Transcript
Speaker: Dr. Jeremy Stevenson, or should I say Jeremy, thank you for joining me today. Where does today's recording find you? So I'm in Adelaide, Australia, so down under, I think you guys call it.
Speaker: Would you mind telling me a bit about yourself, Jeremy? I was actually born in South Africa and came to Australia when I was five with my family. And yeah, I suffered a lot when I was younger and not no, um you know, drastic way. I think just all the ordinary ways of spending a lot of time feeling inadequate in certain situations, inferior, not good enough.
Speaker: And I was lucky that in my early 20s, stumbled upon good self-help. So I found this book called A New Guide to Rational Living.
Speaker: And one of the authors was this guy, Albert Ellis, who's considered the grandfather of modern cognitive behavioral therapy, which is one of the gold standard therapies in the world.
Speaker: And it taught me this technique called cognitive restructuring, where you challenge your thinking. It's one of the core techniques of CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy.
Speaker: And it changed my life. I just spent I was living with my parents at the time and I just spent those few weeks reading the book in awe, having my mind blown. And it gave me a tool I could repeatedly return to that reliably relieved my misery.
Speaker: And as well as being ah personal inspiration, it's actually probably the biggest factor that led me to return to university. I'd actually sworn to never go back to uni. I'd studied a international finance as my first degree and I just did not like it. Yeah.
Speaker: went away. Um, but this actually made me return to uni to study psychology and, yeah, ended up, uh, doing a PhD in clinical psychology and that's where I am, uh, today. So I work a few days in a clinic in Adelaide and then I do a couple of days of, of research work, which is how I, uh, started working on the, on the book.
Speaker: When you say, you know, it sounds like during your childhood suffering, you know, mentally, emotionally, whatever it is in, it sounds like very common in ways. I forget exactly how you put it.
Speaker: Can you help me understand You know, I guess, what did that look like as in would you describe it as very typical bullying, just self-doubt?
Speaker: um Did you get into situations that you might describe as you experiencing depression? And then also, I suppose. At what age might we be talking about some of these things?
Speaker: I would say I had um just a genetic predisposition to be um pretty neurotic when I was younger. So I remember just being pretty prone to crying when I was a kid. I was really sensitive.
Speaker: And then in my teen years, it manifested more as just a lot of social concern and a lot of approval seeking. was just really concerned about what people thought of me. And I know all of us care about being cool when we're at around that age, but I think I cared more than the average person. And I think it really stressed me out more than the average person. you know I'd have an interaction and I'd go away and ruminate on it. you know how did I come across?
Speaker: And, yeah, I the the the flavor of suffering, I would later learn to put a name to this of shame, ah which is yeah where you tend to feel inferior to other people, like you're less important, ah you feel inadequate.
Speaker: So, yeah that would come up, especially in social contexts. I just, you know, I wouldn't feel as confident as other people or as cool as other people.
Speaker: And, yeah, that would feel bad. that There would be a lot of anxiety that would come from that as well. I think my mood could definitely be affected, but I would say it was more later on in my early mid-20s where I got a taste of depression and what that felt like.
Speaker: And that came more from, I'd say, social isolation, a combination of just being on my own a lot. Ironically, it was after I finished my honors in psychology and I was working this job just trying to rack up as much money as I could doing data entry in this office on my own.
Speaker: And it was very isolating and the work wasn't too demanding. So it was quite easy for my mind just to be lost in thought for um a lot of it.
Speaker: And I'd say that that was my first taste of, okay, this is this is depression. And it yeah it's it's pretty confronting and and it's um it felt really bad. And it's probably been ah a good thing for me to have a taste of it for working with a lot of clients who have have depression.
Speaker: I want to center some of our conversation on your book and then we can branch out as it feels appropriate. But you you touched on a couple of things that potentially make the origin of your book, The Twelve Levers, obvious. But I just want to be clear first, is there are there things about you that it would help for a listener to know in order to understand how you came to write this book with Spencer Greenberg?
Speaker: Yeah, definitely as I mentioned before, I was lucky because I started to find good self-help yeah around my early twenty s and it changed my life. So I had that experience reading A New Guide to Rational Living, that book,
Speaker: I had another experience reading a blog that made me realize how much my approval seeking was causing my suffering and it helped me let go a lot of that and cultivate more of an attitude of self-acceptance.
