The One You FeedHow to Integrate Behavior Change with Your Values with Spencer Greenberg
Spencer Greenberg and Eric discuss how to integrate behavior change with your values. They explore the importance of focusing on the process rather than the end goal and share practice strategies for forming habits that will help you live according to your values.
In this episode, you’ll be able to:
- Identify the underlying values that lead to your decisions, and build a strategy around them
- Recognize the crucial role regular self-reflection plays in cultivating these improved practices
- Understand the significance of prioritizing the process, not just the end goal in forming habits
- Navigate the next steps when facing conflicting values
- Understand the various frameworks for behavior change and the ten conditions for change
To learn more, click here!
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See you there.
The reality is like one person may have no trouble remembering to do the thing, but they find that they lose motivation. And another person may be really motivated, but they literally are just forgetful. And then I just keep forgetting. So I would just ask for your own behavior, chang, what do you find the most difficult, and then that's the stuff you need to build a strategy around.
Wow, welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolfs for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Spencer Greenberg, an entrepreneur and mathematician with a focus on improving human well being through social science. He's the founder of Clearer Thinking dot org, which provides more than seventy free tools and training programs related to topics like decision making and cognitive biases used by hundreds of thousands of people. He's also the founder of Sparkwave, a startup foundry that creates novel software products from scratch designed to solve problems in the world. Spencer has been featured by numerous major media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, The Independent, The New York Times, Life, Hacker, Gizmoto, Fast Company, and others.
Hi Spencer, Eh, good to see you.
Yeah, we are doing this collaborative episode, but will start the way I normally start my show with the wolf parable as a way of kind of just jumping into things. So in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which are presents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the others a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops think about it for a second. They look at it their grandparents. They say, well, which one wins? And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd love to just know a little bit about how that parable applies to you and your work and your life.
It's funny.
I expected you might ask that parable, because you do in all your episodes, and I was curious what chat gipt would say, so I plugged it in and how to generate ten different interpretations and then that I use that as food for thought as I was thinking, well, which interpretation speaks to me the most? And I think that for me, the interpretation of that parable, I like is thinking about what are the underlying values that lead to our decisions?
Right?
Yeah, so when you're operating, are you operating out of fear? Are you operating out of trying to help others? Are you operating out of trying to make yourself happy? And these underlying values that actually guide our decisions to me seem incredibly important and relate a lot to my own life philosophy.
Yeah, I may have to do that to chat GPT myself. How did you phrase the question?
I think I just said in the famous parable about which Well, if you feed, what are ten different interpretations you have? And you know, just generated them?
So we could probably spend the entire conversation on AI, but I don't think we will. So you mentioned values, and you've got a philosophy you call valuism, And I think values are really interesting because, as you mentioned, we often don't think about them, and then also often they are in conflict with each other and the other problem I often find with them is that I have too many of them, right, Like I went through and took your values test, right, and you know, I'm going along fine till it's like, well, pick the most important one out of my list of like forty, and then I'm just stumped. Right, And so when you are sort of at that point, how do you narrow?
Yeah, that's a good question. And for anyone interested, we have our intrinsic values. You can take on our website Clearer thinking Dot'll work. Yeah, So people tend to have quite a lot of values. If we look at the most important values they have, they usually will have like something like ten to fifteen of them, which is still quite a decent number. But then people might have dozens more that are sort of somewhat important to them. One thing that I think about is that the values won't all equally be activated in your life, Like you might find some of them come up a lot and others maybe don't come up that much. And so one thing that I feel in my life that I'm trying to balance three things a lot of times. One is my own happiness, which is one of my intrinsic values. A second is the well being of my loved ones, which is another intrinsic value of mine. And the third is reducing suffering in the world broadly to all sentient beings. And so sometimes they come in tens because like, well, do I spend another four hours working, or do I go relax, you know totally, you spend more time with my girlfriend, or do I take on the extra project? Right, So I'm wondering for you, when you think about your own values, do you feel like that certain ones come up more for you?
Yeah, I think the core is the one you've just sort of illustrated, which is, I've got certain values around things I want to do in the world. Reducing suffering is one of my top values just broadly speaking, obviously our loved ones.
I have a son, I've got my partner.
Jinny, good friends, and then wanting to have pleasurable experiences and enjoy my own life. And I find that core tension between what I would call, on one hand, my time and then the time that I give to the world is the core tension I feel in values, and I feel like it's just once upon a time I would have dreamt of a state where these things get resolved, but I actually think the act of being a human is continuing to be something I have to think about and live into and wonder is it shifting? Am I too far over?
Oh?
Yeah, I am a little too far over that way. Okay, I need to move back this way. And so yeah, I think that's my core challenge.
Yeah, and I think that's probably one that many people face work versus self, versus family or loved ones. But I think a lot of people also will have additional ones too. So, for example, I have an additional intrinsic value that's really strong around truth. So whenever there's something where it's like, well, I could lie to protect someone, but then I'm lying, that really bothers me, Or like, oh if I said this thing perfectly accurately, it wouldn't be as persuasive, you know, But then that's going to bother my truth value be like no, no, no, I need to say it accurately. So I'm wondering, besides those three, do you see other kind of big intrinsic values for yourself that come up?
I think freedom is one that comes up a lot. But as I think about freedom, I actually kind of mean it on a couple different levels, which then I just go, well, since I value both of these things, I'll just group it and say freedom is a big value. I mean, one is, you know, either freedom to be autonomous, to do the things that I want to do, assuming they don't harm other people. But then more is freedom and internal freedom from being sort of shack to the ego, the part of me that's very focused on protecting and enhancing Eric as a character in a sense, you know, I want freedom from that. In the AA Big Book they call it bondage of self, you know, and so that's one for me. It's like, you know, that's that's an important freedom to me.
Could you impact that, because it seems like there's a lot there like freedom from self.
As I meant you.
Well, in the Buddhist tradition, there's an idea that's known as anata or no self, which posits that this thing that seems really solid in us, Eric is a collection of all these different things. You know, we're just a collection of processes that are running right being too attached to Eric, and I primarily mean ego wise. You know, some of the biggest freedoms I've had in my life have been when all of a sudden through one mechanism or other, the concern about how I am perceived in the world, about how others see me, about how much myself is being protected. When those have fallen away, I've experienced a great deal of freedom. But also, and you talk about this in your values work, that there's these different things that impinge upon our values, right, are traumas, and even if we want to talk about lowercase tee trauma, like just the conditioning our families, you know, So some of being freedom of the bondage yourself is being free from any of that that I kind of been dragging around with me.
