WHOOP Podcast - The Mindset Reset: Scientific-Backed Approaches to Goal Setting with Dr. Gina Merchant

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

We are kicking off the new year with a show that will help you get a jump start on your resolutions. Our VP of Performance Science Kristen Holmes is joined by behavioral scientist and WHOOP Scientific Advisory Council member Dr. Gina Merchant to share her insights on behavioral change. Dr. Merchant and Kristen discuss creating the framework for change (3:18), intrinsic and extrinsic motivations (7:38), how core values can impact changing habits (11:08), the science behind behavior change (16:08), the non-negotiables for creating new behaviors (18:49), the interpersonal aspect of committing to altering your lifestyle (22:01), the impact of making small changes day-to-day (26:58), self-monitoring while achieving goals (32:33), unpacking self-determination theory (34:27), how social media can impact change (38:58), quitting cold turkey (42:16), developing long-term changes and self-reporting (45:58), and how competition can help fuel habit-forming (50:40).Resources:Gina’s WebsiteGina’s LinkedInConnected by Nicholas A. Christakis and James Fowler Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. That's right, happy new year. I'm your host, Will Amit, founder and CEO of Woop. We're on a mission to unlock human performance. It's the new year. I hope you got maybe a chance to reset at the holiday break, a few more green recoveries than red. Interestingly, in 2022, our lowest recovery average of the year was January. first. So I'm hoping many of you have now since recovered from that and you're enjoying rolling into the new year. If you're a WOOP member, we're launching the January jump start, an opportunity for our members to set one goal for the month, track their habits in the Woop Journal and see their progress. And that's also why we have Dr. Gina Merchant, joining the podcast this week for a conversation

with no other than Kristen Holmes, our VP of Performance Science. Dr. Mercer, Merchant is a behavioral scientist and member of the WOOP Scientific Advisory Council. Her research is at the intersection of psychology, public health, informatics, and data science. As we think about forming new habits, letting go of old ones, and achieving our goals, there's no better person to join us in kickstarting the year. All right, Dr. Merchant and Kristen discuss how to develop new habits and get rid of bad habits, how to psychologically prepare yourself for long-term goals. staying committed and compartmentalizing goals, the impact of making small changes in a daily

routine, how technology can be helpful and hurtful developing habits, and how online communities can help some achieve their goals. If you're not yet on WOOP, you can use the code will and get a discount on a WOOP membership. Check that out at WOOP.com. Also, if you have a question, you want to see answered on the podcast. Email us, podcast at Woop. call us 508443-4952. Here are Kristen Holmes and Dr. Gina Merchant. I am so excited for this discussion with behavioral scientist Dr. Gina Merchant. Dr. Merchant has spent her career studying how social online and offline social networks influence our health behaviors and health care decision making as well as measuring both the

quantitative and qualitative effects for spending time on social media platforms. and just how they, you know, kind of affect our health. Gina is also a new member of our Loop Science Advisory Council. So Gina, welcome. I'm so excited to talk to you today. Thanks, Kristen. I'm super happy to be here. So as the new year and resolutions are top of mind for a lot of our members,

we wanted to leverage your expertise in all things health behavior change with the goal of coming away with some really clear, actionable, and scientific steps that will help our members on their respective change journey. So I guess with that as an intro, you know, just what would be your advice, Gina, just on kind of creating an initial framework around change? Like, where would you start the thinking for an individual? Yeah, I think people often skip this part because it's not very sexy, but it is very helpful because otherwise we tend to immediately digress mentally into kind of the woe is me, like I'm failing at my efforts here. So if we start,

from the beginning, you know, we can think of a behavior change as something that's often recurring, right? So the obvious examples are things that occur within a 24-hour day. So sleep occurs every night or should occur every night. We have to eat multiple times a day. And so those things are usually the hardest because we have habituated to kind of our current standard way of doing and living. And then also on the other end of the spectrum, we have these less often recurring behaviors. So cancer screening is a really good example. things that happen in a seasonal manner. And so when we're looking at kind of the New Year's resolution space, often they're really frequently recurring behaviors. And so the challenge that

immediately confronts us as humans is that our current environment, so both our social and our physical or built environment, is going to have a lot of influence on what we do. So say someone decides they want to lose weight, like that's the most common thing. Well, we've got to break that behavior down. So I talked about the frequency of it recurring as well as if we think about the goal of weight loss or what goes into that. So we've got diet, we've got physical activity, and then we often skip like sleep and alcohol ingestion. But you want to think about which of those are you going to tackle first? And then once you've sort of landed on which one is the most reasonable, the most desirable to you, then you can start down the path of what does that look like

to make changes within your day. The other piece of behavior change framework to consider is whether you're looking to start a new behavior or stop an existing one. And if you're starting a new behavior, it's highly likely that you've tried to start it before. So you might be familiar with what cues and ways to reinforce it that didn't work in the past. And you should leverage that historical data. But if you're brand new, never tried this before, it's important to recognize that your environment, meaning both your physical built environment, as well as your social environment, likely isn't super supportive of this new behavior. And that's not a dismissal. of either your physical or your social environment. It's just a fact. And so you're going to have

to actively work to generate or create new contextual triggers and cues to support the initiation of that behavior, as well as to give yourself some positive reinforcement when you make progress on the behavior change journey. Differently, when you're stopping something, it's true that you likely have an abundance of contextual cues, physical objects even, especially if you're thinking about drug or alcohol use, right, that exist in your environment. as well as your social environment. And so you have to actively coach yourself to turn away from these things

and then obviously physically removing items in your environment. And this is going to vary in terms of how deeply entrenched or how long you've been doing this behavior for in your life. Some things are incredibly contextualized, highly ritualistic. And you may or may not have a conscious awareness of them. So it can be a really great tool or exercise to do rather to start to write some of these things down or even like an accountability partner, this person may or may not live with you, but really to

