Cara Harvey 00:00:03 Welcome to the Purpose Driven Mom show here at A Purpose Driven Mom, we believe that it’s possible to manage your home, work on your personal goals, and grow and scale in online business. Most productivity tips out there tell you to hustle more and make you feel shame about not being motivated enough. And we’re here to dispel this myth. I’m Kara Harvey and I am on a mission to help work at home. Moms realize that they have the power to go after their dreams, take care of themselves, and manage their home without perfectionism, guilt, or having to sacrifice their sleep. If you’re ready to shift your thinking around productivity and get some practical tips to help you manage your mom life. Toss your earbuds in while you fold the laundry. And let’s do this!

Cara Harvey 00:00:44 Welcome to the Purpose of Your Mom Show episode 480. I have another podcast episode and YouTube video today coming to you straight from the Purpose Driven Mom Club. One of the things that we do every single Friday is I teach into the program.

Cara Harvey 00:00:56 So there’s a program called Soar Inside the Club. It’s a course and I like to make it real in life. So I will teach the topic and then do coaching on it. So I’m pulling out the teaching for you today and it’s on the microwave minute. This is one of my foundational principles you find in my book the 15 Minute Formula. I’ve been talking about it since 2017. The microwave minute is here to stay, and it is one of my game changing productivity tips and tools. In this episode, I’m going to talk to you about how to free up hours during your week because you’re using the time that’s hidden inside of your day to do those little itty bitty things that have to get done anyway. Show notes are over at a Purpose Driven mom.com/podcast 480. That’s those numbers, a purpose driven.com/podcast 480. And you can check them out today. If you do a microwave minute task, tag me over on Instagram at A Purpose Driven Mom. Enjoy the episode. All right, so we are talking today about how to break a bad habit.

Cara Harvey 00:01:48 And I think this is a topic, especially as we get into September, a bunch of stuff happening that is important that we talk about. Because here’s the thing. Like your habits are autopilot, right? If you’ve been someone who, from you when you were a kid, was like, I make my bed when I get up. You probably don’t have to think about it. No, I never didn’t grow up in a make bed home, so I have to think about it a little bit more. But I have other things. Like when I brush my teeth, right? Like right when I wake up, those kind of things. Their autopilot. When the order I make my coffee, like all those things our brain prefers, and our kids right to run on a routine. And I think a lot of times when we have bad habits, we think there’s something wrong with us. Okay, they’re not character flaws, right? They are loops that we’ve created dopamine hits of. I do this and I get this thing right.

Cara Harvey 00:02:37 And loops can be changed. So I just want to remind you that while we spend a lot of time talking about creating new habits, we can also stop or break habits that aren’t working for us. Okay? Ones that are unfavorable for the moment. Because there might be some times where a habit that you have isn’t detrimental to your goals. We talk about this a lot when we talk about like, too much TV or scrolling on your phone and things like that, until you get to the point where you find yourself being like, I don’t like the way this is going or this is getting in the way of my goals. Then it’s like, let’s change it. So I just want to remind you today that if you have a habit you’re looking to change, there’s nothing wrong with you, right? It’s just that we need to reset the patterns around this. Things have become a habit because you’ve developed patterns. That’s all it is. And if they’re unfavorable patterns, then we just need to adjust them.

Cara Harvey 00:03:29 Okay. Here is the habit loop when it comes to either creating or positive or negative habit. Okay. Any single habit you want to create starts this way. Okay. There is a trigger that kicks it off. And this is going to be important for breaking the bad habit. You need to know what the trigger is and if you have a good habit, write the habit of I need coffee is like I’m tired. Like as soon as I feel that like like even right now, I typically like to have a habitual cup of coffee around 2 or 3:00. There are days I do not need this coffee. There are days I do not need any coffee at all. But I like to have the coffee because it is a habit. I’m used to it. Does anyone else do that? Like, right now I’m sitting here and I’m like, oh, coffee? Yeah, I could be tired in a little bit. I eat my meals at a certain time of day. Those are habits for me.

