In this episode we discuss How To Use “Mind Control” Techniques to Create Any Habit You Want, why we are driven much more by pain than pleasure, the “hook” model for describing human behavior, how to hack your rewards to change your behavior, the power of tiny amounts of friction, and much more with Nir Eyal.

 

 Nir Eyal is an expert in “behavioral design” having worked in both advertising and video gaming helping companies build and create more engaging products. Nir is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the book Hooked: How To Build Habit Forming Products and has been featured in Forbes, Psychology Today, and more. Nir is an active angel investor and currently writes to help companies create good habit and behaviors in their users on his blog NirandFar.com.

 

We discuss:

 

Persuasion, mind control, and behavioral design

What is a habit and how do you define it?

How we can leverage technology to build healthier habits

How 50% of your actions take place with little or no unconscious thought

Internal vs External triggers 

There is only one reason you use a product or service - to modulate your mood - that’s it

Our behaviors are driven NOT by seeking of pleasure, but rather the quelling of a unconformable emotion 

Figure out what your frequently occurring internal triggers are

We are driven more by PAIN than by PLEASURE

There’s no end to what we can accomplish if we can understand that pain is our primary motivator

Even seeking pleasure = satisfying the PAIN of WANTING

The power of the unknown to draw us in 

The 4 stages of the “Hook” Model on how Habits are formed and sustained

Rewards are actually wanting to quell the “stress of desire”

Discomfort drives us to action

How the same mental hardwiring behind addiction also underpins love and desire

The easier you can make a behavior the more likely people are to do it

The biggest thing that drives people to adopt technology is making life EASIER

Reward itself doesn’t have much impact on your brain, its the anticipation of the reward that drives us 

3 Kinds of Variable Rewards

Rewards of the Tribe

Rewards of the Hunt

Rewards of the Self

Belief is as much of a factor in addiction as physical dependency itself

How making a behavior just a little bit easier can have dramatic results

How to put the hook model in reverse and destroy bad habits

How putting space between steps in your habit loop can create massive changes

How can you make bad habits more difficult, take longer, or be harder to do?

How you can use “temptation bundling” to break the hold of variable rewards in your habit loop

Never do something when you don’t have the end in sight - do things that have a finite END so that you don’t get hooked

Key question you must ask yourself: Is this technology serving ME, or am I serving IT?

One simple piece of advice to implement the ideas discussed in this interview right away

How to leverage technology to combat technology that is distracting you 

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