SPENCER: Eric, welcome to the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

ERIC: Hey, Spencer, it's good to see you again.

SPENCER: A lot of self-improvement books treat it as if there's one big insight or one big epiphany that's going to shift your life, and then things are never going to be the same. But with your book, you took a really different approach. You even named the book How a Little Becomes a Lot. Why did you name it that?

ERIC: Well, because as I've paid attention to how people change over the years, I've been intensely fascinated by it for a long time, for reasons we can get into. I just noticed that little by little is the way it all happens now. Little by little, I mean something specific. By that, I mean low-resistance actions done consistently over time in the same direction. So, little may look different from person to person, but that's the nature of how change works.

SPENCER: So, low resistance. Let's start there. What does that mean?

ERIC: Low resistance to me means you can get yourself to do it. For example, let's take exercise. You might be in really great shape, and so working out for an hour is low resistance for you. You can get yourself to do it. For someone else, I just got over a cold, and so right now, for me, after having been really sick for a week, an hour of exercise is not low resistance; that's a lot to do. So, I'm doing something smaller. Basically, it means can I get myself to do it, and then consistently over time is exactly what it sounds like. In the same direction, we are not jumping from idea to idea. We could all find 50 different ways to improve ourselves in 30 minutes on Instagram. We get all these things you could do: you could do a cold plunge, you could meditate, you should be journaling, you should be strength training. The list just goes on and on, and we often have a tendency to jump around between a lot of things. A little bit scattered all over the place does not lead to a lot; it just leads to chaos or not much of anything.

SPENCER: How do you think about what direction a person should choose? As you point out, there are so many different ways you could go. Where do you begin?

ERIC: Well, I have a whole chapter in the book that talks about motivational complexity, values, and desires. As Stephen Covey famously said, "We have to begin with the end in mind a little bit: what are we trying to do?" Then pick what we think is the best thing out of those. It's not easy to do, but it is worth doing. It's the kind of thing we need to do if we want to have a life that feels full, complete, and meaningful. We have to be thoughtful about how we spend our time. It is a core prerequisite, I think, for any kind of good life: the ability to think about what we want. We can go into the ways I talk about discovering values in that book. I also often think of things in terms of a keystone habit: what thing do I do that could unlock lots of other things? For me, my keystone habits — boring as they may be — are sleep, exercise, and eating well. Those three things unlock the ability to do many other things. Without any of those three, my energy and general desire to do anything plummets, making it harder to do everything else in life. Oftentimes, if I were working with a coaching client, that's what I'd be looking at. I'd be asking, "What can we do? If we're going to make one change in your life, what's one change we could make that is likely to help you unlock the other changes you want to make?"

SPENCER: Now, those three keystone habits could be useful for almost anyone, but would you recommend that everyone have the same ones, or is it going to be really personalized?

ERIC: I think it can be personalized. You have to know yourself. There's a researcher at the University of Michigan named Michelle Segar, and she studies movement and adherence to movement routines, all that kind of stuff, and she has an idea. I'm pretty sure this is where I got it. She calls it the Self-Care Hierarchy, and for her, sleep is the key thing. If she doesn't get enough sleep, things become a mess for her quickly. For her husband, it's exercise; he can get a little bit less sleep. It doesn't bother him as much, but not exercising is what tends to bother him. So, it's going to be different for each person. You might find that you can eat more or less whatever you want, and it just doesn't matter. It doesn't bother you, but someone else might be hypersensitive to what they eat, so that might be the priority for them. So it is personalized. I think that's kind of what I'm trying to make a point of in the book, in my podcast, and in the work that I do, and I know you do too, because I love your attention to detail and nuance. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to life for everyone. It doesn't exist. We can hear lots of good ideas, but we have to test them out for ourselves to see what makes the most difference for us.

SPENCER: If you're up for it, I'd love to talk a little bit about your story, because it's really an incredible story of transformation, and how these ideas that you talk about in your book came up for you and started to become a framework. So, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your early 20s, where you were at, and what your life was like at that point.