Cara Harvey 00:04:14 But they didn’t start out as habits. It started out with the trigger of I’m feeling hungry and then it has created this habit. There are days where at quote unquote, lunchtime, I’m not hungry, but I eat lunch anyway because it’s become like a habit for me. So same thing. I’m tired. So now I exhibit a behavior, which is I get my coffee. After my behavior, I get my reward, I feel better, I’m happier, I get that dopamine hit. That’s how all of our habits are created. Good, bad, favorable, unfavorable. And if we know how they’re created, then we can figure out how to break them at the same time. So I want you to think of a habit that you have. I’m going to go for me with my phone. I’ve been working all summer on decreasing my phone time. I was doing better. I got off track after vacation. But for me, my unfavorable habit right is scrolling my phone. It’s still a reward, and a lot of times I want to be clear.

Cara Harvey 00:05:07 Like rewards can be positive or negative rewards. Our bodies just getting hit with them and we have associated something with them. So my trigger for me is I go up to my room, okay, I like to go up to bed. I like to get in bed by like 11. So anytime between 10 and 11 I’m going up to my room. The trigger is I go to my bed. The behavior is I pick up my phone and my reward is I’m getting back to back. Dopamine hits of TikTok scrolls, right? If I can identify those things, then I can figure out how to backwards plan them. So I want you to think right now of your habits that you’re like, yes, I’d like to change this habit and ask yourself, what is my trigger? What is the behavior and what is the reward? And again, it doesn’t have to always be a positive reward. It sometimes can be a negative reward.

Cara Harvey 00:05:53 I don’t invite you over to grab a $10 club pass today. The purpose of your mom club has been around for almost five years now, and we know that sometimes it can be hard to commit to Something like a membership, ongoing payments, and all of the times you feel like you have to show up.

Cara Harvey 00:06:06 So this summer we came up with the club Pass, and we are continuing it into the fall. For just $10. You can join any of our calls. We have planning calls every Sunday during the week. We have accountability calls where you can get coaching and a laser focused plan for what you want to work on. And we have a co-working, which has been incredible for our members, where you literally show up with the tasks you want to get done, and we are that little kick in your booty to get it done. We are going to hold your hand as you complete the task. For only $10. You can join any of the calls and check out the purpose of our club. Go to a purpose driven romcom and grab your pass today and I hope to see you on a call.

Cara Harvey 00:06:46 I struggle with emotional eating. Okay, so my trigger is if I’m feeling tired, stressed or overwhelmed, I would like a snack. That is my behavior. I go to the kitchen and I grab a snack.

Cara Harvey 00:06:57 My reward is that instead of thinking about the thing I’m feeling is I have him now just thinking about the favourable food. I can pretend that the feeling does not exist. Now I know this. So I’ve been working on how do I work around this? Okay. When you know it, you can change it. So your first step is to identify the cue, the antecedent or the trigger. So if you have a bad habit that you’re looking to break, I want you to track it. Okay. Now what happens when you’re tracking your habits and you have to stop to notice you’re doing it? Is it. Is it pattern interrupt in your brain. And then your brain is like, wait, we’re doing something right. So no matter what, just tracking alone can help you stop a bad habit. So if I notice that I’m going to the fridge for my food, if I notice I’m picking up my phone, if I notice I’m starting to complain about something or I’m getting negative. Whatever your bad habit is, I want you to start tally marking it down, okay? And then ask yourself a couple questions after you’ve tracked it for a few days, because I want you to really start to find why is it happening? Because maybe one time I eat because I’m stressed, but another time I eat because I’m bored.

