Episode 73: Habits are Tools for Executive Functions

Below you can view or listen to Episode 73 of The Personal Brain Trainer Podcast.

Confusion and Executive Functioning

In this episode of 'The Executive Function Brain Trainer Podcast,' hosts Darius Namdaran and Dr. Erica Warren explore into the power of habits and innovative tools for enhancing executive function and learning. They discussed the formation and benefits of habits, especially for individuals with dyslexia and ADHD, and introduce iVVi, a groundbreaking app for visual note-taking. The episode also covers key strategies like utilizing visual and auditory cues, balancing structured routines with creativity, and employing the 'Four Ts' - Techniques, Technology, Time, and Together - to simplify and enrich the learning process.

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Dr Erica Warren Assessments

Transcript:

Erica: Welcome to the Personal Brain Trainer podcast. I'm Dr Erica Warren.

Darius: And I'm Darius Namdaran. And we're your hosts. Join us on an adventure to translate scientific jargon and brain research into simple metaphors and explanations for everyday life. We explore executive function and learning strategies that help turbocharge the mind.

Erica: Come learn to steer around the invisible barriers so that you can achieve your goals. This podcast is ideal for parents, educators, and learners of all ages. This podcast is brought to you by goodsensorylearning.com, where you can find educational and occupational therapy lessons and remedial materials that bring delight to learning. Finally, you can find Dr Warren's many courses at, learningspecialistcourses.com dot. Come check out our newest course on developing executive functions and study strategies.

Darius: This podcast is sponsored by dyslexiaproductivitycoaching.com. we give you a simple productivity system for your Apple devices that harnesses the creativity that comes with your dyslexia.

Erica: Hey, Darius, great to see you today.

Darius: Hey, Erika. Nice to see you, too.

Erica: So, what's on, the docket for today?

Darius: Well, I want to talk about how habits are tools. This seems like a strange topic, but, you know, we get used to having software that is like a tool. We've got physical tools that do certain jobs. But what I've been pondering on is, like, habits are kind of like tools as well. Just like an app leads you through doing certain processes and steps in an order, so does a habit. So when you move something from being highly intentional about doing it, and it moves down into the habit realm, it becomes like a mental tool. And I thought we could discuss about this.

Erica: I love this. I mean, what I love about it so much is it becomes a subconscious tool so that you no longer have to consciously follow, a sequence. Because once it's become a habit, it's become automatic. It's almost like an established routine that you do, and it just goes on automatic pilot, so to speak. So, yeah, this is very interesting. Let's talk more about this.

Darius: And the reason why I brought it up was because I actually find it hard to build habits, because automaticity, for some people with dyslexia or ADHD or other neurodivergent thinking, automaticity can be one of the things that is hard. So, automaticity being the ability to become automatic at something, and it's a great skill to be able to be automatic at something, but it has its downsides. So if you become rapidly automatic at doing something, that is the wrong way to do something. You've learned a bad habit, and it sticks with you, and you just repeat it. And then there's other people who are on the other side of, like me, who find it really hard to become automatic at something. And so they're always having to reinvent how they do something. They're always having to sort of approach something like they're a beginner or doing something new takes a lot more cognitive attention and awareness and energy, but it brings a lot more intention, brings a lot more adaptiveness. And so often people like that invent and discover new ways, new processes of doing things that are not typical because they're constantly doing it a different way, which, if you remember that process or that recipe, if you're a chef or whatever, is fantastic because you can then codify it, pass it on, to someone else who does follow processes and is automatic at something, or choose to make that automatic for you. So there's real upsides and downsides for this specialization of automaticity, but the bottom line is everyone needs habits. And from my background, I think I'm speaking to people here that maybe find habits hard or maybe have a negative approach towards habits. Oh, I don't like habitual thinking. I don't like doing things the same way all the time. And I'm a very creative person. Why do we need this habit or whatever? And habit becomes a bad word in their mind, as it were. And maybe, in a way, I've kind of absorbed

00:05:00

Darius: that through my childhood or whatever, and I've associated, I suppose, maybe because I've not been good at habits, I've had a negative relationship with habits because habits are always there, condemning you for not having followed it. So you go, well, I don't need habits. And you start becoming more independent or whatever. And I actually rely a lot on tools to take the place of habits, like software tools to take the place of maybe not having a systematic approach to something. I rely on a good bit of software for X, Y, and Z, and that's the strength of certain apps. They lead you through a specific process to an end result, which is like a habit, which has led me to this kind of realization. Oh, my goodness. Habits are like having an inbuilt app that does a specific good thing for you.