ERIC: Yeah, I'll tell that story also to lead us to how I got to the idea of How a Little Becomes a Lot, and this is more or less how the book kind of kicks off. If you were making a movie of my life, you would be focusing on a pivotal scene that occurred in 1994 when I was 24 years old. I was a homeless heroin addict. I was looking at going to prison for up to 50 years. I weighed 100 pounds. I was jaundiced and yellow from hepatitis C. I was in deep trouble, and I stumbled into a detox center just because I had just been arrested the night before. At the restaurant I worked at, I was hauled out in handcuffs. I had been sleeping in the back of a van that the restaurant owned, and now that was gone, I just didn't know what to do. So I stumbled into a detox center just to get a few days so I wasn't crazy dope sick. While I was there, they said, "We think you should go on to our long-term treatment program," to which I promptly replied, "No, thank you," which makes me laugh to this day.

SPENCER: Do you remember what you were thinking at that moment? Maybe it's hard to get into your head.

ERIC: I don't. I just think there was this sense of 28 days, I can't do that, I got to get back to my life. It doesn't make sense from a rational mind; it makes zero sense. It's completely nonsensical, which is why it kind of makes me laugh, because that person really was like, "No, I can't do that." But when I went back to my room, I had, as we call it in recovery, sometimes a moment of clarity, and in that moment I just saw, "You know what, I'm going to die or go to jail, and it's going to be soon if I leave here." So I went back and I said, "Okay, I'll go to treatment," and if you were filming the movie of my life, as I said, "That would be the pivotal scene." You'd see me kind of walk back down the hallway, say to that person, "I'll go to treatment," and the music would be triumphant in the background; it would be this big thing. I'm not saying that moment wasn't important, but it was only important because of the thousands of little choices that I made day after day, month after month after that, that made that moment have significance. If I hadn't done all those little things after, it just would have been another time of me going to treatment and it not working. We prioritize the epiphany, the moment we think that's what's important, and I'm not saying they're not, but it's all those other off-camera moments that are too boring to film that would really add up to the change that went from me being there to where I sit today.

SPENCER: In the Hollywood version, after that, you'd probably just start making a series of better and better choices that would eventually culminate, and turn your life around.

ERIC: Exactly. Yeah, and not that that's not the overall trajectory, but again, there's so much "boring" stuff that happens in real transformation. Any sort of change involves lots of moments of showing up that just don't look like very much. They don't even feel like it very much often. They're just like, "Well, I just did it, you know. All right, I got it done now." There's a way to make it. I spent time thinking about how we make those moments a little bit more meaningful, but that's the arc of change.

SPENCER: My understanding is that for people with severe addictions, when they go into a treatment center, there's actually a really good chance that when they come out, they're going to become addicted again. Is that accurate?

ERIC: The statistics on this are all over the map. But yes, most people will not achieve recovery coming right out of a treatment center, particularly the first time. This is my experience, which is more anecdotal, but it's 30 years of watching people and being pretty involved in this space. Recovery is a learning process, and I think all changes to a certain degree. We have to learn what works. For me, it was that way. From early in my addiction, I was trying to control it in lots of different little ways. Those were my attempts to change. None of them worked particularly well. As things got more severe, I started thinking, "Let me try to kick cold turkey," or "Let me go to an NA meeting," or I had been to treatment a couple of times before that time, where I went in and tried, and each time for me the process seemed a little bit like they would say, "Hey, look, if you want to give yourself the best chance of recovery, you need to do A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H," and I would come in and I would try A, and it wouldn't work. The next time I'd be like, "You know what, I'll try A and B," and that wouldn't work. Eventually, I found whatever it was, whatever the threshold was for me that allowed me to get to permanent abstinence. That's a journey to get there, although figuring all that out is one of the problems with substance abuse and addiction recovery models that we have, which are largely abstinence-based. There's a reason abstinence is really important. I think somebody made this metaphor recently, and I've thought about it ever since. They said alcohol is like a magnet, and I'm metal, and so what I want is to be as far away from that magnet as I can. That's what abstinence gives us. It gives us that distance. The problem is then you're grading somebody zero to 100; it's either pass or fail, and that's really difficult, because most people aren't going to pass right away. What you see a lot of, and 12-step programs have saved my life, and I love the celebration of counting days, is a lot of people who can't get one year, two years, three years of continuous abstinence. What ends up happening is those people feel like they're failing the whole time, when in reality they might be moving closer every time. Sometimes we have to reframe the way we think about that. That was a bit of a diatribe on recovery and addiction, but there you have it.