I had an interesting experience where a friend of mine was feeling very depressed, and she had a sense that it has something to do with her partner, that there's something wrong in her relationship. And she's like, I don't understand, and I'm so unhappy. But he's such a great guy. And so we did this little exercise. I had her sit down and I had her list out the ways that he's a great guy, and then I had her list out her own values. And the funny thing is that there was like no overlap.
Interesting and she was right.
He was a great guy, just not a great guy according to her own values, and then I had her write out her parents' values, and he was just perfect according to our parents' values exactly.
Yeah. Yeah, such a great point.
And I'm curious how you think about this, because our values, we want them to be as much ours as we can. But we are just a combination of all the conditioning that we've had before us. Right, everything we are is a result of past causes and conditions, countless ones figuring out the me and all that. Like, what do I really believe? I find to be an interesting exercise? How do you think about that?
Yeah, I don't think we choose our values. I think we have values.
Yeah, we can go through this process of understanding them better and you know, exploring them. But I think that there's something that sort of is a part of us, like our personality, for example, And I think they come about through a combination of genetics, Like you know, our genes make it possible to have values at all, right, and may make it more likely to as or's others. And then obviously our upbringing and then our culture and all these things. And I think by the time people reach, you know, mid adulthood, I think their values have often solidified pretty strongly. They could still shift a little bit. But I don't really think of it as like, Okay, you're going to go, you know, try to change your value to something else, right, because well, why would you do that unless you had maybe you had a meta value of changing your values or something like that. But normally it's more about, Okay, let me try to figure out my values and then try to live according to them. And this sort of gets to my life philosophy, which I call valueism, which is very simple lif philosophy, but there's a lot of interesting implications of it. So very simply stated, it says, try to figure out what your intrinsic values are and then try to live in such a way as to effectively create more of the things that you intrinsically value. And by effectively I mean using effective methods. And just to add a little clarification here, why do I say intrinsic values? What do I mean by that rather than just a value? Because I think you know value intrinsic value, it's actually an important distinction. So there are tons of things that we value. For example, like cash. We almost everyone values having cash because you can do a lot of stuff with it. But you don't value cash intrinsically because you wouldn't value it if you couldn't do anything with it. So intrinsic values we value for their own sake, not as it means to an end, whereas values, there's just things that we care about for any reason, right, just to clarify for the listen.
Yeah, And I think that's an important distinction because often what we think we value, if we go a couple levels deeper, starts to transform. And I think part of the freedom in that is My partner Jenny said it well in relation to food and emotional eating, and she said, you know, if I think that what I want is a cupcake, there's only one answer for that, It's a cupcake.
If what I.
Recognize that I really want is not to be bored or not to be sad, or there's a lot of ways to get to that. And I think to your point, if we can get underneath to what the intrinsic value is, there's lots of different strategies there versus being stuck on its money. Okay, well, why you know, oh, it's freedom. Okay, there are other ways towards freedom, you know, So I think that's a really important point.
That's a really great way to say it. And I think that goes to one of the reasons why I can be useful think about your intrinsic values, because they're the underlying kind of why why you want the stuff that you want, and then that means that you have the strategies to get them. And I think it is very common for people to anchor on a particular life strategy. Maybe they learned when they're young, Oh, you should, you know, go get a degree because that's the way to have a good life. Where you should, you know, get this type of career because that's respectable whatever. But it's like, wait, but why are you doing that? Because if you realize why you're doing that, maybe there's a different strategy. It gets even more of what you want.
Yeah, yeah, And I do think untangling some of are I'll use the word because you used at traumas, but we could just say psychological baggage is really helpful because I've been driven in my life a lot of times towards certain things that felt like that's what I wanted more than anything in the world. Heroin being one example of that in my life, right, But it could be women, it could be any you know where that's just the whole focus, and it seems so clear and real, you know, But it's being driven out of a wound. I think it can be difficult as we are, and I think we're all on some part of a healing journey to separate those things.
You know, what do I.
Really value versus what am I sort of being pushed towards valuing because it makes me feel better safer.
Yeah.
I'm glad that you brought up heroin as an example because I think it's such an interesting example because people might want to dismiss it and saying, oh, it's completely out of a line with your values. But I think in practice what's happening is it's taking one value like pleasure or another value like the alleviation of suffering of your own suffering, Yeah, and putting them in front of all your other values.
Yep, yep.
So it's giving you something you want, it's just a destroying everything else in the process, right.
I mean the.
Value that drugs and alcohol gave me was a value I really have, which was to feel connected to people and the world around me, to have an experience of being alive, of being here, of being present. And that's what drugs and alcohol, at least in the beginning did, was they brought the world to life. For me, it was in the beginning deeply tied to some values of mine, you know. Carl Jung made the point to Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, that isn't interesting that the word spirits, you know, for alcohol, is the same word we use spirit for this deeper, more meaningful connection to something bigger than us. And so, yeah, I think you're right. But then over time, yeah, that crowds out every other value. And that's a pretty good example of what addiction is.
That's really interesting that the motivation was less around pleasure and more around like feeling alive. What was that like for you when you were doing drugs originally, and how did that contrast with how you felt not on them.
There's a line in an old movie. I think it's called Days of Wine and Roses. I could be wrong about this, but it's a movie and there's two alcoholic lead characters and one of them goes on to get sober and he's trying to get his wife to do it, and there's just this very memorable scene where she's describing to him, and she says, it's like life is in black and white, and when I drink it turns to color. That's the best way I can describe it. Now, why did I feel that way? I don't know. My guess is, if I run it all through psychology and different theories, is that my home environment wasn't a particularly safe place to have feelings or emotions, and so I deadened everything. And while deadening the bad, I deadened the good everything. You know, by the time I was like nine, I was like a kleptomaniac. And it wasn't because I wanted all these things that I stole. I mean occasionally I did, sure, but it was I felt alive. So something in my life I think it caused me to sort of deaden, and for whatever reason, alcohol and drugs brought it alive. The tragic cycle of addiction is after a certain amount of time, as we said that alcohol or drugs crowds out all your other values, you start to feel bad about that. And as you feel bad about that, the only way you know to cope with that feeling bad is to drink or get high, which then causes you to crowd and that's the downward spiral. So over time, I think it morphed from connection to just deadening pain, the pain of being the person I was at that point of having basically given everything that I had once valued over to getting high then starts to cause such feelings of self loathing and shame that you begin to have to medicate those.