Erica: You know, I'm super excited about something that you said, which was that the word habit can be a trigger for some people. So while you were chatting, I went ahead and went onto Google, and I was like, what are some synonyms for habits? Because I'm a firm believer that words are really important. Well, particularly if some words are triggering, and that it's important for people to find the word that resonates with them because that sometimes opens a door. So if habit's not a good word, what are some other words that basically enable you to do that thing? That could be enormously beneficial, but it feels better. Like, people might say that they're very anxious about something. And I. One thing I often say is, well, you know, when you're anxious about something, it's very similar to being excited, that the emotion is very similar. So I'm curious if we could change it from anxiety to excitement, because then it kind of opens a door. And so I'm thinking about the same thing about habit. If habit is a word that triggers you, what are some other ones? Routine. Routine triggers me a little bit. Habit feels a little bit better. You could talk about it as a style. I thought this was interesting. A tradition. A tradition kind of. In a way, if you do something traditionally, it's kind of a habit, but it may not be as triggering. Although for some people it might be like, oh, no, no, stay away from tradition. That doesn't feel right to me. But it just goes back to the idea that finding the right word that enables you to get to where you need to be. Because really, what we're trying to establish is that you're able to get things done in a way that's not painful, as we've talked about in the past, moving things from hard to easy.

Darius: Yes, exactly. And, in a way, what you're trying to do is delegate that task to something that takes less cognitive load, takes less resources, so it frees up more capacity to do something that is of more interest to you, you know? And there's lots of ways to do this. Andrew Huberman would say protocol. That would be one of his words, wouldn't it? He talks about protocols. You've got, rituals, don't you?

Erica: Ooh, rituals. And that's going to really appeal to some people.

Darius: Yes, yes. And I think there's, in a way, app has, appealed to me because I'm developing an app. I love apps, I love technology. And thinking about a habit routine as a way of sequencing that app, that process so that it happens automatically and reliably is so attractive to me.

Erica: Well, and if you think about computers, they have these rules. It's a rule that just always happens when it follows a certain sequence. Or you could think of it as a way or an approach.

Darius: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, you're talking, you're now starting to talk a little bit more like spiritual people talk about in terms of the way or, you know, what other kind of, in a sort of religious sense, do people talk about them? When we've talked about traditions, we talked about rituals.

Erica: Yeah. It makes me think of almost like a pilgrimage. But there's something, a pilgrimage is a little different, but it is a path. Yes, it's a process.

Darius: That's true. It's another process. A lot of the, these pilgrimages have got set spaces and set ways of you know. Yeah, it's interesting.

Erica: And a habit could be thought of as a process that you have a new process, a new way, a new process. But

00:10:00

Erica: it's, the idea, as you said, that you're building it to automaticity. It's becoming kind of this unconscious or subconscious sequence that you follow. Just like in the beginning when we all learned to brush our teeth, it was something that was uncomfortable until it became a habit. And I think that's the sweet spot that you're trying to get at, if I'm correct, or at least the sweet spot that I'm feeling, is that when something becomes a habit or a ritual or whatever you want to call it, it becomes easy, it just happens. It's no longer a struggle, you no longer forget to do it because it just becomes a part of your day.

Darius: Yes, yes. I suppose I've experienced how valuable habits are over the years and through this podcast we've been talking a lot of the time. It's about what sort of executive function, habits you're making within your mind, what habits you're using with software, what's happened, habits you're doing, processes, procedures, strategies, these all end up becoming encoded into a good habit, essentially. But what I've realized is that I think subconsciously I've had a negative reaction towards habits. I mean, if you think as a child, sometimes you get habits forced upon you, don't you? Oh, you've got to do it this way, you've got to do this, and you're like, oh gosh, everything's getting rules and regulations, and I have to do it like this, and I have to do it like that. And you kind of feel like it's being imposed upon you. But the beautiful thing is about growing up is you can choose what, what processes you impose upon yourself for your own outcome. And in a way, sometimes I think maybe that the gift of habits has been sullied and a direct comparable would be my approach to the calendar I had a negative approach towards the calendar. It never really served me well because I put some things in it that would work, and it would feel like a tyrant. Orlando. A lot of effort for not much return on investment because it never really worked for me until I had this paradigm shift where I said, my calendar is my book of promises.

