Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
The Durable Dad podcast gives men the skills and tools they need to be rock solid for their family, their work and their community.
Durable Dad with Tommy Geary
084: 3 Easy Tactics to Get Off Your Phone
How’s your phone usage?
One guy I was working with knew he was on it too much at bedtime and that it was interfering with his sleep.
We pulled three principles from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits and honed in on:
1. Habit stacking
2. Environment support
3. Identity shift
Whether you’re trying use your phone less, go for a run more consistently, or drink less alcohol, this episode will help you create a plan that you can stick to.
You’ll also avoid the obstacles that are easiest to overlook so you don’t slip back into your old ways.
This is the Durable Dad Podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. All right, what's up? Episode number 84. I'm home today. Well, I work out of my home office and one daughter is home sick and Brenda is also sick, in bed sick as a dog. She never gets this sick, but she's in bed all day and I feel like every time I am updating you guys on my life, this is what's going on and it's been a good day, still productive. I'm recording a podcast and my daughter and I sat outside while I worked and she drew and just making our way through life.
Speaker 1:Um, one of the things that I wanted to do this year was to read 12 books, and I'm probably not going to hit that goal, but I have read some really good books and probably done more reading than I've done in the last few years, and it's been a mix of fiction and nonfiction books, and the one I want to talk about today is Atomic Habits by James Clear. So this book was actually a reread for me. I read it a few years ago and it's just got so much awesome content and he's a really good writer and Brendan and I were talking about it and just like each sentence of his can be broken down and is really meaningful and has a lot of knowledge wisdom in there. So I reread it and a few weeks ago got really detailed with some of the Atomic Habit principles, with a client that was working on his phone use, mainly around bedtime. So he was at this place where he was listening to audiobooks to go to sleep and listening to audiobooks would turn into opening up his phone and checking email one more time and then that would turn into scrolling and it was interrupting his sleep. And you probably heard the studies that blue light at night looking at a screen before bed. It just keeps your mind going. It doesn't allow you to slow down and get into more of the parasympathetic sleeping mode.
Speaker 1:So this guy, he's a healthy dude, he knows this stuff, he's aware that the phone isn't helpful and he's also aware that his sleep kind of sucks. So he wanted to improve it and we kind of sucks, so he wanted to improve it and we kind of pulled some of the atomic habit principles and applied them to what he has going on, and the ones that I'm going to talk about today are habit stacking, designing your environment and how identity change is the most impactful change you can make for creating new habits, new behaviors. So the first one is habit stacking, and in Atomic Habits, james Clear describes what habit stacking is. Basically, it's adding your new habit right after an existing behavior you have. So you look at your current daily actions or your current patterns, and then you pick something that happens regularly and whatever the new habit is, you insert it directly after that. So examples from the book are after I pour my coffee, I will meditate for one minute, or after I get back from lunch, I will call three potential clients. That's habit stacking For this guy.
Speaker 1:When we're coaching about his phone, he was currently setting his alarm when he got in bed and the new habit he wanted to create was not bringing his phone into bed. So when else could he set his alarm? When else could he set his alarm? And when we looked at his current behavior, every day before he went upstairs for bed, he would set his home alarm, his security system, downstairs. Since that happens every night, we decided to stack the new habit right after turning on the security system. So every night, after turning on the home alarm, he would set his wake up alarm on his phone. So that's habit stacking.
Speaker 1:The next principle we used as we're deconstructing his current process and putting into place a new process is changing his environment. So James Clear says environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior. So the environment that we're in impacts the choices that we make in our habits that we have. So for me, when I started journaling, I mean I could remember I put the journal on this turquoise table we had in our little one bedroom apartment and every morning when I would come out of our bedroom the journal would be sitting on the table. Nothing else would be on the table except for a journal and a pen, and that would prompt me to start journaling. Actually, this journal was called the five minute journal and it had daily prompts in there for me to just open up and answer, which is another principle in Atomic Habits is make it easy. I had never journaled before, so if it was just a blank piece of paper I wouldn't really know what the hell to write. So, not to go off what we're talking about too much, but to make it easy, I bought this five-minute journal. If you're looking to get into journaling, it's an awesome one to get a habit started. But environment there's a lot of other examples in the book about how you can set up your environment. One more at the Geary household.
Speaker 1:More recently, brenda has kind of slipped into drinking a little more often than she wants to. She used to drink a lot and I don't know if I've talked about it on the podcast before but she totally quit drinking, didn't drink for a couple years, started to dip back in a little bit here and there and recently she was just drinking more often than she wanted to and she knows that she feels a lot better when she doesn't drink. So the other day I went into the garage and I went into our fridge in there and all the beer was gone. And I was kind of like whoa, brenda drank all the beer and went inside and just like hey, all the beer's gone. And she said I moved it to the basement. And I was like, oh, I thought you drank it, laughed about it. But she was just like I moved it to the basement. When it's down there, it's warm, it's out of the way, it's a lot easier for me not to drink, setting up the environment so it's easier to do the new habit that she wants to do not drinking as much.