Yeah.
I think this touches on a really useful point, which is that unhelpful behaviors almost always are doing something helpful.
Yeah, And it's.
Like, to just treat that behavior as totally pointless or ridiculous is to miss the point. Now you're actually doing it for some reason, very likely, Yeah, and then actually identifying that reason, like if somehow you could identify Oh wait a minute, drugs are peeling to me because I don't feel alive otherwise. I wonder if there's another way to feel alive. Right, And so I'm wondering, does life feel like it's in color now for you? And if so, how did you get there without drugs?
I will say that it doesn't feel in color to me the same way that certain drug experiences did. But those were as they I think when they talk about like, you know, the idea of like, this isn't the right word superfoods, that's not yet super stimulus, Yeah, super STiMi right, so it was even beyond right. But I would say, in general, yes, life does feel more alive and I do feel more connected. But what I realized of coming out of addiction was that I think I had depression. And my depression shows up not as sadness but as deadness.
So that's been.
An ongoing thing that I've worked with throughout my adult life. But yes, I would say that I'm at a point where I'm fifteen years sober now, and I had been sober eight years before that. So the vast majority of my adult life and life feels in color enough that I've not felt any need and I'm not tempted to go back there. And how did I do it? I mean, I think I just to go back to what we're talking about. I think I try to live by my values, you know, and recognize the satisfaction in that, you know. I think we both share an interest in behavior change, right, And I think one thing that really helps in behavior change the maintenance of it, is to recognize that the behavior feels good, you know, whether it's the direct result of the behavior or the way you feel about yourself because you're doing what you said you were going to do. There's a quiet satisfaction to that that I think I got better at tuning into. And then I've just learned that, you know, things like creating art make me feel alive. Being around art and beauty makes me feel alive. So I've found the places that it's there for me and learn to tolerate better the periods where it doesn't.
Feel that way so much.
You know, where a depressive mood or episode comes in and I just don't react to it and I just go all right, Well, for whatever reason they seemed to come from time to time, I think it's going to pass, you know, not making such a big deal out of it, not making it worse, I guess would be the way to say it.
This reminds me of something I've observed, and I wonder if you've observed the same thing, where if one of your really important values is not getting satisfied, it tends to pull more strongly. Yeah, it can become almost like overpowering because it's sort of missing.
Yeah, Whereas if.
You kind of get enough of it, then it kind of will shut out, it will be satiated.
Yeah, Yeah, I'm curious to hear your experience around that.
Well, maybe all put that back to you a little bit, which is like, it seems to me that that phenomenon is very real and what can happen what I've seen happen in others and myself, is this big pendulum swing. So it gets over prioritized, and the pendulum swings way over and then the other one and it swings back. And I think for me, a lot of it has been like how do I not have that pendulum swinging so much, you know, from one extreme to the other extreme of my values, but that I'm honoring them all a little bit. And that's one of your key strategies that you talk about, is like you got to keep them all in mind, and you've got to recognize where the conflicts are. And I think that's often what we miss. We aren't conscious of the value conflict that's coming up. We're not making it explicit enough in our own minds so that we can sort of take it head on.
Yeah.
I've been using this technical a lot lately, both in my own life as well as like when a friend brings a problem that they're grappling with. And that's my thoughts on it is try to just sit down and say, well, what are the values that staycare?
Yeah?
Right, and then once you figured out the values at stake, and they have to be the values for that person, right, because different people are different, Yeah, intrinsic values. So once you figure out the values for that person that are at stake, then you can say, okay, so really this choice you're making is a trade off between you know, value A and B versus value C and D, And I found doing that for myself and others it could be incredibly clarifying. It's like, oh, hey, that's why this is such a hard decision, because I actually really care about both of those you know, sets of things. So an example of this would be a friend of mine came with a challenge she was having with a friend of hers and basically she could either help that front of the project, which she wanted to do because you know, she cares about her friends. She wants her friend to succeed, but in doing so, it would kind of be giving up on one of her own goals that she cares about. And it's like, oh, yeah, of course that's a hard decision because you genuinely really value both of the things. And then that doesn't mean that the decisions automatically made, but at least now you know it's at stake, you've really clearly identified it, and now you can say, well, in this particular case, which of these do value more?
On the margin?
How do you in your own life and in people that you're talking to, then go about trying to resolve that conflict, because even have to clarify and it's still like, I don't know, well.
The first thing I like to try to do is say, hmm, could there be some third option that's missing that actually satisfied both sets of values at stake? Maybe there's not as much of a trade off as it seems, right, And we've actually done some research on this week. We've run a lot of psychology studies and we were building this tool called the Decision Advisor. It's a tool on our website where you can walk you through a difficult life decision. And in developing it, we ran some studies and one of those studies, we asked half of the people to just use the tool as normal, and we asked the other half to come up with an extra option for what they could do in their decision that they had never thought of before. Yep, And we just said you're not allowed to proceed until you've come up with more options, and something like. It was a small studies, I wouldn't generalize too much, but something like twenty or twenty five percent of the people ended up choosing that new option as their preferred one, And it just really got me thinking, Wow, we often just get stuck on our first two options we're considering.
Yes, yeah, I mean I talk about this in the Spiritual Habits program, but I talk about two scenarios in my life where a third option was the right choice. In the first was when I wanted to start a solar energy company, but I still worked full time in the software business, and I felt like my options were either start the solar energy company or give up that dream and stay in the software business. Right, Neither of those choices felt palatable to me, you know, you know, the third way was like, Okay, I'm gonna just have to find a way to kind of do both, which is going to have its own set of sacrifices and challenges, but it was a path forward for me, whereas before that I got stuck in that dichotomy in that apparent only one or two choices, and always defaulted to the choice that there was the most pressure on me to do, which was to sort of stay in the job, right, But then the other thing was in a really difficult marriage. I was so fixated on go or stay, go or stay what we eventually did and I don't have the foggy st idea quite how we got here. I feel extraordinarily fortunate. We got to a point where we said, you know what, we value the home we have for our kids, her son and my son. We're you know, we value this home there in high school, and we want them to get through high school. So we're going to remain as a family unit, but we're not going to be a couple anymore.
Right.