talk about, oh gosh, like, or you can even talk to yourself about this. Like, this is something that is triggering me to do this thing. I don't like that. And then find a way to, again, either coach yourself to turn away from it or to remove it if possible. I'd also add one other thing, which is often when we think about quitting something, we ask ourselves the question, is this bad enough to quit. And I really love a reframe of this, which is to say, is the status quo good enough to keep going? So I think that that type of framing is really important in a lot of ways when we look at behavior change and how we can persuade ourselves or others to change. Yeah, repeatability is really important. So oftentimes that involves the individual kind of reflecting on, maybe talk a little bit

about kind of the concept of intrinsic and extrinsic kind of motivation and how that plays into sustainable long-term behavior change. Because I feel like that's also an area that needs to be thought about on the front end as we're kind of considering change and kind of tapping into that intrinsic motivation. And maybe if you can kind of unpack that a little bit for us. Yeah, everybody loves talking about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. And it's true for kids and it's true for adults. You know, you can kind of manipulate your child to do something in the immediate term to say, look, if you clean your room, I'll give you this toy. But the problem with that is it can crowd out intrinsic motivation. If you're constantly expecting this external

reward, whether it's validation from others, oh gosh, you look so thin or, you know, some sort of favor that you expect to be handed to you, you're not going to build that internal muscle. So the way I like to think of it is that extrinsic motivation is a good foot-in-the-door technique. So you can do things related to giving yourself a reward. So it's kind of the opposite of self-binding, right? So you're going to say, if I go to the gym a few times in this first week of January, I'm going to give myself a manny-petty over the weekend, or I'm going to take myself out to a nice dinner with some friends.

And that can be great because then you're actually building in this future reward. word state. The problem with that is it becomes really unsustainable over time because you can't always do those things because you run out of financial resources or your day and your life gets too busy. And so you have to identify how could I start to enjoy what behavior change I'm working towards? And I think this is something that a lot of people don't focus enough on because they kind of force themselves into it saying it's kind of like the shame or blame thing. Like I've got to lose weight because my doctor wants me too or I feel really bad about myself. And then they say, okay, well, I'm going to force myself to go to this exercise class. It's at 6 a.m. And they have an

absolutely horrible experience. They don't like the exercise class. Maybe they hurt themselves while they're doing some sort of the activities. So it's really about identifying the moments that are small while you're doing it that give you reward. So I'm a runner. It's not particularly fun to wake up and go outside when it's, you know, I live in San Diego, it's 50 degrees, so that's cold for us here. But I look at the moon is still out, or I look at the sun rising, or I listen to the birds chirping, and maybe those don't resonate with you. Maybe there's something else that you enjoy. You see a neighbor, you can see dogs, but finding these micro moments that give you some sort of internal satisfaction, and then taking a moment when you're done with your physical activity

to say to yourself, gosh, I really have this uplift and mood, or I have these things that I'm experiencing in my physical or spiritual self. And those can really start to build that internal or intrinsic motivation because they're rewards that are naturally tied to the behavior itself. And they're not something that are reliant on external factors. That's a beautiful background. Thank you. And I think we'll be a really helpful framework. What would you say about values in terms of driving behavior change? You know, I personally kind of think about that a lot and find that as I consider kind of the choices I make over the course of the day, the behavior, that I potentially, you know, behaviors that I want to try to drop because they're not serving

kind of my greater purpose. That often requires, you know, some substantial changes in not only the things that I'm doing over the course of the day, but potentially communication with a partner about the change that I want to make. How can people maybe use this framework of values, core beliefs in helping that personal change and then maybe talk a little bit about the impact of change on others and maybe how to approach those conversations. Yeah, okay, so there's a lot there. So we'll actually tackle that last part first is kind of a segue into the values conversation. So there's been loads of research and it's quite fascinating and this is what I used to do in my past life as an academic, which was to understand how our behaviors spread among our social

networks. So there's the famous book connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, talks about using the Framingham Heart Study, looking at how obese. obesity can actually spread within geographical networks, as well as people who you may not live nearby, but you socialize with frequently. And this has been repeated throughout numerous types of behaviors with smoking, with eating, with physical activity, with drug use. And so there is this percolation effect. And this is especially true for those that we share a household with, for example. So I think the values conversation is something that we, unfortunately, especially nowadays, where we're so constantly bombarded with external stimuli, are not having enough with ourselves.

And so if you don't have your time to think. Yeah, literally, literally, time to think. Yeah, I know. And so if you haven't stopped and had that conversation with yourself, I think that coming into the New Year is a really great opportunity to sit down. Brene Brown's got great resources. You can do a quick Google search and write those values down because those are going to be your North Stars.

So I'll go ahead on AllSenter, a personal example. So I am relatively recently someone who lives an alcohol-free lifestyle. And the way in which this behavior change came about for me was actually a threshold moment, as they call it, where my son was looking at me. And I was a little bit tipsy. It was a New Year's Eve party a few years ago with some friends. And something about the way he looked at me like dug deep into my soul. And this experience centered the child inside me because I was raised in an alcoholic home with my mother suffering from lifelong alcoholism.