Erica: Yeah.

Darius: Do you want your promises? Do you want to fulfill your promises? I do. I want to do this. And so the calendar no longer felt like something imposed upon me, but it becomes something that I chose to impose my desires on, which is to fulfill my promises. And likewise, the same with habits. Habits are a tool which deliver the promises you're making to yourself.

Erica: I love what you're saying, and it's going right back to picking a word that helps you to get through the muck, that makes it reframes it in a way that makes it palatable. Yeah, it makes me well. And really what it's making me think about is cognitive flexibility. It's what you're doing is you're being cognitively flexible, and you're saying, okay, is there another way of approaching this so I can trick my brain into doing what I want it to do? And that's ultimately what you're doing, right? You're trying to get yourself to follow through with something. But, yeah, I think that there really is a something super sweet about really being mindful of picking the right words.

Darius: Yeah. And I think so. First of all, step one, make, friends with habits. They are your friend. They are on your side if you choose them well.

Erica: Right. And before you let that go, I want to add to it. Step back for a moment to what you said about how there's often childhood trauma. And I think it's because, for me, because it was like being told that I need to get rid of bad habits. You know that oftentimes it's associated with it being bad. Oh, what if that's a bad habit that you have, like smoking or whatever is a bad habit. that we don't often think of habits as being good, but habits can be wonderfully good.

Darius: And actually, you made me think about freedom as childhood. You get these habits imposed upon you, and it feels like it's the antithesis of freedom. Like, habits take your freedom away. But actually, habits create freedom from the tyranny of the mundane. If your mind is continually absorbed

00:15:00

Darius: with doing all those mundane tasks, so intentionally, all the time, and that's the reason why we have automaticity in our brain. That's why we have so much of our brain dedicated, over 80% of its dedicated to automatic functions in our body and our life. You know, bodily organs. These are all habits encoded into our DNA and our bodily process, the way our heart beats, the way we breathe. And all these things, ah, are habits of the deepest level. So it's about freedom, too. And I think that's something that I remember when I was hitchhiking in Europe. I read this book called the Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe as a spin-off of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And it was this great guy, he wrote this book about traveling, and it was as much a book on philosophy as the practical approach to hitchhiking around Europe. I ended up hitchhiking to Istanbul as a result of it. And one of the things he said was in order to enjoy your freedom, you must restrict it.

Erica: That sounds like such an oxymoron.

Darius: It does. And then he said, I meet so many people who are into railing. They're trying to explore all of Europe, and they spend one day in Paris, and then they get on the train, and they spend another day in Nice, and they get on the train, and they get, another day in Bordeaux and another train, another day in Nice, another day in Venice, another day, and they're going everywhere in their 30 days of traveling. And actually, have they really traveled? Have they really had the fruits of their freedom? They've expressed their freedom, but have they truly got the benefit of their freedom? And so, sometimes restricting your freedom to enjoy your freedom, you have to restrict it. And so, in a way, this habit is like deciding these are really important things for me that I want to reliably keep happening, like taking my tablets or whatever, that I know, in the long run are going to give me the space to do the things I want to do. And you start having this more positive approach to habits, rather than a childlike approach, where you are rejecting it. So, in a way, what I'm doing is, as a 55-year-old man, 54-year-old man, saying, I've made friends with habits now, and I'm kind of encouraging you. Number one, make friends with them early on in life. And number two, choose your habits carefully.

Erica: Yeah. And when you choose them, choose to name them something that empowers you or that feels possible. If it starts to feel impossible, it's not going to be attainable.

Darius: I think I quiet. I'm quite fond of Andrew Huberman's protocol. It's very, very popular at the moment. This is my protocol for, you know, he does it all the time, basically, a protocol, by implication, is saying, I'm intentionally aiming for an end result. I am being systematic about it and probably scientific. There's some sort of verifiable, reliable, proven method towards to get to that end. It implies all of that. I'm going to do it predictably, over and over again and just trust that over time that protocol will yield those results. And it could be as simple as one of his protocols, for example, is. And I'm probably butchering it but is to get out early in the morning and have sunlight on your eyes and ambulate. You know, he says ambulate and sunlight.