And I'm not saying everybody can do that, right, but we were able to and it turned out to be an incredible solution that got me out of the stay or go which we had been mired in for years because we didn't see that there was any other option.
Yeah, that's such a good example, because I think we have most peop wouldn't even consider that because it's so standard, like you're either with the person that you're now with verson.
Yeah, it turned out great.
We got the kids through high school and everybody did well, and then we completely separated and went on with our lives and the boys are good.
We're good again. I don't quite know how we made that happen.
It feels very fortunate, but it was a way of getting out of what had been a very stuck place for a number of years.
Yeah, and so coming up with a third option. Obviously that can be a great approach, and I think people under use it. But another interesting approach is that you could say, well, in this particular case, maybe I will sacrifice some of one of my values for another, but there's a larger game here. Maybe I can promote that other value in a different way in my life. Right, So you can kind of view it as part of a bigger picture. It's not just you know, this is the only decision in my life, right Yeah.
Yeah.
As I was looking through your writings on valueism in this conflict, that was one of the things that struck me was, you know, taking a longer view of it, because in the moment, there may not be a resolution right here, there may be a resolution down the road, you know. So for me, eventually the problem went away between solar company and job or podcasting job where you know, for now it's the podcast and I can do that full time. That went away, but it took a while of doing that sort of third thing.
So one of the things.
I admire about the work that you do is you are very good at categorizing things. We were talking about this before the interview. You've choosen to take this applied mathematics background PhD and apply it to psychology and so on the topic of values. You know, you've got your Intrinsic Values test. There's a lot of different ways that people propose going about finding out.
What your values are.
Did you, when you create that test, go out and look at a lot of the different ways that people do and kind of try and boil it down. You know, what's salient about trying to figure out our values because there are lots of different ways in there.
Yeah, So we started that project looking at the ways that values have been categorized before. So we looked at the way philosophers have categorism because they think about them with regard to ethics.
We looked at the way political scientists had done it.
They think about it in terms of different countries have different values that they tend to promote. We looked at how even human resources and career counselors categorize them because they want to think, well, what job would you be appropriate for based on what you care about.
So we looked at all of.
These we kind of tried to merge them together, and then we ran our own study. And the way it worked is we put people through a little mini module that explained to them what is an intrinsic value? Has it different from instrumental value? And then we said, okay, just generate some of your values, just write them down, and then we went through and we ended up with like three thousand and we duplicated them. So we tried to find ones that were unique, and then we started to trying to categorize them and say, well, how many different categories of them are there? And we came up with twenty two categories.
So it's a lot.
It's a little it's hard, you know, it's not the certain thing you can just say, you know in the sound by, but yeah, so we have twenty two categories and everything from caring about like longevity, like living a long time, to pleasure, to justice, to quality and so on. So there really are a lot of things that the humans value. And it really helped me appreciate just what a wide range of different sorts of people there are in the world, because for any one of these there are people well that is their big, most dominant value.
Yeah, you've got a values wheel on the website, and I didn't feel like there were twenty two categories.
There are There are twenty two on there.
Yeah, it was twenty two values, but you actually then further categorize them into like preserve or ah.
Yeah, yeah, so we do like a hierarchical categorization. So I think if I call correctly, there's sort of four meta level categories. Yeah, then there's twenty two categories, and then in each category there can be multiple different in terms of values, like take the value of longevity. You might care about yourself living a long time, but you also might care about your loved one's living a long time, and so on, so you can apply that value to different things.
This happens to me every time I try and do values is I get a really big list and this is entirely coherent with my personality. Like if you ask me to take any test, I just tend to fall right in the middle, Like it just seems to be I encompass a lot of different things, and so longevity came up as one for me. But then I started thinking that that can.
Be an intrinsic value.
But I started reflecting on what about longevity feels important? Is the chance to experience more pleasure? Right, which would then be back to sort of the value of pleasure is it to relieve more suffering in the world.
Well, in that case, it's more so.
Even thinking about it in that way caused me to sort of dial deeper into even what is an intrinsic value, to try and understand a little bit more about what about that feels important.
Yeah, it's a great point because while longevity might be an intrinsic value for some people, it might be instrumental for others. Yes, like they only care about because it gets some more pleasure. Well, that's not intrinsic. It just a means to an ad to get pleasure, So then pleasure would be the intrinsic value. It can be tricky to think about the difference between what our own instrumental values are versus intrinsic, because that's not the way our brand naturally codes them. And there's this idea that I like to think of a value trap, which is when you pursue an instrumental value as though it's an intrinsic value.
Yeah.
Class example, someone just pursuing money mindlessly because it was sort of rewarding, and they thought of it as like how they get ahead and so on, and they pursue it way past the point where it's like giving them the things they care about because now they're wealthy, but their family life is shit and they have no friends, and you know whatever, all these other parts of their life are not working the way they would want.
So I think that is useful clarification.
Yeah.
I think you're pointing to something there which is interesting, which is we often get our values sort of I don't want to say set, because it's not even that conscious, but that we sort of get on a track and we just sort of stay on that track, you know. Living a values based life, or valueism, as you say, I think does take a certain amount of consistent and ongoing reflection about what really matters.
Do you find that true for you?
Yeah?
Absolutely, And I think it does take a lot of reflections really parse out your values. We created the Interesstic values test to try to make a bit easier, but yeah, reflection is definitely a big part of it. And you can get into subtle situations like hmm, but do I really care about that thing, like you were dealing with longevity. Do I really care about longevity or just do I just cared about as it means to an end? Yeah, there's no way around it. I think a lot of self understanding can only happen through this kind of deep reflection.
Do you think that values change over time?
I think they can shift. So sometimes they shift you to change about our beliefs. So for example, someone who's deeply spiritual, let's say they one day become an atheist, Like that can cause a sudden change in their values because they had different beliefs about the nature of reality. So sometimes that caused it. Sometimes I think that social forces can change our values kind of slowly over time. So let's say you were like isolated on a desert island with people who all, like you know, deeply cared about equality, and that was like the one thing they all cared about. Maybe after ten years maybe you would find that had seeped into your value SYSM, even if you didn't start caring about equality. So I suspect that we kind of like will observe them, and when we're young, we observe them a lot. I think as we get older, we become more previous to other people's values.
But why do you think that is? You know, why do you think as we get older? Sort of the term I often use is calcify, which is one of the things about getting older that I feel to talk about values feels important to me, which is to not sort of calcify, to remain in a state where life can influence and change me and that I can evolve.