And that prompted me to go on this recovery journey with myself as someone, again, living with a mother or a parent with alcohol addiction. And I wrote down my values. And one of my values was to not center alcohol in my family. And then I was able to observe how alcohol as a drug is like the one thing that people have to give an excuse for not ingesting, right? And it's a really hard behavior change to experience because people will say things like, oh, just have one. You don't have a problem. It's not a big deal. And you're constantly having to thwart against all of this external pressure. And this

can happen with sweets. This can happen with, ah, just watch the Sunday football game. You don't need to go to a yoga class. But if you have those values centered within yourself, you can constantly return to them. And then you can start to build that good feeling inside yourself as you work your way toward that behavior change goal. And then we can talk about things like streaks, which can become really important because then you can start to observe the number of days that you've flipped out call three or the number of times you've gone to the gym. And then you can center that and start to feel good about maintaining a streak. We have that feature actually on whoop, which is really nice to be able to see, you know, how many days you've met your sleep

need and, you know, how many days you've, you know, been, you've worked out or, you know, how many days your strain was above a certain threshold. So, yeah, I think the streaks are really, really a fun way to kind of keep track and incentive vibes change. But thank you for sharing that story. It's really powerful and definitely resonates. Same grew up. My mom actually, you know, passed away from cirrhosis of the liver. She was an alcoholic my whole life. And, yeah, so, you know, grew up in that kind of environment and had, you know, kind of a very similar process of really making that decision to not have alcohol in our home. And that required some really big changes, you know, for both my partner and I. So, but I, you know, it's been, and I think

this is a great maybe framework to talk about just how hard change can be. And in order to make a big lifestyle change, you know, what are some boxes that you need to change? You know, what are some boxes that you need to check to kind of ensure that, number one, you can sustain it. And number two, that this is actually really something that you care about. And you know, you kind of talk a little bit about values and how that can kind of connect. But are there any, you know, kind of, I guess, for lack of real word, just like a very clear framework on just, okay, we're about to engage in like a big change. You know, what are we, what are the non-negotiables, you know? And I know we need to create some sort of gray area potentially because we need to forgive ourselves.

we're going to go off track. We're going to have a, you know, engage in a behavior that contradicts the things that we value and contradicts a change that we want to make. But how do we kind of reconcile that and be tough enough on ourselves where we do what we say we want to do without crushing our soul? Yes, yes. Well, you know, so I always say that behavior change is hard and science helps. So, yeah, and I think, I guess I'll say three things and then we can unpack them. So the first is that what's going to get you start? on your behavior change journey is not going to be the same thing that sustains you.

So there's a big difference between behavior change initiation and behavior change maintenance. The second thing I'll say is there are some non-negotiables, and we can touch on a few of those. And then last but not least, I think, you know, one of the things that chronically gets overlooked is that time is finite. So as you start to initiate change in one direction, you're going to have to make adjustments in other areas. So I'll start with that one. So if we think about our 24-hour day, as I went on this alcohol-free journey, I started

out, you know, it was the quote-unquote sober curious, which is a beautiful movement. I actually first did this dry January. And what ended up happening was I, this is, I'm not on Instagram anymore, but I was. And I started shifting what I talked about and in changing my online network. So I brought in an enormous amount of support from strangers and friends alike. But what I noticed I was doing was I was spending. an exorbitant amount of our of our of my uh so hour being our shared space right online but my evenings um so let's say an hour right sometimes maybe 90 minutes on and off right after the kids go

down that's a large chunk of my day just sitting facing my phone scrolling what is that doing to my brain how is that affecting my mood what am i not able to do because i'm investing that time in that way. So fast forward two and a half years. I'm actually not on Instagram anymore. I left Facebook prior to that. I'm not on Twitter anymore either. So I've opened up a whole new opportunity within myself. And what that does often is now I can sleep earlier or I can have more sleep opportunity, get into my bed. I'm not interfacing with the screen that's going to influence my sleep. And the point here is that all of our behaviors are related. So alcohol is a great example with physical activity and eating. We often forget the anxiety and the seemingly like insignificant, oh, I've just had one or I

just had two. The ingestion of those alcohol calories has a profound effect on the next day or 48 hours later. And so if you're looking to initiate a new gym routine, but you're still ingesting alcohol on an almost nightly basis, you're actually contradicting yourself. So I can pause there or we can shift into some of those non-negotiables that can help with the behavior change initiation. Yeah, I love that. I mean, yeah, keep going and then we can circle back if we need to. Okay. So the non-negotiables. So behavior change is hard, as I mentioned. And we do love things like streaks, but we're going to fail. And I think really honoring that within yourself and having a lot of, you know, grace, giving yourself grace is a phrase that you'll hear often.

and one of the ways that you can help this process is to surround yourself with people who are on a similar change journey and they're usually at the same stage as you. So if this is to do a new gym routine, I remember when the November project came out and I thought it was such a wonderful way in which strangers could come together and rally around a shared goal of exercising on a regular basis. And there's micro communities like this. I know there's ones for dads, there's ones for vets, all different groups that could come together and they can say, look, you know, we're not in the greatest shape. We don't really like early morning workouts, but when you surround yourself with other people who are striving towards the same thing, and they're not like, you know, four-minute

milers, but they're, you know, couch potato to 5K like you are, you're going to feel better about, you know, not doing it perfectly. So I think that social support is a non-negotiable. Social accountability is as well. So alcohol is a really good example of this. When you're changing that type of a behavior, you don't want to surround yourself with your same drinking friends per se. I'm not saying you have to cut all ties immediately, but you need to tell other people that you're trying to do this really hard thing. And then they can have you be accountable to maintaining that effort. They're not going to say, oh God, you're awful because you messed up and you had a drink this night. But they're going to say, hey, I noticed that you did that. How did that make you

feel, right? They're going to say, I notice that you're struggling right now. A.A. is a really good example of this. So your social environment is really important. I think the other thing is setting yourself up for success with these little small internal nudges. So you'll hear things like putting your running shoes right at the foot of your bed so that you trip over them when you get out of bed in the morning. If you're trying to eat healthier at lunch, you need to pack yourself a lunch or you need to plan ahead. So this is called action planning in the behavior change technique literature. But it sounds boring and like, oh, God, you know, I did that when I was little. Like my parents were always telling me plan ahead. Well, it holds true as an adult

as well. I love the social support, social network and how, you know, there needs to be really clear communication and you need to think about who you're hanging around and how that's going to impact your ability to kind of do this hard thing. I think that's like just so critical. and just having, like, courage, you know, to be able to share with people, you know, the change that you want to make. And I think, I guess the question I have around that is, you know, some people are going to be really resistant to change. People don't like to see change because often that's a mirror into their own kind of behaviors, right? So maybe just talk a little bit about how to think about that interpersonal kind of interaction and maybe how to navigate those conversations specifically. Yeah.

