The Science of Habits | Marco Badwal | TEDxFS

[Music] Thanks let me introduce you to someone who had a clear vision in life who had clear goals who wanted to make an impact in life that's right I'm talking about myself about seven years ago when I had just finished high school and it's quite obvious that I was at a great place in my life I knew what I wanted to achieve within the next few years and I had good grades in school I was basically good at anything I was doing sounds like a remarkable girl right unfortunately that's really not true it's more like

the opposite was true I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life I was at best average at most things and my core competencies were partying chillin and I was trying to be a cool guy so to be honest all this didn't make me happy I felt empty I felt shallow and most the time I felt pretty miserable it slowly changed when I started studying in South Africa and at the same time I started reflecting on my life who did I want to be what did I want to do with my life

fast forward three years now here you can see me with my dad and I just graduated with a Bachelor of Science laude fast forward another two years now this was taken about a week ago on the Harvard campus in Cambridge where I'm currently doing research and I can honestly say that today I'm actually pretty happy so what happened in between here how do I get from this guy all the way over there before I can answer this I need to talk about a topic that might seem very unrelated at the beginning but we will get

back to this the topic of habits the we humans are without a doubt creatures of habit Wendy wood is a researcher from the University of Southern California and she found that forty to forty five percent of our daily behaviors or habits I mean that's a lot that means almost half of everything you do every day is actually a habit let me give you some examples the time you get up it might be early in the morning for me it's very early that's a habit that you have computer games my habit used to be I would

come home from high school and I would play computer games right away horrible habit but I had that cell phones how often do you take out your cell phone check messages notifications it horrible habit everyone has it and we have more driving a car that might not seem like a habit but we're only capable of driving as we do because it has become a habit to us and there are many mores eating fast food it's super unhealthy habit so many people have it exercising two three four or five times a week one of the best

habits you could imagine and there are many more it took me just a few hours to come up with a lot of examples but you might ask yourself what do all those behaviors have in common how can I talk about habits and name all those behaviors well habits are by definition automated behaviors that we repeat over and over again always in the same context or environment and that run in our subconscious mind what I mean by that is you're not really consciously aware of it anymore you have done it so many times that you don't

have to pay attention to the behavior your mind is wandering you're thinking of the past you're planning into the future but you're not really there let me give you an example like driving a car it has probably happened to you that you were driving somewhere you would arrive and you couldn't even remember how exactly you got there it's because driving has become so habitual to us habits are usually triggered by some form of a cue that's like a person you run into on a regular basis it's an environment that you are in very often and

they're rewarded at the end that could be a piece of chocolate taking a small break could be basically anything as long as there's dopamine released in the brain it's a little chemical it's a neurotransmitter that signals the brain oh this is pleasure this is reward we like this for example the cell phones every time you get a message or notification a little bit of dopamine is released in the brain let's like companies like Facebook Instagram snapchat they program their software so dopamine is released in the brain that's because that's why cell phones are so habitual

to us we put this together and we get the so called habit loop EQ triggers the behavior behavior carried out rewarded in the end dopamine released because of that reward and dopamine we do it again the next time the queue comes around that's the habit loop and we go through this many many times and we have many habits and in the background all our habits run through this loop over and over again so let me give you a real life example make it a little more descriptive and lively an example from my life when I

got asked to give this talk I was at the same time riding my master thesis then I was researching in Harvard and I was working part-time for a startup company I was juggling with a lot of tasks and I had to be really productive when I was working there and there were so many distractions out there Facebook Instagram snapchat so what I needed was a behavior of working focused now I needed a cue I found an app on my phone called the forest app you plant a little seat on this app and when you don't

check your phone for a set amount of time you plant a tree on your phone so Mike you would be put my phone on flight mode and work focused plant a little tree now in the end I would actually grow a whole forest at the end of the day I would have 7 8 10 trees I called the whole thing my new deep work habits and it worked perfectly well I'm standing here and I hope I'm doing a fairly alright job ok so by going through this habit so many times for several I was actually

changing certain mechanisms and structures in my brain and to make this talk a little more scientific I think we should actually look at the human brain now this is the human brain and you can see it's fairly complex and if I was going to tell you that about here there is some change occurring when you're doing something over and over again it probably wouldn't really help so what I did was I simplified the whole thing just a little bit and I draw us through a scratch sketch of my brain now that's my brain and anding

is fairly simple now and after going through the deep work habit let's say for one or two weeks this is what you would see you would see a network of neurons that start being connected together and you can see that they are connected by pretty weak connections at the beginning now after several weeks of me repeating this behavior over and over again you would see that the connections are slowly getting thicker and stronger now after four or five six weeks of me repeating this behavior seven eight ten times every single day this would happen the