Yeah, and I mean that's something I care about deeply as well. And actually one of the more common intrinsic values we found when we survey people is values around continuing to learn and grow. Like that is really common in the US, especially as a value. I mean, I think I go back to biology and evolution here. I mean, I think evolutionarily, you know, if you're a baby, there's just an incredible amount of stuff you need to learn in order to not die. And then as you get more and more of that knowledge. There's less incremental value in learning relative to doing stuff in the world, and so we, you know, go from a baby that's learning constantly and doing almost nothing to a child who's, you know, learning a lot and doing a little bit, and then eventually we're an adult who's learning a little bit and doing a lot. And you know, from the point of view of the survival regienes that probably makes sense. But from our personal fulfillment, I think there's a great deal of value in continuing to learn and ground not necessarily changing our values. I don't think that's something you should purposely trying to do. But in terms of learning about the world, learning about yourself, like deeping yourself understanding Sean.
Yep, I heard somebody want say, and I'm just curious what you think of this general idea. I'm not going to attribute it to anyone because I think I know who said it. But I'm not going to attribute it because I'm not sure said basically like self development is about learning to want better things. I think I can interpret it on a couple levels. On the level that we've been talking about, I think it means that I'm getting clearer on what my real values are, and I'm seeing through the values trap, I'm seeing the conflicts. I'm reflecting more deeply on what really matters. I'm not on autopilot, right, I'm not grasping for what's the most easy and satisfying thing, necessarily so that over time I'm beginning to, you know, want better things. So like for me with addiction, right, it was that process of going from well I want heroin to what do I really want?
And then you know, trying to aim at that what do you Yeah.
It's interesting.
I don't like the phrasing want better things because I worry people get confused and think, oh, want better things, like I want the highest things in life or the you know, I want the fancy things or something.
Yeah.
I think I think that they would mean it more along a more moral, deeper sense of things.
Right, you want the sort of things that you more fundamentally care about, not the things you kind of superficially care about. Yeah, And from that point of view, I think that makes a lot of sense.
You know.
One thing we haven't touched on, which I think is quite interesting is the difference between values and principles. And I've been thinking about this recently because We actually for our website clear thing dot org, we made a new module you can explore your principles.
Ah. I would love to hear the difference.
Yeah, and so I think of it as a principle is like a rule of thumb, or like a decision making strategy. Okay, where's the intrinsic values? Are like the thing that you're ultimately seeking? Okay, right, for exam One thing that I might be, you know, fundamentally seeking is like helping people, and a strategy to do that might be that I always tell the truth or something like that. Right, So the principle would be always tell the truth. It's like a heuristic, but there's an intrinsic value I'm trying to get under that, which is like trying to help people not harm them or something like that. So I think it's interesting thinking about what principles you have. Essentially, there are things you've predecided, right, so you could go about your life and every decision you could, like from first principles, try to.
Figure out what am I going to do?
But it's a lot easier if you sort of have a preset set of principles that are like, ah, well, these are rules of thumb how I live my life, and so some examples which I think can help clarify. You know, one principle I have is that in so far as I'm able, I should always be trying to help the world, right, And so that's just like something that I'm like, that's just the life principle I try to live by it. Or another example would be that I try to always tell the truth unless I think that it's going to bump up against my other values too much, right like, because you know, I don't infinitely care about the truth. At some point it would destroy my other values too much. But in so far as it's not bumba al ma against other values, I always try to help truth. So I'm curious if you have other sort of principles that you try to live by, sort of rules of thumb for a living.
That's interesting because I don't think up till now I made that distinction. I would have thought of principles and values as sort of two ways of saying the same thing. But interestingly, like so a principle I generally live by is it sounds so kindergarteners, But I try and leave each situation, person, or place that I encounter better than when I found it. It's a great principle, you know, And there's almost always some way to at least make that attempt. I don't think it always happens, like have I made Gotham Production Studios better for being in this week? I've been friendly, I've been kind, you know. Did I make it better? I don't know, but I tried, you know, I was oriented in that way. I'm trying to think of other principles that's really interesting, Other rules of thumb.
Yeah, and they're essentially decision making strategies, so that rather than have to deal with all the details and complexity, you can just say, well, my principles do this, so they allow you to make your decisions faster.
But they also actually can often.
Make it easier to live by your values. So, for example, if you have a principle like don't lie, then well that's going to support your value of like honesty, right, And then when you're in a situation.
You're like, hm, try lie, No, I don't lie, that's right.
Right, So you're you're trying to predecide so that temptation and all these other factors don't push you over into doing something that's not aligned with values.
Yeah, that makes sense.
So values are you know, we spend a lot of time talking about it, and that living according to your values is really important. And the way that we live out many things in our life is through our behavior, right, And so oftentimes we may have a value that we haven't yet figured out how to live into. I may value physical health, but I haven't figured out how to exercise regularly. Right. So that sort of leads us into another air that you and I both are really interested in, which is behavior change. Talk to me about what got you interested in behavior change?
Yeah, So as I thought about the kind of effects someone to have in the world, like the kind of values I have of trying to increase happiness or do suffering, I started to realize that so many of those values.
Actually have to do with behavior.
Yep.
Whether it's mental health, which is something that I've worked in, or it's reducing cognitive biases and irrationality, so many of these things are actually fundamentally behavioral. And then I started thinking, well, changing human behavior that's really hard. People you know want to go to the gym and then they don't do it. People you know want to spend more time with their family and then they don't do it and so on. So many challenges we face in our life are because we can't get ourselves BacT the way we want to act. So then I started really systematically investigating this, and so we ended up looking at sixteen different behavior change frameworks they are out there, studied them, tried to really understand them, and then we said, okay, where do we see a gap here?
And what we realized is that.
We tended to find a few different types of behavior change frameworks out there. They're really simplified ones which can be really useful to provide some basic guidelines, but they're not trying to be comprehensive. So the Hook framework would be an example of this. So the idea that like, you know, you're trying to make a behavior change, well, here's two things to keep in mind, or here's three things to keep in mind.
Right, So that's on the one hand.
The other hand, we found these academic frameworks that are much more comprehensive, but.
They're hard to apply on the step by step out yes, right, so it's like, how do you use this?
