416: What GLP-1s Actually Do to Your Habits with Charles Duhigg

Introduction 

You're listening to Biceps After Babies Radio Episode 416.

Hello and welcome to Biceps After Babies Radio. A podcast for ladies who know that fitness is about so much more than pounds lost or PR's. It's about feeling confident in your skin and empowered in your life. I'm your host Amber Brueseke, a registered nurse, personal trainer, wife and mom of four. Each week my guests and I will excite and motivate you to take action in your own personal fitness as we talk about nutrition, exercise, mindset, personal development and executing life with conscious intention. If your goal is to look, feel and be strong and experience transformation from the inside out, you my friend are in the right place. Thank you for tuning in. Now, let's jump into today's episode.

Hey, hey, hey, welcome back to another episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm your host Amber Brueseke, and today I have a really exciting guest on my podcast. This is an author that I read years and years and years ago, his book, The Power of Habit, and it has informed so much of my coaching over the years. I bring up the habit cycle all the time when I'm coaching. And so it really is an honor to have Charles Duhigg on the podcast today. Charles is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist. He writes for the New Yorker and while I know him best for his book, The Power of Habit, which spent three years on the bestseller list has been translated into 40 languages. Like it's a fantastic book. He also has written a couple of other books, Smarter, Faster, Better. And then most recently his most recent book is Super Communicators, which I'm like about halfway through, but my husband raves about it and loves that book. 

The topic of conversation today is GLP-1s and habit formation. Now I have done a podcast episode all about GLP ones with my husband, who is a physician back in Episode 395, where I talk about, well, the title of the episode is, I was wrong about GLP-1s. So you can go and listen to that podcast episode. I think that is a really good introductory episode about GLP-1s. We talk a little bit about the history. We talk a little bit about how they are currently being used now, because this is a class of drugs that came about 20 years ago. This class of drugs has been around for a very long time, but there has been a rise in use over the last couple of years, as we have really started to understand that while GLP-1s have been used a lot for blood glucose management in the past, they also have this side effect of weight loss. And so you probably know somebody who is on a GLP-1, or maybe you're on a GLP-1 yourself. They go under names like Wegovy and Monjaro, Trazapatide, those types of drugs. And a lot of people are on them. In fact, the latest research that I've read is that about 12%, or one in eight adult Americans is on a GLP-1. So this is a class of drugs that is not going anywhere. They are being used by many, many, many, many people. And I really wanted to have this conversation about how GLP-1s play into habit formation.

Before we dive in the episode, I do want to mention a conflict of interest. I think it's really important to be very transparent about this, this kind of stuff so that you know, going into it, where there are conflicts. Charles recently became an advisor to the brand Noom. You will hear him mention it several times on the podcast. And I think just understanding that there is a financial incentive there is really, really important. Obviously a lot of the things that he talks about are still really relevant, whether or not you go through Noom for your GLP-1s or for any of the habit formation things that he's talking about. So the podcast is still relevant, whether or not you're, you're going to be going with, with that brand. But I do think it's important to just make a note of any conflicts of interest, any financial relationships that, that may impact, you know, what somebody is saying. So just keep that in mind as you listen to the episode. But regardless of where you land on GLP-1s, if you're using one, if you use one in the past, if you are thinking about using one or if you never want to use one, what Charles Duhigg breaks down about cues, routines and rewards the habit cycle. And this idea of a habit window really applies whether you're on the medication or not. So let's get into the conversation.

Amber B 04:31

All right. I'm so excited to welcome Charles Duhigg to the podcast. Welcome. Welcome. 

Charles Duhigg 04:37

Thank you so much for having me on. It's exciting to be here.

Amber B 04:40

I was just telling him before we hit record that The Power of Habit is one of those like benchmark books that I read years and years and years ago, but that I often refer to with my clients. So it's such an honor to be able to have you on the podcast today. 

Charles Duhigg 04:52

Oh, thanks. No, it's a, it's an honor to be here. I really appreciate it. 

Amber B 04:56

Awesome. So let's dive into the conversation. Cause we're going to talk a lot about GLP-1s, which I was also saying a lot of my audience is GLP-1 curious. I think we're gonna have a great conversation about that, but I want to slide into that conversation from the angle of habits because that's how I found you. That's how I like started to get to know your work. And you've done a lot of research and publishing on habits, how they're formed, why they're so freaking hard to break. So what made that your area of focus? What got you interested in habits in the first place? 