Erica: You know, he calls it forward ambulation.

Darius: That's right. Forward ambulation and sunlight.

Erica: And I have more. I mean, anytime I've kind of followed his protocol, I've felt a shift in me.

Darius: Yes, yes.

Erica: You know, it's really lovely, and it's so timely that this is coming up because I'm taking an internal family systems course. It's a form of a therapeutic coaching kind of intervention. And in my last class, my teacher said, you need to make sure that you have a daily routine. A daily. Oh, there's another one. A daily practice.

Darius: Yes, a practice. That's the sort of religious terminology, you know, this is my practice, you know?

Erica: Right. Yes, a daily practice. He said, it's very important that you have a daily practice where you can drop into self. And self is just, a term that's used that reflects you and your best,

00:20:00

Erica: your best self, your best perspective. It's when you are standing strong, you're open hearted. And he said, it's really imperative that you have a daily practice. So this is really amazing timing because I really want to establish a daily practice. I do so well when I'm in a really structured and organized environment. And I'm revamping my life right now to get back into that because I miss it. I miss it and I need it. But when you cohabitate with other people that are not into a structured routine, it's very difficult to maintain one for yourself. And so, yeah, I'm trying to reestablish that sense of peace. For me, it is peace, right? Because you know what to expect, you know what's coming next. And. And it does enable you to create that. That, oh, I like that habit, that peace. So.

Darius: Habits bring peace because certain areas that, you know, need to be addressed are, you know, are covered because those protocols are going to end up with that output. And so it's interesting, Jordan Peterson talks about this with creative people. He observes with creative people that a lot of creative people are creative with everything. And this is kind of what we're talking about. Sometimes you I don't want to be held down, I don't want to be told what to do, etcetera. And so you're creative with everything, and then actually what you end up being is just chaotic with everything and not actually get to the end result of a creative process. So what he suggests is be creative, but decide to be creative within one clear domain, and then the other domains don't be creative, be systematic, so that they end up being at peace or sort of shut locked down and don't create chaos and allow that creative chaos and order to happen inside of the area that you've decided to be creative in. I think this is this dynamic that we're talking about. You just can't always be dynamically dealing with absolutely everything all the time because you're going to drop the ball.

Erica: And on the flip side, you can't be moving from one habit to the next, or you lose a sense of creativity and consciousness. I mean, because that's the interesting thing.

Darius: What you're saying is you can't be always doing everything by habit because it locks everything a thing down. Yes.

Erica: Right. And then you could say that you're not living consciously. M. Right. So if you're stuck too much in a habit, so it seems like you really need a balance of habits and then evaluation.

Darius: That's right.

Erica: Ooh, how's that habit working out? Or is there any way I can tweak it and make it better so that you're still having moments of consciousness? But then, in a way, the purpose of a habit is to also increase creativity because you're not getting caught up in the routine of, you're not getting caught up in all the stuff of your day, that's being done automatically so that you then have the openness to grow and to create and the cognitive.

Darius: Bandwidths and the energy and so on. the mental energy, because, you know, we see it a lot with dyslexia and adhd, for example, how much cognitive bandwidth it takes to do some of the most mundane thing. You know, it's a proven fact that people with dyslexia, even though they could read just as well as, anyone else, for example, if you objectively got them to read a piece of text, a person with dyslexia will be, if you look at the MRI, will be accessing more areas of their brain. Often the more creative areas of the brain to achieve the same task and using up, more energy. And they will often be more tired, mentally tired, by the same act.

Erica: Yes. I mean, I see kids all the time that have some learning challenges, and the challenge is just that they don't learn the way that the school is asking them to learn. So they're having to accommodate that, and they're having to kind of reroute things in a way that's uncomfortable for them, and it is super exhausting. And I get so many kids after school where I'm like, they're spent. Yeah, they're completely. And the parents are like, I don't know what to say. They can't get their homework done. They're just. They're cooked. They're done. How do we, you know, give them the energy to be able to get through what they need to get through? It's. It's such a chronic problem of. Of exhaustion.