So we wanted to do is try to create a framework that was comprehensive, so all behavior change strategies can fit in it somewhere, but also gives a step by step process that you can go through. And so we create this framework we call the Ten Conditions for Change. You can find on our website, but basically the general idea is it's trying to identify ten conditions where if they're all met, a behavior change is very likely to occur. So you know, you get the ten the conditions in place, the behavior change is likely. What what that means is if the behavior change is not happening, so the person is not engaging in that behavior, then one or more of the conditions it's not met.
Therefore you can go kind.
Of use it as a diagnostic diagnostic exactly, you go through and you try to pinpoint well which the conditions are not matt So that's what I say, concept.
YEA, hold that for a second. I want to jump back to something you just said a minute ago, which was that your values around increasing happiness and reducing suffering do you see those as the same thing?
You know? I don't necessarily. I think that some people care a lot more about reducing suffering. For example, they view it as very charitable to try to help alleviate pain and people who have disabilities, right, But they wouldn't necessarily view it as, you know, that important to take people who are like neutral and make them really happy. They just view it as a Yeah, that's not as motivating for me. I think I'm genuinely motivated by both. I'm really motivated by like, when someone suffering, it's really bad, and I think it's really good to help them not suffer. But I also am really motivated by Okay, someone's doing okay, but they could be really joyful, and that's really inspiring to me too. So I think I care about both of those things, and not everyone does. Sometimes people just care about one more than the other.
Yeah, it's interesting, I would have said. Earlier in my life, I was more on the reducing suffering side, having been an addict, that was where I spent a lot of my early time was with other people who were sort of at the low levels of human functioning, you know, life sort of burned to the ground, you know. But then as I've gotten healthier, you know, I've started to broaden that to also like, Okay, well how do we also increase happiness? So, like you, I feel like I value them both. I've tried to tweeze a part so I value one more than the other, and I end up sort of in a place where I'm like, I think I value them fairly equally.
Yeah.
Yeah, there really are just a huge number of people who are doing okay, but they're not flourishing yep. And that seems to me like a very important problem. I mean, I was saying it's more important than preventing basic disease or poverty or you know, really bad things that are causing on of suffering.
I don't think it's more important that, but I do think it's important.
Yeah, I want to ask a more fundamental question about behavior change and tie it back to values. We said that one of the things that can be problematic is when our values are kind of in conflict with each other. So I value health and going to the gym, but I also value the time I spend with my kids in the morning. So in your framework for behavior change, I'm assuming there's a way of recognizing that tension between values and trying to figure out which you want to prioritize.
So we approach behavior change in the framework not starting with values, but starting with the behavior right. So it's sort of like, Okay, you've decided that this behavior is good according to your values, you'll be better off living with it, now what right. So that's sort of the starting point. I think of it as like sort of coming in stages. There's like okay, figuring out what you value, and then figuring out what you want to do based on what you value, and then getting yourself to do the thing, or you know, actually creating the behavior. And so this is sort of the latter step where it's like you figure out your values, you figure out what you want to do and how you want to behave based on the values, and now but you're not living up to them.
Now we get into the behavior change component.
When I look at your framework and I don't have it in front of me. There were in the early phases of it there was clarification around why this is important to me, right, and clarification around intention, which seems like it is a little bit of the reflection on values, because I do think that a lot of behavior change problems are competing commitment idea, which could be said competing value idea, And like we've said earlier, I think the more we can surface that the better off we are because they're often unstated, unknown, ununderstood, but they exert a tremendous pull.
Right, And I think one of the points of tension here is that our framework can be used sort of a sidle level, like oh, how do we help people exercise more who want to exercise more? Or can be apply at the individual level. I think you're coming from more the individual level and self applied, but I also thinking keeping my mind of the societal level. It's like you're trying to create positive outcomes in society, but as you point out, values does come into it indirectly because if we kind of go through the beginning of the framework, the framework divides behavior change into three phases. The first phase is about the decision to engage in behavior. The second phase is about taking a series of actions over time, and the third phase about maintenance, like keeping up with the conditions and not letting them laps. In the decision phase, when you're deciding to engage in behavior, let's say you know, going to the gym five days a week. Let's say that's the behavior in question, the first condition is have you considered it?
Right?
If you've literally never considered going to gym, you're almost certainly not going to do it right right. The second condition, though, is desiring it, and that's where now you're starting to get values coming into play. If you don't desire to go to the GM, you, of course you're not going to do it, okay, But well what kinds of desire are there? And now we unpack that into two types of desire. We've got intuitive desire like I want to eat that cupcaate it looks delicious, and reflective desire like, oh, I've weighed the pros and cons and decided that I really should do this thing because it's good for me. And so that's where a lot of the value stuff will come into that second condition of the desire's condition. So an example why someone go to the gym is that they actually just don't desire it, and then there'd be an exploration there of like, well, but do you desire being healthy? And you know, you could start to unpack that and like and reflect on that, and it's like, well, maybe if you really desire being healthy and you also believe that going to the gym will make you healthy, and you won't be healthy otherwise, Like any of that could stoke that desire, and now you have.
A desire to go to the gym.
Yep, And I think that, you know, for me, part of maintenance particularly and I'm jumping ahead to maintenance a little bit of a behavior though, is is there a way to shift that from entirely reflective to also being sort of intuitive. So, for me, a huge shift in my ability to stay consistent with exercise was when I realized the very short term benefit of my own mental health and my moods. When I made that connection really solidly, exercise went from reflective it's good for me down the road, it's going to prevent these conditions, Da da dad, to intuitive I want to feel better now this actually works to do that.
Yeah, that's such a great point.
And so the way we think about this is you really need the desire condition to be met. There's the two types, intuitive or reflective. It's really best to have both, right, That's that's the best.
Yeah.
So an example is, if you're going to go exercise and you don't like going to the gym, pick a different type of exercise. Pick the type of exercise it gives you the most immediate reward. Yes, And also, you know, remind yourself that doesn't making you healthy. So you're going to spend time with your rank kids, right? You want those? You want both the reflection pulling on it and the intuition pulling on it, because with just a reflection, well maybe I don't feel like going to the gym today, and it's you know, maybe you're just not going to do it.
There were a couple of psychological studies and I'm not going to be able to quote them or reference them. And maybe you've heard of this or maybe you haven't, but I've always wondered about them ever since I heard them, which was that multiple motivations in doing something could actually weaken your overall desire to do it, and that has always felt deeply.
Counterintuitive to me. What do you think about that?
Have you ever heard of that sort of research? And if so, what do you think? And if not, what do you think?
