Hello and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.

One of the most important skills a person can learn in life is how to regulate themselves. But self-regulation is one of those ideas that's easy

for people to misunderstand. It's not rigid emotional control. It's not cutting off our feelings. It's not

even just have more discipline. At its heart, self-regulation is flexibility, the ability to be with

what's happening right now, see all the choices in front of us, and select the ones that

line up with who we want to be. To help me talk about that, I'm joined today by a very special guest, Eric Zimmer. Eric is a behavior coach, the host of the One You Feed podcast, and the author of the new book, How a Little becomes a lot. So Eric, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me on, Forrest, it's always a pleasure to talk with you.

Likewise, it's been a while. You were on the show.

Years back. I showed up with Rick on your podcast as well. And I think I've already told you this, but back when I was starting the podcast in, I think it was like 2018 or 2019, it was something. I always forget what exactly we started because we had a year where we were just talking about our book resilient together. But the one you feed was one of the podcasts that I looked at as kind of an inspiration for being well. It was permanently in the various podcast charts. I was like, oh, yeah, if we could do something like that, that would be so cool. And so it's great to be able to do this with you today. Well, you have met the mark and exceeded it. You guys are great. Oh, thanks. Really appreciate it. And one of the things that was just in my head as I was reading through your new book is this frame of self-regulation, how you talk a lot in the book about selection. You know, at the very beginning, how do we figure out what matters to us? Then how do we execute on that? Like, how do I act when I've got these moments of decision where there's this thing that maybe I want right now, and then there's this thing that I know that I value in the future, and there's often a gap between those two things. And then there's a lot in there about how do I respond when life happens, you know, when you slip up, when you make mistakes, when you don't quite do things the way that you wanted to. And then in the second part of the book, you get into a lot more that's about how do you relate to all of that? How do you kind of regulate the relationship that you have with yourself, with the part of you that's doing all of that regulating. And so that was just in my

head as I was thinking about it. And there was something there that felt real and also lined up

a little bit with your own personal experience, which you talk about a lot, both in the book and

your podcast related to substance use and addiction. So I wanted to start by just running that by

you and what did you think about it.

I think it's a really interesting concept because we have this sense that we want to be robotic

in a sense. We want to make all the changes in life that we want. We want to do them perfectly.

And we want to not get off track

and we want our emotions not to drive the show. I think it's partially why we as a culture have been

so obsessed with this idea of habits. Because if we could make something habitual, it would just be

easy and we'd never have to think about it or struggle with it again.

Unfortunately, we are human beings and not robots, and so it doesn't really work that way.

And the kind of change that I'm interested in are the sort of changes that you make that ideally last a long time.

There are things like where your lifestyle shifts. Instead of being on a diet, you learn to eat well, and that becomes part of your life.

Instead of focusing on just publishing four pieces of content to Instagram each week, you're focusing on,

...