Dr. BJ Fogg
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
If you focus on new habits that you want, there's a way to design them into your life. And that's what finding habits is all about. That's what the book's all about. And so the book is doing two things at once. Number one, it's presenting an absolutely new way of thinking about how behavior works, a new model and a new set of models, which I think is really groundbreaking.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
A behavior model is a big deal. And then it's also telling people how to apply this in a really easy way in their everyday lives. So in writing the book, I'm starting to do both at once, then I hope that you see.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Yeah. Well, right now, there are two medical doctors who are part of my boot camp this month. And one of them is from Ireland. And he, after class three, I think, or after class two, he emailed me and said, BJ, I now see for the last 20 years, I've been doing this exactly wrong. And I felt kind of bad.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
but also he is creating a behavior change program for his patients and other physicians, so now he can do it right. One of the systematic problems is focusing people or yourself on something abstract, like, oh, I got to exercise. That's an abstract thing. It's not a behavior. We'll often call those things behaviors. They're abstractions.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And then the next thing that goes wrong is people are saying, I just need to motivate myself. That combination of trying to motivate yourself towards something abstract does not work very well at all. Whether it's your own behavior or somebody else's.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
In fact, with kind of an oversimplification, in my work in Tiny Habits, rather than motivating the abstraction, make something very specific really easy. So I do three jumping jacks, right? Yep. They make it really easy to do. And so you're not worried about motivation and you know exactly what the behavior is.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
One of the differences between, and I think this doctor, this would be one of the issues, an expert, when you say, you know, eat more leafy grains, an expert in his or her mind knows what that means. But an amateur might go, I don't know what that means. Grass. The grass.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So experts that are prescribing, like, hey, you need to change your diet, you need more leaky grains, they're not understanding that perhaps their patients are totally confused. So instead, they need to be very, very specific. Here's what I want you to do. I would eat bok choy and eat broccoli. Have 17 leaves of kale. Yes, every evening and steam it or saute it. Put it this way, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So really it's what is exactly the meat of the yard and here's how to do it. And that is a much more successful approach.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
You know, I don't know if you want to go that. I'm going to go here and you can change it if you want, but. Just everyday people don't even have the right guidance. I mean, for most people, if I were to walk out on the street and say, oh, how do you lose weight? I would wager 90% plus would say, oh, I just have to exercise more. And that's, you know, that's what.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Which is actually a false idea, right? Right. And so, so people, so they're like, oh, if I only could get myself to exercise more, I could lose weight. Well, they're headed in the wrong direction. They haven't been given the right behavior, which is mostly nutrition behaviors, as you know, and the right way to make those into habits.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So there is, and why that idea that exercise is the key to weight loss? Why that keeps living on and on? I'll tell you why. Why is that so persistent?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
I didn't understand that's where everyday people are until about coaching with probably 2,000 or 3,000 people. This would be 2011. You're a slow learner. I was in my little bubble of Stanford and high achievers and CrossFit type people. I'm in a very selective kind of world.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And I'm coaching, you know, 300 people a week about in tiny habits through email, but there's email exchanges and about two, 3000 people. And somebody wrote me and she said, Oh my gosh, BJ, thanks to you. I now see that I've endured a lifetime of self trash talk and tiny habits. What we do is we teach people to say good for me and feel successful and raise it. And so she wrote to thank me.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
She says, this, this bam has changed my life. And I paused. This was a huge moment for me, Mark. It's like, that is where people are really at. And then I started reading all the emails and my interactions with them were different. And I was like, people, they have so many ways to say, I did a bad job. I'm insufficient. I lack willpower.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And that's why in the book when I say that, that was in some ways a little bit risky because it's just inviting a lot of criticism, but it's true and it's accurate. And so to say, look, if you haven't changed, it's not your fault. You just didn't have the right way to do it yet. That's right. Now you do. Welcome to tiny habits. Now you do. Now you can do it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And it's not about willpower or discipline. It's about design. You design things. new habits into your life. You don't force them or you don't use just plan, motivation or willpower. It's a design challenge, not a test of somebody's character.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Well, first, we talked about the idea of people even focusing on the wrong thing. Like if your aspiration is weight loss, and you think it's about walking on the treadmill at the gym, focused on the wrong behavior. So that's one of the systematic problems. Another one of the problems is the idea that you set this really lofty goal
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And then you just have to keep yourself motivated toward that lofty goal. Now, in my work, I don't use the word goal. In fact, in the book, I talk about why I think it's a bad idea to use that word. Are you going to put a whole bunch of goal-setting people out of business?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Not totally as opposed to the goal thing, but it's not a winning strategy. The fact that I've even written down a goal and I'm like, now I'm going to just keep myself motivated toward this goal. It's hard to do. you're not facing the reality that your motivation is going to shift over time. The idea, and we can come back to that if you want, and