00:25:00

Darius: Yes. It's totally understandable. I mean, you can see it on the MRI scans. Those MRI scans. That was it. Cambridge, who did the dyslexia MRI scans? They did a big study on it in America. It wasn't Harvard. It was. I did a video on it where I drew some of the scans out and so on. Anyway, we'll put the link in the description below. But when you look at the MRI scans of a typical person with dyslexia versus a typical non dyslexic, typical thinker, the MRI scans of a typical thinker showed up in the brain scans in two areas on the brain, strongly on the left hand side, whereas on the dyslexic thinker, it was fainter on those two areas, but really strong on the central right hand side, over two or three areas consistently across the mall. On one exercise, it showed it up. And that one exercise was the ability to read a new word. So, a, word that they've never experienced before. So a person, typical reader will still access their normal decoding centers and be able to read that word out. It's a made-up word, but it sounds like a normal word, you know, whereas the person with dyslexia has to access so many other areas to decode them. And the energy for doing that is.

Erica: Immense, you know, so funny, because, as you know, and some people that are listening to this know, I have dyslexia, you have dyslexia. And I have to say that it's not something I do for pleasure. So it's funny when people say, oh, I read for pleasure. I'm like, oh, I'm so jealous. I want to read for pleasure, but I don't ever read for pleasure. I read for knowledge. I enjoy the knowledge, but I don't enjoy the process of reading. I find it taxing, overwhelming and a little bit agitating because it's like listening to an audiobook. You get the information for me, I'm able to absorb it in a way that's more fluid and comfortable than decoding words. I suppose perhaps, you know, I hear that people that, that are great readers, and I would say I'm a great reader, but it's just not, it doesn't come naturally. I can do it. It's not comfortable for me. Yeah, but I'm so like, oh, my goodness. When I hear people say, yeah, I, read a book and a movie happens in my head, I'm like, so jealous. You know, I guess I can sort of do that, but I can't do it simultaneously to reading because the reading process takes up so much cognitive energy that I don't have the space to activate my visual cortex.

Darius: See, I see, I see, you know.

Erica: Where some people do. So it's really, really interesting. So I have a theory that I've been able to validate many times over, and that is anytime I've had a student, and they've said, I hate to read, I ask them, can you visualize? And every single time they say, no, they can't visualize when they read. And it made me think about the idea that if you're going to a movie and your eyes are closed, it's a lot of work to keep track of the movie, right. And it's not that fun. But I think that a lot of dyslexics don't like to read because they don't get visuals, because they don't have the cognitive space to do so, or for some reason, they may not have strong visualization skills. But yeah. What are your thoughts on that?

Darius: Well, I mean, they may have, like we talked about before, they may have strong visualization skills, but so much of their cognitive ability as energy is going to the basic decoding that's being taken away from the visualization. So when you release that and they can listen to it, then the visualization skills can happen. That's essentially can happen. And it's interesting because, I just started with a new student, an 18-year-old, and I see this often with students when it comes to taking notes. They've got so used to taking notes by hand, the way they should do by writing lists of words and paragraphs and bullet point lists and so on. But they never refer back to them and they never relate to the notes that they've taken. So what's the problem there? Because notes are meant to be the

00:30:00

Darius: ability to capture those golden nuggets that you're taking out of what you're getting.

Darius: One way of thinking about it is if you're in a lecture or your job is to understand 100% of what's there and capture 1% of what's valuable, the golden nuggets. If you're in a meeting, 100% engagement and understanding 1% notes. And that might seem a bit strange, but actually, if you do the maths, a typical 1-hour talk, 7000 words are spoken. Okay. You only need 70 words to probably capture all of the golden nuggets. In that 1-hour lecture, there will be key words like photosynthesis or cytokinesis or, you know, different key ideas. If you have 70 of them, more than enough to create what I would call like a golden bridge between the topic and what's being taught, you're filling in those with key ideas and so on and unpacking all the rest of the words that are just there to deliver those golden nuggets and those valuable key ideas to you. They're delivery mechanisms. Language is a delivery mechanism for those key words and key concepts. So when that student is sitting there and, they're just transcribing everything, they're often not engaging and filtering.

Erica: You're right, there's not enough cognitive space.

Darius: That's right.

Erica: To listen, to process, and to write.

