According to Charles Duhigg, to change habits one should deconstruct them into their constituent parts. I’m pretty sure he oversimplifies it quite a lot, and the structure of his model isn’t great, but I still think he’s got the right idea – here it is:

Cue: something triggers you to look for a reward.

Reward: the result of the habit’s routine.

Routine: the series of events from Cue to Reward.

What are my habits? What’s a habit that’s worth changing? What is the Cue for this habit? What is the Reward of this habit? How can I change the routine?

I just asked this question on Quora. I posed it to a load of Cognitive Neuroscience guys – not sure if they’re the right ones to ask.

I’ve wanted to get some information on this question for some time, so please leave some guidance in the comments if you have any.

Essentially, Gut Churn is the excited, terrified feeling you get when you’re forced into a certain type of action. When you quit your job and you have to make the next thing happen on a shoestring budget, you get Gut Churn. I believe that if we consciously process this feeling in the right way then it can lead to profound perfomance enhancements. 

I first heard about Gut Churn in this fine talk by the guy from Radiolab. He described his first months/years in the radio booth, developing the now-seminal Radiolab talk show. They had no money, they had almost no viewers. But they were compelled to create good content. They were being chased down my limited resources, forced to come up with the goods. He describes the resultant feeling of Gut Churn – the discomfort of extreme tightening in the digestive organs.

Apparently this phenomenon evolved in the Serengeti during hunter-gatherer times. It was a mechanism devised to draw resources- blood, presumably- away from the non-vital organs in times of peril. When you’re running from a lion, you need blood rushing through your muscles, not the walls of your stomach. This is the same feeling that many creative entrepreneurs feel, day in and day out. If you’ve never experienced it as someone trying to start a business, hark back to your days in school, waiting for a running race. The feeling in your stomach then, that’s the one I’m talking about.

Anyway, I’ve been experiencing that feeling quite a bit recently. Similarly to the Radiolab chap in that talk, I look at it with positivity. It’s a horrible feeling in itself, but the result of having it can really bring the best out of you. Gut Churn forces you to pick a path. It makes you feel the intensity of your situation – something that is heavily abstracted in our comfortable, modern lives.

Olympic pundits often make the distinction between athletes that are able to feed off the roar of the crowd, and those that aren’t. It’s the ones that let the crowd in, let the Churn in and transform it into performance that ultimately have the edge on the day.

There’s energy in your belly, you choose whether to let it sink you or to make you fly.

People get in my way.

People are always interrupting me, breaking my flow.

If, however, I reflect on these interruptions I find that they do not always, ultimately, have negative outcomes. In many cases these interruptions lead to, for example, me stopping working on something that I had already spent enough time on.

I think this is about the nature of relationships. A specific other individual has a higher likelihood of causing significant negative or positive interruptions. So I analyse this to mean, does this friend/coworker/business partner add ultimate value when they disrupt my work?

This idea of disruption was thrown around for years in the tech industry, and Jason Fried often talked about interruptions as a source of negativity in the workplace. In the case of tech disruption in general, it seems a little simplistic to suggest that all industry disruptions are beneficial. The disruptions generally associated with recent tech are generally good as they’ve resulted in greater accessibility to certain products and services. However it is useful to remember that disruptions are unlikely to always be constructive. I should have a concrete example to put here but I haven’t been writing much so I can’t be bothered, but as I’m working from first principle I’d imagine it’s safe. Jason Fried’s perspective on disruptions in the workplace is also relatively simplistic. Being interrupted can be a good thing because resetting your workflow can make you aware of an unnecessary path.

For people who are looking for new partners in the form of friends, new companies to work for, business partners to start something new with, I recommend becoming more aware of their impact. Does your new friend create more, good opportunities for you, or fewer? It’s important here that in your reflections you follow your friend’s impact all the way through to the result. Intermediary steps on the path to the result are unlikely to be an accurate guide.

Here’s an example. You meet a new friend, go out for drinks with them and halfway through the night they unexpectedly leave. You may be offended, but what happens next is the important thing. As a result of their leaving are you presented with new, better opportunities? Perhaps you meet some other interesting people on account of your being left alone in a bar.

If you have any perspective on this, please feel free to leave a comment below.