SPENCER: It reminds me of gamification when they're trying to make games stickier, so people play them longer. They'll sometimes have things like streak counters, like how many days did you succeed at this puzzle, and they're very motivating when you have a long streak, because you don't want to break it, but as soon as you break it, you're like, "I'm never gonna get back to my 100-day streak, so I don't even want to play anymore."

ERIC: One hundred percent. Part of my story is that eight years after the moment I'm talking about, when I got sober, I went back out and drank, and again smoked pot for a few years. I never went back to heroin, but when I came back, it didn't work out, because I had to get sober again. So that tells you all you need to know about that experiment. When I came back, it was really difficult, because I had had eight years, and I was so active, and I had sponsored so many people, and I was just well known in the community, and now I'm walking back in at zero. My second time around, I really just tried not to pay attention to days, because up until eight years I'd be like, "Well, it's not eight years," and that would just be supremely demotivating. I just kind of gave that up. I didn't go get one-year coins or five-year coins or the sort of things that people tend to do on their anniversary, just because for me it didn't make sense. Now I've been back 18 years, and I still just don't think about it that much in that way, because I had to change my relationship to it for a period of time in order to get sober the second time.

SPENCER: People often say things, in the modern world today we're all addicted to social media, and I'm wondering, do you think that social media addiction, which many of us could relate to, is it really analogous to something like being addicted to heroin, or is it so different that it's not a good comparison?

ERIC: This is a really deep question, so we'll go as deep as you want to go on this one, because I think about this a lot. I do think it is analogous. Because addiction to me is about lack of control. That's the whole heart of the thing: am I able to make a decision about how I want to interact with whatever this thing is, and am I then able to stick to that? If I'm not, I end up being out of control with it. Then, in many ways, yes, it lends itself to a category that we call addiction. Now, in the substance abuse world, that term is used less. We talk about substance use disorder because what we're saying is that there's a spectrum and everybody's sitting at different places on the spectrum. There's not a line at which you cross and now we call you an addict. There used to be, but even that was fuzzily defined. There's the whole issue of being at the range of something, like diabetes. If you have a blood sugar of one thing, you have diabetes; if you have one point lower, you don't. There's no real big difference between those two people, but we will treat them very differently based on that information. So, this spectrum idea is relevant everywhere. What I don't know, and this is what I think about a lot, is calling all of these things an addiction. Is it empowering to people, and does it make them more able to change, or are we describing something in a way that is taking people's agency away and making them feel like, "Oh, I just can't do anything about it, because big media, big tech is pulling all the strings?" I think that's a bigger issue. I have a couple of friends who are writing, one wrote a book, another's working on it, called Basically Little Addictions, about these little things. I don't know whether addiction is the right word or not. I think it depends on the person, honestly. But I think, absolutely, it is analogous back to what you said, in that I keep saying I'm not going to do something, then I keep doing it. That is a problem, whatever way you want to slice it, and whatever you want to call it.

SPENCER: I think sometimes when people have friends or family, or even just acquaintances, that have very severe substance use issues, they can have trouble relating to how that person behaves. They think, "How could they possibly do this thing? They seem to be willing to sacrifice everything for their drug." Could you talk a bit about what it was like when you were really deep in that and what your mindset was?

ERIC: Yeah, it's hard to fully go back into it, because even though I understand and live it, watching it from the outside, you're like, "This person is insane." In the second step of the 12-step program, we came to believe that a higher power could restore us to sanity, because the actions of an addict are to a certain degree insane. They make no sense from any perspective except that one, and the only way I know how to describe it is it was just a shrinking of my world until only one thing mattered. It was a gradual process, but by the end everything in my life was oriented around getting high or almost maybe not getting dope sick, which are two sides of the same coin. Addiction is a nasty spiral, because what happens is you start going into addiction because there is something you're feeling that you can't, you don't know what to do with, and the substance or the behavior makes you feel better. That goes on for a little while, but at a certain point you begin to sacrifice some of what matters to you in life, and now you feel bad about that, in addition to whatever the original thing was. So what do you do with that? Well, you use, because that's the way you cope. Now you've done it again, and maybe you did something you're not proud of, so now you've added another five pounds to the weight that's dragging you down. What do you do when you can't handle how you feel? You use. You can see the downward spiral that happens. It accumulates on itself. There's a reason it starts, which is reason enough, but then the mechanism of addiction just keeps adding weight, and that's the best way I know how to describe it. It's a myopia that is so severe that, again, it doesn't make any sense from the outside, and yet inside of it, there just doesn't seem to be any choice to a certain degree. That's the only way I know how to say it. There seems to be no possible way out.