Darius: Absolutely. And they're often being shut down by the panic. I was speaking to one mom, I was showing her iVVi, for example, and.

Erica: Tell everybody what iVVi is first if they don't know.

Darius: So IVVi is an app that I'm developing for visualization people. And basically it helps you master lectures and meetings. You hit record, it records the audio, it transcribes what you're saying, and in real time, creates a mind map of what's being said. So you have this visual map of the keywords, adds pictures to it, and structures it in real time. So as you're hearing the conversation, you're seeing the keyword, and the picture appear. And so you're associating with what's being said, with what that icon is or that word, and creating a mental map of that experience. So when you go back to looking at it, it's not like reading a transcript or a summary. It's something that you experienced, and you saw. Oh, that's funny how it used a car for that, or that interesting icon or so on that associated with it, quite cleverly, that you go, oh, I remember that was that little point there. And if you want, you can zoom down to the actual transcript, but you've got the key ideas. That's iVVi. Yeah. So I showed her mum this, and she was like, oh, my goodness. Now, my son, instead of panicking in a lecture, can listen in a lecture. And that's interesting, isn't it? Because the moment you start panicking, you stop listening.

Erica: Right. And your capacity goes down and your working memory.

Darius: Yeah, absolutely. And, I was like, wow, iVVi means you can relax and start listening. And I think it goes through this process of, you need to listen, which leads to understanding, and then through understanding, you identify what the key things are to remember. And then once you remember those key things, you can then apply it.

Erica: Yeah. You know, I'm curious. I know this is a little bit of a rabbit hole, but I can't help but ask you in this moment. So I could listen to an audiobook and use IVVi at the same time, and then it could outline each chapter for me.

Darius: Absolutely. You could listen to a podcast. You could listen to a podcast, you could listen to an audiobook, and you.

Erica: Get all the golden nuggets.

Darius: Yes. And, you know, the best thing, Erica, is you've got, like, three buttons. Okay? One button is a highlight button, which just highlights the last sort of ten or 20 seconds that you heard. Oh, somewhere in there, it's quite good. Okay. And so you can just go into sort of a more passive approach where you're just listening to it, and you reckon there's maybe about seven nuggets in an hour that you'll get 710 seconds that are like, oh, that's a really good quote, or that's the thing that I'm committing to, or that's a really important idea, you know, so you could be passively listening, but then you go, oh, that's important. You know, wipe off your. Your foam, off your hand while you're washing the dishes or whatever, and you tap the button, and you know that it's just highlighted that last section for you, and you can just tap highlights afterwards, and you've got those 770 words that you can read in one or two minutes,

00:35:00

Darius: and that's summarized, you know.

Erica: Oh, that's so that. That's freedom.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: Bring us back to habits and freedom. That's free. So. Oh, interesting. So I guess IVVi could become a habit so anytime you listen to a lecture, or you listen to a podcast, or you, get into the habit of, turning on iVVi so that you can capture the essence.

Darius: Absolutely. I'm hoping that if he passes the toothbrush test, Larry Page said, you know, a piece of software is not worth investing your time or money in unless it passes the toothbrush test, which means you use it more than twice in a day. That students will be using this five, six times a day. They'll listen to a lecture, and they'll hit record and transcribe the whole lecture, turn it into a mind map. They'll listen to a podcast, they'll listen to an audiobook, or they might just take a piece of text, switch on text to speech, and get it read out to them, and then it reads it out to IVVi at the same time. IVVi takes notes. But the great thing about it is that the second button is even better than the highlight button. Yeah. So what I've been doing, and I'm loving it, because I'm doing this all in the background. No one has access to this at the moment, but it's going to be released very soon. While the text is appearing as a stream of text, if he chooses one of the words from the paragraph and adds it to the mind map for you with an image. Okay. And then it goes to the next paragraph, and it chooses a keyword. So you've got all of the keywords appearing for you, but you might look at it, and you go, maybe I don't agree. And you just tap on a different word, and it takes that word and adds it into the mind map instead. So you don't type, you don't have to select and highlight. You just tap. So you tap, ah, to highlight, and you tap to identify a keyword, and it puts the keyword into the branch, but it doesn't stop there. It suggests five well designed icons and images that are related to that keyword to help you remember it in that instant. And you can then just go with the default that AV chooses for you out of those five. Or you could choose one of those five that you think is more relevant. Basically, what I'm trying to tap into is learning is about choosing what you think is more important to focus in on. It's this inhibitory control. Learning is a choice. Teachers are always trying to get you to choose what is the key idea and concept and understand it. It's this ability to discern what is more important than the packaging. Right?

