 If you wish to stick to your diet, you must first create a universe of habits. Hello and welcome to the Communist Manifesto for Personal Finance. The only program that teaches you how to seize your means of production, I'm Comrade Rourke. Behold the human brain, the organ that governs everything we have done or will ever do. Here we have the occipital lobe, which interprets vision so we can understand memes. Here is the cerebellum, the part of the brain that controls motor functions so we can re-educate fascists with our tanks. And here is the temporal lobe, the part of the brain that understands language so we can call each other f***ing on the internet. The brain is a miracle of evolution, marvelously sophisticated, full of lobes and cortexes that have built the glorious civilization we see today. Truly, the brain is something we should be proud of. What we shouldn't be proud of is our bad habits. If there is one fundamental conflict we will never escape in our lifetime, besides its class conflict. It is the battle between theory and praxis. As a communist, I know this conflict all too well. No, I don't. When I say there is a conflict between theory and praxis, I mean there is a disconnect between what we should do and what we actually do. We know staring at screens is bad for us, but after a stressful day we doom-scroll on our phone. We know we should eat fruits and vegetables, but we order pizza every night. We know we should save money for retirement, but Mark's dammit, I want that gold-plated clashnikov on Red Sea, the communist version of Etsy. Why do people behave irresponsibly? As arguably, the most intelligent species on the planet, shouldn't we base all of our decisions on reason and logic? Why do we fail to do this? The answer is literally at the center of our brain. With all the folds of gray matter, just above our brainstem sits a little ball of tissue called the basal ganglia. Chances are you've never heard of the basal ganglia, but it is a very important part of your brain, because it is the part of the brain that controls habit. A habit is a behavior repeated so often it becomes automatic, brushing our teeth, flipping on a light switch, spreading disinformation on the internet. All of these are habits. In 2006, researchers from Duke University found that 40% of our behavior is controlled by habits, meaning that for the rest of your life, you will perform two out of five actions without conscious thought. Now before all you dead poets jump on your desks and scream, Carpe diem! Understand this. The fact that habits control 40% of our behavior isn't a bad thing. In fact, habits are a very necessary function of our brains. Habits are how the brain clears space for higher functions. Do you remember when you first learned to tie your shoes? Probably not, but I'm betting for most of you it was mildly to moderately difficult. But after you did it a couple times, you could do it without any thought whatsoever, because tying your shoes became a habit. But imagine if every time you had to perform this simple task, you had to really think about it. What if you had to exert the same amount of brain power for tying your shoes as for the SATs? 20 years, bunny ears, Chris crossed a tree trying to catch me. Bunny ears, bunny ears, jumped into a hole, popped out the other side, beautiful and bold. Imagine if we had to critically think about every single tiny habit we perform throughout the day. The human species would go insane. More insane. In a sense, habits are the atoms of our behavior. They combine and form the patterns of our day to day life. Consider the act of driving. Driving is a multitude of habits combined into a single action, wearing a seat belt, checking your turn indicators, checking your mirrors. All of these are habits that make us successful drivers. Yet as we all know, there are good drivers and there are terrible drivers. This is the great drawback of habits, much like compound interest. Habits grow exponentially. If you perform healthy habits, they can become creators of wealth. But if you fall into unhealthy habits, they become destroyers of worlds. And here is lesson one. Before you try to improve yourself, understand habits. Every habit begins with a cue. The cue is a signal, or for you snowflake cuckolds, a trigger. Every day we are constantly bombarded by signals from our environment, and at least 40% of the time the basal ganglia automatically responds. When you enter a dark room, you turn on the light. When you hear the sound of a text, you pick up your phone. When someone cuts you off in traffic, you flip them the bird. These are all automatic responses to your environment. For all intents and purposes, the basal ganglia is a hard drive that stores away environmental information. So when you encounter a familiar cue, you automatically know how to respond. What's truly amazing is that the basal ganglia rarely forgets a cue. You've probably heard the phrase, like riding a bike, or muscle memory. All these phrases describe how when a person learns an action, like riding a bicycle, they can easily recall that action, even if it's been several years since they last did it. Because their muscles remember it. Really though, it's the basal ganglia that recalls action, and as long as your basal ganglia remains undamaged, it will keep remembering cues and forming new habits for the rest of your life. But this incredible ability is a double-edged