Charles Duhigg 05:25

You know, it was actually two experiences. The first is that we had a kid and I realized that my habits had to change once, once we had a kid in the house. 

Amber B 05:35

Yeah. 

Charles Duhigg 05:35

And so, so I really wanted to, I mean, the original impetus was like if I write a book about habit formation, I can call up all these experts and ask them how to change my own habits. And I'd also had this experience. I'm a, I'm a reporter in, I had had this experience when I was reporting in Iraq, which is that I spent a lot of time with the military. And one of the things that the military really does is that they are habit change professionals. Like that's what, that's the training that they give troops is how to change your habits. And so I just thought that was really, really interesting and it deserved a bunch of attention. And so I decided to spend time looking at it.

Amber B 06:11

Okay. So one of the biggest habits that a lot of people are trying to change and a lot of people who are listening to the podcast are trying to change is in the realm of health and fitness, right? Well, we eat our exercise habits. And you know, I don't have to tell you that there's a lot of people who start those habits. Usually it's on June or January 1st. And then, you know, a month later, we're not doing those habits. So these are, these are very hard habits to break. So what have you learned about why that cycle is so common and why it is so hard to rewrite those patterns? 

Charles Duhigg 06:41

Yeah. So, so I'll say I completely sympathize with this. Like one of the questions I asked myself is like, if I'm so smart and so talented, why is it so hard to get myself to wake up in the morning and go for a run? Or why do I, when I'm sitting at the dinner table, why do I always reach over and grab one of those French fries? It's just sitting there when I, when I'm not even that hungry.

Amber B 07:00

Yeah. 

Charles Duhigg 07:01

So, so one of the things that we know that happens is there's a part of our brain known as the basal ganglia that exists just to make habits, right? And every, every mammal on earth has a basal ganglia. It's, it's, it's incredibly important to being able to survive as a species. And what the basal ganglia does is it recognizes it links some things together. Every habit actually has three components. There's a cue, which is like a trigger for a behavior to start. And then there's the routine, which is the automatic behavior itself. What we think of as the habit. And then finally, there's a reward. Every habit in your life and about 40 to 45% of what you do every day is because of a habit. Every one of those habits delivers a reward to you, whether you're aware of it or not. And so what the basal ganglia does is it says, okay, look, if I can observe this cue, this routine, and this reward kind of happening in a stable environment kind of happening, you know, a handful of times, what I'm going to do is I'm going to link these together and I'm going to make them happen almost automatically.

So that when someone sees that cue, hardly without even thinking about it, they're going to go ahead and do that routine and they're going to get that reward. This is a learning capacity that our brain has that every mammal brain has. And it's incredibly important because if you had to think about all the choices you make every day, like if you had to walk down the path and decide whether to pick up and bite on the rock or bite on the apple, you wouldn't have time for anything else. It'd be incredibly taxing. And so this ability to basically turn off our brains and make things happen automatically is, is critical. But of course, it also means that if you're not paying attention to what's going on, then habits can pop up in your life that you don't want.

Amber B 08:43

Yeah. Makes total sense. So let's shift this into what brought you from habits and understanding habits, understanding basal ganglia, how this all works together to then being curious and interested about the GLP-1. How does, how do those two things mesh? 

Charles Duhigg 08:59

So it's, it's really interesting. So I actually started on a GLP-1 about two years ago. Um, and, and I, I, and, and it, it worked right. They, they, they're very effective. But what was really interesting to me is that I found that it was changing my habits. And so I started doing research on this and I found this company Noom, which some of your listeners might be familiar with. Noom is the, is a, it's like an app that helps you lose weight and build new, build new habits. And they're now, they, you can, you can get prescribed to GLP-1 micro doses through Noom. And Noom was doing all of this really interesting research, trying to figure out what happens when you start taking a GLP-1. And one of the biggest things that they found is that when you start taking a GLP-1, it changes the cues in your brain, right? And this is why, for instance, people crave alcohol less or crave gambling less when they're on a GLP-1, it disrupts the normal cues. And when those cues are disrupted, you have a window, the habit window where you can change your habits much more easily, but the window doesn't last forever, right? You have to take advantage of it. And you have to sort of deliberately change your habits when you're in that window. And then if you do change your habits, you can actually stop using the medication and the, the better behaviors, the, the weight loss will persist because, because you've built new habits. And I thought that was really, really interesting. And I wanted to learn more about how that process works because this is kind of the first time that we've seen a pharmaceutical really change habits on such a, such a broad plane. And, and nobody's completely understand, understands all of the science behind it, but we understand enough now to know what's going on and to know how to take advantage of it. 