Speaker: So I knew that good self-help existed, but it was pretty hard to find. There's a lot of um unhelpful stuff out there.
Speaker: So that was one observation that, you know, that there are good techniques out there, but they're hard to find. The other is that even when you do find good techniques, they're not always easy to understand. Like there might be instructions that are ah unclear, difficult to follow. You might be told to do things you can't control, like just believe in yourself, stop thinking negatively.
Speaker: And the other interesting thing is that the more I read into self-help books ah and the more I you know got into my PhD becoming a psychologist, the more I started to notice these patterns in techniques.
Speaker: So you know you you'd read a book and you'd get past the theory and stories and motivational material And you'd get to the techniques and they just seemed familiar. It's like you they might have a different name, but you recognize them from somewhere before. And even in therapy, you'd find this like I...
Speaker: I did this placement in a PTSD clinic in my PhD, and I was really eager to learn about this therapy that I hadn't encountered yet called cognitive processing therapy.
Speaker: But what I found was that the core technique of cognitive processing therapy was the same as one of the core techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy, and as the technique I mentioned before, cognitive restructuring, where you're challenging your thinking.
Speaker: It doesn't mean that though you know that those therapies don't work or that technique's not effective. they're They're very effective, but it's just a good example of the overlap in techniques that you you often find when you spend a lot of time in these in these resources.
Speaker: So those observations made us want to number one like create a place where you you had all the most effective techniques in one place.
Speaker: And then number two, to explore, like, is there hidden framework beneath all these techniques? Like, it it certainly seemed like there was something connecting the dots that we hadn't uncovered yet. So that was a big part of the motivation in in doing the research.
Speaker: So now, I suppose, describe your book, The Twelve Levers, to me. the The premise of the book is that techniques are the most important ingredient of self-help.
Speaker: So our research involved going through a huge amount of self-help books and therapies and and other journal articles, videos and so on.
Speaker: And every time we came across a technique, which is you know a specific instruction of something repeatable and controllable you can do to achieve a certain outcome, we would extract it and put it into this database.
Speaker: you know So for example, we might pick up a book like The Happiness Trap, you know which is about acceptance and commitment therapy, and pluck out techniques for mindfulness like um you know expansion, defusion. And then we might read Atomic Habits and pluck out techniques like habit stacking or temptation bundling.
Speaker: And that database grew and grew until after about two years, we had almost 500 techniques in there.
Speaker: And at that point we hit this saturation where it no longer felt like we were finding new techniques. There were just variations of ones we'd already discovered.
Speaker: So then we stopped the research and we started synthesizing. So we started going through each technique one by one and starting to to put it into categories and After a ah long time doing this, carefully categorizing each technique, we found the the core discovery of the book, which is that all of these hundreds of techniques collapsed into just 12 broad psychological strategies.
Speaker: And we call them levers, they're tools to create change and to understand the difference. So a lever is the book the broad psychological strategy. So one lever from the book is lever six, shift your body to shift your mind, which involves regulating your physiology using physical techniques.
Speaker: And then some examples would be optimizing your sleep, using breathing for relaxation, using breathing for energizing, exercise, cold exposure.
Speaker: All of those are different techniques that fall under the broader lever of shifting your body to shift your mind. We did the research and we then were were deciding What do we do with this? And ah we decided to write a book. So that's the that's the essence of the the book.
Speaker: When you went into your research, were you then initially you were not necessarily thinking that you would write a book or how was there a motivation at first for your research?
Speaker: Yeah, this is a ah part of the story that I think Spencer and I don't actually remember that well because um we weren't committed to a book from the early days. We just wanted to do the research and see what came out. And we didn't know what to expect. We didn't know if it would be a ah dozen levers or three or 50.
Speaker: ah So that itself was interesting that it turned out to be 12 levers. And we did the research and then I think we just had a small handful of other ideas like do we build a website, do we we make an app and yeah for whatever reason um maybe it was interest, motivation, ah we liked the idea of the book, we liked the idea of freezing these ideas and in one place, we we chose a book and I'm glad we did in retrospect it was ah it was a ah fun experience.