Cara Harvey 00:08:05 Or another time I eat because I’m sad, right? Like, I want you to notice the pattern and ask yourself, when do I do this pattern? Is it every time I get off the phone with my mom and I’m feeling stressed out? Is it right before I go to bed? Is it when I wake up in the morning? Whatever your habit is. What is triggering it? Time. Place. Feelings. People. So if you have a bad habit of maybe getting into a negative mindset, okay. And you notice that it’s happening when you’re around a certain group of people. Ding ding ding. Right? That’s the bell. Now think about it in the other way. If you know that getting on our purpose driven mom calls helps you feel more motivated and inspired and wanting to work towards your goals. Well, the antecedent right? The trigger, you know, the behavior is get on the calls. What has happening before it might be, hey, I’m not in the greatest mindset. I need some motivation to my goals.

Cara Harvey 00:08:53 I’m just not feeling like I want to do anything. So I get on the calls and my reward is I start to feel a little more motivated or I get things done. So see how it works both ways. Okay, start to note it for a few days. Once you’ve done that, I want you to look at the reward because we know what the behavior is. What are you getting out of this habit? Why are you doing it? Is it comfort? Right. Is it like sometimes maybe something happens and you get stressed out and you notice every time I get stressed out about XYZ thing, my thing is I go and I watch some TV. It’s giving me comfort. It’s making me feel better. Things like that. Okay. Is it escape? Like I mentioned with the food sometimes, like I just can escape into it. And then I’m like, great. Now I don’t have to think about the thing. Is it the dopamine that quick hit a joy like we get from scrolling our phone? Right.

Cara Harvey 00:09:40 When you know the reward. And now we can say, all right, what’s a better replacement? Because you’re not going to be able to change your bad habit just by saying, I don’t want to do it anymore. What you need to figure out is why you’re doing it and what you’re getting out of it. And when I used to have a special education teacher, right. So I would write a lot of FBA functional behavior assessments for kids. And I would come up with their plans and we would have their behavior charts and all these things. And this was part of what I did, was I helped come up with replacement rewards, figuring out triggers because we can really adapt and change things if we can make an appropriate plan. So if you can change the reward of, oh, when I go to bed, I pick up my phone and I scroll it. What I’m getting out of it is that quick dopamine hit. If I can ask myself the question, which we’ll get to in a second, but the question of how else can I get that quick hit of joy? I can start to change the behavior to still get that quick hit of joy, because it’s not always so much about the behavior itself.

Cara Harvey 00:10:41 It is often about the reward that you’re getting out of it. And again, reward, consequence, all these things. And there can be positive and negative consequences, okay. Some things happen that are either favorable or unfavorable. So I want you to think that through. And then we’re going to replace it. Because you can’t just stop this habit that you’re doing. You can Replace it with something else. I want you to choose a new routine that gives you a similar reward. Okay, so my stress rolling. One of the things I’ve been working on is reading instead, because I know that scrolling before bed, it relaxes me. My brain doesn’t have to think I’m tired from the end of the day. I don’t want to, like, do anything really engaging, but I’d rather not be on my phone because I found that it was an unfavorable habit for me because I was then getting anxious before I went to bed having bad dreams. I wasn’t sleeping as well. So what I’ve chosen to do is read.

Cara Harvey 00:11:36 So I bring my book up there and I read. It’s something that I don’t need to use a lot of my brainpower for, and I enjoy. And I honestly get tired when I read in bed, so it double dip there. The goal there is, oh, I’m not going to find more reading time at night. The goal is I’m like, oh, now I’m tired. I actually get to go to bed instead of continuing to get the dopamine hits right, but you could replace it a quick walk, some deep breathing if it’s happening during the day. If you’re struggling with nighttime snacking, right. The reward is it’s giving you that, you know, maybe a sugar hit or it’s helping you relax at the end of the night because you’re like, oh my gosh, I only get three seconds to myself all day. This is the thing I’m going to do for me. Can you have some tea? Can you go journal? Can you go watch a show? Now, if watching a show makes you think about snacking, then you want to pick a different replacement behavior.