Well, so it does remind me of something I think is true, which is that if someone's trying to convince you of something and they give you like the ten reasons why they're right and you should do this thing, that cofa be weaker. Then if they just focus on sort of the two most perspective reasons and really having on those yep. So I think in an interpersonal communication we're talking about mother, they another person.
But this is more internal. Their point was that if you suddenly go to the gym because it helps your mental health, it contributes to your long term health, it makes you look better. When you start layering those on top of each other, you actually end up with a weaker case than if you were just very solidly motivated by one thing. Again, to me, that's always felt deeply counterintuitive.
So let's say you know you've got five reasons go to the gem. The first one is a ten out of ten, and the other ones are one out of ten importance. I don't think having those extra one and times is going to make you less likely the gem as long as you got the ten out of ten there. But if we're talking about comparing one ten out of ten versus you know, ten one out of ten, well maybe that one ten out of ten will get you the gem more. Yeah, so one really strong reason may be better than a lot of weak reasons. But I don't think adding extra week reasons is going to demotivate you.
Yeah, because I've always just found that, like you said there's these two types of desires, right, I think that's the term you used, you know, the intuitive and reflective is I've just found that, like, on different days, I need to pull on different reasons. Like one day, it might be the fact that, like, for whatever reason, I've been to the doctor recently and I've seen my cholesterol levels, and all of a sudden, I'm more motivated than I normally am by long term health. That's one that sort of drives me, and I can pull in that. And then there are other days where I'm like, well, it doesn't even seem to matter right now. I mean, I know it does, but I don't feel it. But knowing that I'll feel better in an hour does matter. And so I've always found having a menu of them more helpful.
Yeah, I agree with you.
So there's the decisional.
Yeah, and maybe I was just mentioned the third condition, the third and file condition and the decision phase, which is intending to engage in the behavior. Yeah. And this was a really interesting one and it comes up I think a lot in addiction as well. So you might think, oh, well, if someone's considered a behavior change and they desire it, they're going to do it not so not so people often have considered something in desire but don't actually intend to do it, and you know why am I not? They intend, well, oh, I'm so busy right now, I'll get that next month, or I don't know where to start, and so they just never, you know, take that first step. So the attention part is when it goes from just an abstract idea to a concrete Oh, I'm going to start this on Monday, or I'm going to go to this particular Jim.
Yeah.
I often in talking with people about behavior change, you'll say you're not even at the point where you're procrastinating yet, because you haven't actually decided what you're going to do. Like to your point, you say that you want to exercise more, that that's a value, but we've gotten nowhere near an actual plan yet. So I wouldn't even say you're procrastinating on an activity because you're still in, as you would say, that intention setting phase where I get specific about what I'm actually going to do. And that's one of the things I find so helpful about that specificity, at least in the beginning of Monday morning, I'm doing this, and I'm doing it for this long. It pushes us to that point where we have to make an actual choice.
Yeah.
And on the negative side, in cases where a behavior is harmful, we could take suicide where people start to get really concerned when someone said that that's a suicide plan, right, right, It's like a lot of people have just thought about suicide. Almost everyone thought about it at some point. But what's scary is and someone's like, no, no, no, I have a plan to do it exactly.
I'm gonna do it on Monday.
Okay, that's when you really need to be concerned.
Yes, okay, So we get through the decisional phase. Now we're into the action phase.
Right.
So now you've okay, decided you're going to go to the gym. You're gonna start on Monday and so on. Now you have to take a series of actions across time. You've got the gym membership. You gotta you know, go on Monday, you gotta go on Tuesday, you gotta go on Wednesday, and so on. And there's a whole bunch of conditions here that are important to meet to make the behavior change likely. And so the first is you have to remember to do the action. Very simple but if you literally Monday comes around, you literally don't think about going to the gym. You know, you're not going to go the problem of forgetting exactly, and that's a really common problem.
Yeah.
Fortunately there really simple solutions, everything from get a buddy who's also going and then you're not going to forget, you know, or they're going to call you like where are you? You know, write a reminder to yourself on your ticket, on your you know, computer, set up an alarm and so on. So a lot of like very basic strategies, but often these can actually increase compliance even though they're so basic.
Yeah, no, I think they definitely do. I mean, I'm curious what you think about when you're trying to So this isn't exactly behavior change.
This is where it's sort of morphs. But let's say that what you want is to be more self compassionate towards yourself. Right. It's funny.
I was we're making a self compassion module and I was literally just at this morning sky very top of mind. Yeah.
Yeah, and so you know, in the Spiritual Habits program, what I talk about is basically what you're saying here, we need some sort of trigger to actually remember to be self compassion Now, the ideal trigger is sort of what I would refer to as like an emotional trigger, right, Like, when I find myself being hard on myself, I remember to be self compassionate. But that feels like a more advanced one, right. Whereas if every time I go in the kitchen for the next two weeks I reflect on self compassion, it's more likely that it's going to be top of mind when I kind of need it. So it's a way of sort of trying to thread ideas or reflections into our day.
Yeah, no, it's a it's a really interesting point. So it reminds me of this idea of implementation and tentions, yep, which is so the concept is you're making a plan that when a certain thing occurs, you're going to take a certain action. So yeah, the next time I, you know, being hard on myself, I'm going to then think the following thought that you know, you.
Are a worthwhile person or whatever.
Right, And there been a lot of studies on them that found them helpful, but as you point out, they can be quite difficult to create. So we ran a study where what we did is we had people pick an object in their home environment yep, like a mirror or something like that. And then whenever they pass that thing, they would have to take a certain action so they be mindful or have gratitude.
And actually we study them for three days.
We found that people actually were happier after three days of doing this, yeah, relative to a control group that was just as to kind of count how many times.
They saw that object.
And so, yeah, I think this really can work as a basic starter plan yep. And then as you say, you can do more advanced ones that are more situational.
Right, because I think ultimately what we want is i'll call an emotional based trigger. You might have a more precise word for it than that, And we almost always have them. They just tend to be for the negative, and they tend to be unconscious. When I get bored, I grab my phone. You know, there's an unspoken implementation and tension in there that generally leads us in a direction we don't want to go. And so I think it's learning to catch that moment board and then how actually do I want to respond when I feel that?
Yeah, I think this actually speaks to another important point we haven't touched on, which is that it's often easier to replace a habit than to just erase something.
Right.