SPENCER: So, is it fair to say that as you sacrifice more and more for the addiction, then you need the addiction to handle all your sacrifice?

ERIC: You said that in a much more succinct way than I did. That's exactly it. I started drinking around 18, for real. I think I started because alcohol and drugs made me feel more connected to life. I don't know if I was running away from something, but what I remember is it just made life come alive to me. For whatever reason, I think I already had the sort of depression that numbs life out, that makes it gray. I was a kleptomaniac at age 10, and I think it was because stealing made me feel something. Even by 10, I think I had sort of deadened things. We could go into why or what. In the beginning, I think addiction was a mechanism of connecting me back to life. As my life began to shrink from addiction, that weight began to take on a life of its own.

SPENCER: Do you think that's a common thing where addiction starts as more of pleasure-seeking, but then there's this shift that occurs, and it eventually is no longer about seeking pleasure?

ERIC: I don't know if I would call it pleasure-seeking. I think people turn to substances for different reasons. For the average person, it's just a pleasure-seeking activity, generally.

SPENCER: Most people relate to alcohol as fun or something.

ERIC: But there are a lot of people, if we ask them, who wouldn't show up as having a problem, who would tell you that it's to relieve stress at the end of the day. We know that addiction rates go way up if you have more what they would call adverse childhood experiences. There's actually a survey out there called the ACE, and it just lists all different kinds of things that can happen to you as a child that are not ideal. The higher you score on that, the more likely you are to be an addict.

SPENCER: And lots of other things too, depression, anxiety, all kinds of things.

ERIC: Exactly. It's not good. Addiction is often, for many people, a solution, whether it's pleasure-seeking or not. It works very well for whatever that problem is. It worked very well for me for a while, but then it started to bring on consequences. Most people, if they're in this cycle, as the consequences occur, begin to recalculate the value, and they go, "You know what? That's not worth it. That hangover is not worth sacrificing Saturday and half a Sunday to get hammered on Friday night. So I'm not going to do that," or whatever your kind of consequences are. But it seems like in the addict, that doesn't happen. There's a theory that addiction is a learning disorder, and the problem is that as we calculate reward value based on what we do, we update it. I do something, it feels good, okay, do more of that. I do something that feels bad, do less of that. We are doing these calculations all the time. One of the theories is that in the addict's brain, it gets stuck, and that calculation does not update. Somehow it's still stuck on "doing this is good," even though all sorts of terrible things start happening. That's one theory, but it makes a certain sense to me because I saw it happen with me and my friends. A lot of people aged 18 or 19 on a college campus would look like they have substance abuse problems. A lot of my friends did. Some of them actually did, some of them I ended up in recovery with, but others it just faded away. They drank like me, they partied like me, but as life changed, as their reward values updated, it all sort of went away or slowed down, and that just didn't happen with me. Often what happens is as the addiction begins to cause problems, sometimes the addiction starts to ramp up. At the time, you'd think you'd go, "Hey, let's slow this down," but it starts getting worse, and I think some of that is because of the shame of what we're doing.

SPENCER: Imagine when you first tried heroin, it probably felt amazing. Was that your experience? I'm wondering, when you were deep in the throes of your addiction, did it feel totally different at that point?

ERIC: It did feel amazing the first time. How crass do we get on this show?

SPENCER: You go as crass as you want. Yeah.

ERIC: I've described it as getting a blow job from God. So, yeah, it's pretty intense. In the end, it's not like that. There's an initiative by the end. What's happening, particularly with a drug like heroin that is so physically addicting, is that the dope sick symptoms are going away, which feels very good, but it's not the same animal, and I think all addicts will report something similar.

SPENCER: It's more relief at the end, whereas in the beginning, it's this incredible experience.

ERIC: That's it. That's a good way to describe it. And that's how it changes over time. For most addicts, the pleasure they got in the beginning isn't the same. It is, like you said, more a relief of a lot of very awful and uncomfortable feelings, because the addict's brain is changing too. You're messing up your neurochemistry, your ability to feel good normally is severely impaired. That's what makes early recovery sometimes so difficult for people. You take the thing away, but you're left with all the crap of how your brain works, the stories you tell yourself, and your fears. You are overwhelmed by them, which is why for people with a real addiction, help is so critical, because doing it alone, I just think from the depths of where I was, there's no possible way on earth I would have found my way out of that by myself.