Well, I think since we're entering the holiday season, it might be nice to center family, because what happens to us as humans psychologically, we often revert back into our roles as children when we engage in our family systems. And it can be incredibly triggering and it can be really upsetting because maybe we've made the commitment to ourselves and we're on this great path. And then we experience extreme resistance from those who we would expect to be the most supportive or to know us really well. But as you said, it's often a mirror up to their own behaviors. They often also subconsciously see you as that child or that person you were a year ago, five years ago. And then really from a participatory standpoint, you know, if you're not engaging in kind

of the social norm of the group, you're a threat, right? So you're not in this, you know, we're tribal social creatures. And so that can be really threatening to people. So some of the techniques that you can engage with, again, is to have kind of in your back pocket your exit plan, and then often that does involve your support of others, and they can be strangers on the internet. You know, there's often a lot of private Facebook groups. There's great online communities for change, and those are resources that you can access, obviously, asynchronously. So I have a group through a running community, and we're called the Sobirds for Sober Birds with Wazel, which is a female-owned running athletic apparel a company.

And when I was doing my first sober Christmas with my extended family, I would go off into the other room because everyone was drinking, you know, day drinking, and I would just start to chat with them. And I think having that exit plan can make you feel from a planning perspective like you haven't out. I think the other thing is knowing that you don't need to explain yourself to everybody. you know, often we get caught up in this idea that we have to appease or we have to explain because people are asking us questions. And no is a complete sentence. I guess the final piece

when it comes to things that, you know, because again, when we talk about like the behavioral framework, we've got off repeating behaviors, I don't think I mentioned this in full, there's often things where we're stopping a behavior or we're starting something new. So if you're starting something new like exercising, maybe it's going to take you away from some planned activity with your friends. Again, no is a complete sentence, but also if you plan ahead and you're going to go meet someone, you can say to the group, you know, I've got, Jane is waiting for me at the gym. And then you have this like, you know, oh gosh, I understand what that feels like. I've got to go make that external commitment to that person. And people are maybe more likely to get off your

back. I also think, though, there is this process of kind of shedding maybe sounds too harsh of a word, but making these changes to whom we spend our time with because we often, birds of a feather flock together. And so you're going to observe a change in your network as you make those shifts. And often you'll hear people in the maintenance part of behavior change have this total revolutionary. They sound, you can hear the excitement in their voice

because they've adopted a whole new family. And they feel really empowered because of that. And that's the group that's going to sustain them over the long haul. Yes, that's such good advice. And I think everything, I think what really sits with me as you're kind of talking through this is, is the actually the amount of pre-planning that that does actually, in fact, take place. You know, just with this one change that you want to make in your life, it has this cascade across, you know, people you're in acting with, you know, just the little micro choices you're making daily. And maybe we can sit on that for a second in the sense that, you know, when we think about our individual role and change, and as someone who's, you know, coached athletes for many, many years. You know, young athletes, I really try to share some level of wisdom around that, you know, we

have so much control over our day-to-day choices for the most part. And I think when change becomes hard, or we have competing interests, we can let ourselves off the hook. And, you know, one of the, you know, things that I say in my mind when I'm confronted with a choice, you know, I'm saying, all right, is this a choice going to help me with my values? You know, and if one of my one of my values is to be a centered, you know, kind of loving person. And I'm about to react harshly to a situation unnecessarily. You know, again, like I have this kind of conscious, like this kind of bird on my shoulder that is, is this decision, is this choice? Is this the way I'm confronting a situation going to actually help me with my values? And that honestly,

like, I think it is largely binary in the sense that it's, it's either going to, this choice is either going to, at a micro level, going to help you live your, you know, greater purpose in life, your values or it's not. What do you think about that as a framework? Is that too binary and too harsh? Or do you think that's a good framework for people to think about their individual role and change? Yeah, no, I think it's a good framework. I think where we get into trouble with it is that it's a privilege to be able to do that. So I mean that in a couple of different ways. One of them is time scarcity and competing demands and cognitive fatigue. So we're often in suboptimal choice environments as we move about our day. And so one of the ways that we can,

you know, that's a hard, what I'm saying is that's a hard thing to center when you're in a lot of constraints, when you're experiencing a lot of constraints. And that seems, that makes a whole lot of sense. Yeah. So, so one of the things that I've really enjoyed bringing into my own life is halt. So hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. The idea here, and this I think is actually from the behavior change around alcohol and drug use community. But if you're about to have some sort of impulsive decision, whether it's toward food, you know, when we talk about addictive behavior, we're so much more sophisticated than we were even five or ten years ago.

Our phones are addictive, impulse shopping, gaming. I mean, we tend to just look at like drinking to extremes or, you know, eating to extremes. But for all intensive purposes, anytime we make a choice to your point that is against what our actual value system or our desire coming into it, we're leaning into that addictive part of our brain, right? We're just airing on the side of give me that quick dopamine hit. I've got to have this thing right now. And so the whole is a really good way to center yourself because often those are constraints we're operating under. Hunger for me, and this is going to vary by person, but when I'm hungry, I make very important. decisions. And I'm often hungry. So if I don't have snacks in my bag, if I don't have it out,

you know, I'll snap at my kids. I will rush through something at work. I just can't seem to make a good decision. Same with being tired. And this happens a lot, especially because today, people are just not getting anywhere close to the right type of sleep or the right amount of sleep. And so that's a really good way to ask yourself, how can I fix those things so that I can put myself in a position to make the most optimal behavior choice next. The other thing I'd say about this is we do need to have this over under, right? So we need to have a grace within ourselves. So if you are going to, and you have to be careful with this with activity and eating,

