 The largest cause of premature death in the US is decisions we make that could be changed. 40% of premature deaths in this country are due to decisions we make about what to eat and drink, whether or not to be physically active, whether or not to be safe when we get into vehicles, whether or not to smoke. And that just blew my mind how big the opportunity was to make a positive impact if we could understand what it takes to create positive change. Cause we all know what we should be doing, but we aren't doing it. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. So the work I was doing on behavior change that came out of that initial interest in behavioral economics, I'd say it started out as casual and I was just studying all sorts of quirky things about human behavior without a super laser sharp focus on improving decisions. And then I had the good fortune to become an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania at the Wharton School where I still teach today. And Wharton has a strong relationship with the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. There's a lot of cross-pollination. There's a lot of neat work going on at the medical school related to improving decisions. So I was spending some time hanging out over there going to seminars, seeing what I could learn from these interesting doctors thinking about decision-making. And I went to one presentation that completely blew my mind and what blew my mind was a single graph. And that was a pie chart showing the fraction of premature death in the US that we can attribute to different causes. And I would have thought a lot of premature death was bad genetics, you're in the wrong environment so you get exposed to something yucky, accidents. Those are the kinds of things that loom large in my mind. But what I learned is actually the largest cause of premature death in the US is decisions we make that could be changed. 40% of premature deaths in this country are due to decisions we make about what to eat and drink, whether or not to be physically active, whether or not to be safe when we get into vehicles, whether or not to smoke. And that just blew my mind how big the opportunity was to make a positive impact if we could understand what it takes to create positive change. Because we all know what we should be doing but we aren't doing it. And so that graph kind of really changed my focus. I'd been casually studying behavior change and then I thought, oh my gosh, if I really apply myself to this problem and I wasn't just interested in behavior change when it comes to health, I was also interested in when it comes to savings, when it comes to educational outcomes, but it was obvious that in all these places it must accumulate in a similar way even though I've never seen the same graph. So that's what led me to the work that I now do with almost all of my time on behavior change. Well, your new book, How to Change, it's 273 pages. There's a ton of strategies in there and I think a lot of us when we think of science we look for the clearest answer. Just give me exactly what I need and the book is full of a lot of different strategies and there's really no one size fits all approach to changing. So as we go through some of these strategies how should our audience think about actually trying these and finding what works for them with all the strategies that science has shown us? Yeah, I love that you went there because I do think that one of the biggest mistakes people make when it comes to change and one of the things that frustrates me most about many books that have been written on this topic previously is the desire to get a single answer, a magical solution, a one size fits all. And it was just talking about how much I've been influenced by spending time around medical researchers and how that spurred my direction. I think we'd never make this mistake if we're thinking in medicine, right? You go to a doctor, you ask for a diagnosis, you expect to be given different treatments depending on what the diagnosis is to improve your health. And yet when it comes to making a change in your behavior, we don't have the same expectations. But what science really shows is we need to, we need to diagnose what is standing in our way. What is the specific obstacle or set that's preventing us from changing? Is it a lack of confidence in our ability to do so? Is it impulsivity? Is it that the temptations are not aligned with our long-term goals and we can't help but reach for what's tempting instead of what's good for us in that long term? Is it habits? Is it forgetfulness? What is the barrier? And once we understand, then actually science has great offerings. There's lots of evidence on what can help us but without that diagnosis phase, you might slap the wrong solution on for a problem you're not even up against and you're not gonna see results. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. And in all of this research, there's a lot of common knowledge that's debunked. A lot of things that were told about change that really aren't true. Is there anything that stands out to you that was surprising in the research that you did around change? I think maybe the most surprising finding I have stumbled on myself when it comes to change had to do with habits and a common bit of wisdom around how we should form them that my collaborators and I proved was not right. And by the way, I was completely taken in by the common wisdom. I started this research with that, the same misconception. The misconception that we debunked, let me start there, was that it would be ideal if you're forming a new habit to try to be really consistent about the time and place when you engage in that behavior if you wanna put it on sort of long-term autopilot. We thought that was a great idea. And there's lots of reasons we suspected this, right? There's