Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast with Dr. Kevin Payne, a better way of seeing the life that you want to live.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Welcome.
[00:00:10] Speaker C: First, my apologies because it's been a long time coming. We've been away too long. Things were going really well. All we do at yout Life Lived well was catching on. And then wham. I've lived with multiple sclerosis for decades. Just when I think I have it figured out, it pulls a nasty surprise. I hadn't had a new symptom for a long time, but this time I lost my voice. I was hit with a bout of dysphonia. My voice became weak, raspy, slurred, and difficult to hear, let alone understand.
It is hard to podcast, teach, and speak when you don't have a voice. Frankly, it was frustrating and discouraging. I felt like I couldn't catch a break. Multiple sclerosis never runs out of creative ways to screw with your life plans. I only had one choice. I had to go back to square one and rebuild my voice from scratch. I sort of disappeared from the world, but every day I added vocal exercises to all the rest I had to do. My voice is now a lot better than it was, but it's far from 100%. I don't know that I'll ever regain my singing voice, let alone my Irish tenor. I keep trying. For now. I've got things to do, so this voice will have to be good enough. So why, you might add, did I choose to kick off our resurrection season on a podcast about living well with chronic illness with an episode about behavioral change? Because a lot of our quality of life comes down to our behaviors. Because for many chronic illnesses, we engage in behaviors that worsen our conditions or at best, don't help us live better. Because there are life changes most of us can make to improve our odds of better quality life and health. But notice I have yet to say the word choice. Why? Because it's rarely that simple. In this episode, I'm going to unpack some of the many reasons why changing a behavior is so difficult. In reflecting on this episode, I was trying to decide what else I wanted to cram into an episode, introducing some of the basics about why behavior change can be so difficult and discouraging. And then, of course, what to do about that so you succeed. This might seem strange, but my first point of introduction is that we are a society of mind. Our brains and minds are made up of many little systems that are adapted for one specific job. Getting food, being safe, finding love, seeking social approval and so forth. You get the idea they're not full fledged personalities. But each one has a goal and a particular way of seeing and judging the world. Each one thinks it knows best. Each one has your best interests at heart within its narrow, biased view of things. And each one wants to be sure it gets listened to when it thinks it sees what's best. Each voice is a judger and a mover and can't see beyond its own limits. Some voices are really old in both evolutionary and biographical terms, and some are much newer. These agents don't tend to learn and grow up. We just add more voices as we live longer. Some are quicker, louder, more insistent, seeming more certain and unreadable. A lot of what your identity does is try to knit together a consistent story to keep some level of peace among these conflicting ambivalent demands. Your identity is also trying to figure out what they all want and why. Sometimes some of these inmates are so powerful that they're running your asylum for a while. And your identity tries to rationalize away what they've done after the fact. You must always remember that some part of your mind really does believe that the habit you want to extinguish is a pretty good idea. It just can't see the bigger picture, so you can't reason with it. You have to learn to speak its language. Keep this background in mind.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: I promise it will help you better.
[00:04:21] Speaker C: Understand difficulties you face with your own behavioral changes. In this episode, I'm sharing some important considerations about changing our behaviors that we don't normally hear. Most discussions of behavioral change are granular, microscopically hyper focused. They're so locked into the tiny behavior that they lose sight of the true scale of what's happening. Habits are embedded into our whole lives. They influence other parts of our lives. They form foundations for our experiences. They are connected, often surprisingly, in a complex web of association. The behavior we see and are often annoyed by is the tip of the iceberg. And so after this quick break, we'll dive into this episode on how to successfully change a behavior again. Thank you so much for joining us on our return.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: I'm Dr. Kevin Payne. Just jump with me into your life lived well.
Half of us now live with chronic illness.
Mine is multiple sclerosis.
It's your life. Live it well. Live a chronic diagnosis doesn't mean goodbye to the good life you wanted. You don't have to feel overwhelmed or hopeless. I'll show you how to save yourself. Take your first step at justjump life.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: It's the youe life lived well, podcast.