but if you're going to exercise, you don't want to then say, well, I'm going to go consume like a 2,000 calorie breakfast after a 30-minute, you know, CrossFit workout. But you can't say to yourself, hey, this morning I went to CrossFit, I'm going to have a piece of tea candy after dinner tonight. And so giving yourself those allowances makes it easier to sustain behavior change because when we get really rigid in our thinking, we're going to fail. And I want to introduce something a little bit to the side of what we're talking about right now because I think it's really important. And I was just reminded when I mentioned sleep. So self-monitoring is a cornerstone of effective behavior change because then we can bring to the surface how often we're doing. something. This was really helpful for me with alcohol. When I actually forced myself to write down

how much I was drinking every night in a very clear way, like, you know, no one really measures how much you're pouring into that glass. I could look at that on paper and be confronted with a very uncomfortable truth. But I don't do this for something like sleep. I don't self-monitor my sleep objectively. Now, I do do things I get into the bed at the same time, get up in the morning at the same time, I don't, you know, I have these like self-binding techniques to give myself the most optimal choice. But I don't track it because I've had problems with insomnia in the past. And self-monitoring can be problematic for people. It can be getting on the scale every morning and then not observing change. And especially for women, we should be careful with that scale on a daily

basis because hormonal cycles, menstruation. But individual differences matter a lot, right? So if I had more water in the morning. I haven't gone to the bathroom yet, what have you. We can have bad news presented to us when we self-monitor. We can be afraid or anticipate bad news and that can lead us into avoidant coping or abandonment of behavior change. And so I think that's a really important thing to mention because sometimes we get so strict with ourselves and then we just abandon the effort all together because of the bad news bears. Okay. That's a lot of really, really good important insight. Thank you for that. I love, I love Halt. And I think, you know, it's interesting, I, you know, the self-monitoring piece, you know, I'm definitely someone who's always

quantified things and, you know, I kind of like seeing progress, you know, that ladders up to the things that I care about. And so I'm kind of that type of personality. But I can totally see where, you know, if you don't have a healthy perspective, you can go up the reels very quickly. And to your point, kind of give up on whatever the behavior change it is that you're trying to you're trying to make. So it's, I think that people need to be really conscious of how that monitoring is, if it's, if it's serving you or not, and being able to, you know, kind of let go of the things that might be actually thwarting the very things that you want to change. So I love that. You brought that up and that kind of is, I think, an important piece of

awareness kind of going into any big, any big type of change. Yeah. There's another example that might be relevant in this context, which is it's obviously behavior dependent. So I mentioned I don't do that for sleep. But I do do it for my running, especially right now. So I got COVID over the summer. And unfortunately, I've had a really hard time post COVID. I don't know if it's long COVID yet. But basically my heart rate is just not quote unquote cooperating, right? And I've been a lifelong athlete soccer and track in college. And I clearly know my own body and my training. and all of these things. And it's been a very frustrating experience. And finally, my girlfriend sat me down. She's a physical therapist, Ph.D. And she said, Gina, you need to just keep it below

160. Just, I don't care how slow you're running. Just keep it below 160. And you better believe it. I'm like my wrist and arm are getting like sore. I'm like going to get a shoulder injury. I'm chronically looking at my watch. But this is important because this prevents me from, you know, I'm serving my long-term self. And so there's going to be areas in which self-monitoring might serve you and areas in which it won't. So it's never the case that you should apply some behavior change technique to everything. You have to really look at it in context.

I love it. Okay. So now that we kind of just said we have a framework for the change that we're going to make, we've thought about all these kind of, I think, principles, scientific principles that are going to help improve our chances of making this change versus not. Now let's maybe talk a little bit about goals. like how do we actually set goals off of this? And I'd love to just get your thoughts in terms of how does self-determination theory kind of factor into goal setting? And is that even a framework

that makes sense from your perspective? Like how can people think about that? Well, good old self-determination theory. I know. It just, you know, Richard Ryan, Edward Desi, you know, I can't help but want to bring them up. Oh, oh, I think, I'm glad you did. I mean, I think, So just as quick side note, I get asked all the time, like, what's the framework, what's the, you know, in my roles throughout my career? And I'm very often loathe to do so. You know, I'm not going to have, I've got my toolbox. I've got my shelf of techniques and things that I bring to the table. But it's really not one thing, except perhaps self-determination theory. So as humans, we are very aware as animals, or at least I think we. should be aware, we forget sometimes, perhaps, because now we live in these industrialized modern societies. You know, we've got food, water, shelter, and we need those things to survive. It's equally true that we need autonomy, competence, and relatedness to thrive as humans. And so if we don't get those needs met, we are going to suffer from severe mental distress.

We might develop, you know, chronic mental health disorders like depression or anxiety, and our physical health is going to suffer as well. will experience loneliness and isolation, all things that are bad for our all-cause mortality, cancer risk. I mean, you name it. It is core to us thriving as a human being. And so what are these big fancy words, competence, relatedness, and autonomy? So just again, centering ourselves as babies all the way through the lifespan, you notice this with children, is that they need to challenge themselves just enough, but they don't need too much help. If you give them too much help, they're not going to achieve competence.

They're going to get frustrated. I do, I do. My three-year-old, almost four-year-old, chronically wants to do it herself. Mess be damned. And I have to give her the space to do that. So in a behavior change scenario, what you want to do is you want to give yourself enough of a challenge,

but not too much of a challenge. Give yourself the opportunity to demonstrate competence. The other thing is autonomy. We really need to have enough choice in our life. And this is unfortunately we see a lot of health disparities and you see a lot of the racism that's institutionalized in our world and society come to bear a disproportionate burden on black and brown communities and communities of color. And what this looks like is people who work, you know, multiple jobs, they don't have a lot of

discretionary income. And so they don't have a lot of choice in how they spend their time or what types of things they can do in order to make health behavior change possible. But if people can find ways in which they have choice and they have autonomy over the things that they do, you're going to have a lot better long-term success. So again, using that simple example of forcing yourself into an exercise class because it meets your schedule and then discovering that you hate it, let it go. Go try something new.