Erica: Well, I guess it's a form of metacognition Yes and no. Yes and no. You're choosing what's most important, but you are having a little bit of an internal conversation where you're aware of your own thoughts. So it is probably largely a,

Darius: Metacognitive process, which also is metacognitive in terms of you've got to relate it to your goals, you know, because learning often is determined, how you learn is determined by what your personal goals are. So if you're doing a psychology degree and you're very interested in one particular aspect of psychology, then it will affect the way you choose certain information. That's the beauty of learning, because it relates to your context and your desires. So you will pull out different keywords, different quotes, different ideas than another person. And that's the joy of learning, you know?

Erica: Right. It really brings in the idea of reflection, and when you have the opportunity to reflect on what you're learning about, that's when the deep learning happens, and that's when you make those cognitive connections so that you can access the information better.

Darius: Yeah, yeah. And what I'm hoping is in the future, once iVVi becomes voice activated, because IVVi is an AI powered, visual note taking assistant. Basically, while you're listening to your podcast, Erica, and you've got IVVi on, you'll say, oh, switch on iVVi. And IVVi will come on, and IVVi will just start automatically recording that podcast, transcribing it, turning it to notes in the background, and you'll be able to say to IVVi, oh, IVVi, that's important.

Erica: Oh, that's. Then you can really multitask. You can be doing your dishes, be taking a walk, you could be driving.

Darius: you know, oh, remember, IVVi, that's important. You know, like, what is in a meeting, you say to someone, oh, could you please minute that? Please minute that. if you've got a minutes meeting, you'd be in important meetings and things like, please minute that.

Erica: You know, but that's time

00:40:00

Erica: consuming, because if you have to stop everything, you don't. Now, you don't really have to. If you use iVVi, it's really cool. Well, so to bring us back to habits.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: What do you think? Where should we go from?

Darius: Yeah, so, okay, I might be quite useful to just talk about some useful habits that we've kind of touched on in the executive function podcast here over the months and years we've been doing. How long has it been? We're over episode 70. Have we been doing this for longer than two years now? Is that nearly two years or something like that?

Erica: It must be.

Darius: And by the way, listener, thank you very much for taking the time to be here and listening to us, rambling away and sort of brainstorming here. And thanks being on this journey. So please reach out if you're enjoying this. We love to hear from you. So some of the things, if you think about it, we talked in the last episode about making things go from hard to do over to easy to do, okay? And I was working with a client, an osteopath, a week ago and we were reflecting back on having done like twelve sessions of executive function coaching and reflecting back on what sort of techniques had shifted him from going from hard to easy to do. Okay? And we broke it down into four t's. And I want to share with you those four t's. Okay, so the first one was, is there a technique that would really help shift something from hard to do too easy to do? Okay. Second one, is there a technology that would help move something from hard to do too easy to do? And I mean instantly hard to easy. An example would be speech to text. Text to speech. Will it read it out to me? Oh, that makes it so much easier, for example, for some people. So we've got technique, we've got technology, and then we've got time. And we've talked about time as well. Time chunking, for example. Could I change the time I do this activity? Could I chunk it down in time, etcetera? And even could I chunk it down into a three-minute task that ends up becoming part of a protocol that is easy to do and builds up over time and delivers that result rather than trying to do it over a big intense period. And the fourth was together.

Erica: Aw.

Darius: you know, sometimes a task goes from hard to do too easy to do when you do it together with people.

Erica: Yeah, I like that.

Darius: And so together might be from the body doubling we talked about last week, last time, where you just have someone who chums you and does it with you and it just becomes easier. There's just some accountability and that presence and so on. For a lot of people with ADHD, it's really helpful. It could also be someone is more experienced at doing finances than you or that's more their sort of thing and you're really terrible at it, but you still need to do it. So you do a deal where let’s meet up together on Zoom and you hold me accountable and then I’ll help you with your creative website, blogging or whatever it is that you’re really good at. And there’s some quid pro quo, or it could be together in terms of I’m going to delegate this to you, so were still doing it together, you’re being paid and I’m delegating it to you. So under these sort of four t's, I noticed so many different strategies emerging, you know, so what was it? Technique, technology, time and together.