Don't forget to, like, share and subscribe.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: A few days ago, I was talking to a friend of mine from school. So years and years ago, I've known her for years on social media and she was deciding that in this new year she was not going to end her day with a glass of wine every evening. You know, we all have habits. Some of those habits are really useful and there are good reasons why habits stick around.
But habits are complex and it's probably better to illustrate it with a story. So I love my animals.
I've always had a dog.
I grew up with dogs. I've had them all my life. I love them. They're better people than most people. Part of my habit, deeply ingrained, is that the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is I feed the critters and I take the dog out. And this kick starts my entire process for the day. I take the dog out, feed the critters, make my coffee, make some breakfast, go down to the gym and lift weights and row, meditate for a little bit, clean up, sit down and write for a bit. Then I check my emails for the day. Okay, so it sets off this entire stream of behaviors in my morning and that's how I get things done. And it doesn't change. It literally does not change. That is seven days a week, every day for me. Holiday, weekday, doesn't matter. I always start my day that way. And then a couple years ago, when my previous Akita Nemo suddenly passed away, it was traumatic. Not just because he's my buddy and been my friend for almost 12 years, but it completely threw my morning routine into a tailspin because taking the dog out was the keystone habit that started that entire sequence. All kinds of things in my life just went completely pear shaped. And now I was stuck in this conundrum. I missed my routine, I missed the dog that I had. I wasn't emotionally ready to get another dog. And so for a while, I sort of lived in limbo, limping along, trying to get things done just because I didn't have that core part of my routine. And also the social support and the companionship and everything that comes with it. Habits are littered throughout our lives. And when we're trying to change behaviors, we're usually trying to change something that is habit. When it is habit, it's pushed down, down, down, down, down below our conscious. We don't even typically think about it until after we're doing it. What kinds of habits do we want to change? Usually it's A health related or normative behavior, something we think we should do or should not do. So it's related to food, exercise, maybe alcohol or smoking, or worry, anxiety, attitude toward life, those kinds of things. But just like the calendar, what we find is that should is a really weak hook to hang a life change on. We'll do something we like doing all the time. We will find any way we can possibly think of to get out of something we think we should do. And that's why we have the law, that's why we have religion. Those are massive social systems that add a whole lot of weight and reinforcement and motivation behind things you should do or shouldn't do. So if you're just sitting there by yourself thinking, you know, I really should change this one thing in my life, well, if that's what you're relying on, like a change in the schedule or the calendar, then that's probably why you're going to fail. Because you haven't provided enough motivation or weight behind what you're trying to do to give it that oomph. We're going to get into all these things that this behavior is actually doing because you can name this easily. You can say, oh, I want to weigh less, I want to lose 50 pounds, I want to run a half marathon. Okay, good. By naming it, you still don't really know how you're going to get there. You don't understand what the experience is going to be like. And you have no experience with actually doing it. A behavior that can look really tiny, like, oh, I'm going to take another sip of this drink or I'm going to eat another cupcake, or I'm going to sit on the couch for an hour instead of getting up and moving around or whatever it is that we're trying to do. It seems really small when we're living it. It's one little thing, one little thing, one little thing. And when we're living it, all we see is that tiny little micro perspective. When you're feeling rational and you have distance, you can say, oh, I really want to make this change in my life. And you have. This is one part of your identity with one kind of perspective that is not the same portion of your identity or the same perspective that's making those little tiny decisions day in and day out. Because those decisions are habituated, we default to when we're not thinking. And those happen before we engage our cognition. A behavior is not just about getting something done. It's not just functional. It's