And it doesn't have to be fancy. You know, brisk walking is a great physical activity and it doesn't cost very much money at all. You need a pair of shoes. And then relatedness is this idea of surrounding yourself by others like you. You need to be seen, feel seen. And this is, I think, getting a little bit better in society, although we still have a long ways to go. And so surrounding yourself by others who, quote, unquote, get it, is going to set

yourself up for success. Amazing. I appreciate that breakdown. Okay. So one of the areas that I think can be a problem for folks is that they want to make this behavior change. but motivation is kind of waning. And how I think about is motivation is really tied to a lot of, like, you know, not simple.

I don't want to, sleep is not easy, right? I mean, as someone who suffers from insomnia, you know better than anyone that sleep is very difficult. It's not an easy behavior. But we know that there are some behaviors that provide a foundation for other behaviors, I think to your point. Like you want to oftentimes be able to think about the relationship between, you know, eating, you know, sufficient amount of food during the day, not overeating.

and how that actually relates back to sleep and the hormones that are affected when we get insufficient sleep. Same with alcohol, like our, if we don't get sufficient sleep, be potentially more impulsive the next day, right, and make decisions that we wouldn't otherwise make. So sleep is really important. Other things like, you know, viewing screens within a, you know, a couple hours of bed, it can fragment our sleep. But more important, impact our dopamine system next day.

Like, you know, so it's like, how would you help someone think about, you know, who's, I want to make this change. how do we think about the foundation that's going to enable that change to occur that might not be obvious to that person? Yeah, so there's a lot of ways I could take this, but I'm going to center the social media piece because it is so prolific in our days, unfortunately. And there's a really good book coming out or it's out now. I'm forgetting the author. He was interviewed recently on the ritual podcast. And they've done studies now where social media use and kind of rage tweeting, for example, doesn't just increase the person's cortisol and anger, you know, indicators in the moment in which they're doing the behavior on social media. But it has this long tail effect. So the next day, next week, the human is actually experiencing increases in indicators of anger, both physiologically as well as behaviorally. So that's a really important thing to think about. And anger is just one example. Another one is social comparison and our sense of self and our sense of self-worth. So if we're constantly confronted

with these artificial representations of others, whether it's their vacation, that they've taken, how perfect and clean their house looks. They're both artificial, as I just said, but they're also centering in our head this ideal state that we're going to then self-reference, and it's going to make us often feel bad about ourselves. It's not something that's going to motivate us. So I hear a lot about people saying, you know, even like YouTube videos, like there's been some research on like people that want to change, right? They want to learn how to build something. So they'll watch YouTube videos from a construction worker or a builder. Or they want to learn how to be a better chef.

So they'll watch cooking shows. So they're spending all this time actually engaged in what they have convinced themselves. And I don't mean this as a pejorative, but it's just the way our brains work, right, that I'm learning some skill. Well, watching other people do it is a very, very, very small part of it. As they say in soccer, the game is the best teacher. You need to put yourself in this situation to go do that behavior. And so we spend an exorbitant amount of time on social media engaging with others. And I think that we convince ourselves that that serves as motivation.

But it's both harming us because it's having all of these negative downstream effects, which are so myriad in their number and their diversity. And then it's also literally taking time out of our precious day, which we don't have a lot of, in a discretionary perspective, to engage in those things. So you have to really build into your day, the opportunity to be successful. And some people are going to say, well, I'm not a morning person, or you get tired at the end of the day, you get stuck in traffic, I don't have time in the afternoon.

You have to really do self-experimentation with when it is that you can engage in those new behaviors you're trying to introduce. So I think from a foundational perspective, letting go of a lot of the time spent on social media and then finding the time in your day to allocate the behavior change effort is important. Would you say, so there are obviously tons of different types of behavior change that are that are possible, is there like a rule of thumb when we think about, you know, stopping behavior cold turkey versus kind of weaning yourself off of like what you consider maybe is a bad habit that's not serving you, that, you know, you want to try to make the change.

What's, how do people think about that? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think first it's important from a like PSA standpoint to say, you know, a lot of people do need professional help. So I'm going to talk about harm reduction because I think that's a really good example of this. And some people can do harm reduction under the supervision. And this is related to obviously alcohol or drug use if they're going to look to stop that harmful health-impering behavior. But it's under the supervision of a medical doctor and clinicians.

And then some people would need to go into like a detox environment. it. But I think for someone like myself related to alcohol, you know, I wasn't in that situation, but I did recognize that it wasn't going to be a cold turkey situation. And for a lot of people, when you're stopping a behavior, whether it's harmful eating, again, notwithstanding if you're in an extreme binge situation or somehow with anorexia, I mean, that's deprivation. But, you know, in some situations, people do need professional help. But if you're like, you know, majority of the population that's looking to stop something harmful, generally speaking, you should not look to go cold turkey. I'm going to caveat that by saying dry January, sober October,

I don't know if there's corollaries for other behavior changes, but those are great kind of catalyst events that you can jump into, you know, full bore and experience what that feels like because you are going to need to attain a streak to often experience the benefits, like the full body, mind, spirit experience of what it feels like to be fully like disengaged from the bad habit that you want to break. But the problem with that, which is why this is a caveat, is that that's often really hard for people. So I've heard people with dry January say, I could only make it five days and then I'll, you know, F it. It's the weekend. I'm going to go out with girlfriends. And so if that's not working for you, it's just again, breaking down the day

into these micro moments and saying, you know, what is it like for 24 hours? What is it like for 48 hours? And then maybe if there's a slippage, and you can kind of build on that over time. I mean, success breeds success. I think the other thing that's important to center here, you know, you and I are both athletes. And when I look at physical activity in particular, because I used to do a lot of physical activity research, you know, we're quote unquote experts. And most people are going to be novices when they enter into this change state. And I'm in a massive advantage. So when I came back for both of my pregnancies, yeah, I had a ton of weight. I gained a ton of weight with both my kids.

