The Key Strategies Of Behaviour Change - Dr Rangan Chatterjee (4K)

What's the problem with reliances?

The problem with reliances is that we are overly reliant on too many things in the outside world which we cannot control, and those reliances, Chris, are tying us down. So, as a medical doctor, one of my main interests is how do you help people make changes that actually last? Not changes for two or three weeks in January, or maybe January, February, March, but actually long-term transformational changes. And I've realized that one of the reasons why people cannot, or they struggle to make those long-term changes, is because they're too reliant on too many things. I'll give you an example, right? So, many people feel that they can only feel good and live the life that they want when everything around them goes right. Okay, there's no traffic, the emails are okay, the coffee is given to you by your barista just the way you like it. Okay, your boss treats you nicely. There's no traffic on the way home from work. If those conditions are met, we can feel calm and satisfied, and we can get on with our life and make the choices that we wanna make. But if those conditions are not met, then actually we start to struggle. We don't feel good in who we are. And what I've realized, Chris, over 23 years now of seeing patients, is that usually the behaviors that we are trying to avoid or cut down on are there for a very good reason, and they're usually there to help us neutralize the internal discomfort that we feel. So, the reason I think that most people cannot or struggle to make changes that last is because they're not understanding the role that those behaviors play in their life. They're too focused on the behavior, but I think we need to be focused on the energy behind the behavior.

How do you dig behind a behavior, given that it's quite hard to... We're not crystal balls to ourselves. We don't know why we do the things we do all the time.

Yeah. It's not as hard as, actually, it's not as hard as we might think, right? Because let's take something super, uh, common, and something that people are trying to reset their relationship all the time. Let's say alcohol, for example, right? So, what I see a lot of in medicine is us try to give public health advice to people saying, "Look, too much alcohol, or frankly, a little bit of alcohol is probably not helping you that much." And the way we'll try and facilitate change is by giving people more knowledge and more information, right? "You know, too much alcohol will damage your liver. It's not good for your weight. It's not good for your sleep architecture," or whatever it might be. And that can be helpful up to a point, but I submit that most people who are trying to cut back on alcohol or cut it out completely, and you can substitute alcohol for sugar, or online pornography, or gambling, or whatever you want basically, it's a behavior. What a lot of people who are trying to do that, they already know the damage that that is causing for them. Not everyone, but a lot of them do. What they're not understanding is why do they keep going to that behavior? So instead of every January, for example, buying the new book on the alcohol detox or the sugar detox, anyone, Chris, can stop a behavior for three or four weeks, and they think that they're getting somewhere. But they're often not getting somewhere because that behavior was there for a reason. So very simply, if you're drinking alcohol to manage the stress in your life, which many people do, then you can white-knuckle it for four weeks and quit, but usually, you'll end up back to where you were unless one of two things has happened. Either the stress in your life has to come down, so you have less of a need, therefore, for the alcohol, or you need to find an alternative behavior to alcohol to manage the stress. When I put it like that, it sounds really, really simple and obvious-