So it's like, if you find that you're, you know, engaging in an unhealthy habit, like constantly checking social media even though it's not bringing you joy, it's like, well, maybe you can't get yourself to stop, but can you replace that with something like right, oh, next time you have a really strong temptation to do go pay your dog, you know, or go take a walk outside. That's often actually a more effective strategy.
Certainly, you know, with addiction, that is a big piece of what we have to learn to do, right, because the trigger isn't going to go away, at least not for a while, right, The trigger of I want a drink is just going to continue to return for a while.
So it's what do I do? Then?
You know, what action do I take that's not a drink? And having thought those out in advance is a really good strategy because oftentimes what I find, and I'd be curious your thought on this, is that when those things arrive, our emotional activation levels tend to be fairly high, and our ability to cognitively think, well what should I do now? Oh, I'm going to do this, and then I thought I was going to do that, like we almost just need like that implementation instruction of very simple when this, then.
That absolutely And it's also ideal if that new behavior satisfies the same goal as the original behavior. Right, So if you're trying to avoid boredom, then whatever you're replacing that with should avoid boredom.
Right.
Otherwise you're just kind of forcing something but it's not actually hitting the underlying need.
We're getting near the end of time, so I'd like to maybe move to the end of your framework, which is maintained, because this is a phase I'm really interested in because for some people, getting started is really hard, and there are lots of ways to do that, and I actually find that an easier problem to solve with clients that I've worked with, like getting started, the long term maintenance seems to often be the challenge. What have you found and codified into your framework that helps us do that?
Yeah, So that we think about this is that each of those ten conditions, and we've gone through a few of them, but you know there's ten in total, they can disappear so they can be met and then.
Stop being met.
Yeah, And so the analysis I do is I think about, well, which of these is most likely to stop being met?
Is it that you're gonna.
You were remembering to go to gym, but then you're gonna start forgetting because you move somewhere else now your schedule is all different. Or is it that you used to desire the thing, but you actually lost the desire and you need to reconnect with the same reason that you care about it.
And so that's the lens source.
I do the analysis of which condition is going to fall away, and then how do we boost that back up to make sure that doesn't disappear.
That's interesting because, as I recall, from the trans theoretical model of behavior change, there was an idea that you do the actions that are right for the category, you know, the stage that you're in. And I felt like, at least what I took from it, and you've probably read it much more closely than I have, given your nature, was that like, at a certain point you aren't stoking motivation, you know, but it sounds like you're saying all of these ten things need to be kind of up to date.
It's a really good point.
What can happen over time is certain of them can become unnecessary because of, for example, habit, let's say brushing your teeth.
Right.
You know maybe when you're a child, like your mother needs to remind your father needs to remind you to brush your teeth. But then once you've done it like a hundred times, now you're just like doing it without thinking about it. So the memory thing is no longer a problem, right, because it just gets locked in place. So some of them will get locked in place, but other things could then disrupt that. So you know, maybe with toothbrushing, that's not gonna be a problem. But suppose you had an oral surgery and you weren't able to brush your teeth for three weeks m h. And then it's like, oh, haven't brush my teeth in three weeks? Maybe you actually will now need to like actually remember again.
Which you haven't done since childhood. Right.
You know where I find so many people and myself too, get off track is when something significant change. We're going along great with my daily exercise habit or my daily meditation habit or whatever it is, and then I go on vacation and when I come back, it's like, well, it.
Seems to have just sort of faded away.
You know, or the school year starts, or any number of different things. And there's certain ideas around behavior change that I think get oversimplified into pick the thing you're going to do, get specific about when what you're going to do, and then just stay with it, right, But I think that ignores the complexity of most people's lives.
Right, And the reality is that forming habits is a never ending thing we have to do because our habits always will get eventually disrupted, whether you have kids, or you move, or you change jobs, your schedule changes. So it's like the skill of recreating the habit is actually incredibly important. You're never going to just get it once and be done for life, right.
Yeah.
I think part of the reason that habits is such an alluring thing to people is they feel like they could just make this thing automatic and never have to think about it again. And I've found that for most complex behaviors, things that take a significant amount of time or energy, like going to the gym, that like you said, it's more a matter of a constant recreation than it is like you just get this thing locked in and it's not a problem. Now, there does seem to be something of momentum right there does seem to be something like when I've been going to the gym pretty much every day, it's much easier to go than it is if I haven't been going at all. But I wouldn't go so far as to say it's exactly a habit, particularly if it has to be very varied. You know, I travel enough with different things that like nothing ever gets baked into stone enough that it's just like, I mean, besides brushing my teeth, you know, maybe as an example, all the rest of it, I kind of have to keep figuring out.
Yeah, it's such a good point. I totally agree.
So is there anything else from your ten conditions for change that you feel like we might want to hit with our last couple minutes here.
Yeah, So, just to kind of give an overview of the way I think about it, Basically, you've got this decision phase, action phase, and the maintenance phase, and then in any given behavior change situation for any given person, which conditions are going to be the key ones are going to differ. So the thing that I would ask people to reflect on is like, for you, what's mostly to get you to not engage the behavior or to stop and I think that a thing that can often happen is people try to take a one size fits all approach, right, But the reality is like one person may have no trouble remembering to do the thing, but they find that they lose motivation. And another person may be really motivated, but they literally are just forgetful, and they just keep forgetting and it's like the strategy is going to be really different. So I would just ask for your own behavior change, what do you find the most difficult, and then that's the stuff you need to build a strategy around.
Right, Yep.
Yeah, I think that's a big part of you know, when I've done coaching with people's we get through this very great plan what we're going to do on and then it's like, all right, well, what's going to go wrong here? Like let's think about his dorically what's gone wrong. But I've also heard you say you can also reflect on what's gone right, Like what has worked for you before is also a very useful reflection when we talk about behavior change.
Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because we ran a study on habitformation where we randomize some people do in the control group and some people to get habit interventions, and one of the interventions we found particularly good, very simple. It's you think about a habit you've done in the past. You think about what you did that helped you succeeded that habit, and then you write down how to apply that to the current habit. We call it habit reflection, and it's essentially saying, well, what worked for me, and then how do I adapt it to this situation. And so yeah, I think that's an especially good strategy. That's like very simple, it takes two minutes but can help you excellent.
Well, I think that's a good place to wrap up. I feel like we could do this in another couple hours, but we are at the end of our time. But it's been really fun to talk with you and get to know you, and so thank you.
It's been really great. Thanks so much.
Eric.
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