Speaker: It sounds to me like there was a personal and or professional curiosity that, you know, you, you enjoy what you do or you're motivated to learn more. And so you're reading research. You're also reading some, it sounds like to some extent, popular books, popular self-help psychology, whatever books.
Speaker: And then, you know, what you might do of that or the The synthesis, you know, the the benefit of that synthesis that was going on became clear.
Speaker: So as you were going through all of this reading, you know, even if it had not resulted in a book, though I am very curious about the process leading to the book.
Speaker: How did you differentiate or Jeremy, how do you differentiate between the advice that you find that maybe is quite common, but you found does not work versus advice, whether it's common or not does work. How do you differentiate between those?
Speaker: The initial process of extracting the techniques, we we weren't very fussed about the effectiveness at that point. We were just getting the techniques in, just put put them into the database.
Speaker: And then that's because we wanted to have a just a comprehensive list of all the techniques as a basis for the categorization, for the synthesis.
Speaker: Once we had the synthesis, so the 12 categories, the 12 broad psychological strategies, then we had to choose which techniques to include. So this is especially for the for the book or I imagine whatever you know product we ended up with, we had to choose a small number of techniques because you know if if you included all of them, it would just be overwhelming.
Speaker: And so then we could start looking at what is the effectiveness of these techniques and We relied on ah you know different types of evidence. So obviously the the the main type is what's the empirical research on it.
Speaker: So we wanted to look into that and make sure they yeah the book the the techniques we included did actually have some evidence and work well. Then there was also my clinical experience. And if probably not many people will read the appendices of of the book, but one pattern you'll notice if you read them is Often individual techniques themselves might not necessarily have evidence. so you know if if one technique, you know one type of mindfulness practice from acceptance and commitment therapy, that might not have specific evidence for itself. like it There might be very good evidence of acceptance and commitment therapy as a broad package, but finding the evidence of the different ingredients is more more challenging.
Speaker: So that's where that evidence evidence didn't exist. So we would then have to rely on my clinical experience. you know What have I observed in clients? And also Spencer's more bird's eye view of designing protocols and modules that have been used by hundreds of thousands of people. What has he observed in designing those? And also seeing how they go with people and doing the research and getting feedback from participants. so in the end, it was a combination of these different forms of evidence, obviously at leaning toward the empirical evidence where possible. But anyone who's looked into the research on these things,
Speaker: will know that, you know unfortunately, you just you can't have a meta-analysis of high-quality randomized control trials for every single tiny technique out there. just it's you know Those kinds of studies require a lot of resources.
Speaker: As I was reading your book, one thing that occurred to me is that if I If I need to work on anything, it could be cooking.
Speaker: I want to become a better cook of any sort. Then if I if I try to start from reading a book, watching YouTube videos, whatever, that are going to you know expose me to the entire landscape, it can be difficult because...
Speaker: I don't quite have enough knowledge to, I don't have enough wisdom actually might be a better word because I, I'm getting exposed to information, but I don't quite understand how to place the little bits of information and that education in whatever form it comes.
Speaker: can do its best to help me, but just getting some experience with cooking can then help me understand when I'm going through a ah YouTube video on, you know, browning something that I'm cooking or the Maillard reaction or whatever it is, then I can place that in my mind in relation to other things.
Speaker: Yet at the same time, if I'm learning to be a better cook and, or if I want to, I'm starting out and I pick one direction, then it might turn out I'm not interested.
Speaker: I don't have the fundamentals to, I'm not interested in that particular direction to be clear. I don't have the fundamentals to really understand why does it work like this? So the experience helpful, but it's like wandering around in the dark with a flashlight.
Speaker: Maybe I run into something meaningful and maybe I don't. And I was thinking about that a little bit as I read your book that on one hand, I imagine that someone that has read Feeling Good, I think is one of the books that you talk about.
Speaker: David Burns, yeah. And that was ah a book that I read. I thought that it was a great book, at least from my perspective. I think a lot of people agree on that one. And yeah if I have read that book,
Speaker: no matter what I took away from it or how I felt about it or anything else. And then I read another book and then another book and another book. When I come to your book, then I feel like because I've illuminated more spots in the dark,
Speaker: that you now kind of fill in a lot of the background and and there'll be a couple of key points, some of these levers or techniques that I'm not familiar with.