Cara Harvey 00:12:19 But once you figure out the reward and maybe the reward is I’m just doing something for me. Like, I just want to sit and enjoy my little snack all by myself with nobody bothering me. Ask yourself, what can I do that will still let me enjoy my time with no one bothering me? Okay, go take a bubble bath etc. keep your hands busy. Things like that. Snooze. If you are struggling with the snooze button, which I know I feel like I am this week, what do I get out of that is I feel like I’m getting more sleep, but can we be real about the snooze button for a second? You’re not actually getting quality sleep at all. It’s fake sleep, right? Your extra nine minutes is not doing anything to refresh you at all. If anything, it’s making your your wake up worse when you hit the snooze. So what is a replacement routine? Keep your alarm across the room if I have to get up for my phone, I’m not going to get back into my bed.

Cara Harvey 00:13:05 But if all I have to do is like, lean on over and grab it, you better believe, right? I’m going to hit it. So replace that routine and start tiny. Don’t feel like I need to change everything I’m doing all at once. We know what we teach here and it’s not do everything at once, right? Shrink the change. Say. All right. I’m never drinking soda again. Say, that’s a bad habit you’re trying to get. Get out of. Right. What if you say. All right, I know again. Find my baseline. I’ve been tracking. I know what it is. I know I drink four sodas a day, right? Instead of drinking four sodas a day this week, I’m going to drink three maximum, then two maximum, then one maximum. Right. Slowly change them over. Right. The zero screen time. I think this is a really big one we did this summer. That helps was instead of like, oh, we’re not having tech.

Cara Harvey 00:13:52 We would just have like tech free hours where we’d be like, all right, this is even a tech free half hour of like, mommy’s putting her phone on the charger. No tablets. Let’s go do something else. And just calling it that instead of we’re never going on our tech again. Like, you know, like we say these things but they don’t actually work. So start small. Once you have made a plan of what you want to replace, it can be challenging to cut things out.

Cara Harvey 00:14:17 Cold turkey.

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Cara Harvey 00:14:55 That’s a purpose driven romcom. AI prompts.

Cara Harvey 00:15:01 Now, I will say the cold turkey approach works for some things in some people. All right. And sometimes you have to cut it out. Cold turkey, things like alcohol, even cigarettes. I mean, I think you need to know your personality. I remember coaching someone who was quitting cigarettes a few years ago. And we started with, how many do your baseline, how many are you smoking a day? And then we cut it down by two and then by two and then by two. That worked better for them. Now I’ve had other people I’ve coached through who are like, I just need to cut it completely because if I have one hit of a cigarette, like I’m just going to be done, you know, your personality, so you know how you want to to approach it. I just feel and find. And the research shows these small steps really do help with certain habits. But you have to, you know, check your personality on that.

Cara Harvey 00:15:44 The last piece of this is planning for the triggers. Because if you can identify the triggers like we talked about at the beginning, you know what’s going to trigger you. You know what’s going to stress you out. You know it’s going to make you go to the food, go to your phone, go to TV, just, you know, procrastinate, make it easier for yourself, okay, get the snacks out of your house if you know that this snack is something that you’re going to struggle with, move it! I have been taking certain apps off my phone. I’ve been contemplating taking TikTok off my phone. I might do it. I might just try it for 30 days and see how it goes. Delete the app. I had a bad habit of Teemu shopping a few months ago, and I would just scroll and I would add things to my cart when I was watching TV, and then I would just buy them. I just, I took all my shopping apps off my phone. I just put Amazon back on.

Cara Harvey 00:16:31 But anything else like my Sina, my Timu, like anything else I had that was a shopping app. The only one I have right now is Amazon. And then I just downloaded the Walmart one because I wanted to order something, but I knew that, oh, I know I wanted to order this from Walmart. I’m going to redownload the app, take them off your phone. Right. The other thing you can do to plan for your triggers is to add some some friction, right? Make it a little bit harder for you. Extra steps to access the bad habit. Again, if my phone is across the room, could I still hit the snooze and then walk back to my bed? Yes, but it’s a friction point. It’s an extra step that’s in there. If I put my phone downstairs, right, if I leave it down there, I wonder what we’ll do when my littles get their phones. We never did this with Dean, but I do wonder, like they won’t have phones till at least eighth grade, if not beyond.