Amber B 10:52

So interesting. When you say that the window doesn't last forever, do you mean once you start the medication, um, that window doesn't last forever or what does that actually mean? 

Charles Duhigg 11:02

So, yeah. So once you start the medication, you have this period, it's up to a year. So it's not like a really short window, but while you're on the medication, you have this window where you can make behavior changes and they're much more easy to make, but you need a structure to make them right. It's not the type of thing where you can kind of just like decide, Oh, I want to change my habits. And then the hope that it happens. And this is one of the things that I like about Noom is they actually give you this daily structure for measuring your habits and changing them and seeing if you're, if the change is taking hold or not, and if you need to change it up a little bit. But that's, that's the important part is that you have this window and it differs from person to person, how long it is, but it's a good-sized window. And in that window you can make these behavior changes and the behavior changes will stick. They'll become permanent habits inside your brain. 

And at that point, if your eating habits have changed or your exercise habits have changed, then you don't need the medicine at that point. You can actually go off the medicine because those habits will do the work that was being done during the medicine. The medicine in many ways is simply something that changes the cues inside our brain. And anyone on a GLP-1 knows this, right? Before I was on a GLP-1, you know, I would sit down and if there was a bowl of fries on the table, I would absolutely start picking up those fries. Even if I wasn't hungry, even if I didn't really want to eat the fries, just sort of automatically without thinking about it. In science they refer to that as the food noise. So there's food noise in your head, right? And that food noise is a cue. That food noise is a cue that says, Oh, even if you're not hungry, like the food noise is there. And the way to satisfy it is to reach over and grab one of those French fries. What the GLP-1 does is it tends to quiet the food noise. So suddenly that cue is gone. And once it's gone, you get to choose new cues and new routines and new rewards and practice them again and again and again until they, until they take effect. And at that moment you, your behavior has changed.

Amber B 13:09

Yeah. So the thing that I hear a lot with people is, is that decreased food noise. And so what you're linking to that in the habit cycle is the cue, right? The cue is changing, which then means the routine can change, which then means the reward changes. And we're able to reset that. Um, do, do we understand, or do you know the science behind what is actually decreasing the food noise? Do we even know that? 

Charles Duhigg 13:32

I, so I would say we know a little bit, like we know that that, so a GLP-1 is a glucagon like peptide, right? And, and it appears, so basically what it does is it acts like a glucagon. Um, and a, and a glucagon is a, is a something that's often released by your digestive system after you've eaten. And so what it seems to do is it seems to link up with the receptors for the, for glucagon and in doing so create a feeling of satiation and fullness. So you're basically just aren't hungry, right? And it sort of removes that, that hunger and that food noise. Now what's interesting is that it seems to actually do a bunch of other stuff, right? As I mentioned that in anyone on GLP-1 knows your desire for alcohol goes down significantly when you're on a GLP-1; your, your, um, your desire for other, what might be considered addictive behaviors like gambling also goes down. And we're not completely certain why, like that seems, it turns out that glucagon is actually much more powerful and important than we thought it was. And this is teaching us that. But then there's these other things that happen, which is when you start to lose weight, exercise becomes much easier, right? If you're, if you've lost 15 or 20 pounds, when you go out running for a jog, it's just easier because you're carrying 15 or 20 pounds less.

And as your body begins to change, that creates another opportunity to build new habits because the reward from that jog feels different. It feels better. And so what it might be, what might be happening is that the glucagon sets off a chain reaction. It might also be that glucagon plays this incredibly important role in our mental activity and our physiology that we don't completely understand yet. But that's actually true of a lot of drugs that we use. Like we don't actually know exactly why aspirin works, right? Right. We just, we just know that it works. We know what it's, what its effect is. And so one of the things that, that researchers are trying to learn more about right now is how does a GLP-1 do what it does? That being said, since we know that it actually works, we can prescribe it even without completely understanding the mechanism because we understand enough of the mechanism to, to allow us to figure out what's going on.

Amber B 15:50

Yeah, that makes sense. So, you know, I understand how the food noise is quieted, that changes the cue, that changes the habits that allows you this window of opportunity that you're saying to be able to make conscious decisions and change how it is that we're going throughout our day when it comes to food and exercise and all those things. When that food noise comes back, because that's the thing that I've heard is like a lot of people, they stop, you know, a GLP-1 and that food noise returns. Obviously they've created some new habits, but how does that, that transition work when those cues start to come back? I assume that those habits are still in there somewhere. 