I was so swollen. I pre-eclampsia. I was like all the things I had them. But I knew how to train my body. I knew how to suffer through it. I knew how to just struggle and just put one foot in front of the other. But I have the luxury of that because I've been doing it since I was, you know, seven years old. And so giving yourself that grace, recognizing that the behavior change is hard,

is really important as you go about this process. Yeah, and maybe just kind of further expand on, you know, how do we kind of set, or should we be setting kind of minimal thresholds? You know, how do we, I guess, evaluate how much time per day we should be spending on that change? And you touch on that a little bit, but I, you know, is there a way to, I think about that? And obviously, it's, you know, all behavior changes are going to require something different, But are there just some rules of thumb that we can kind of put in place that help us understand, you know, how much time we need to be spending on this behavior in order to actually, you know, create a situation where we can have long-term change?

Yeah. So there definitely are public health recommendations, as you know, for various behaviors. So for alcohol, it's one drink or less per day for women, I think. But they're actually, I do believe in the process of, or I feel like I'm getting that wrong. go ahead and Google that. Don't quote me on it. And it's slightly more for men. And that's, you know, a standard drink is in a measured amount. For physical activity, it's 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous. And when you look at where, you know, 10,000 steps a day, but when you actually self-monitor and you look at where most humans are across all behaviors, as sleep, great example, right, eight to nine hours a night for adults. Yeah, we're not good at self-reporting our behaviors. Yeah. Right. So if you look at the public health data, if you want to look at the Burphus versus the N. Haynes, I mean, it's stark. The objectively measured accelerometer data

compared to self-reporting is not well correlated. It's just not. Yeah. It's okay. So we just, we swallow that and we sit with it for a minute. And then we say, okay, well, where am I today? And I think that's really important. It's an individualized goal. And I think our systems, you know, I used to spend time in this dynamic system space from a digital health perspective where we have like controllers and these, it's from control systems engineering, but we have a way in which we can use technology to support our behavior change. And I think a lot of the digital health companies aren't there yet today, but they're getting there. And I think, you know, WOOP is a good example of a much more sophisticated experience, but not all.

And Gina, you're going to help us be even better. That's why we brought you on. I do want to caveat this by saying that not all apps are created equal. So a lot of the marketing claims don't match the experience. So that's really important to understand. But let's just use the daily steps as an example. So if you set out to say, well, public health says 10,000 steps per day and you start wearing some sort of, you know, watch and it tells you that you're at 3,000 steps, that's a huge

Delta. So instead, I would recommend saying, okay, I'm at 3,000 steps. Monitor yourself for a week. And your average is, let's say, 3,500 steps. Maybe you get more on the weekends than you do during the week because you're working and you're sedentary at your desk. Set your goal for, you know, 15 or 10% more than that. I'm just making up a reasonable increase. And then that's what you work towards. You're not going to center yourself like, you know, again, the four minute mile is an extreme example, obviously, or I'm going to go run a marathon. It's like, can I complete one mile without stopping? Or can I get closer to 10,000 steps by the end of next quarter? And then this is where that social support and getting surrounded by others like you is important, because then you can

see other people suffering or striving towards the same goal you are, and you're not looking at like Serena Williams as your icon for like, you know, your physical activity exploits. Right. Okay, gosh, there's, I think, a lot of really good stuff there. I mean, I love the idea, you know, and of course, I really believe that health tech is a way to foster human performance and, you know, flourishing and everything. So that is a kind of a framework, or to, I guess, caveat what I'm going to say, you know, I love knowing my baseline, you know, for all the reasons that you state, because it allows me to then be able to make goals that are actually achievable, you know, and I think without knowing our baseline, I think sometimes we over-index on our capabilities. And then we're disappointed that I didn't do what I said I was going to do. And meanwhile, what I said was going to do is that delta is so big that it's not even a realistic thing. I didn't create a realistic goal. So, you know, we know realistic goals are really important in order to actually facilitate behavior change. So I do love the opportunity that technology gives us to really provide that

baseline as kind of a source of truth, even though the truth can be harsh and hard. hard to digest at times, but just kind of understanding, hey, where, where am I actually at and then be able to make, you know, some reasonable kind of goals and, um, and milestones off of that. Um, you mentioned, uh, kind of support. So there's, you know, I think that support, it can be awesome, you know, as benchmarks, but it can also go wrong. So in terms of like social comparisons and competition, how do you, and our members just love to compete with each other. It's, I think it's just the, you know, kind of the mindset of a lot of our members. But What's the kind of the healthy way to think about that as it relates to behavior change?

Competition's great. And I think it's fun, right? Or it should be fun. And when we start at when we're little, you know, you're playing tag. My son, he's in first grade and he's playing tag on the playground and you learn how to lose gracefully and you get frustrated and you want to do better. Where it becomes problematic as adults in particular is that we're comparing ourselves to people who we have zero visibility into their preparation, training, resources, and so forth. So I used to do triathlons, you know, 15 years ago. And I didn't have very much money at all. And I wasn't really a very good swimmer.

I was a very good cyclist, very good runner. But from a cycling perspective, I couldn't afford a fancy bike. I could never afford the trips, all of these things. And I, you know, would go on Strava or I would be at the, you know, early morning wine, see swim, and I would just get really down on myself. And I was also like getting my PhD at the time. And it was just, there was a lot going on. And what I didn't give myself in terms of grace was recognizing that a lot of these people had large amounts of discretionary income, came from a swimming background, had more time in their day to allocate towards their

experience. And frankly, they enjoyed it more. You know, I was engaging in it from a competition standpoint. And so I think if I can bring up internal family systems for a minute, you know, we all have multiple selves. And so one of the things that I think helps if you are able to, you know, have the resources and the time to get a therapist. And I know mental health resources are getting better, but they're still for a privileged few, unfortunately, especially in the United States. It could really help you understand yourself better. And so for me, one of the things I've been working on is saying, you know, I'm naturally extremely competitive. And so I will or have been more historically in the past engaging in things purely because I just want to win.

