Moment 49 - How To Form Habits That Actually Stick: Professor Steve Peters

00:02Steve's invented this groundbreaking concept called the chimp model and it focuses on how there's these kind of three parts to our brain. The first part is called the chimp which is our sort of desire to be impulsive and irrational and emotional and short term. The second part is what he calls the human which is logical and rational and thinks in terms of facts and thinks things through in the long term. And the third part is what he calls the computer which is our set of core values and beliefs. Steve's work focuses on how we can manage and control the interaction between these three parts of our brain. One of the things you talk about extensively is about forming habits and a lot of people in my life recently, including myself, have tried to be, tried to form habits, especially during the lockdown when so much of our lives was, um, our habits were broken, our cycles were broken because we' were all trapped in our houses. So whether we, you know, had formed a habit of going to the Starbucks, then the gym in the morning or whatever, we had our habits broken. So I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could form healthier.

01:03But I, and one of the sort of, I guess, popular narratives is that if you do something for 21 days, it becomes a habit. What is the truth about habits and how we form them? I mean. there's a lot of research on this and they're a little bit contradictory, so read and believe what you like, but I mean the general fail is that if you look at why we form a habit, it's either consciously done with a belief system under or it's unconsciously done. We aren't thinking about it, a common one, for example, a poor habit is uh, and I use this a lot when I do keynote speeches to say to people when you go home, if you're with a partner that you love, uhm, how do you present to them when you arrive. And it's amazing how most people mourn.

01:45Which you know, they've not thought that what they don't want to see somebody more than you don't meet someone and say, you could have this every day of your life, I'll come back and see you you know, so what you do is you walk in and think, what habit would you like and the belief then is if I go in morning they could leave me. yeah. this could damage now that's going to shift your habit. So once you've turned the belief around this, you're unconsciously doing it without thinking this is damaging. And so if you actually sit down and work that out and put it in your computer system, then when the chimp gets through the door it's not going to mourn because what the chimp has to do scientifically is consult the computer before it does anything, it all happens in a tiny fraction of a second, but if the computer' is programmed to say dont forget.

02:27It will unconsciously remind the chimp, you need to be in a good place when you walk in because that's what they're going to decide and whether they're there the next night. So. you start to recognize that being someone who mourans all the time or complains when you first meet someone isn't ideal. So we have these unconscious habits which we're not aware of, which we can bring to conscious by starting to look at our life and say is this how I want to be but you have to ask the question. Oh we have habits like we eat too much now these are different because the first one wasn't based on a drive, it's just based on a behaviour that we've gotten into a pattern the the eating habits much more complex, because now you've got not only a behavior that we've got into like eating too much or eating the wrong things, uh, we're driven with an incredibly powerful survival drive to eat.

03:17So now we've, we have to deal with two aspects, one is what is it the habit that we want to get and what are the beliefs we're going to underpin with it, and how we're going to manage this drive, how were going to fulfil the drive in a way that our chiump's happy. That it's got its drive fulfilled and we're happy. So. now you really have to look at that. So that's a big battle. That's not an easy battle, but it can be won. It can be won. So again, habits are not straightforward. They need to be subdivided and say, let's look at unconscious conscious whether they're linked to drives or they're linked to some really bad experience. Sometimes we have a habit because we've got a bad, bad experience.

03:56It's like you, you explained that you went through a really bad time with this girl. If it got repeated, god forbid if it got repeated three or four times, you can see how your habit would be to distrust and it would become a habit because your belief is that these women aren' not trustworthy, and suddenly your chimp generalises all women are like this and you hear a guy saying this and clearly this' is so untrue. You know and so with you I'd be looking and saying when you meet this what are you looking for in the girl? Are you looking at physical looks? Are you looking at do they make me laugh or are you looking at their values? So.

04:30we can actually start looking at how you're choosing your partners and that might help you to avoid the behavior, the habits of picking up what you might then define as the wrong person and and worse even to blame yourself then instead of saying right, let's analyze this so again there's habits there where it's based on your belief of what you've experienced or you're. Letting your chimp make decisions. Instead of your humans saying hang on, can I make decisions from a more rational basis than just keep deciding on an emotional basis.