Charles Duhigg 16:27

Yeah. Yeah.

Amber B 16:28

Do you find that people tend to go back or are they able to maintain those new habits? 

Charles Duhigg 16:31

Well, so here's what's interesting about it. So the idea, there's this thing known as the golden rule of habit change, which is that you really, once a habit exists in your brain, that those neural pathways are sort of there forever. So instead of thinking about breaking a bad habit, what we should think about is changing a habit, right? And in changing a habit, what I mean is you take the old cue, you link it to a new behavior, a new routine that delivers something similar to the old reward. So if you can identify the cue in the routine, then you can fiddle with the, I'm sorry, if you can identify the cue and the reward, you can fiddle with the routine. So what happens when we're on the GLP-1 is it's not that we abandoned those old cues altogether. It's that those old cues can now more easily be linked to a new. So what actually happens is when I sit down at that table, right, there is this food noise in my head. That's part of the cue, but there's a bunch of other cues, which is my brain knows when I sit down at a table, the whole point is to eat. And so it'll force me to eat, right? Or it'll nudge me to eat. My brain knows that French fries taste really, really good, right? They're like crunchy and they're salty and they're taste excellent. It gives me a little calorie boost. So, so again, all those cues and those rewards exist even beyond the food noise.

When the food noise quiets, it gives me a chance to pay attention to those other cues and link them to something new. So now I sit down at a table and I don't grab some of the fries and suddenly my brain starts saying, Oh, if you sit down at a table, like it's just as normal not to eat as it is to eat. Right. Or I sit down and like, I look at the fries. I'm like, ah, I'm, I don't feel hungry. Like I don't want any of those. And now my brain is saying, Oh, actually those French fries, they don't deliver the reward that that we used to assume that they would deliver. And so as a result, we should start linking this, this cue in this reward with a new routine. At that point, if I've changed the habit and the habit has taken hold, if I stopped taking the GLP-1, if a little bit of the food noise comes back, the food noise is much less impactful because basically my brain has learned all these habits in the absence of the food noise. So now the food noise is a cue that's off in its own galaxy that isn't really linked to anything because I've, I've changed what the linkages are to build new habits. Does that make sense? 

Amber B 18:56

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So with this, this window and this changing of habits, what does that actually look like on a day to day basis? So say I am, I start taking a GLP-1, I recognize, Hey, you know, things are shifting. The cues are shifting. My, my food noise is decreased. I want to take advantage of this situation and I want to make it as most effective as possible. And I actually want to be really intentional about changing these habits. Is there something that someone needs to be doing specifically in that window to make sure we're actually rewriting the brain and not just posting, I guess.

Charles Duhigg 19:28

This is where Noom becomes so helpful because what you really need is you need some type of daily system for tracking, measuring and evaluating if the change is taking place. The thing about when, when, when, when our basal ganglia takes over, when a habit starts really unfolding, our brain actually turns off. Like we basically stopped paying attention and the nasal ganglia is a deep interior structure. It's one of the oldest structures in our brain. It kind of operates on its own without any conscious thinking. And so, so what's really important is to draw our attention to what's going on in the basal ganglia because we will not notice it on our own. So a system that basically says like, okay, here's the thing to measure today. Like, did you do X? Did you do Y? Did you do Z? If you did, then what should you do in response to that? Right? So here's the, these are known as implementation intentions in psychology. 

Amber B 20:23

Yeah.

Charles Duhigg 20:24

If you do X, the implement intention should be, should be a, then did you actually do it right? And if, if half the time you did do it and half the time you didn't do it, let's analyze a little bit like why, like what was the difference? What were the variables there that influenced whether, whether it unfolded the way you want it or not. Those are all really hard things to do on our own. There's a method known as habit reversal therapy that teaches people how to do this, but it takes, it takes a lot of sessions with a, with a psychologist or a psychiatrist to learn the method. And you carry around these cards and you make all these check marks on it and it works. But the, the way easier way to do it, because we all carry phones around is to kind of automate that process a little bit and just have something in your pocket that says like, ding, like, like let's check in what happened this morning or do you remember that like at noon, you usually go out for lunch at 12:15. So at noon, I'm going to remind you what your implementation intention is.