sword because while the basal ganglia never forgets the cues for useful behaviors, like tying our shoes or subscribing to YouTube channels, it also never forgets the cues for unhealthy behaviors. If you've tried losing weight, you know what I mean. Say you've been on a diet for two weeks. You're exercising every day. You're eating kale. Things are going okay, but you're expending a lot of willpower to stick to your diet. But as long as you don't encounter any unhealthy foods, you should be able to control yourself. And then, **** Sharon brings chocolate cake to work so she can share it with everybody. Why did you do that, Sharon? Don't tell me you just wanted to do something nice for everybody. You did it so you could **** me over because you know I'm on a diet. Now, I have to eat all this cake just to make you happy. Are you happy now, Sharon? Are you eating well? Cues can have much more serious consequences. All too frequently, a person who is struggling with addiction will go to rehab and get clean, but then return to the same environment that triggered their addiction. Faced with the same cues, many people often relapse. Cues can also be a powerful tool for capitalism. You may have not heard of them until today, but I guarantee capitalist pigs have spent billions, if not trillions of dollars, engineering the perfect cues that will make you spend, spend, spend. An advertisement on your social media, a suggested video on YouTube, all of these are cues designed to modify your behavior. If you're living in post-pandemic times, visit your local grocery store and look at the shelves. Cues are the most expensive items are at eye level where they are easiest to see and grab, while the cheaper items are on the bottom shelves. Retailers often design their stores so the most profitable items are easiest to see. All of this brings us to lesson two. Half the battle is modifying your environment. No, no, no, I'm talking about the environment we actually live in. Oh, shut up. We're the most disciplined people in the world. Personally, I think of soldiers and nuns. Do soldiers and nuns have more willpower than the rest of us? No. They just live in tightly controlled environments designed to modify human behavior, barracks and convents. In one of these environments, individuals are subjected to rigorous discipline bordering on abuse, where every mistake is immediately corrected by screaming, physical conditioning, or even corporal punishment. And barracks can be pretty rough as well. Point is, highly motivated and disciplined people aren't genetic marvels who have unlimited amounts of willpower. They're just people who live in environments designed to cue a specific behavior. Which means you also can change your environment to make the cues for healthy habits obvious and the cues for unhealthy habits invisible. If you want to get into shape, you can remove all the sugar from your home. If you want to read more books, you can hide your smartphone. And if you want to save money, you can use the skim. Here at the CMPF, we often advocate using the skim. For those who haven't seen our episode on budgets, the skim has three steps. Number one, decide what percentage of your income you want to save. Number two, when paid, immediately put that amount into savings. Number three, spend the rest. Eventually, the skim is environment modification. If you set up automatic deposits into your retirement account, you no longer have to expend willpower to save money, because a computer does it for you. You have altered your environment so that less money is available for you to waste. Again, make the cues for healthy habits obvious and the cues for unhealthy habits invisible, because the wrong cue could lead to, why do people eat dessert? As far back as I can remember, there have been countless scientific studies and after school specials warning of the dangers of sugar. Yet millions of people still eat unhealthy amounts of sugar every day. If you're someone with a terrible sweet tooth, I'm not trying to bully you. In fact, I'm on your side, because at some point somebody probably asked you, Why did you eat all the ice cream? Don't you know that's bad for you? This is an asinine question. It's like asking fat people if they know they're fat. Yes, we know we're fat. We also know borscht is delicious and jogging is the devil. The issue is unhealthy behavior isn't an intelligence problem, it's an emotional one. The great misconception we have about our brain is that we think it's sole purpose is to think. But really, thinking is our brain's secondary function. The primary function is to feel. This is hard to comprehend because our brains are the center of our intelligence. But we forget they're also the centers of our emotions. Try to remember all the times you were scared or angry or sad. When you were in these extreme states of emotion, did you make the best choices 100% of the time? Oh, God. I'm going to guess no. The reason people behave foolishly when they're scared or angry is because their emotions take over their brain. When somebody is in a state of extreme emotion, a small part of the brain is thinking. I don't think this is a good idea. We'll probably regret this later. But the emotional part of the brain is screaming. Let's burn this mother f***er down. This is lesson three, emotion f***ing logic. In other words, your feelings don't care about facts. Look at dessert from a purely