So today you're talking about adopting good habits, the science of changing habits. So let me ask you another question and Carson you can answer this question. I knew you can answer either. How many of you have ever tried to change a habit Or adopt a good 1? You had a bad one you wanted to get rid of or you wanted to adopt a good habit. Please raise your hands. I am going to raise both hands and we are in january. Right? So this is the month of what? New Year's resolutions. I'm not going to ask you how many of you have been successful because I already know the answer. At least I know my own answer. But this is what we are all hoping to achieve, right, changing habits and adopting good ones. So when we talk about habits, the first question is, what do you want to change? And how badly what do you want to change? And how badly? And so what I want you to do right now is to really just, if you have a piece of paper, if you have a phone, laptop, you can write down exactly what you want to change. But come up with one or two things, one or two habits that you really want to change and you really want to change it badly, not just want to change it. So the second question is why do you want to change it? Why do you want to change it? You don't know that? Why? Why is funny? Okay, we have to students who think why is the funny part, I'm not going to ask you to share that with us. Why do you want to change it? I was thinking about the class this morning and I realized that one of the very bad habits that I have is that the moment I wake up in the morning I grabbed my cellphone and I start checking my phone and this bad habit, what do you think does to me? I start my david stress because usually I see something stressful. It's either some news on the media, a text message, an email. So this is like one of the habits that at least I need to work on and why do I want to change it? Because this habit is making me unhealthy. It really sets the wrong tone for that day. And the final question when it comes to habit is that how will you motivate yourself to change it? And this is the tough question. If you look at science, there is such a thing called science of motivation or science of habits. So when we want to change a habit, usually we try to associated with the reward or incentive, right For me, If you tell me that if you don't check your phone every morning, the moment you wake up for every time that you do that we give you $1 For every day and every week I make $7, right? Do you think this is going to motivate me? Yes. Does it motivate you? How about $5, I'm go up. You do that for $5. Okay. All right. So just keep that answer for now. But the research is very clear. The research is extremely clear, rewards do not motivate us. They don't. So now I'm going to tell you what motivates us. So when it comes to motivation, we have extrinsic motivators and we have intrinsic motivators. So the extreme, extreme extrinsic one is the one that I just talked about. The rewards and motivations. And science has shown that they don't work. There is a study, a very interesting study and I usually talk about this study performed in lawyers And 25 lawyers were given a task to do something and they will pay $10 per hour. Lawyers make a lot of money, right? $10 an hour is nothing, but they were paid $10 an hour. Another group, another 25 of them were given the same task and they didn't give them any money. Which group do you think cared more and perform better? The group that was paid or the group that wasn't paid? The ones who did it for free, The ones who did it for free. And the question is why so intrinsic motivators are more important because they are based on your values. For instance, for me this morning, I realized that if I don't do that, I'm going to start my day in a very calm way. I'm not going to start my day at 6:30 AM with stress. But if you give me $5 and if I have to compare the $5 every morning to the intrinsic motivators, probably having less stress motivates me more. And then when it comes to motivation, you have to change. I have to to, I choose to. So you're all college students, right? Do we have anybody who is not? Because sometimes I have visitors and they are not college students. But you guys are college students. You study for grades, right? You want to get good. Of course you study to learn. But great is a big motivator and you can start your class this class or any other class by saying that I have to get an A. But I'm going to give you a little advice today. Change that mindset to I choose to get a good grade. I choose to get a good grade because I want to become educated to help my community to help people. Not that I have to get a good grade because I want to go to medical school, I want to make money. I want to buy that expensive car and that expensive house and and so on and so forth. Change that mindset and you will see that your motivation becomes much stronger to get good grades efforts and measuring progress is very important to. And we're going to talk about it in the next slide and have a support group. A support group means that if today you put on that piece of paper that you're going to wake up every morning and you're not going to look at your phone, have somebody have a friend who's going to check with you once a week, how are you doing? Or have somebody who is doing the same thing with you form a support group. So that's very important. And I'm going to finish this part by saying that when we change these habits, when we adopt healthier lifestyle choices, we are also going to cause changes at cellular levels and I'm not going to get into too much step on this slide and the next one. Because I am going to cover them in other lectures and I don't want to take up too much time today because we have a a very, very good guest speaker who is who I'm going to introduce shortly. But this was a study that was done at UCSF looking at the impact of lifestyle changes on telomere length. How many of you guys know what the numbers are? So I wish I had, I wish I could ask you. So, who can tell us in like one sentence? What is the telomere do you want to tell us? Isn't it? What they don't know that you're that you're perfect. What is your name? Emily? Very good, very good. You win the prize for the shortest answer to what is the till? Yes. So let's see who has shoes with shoelaces. If you're wearing a pair of shoes right now with shoelaces, that plastic cap at the end of the shoelaces, you're team number is exactly what universe do they protect your chromosomes as we age? The kilometers length shortens. If we have poor lifestyle choices, it shortens. So this study showed that lifestyle changes is going to Increase the length of one km. And this is the lifestyle changes that we're talking about. We are talking about a diet that is high in whole food is mostly plant based. It's not a diet that we're counting calories is a very simple diet. You're talking about moderate aerobic exercise is walking 30 minutes per day, six days a week. But you guys can do this on this campus just going in between classes. Right? So we are talking about stress management and we're not talking about four hours of meditation every day. We are talking about simple yoga based stretches, breathing exercises or everything combined for 60 minutes per day, not just sitting down and meditating for one hour and increased social support, meaning that having friends having a good social support system. So these were the lifestyle changes that resulted in the increased length of telomeres as simple as that. So in this class, hopefully by the end of these 10 weeks, I wish I had a way to measure your telomeres right now And then measure it after 10 weeks. And I can guarantee you that if you practice some of the recommendations that we have in the class, you're going to see that. But unfortunately I don't have the resources to do that. So I am going to end this portion of the class by giving you a practice and you already started doing that. Which is adopting good habits. You're going to ask me how come you don't have a fancy app or a website or a form that we should feel to do this practice? There is a reason for that because you all were all different. I have tried those fancy apps and you name it, they don't work for me. I have a little notebook and in my notebook I write things. So what I want you to do is to make a decision to change one habit and make it very simple. They have, it should not be starting today or tomorrow. I'm going to exercise two hours every day. Simple and develop a plan with 1-2 achievable goals for me, starting tomorrow. I am going to resist checking my phone until I have my coffee. So I'm going to have a coffee really fast. I'm going to get up and the first thing I'm going to do is to happen. I'm kidding. You guys are supposed to be laughing. I'm just being funny right now and nobody's laughing and then started now and today. Don't say I started February one. Don't say Monday. Don't say starting Saturday. I'm going to do that today and during this class, every Wednesday we're going to talk about something that we can change. But I'm sure every single one of you wrote something. I hope you did. Did you, did you write something that you like to change? Yes, Yes. You're very quiet