So, so being able to have something in your life, whether it's new or any other system, a system that helps you measure, observe and change your own behaviors is really critical. And the other part of that is that you do want a person involved, like a someone who actually a medical provider of some kind who, who is helping you track what's going on, because they're the ones who can say either you should increase your dose slightly, you should decrease your slow dose slightly. You actually are at a point where you can stop taking the medication. So that's kind of the, the it's, it's changing these behaviors can be somewhat complicated on, on our own, particularly when it comes to food and exercise. And we can do it with a lot of deliberate practice and a lot of deliberate thought. It just gets easier when we have, it's something like an app that we can rely on to, to help us measure and track what's going on.

Amber B 22:21

Yeah, that makes sense. I've heard you talk about or mentioned that phase one versus phase two when it comes to GLP-1s. 

Charles Duhigg 22:28

Yeah.

Amber B 22:28

Talk a little bit about that. What does that mean? 

Charles Duhigg 22:31

Yeah. So, so the phase one, the first phase of GLP-1s, was kind of this amazement over seeing how it does quiet the food noise, right? They're like, they're like people who previously had real trouble losing weight can now lose weight on a GLP-1. But the problem is that during that phase one, the other thing we learned is as soon as people went off the medication, they gained the weight back, right? It was all it was like almost inevitable that you would gain that weight back because, because all you were doing was you were removing a cue from someone's from someone's brain. And then when they stopped the medication, the cue came back and they were completely unprepared to, to deal with the cue returning. 

Phase two is our understanding that when you start taking that GLP-1, not only is there an opportunity for weight loss, there is this habit window. There's an opportunity to build new habits if you're deliberate about it and you have a system. And once you build those new habits, then you can actually go off the medication without weight loss. And again, Noom has done a bunch of studies on this. I think they found something like 80% of people who use Noom, keep the weight off for like at least two and a half years after discontinuing the medication. I, those numbers might be a little bit wrong. I'm just quoting them from memory. But, but the point being that like G, the second wave of GLP-1 use is understanding this isn't just a medication. This is an opportunity for behavior change. And if you take advantage of the opportunity for behavior change, and it could be that it has nothing to do with eating, right? It could be that it could be an exercise habit. It could be a gambling habit. It could be a drinking habit that if you take advantage of that window and you actually try and change the habits inside our brains, then once the medication receives the habits still remain. And that's where all the research is happening right now. People are really excited at trying to understand how do we take advantage of this window of change so that people have lifelong new behaviors. 

Amber B 24:36

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What if someone's listening and they've already taken a GLP-1, maybe they lost weight, maybe they regained it back. And now they're listening to this and going, Oh shoot. Like I totally screwed that up. Is that window gone for good? Or is there a window? 

Charles Duhigg 24:49

No, no, no, no, no. That window is not gone for good at all. The window basically exists as long as you're taking the medication. 

Amber B 24:56

Okay.

Charles Duhigg 24:57

Right. So, so like, and if you take the medication and then you discontinue and you gain that weight back and then you start the medication again, then you still have access to the window. Now I'm a little hesitant to say that definitively because different you know, different metabolisms, different like body types. But in general, if there's anyone who's on a GLP-1 and they're wearing, Oh my gosh, my window is already closed. That's not true. As long as you develop a system, as long as you have a deliberate system that allows you to track, that allows you to measure changes, you can still change your habits. On that being said, it does take a little while. So like if you're someone who was on a GLP-1 and then you got off of them and now you're going back on a GLP-1, you're probably someone who doesn't want to be on a GLP-1 your entire life, whether it's because of cost issues or, or, or because you don't like giving yourself a shot for the rest of your life. And so if you're someone who wants to go off medication, then taking advantage of that window is critical.

Amber B 25:56

Makes sense. Yeah. A lot of people, you know, it sounds like GLP-1s have created this with this window. And there can be some habit change that occurs during, during that time. I've heard you like link that to unlocking a new identity. And really relating that not just to like the scale going down, but unlocking a new identity. How do you explain that connection? Like what does that, what does that look like? How are we, how are we unlocking this new identity? 

Charles Duhigg 26:22

So this is, this is when we know that the habit change has taken root in a, in a really significant way. So what often happens is there's two parts of our brain. There's a part of our brain that pays attention to what we're doing in a conscious way. Right. And what it pays attention to is what's known as stated preferences. If I say something like, I really want to lose weight, my prefrontal cortex, the, the, the, the sort of thinking part of my brain pays attention to that. They're like, Oh, Charles, Charles is someone who wants to lose weight. But there's another part of our brain, which is deeper, which really just pays attention to how we behave. Not what we say, not what we want, but how we actually act. And that, and those are known as revealed preferences. So stated preferences versus revealed. 