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So the goal setting, people don't get super upset with me. I break it into aspirations and outcomes. So there's a type of goal that's an aspiration. There's a type of goal that's an outcome. So rather than using an ambiguous word, because I'm really big on precision, let's use, when it's an aspiration, like earlier, Mark, you said you wanted to get stronger. That's an aspiration.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And then you find behaviors, specific behaviors that will take you there. An outcome might be somebody might say, wow, I want to lose 20 pounds. That's an outcome. Then you find specific behaviors that will take you there. So in either case, you start with what you want to achieve. This is part of the system in the book.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And then you figure out what behaviors are the right ones for you to take you there. So you don't guess at the behaviors. There's a way to figure out one of the best behaviors for you. You go to that aspiration or the outcome. And I'll go to a slightly different spot. Another one of the misleading ideas is that repetition creates the habit.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
So if you can just keep yourself doing the behavior, it'll become a habit. And that's not true at all when you look at what the research. So the people that are advocating this, and there are very popular books, and there's a lot of the culture that's saying repetition creates habits. That's not true. You're being misled by those books and that thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
When you look at the research that most people cite, It shows that repetition correlates the strength of habit. It gives no evidence whatsoever that repetition causes the habit to form. So the correction in my book, what I try to make very clear is it's emotions that create the habits. So that's one of the myths, myth busters in the book. Other things include like you have to set a goal.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Well, I have quite a long, so I'm training the tiny habits coach as we go through this thoroughly. And the reason, I mean, the question really is why do people think it creates habit change, right? That's really the question. Why do people think that? Well, because they've been told that for years. So when you look at the research, it does not say that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Um, so I gave you the example, like for me, just to be a little devil's advocate.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And I don't have that mental resistance that I have. Yeah. And the way to think about that, it wasn't a function of repetition. It was a function of your feeling successful. You're seeing progress, right? Okay. So notice it resulted, like if you, had to do the swimming, and you never felt successful, you would not have, eventually once you failed, you would not have created a habit out of that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Okay, all right. So people are, first they're misleading you in these books and blogs, but when people think that repetition is the key to creating habits, They think, oh, I've got a, and one of the memes is that 66 days, not true, but that's what's out there. So they think, okay, in order to create an exercise habit, I have to repeat it 66 days. Oh, I don't have time for that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
I'm going to wait till I have fun. They look at behavior changes, something to dread, something to endure, something that might be painful. And none of this is helpful. Instead, you can change your behavior by feeling like happy and joyous. Now, when you look at what has worked, Like your example is a great one, Mark.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
When it has worked well, it will always be true that there was an emotional component where you felt more successful or it relieved some negative emotion. Yeah, or pain or whatever. That's what it is. And so in Tiny Habits, we don't leave that to chance. I mean, I have a chapter that's like, emotion's great habits. And then we give...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
In the book, specific techniques and the coaches that coach people in tiny habits help you find exactly what techniques do you use so you can feel that emotion at exactly the right times to wire in habits really, really quickly. And the better you are at feeling that emotion, that positive emotion on demand, the better you will be at wiring and habits. So that's an interesting piece.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Yeah. Yeah, well, let me sketch it out. So when I say behavior, I mean all types of behavior. Habit is a subset. So within, like if I were drawing a diagram, within the big circle, that is behavior. Motivational ability prompt applies to all behavior types. It applies to habits. It applies to stopping behaviors. It applies to one-time behaviors.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
It applies to temporary behaviors like taking an antibiotic. Then when you get down to the subset of habits, those are behaviors you do quite automatically. Those are different than the other types of behaviors. What creates the automaticity in the emotion, the positive feedback, the emotion. I have people focus on the emotion of success, the feeling of success.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
That's what makes that behavior automatic and posted in the category of what we call habit. Powerful.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Tell us more how that happens. I can't say this is the magic, because I'm a scientist, but this is awesome. What happens, and we see this in our data week after week, is when people do something small and feel successful about it, like they're flossing one tooth or doing two push-ups or steaming broccoli for dinner, that feeling of success also changes how they think about themselves.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Oh, I'm the kind of person who can take care of my teeth. I'm the kind of person that eats steamed vegetables. So when they don't change their identity by like going and listen to a motivational talk, at least in tiny habits, they change because they see evidence. That they are changing and seeing the effects of that. And that identity shift can happen really quickly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
We see a lot of evidence of that within five days. And it seems to be a function of people seeing evidence and feeling successful in their quest to change. So it's And it doesn't have to be like running a marathon. So it's like a feedback loop. It's a positive feedback loop.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
Yeah, and when people acknowledge that and see that, and part of the program and part of the book is like, hey, look, recognize you are succeeding. I might be tiny, but you're still changing. That then shifts people away from the self-trash talk, the thinking that they don't have enough willpower to seeing themselves in a whole new light.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And the phrase that come back to us is like, now see I'm the kind of person you can change, I can follow through, I can achieve whatever goal I have, and it goes on and on. So it's the positive feedback loop. Yeah, yeah. And I don't talk about it exactly in those words as positive feedback, but that's exactly what it is. I mean, we talk about it as emotions.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Why You Know What to Do, But Still Don’t Do It
And positive feedback that affirms you're succeeding. So it's the feeling of success that wires in the habit and also motivates you to continue. So it has those two functions.