SPENCER: I would imagine that shame is a big element as well, because when you come out of that, you're now reducing or eliminating your substance use, you have to grapple with behaviors you engage in that you regret, you have to grapple with the way society stigmatizes substance use, etc.

ERIC: Well, 100%. For me, when I had sacrificed everything that mattered in life to this thing, that is a serious reckoning. I had burnt my life to the ground. It's hard to go a lot lower. You can end up in prison, or you can end up dead. What's interesting is the second time I got sober, I told you I had been sober eight years, I went back out. The second time it was a very different experience, because on the outside, everything was good. I had just gotten the best job I'd ever had, I had just gotten promoted, I had a nice house, I had a nice car. I think I was a pretty good dad overall. Lots of things were looking very good. What caused me to get sober was when I looked inside, what I saw was I was as out of control as before.

SPENCER: Even though externally your behaviors were much less out of control.

ERIC: My behaviors were more socially acceptable because I wasn't using heroin. I was smoking pot and drinking, which you can largely say pot wasn't legal then, but it wasn't a big deal. Alcohol is everywhere, and not free, but you get my point. Heroin got very expensive very quickly and very dangerous, so they're very different. But inside, the mechanism was the same for me, which was that ultimately I was making drinking or getting high the most important thing. I just hadn't yet burned my life to the ground, but it was coming. It was going to happen. I was taking my son to soccer practice, dropping him off, going and having a couple shots of whiskey, going back and picking him up. In my mind, I would have said, "That's two shots of whiskey, who cares, not a big deal." The sane version of me is like, "What? No, under no circumstances." So when I started looking at that, I was like, "Oh, do I really have to wait until I'm in an accident with him? I know where this is going. Do I have to follow it down in order to stop?" It was harder, a lot harder the second time, and I think part of that was it was a more intellectual exercise. The first time I had just had the shit kicked out of me. The second time just wasn't as severe, but it would have been because the mechanism of action was completely out of control, and what was most important. I was just as sick both times inside. Luckily enough, the second time I could diagnose it earlier more clearly.

SPENCER: Did it make it easier to identify because you'd gone through it, or was it harder because, relative to heroin, you're like, "Oh, I don't have a problem." It could be easy to rationalize it.

ERIC: That part was harder, for sure, because it was easy to rationalize from the outside, because nobody else, with the possible exception of my wife from time to time, had any issue with what I was doing. And I was doing well in the ways that we reward the world. Instead of shooting heroin up in a basement by myself, I would go out after work on happy hour with the people from work, and it was a socially acceptable thing. So yeah, it was harder in that way. It was sort of an intellectual exercise. I had to keep connecting the dots there. It was easier in some ways because I knew the terrain. I knew that I had stopped before. I knew kind of how to do it. I still needed the support of a 12-step program to do it, but I would say if you asked me which was the harder time, I would say the second time was much more difficult getting sober than the first time. It just felt like I battled it harder for a long time. Circumstances were different too. The first time I was in a treatment center, and then I was in a halfway house, I was surrounded by recovery; that was all I had to do. The second time I'm working, I have a demanding career, I have two kids, I have a marriage that's not good, and in the midst of all that, I have to figure out how to get sober, so circumstances made it more difficult, also.

SPENCER: People sometimes talk as though hitting rock bottom is this thing that needs to happen so that you can then realize, "Okay, I've got to make a change." What do you think of that concept? Is that useful or is that misleading?

ERIC: I don't think it's misleading. It points to something that's directionally true, which is you're not going to give up the thing that you love and depend on if it's not causing problems in your life. To that extent, it is a truism. What rock bottom means, though, is different for everybody, and my experience is people can keep digging far lower than you would expect. What's rock bottom for a normal person? An addict just goes right past. There does need to be some degree of, they say, sometimes jokingly, in 12-step programs, there's a step zero, which is this has got to stop. There has to be that, but I hit what I thought were a lot of bottoms that weren't. We need this. The shit has got to stop, and at the same time, I think we need hope to come in because just a bottom or severe consequences without anything else leads to despair, and despair is not very helpful for anything. I had a lot of moments after I'd gone to treatment the first time that were really dark, where I thought, "This is just I'm going to die like this." Up until I went into treatment, it sort of sat out there like this magic idea, like I'll just pull the rip cord at a certain point, and then I'll go do that. When I did that and it didn't work, those were dark and scary times. What luckily happened for me was that at the moment of despair, or that the rock bottom hit, "Okay, shit, 50 years in prison, that's motivating. Hepatitis C, oh God, I'm dying." At the same moment that happened, hope was presented to me too. So I think you need both.