evidence that for instance, the people who take their medication most regularly tend to do it in the same time and place each day. The people who exercise most regularly tend to do it at the same time most days. So that has led people to think, okay, consistency and location, that's really important to building habits. But we ran this experiment actually at Google with about 2,500 of their employees who wanted to form exercise habits. And we randomly assigned them to different experimental groups. And some people were encouraged with financial incentives to after picking an ideal time for them to go to the gym telling us when's the best window to our window each day to work out. With financial incentives, some of them were encouraged to always go at the same time for a month. This is sort of startup phase that we're focusing on here. Another group is encouraged to vary when they visit the gym. Sometimes go at their ideal time but also go at other times. And what we ended up with is two groups who ended up going to the gym at the same frequency for about a month, but one of those groups made 85% of their gym visits at the same time. And the other group due to our, you know, being randomly assigned to get different incentives from us only made about half their gym visits at the same time and they were mixing it up more. What we were interested in is what happened after this startup phase. We get out of their lives, we get out of their hair and we just watch. Who has formed a habit? Who keeps coming to the gym more consistently? And what was fascinating is it was actually the group that was less consistent during the startup phase and when they visited the gym. The group that we had rewarded for varying their activity more ended up having a more stable exercise habit. And when we dug into what was going on, we basically found that they'd built more flexible habits. The group that was always going to the gym at the same time did go a little bit more often at that magical time. But if they didn't go then, they didn't go at all after our program ended. Whereas the folks who had built some flexibility into their routines because sometimes they went to the gym at 7 a.m. and sometimes they went at three and sometimes they went at five. If something got in the way of doing it at that first best time, they still fit in a workout with a higher probability. And so that built more lasting change. And to me, that was a really important lesson because I was so focused on the importance of routine that I think I had neglected how important it is also to anticipate obstacles. That life does not just give you an easy ride when you wanna create change. And you need to be able to be flexible and pivot and get something done no matter what. And once that becomes your method, that actually creates more stable habit and more stable change. This becomes interesting at this point because now rather than the habit building, we're discussing the correlation between personality types and then the strategies that you're gonna use to build these habits. So did you notice in your research any other correlation between personality types and what habit buildings strategies work best? I should clarify, this isn't a personality type. This was a random assignment study and it's not correlation. We could actually establish a causal link between people who a coin flip led to exercise in a more flexible way, right? A coin flip led us to incentivize them to be exercising in a different way than others. And that coin flip is what determines in a causal chain that they end up with a more stable habit because we have randomly assigned them to just a different program, a program that emphasizes flexibility that was much more effective than a program that emphasized consistency. So I think actually that's one of the most interesting things is it wasn't that this only worked for a certain personality type. In this case, it was across the board. We didn't really see any groups for whom it was better to be rigid. For everyone that we could identify, you know, men, women, people who already had been exercising at a fairly high frequency versus those who were newbies to the gym, people who were more senior at Google and more junior, people who were older and younger, this pattern was there that it was better to build a habit using this flexible approach rather than a rigid approach. So I just wanted to clarify, in general, I actually would say, while I think it's important to tailor your solutions to your obstacles, and I've seen that time and again, mistakes made by individuals and organizations not thinking through what's the barrier here. It tends to be the case that it's not a personality type that predicts what the barrier is, but rather, if you look at a specific challenge someone is facing, that challenge, there will be more commonalities often across people than between them. So let me give you an example of the kind of challenge a lot of people when they face math and science problems in college lack confidence. So there are some subgroups that probably lack it even more than others maybe because of the stereotypes that they've been facing throughout their lives, but confidence is a really common barrier when it comes to performance and those really tough disciplines. Another commonality a lot of people, the reason they don't save is that they're more instantly gratifying things to spend their money on. And so in that case, a common barrier would be for many people that it's not enjoyable in the moment, it doesn't provide enough instant gratification. And those are really different barriers where you need different solutions. So, and I'm happy to start talking about those too, but I just wanna clarify, I don't think it's about personality type so much as it is about sort of what is the specific problem you're facing.