Why New Habits Have to Be Tiny (w/ Dr. BJ Fogg) and Why Human Infants Are Late Bloomers
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 964 Ratings
🗓️ 30 July 2020
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Stanford behavior scientist Dr. BJ Fogg, author of “Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything,” explains why the best new habits are tiny ones. Then, learn why human infants are late bloomers compared to other baby animals.
More from Dr. BJ Fogg, Stanford behavior scientist:
- Pick up “Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything” on Amazon https://amazon.com
- Official website https://www.bjfogg.com/
- Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University https://habits.stanford.edu/
- Follow @bjfogg on Twitter https://twitter.com/bjfogg
- Hear us discuss the Fogg Method on a previous episode of Curiosity Daily: https://curiositydaily.com/is-bee-venom-therapy-safe-plus-teeth-cleaning-history-and-how-to-change-bad-habits/
Babies are all born prematurely - Compared to Other Baby Animals, Human Infants Are Late Bloomers by Ashley Hamer
- Dunsworth, H. M., Warrener, A. G., Deacon, T., Ellison, P. T., & Pontzer, H. (2012). Metabolic hypothesis for human altriciality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(38), 15212–15216. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1205282109
- Warrener, A. G., Lewton, K. L., Pontzer, H., & Lieberman, D. E. (2015). A Wider Pelvis Does Not Increase Locomotor Cost in Humans, with Implications for the Evolution of Childbirth. PLOS ONE, 10(3), e0118903. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0118903
- Pappas, S. (2012, August 27). Why Pregnancy Really Lasts 9 Months. Livescience.com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/22715-pregnancy-length-baby-size.html
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from |
| 0:04.7 | Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about why the |
| 0:09.0 | best new habits are tiny ones with help from Stanford behavior scientists Dr. |
| 0:13.4 | B.J. Fogg. Then you learn why human babies are late bloomers |
| 0:17.6 | compared to other baby animals. |
| 0:19.2 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:21.2 | Yesterday on curiosity daily you learned how to choose new |
| 0:24.8 | habits that you might actually stick with and today Stanford behavior scientist |
| 0:29.2 | Dr. B.J. Fogg is back to explain why those habits should be tiny. |
| 0:34.7 | Seemed like a pretty good question to ask, |
| 0:36.5 | since his newest book is called Tiny Habits, |
| 0:39.4 | the small changes that change everything. |
| 0:42.0 | Here's our conversation. |
| 0:43.0 | The best way to start habits and the only reliable way is to start them really, really small. |
| 0:49.8 | And the reason for that, there's various reasons, but the main one and the one that led me to develop the method in 2010 |
| 0:57.0 | was that if a behavior is really, really easy to do, then you don't need lots of motivation to do it. So for example, you |
| 1:07.3 | know, meditating for three breaths as opposed to 30 minutes, three brass doesn't take a lot of motivation, doing two push-ups rather than 20. |
| 1:16.9 | And the reason you don't want to rely on lots of motivation is because as human beings, our motivation is not stable and it's not reliable, it goes up and down. |
| 1:27.3 | And if you set yourself up for something big and hard, so big habits rather than tiny habits, you're human and your motivation is going to sag and guess what you can't do the big one but you can do the tiny one and so tiny habits is a super reliable way to create habits. Now you can always do more if you want to. |
| 1:46.9 | You can do more than three breaths. But the minimum requirement, I don't even call it a requirement, but the baseline is just take those three calming breaths. |
| 1:57.0 | Bam, you did the habit. If you want to do more great, that's extra credit. |
| 2:01.0 | And surprisingly enough to people who love life hacks like I do and like you all is you don't raise the bar on yourself over time so even though you're succeeding on the pushups to pushups you don't on your |
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