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

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this one, I’m taking a section from Steve Peters, a doctor, psychiatrist, professor and mental coach for the world's top athletes and business leaders. Here he shares his wisdom about how we can form healthy habits and ways in which to maintain them. He explains that habits can be formed both consciously, based on our belief system, and unconsciously, the ones we aren’t knowingly thinking about. When we look to battle those good habits from the bad, it is not straightforward, and they need to be subdivided. Steve is the author of “The Chimp Paradox”, which has sold millions of copies worldwide and put forward the groundbreaking ‘Chimp model’ for understanding how our brains work. The model focuses on the 3 parts of the brain and he talks briefly about one of them here. The ‘Chimp’ which is our desire to be irrational, emotional, impulsive and short-term. Basing habits on our beliefs and experiences is letting the Chimp make those decisions, and sometimes we need to connect the other parts of our brain; the ‘Human’ and the ‘Computer’ to manage and control the interaction they have with habits. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/wyvTqTz7sob Steve - https://chimpmanagement.com/professor-steve-peters/ Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Steven Bartlett?

  Steve's invented this groundbreaking concept called the chimp model. And it focuses on how there's these kind of three parts to our brain. The first part is called the chimp, which is our sort of desire to be impulsive and irrational and emotional and short term. The second part is what he calls the human, which is logical and rational and thinks in terms of facts and thinks things through in the long term. And the third part is what he calls the computer, which is our set of core values and beliefs. Steve's work focuses on how we can manage and control the interaction between these three parts of our brain. One of the things you talk about extensively is about forming habits. And a lot of people in my life recently, including myself, have tried to be, tried to form habits, especially during the lockdown, when so much of our lives was, our habits

• 0:48Steven Bartlett?

  were broken, our cycles were broken because we were all trapped in our houses. So whether we, you know, had formed a habit of going to the Starbucks, then the gym in the morning or whatever, we had our habits broken. So I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could form healthier habits in my life. One of them was working out every day. But I, and one of the sort of, I guess, popular narratives is that if you do something for 21 days, it becomes a habit. What is the truth about habits and how we form them?

• 1:12Steve Peters?

  I mean, there's a lot of research on this and they're a little bit contradictory. So read and believe what you like. But I mean, the general fail is that if you look at why we form a habit, it's either consciously done with a belief system under, or it's unconsciously done, we aren't thinking about it. A common one, for example, a poor habit is, and I use this a lot when I do keynote speeches, to say to people, when you go home, if you're with a partner that you love, how do you present to them when you arrive? And it's amazing how most people mourn, which, you know, they've not thought that what, they don't want to see somebody mourning. You don't meet someone and say, you could have this every day of your life, I'll come back and see you, you know? So what you do is you walk in and think, what habit would you like?

• 1:57Steve Peters?

  And the belief then is, if I go in mourning, they could leave me. Yeah. This could damage, now that's going to shift your habit. So once you've turned the belief around this, you're unconsciously doing it without thinking, this is damaging. And so if you actually sit down and work that out and put it in your computer system, then when the chimp gets through the door, it's not going to moan. Because what the chimp has to do scientifically is consult the computer before it does anything. It all happens in a tiny fraction of a second. But it's the computer's programmed to say, don't forget. It will unconsciously remind the chimp. You need to be in a good place when you walk in because that's what they're going to decide on whether they're there the next night. So you start to recognize that being someone who moans all the time or complains when you first meet someone isn't ideal.

• 2:43Steve Peters?

  So we have these unconscious habits which we're not aware of, which we can bring to conscious by start to look at our life and say, is this how I want to be? But you have to ask the question. Or we have habits like we eat too much. Now, these are different because the first one wasn't based on a drive. It's just based on a behavior that we've got into a pattern. The eating habit's much more complex because now you've got not only a behavior that we've got into like eating too much or eating the wrong things. We're driven with an incredibly powerful survival drive to eat. So now we have to deal with two aspects. One is what is it the habit that we want to get? And what are the beliefs we're going to underpin with it? And how are we going to manage this drive?

• 3:27Steve Peters?

  How are we going to fulfill the drive in a way that our chimp's happy? That it's got its drive fulfilled and we're happy. So now you really have to look at that. So that's a big battle. That's not an easy battle, but it can be won. It can be won. So again, habits are not straightforward. They need to be subdivided and say, let's look at unconscious, conscious, whether they're linked to drives or they're linked to some really bad experience. Sometimes we have a habit because we've got a bad experience. It's like you explained that you went through a really bad time with this girl. If it got repeated, God forbid, if it got repeated three or four times, you can see how your habit would be to distrust. And it would become a habit because your belief is that these women are not trustworthy.

• 4:12Steve Peters?

  And suddenly your generalizes, all women are like this. And you hear a guy saying this and clearly that's so untrue, you know? And so with you, I'd be looking and saying, when you meet this, what are you looking for in the girl? Are you looking at physical looks? Are you looking at, do they make me laugh? Or are you looking at their values? So we can actually start looking at how you're choosing your partners. And that might help you to avoid the behaviour, the habit of picking up what you might then define as the wrong person and worse even to blame yourself then. Instead of saying, right, let's analyse this. So again, there's habits there where it's based on your belief of what you've experienced. Or you're letting your chimp make decisions instead of your human saying, hang on,

• 4:56Steve Peters?

  can I make decisions from a more rational basis than just keep deciding on an emotional basis?