Speaker: And that's really helpful. Yet at the same time, maybe I've read only one book and, or I should say, conversely, if I've read only one book or watched, you know, one YouTube video, and then I come to your book, your book might serve as a bit of a wayfinder and help me in, I guess, sort of an overview sense to, direct me, even though I might not quite understand really what I'm supposed to do with mindfulness or, you know, getting natural light in the morning or any of the, I I forget exactly all of the techniques that are there. A lot of them I might not totally understand.
Speaker: I get the potential benefit of you shortening that wandering in the dark. It really kind of depends on the context, not just the context of my education, you know, my experience, but also...
Speaker: my ability to come away from your book with something that I feel like is meaningful. You know, if I have very little experience or education, do I feel like it's meaningful that you pointed me in the right direction?
Speaker: You know, and if I'm just not there and I'm just not ready yet, then that's really unfortunate. But also, you know, if you fill in the, if you have the opportunity to fill in that background, as I described it, all of those dark spaces, but I'm not ready for that, then that's unfortunate too. So it seems like point being your book could serve a lot of different people.
Speaker: It really depends on their readiness for that at in their journey. Yeah, and and some and nice reviews we've had of the book have been along the lines of this this book is going live on my bookshelf for good now and and I'm going to return to it when I need to. And I think that's a good way to use it as well is you know maybe you read it and you have a crack at one of the levers and it helps you and you put the book down.
Speaker: But then um you know bookmarked in your mind, you know these other other strategies exist and you might be going about life and then some new challenge comes up and then you know you can you can fall back on the book and use it when you when you need. So Yeah, I I agree with what what you're saying. I think there's a bit of a win-win element to it of if you don't know any of the strategies, well, it'll give you the bird's eye view and it will give you enough instruction to have ah have a crack at them.
Speaker: But then if you if you do want to go deeper, we do give recommendations of other resources like Feeling Good. So, you know, we have one subchapter on cognitive restructuring.
Speaker: But Feeling Good by David Burns, his whole book is essentially on that one technique. So it's really a ah ah deep dive. and And yeah, the the other aspect of the win-win is, yeah, if you've read a lot of self-help already, I think you'll just find it satisfying to see the bird's eye view of, okay, where where do um all these books I've read in the past, how do they fit into the framework that you guys came up with?
Speaker: Let's say I have some common problem. I have a challenge in front of me that's common. Lots of people deal with it. And so they go to self-help of some sort, books or otherwise.
Speaker: How do I come to your book and determine, you can, Jeremy, you can pick whatever the the problem is that I'm facing. How do I come to your book and determine which of these levers to pull?
Speaker: Yeah, let's take anxiety because it's it's got to be one of the most common problems that we confront. And I'd recommend going to the first lever of the book, which is Unravel the Causes or Understand the Problem.
Speaker: It's a great starting point because it helps you figure out what's actually going on. So with anxiety, you could use one of the techniques in there. So the ABC analysis is one technique where you're breaking down situations you know when you're anxious into activating event, beliefs, consequences of how you felt, what you did.
Speaker: And yeah, especially with anxiety, you want to see what the triggers are. What's what's the activating event of the anxiety? And for someone with social anxiety, of course, it's going to be different social situations. But even there, there might be some nuance of is it group interactions? Is it one-on-one? Is it people I'm close with or strangers?
Speaker: You know, if it's more generalized anxiety, there might it might actually be triggers of, you know, a thought might pop into your mind of, okay, you know, what if my relationship ends suddenly suddenly?
Speaker: If it's panic, the trigger might actually be a ah body sensation. you know, I suddenly get tightness in my my chest. So you can take that understanding and use it because better understanding leads to better solutions. And specifically, you could then jump to lever five, which is approach the monster, face your fears. This is about the most scientifically validated approach to anxiety in the world, which is gradual exposure.
Speaker: And this is where you're taking the triggers of your anxiety and you're putting them on a fear hierarchy. So starting with triggers that are not too, you know, maybe they cause moderate anxiety. So if I'm confronting a public speaking fear,
Speaker: Maybe the first thing in my hierarchy is I'm just going to do a presentation in front of a mirror to myself. Even that invokes some distress. And then I might be in front of one person and close to me, in front of three people, and you keep going down that list.
