#spilled truth

[colepaxton]

The science of habits will make you question everything you thought you knew!!

— Habits are not stored in the prefrontal cortex where conscious decisions happen. They are stored in the basal ganglia and run automatically without requiring attention or willpower. This is why changing habits feels like fighting yourself.

— Once a habit is formed it is never fully deleted. The neural pathway remains. This is why recovered addicts remain vulnerable to environmental cues associated with past behavior even after decades of abstinence.

— The habit loop, cue, routine, reward, runs automatically the moment the cue is encountered. Changing a habit requires keeping the cue and the reward and changing only the routine. This is why cold turkey is so difficult and substitution often works better.

— Willpower depletion is real. Using self-control in one domain reduces its availability for other domains in the same period. The person who resists dessert may be less patient afterward. Habits bypass this system entirely.

— The first three days of a new behavior are the hardest because the neural pathway hasn't been myelinated enough to feel automatic yet. Most people quit here and conclude they're not capable of the habit. They were just at the hardest point.

— Small habits compound over time in ways that feel invisible until they become unmistakable. The math of consistent small behaviors over long periods consistently surprises people who only evaluate progress in the short term.

— Identity-based habits, I am someone who exercises, are more durable than outcome-based habits, I want to lose weight, because the identity survives the achievement and provides ongoing motivation.

— Environmental design is more powerful than willpower for habit maintenance. What surrounds you predicts your behavior more accurately than your intentions. The people who sustain habits have almost always changed their environment.

[colepaxton]

Best Sleep Advice!!!

❙ Knowing you should sleep eight hours and actually protecting eight hours are two different skills. The second one requires decisions made before you're tired.

❙ The reason you feel exhausted isn't always about the hours. It's the quality of what happens in those hours when your phone is still in the room and your mind is still running the day.

❙ Sleep debt expands to fill the cognitive capacity you give it. Most people functioning on six hours have normalized a level of impairment they've stopped noticing.

❙ Using stimulation to push through tiredness in the evening is an expensive habit that is solving nothing and costing you tomorrow's mood, patience, and decision-making.

❙ The people who seem to have more hours in the day have often just protected their mornings, which starts with protecting their nights. The morning routine everyone wants begins the night before.

❙ Investing in better sleep is the one health intervention that improves everything else simultaneously. Not one of the things. Everything.

❙ The phone is not the problem. The accessibility of the phone at 11pm is the problem. Remove the accessibility and the problem removes itself.

❙ Most sleep problems are lifestyle problems in disguise. The caffeine timing, the light exposure, the irregular schedule. Fix the inputs before you treat it as a condition.

[colepaxton]

How To Actually Stop Scrolling So Much!!

⎪Track how much time you're actually spending on your phone for one week without changing anything first. The data is almost always more confronting than the estimate. Start with the honest number before you try to change it.

⎪Put the phone in a different room when you're doing something that matters. Not face down next to you. Out of the room. The presence of it reduces your cognitive capacity even when you're not using it. Remove the presence.

⎪Replace the scroll with something that requires your hands. Cooking, drawing, writing, stretching, building something. The reach for the phone fills the space where nothing else has been placed. Place something else.

⎪Identify what you're actually trying to get when you pick it up. Connection. Stimulation. Distraction from discomfort. Knowing what the phone is substituting for tells you what to actually address.

⎪Make the first thirty minutes of your morning and the last thirty minutes before sleep phone-free. Two things improve simultaneously. The morning and the sleep. Both are worth it.

⎪Unfollow accounts that consistently make you feel worse about your own life. Your feed is an environment. Environments shape your mood and your self-perception. You are allowed to design yours.

[colepaxton]

How To Actually Have A Better Morning!!

〰 Protect the first thirty minutes before anything requires something of you. Before the messages. Before the email. Before the news. That window, kept consistently for yourself, changes the quality of everything that follows it.

〰 Drink water before anything else. Before coffee, before food, before you look at anything. Your body has been without it for hours. Give it what it needs first before you make demands of it.

〰 Move your body in some way before the day claims you. Even five minutes. Ten minutes of stretching on the floor counts. The body that has been moved thinks differently from the body that hasn't been moved since yesterday.

〰 Stop checking your phone for the first ten minutes after waking. The first input of the day sets something for the hours that follow. Choose what sets it instead of defaulting.

〰 Do one thing for yourself in the morning that isn't functional. The specific music. The coffee made properly and tasted. The five minutes outside. Something that signals the day has begun as yours before it becomes everyone else's.

〰 Give yourself more time than you think you need. The morning that is chronically rushed is not a morning that belongs to you. Leave earlier, wake up earlier, schedule less into the pre-work hours. The morning needs space to actually be a morning.

[colepaxton]

How to stop overthinking!!

〰 Recognize that overthinking is almost never thinking. It is anxiety wearing the costume of thoroughness. Real thinking moves toward a conclusion. Overthinking circles the same content indefinitely. If nothing new is emerging after twenty minutes, you are not thinking. You are running.

〰 Write the thought down and close the notebook. The loop runs partly because your brain is trying to hold the thought while also thinking about it. Externalizing it onto paper completes something. The thing written down is no longer the thing you have to keep holding.

〰 Set a decision deadline and mean it. Open-ended questions stay open forever. Name the point at which you will decide with whatever information you have and treat that commitment as real. The overthinking feeds on the absence of a closing time.

〰 Ask what the realistic outcome is. Not the catastrophic one your brain keeps modeling. The actual most likely scenario. Your threat detection system is consistently generating worst cases and presenting them as predictions. They are not predictions. They are possibilities. Usually unlikely ones.

〰 Take one small action toward the thing you're overthinking. Action interrupts the loop better than any mental strategy. The moment you move, the relationship to the stuck thought changes. Motion is the circuit breaker.

〰 Stop seeking more opinions past a certain point. Two or three perspectives is information. Seven is noise wearing the costume of due diligence. At some point you have enough to decide. More input is more delay dressed up as carefulness.

〰 Accept that certainty is not on offer for most things that matter. The resolution you're looking for through more thinking is not available that way. At some point you decide with what you have and adjust as you go.

[colepaxton]

How to actually follow through on what you say you're going to do!!

〰 Make the commitment specific and time-bound. Not I will work on this more but I will do thirty minutes on Tuesday at 7pm. The vague commitment has no anchor and floats away. The specific one has somewhere to land.

〰 Tell one person. Not for pressure in a punishing way. Because the commitment that exists only inside your head is different from the one that someone else now knows about. Saying it out loud makes it real in a different way.

〰 Make the first step embarrassingly small. Not start the project but open the folder. Not begin the routine but put on the shoes. The barrier is almost never the full action. It is the starting. Make starting tiny.

〰 Schedule the recovery when you miss rather than when you succeed. The question after breaking a commitment is not why did I fail but when exactly am I returning. Same day if possible. Tomorrow if not. The return matters more than the streak.

〰 Remove the decisions required to start. The version of you at the moment of commitment and the version of you when the commitment comes due have different levels of motivation. Design the environment for the less motivated version. Remove every barrier in advance.

〰 Reduce the number of commitments you make. The person who follows through on five things is building a different relationship with themselves than the person who makes twenty commitments and follows through on twelve. Quality of commitment beats quantity.

〰 Track the follow-through over time. Not to punish the misses. To build the evidence of your own reliability. The accumulation of times you did what you said changes how you think about what you say.