logical perspective. It's an extra meal we don't need to eat. The ingredients that make up dessert like bleached flour, refined sugar, and heavy cream are so unnecessary for our survival, they do more harm than good. But I'm betting most people who eat dessert don't do it because they rationally want all the health benefits of ice cream. When someone with a sweet tooth sees a queue that reminds them of dessert like an internet video where the host spends five minutes eating cake, they experience craving. Craving is the second part of a habit. It is the desire for the habit's reward. Do you remember the first time you had a slice of cake? Probably not. But I'm betting that most of you enjoyed the experience. Because with each bite of warm, moist, sweet, frosted goodness, your brain was releasing dopamine. Dopamine is literally the molecular component of craving. It is a neurotransmitter, a chemical messenger that tells our brain which actions are pleasurable. When somebody does something they enjoy like eating a piece of cake, your brain thinks This is an enjoyable experience. If I want to experience this feeling again, I need to repeat the action. Dopamine hardwires habits into our brain through emotion. So when you encounter a queue for that habit, your basal ganglia will automatically swing to action. The next time you see a piece of cake, your basal ganglia will remember the joy that first slice brought you and you will want to eat another piece to get the same feeling. Often, when we crave something, we don't crave the object itself. We crave the emotion attached to it. We don't eat a whole jar of cookies because we really want diabetes. We eat a whole jar of cookies to relieve our stress, especially if our job actively abuses us, which is the case for at least 20% of U.S. workers. Don't scroll through social media because we really want to read everybody's well thought out political opinions. We scroll through social media because we're bored and doom-scrolling passes the time. We don't spend thousands of dollars on useless crap because it makes the most sense economically. We spend thousands of dollars on useless crap because we saw an advertisement or social media post that made us feel insecure. But if we buy the new smartphone, we'll fill the gaping maw in our soul for at least 15 minutes. To break kayfabe for a moment, when I was $50,000 in debt and working 12-hour days at the post office, logically, I should have just eaten beans and rice. I would have gotten a complete protein and could cheaply purchase these items in bulk. But I didn't do that. Instead, I spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on fast food meals. When I did that knowing full well, it was a really dumb habit and very bad for my heart. But I didn't care. Every time I spent $15 on a fast food meal, I was feeding my emotions. I was trying to eat the pain away. Because emotion f***ing logic, people often give in to their emotional desires even if they know their actions are unhealthy. This brings us to the question, how do we quit unhealthy habits while still satisfying our emotional needs? Most experts recommend a golden rule for changing our behavior. To successfully quit an unhealthy habit, you must substitute it with a healthy one that satisfies the same emotional need. Now before we go on, I want to make a very important disclaimer. So important, I'm going to say it three times. Substitution is not a solution for addiction. Addiction is not a solution for addiction. Substitution is not a solution for addiction. Addiction is a very complicated and difficult subject and we do not claim to be experts on it in any way whatsoever. In fact, when researching this episode, every actual expert we read made it very clear that their methods were not alternatives for addiction treatment. If you are struggling with addiction or know someone who is struggling with addiction, it is imperative that you seek actual medical professionals or support groups devoted to treatment. And I know if you live in the United States, that's easier said than done. Now if you are trying to quit an unhealthy habit that isn't an addiction, there are many substitutes you can try. If you're bored but don't want to spend all your time scrolling on your phone, try reading a book instead. If you want to build up your self-esteem, try exercising for 15 minutes instead of going on a shopping spree. Instead of eating your feelings, try meditating. The beauty of substitution is that it's a very simple idea. So simple most people could figure it out if they took the time to think about their habits. In theory, it should be easy for all of us to discard unhealthy habits simply by substituting healthy ones. In theory. But this phrase in theory brings us back to the central problem. The great chasm between what we should do and what we actually do. Because in reality, replacing unhealthy habits is a difficult process. Often people fail to make new habits stick. In order to understand the mistakes people make and avoid those mistakes, we have to leave the world of theory. To fully understand habits, we must grapple with their praxis. To be continued. Produced in collaboration with Fort Collins Public Media, if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for future episodes, please email us at communistfinance at gmail.com. Or follow us on Instagram at comradroark. I hate you, challenge. I hate you. You lost.