Amber B 27:07

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Charles Duhigg 27:08

And in that part of our brain, it's like, I don't care what Charles is saying. Sure. He says he wants to lose weight, but like I noticed every time he sits down with a bowl of French fries, he eats those French fries. So he must not actually want to lose weight. Like he's not behaving in a way that suggests his stated preference is a real preference. So what happens is when you start to change a behavior, that interior part of your brain, it starts creating a new identity for you. So let's take exercise as an example. For many people exercise is what's known as a keystone habit. When it starts to change, when you start to exercise more, it sets off a chain reaction that changes other patterns as well. For instance, on the day that you exercise, it's easier to eat a healthy lunch. Research by these two Australian researchers shows that on the days you exercise, and once you start exercising habitually, you tend to use your credit card less that day. You tend to procrastinate less at work. Now there's no reason why going for a run in the morning should make me keep my Amex in my pocket or make me eat a salad instead of a hamburger at lunch. But what we know is that when you start exercising, that interior part of your brain, that revealed preferences, part of your brain starts saying, Oh, you know what? Charles is an athlete. Like, like I didn't realize this before, but Charles, Charles is an athlete. That's how he's behaving. And an athlete, an athlete doesn't eat an unhealthy lunch. An athlete doesn't, doesn't spend needlessly an athlete, someone with discipline.

And so as your identity, your self identity starts to shift, it makes other kinds of changes easier. And so, and so how this relates to GLP-1 is when I sit, when I sit down at that table and I do not pick up the French fries, I do not eat the French fries. They're easy to ignore, that interior part of my brain is saying, you know what? Charles is the kind of guy who can sit down and not eat French fries. Like I didn't, I didn't realize that before because he was behaving differently before, but now he's behaving a new way, but, but let's give it a little bit of time, right? Like that's one day that he had this behavior. But then a couple of weeks later, that interior part of your brain is saying, you know what? It's been a couple of weeks. He hasn't eaten a French fry once. And your brain starts saying, I guess I need to start changing this pattern and other patterns on a permanent basis because the self-identity that I hold in my head of who I am has shifted. That's when the change becomes permanent is that when you can convince that that deep interior part of the brain, the part of your brain that you can't really talk to, you can't really BS, right? It's the part of your brain that that pays attention to how you behave. When that starts to shift, that's when the shift becomes permanent.

Amber B 29:48

So interesting. So would you say, I love this idea of a stated preference and revealed preference. And so would you say that the stated preference is linked to like the prefrontal cortex and the revealed preference is more of a subconscious, you know? 

Charles Duhigg 30:03

Yeah. Right. So, yeah. Or at least we know that it's more related to the basal ganglia and the deeper interior structures. Right. And the brain's really complicated. And so it's not like anything happens in just one place in the brain. 

Amber B 30:15

Of course.

Charles Duhigg 30:16

But in general, we know that across every human, there is this distinction between stated preferences and revealed preferences and that it's only once you really get access to the revealed preferences that you can create permanent behavior change. 

Amber B 30:31

That's really interesting. Where does the conversation around dopamine come in into this? Because you know, dopamine is also one of those things that our brain really highly seeks. And we know that we will do behaviors, things like drinking alcohol, things like spending money, things like food that will like, give us that dopamine boost. So how does that link into the GLP-1 conversation and into habit change? 

Charles Duhigg 30:53

Yeah. So, so dopamine and serotonin and a handful of other neurochemicals. You're exactly right. This is basically how we create, how we create pleasure signals in our brain and our brain craves pleasure signals, right? It craves the things associated. It feels good. It makes you feel good. So the key is that the dopamine gets released whether you want it to or not. 

Amber B 31:16

Sure.

Charles Duhigg 31:17

Right. But there are ways to influence that. So if I'm sitting at a table and I reach over and I eat a French fry, even if I say to myself, I should not be eating this French fry. I will get a little dopamine hit from eating the French fry. 

Amber B 31:29

Yeah. 

Charles Duhigg 31:29

So what I need to do is I need to somehow convince my brain to deprioritize that dopamine hit and reprioritize other dopamines as, as more attractive. And the way in, in people have experienced this, even apart from GLP-1s, like anyone who's stopped eating carbs, you, you, you like kind of demonize carbs in your head. And at some point you find yourself getting kind of disgusted by like the thought of eating like a pancake, right? You're like, Oh, I don't want to eat a pancake, even if I'm hungry, what's happening there is that your brain is recalibrating the reward signals, part of them being dopamine, part of them being serotonin and other neurotransmitters. It's recalibrating those because you are choosing something new that you prioritize as a reward and deprioritizing something else as a, as a reward. That, that doesn't mean that your control is absolute, but we do know that when you anticipate enjoying something, you actually enjoy it more. Right? 

