The best method to stop a bad habit
And everyone saw book club last night. I need to to explain what we spoke about because it's absolutely critical. So when we gone through went through the book and we went through a five step process, which is if we wanna a bad habit, there's five steps to do it, right? So step one is to write down habits you'd like to stop. You gotta be specific.
Speaker 1:So instead of saying stop drinking Coca Cola, you say stop buying Coca Cola for lunch. The second step then is to think of something now you wanna stop. So three habits or one habit you wanna stop. Most people said they wanna stop scrolling on social media in the nights. Okay, so for step two, think of ways to remove the prompt of scrolling social media in the night.
Speaker 1:So this is obvious. If we can remove the prompt which is to remove the phone entirely from the bed or the bedroom, then you've got no phone to scroll. Therefore, the habit doesn't happen. Make sense? That's the first thing.
Speaker 1:But if you can't do a new phone for whatever reason, then we move on to step three. And step three is for each habit, of ways to make it harder. So this is something like removing the apps from your phone and only having browser availability, putting more restrictions on your apps on your phone, signing out all the time and signing back in and changing passwords, like make it more difficult. That's something the ability to scroll is harder. And then the fourth one is for each habit, think of ways to reduce the motivation.
Speaker 1:So what's your motivation for scrolling is to feel, I've done a post Instagram, wanna feel nice or whatever it might be or you wanna check your emails, see if anything's come in. You need to reduce the motivation for that. So maybe reducing motivation for realizing that it saps your energy, making sure every time you go on your phone there's maybe a, screensaver that says the more time you spend on your phone, the more the less life you have essentially. So maybe we need to reduce some motivation. And then step five is to mix two, three and four to put a solution in place.
Speaker 1:So we spoke about and it's nuts now, we've all joined this challenge, mostly ninety percent of people have joined it to lose weight. And then the first thing we look at when we're gonna stop a bad habit is most of us have got online shopping issues, scrolling on social media and, Deliveroo, right? So isn't it interesting and this even says in the book and there's a quote by this that BJ Fogg says in the book about his client who was trying to stop scrolling, but she wanted to work out and stuff as well. Right? So they asked her, well, what about her exercise habits she wanted to start?
Speaker 1:Well, after she stopped her phone scrolling, she didn't need any adjustment. Once Katie removed the distraction of scrolling, she started working out with the plans and tools she already had in place. So on our journey, the actual main block for all of us in in working out, tracking our macros, getting our steps in, doing work, like deep work for our jobs, all these, you know, doing these thing things reading is our phone. It's the common denominator in all of these. So if we can stop this pointless scrolling as we wake up and before we go to bed, we allow ourselves before bed to get a good night's sleep.
Speaker 1:And if we have a good night's sleep, that means we're not gonna be excessively snacking the night the next day according to research. We have a better mood. We wake up earlier and have more hours in the morning. But if we do scroll every night and we go to bed tired because of the blue light, we wake up later, we don't have restful sleep. Because we haven't slept enough, we're stressed, and we don't really do the morning routine because we don't have enough time rushing to work.
Speaker 1:Rush to work, more stressed. We have a meal prepped or we just we're panicking. The more stress we do, the less the the worse our decision making. And because we're stressed, we are more likely to snack in the evening because that's what the research says. We eat more calories, and then we gain more weight if we're not looking after things.
Speaker 1:And it's a vicious circle, and it all starts with the scrolling. And it's very clear to me that we need to do some kind of systematic thing as a turtle to even help remove this scrolling thing as a separate thing entirely because it's such an important thing. Now what did Katie do to stop her scrolling? She did two things mainly, and I think you should all try it. She put physical distance between her and the phone, so it made it hard as she put the phone in the kitchen, so you have to walk over to get her.
Speaker 1:She can't just roll over bed to get her. And she had an alarm clock wake her up instead of her mobile phone. So there was no prompt in the morning to look at her phone because it's not there. The phone isn't there to to prompt you to go on it. So you the alarm clock wakes up.
Speaker 1:It's so far away, you just go into the bathroom. And then once you go in the bathroom, you brush your teeth, and then you brush your teeth as an anchor habit because we do it every day, which will then prompt another habit, which could be something like, I don't know, 10 squats. It could be something like then you floss your teeth, like it says in the book. It could be something like after you brush your teeth, you even go and read first and then once you finish reading, you close the book then you shower. Does it make sense?