Speaker: And when you get used to one level in the hierarchy, you can then progress to the next one. And that's how exposure works. It's It's this wonderful process where when we confront the things that make us afraid, the fear will gradually come down. And all of us have experienced this. There's definitely things we've been afraid of in the past, you know, driving, swimming in deep water, talking to strangers. But this is about doing that process more systematically
Speaker: Those would be the first steps I'd be providing. Often that's all people need in in therapy. Gradual exposure is the gold standard. But there might be some other levers you'll be pulling as well. There's lever seven, steward your your thoughts. so ah you know you might be challenging some of the unhelpful thinking you you have and you know challenging the belief that people are going to judge you negatively if you speak more than usual in a sort social interaction.
Speaker: And you might be using lever six of, you know, even if you're doing the exposure, you're going into these situations, you might still have the the physical symptoms of anxiety. You know, yeah you might still be feeling uncomfortable.
Speaker: that's That's good. it means you're doing the work, but you might just be doing something like, you know, controlling, slowing down your breathing. Once you're in the social situation, that's okay to do. And then you might also use something like lever 12, which is pay attention. so again, if you're already confronting the difficult thing, you're feeling anxious, that's a good sign of progress.
Speaker: That anxiety will come down. But while you're feeling the anxiety, you might just be practicing mindfulness. So you're you're you're allowing the the anxiety to be there. so And I mean, there's even a range of of other levers that you you could that that could apply to anxiety, but those would be the the main ones I'd be I'd be looking at.
Speaker: So it occurred to me, Jeremy, as you're talking, that... because you distilled down a number of these books and research and all of that that you read, that maybe a better way for me to think about this or a better line of questioning is less, I suppose, coming from it in terms of, okay, if I have a common problem, how am I going to which chapter to go to in your book?
Speaker: And instead, maybe to think about it like, Okay, it's not anxiety. It's anger issues or trust issues or whatever else. I realize that not every lever or technique is going to be appropriate to every issue that I'm facing.
Speaker: But on average, if someone does feel motivated to seek information or help or whatever their issue might be, would I be fairly safe starting from something like lever one, or just starting from the beginning of the book and then being able to find something that I'm going to say might help me, not necessarily that will directly deal with my issue, but rather than, you know, lever one is going to be, that's where you start for anxiety or lever nine or whatever.
Speaker: Rather, you know Because these show up, as you said, these sort of fundamental approaches show up across a lot of different challenges or a lot of different stories, then I may actually be able to use several of these regardless of the issue I'm facing.
Speaker: Is that fair? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And again, that's why I love lever one about understanding the problem because you'll if you go through and apply that lever, you'll you'll be able to identify the controllable causes of your problem because it it might be you know some activating events like social situations causing your anxiety It might actually be the thoughts going through your mind, the beliefs you're having that are better targets. There might even be some behavioral consequences. So, you know, things you're doing that are making the problem worse where ah maybe changing your your habits is actually a good approach for targeting those behaviors.
Speaker: So lever one will give you ideas of which levers um will will help, but we're also not dogmatic. We didn't want to make that mistake of saying, you know, this book has the answer to every problem. And We tell this story, and if you remember the story of Carrie Poppy in the in the first chapter of how ah she was um she she moved into this house in LA and started to get these weird symptoms, like she paranoia, feeling like she was being watched.
Speaker: And long story short, she went onto this forum online for a ghost hunter skeptics or something like that, and someone asked her, because she thought she was being haunted. that That was one suggestion of a friend of hers.
Speaker: but someone in the forum asked, like, you know, have you heard of um carbon monoxide poisoning? And she found out after she got ah a technician to come that there was a gas leak in a house that was causing all these these symptoms. And when she moved out of there, all the symptoms faded away.
Speaker: And this this can happen. You can have other types of... physical interventions that we don't include in our book to do with medicine and diet and so on that solve psychological problems. But yeah, we can't give a blueprint of when those are going to help. So we we at least just propose, just spend a bit of time pondering whether there might be some physical causes, environmental causes to the to the problem and then that they might be a better approach than the the psychological interventions. And also your listeners might want to know a shortcut. If you go to the very end of the the book, at the end of the conclusion, there is a a table we've made of how to choose which lever is going to work for different kinds of of problems. It's not completely exhaustive, but it's a ah good, it gives some good pointers of which ones you can choose.
