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

Steven Bartlett (0:02)

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 in 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 form habits, especially during the lockdown when so much of our lives was our habits were broken, our cycles were broken because we were all trapped in our houses. So whether we 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?

Steve Peters (1:12)

I mean, there's a lot of research on this and 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 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 were the 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 it. So what you do is you walk in and think, what habit would you like? And the belief then is, if I go in mourning, they could leave me. This could damage. Now that's gonna 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 gonna mourn. 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 a computer's program 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 gonna decide and whether they're there the next night. So you start to recognize that being someone who mourns all the time or complains when you first meet someone isn't ideal. So we have these unconscious habits, which we're not aware of, which we can bring to conscious by starting to look at our life and say, is this how we want to be? But you have to ask the question. Oh, 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 habits are 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 this? How are we going to manage this drive? 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. And suddenly your chimp generalizes, all women are like this. And you hear a guy saying this. And clearly that's so untrue. 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 behavior, 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 analyze 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, can I make decisions from a more rational basis, then just keep deciding on an emotional basis.