Speaker 1:We start anchoring things and the good ones and eventually before you know it, the morning is filled with really good habits that are benefiting us as opposed to the scrolling of Facebook taking us. Now isn't it strange? I'm saying this, but we got our group on Facebook. We got our face turtle audio in the morning for you designing on. And it's obviously is a balance in it, and it's hard for us, you know, in the ideal world.
Speaker 1:I don't like social media. It's a necessary evil in a sense. There is a lot of good to it. But if it is really impacting your sleep in your mornings, if we can give ourselves one hour in the night and one hour in the morning without our phones, that'll change everything for us. Won't it?
Speaker 1:And I made some graphs, like really terrible quality ones from the the b g fog model. So this is really good. I'm gonna actually get these made so we can all start doing them. So if you think about it, so if your motivation is high and your ability to do something is easy, so just scrolling your phone, then you're obviously gonna do the action because the motivation is high. You wanna check if someone's liking new photo where you're looking flames as they say, and then you got it's easy to do.
Speaker 1:But if it's hard to do, but your motivation is sky high, like a mother protecting the child, then you still cross the line which means you will do the action. So we need to actually, like he says in his book, become our own scientist. Like, what is easy for us to do? So for example, if working out in at home is much easier for for us to do than the gym because it's thirty minutes away, then obviously the motivation to work to do a work at home might be slightly lower. But because it's so easy to do is pushing us over the action line.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? But if your motivation is high, but it's hard to get to the gym and it's hard to go there and you've got this anxiety and gym anxiety and this the ability is much lower, you might still fall under the line and never train even though your motivation to always wanna go to gym initially is high. Your ability ends up not being enough. So we have to start playing with these levers and seeing what happens in our day. So we start our day off with the Maui habit.
Speaker 1:We wake up two feet on the floor and we say, today's gonna be a good day and you smile, three second habit. Soon as a habit, that could be an anchor habit. As soon as we do that, we walk and weigh ourselves, step on the scales ten seconds, job done. Soon as you weigh yourselves or you might go to the toilet first, as soon as you go to the toilet you finish your toilet, you then brush your teeth, as soon as you brush your teeth you walk to go and weigh yourself, as soon as you weigh yourself you then you have your glass of water, then you have your glass of water, then you write down something in your journal just a bit of thoughts. Once you finish that you then jump in the shower.
Speaker 1:Once you finish your shower you dress and once you dress you might wanna just walk straight out the door Or it could be if you got a workout in the morning that you do the weigh in. So you wake up Maui habit. Maui habit equals brushing your teeth and brushing teeth in toilet, toilet and weighing yourself, weighing yourself in water, water then journal, journal then train. I mean we have to start thinking of these things. So this is gonna be a short voice note.
Speaker 1:I want you all to start thinking today, post in the group like the book club, I'll share all the ideas. But five steps, what is a habit you wanna stop? We start off not with the motivation to stop it, that's the third step. It's not about the motivation. If we remove the prompt, you remove the habit completely, right, because you don't see the prompt to do it.
Speaker 1:So the first step, think of the habit you the one you really wanna lose. Step two, how can you remove that prompt? How can you remove it entirely? Three, if you can't remove the prompt, how can you make it harder, your ability to do it? And if that's something that's not really making it for you, how can you reduce your motivation to do it?
Speaker 1:And I want you to come up with me solutions underneath this post and see where it goes. Hopefully, voice note was helpful. Tiny habits by BJ Fogg, amazing book, and put that into practice. Let me know. You got your one big thing today.
Speaker 1:Let's anchor this. Your anchor is listening to this podcast. And now the next action is that one action you're gonna do. And I I want your one action to be to do that that, experiment thing, write out the habit you wanna stop and then ways you can stop the prompt or make it harder or reduce your motivation and then post it in the Facebook group what you've got. And then I'll comment underneath and see if anyone else has some ideas.
Speaker 1:But guys, have a good day. I hope this is useful. I hope you're all reading this book because it it could be life changing for many of you to understand this because he explains it's not your fault that these things happen. It's a design flaw, not a character, a personal flaw. Once we see it that way, I think we can change many of these these levers, and then they will change your life.
Speaker 1:So have a good day. Speak to you tomorrow.
