Why Is It So Hard To Change A Habit?

why is it so hard to change a habit today we're going to talk about one concept in understanding how to change habits that if you understand you can use to your advantage if you're looking to change something about your life what's going on you guys i'm tyler your wandering therapist i'm out how i'm a little bit winded today i just climbed a mountain that i'm not used to climbing and i'm a little bit out of shape and so you have to bear with me on my breath but i wanted to talk a little bit with you guys today about habits and how to change habits one of the questions that i get so often in my practice is how do i change an unwanted behavior in my life and how come it's so hard when i have the motivation on the inside one day but i wake up the next morning i can't seem to start the thing that i said i was gonna start and this is something that's really common for all of us how many of you have started the new year's resolution before only to find out that if you're lucky you made it two weeks before you get went back the same way that you were living this is something that happens to everyone even the best of us and one of the things that we don't understand is understanding how habit works in our lives and how to start changing a habit and why it's so uncomfortable when we start to make those changes so when we start any type of a behavior it takes an insane amount of willpower to change that behavior we wake up with a limited amount of willpower every day and we get to use that willpower on all sorts of different things you're using your willpower when the alarm goes off and you decide to either stay in bed or get out of bed you use your willpower when you decide what you're going to wear for the day some people spend a lot of time on their willpower looking at themselves in the mirror deciding what they want to look like for the day every choice that we make takes a little bit of willpower it's a resource that gets drained from us and that's why for a lot of us at the end of the day when we're tired and we're worn out we don't seem to have a lot of willpower how many of you guys have woken up in the morning and said i was going to work out this morning but i'll just do it later tonight only to have later tonight come and realize that you don't have the motivation to go and get yourselves to actually do what you said you'd do that's because you've lost the willpower over the course course of your day making different decisions so i want to talk to you a little bit about how to use the willpower in a beneficial way that can help you to make changes in your life to introduce this i want to tell a little bit of a story about myself and what's happened in my life just over the last few months i i contracted covid back in november and my current my case of covid was actually a pretty significant case where i was sick for quite a long time for a few weeks and over the course of that few weeks i got out of all of my habits that i've been doing with all of my good health where i'd get up early and i go exercise and i do something spiritual for myself and in the process of contracting covet i also had this weird phenomena happen where i weighed about 190 pounds before covid and after covert i was down below 175 pounds so i lost 15 pounds which was actually kind of a blessing to me because i kind of want to be at about 180 or 185 myself the problem is i lost the weight in a really unhealthy way because i couldn't eat anything and i i hurt my health that way and then i got out of bad habits after i got better from kovid i ended up in the last three months gaining back over 30 pounds and just last week i tipped the scales at a whopping 207 pounds so you figure going from 175 to 207 that's probably not trending in the right direction so last night i made a commitment to myself i said it's been long enough i need to get my health back i've got to get back into the habits that i once had established and i need to i need to make the changes that i need to get myself back in shape so i committed that i was going to wake up at 5 30 in the morning i live right by the mountains so i was going to come to the mountains i was going to run over a mile to the canyon that i lived by and i was going to do the wim hof method in a creek an ice cold creek that's just running winter runoff right now the wim hof method is where you actually take cold showers or you sit in the cold for an extended period of time every day and then i was going to run back across the trail and come home and that would be my dailies for the day and last night i was so motivated and i was so pumped up and i was ready to go and this morning when my alarm clock went off at 5 30 what was the first thing went through my mind no way is this happening i would rather sleep for an hour and then i laid there but i was kind of awake just enough to know that i let myself down if i didn't get out of bed so i said i'll get out of bed and i'll at least go do the one mile hike so i got out of bed it's dark outside it's cold it's windy but i get to the trail and i come and i do one my one mile hike and as i'm doing my one mile hike in the back of my mind i'm thinking to myself tyler you committed to go get in that ice cold creek and sit there for a minute and i thought no i don't really need to do that like i've already got a good start i don't know if i need to do it all in one sitting and then i got over i looked over the edge of the creek and i stat sat there in my own thoughts in my own mind and i thought to myself well you're here you might as well at least see how cold it is so i took my shirt off and i took my shoes off and i walked down to the creek bottom and i dip my toes in and it was as cold as i expected it to be and instantly in my brain again what happened you've already done enough tyler it's the thought that counts you're fine you could probably just do it tomorrow you've already got a good start but i stood there and i thought you know what i'm already here i might as well follow through on what i said i would do so i plunged myself into the creek and i sat there for the bare minimum of 60 seconds just to say that i did it and then i hurried and scrambled out and i dried myself off and i put my clothes on and i ran the extra mile all the way back and got back to my house but by then i was actually feeling alive and invigorated and i thought to myself wow like i could do something else so i heard and jumped on the stationary bike and i did 20 minutes on the stationary bike and then i started listening to a book that i'm listening to right now to try to better myself and become a better therapist and all of a sudden this energy has kicked on to where now i'm ready to go and i'm playing with house money for the rest of the day i haven't even started my day at work yet and i'm already motivated and invigorated and ready to go and the principle here that we're talking about is called activation energy when we are trying to change a habit in our lives it's so difficult because we're not used to it because we're not used to it it feels extremely uncomfortable and it feels almost like it's double the effort just to get the motion going that's what activation energy is is it's learning to lean into the pocket of discomfort of the thing that we don't want to do in order to get ourselves moving but when we're finally moving that's when the motivation comes in i say this in some of my other videos but i believe this quote that says motivation comes after the action so if you're in the process of trying to make a change in your life and there's that difficult part that you're trying to get over understand that that difficult part is just a natural part of the process and if you know that this is just part of the process you can lean yourself into that pocket of discomfort and if you stay in that pocket of discomfort just long enough you'll allow yourself to get moving and once you're moving then that energy that you took to get started doesn't take quite as much to keep moving it's just like rolling a ball down a hill and once you get that that boulder off the top of the mountain and you start pushing it once it starts to move it gains its own momentum but we have to be the ones to get it moving so challenge to you guys today think about something in your life that you've been putting off a little bit of procrastination whether that's something with your physical health whether that's something in your relationships that you might need to go make a repair on but you're afraid to do it for whatever reason or you're worried about how the outcome is going to turn out maybe you want to start doing something like reading good books instead of watching tv take the challenge today to lean yourself into the discomfort and when it's uncomfortable remind yourself that this is part of the process you're leaning through the pocket of discomfort and you're allowing yourself to take the first step in establishing a new healthier pattern a new better you have a great day thank you so much for being here with me if you found this to be valuable for you please hit the like and subscribe button if you're facing particular struggles that you need help with or roadblocks that you're running into please submit a question i'd be happy to answer it for you [Music] you