also what we'll Call conservative. What do I mean by that? We are resource misers. Both of these are just really polite social science ways of saying we're lazy. And I mean that in the nicest possible way because it really makes good sense. We have limited resources. We don't know what's coming up ahead of us. We do everything. Everything about humans is adapted to conserving what we have at this point and to protecting our resources. So we don't want to use a lot of energy. We don't want to overthink something, all of those things. So it's not about just getting something done. It's about doing it in what, to our perspective, based on our experience, seems like a reasonably efficient way of doing it. These behaviors are also emotional. And a lot of that has to do with. Even if it's something that we despise, even if with every bite of that cupcake you are berating yourself, it's still familiar. What we know is something that is cognitively safe, because even if it's bad, it's emotionally safe. Even if it's bad. We don't have to deal with all of the possible negative what ifs that could arise if it were something different. So our behaviors, they're functional, they're conservative, they're emotional. They're also rituals. Humans like rituals. I'm like, one of the least superstitious people you will ever meet. And yet there are certain rituals in my life. At the end of the night, I go through the house and I check things in a particular order. And if for some reason I get distracted or lose my place, I have to go back and start from the beginning. And you all know what I'm talking about. If you sit down to watch a game with your favorite sports team, then maybe you're wearing your lucky socks or something like that. And cognitively, we all know that that doesn't help. That doesn't matter, because the ritual is the important thing. And habits that we've already developed, some of these have years, they have decades behind them. And that gives it the weight of that familiarity and the ritual, that process that is so well ingrained that you don't even have to think about it. There's another thing that our behaviors are doing for us here, too. They're reinforcing our identities. When Nemo passed away, part of my identity is I'm a dog owner, and I do these dog owner kind of things. Or maybe I'm owned by my dog. I'm definitely owned by a cat. He's tiny, but he's got like a lot of catitude. And this was really difficult for me because a core part of my identity was being that guy. There are other things about me that are, that are ritual and habitual and part of my identity. I always drive a truck. Now I have no earthly reason to drive a truck. I don't work in a trade. It's really, really useful. Maybe half a dozen times a year, somehow I got into the habit of driving a truck. Anything else seems weird and I wouldn't even look at a non truck. It's part of my identity. Guy who jumps out of airplanes in 2020 I logged 370 skydives better than one a day. It is now weird for me when I have a day that I don't jump out of an airplane. It's part of my routine, it's part of my identity. All of these habits, even the ones that we don't like are doing all of this other work. Whether it's eating or movement or substances or emotional issues, whatever it is, they're all doing these other things as well. We have to really stop and think about our habits and we have to think what are these underlying values that they're providing for us? Because even if your highly developed forebrain is saying this is not something you should do, your inner cave children don't care. And I mean inner cave children, because efforts that are pushing you in the direction of those habits that you don't like, they're primal, they're older than we are as humans and they're not very well developed. We like to think of kids being these innocent little bundles of joy. And they are on the one hand. On the other hand, they're ignorant little self centered twits that we have to love through that stage. But the problem is when we grow up, we think that those parts have grown up. But that's not the way the brain or the mind works. We just add other layers on top of it. You and I and everybody else are still those little cave children. Those little cave children are deriving a great deal of safety and satisfaction and understanding and comfort in the world from these habits. And so you've got to keep them happy in some way so that you're not fighting them. You've got to get them on your side, so you've got to understand. So say for example, if we go back to my friend who was attempting to get rid of a glass of wine every night, well, you know, I said, okay, so let's think about what that wine is doing part of it is the ritual of decanting a bottle of wine and pouring it and sniffing it. It's that sensory experience.