Speaker: Do you have a favorite lever? I'm very partial to, I believe lever nine, which is do more glad you did it activities in more clinical language. It's largely focused on behavioral activation, which is a really common technique for depression.
Speaker: And it's based on the idea that when we feel depressed, we tend to withdraw from activities in our life, like socializing, responding to messages, exercising.
Speaker: And then because we're withdrawing and getting less reward from our environment, we feel worse. And then we have even less motivation to do activities. So it creates this vicious cycle where lower mood causes more inactivity and the cycle goes around.
Speaker: And obviously you can't directly change feelings. That's why we need techniques in the first place. But the controllable part of the cycle is the activity level. so what you want to do is to gradually get people to increase their activity level. It's quite similar to gradual exposure, gradually doing things that you're afraid of. You might not be afraid of these things per se. They just might require energy. I've got to, if I'm severely depressed, I've got to get out of my bed and walk around the block.
Speaker: But the principle, after scratching our head for a while, the principle we uncovered here of, okay, why does behavioral activation work is it gets you doing more activities that make you feel gla glad after you do them. And when you look at the kinds of activities we do when we're depressed, a a lot of them are just short-term benefit, short-term gratification. So, you know, a lot of TV and doom scrolling and so on but they tend to make us feel worse after like we've wasted our time. And then when people recover from depression, there's a lot more, you know, exercise and cooking and socializing, uh, which are activities that make you feel better after you, you do them.
Speaker: And it can even apply to people who are overactive as well. Like if you're just working too much, then you probably want to replace some of the work with something relaxing that is going to make you feel glad after you do it.
Speaker: And this this is, it's close to my heart. I mean, Firstly, because I just use it a lot in therapy and I see it work really well. Also, because I think it's overlooked in self-help resources. For some reason, there's very few books that cover it. And and it it is a gold standard approach to to depression. It's actually part of cognitive behavioral therapy, but you can use it on its own as well as a treatment.
Speaker: And the research shows it's pretty competitive with with cognitive behavioral therapy. And also just in my own life, like I mentioned before, that I've had experiences of feeling depressed and a large part of overcoming that depression for me was recognizing that yeah I needed to engage more with the world around me. But but I even found and some of the research on behavioral activation is that even healthy people with no depression, they get benefits from it. They can feel happier for for doing it.
Speaker: And I can relate to this, even periods of life where I wasn't depressed per se, but I was feeling flat or lost. I was doing a reasonable number of things, like I was working part-time and um you know catching up with friends, but there were still big blocks of time where I just wasn't really doing much. And I think my my mood was suffering as ah as a result. So if I'd known this strategy back then, I think it could have helped lot.
Speaker: helped a lot How do you go about identifying the things that you'll be glad you did them after the fact? A great first step and what we tend to do in therapy is something called mood monitoring.
Speaker: And it's where you say for a week, each hour you're awake, you get some paper. There's many apps that would do this as well. You write down the main activity you were doing and then what your mood was out of 10. So it's quite simple. So, you know, maybe in the first hour after waking, you just write down getting ready, you know, you're having breakfast and so on.
Speaker: And then if you felt really bad, maybe it was one out of 10. If you felt really good, nine out of 10. If you just felt neutral, it'd be a five out of 10. So you do that for each hour and you collect that data for a week.
Speaker: And you still have to be a bit careful because it's correlational. It's not you know a huge amount of data. But yeah it'll give you some food for thought of some patterns in your mood. You'll notice like when your mood tends to be better, when it tends to be lower,
Speaker: And it's really useful because we just tend to be quite bad at remembering how we felt during different things. And I don't know if you've had this kind of experience before, but like for me, one standout is um with a group of my friends, we but we organized to go up to this pub in the hills of Adelaide and just had this amazing catch up and we were driving home like, why why didn't we organize this earlier?
Speaker: And I think part of that is we just forget how fulfilling some of these experiences are. But we can also forget how unfulfilling some other experiences are. So mood monitoring will give you ideas for the next step of the process, which is where you're making a list of activity ideas.