So, so if I, take for instance, if I'm walking through my office and I'm not hungry at all, I'm not craving a donut. And then I walk past the, the, the break room and I see a box of donuts. What my brain will start doing is it will start anticipating the dopamine hit it gets from eating a donut. And then I'll start craving a donut. I'll start to become distracting. I'll be like, I'm not hungry, but like I should really go eat one of those. And so if we can disrupt that pattern in our head, then what our brain does is it starts reprioritizing other rewards. So if I'm on a GLP-1, for instance, or if I'm in a habit change program, that's actually, you know, that's structured and is working for me when I walk past the break room and I see the donuts, I think to myself, yeah, I could eat a donut, but actually I'm going to feel so good about myself. If I, if I don't, like I'm going to feel amazing at like my level of self control. If I don't eat that donut. Now I have a new, a new trigger for that dopamine that it satisfies what would have been a donut craving. And again, this is a vast oversimplification, but yeah, thinking about it. 

Amber B 33:36

Yeah. That's interesting to me because I think a lot of times what we try to do in those situations is we try to prioritize longterm rewards like, Oh, if I don't eat the donut today in seven weeks from now, I'll hit my goal. Wait, like it doesn't almost provide like the same dopamine response to think about the future than it does today. 

Charles Duhigg 33:55

Not at all. Yeah. One of the things that we know is that a fast-arriving reward is much more powerful than a long-arriving reward. Okay. So, so what do you do in a situation like that? Well, one of the things that's important to do is you need to give yourself a short-term reward for not eating the donut. Right. And that could be as simple as you go back to your desk and you make a check mark on your card or you open up your app and you're like, I avoided the donut today. That, that activity, that short-term activity, it will create the conditions that allow you to feel a reward. You feel a sense of pride, right? Associated with, with, um, with not eating that donut. And so you're giving yourself a short-term dopamine hit, which feels good. And you know, one of the, my best examples of this is like, think about our kids. So when our kids first go to school, they assign no value to getting an A on a report card, right? Because there is no value to it. There's not, there's no, you don't get any money or like pieces of chocolate. But when they come home with an A on their report card, we lavish praise on them. Oh my God, you did so good.You're, you like worked so hard. And you got these great grades and that gives them a dopamine hit. And now they associate getting an A with that reward sensation that they, that they know I anticipate, but sometimes they crave a little bit. Like they want to get that a because they want to feel good about themselves. 

And so what we need to do with ourselves is we need to find something similar. We need to give ourselves praise. We need to give ourselves rewards. It, you know, there's almost a stoicism particularly in America that like, I'm going to, I'm going to go run 10 miles. And then as a reward, I'm going to have a kale smoothie, right? Kale smoothie is not a reward. That does not work. We need to give ourselves rewards because when we do so, we, we're basically training our brain on how to behave going forward. And, and whether that reward is, you know, just a calendar where you make a checkmark to say I did good today, whether it's an app that sends you like a little, like, you know, like thumbs up on the screen or whether it's a friend that we're exercising with where they, they like, they say, Oh, we met every Wednesday for the last, like, you know, three or four weeks. I can kind of see the definition in your muscles. That, that is really important. Giving ourselves that reward creates the short-term dopamine that makes that behavior permanent.

Amber B 36:17

Yeah. It's, it's almost like a Pavlovian response, right? We, we're all like little toddlers. We just need like a potty chart. I like a sticker chart. Well, I was interested in you were saying that about like how we have to like link the aid to, uh, to, Oh, that means something. I was thinking about when I made potty charts for my kids, it wasn't just that they got stars, but if they got accumulated so many stars and they got a reward. And so they started to relate that one star to like getting them closer to that. What they really wanted.

Charles Duhigg 36:45

That's exactly right. And my guess is that so, so you actually created a situation where there's a short-term reward, right? I get a star on a star. I know that mommy's proud of me. And then a long-term and then you're creating anticipation for a long-term reward. If I get 10 stars, then I get to get a new stuffed animal. And then you're giving them a long-term reward. So by stacking all of those rewards on top of each other, you're making each of them more powerful. 

Amber B 37:11

Yeah.

Charles Duhigg 37:11

And that's, that's the key is to think about this in a structured way. 