Speaker 1:But back to this guy that I was coaching and I was working with on using his phone at bedtime. His environment was setting the alarm in bed and then putting his phone right next to him on the nightstand Super tempting to grab it. So the environment to help this new habit is to put the phone away from you, create physical distance between you and your phone, and there's a love seat that's close but not in arm's length to him. He can still charge his phone, he can still use it as an alarm. So he decided to put the phone on that love seat instead of on his nightstand. Changing his environment. I have gone the way of just getting a whole different alarm. Instead of using my phone as an alarm, got an actual clock alarm to physically keep my phone out of the bedroom.
Speaker 1:Now, as I'm saying all this, it sounds like very small, little minutiae things and maybe obvious different tactics. Well, that's why the book is called Atomic Habits and at the beginning of the book and I think it's in the intro James Clear talks about the word atomic and how it means really, really small and it also has a big, big impact. I think of the atomic bomb, but you also think of what that atomic bomb comes from a small little atom being split. So these small little things, they matter and it seems simple, but to implement them we really got to get focused in on the details. So this guy I'm working with, we're coaching around all this stuff and it gets to this last principle that I want to talk about today makes it pretty clear about the impact of your identity change and how much it can help the new habits, help the outcomes in your life, and he talks about the layers of behavior change. So he draws it out as this concentrica three circles and there's three layers. And the outside layer are the outcome changes that we want to make, and this is hitting a sales goal or losing weight or running a marathon. These outcome changes are usually where we start and stop the change. We talk about the changes we want to make but we don't ultimately hit that outcome because we haven't focused on these other layers of change. So the next layer is process change. Process change, our habits. Most of atomic habits is about this layer of change how to change your processes. The third layer, the core layer, the deepest, is identity change, and that is all about changing the beliefs you have about yourself.
Speaker 1:The real big takeaways and I think is sometimes missed in this book is how impactful identity change is, and I'm going to read a quick paragraph from the book. On any given day, you may struggle with your habits because you're too busy or too tired or too overwhelmed or hundreds of other reasons. Over the long run, however, the real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-image gets in the way. This is why you can't get too attached to one version of your identity. Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs and to upgrade and expand your identity. So who we are and who we believe we are is going to impact the actions that we take. I talk about the thinking cycle a lot that our thoughts create our emotions, create our behaviors. Our thoughts are the beliefs we have about ourself. So until we can identify the new parts of ourselves that we want to create, it's going to be hard to implement those new habits and those new behaviors.
Speaker 1:So you know, to the drinking thing, brenda, being not a big drinker was a huge identity change. She probably never called herself a big drinker, but learning to be someone that doesn't drink at a party, in social situations, was a big identity change For this guy that I was working with with his phone. He had this belief that I need my phone to decompress and as he's implementing these changes and these new processes, he's starting to believe that I can decompress on my own, which is a pretty sweet belief, because I know that a lot of us me included like to decompress with food or with booze or with weed, or with our phones or Netflix or just zoning out somehow. But if you can decompress on your own which, for this guy, was just laying in bed with nothing in his ears, with nothing in his eyes, turning the lights off and breathing and going to sleep Like that's, that's a pretty powerful belief. The next week, when we checked in, he wasn't bringing it to bed, he was sleeping better.
Speaker 1:When we start taking those actions that align with this new belief, it's easier to create a new identity. But it is something that we will consistently check in on as we keep coaching, because old habits, old identities have a tendency to creep back in. So we're constantly working on ourself, we're constantly reflecting, constantly working on ourself. We're constantly reflecting and the last thing I'll kind of say about this is that not just Atomic Habits, but so many books out there. You'll read something and get pumped up about them and try them for a day or try them for a week, and there's great knowledge, there's great ideas, but then they fall off and we forget about them and we're on to the next thing. Then they fall off and we forget about them and we're on to the next thing. And I think that's what I love about coaching and the concept of coaching and the accountability to stay on top of the changes that we want to make. Let's talk about that, let's brainstorm, let's strategize. How can we implement it? That's what makes life fun trying new things, seeing what we're actually capable of. It's not about the huge big changes, it's about the small changes and then we start building more confidence and we start building more belief in ourself and that feels good. That's more fulfillment, that's more purpose.
Speaker 1:If this stuff is what gets you excited and you want to talk more about it, set up a strategy, call with me I mean, this is what we do or just talk to a friend about it. Keep the conversations going, whatever you're reading, whatever you're excited about, apply it to your life. When you're getting better, the people around you get better and that ripple effect helps the world. And the world, if you look at it in certain ways, is pretty screwed right now. But if you focus on yourself and making yourself better, that will have an impact, even if it's just a small one, in your family, in your community, at work, that impact does resonate out more and more and more. At least that's what I believe, choose to believe, and that's it. That's what I got for you guys. So have an awesome week and I will catch you next time. No-transcript.