So instead, make a cup of your favorite tea. We're fulfilling some of those other needs as well. It's got the sensory need and the ritual need and this place that is still being held in her life. And then savor it. Don't just have it distractedly. Do other things. Take the most from the experience. And then on some nights, have your. Your glass of wine, pour yourself just a little bit less and savor it as you go. It's not just a matter of making this one little change. It's a matter of that thing is in your life because it's fulfilling a lot of different needs at a lot of different levels. And you're going to have to maybe be a little more introspective than you might even be comfortable with to try to excavate what all those things are. Until you know those things, you don't know what has to go into constructing a new habit that can successfully replace the one that you've got. We think what we're trying to do is change one tiny little behavior. But it's like an iceberg. It's got all of this other stuff that's underneath the surface. And as we saw when my dog Nemo passed away, one of these is often connected to something else and something else, and it exists in a web in your life. It's very difficult to break just one strand of a web. What we're dealing with here is a lot bigger and more profound than what we thought. That leads me to my first admonition here. Show yourself some grace. This is a really difficult thing. And that difficult thing can be made easier if we do it the right way and if we give it the time and the patience that it actually deserves. Because all of these little habits that we're trying to change are the result of years and decades of repetition. They're things that you've done hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of times, or they wouldn't have gotten to the point where you're a little fed up with them. If it took all of that effort to build to begin with without you ever noticing in your life, it just kind of happened. It's like. And I swear this is true, once I gained 120 pounds, and I swear I didn't notice I'd added 20 inches to my waist, then I lost that weight, and I've kept it off for 20 years. These habits can be so big. And then you don't even notice until they've become that oppressive and they've become that awful. So give yourself a break. It's been happening for a long time. It took a long time to get to this point where it. It was a behavior that you found so detrimental to your life that you feel like you have to change it. Don't be ashamed that it snuck up on you like that. I mean, really, if anything, you can point to me and say, look, that idiot went up 20 inches on his waist size and didn't even notice. I swear I didn't. I thought, why am I so clumsy? Because that gain happened in like a year and a half. I was still allowing enough space for my old body to fit. There is nothing wrong with you if this has been going on for a long time and you've not done anything about it yet because it happens. We're human. Be kinder to yourself. Second thing that is important about why this is so tough to change is that your resolution is a goal, not a plan. You say, I'm going to run a half marathon, or I'm not going to eat cupcakes every night, or I'm not going to have wine every night, or I'm not going to worry as much as I do. Those are all great if that's what you feel like you need to do to improve your quality of life. But there's still not a plan. You've given yourself a goal. Your goal is probably really big and really distant from where you are right now. And so you've got to give yourself a map, a plan, a path for how to get there. You can't suddenly jump from here to there if what you're doing now is the result of months or years of practice and learning and reinforcement. You want to have a plan to, on average, take a little step toward that goal each day. And just don't care about the big picture. Okay? So at first you've got the big picture and it's like, here's where I want to be. And then you say, all right, that's a goal. Now I need a plan. And then forget the goal. You can pop up and check on it every once in a while. Are you getting a little closer to the goal? But this. At first, you are relearning something that you have worked on for a very long time. It's going to take a while and there's nothing wrong with you if it does. Gentle. Don't get caught up in that cycle of self blame. Decide it's hopeless and Then give up. That's often what we do because we don't accept that where we are right now is so far from where we want to be. And then the exciting thing about this is once you've started and started in the right way, and first, it's not even about being successful first, it's about building a place in your life for this new habit to grow. And you can't just cut something out of your life. Because we don't like the holes in our lives. You've got to consciously replace it with something else. So have the tea instead of the wine, or have a little less wine, or emphasize the ritual part of it and really enjoy it and savor it and emphasize the experience of it. Because we get so distracted. One of the reasons why we don't feel filled up in our lives is because we superficially exist through the experiences that we have. And we try to multitask five different things at once. And we suck at all of them when we do it. If you really focus on having the experience that's in front of you, you will find that it is much more fulfilling and much more successful. In my case, when Nemo passed away, it took a while, and then I finally got another Akita. And Sanmo is another great dog. Does he replace Nemo? No, Nemo didn't replace Mo before him. He does fill in a part of my routine and my existence. And all of that's really good. Now, is it the same as it was? No, because they have different dispositions and they're different creatures. We're developing our own versions of those same habits. It's not necessarily about replacing everything in the habit that you're trying to extinguish, but it's about capturing some of the values that you've found important in that process. There are 150 different ways to change a behavior. It's just kind of mind boggling. All of them are going