And they don't really serve my long-term interests and letting go and recognizing that that was why I was participating in the first place has freed up time and space in my day and my heart to pursue activities that give me a greater sense of worth and a greater sense of kind of euphoria, frankly. So I think competition can be great because it can help push us to be the better versions of ourselves within given activities. But if you're doing it purely because you want to beat other people or you recognize that you're constantly like checking race results or you're compulsively looking at Strava or whatever it is, you know, that's something to look at. And I'm not saying to judge yourself for doing it, but really to just quantify what type of ways in which. you're comparing yourselves against the other people in your social environment and ask yourself how is it making you feel and if those things aren't serving you then maybe again getting that professional support and I kind of left the internal family systems but we have multiple

selves if you're leaning into your competitive self all the time what are the other selves that live within within you that you can let you know as my therapist would say Gina bench your competitive self and let the other parts, let the other parts come forward. He always uses sports analogies because you know that works with me. I love it. I love it. We're so, we're very similar in a lot of our, yeah, I carry around the competitive baggage. Like there's just, you know, the ambition and the drive. Yeah. But it really doesn't in the long term serve me. And, and that's been very clear, you know, that that winning does not actually correlate to my happiness at all. So I've learned that the hard way over the years.

It's really, it's a dopamine hit. I mean, it gives you that, like, yeah, it's just short term. And I think, you know, as it relates to just, you know, human potential, I really think about it now in terms of, right, am I kind of maximizing my potential as a human being as opposed, and the teams that I worked with them? I'm maximizing the potential of my teams. And if that leads to this outcome of winning, that's great. But I, you know, I think over the course of my career and coaching career, I think a lot about competition. I actually think it can be a framework that diminishes the joy, you know, and I think makes the motivation for why you're doing what you're doing a little bit unclear, and I think takes you away from kind of the intrinsic motivation, you know, that just the joy of competing, you know, the joy of doing the skills and the understanding the tactics and, you know, whatever it is, the sports that you're engaging with, you know, really connecting to that as opposed to necessarily an opponent that you're trying to beat, you know, that I don't think brings kind of sustainable outcomes on teams from what I've seen. And so I think, I think, like,

I love that you brought out, like, think about that, you know, and recognize where that, how competition serves you or doesn't and be able to, you know, be more conscious about, about that. And I think we could probably apply that same exact principle across all sorts of different other types of characteristics that people own. Yeah. And I think bringing up rest is really, important here. So if we talk about periodization for athletes, I apply that within my work life and the teams that I work with and people that I manage. Because, you know, if you're constantly centering competition, it doesn't give a lot of space to rest and recovery. And it doesn't allow you to have that kind of fallow period where you're letting a lot of the work, you know,

put the hay in the barn, right? Like you're tapering before a big race. The hay's in the barn. Like you're not going to be served by getting out there and getting after it a few days before a big race. But I think at a more macro scale over the course of a calendar year, for example, allowing yourself those times in which you step back and you engage in other things. And it's really hard to step away when you're really chronically comparing yourselves to others and you're striving to always be the best and always win. So I think that rest and recovery is a really key piece of it too. Having the emotional maturity to let it go. That's great. And I feel like that's a, we obviously love all things recovery at Woop and balancing our, our load and

recovery, life load and training load with appropriate levels of recovery is obviously something that we think a whole lot about. And maybe we can end with, you know, is there anything that you feel like we kind of, we left out that is like really critical as people enter into this new year, you know, any kind of final, kind of thoughts? Well, the, the gyms are always very packed in January. So I guess this is kind of a silly mention, but I, um, I, always used to notice it at the YMCA. And I think, you know, like I said, it's a catalyst time and humans really do do well with demarcations across the calendar year. They can be seasonal, like January. They can be summer for quote unquote bikini season, which is an awful phrase.

Or they can be like personal events, like weddings and so forth. So I think using those as catalysts is great. But it's also true that there's a lot of kind of external energy surrounding it. So there's hubbub, there's, there's a buzz about the January time frame. And when that dies away, if you haven't set up kind of the internal architecture within yourself for lasting behavior change striving, then you're going to be sorely disappointed. And so I would really recommend people to sit with their values, write them down, identify the why that they want to do this. And a lot of that does, again, take some brutal honesty.

And I think for just one last thing on an example would be like with weight loss, you know, if you find yourself writing down because you want to look thinner or you want to, you know, something external physical appearance wise, I would suggest you try to think about why from a life course perspective. You know, there's great people who have said better than I that, you know, I'm training for when I'm 90. All of this is about longevity and feeling good day in and day out. So try to center it within that as opposed to some sort of external validation. Well, this has been, I could talk to you all day. This has been just so, so insightful. And I just think our members are going to just love this episode. It's just chock full of incredible insights and wisdom and all back by science.

So we obviously really appreciate that. Yeah, this has been really wonderful. So thank you for your time. Yeah, thank you for having me. Big thanks to Dr. Gina Merchant for taking the time to join the show and offer insights on how to create better habits this year. A lot in this episode that I'll be applying to my goals for 23. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a rating or review for the WOOP podcast. Please subscribe.

Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. Have a question you want to see answered on the podcast. Email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. And check out the January jumpstart campaign. If you're a WOOP member, if you're not a WOOP member, go to WOOP.com, use the code will, get a discount, and join us. All right, we'll see you next week. Have a great start to the year.

Stay healthy. Stay in the green.