Erica: Very nice. I love that.

Darius: And so, in a way, what I'm saying is maybe you could make it a habit to reflect on some of the things you find hard in life, hard to do, some of the important things that you find hard to do, like we talked in the previous episode, and shift them over to becoming instantly easy to do by wondering, is there some sort of one to less than three minute activity that I can include in my life that is a technique that will shift it, or a tool, a technology that I can just reliably use? We've talked about apple notes. If you're having an idea, capture that and put it into apple notes. Make that a, micro habit that can transform your working memory and just relieve your working memory having to hold on to important thoughts. So that's a technology. There's lots of technologies like that. Apple reminders, Apple notes iv, making mental maps,

00:45:00

Darius: using your alarm, Google keep. There are all sorts of these little things that you can do in short bursts that just help you, you know, your calendar, etc. Making your calendar into your book of promises, etcetera, and shifting your approach to it. So it becomes a less than a three-minute task to do the job. That's the key, I would say, before, before it becomes a job or a task, it becomes a habit. It's got to be less than three minutes. And you can add them together into a chain of protocols if you want. And then finally together, maybe there's a little one two, three-minute habit you can do with someone together. That makes a big difference. I don't know what that is. Maybe in the morning you make sure you say, I love you, kiss your partner, you know, or remember to do something or text or whatever.

Erica: My favorite habit to encourage people to do on a daily basis is gratitude. And it's such an easy, quick and easy thing to do. Whether it's at dinner or when you first wake up or when you are first, you're about ready to go to sleep, it really shifts you energetically and helps you to be in a better place. And if you do it before you go to bed, it probably will enhance your sleep quite a bit. Definitely. Probably won't have as many nights’ terrors or anxiety or nightmares. Because if you're really shifting your energy to a place of gratitude before you go to bed, you're inviting a more restful night. That's a good habit.

Darius: Yes, yes. Oh, and one bonus thought is for people who do find their automaticity really hard, I mean, my automaticity is atrocious. It must take me at least 125 repetitions of something for it to get anywhere close to sticking to becoming a habit. I know it's somewhere around about that, maybe probably more like 150. But one way of hacking that is by having a visual cue that you associate that habit with. You stick that habit up, so you make sure that there's a certain picture that makes you feel thankful. And you just say, every time I see that picture, I'm going to say thank you for something. Or every time I see x, y or z, I'm going to do such and such. Every time I see my toothbrush, I'm going to brush my teeth, you know?

Erica: Right, right. Well, it's funny because you're very visual. And what I do is I use my devices in my house to remind me. So I have the auditory reminders of. And that really works for me because although visual reminder will work for the first week, all of a sudden it becomes like something that affected and I don't see it anymore. You know, unless I put like a piece of blue tape across the doorway and I walk into it, I just don't see it anymore. So. But I hear it. I hear the auditory reminders, although they can be a little distracting. But yeah, it's a matter of going and really honoring your best ways of processing. Some people like tactile tools, some people like auditory tools. You might want your partner to remind you, which is more of an interactive tool, but use the tools that work for you so you can establish the habits, the good habits that you want to have at a pace that's going to make you feel successful. Because sometimes when it takes too long to establish a habit, we lose our motivation and then we lose when we were so close to establishing a habit, we bag it, which is a shame.

Darius: And that basically is one of the reasons why I'm now thinking about habits as tools. I love, as a woodworker, going to my toolkit and having exactly the right tool, the right chisel, the right plane, the right screwdriver, whatever it is, to do that thing that I need. I'm, not messing around with it. It's reliable, it gives a predictable result, helps me achieve my goal. And habits are tools.

Erica: Beautiful. This was such a fun discussion.

Darius: Thanks for having it with me, Erika. I love just riffing on these ideas each week and seeing where they go. Looking forward to next week.

Erica: Me too. Thank you for joining our conversation here at the Personal Brain trainer podcast.

Darius: This is Dr Erica Warren and Darius Namdaran. Check out the show notes for links to resources mentioned in the podcast and please leave us a review and share us on social media

00:50:00

Darius: until next time. Bye.