to work for somebody, only some of them will work for you. What can we actually do? First, remember that this is deeply ingrained in your life. It's filling a place. If you want to change or eliminate a behavior, you're leaving a hole in your life. And all behavior changes are behavior substitutions. They're behavior replacements. If you don't have a plan for what you're going to put in that place, chances are it's not going to work. Because the thing that you're trying to replace is already doing its job. Especially for your cave children. When you're not paying attention, it's already functional. It's just not what your smarty pants forebrain is thinking you need to be doing. But it's working. You're still here. You're still getting through the day. We don't have to do it. Well, that's not. That's not an evolutionary criterion. We are adapted to do just enough. And that's what this is doing. You have to craft what's going in there as a better replacement. Ooh, look at this shiny little thing. Cavechild. You can have it if you just come with me. So that's first. Second is, remember all the other work that the behavior is doing. It's emotional, it's ritual, it's functional, it's identity. It's all of those things, right? It's filling your time in a particular way. Some of our habits may be distracting because they're keeping us from ruminating on something that's even deeper in our lives that we really don't want to deal with. And a lot of these habits we want to get rid of are probably contributing in that way. The third thing that you should keep in mind here is there are like 150 ways to change your behavior. What have you tried two or three ways? Come on, suck it up. This is really tough. Try number four. Try number five. Try number six. I know how frustrating and discouraging this gets. I get that. I've been there. I'm still there with some things. I'm always changing behaviors in my life. I'm always trying to improve something.
Some of them just don't want to go away. Right. Okay. You've got another thing to try. Think of it in terms of how are you going to fill the hole if you take that out of your life? How are you going to fill the hole that that leaves in your life in a way that doesn't have your subconscious, preconscious, unconscious searching for the thing that you took out Again, what's going to be valuable enough in all those different ways that you want to keep it instead? Because I will tell you what, if you are relying on willpower, you're screwed. Willpower is a short term tool of last resort, period. So you have got to think about the full extent of the habit and how it works. Think about why the habit exists. What is it doing in your life? How could part of you think that this is a good thing if it's something that your conscious mind is up here saying, oh, this is really bad and we really need to stop this? Well, some part of you is thinking oh, this is pretty cool. And I want to keep doing it. What is that part? And don't shame that part of you. Don't put them down for it. You got to treat all the parts in your identity as you would a cherished loved other, because they're all part of you and you're all stuck in there together. And you need to really make this work. Part of you thinks this is positive or they wouldn't keep doing it. So you've got to do that work and really understand what's it doing, what's it, why. Habits fill places in our lives. They exist on many levels. Those needs have to remain fulfilled if the change is going to stick. Because ultimately the behavior isn't the thing. It's the reward that you get from the behavior. It's the value that you get from the behavior that's driving this. What are you playing for here? What is the thing that part of you wants in your life that you're actually getting out of this? You've got a goal now. You need a path, my friend, with trying to reduce the amount of wine that she was consuming. It was restock your kitchen. That's a step in the path. Lay out the materials for preparing tea instead of your wine glasses and corkscrew and that sort of thing, and have that ready out so that's the easiest thing to get to. And then enjoy the process. Make it a ritual so that you are having that full, engaged behavioral experience and savor that. Be in that moment. Turn the TV off, maybe, maybe have some nice music that accompanies it. Whatever it is that makes it the most engaging experience that you can have. And we take that preparation, we make that path, and then we take really small steps. We take really, really small steps. If you're going to exercise, maybe you decide that you want to run every day, or, you know, in my case, I like to row instead of run. If you want to go out and run, say, well, okay, if you've been a couch potato for the last 20 years and now you suddenly want to go running, well, get up and walk for 60 seconds. Make your goals embarrassingly small. Why? Because embarrassingly small is something we can probably do from nothing. And that's where we're going from really, really small. We've got a lot of evidence that really, really, really, really, really, embarrassingly small. Humiliatingly small, you know, so small that you don't even know why you're doing it. Changes are important because the first thing we're doing is finding a place for the new habit in our lives. And then after we make a place, remember, this is a learning process. Then you're going to be bad for a while at this. Give yourself permission to suck. Give yourself permission to fail. That's okay. You may fail eight times, and then you succeed once and then you fail again. Okay, what does that mean? That means you did it 10 times and you succeeded once. That's one more success than you had in the previous 10 times when you filled your life with the behavior that you're trying to replace. That's really cool. And then pretty soon, maybe you're doing it two out of ten times, and then maybe three, and then maybe you slide back to two or one, and that's okay. But that's still more than what you were doing. That's still better. You'll get better in fits and starts. You'll head toward your goal in little tiny steps and you will slide back. And that's okay. Consistency comes last.