connections would even get stronger there would be a layer of fat wrapped around it which is called myelin now you might wonder what does that mean how does that help me why does my brain do this what you need to understand our brains are energy consumers they eat energy the human brain weighs 2% of our body weight but it consumes 20% of our whole energy supply and to make this consumption as efficient as possible our brain makes very important behaviors cost very little energy meaning the thicker the connections between neurons the less energy is needed

to perform a behavior and to activate the neurons in this case my brain has realized that my deep work habit was really important it needed to be repeated so many times meaning we shouldn't invest a lot of energy to go through the behavior now let's go back to the real human brain it has almost 100 billion neurons they are connected by tens of trillions of connections it's vastly complex but despite this complexity the simple principle I just described to you still applies whatever your daily behaviors are whatever you repeat over and over again that's what

the brain decides is important repetition is what the brain decides is important and that's crucial so let me be very clear here it doesn't matter if it's something that's good for you like exercising or whether it's something that's bad for you like smoking or whether it's something that's just needed like driving a car whenever there is a lot of repetition and dopamine released in the brain the brain decides oh this is pretty important we will need this the very very famous psychologist William James said more than 100 years ago make your nervous system your ally

instead of your enemy and he was talking about exactly this about this problem so how do we do this how can we make our brains our allies and don't let it become our enemies it's definitely not easy but I think we can make it simple and the first piece of advice I want to give you is to be aware and to explain what I mean by that I'm actually gonna play you a little a little clip from a podcast that I listened to recently and it's called the finding mastery podcast and the guest is dr.

Judson Brewer a psychologist from Yale University who studies addiction and how to use mindfulness training to treat addiction and addiction is actually nothing else than a very strong overexpression of a behavior that turns into something negative let's do so if we can see those processes in action this is where awareness comes in we can learn to change them if we can't see them like you say we're dead in the water so I think awareness is the basis for both learning good habits or quote-unquote good habits but also let go of habits that don't help us

and absolutely crucial what Judson says here you have to see what you do every day you got to observe you got to be honest with yourself take out a piece of paper and a pen whenever and just write down for one week everything you do and be honest with yourself be very detailed about the small behaviors that you have and then look at the list and be like do I want to be that person if that's what I want to do everyday and if that's not the case if you would like to change something on

it my second piece of advice is go small steps small steps will let you achieve big things it will maybe take a little longer but it's much more likely that you will keep moving the motto that we already talked about is just getting 1% better each day so be consistent start by reading for 5 minutes a day a difficult book meditate 3 minutes a day but keep going keep doing it for one week three weeks four weeks five weeks it will get more eventually at the beginning a new behavior will definitely feel like I really

hate this behavior they don't want to do this eventually will be something like okay I can tolerate it I can probably do this and eventually it will feel like okay I actually missed this when I don't do it and that's the point you want to get to that's when you have formed a new habit so let's talk about four questions that I really wanted to address in my talk today to you all of you guys the first one was what are habits well they are automated behaviors that we repeat over and over again in the

same environment and that run in our subconscious minds they are triggered by a cue and there are rewarded by some form of dopamine releasing reward why did I want to talk about habits and why do I think that there is a problem with habits well 40 to 45 percent of our daily lives that should say at all but the problem actually is that our brain can't differentiate between what's good for you what's bad for you and what's just new the brain just says oh repetition oh dopamine this is probably very important we should do this

over and over again that's not how it is though smoking or drinking a lot no no no can't be good how can we solve this I think awareness is the key to so many things Johannes just talked about it embodied cognition awareness what do you do every day what are your behaviors really the small things that you don't get you're not aware anymore because they are so subconscious so be aware and if you want to change something take very small steps something that might seem tiny in a day will turn into something bigger and real

change does take time so be patient and be consistent and where can solve in all this actually get us how powerful our habits okay well we've been here before and now we're back here changing my habits has not only changed what I do every single day it has played a big part in Who I am today so my change of habits has completely changed the course of my life and it has changed what I thought my boundaries what I thought I was capable of but I'm not standing up here today to tell you you need

this habit or this habit to achieve something alive or to become the person that you want to be because that differs from every single one of you but I am standing here today to tell you that you have to seek and you have to cultivate those habits that are good for you the ones that get you closer to your goals closer to who you want to be and be very very careful with the habits that are very bad for you the ones that take you further away from the person that you want to be and

from your goals your brain cannot differentiate between them so habit shape who you are habit shape what you will very likely keep on doing in the future so ask yourself what bad habits do you have and what good habits do you have what small step can you take today to change who you are so let me leave you with the words of a wise man we are what we repeatedly do excellence then is not an act but a habit thank you [Applause]