“There's no one on this planet who goes for a run in the morning and they're like, oh, I'm going to keep my Amex in my pocket today, right? Like the cause effect there doesn't make any sense. But it seems to be a consistent pattern that when you start creating new exercise habits ... it makes other habits more malleable and easier to change.”

and this gets a lot into the identity stuff that we were talking about before. So, the idea of the Keystone Habit is that what we see in the research is that there are some habits that when they start to change, they seem to set off this chain reaction that make other changes possible in people's lives. A great example of this is exercise, right? I did not exercise when I was younger. I was not an athlete in high school. When I started exercising, what I found was that on the days that I would exercise, I would, it was way easier to eat healthily at lunch that day. There's some researchers in Australia, Otin and Chang, who have found that on the days that people exercise, they tend to use their credit cards less often and spend less money. They procrastinate less at work. Now, there's no one on this planet who goes for a run in the morning and they're like, oh, I'm going to keep my Amex in my pocket today, right? Like the cause effect there doesn't make any sense. But it seems to be a consistent pattern that when you start creating new exercise habits, when you change those habits, it makes other habits more malleable and easier to change. So what do we think is going on there? Well, I think what's happening is that, as I mentioned before, this idea of stated preferences versus revealed preferences, there is a part of your brain that is paying attention to not what you say, but how you behave. So the prefrontal cortex, the goal setting parts of my brain, I can set goals. I can say, look, I want to lose 20 pounds. And I can convince myself that I genuinely do. But there's some other part of our brain, our less conscious part of our brain that's paying attention to me. And it's saying, that guy says he wants to lose 20 pounds, but every time he goes into the cafeteria, he orders a hamburger. Like, I don't actually think he wants to lose 20 pounds, right? And so my self-image of my stated preferences is in conflict with the self-image of my revealed preferences. And I think what happens is when you start exercising, that part of your brain that doesn't listen to your BS, that part of your brain says, oh, this guy's actually gone running three times in the last nine days. Like that actually, that actually, that's what an athlete does. Like this guy is more of an athlete than I thought he was. And an athlete doesn't eat a hamburger for lunch. An athlete eats a salad. And so I think there's this identity change. And the reason why I believe this is true is because what Research shows is that if you were a high school athlete, if you were someone who thinks of themselves as an athlete, and then you take a couple of years off because you have a baby or your new job, and then you go back to running, it tends not to be a keystone habit for you. It tends not to set off that chain reaction. There's other healthy benefits from it, but it doesn't change how you eat or how you. And I think that's because the people for whom changing exercise, starting to exercise is powerful, the people for whom it's a keystone habit are the people who are kind of irrationally scary of exercise, right? Like when I started running, I was like, I'm going to look like an idiot. I look so goofy when I run and I don't know what to wear and I'm not sure what route to take. Those are like clearly the dumbest concerns on the face of the planet, but they were real for me. And I think that suggests that part of my self-identity was wrapped up in this decision to start running. And so when I started running, it really had an influence on my