Cara Harvey 00:17:19 I’m feel very convicted about that, but when we do, I saw this thing where somebody had like a bucket and everybody keeps their technology in it. Like, my kids are not allowed to have their tablets in their rooms, Chromebooks like any of that already. So they put all their tech in there. I wonder how that would be for me if I had a basket at the bottom of the stairs, and I just charged my phone downstairs and I bought myself a real alarm clock, like, I wonder if that would help. Right. And then prepare your replacement. Okay. Know that your book should be right next to where you want it. If you’re trying to do that, I know that I want to have some nice tea. Romanticize it. Right. Romanticize this thing. I want to have a bubble bath. I want to go for a walk. Have your things ready, and it’ll help it be easier for you to pick the replacement activity over the habit that’s unfavorable. What I want you to do today is write down the habit you want to change if you know the cue that triggers it.

Cara Harvey 00:18:05 If not, I really recommend you tracking it for a couple days. And then what’s going to be your replacement reward? What is the new routine you’re going to try? Try these steps slowly to help you figure out how do I cut this habit that is not moving me towards my goals? Again, it’s not bad in the sense of you’re a bad person, but if there are things that you’re doing, like if my TV watching at the end of the night, if I find myself saying I don’t have time for my goals, but I can scroll my phone like in my screen, time is high. And I said this on another call that I was going to like, look up screen time and make some screen time goals. So I think I’m going to look it up right now actually if my screen oh my gosh. So my I’m going to be real with you. My daily average is over 5.5 hours, 5.5 hours on my phone. Now I will say that’s challenging because I do use it a lot for work, but my number one usage is TikTok right out on average, out of that weekly time, nine hours a week on TikTok.

Cara Harvey 00:19:04 That’s wild to me. So what I can do if I’m going to start small is I could do a couple things. So my plan is, yes, I want to cut my bad habit of scrolling my phone before bed. All right. So I know the trigger is that as soon as I get into my bed, I open my TikTok up. Okay, so the replacement behavior for me is I’m going to get back to reading before bed and I’m going to charge my phone across the room. I’m going to put my phone right on the charger across the room, and I’m going to pick up my book. And how I’m going to start small is I’m going to say, okay, it looks like my daily average is one hour and 33 minutes. That’s my baseline. I would like to get my daily average down to one hour. Okay. So I’m going to get 30 minutes off. Tick tock 30 less minutes. So what I can do is if you go into your screen time, it has a thing that says add limits.

Cara Harvey 00:19:52 I can make one hour of TikTok every single day and then it’ll give me a notification. It will let me know. It’ll make it harder for me. I’m going to do this. I think on Monday I think I’m going to do it. And so that’s my plan. I’d love to know yours in the chat, but I will say I feel like this again has helped me be like, all right, I know I need to do it, and I didn’t. I’m going to see what it looks like. Hold on. Add limits. One hour on TikTok a day. I gotta do it. I keep saying I’m gonna do it. I think I’m gonna do it. All right, I’m committing it. I’m committing.

Cara Harvey 00:20:25 Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Purpose Driven Mom Show. If this episode served you in any way, we would really appreciate it if you headed over to wherever you listen to podcast, hit that five star and leave a review and a rating. That’s home where moms can find us and we can grow our community.

Cara Harvey 00:20:39 If you had a tip or an make sure you come over and tag me at a perfect moment on Instagram and share it with your friends. The best way for us to get this message out there, of less hustle and less shame and more intentionality, is for you to share it with people you know need to hear it. Thanks for listening. We appreciate you and I can’t wait to connect with you more outside of the podcast.