Amber B 37:15

Yeah. And I think sometimes we think, Oh, I'm, I'm more evolved than a toddler or than a dog, but our brains are still like, they still like the same reward that toddlers like and that dogs like, and 

Charles Duhigg 37:26

Or, or more importantly, we are more mature than a toddler or a dog, but since the neural circuitry that the toddler and the dog uses is available to us.

Amber B 37:35

Yeah. Let’s use it. 

Charles Duhigg 37:36

We might as well take advantage of it. Yeah.

Amber B 37:40

Totally. All right. So this has been, this has been fascinating. It's such a good conversation to wrap this up. Um, you know, there's a lot of women who are listening, a lot of moms that are listening, trying to figure out their fitness. They're trying to figure out their food. They're trying to figure out what this looks like moving forward. What is one thing from the research that you want them to walk away with whether or not, you know, they ever decide to touch a GLP-1, right? That's a decision that they're going to make in their own life. But what is something that you want them to walk away with? 

Charles Duhigg 38:04

So I think what I would have them walk away with is there is a structured way to change habits, but without understanding that structure, it becomes much more difficult. So whether it's an app, whether it's my book, The Power of Habit, whether it's having a friend who's knowledgeable on this stuff and can kind of sit down and help you help you sort of think about what happened today or last week, you need a structured way to identify the cues, the routines and the rewards in your life. And then you can figure out how to start changing them. But most of us, what we do is we don't, we don't do that. Right. On January 1st, we write down a bunch of resolutions. I'm going to run a marathon. I'm going to lose 20 pounds. And our brain is like, that's not actually a plan. That's not a structured plan. That's not a structured way to change a habit. It's an aspiration. And so, you know, three or four weeks in we find that we're no longer running every day. Yeah. We're not, we're not doing anything anymore. So if we can have a structured system for creating a plan to change a habit and an understanding of what's driving that habit, then our ability to change a habit becomes much, much bigger or to create new habits. 

Amber B 39:17

Yeah.

Charles Duhigg 39:18

The thing about habits is they feel very durable when you're in the grip of them. And it's because your brain is turned off. 

Amber B 39:23

Yeah.

Charles Duhigg 39:24

But they turn out to be very flimsy. Like if you have a system to disrupt the cues or to link the cues to something new, then the habit actually recedes fairly quickly, but you need a system. You need a structured system and a plan.

Amber B 39:38

That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Well, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing. I can't recommend The Power of Habit enough. I mean, again, it's one of those books that I like still reflect back on, still like bring up and that idea of being able to identify the cue and the routine and the reward is, is such a, it's a, such a simple idea and yet it's so applicable in so many areas of your life. So, 

Charles Duhigg 39:59

Well, thank you. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Amber B 40:02

Fantastic. And thanks for coming and sharing about GLP-1s. I know that this is going to be a really interesting episode because a lot of people are very GLP-1 curious and you know, there's a lot of misinformation out there about it. So I'm excited to be able to have something that can direct people to, to kind of kind of debunk some of that stuff and help us understand what is actually occurring and how they can be beneficial in our lives. 

Charles Duhigg 40:22

Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and I would say to anyone who is considering, but not using a GLP-1, I would, I would really encourage you to, to consider it. Like I have found it to be just a wonderful change in my life. And, and there's, there's lots of medical providers who can walk you through how it works and, and how you should dose it. As I mentioned, Noom prescribes that's one of the things that they do is that you work with a medical provider to figure this out, but it's really, it's a good idea to at least consider because I found it to be kind of life-changing. 

Amber B 40:58

Fantastic. Thanks for coming on.

Charles Duhigg 41:00

Thank you. 

Amber B 41:00

If you take one thing away from this conversation, let it be this: habits are not about willpower, they are about structure. And Charles said it so well, on January 1st, we write down aspirations, not plans. And the women who actually change their patterns, whether we're talking about food or exercise or spending or whatever, are the ones who get specific about their cues and they build in a real system to catch themselves and reward themselves along the way. 

If you want to go deeper on this Charles book, The Power of Habit, is a great next read. Like I said, I read this years ago and it's still something I come back and reference, you know, weekly with my clients, with myself. So it's a highly highly recommend that book and Hey, if this episode gave you an aha moment, I would love it if you share it with a friend who needs to hear it and, or leave a rating and review on whatever platform it is that you're listening on. This really helps the show to be able to reach more of the right women. 

That wraps up this episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm Amber. Now go out and be strong because remember my friend, you can do anything.

Outro

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