five closest people in our lives, our five closest friends. our five closest friends, our family members, our partners, those people are what makes up our identity and from our identity stems our motivation. So it may seem harsh, but if you are around people who are going to pressure you into sacrificing your work to go and have fun all the time or are going to pressure you into feeling like your goals and your ambitions aren't worthy or don't deserve or don't deserve your time, I guess, you're kind of not really setting yourself up for a great start there. You're not really setting yourself up for success. So really closely examine

where you sit and where your goals sit in regards to your environment, including your relationships. And it doesn't mean entirely cutting people out. That's ridiculous. But I think what it does mean is knowing what it's going to come at an expense of. And it doesn't mean. And and reminding yourself perhaps more often why you can't go out and drink and why it's probably not great to spend every night clubbing or every night hanging out with these people because you have a bigger goal in mind and you want to stay consistent. I've spent a large portion of this episode really rattling on about consistency and motivation and I think maybe we need a breath of fresh air from that because this is your daily reminder

that not everything is about being productive. Our society is very success-focused and success-oriented. And I think that that can be dangerous because it convinces us that our outputs and our successes are the sole source of our worth. And that's not true. We can't forget that we are more than our achievements. We are more than our consistency.

We are more than our habits. It's very easy, I think, especially in our 20s, when we're really consumed by this pressure to be successful and to achieve all these amazing goals and amazing milestones, it can be very easy to think that the only value that we have to society is what we put out and that our success is the only thing that matters. And that's not true. You need to see that your identity and you need to recognize that your identity is more than just that.

It's actually made up of five core buckets. It's made up of your relationships, of your hobbies. It's made up of your values, your characteristics, and then your achievements. And as someone who gets very hyper-fixated on one goal and can find that everything else around me kind of gets blocked out by this hyper-fixated. taxation. Sometimes it's really important to deliberately remind yourself that life is more than that. Life is more than your grades. Life is more than your career success. It's more than some fitness goal you have. It's also about enjoying your life and pouring as much as you can into every single domain so that you are happy. But back to what we were speaking about today, let's quickly summarize those tips.

all of us want to be consistent. And I do think, like I said at the beginning, consistency is the easiest way to sustain our motivation and to stay focused on our long-term goals, but also enable us to enjoy life. So in order to build consistency, we need to focus on our micro-habits, the small everyday things you can change in your life. We need to set both long-term and short-term goals, including focusing on delayed gratification and incremental gratification. We also need to rest. We need to not focus on our small setbacks and our small failures. They are not what matters.

And we need to create a reasonable routine, something that is actually very easy to integrate, rather than going all or nothing straight away, because that is the easiest path to burnout and to kind of falling off the bandwagon. So I hope that you have enjoyed this. I hope that this has motivated you towards your goals. We are such an ambitious generation, I think, and a lot of us have these grand ideas in mind. And like I've said, so many times throughout this episode, you're not going to get there without consistency.

The secret to success is consistency. And that is what's going to sustain you even when your motivation fails you. So I hope this has given you some practical, tangible advice and habits that you can implement in your own life. I'm rooting for you. I know you're going to get it done. I know you're going to achieve everything that you want. So hopefully with some of this information and some of this psychology, you can make some of

those dreams a reality. And as always, if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening right now. Now, if you have a friend in mind who needs to hear this episode, send them the link right now. You should send it to them. It might help them out. It might make their day. And if you have an episode suggestion, like I always say, please feel free to follow us at

that psychology podcast. I love hearing from you. I love hearing what's going on in your life and how psychology and science can explain some of those experiences. So please feel free to share over there and give us some feedback. just come and say hi, whatever suits you best. And we will be back next week with another episode. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. I'm on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness,

fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier, person. Listen to 2%. That's TWO% on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On the Look Back at it podcast. From 1979, that was a big moment for me. 84 was big to me. I'm Sam Jay. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a year, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it.

With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors. Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. 84 was a wild year. It was a wild year. I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Listen to look back at it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's good, y'all?

You're listening to Learn the Hardway with your favorite therapist and host, Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit or armor? It signals to the world that you're not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to. Listen and learn the hard way on the AHA radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins.

But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct? I doctored the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian. Michael Mancini. My mind was blown.

I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.