And we so often look to consistency as the first indicator that we're doing something right. It is the last thing that comes if you want to be in control. And if you were in the studio, as you could see, I'm doing that with air quotes. You must first be aware. And that's part of this process that we're talking about where you're becoming aware, you're making a place in your life. You gotta drop the idea of control. Control will fail. Because we already established way back at the beginning of this episode that your habit that looks like these tiny little behaviors are actually. That's the tip of an iceberg, and it's a web that's connected to all kinds of other things in your life. So control will fail. Instead, think influence. Every time I jump out of an airplane, I've got no control. The winds and the gravity are bigger than I am. Flat out, gravity is going to win every time. What I can do is I can learn to work with them, those forces so much bigger than myself. I can exert some influence and we can work together. You've got to have that attitude toward these habits and these resolutions and these goals. They're bigger than you. They really are. Because you are this little, tiny part of your mind. And there's all this other stuff going on in your subconscious and preconscious and unconscious, all that stuff happening. So give yourself some grace. You're gonna work on some little tiny thing that you want to change in your life, and you get to think about it more deeply. You're gonna take baby steps and you're not gonna be ashamed for just taking tiny little steps, because tiny little steps are really cool. And as you go on in this process, I swear, I swear by everything that there will be a point if you are just patient with yourself enough that your gains will start accelerating. And what you're experiencing then is that new habit being canalized in place of that old habit. But it takes a lot of effort to get there.
[00:34:18] Speaker C: And we'll be right back to wrap it up after the short pause.
[00:34:22] Speaker B: We all have challenges.
Mine is multiple sclerosis.
We each have this one life, and we didn't choose to be saddled with chronic illness. But there's a better way.
So I choose to just jump.
And you can too. It's your life. Live it well.
Justjump life.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast.
Don't forget to like, share and subscribe.
[00:35:09] Speaker C: When I re listened to this original episode, I was furiously scrawling notes for this closing segment. I ended up with five pages of my dense, indecipherable chicken scratches. I carefully looked through those notes, decided that they were mostly some pretty useful points, but that to do any of them justice would open a whole nother can of worms. And I promise that from now on, these episodes will at least try to be a little more compact. So for now, I'm gonna leave well enough alone. After all, this is just scratching the surface of a very big topic. It's a college course's worth of material I taught during my professor years. I still do whole seminars on personal change. I coach clients through the process, and I teach health, wellness and therapeutic professionals how to guide people better. So it's an important topic. I promise we'll return to, but in the meantime, I want to hear your questions and stories, connect with us on social media and let us know what you think. We'rellwell on most Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and others. You can find all the links on the homepage of yourlifelivedwell co. And that's a really good place to wrap for today. I am so glad to be back. I'm so grateful you've chosen to come along. Please share this with someone you know who could use it, and next week we'll be tackling another important issue, grief. Until then, go forth, be well, do well, and do good.
[00:36:45] Speaker A: If you've enjoyed today's topic and want to join the conversation with Dr. Kevin Payne, find your life lived well on all of your favorite social media sites, Patreon and of course, yourlifelivedwell co.