Speaker: And other ways you can do this, are you can just use categories of activities. pleasure might be one where these are you know things like watching your favorite TV show or movie or having a bath or a massage, things that don't require much effort to do. They tend to be quite relaxing And then you can ah have achievement-based activities where these might these will require a bit more effort. This might be ticking off chores around the house. And there's a but bunch of other prompts that can help. you know
Speaker: What have you been avoiding for a long time? What activities are in line with your values? or it overlaps with some of the earlier levers of the book as well. And we also put down exercise and socializing as distinct categories because I think they deserve to be distinct categories. like that They can be so powerful that I think all of us should at least consider if we're doing enough of them.
Speaker: So that that would be, so you you then ideally have your list of activity ideas on one sheet on your desk, and then you have your calendar next to you.
Speaker: And then the idea is you start plucking different activities out, putting them into your calendar bit by bit. So you might do, you know, one new activity per day and then you bump that out bump that up in the second week and start doing gradually more. and New doesn't necessarily mean brand new. like if If you're ah running once per week at baseline, then a new activity could be just running a second time per week. That would be that'd be fine.
Speaker: Okay. As I was listening to your book, I listened to the audio book. I said read earlier. Hopefully no one will hold it against me if I'm listening to the audio book. I did feel like you you dealt with this. I don't know if you realize this or not. You probably do because you're the author, but you did deal with this question. It was still a sort of tension that I felt as I was going through it.
Speaker: A lot of people do fail because as you said earlier, we just ask them to believe in themselves or we just, we just ask them to be different and, you know, not to diminish anyone's circumstance, but just to paint with a broad brush here, it is so much easier you know,
Speaker: do something that doesn't ask me to change my behavior, like, you know, take a pill or whatever else, because taking a pill once a day, if it counts as behavior change, it's, you know, so painless that it's so easy that it's the most minimal behavior change that we might say qualifies.
Speaker: But You know doing something like not eating sugar anymore or, you know, saying that I'm going to get up and I'm going to get five minutes of sunlight after I get out of bed or anything else. e A lot of what's in your book does ask for behavior change.
Speaker: And so really curious, both as the author, but also as someone who has worked with you know clients and and patients, how is it that we can go about helping people get to the behavior change so that then we can change their mental patterns or so that we can you know help them get to a better place when behavior change is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult parts, if not the most difficult part of this.
Speaker: For our part, we do the most we can. So you know each chapter ends with a list of key actions that people can do. We're trying to make them as concrete as possible.
Speaker: And there'll be there's numerous reminders in the book where we're telling people to do the thing. But it's in the conclusion where we're drilling that point home. like that That's the the most important thing we're defining is taking action. Because like you say, having the knowledge and information will only take you so far. You've you've got to do the thing. So we're really emphasizing whatever lever resonated, go back to that lever if you read the whole book and pick one of the key actions and try it. And it's It's not guaranteed to work. We're not going to make any of those types of promises, but it's got a reasonable chance of working. And if it doesn't, then there there's a bunch of other levers in the book. So you can you can try another one.
Speaker: So... The piece that I was thinking about when I said that I feel like you do deal with this in the book is one of the later chapters, you you'll tell me what the lever was and or the technique, I'm sure, because I forget the name.
Speaker: But you talk about breaking things up into smaller and smaller components. And so there's a point where you say you might get as detailed as open email, type subject line, you know, whatever else. and I realize that if Jeremy, the thing that you're trying to motivate me to do is to become more proactive and that whatever I'm facing in my life, if we we've decided for this time period that we're going to work on my proactivity.
Speaker: And so part of that is that I need to take charge and send my boss status updates, perhaps not wait to be asked.
Speaker: Then you find as I'm coming into you week after week that I'm constantly running into a problem of not doing it. You know, if it was a, so so I don't know about you, Jeremy, but I grew up as a musician and musicians, there's this saying that the hardest part of practicing is opening the case.
Speaker: And, you know, there's this thing with runners. It's something like one of the most effective ways to ensure that you'll run tomorrow is to get your shoes out tonight.
Speaker: And so that's behavior change and so in some respects, but, you know, once, you know, I'm coming in to see you every week. And once you identify that it's actually going to be easier to just like start the email or just open the email or write a note the night before that it, when I come to my desk, it's going to be, you know, update my boss. For example, like we, we just break it down to the, the,
Speaker: the simplest, smallest piece that doesn't feel like, well, now I have to dedicate it half an hour to this thing, then I still have to do the work. You know, I can't shy away from that proactive status update.
Speaker: But I can't shy away from practicing my musical instrument or going from that run. I mean, I can shy away from it, but I'm going to have to do it. But I I think that to get to that behavior change, one of the things is trying to figure out what is that small step that doesn't feel like I'm trying to swallow the elephant all in one bite.
Speaker: Yeah, I totally agree. And breaking things down is part lever eight, increase your productivity. Specifically in that chapter, we're going to the productivity equation where you've got three variables that contribute to productivity. You've got time, efficiency, and importance.
Speaker: And efficiency is where we're talking about different techniques. And this is where the kinds of techniques we're talking about, you can get a bit self-conscious when you're talking about these because they seem really well-known and obvious, like problem solving and breaking things down.
Speaker: But obvious doesn't always mean that we do them as much as we should be doing them. Like they're really helpful things to do. And I tell the personal story in the in the in the book of during my PhD, which can be this overwhelming task in your mind.
Speaker: I would sometimes break tasks down to just an absurd level. Like that that's where I'd be getting the, you know, the notepad document out and I'd be doing like what you said of just, you know, open the Microsoft Word document, scroll down to the results section, know, write one word So I think that is sometimes necessary to get the ball rolling.
Speaker: And I think this also connects with lever three as well, actualize your guiding foundation. So putting your, your values into, into action, especially when we're working on habit formation. yeah you You want to specify what the behavior is and you want to create a trigger for the behavior. And this is also you remember to do it. you know I wake up and I see the glass of water, so I drink the glass of water.
Speaker: But there's a a third piece of habit formation, which is overcoming resistance because all of us know what it's like to see our running shoes and we're like, no, I'm still not going to do it. We we remember to meditate and we just choose not to.
Speaker: So I think that's where some of those behavior change ideas can come in and yeah reducing the size of the task. Just like breaking things down is is one idea.
Speaker: Rearranging the environment, so preparing your environment but beforehand is another. Just different ways of making the behavior easier to do And so I agree, those are really important things to work on.
Speaker: So Eric, I actually wanted to ask you what's your favorite lever of the book? What's the name of lever one again? Unravel the causes. Yeah. Understand the problem.
Speaker: So if you had not answered the question, if you'd put me on the spot, Jeremy, I would have said that it's about understanding what the situation is. You know, even if this is not totally appropriate, I might go further and say, just giving it a name.
Speaker: I think you sort of said this before, but I feel like there are a lot of things in our lives for all of us. You know, whether you really deal with a a challenge, an issue, whatever that we might diagnose, or you're just a human being that there's a big bad.
Speaker: And the only reason that it's a big bad is because it's in the shadows. I think that if we can just sort of put a stake in the ground and say, at least for the moment, this is the way that I understand that thing.
Speaker: then, you know, you might be busy, might not be your top priority. But when you come back around to that issue, you have a starting point because you, as I said, put a stake in the ground or you put a word to it, a description to the thing.
Speaker: And, you know, then the rest, um By no means do I think that one is subordinate to to another, but that feels like a good starting place. And I hope I didn't misinterpret you, but it's not a bad place to, again, start from if you don't know where to go.
Speaker: Yeah, well said. Yeah, totally agree. Before we wrap up or as we wrap up, If somebody is listening to this conversation and they take away only one thing, Jeremy, is there something that you would want the listener to recall?
Speaker: I think that the big thing would be that the common types of psychological things we struggle with, like anxiety, worry, overthinking, depression, procrastination, social stress, social anxiety, feeling awkward,
Speaker: there really are good tools available to help you with them. And I think our book is a great starting point to check out some of those tools and get help with those problems.
Speaker: So I would encourage people to do that. And for those who already have the book, then I would just be urging what we covered before of like really take action, like really try some of the key actions in the book and see what happens.
Speaker: If someone wants to purchase the book or follow you online or they want to go somewhere after this, where would you direct people? So the website for the book is 12leversbook.com with 12 as a number. ah You can also find it in all the the major places like Amazon.
Speaker: And then if you wanted to get in touch with um me specifically, you can find me at drjeremystevenson.com. Well, I hope you hear from someone. I enjoyed the book. I really appreciate you being here. And thank you for making the time, Jeremy.
Speaker: Thanks, Eric. It was a pleasure. Thank you.