SPENCER: How do you feel about abstinence? Because AA, as I understand it, which is, I believe, by far the most widely used system in the United States, essentially requires abstinence. Is that correct?

ERIC: It doesn't require abstinence, but that's its goal.

SPENCER: It's the goal, not saying trying to get to, "Oh, you're just going to drink one beer a week.".

ERIC: No. Yeah, it is not a moderation-based program. Now, AA, it says the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. So, as long as you have that desire, you are welcome. You are encouraged, and you are welcome. But, no, at AA, you're not going to go to an AA meeting and hear people talking about how to have two drinks instead of 20. It will encourage abstinence. Abstinence, like I said earlier, makes sense in that if we think of our substance as being like a magnet and us being like metal, getting as far away from it is important. The biggest gift recovery has given me, and it's given me so many, but the single biggest one is that that issue is just not a problem anymore. I tell a story in the book where I was going to the pharmacy every week, I was picking up my mom's medications, I was driving them to her, and I was giving them to her, and I wasn't even thinking about it. And what I'm talking about are opiates, OxyContin. I would have perhaps robbed you at gunpoint for a bottle of those once upon a time, and now I was taking them to my mom. Not only was I not having to fight using them, I wasn't even thinking about it, so the problem just disappeared. That's what abstinence gives you. My experience is for people who have real problems, moderation often traps you in a place that's deeply uncomfortable because you're fighting it all the time. That said, I don't have a horse in the abstinence or harm reduction race, because everybody's different. For some people, harm reduction, meaning they go from shooting heroin and stealing TVs every other night to drinking three nights a week, you would have to, by any reasonable measure, say, "Well, that's an improvement." So abstinence doesn't need to be the goal for everybody, but for someone like me, it is the way of living with the most freedom. I tried moderating. Every substance user has tried moderating countless times. Before I got sober that second time, I went to a program called Moderation Management, and it was created by somebody who had been an addict who believed they had figured out the key to how to moderate. Now I will also tell you that the founder of the program went on to kill someone in a drunk driving accident. That said, I went to Moderation Management, and I threw myself into that program because I wanted it desperately. "Please don't make me go back to AA. Please don't make me have to quit drinking entirely." From inside addiction, that all sounded terrible. So I tried Moderation Management really hard, and it didn't work. It didn't work in two ways. First, it ultimately just didn't work, meaning I didn't moderate. But it didn't work in a second way, and it was that I was tormented all the time trying to moderate because I just couldn't. It was so hard to do. I remember many nights sitting, I remember right where it was, in the kitchen, in a house I had, and it would be like 11:30 at night, and I had already probably broken past my moderation goals of whatever it was, two drinks a night, but maybe I hadn't. Maybe I'd been good up to that point. It's 11:30, I'm getting ready to go to bed. There is no reason on God's green earth to take another shot of whiskey, there's just none. It doesn't, it's pointless, and yet I would sit there, locked in this internal debate, this tearing apart inside that addicts feel, trying not to take that shot of whiskey, and more often than not I would lose. So, for someone like me, even if I could technically make the moderation work, it was miserable. That's not the case for everybody. So I know people who were addicts, were completely sober, and have gone on and said, "Oh yeah, I smoke weed occasionally now, or I drink occasionally now." Great, more power to them, and maybe I could be that person now. I've spent roughly 30 years with it, with that little three-year exception in recovery. Maybe now, with everything I know, and all the work I've done, and all the healing, maybe now I could moderate. For me, it's a simple risk-reward calculation, though. It's like, "Well, what would I benefit from if I could drink moderately? Oh, a couple times a week I would have a mild reduction of stress and a nice little buzz for a couple hours. Okay, that's good. Who wouldn't want that? I'd like that." What if it doesn't work right? "Oh, I just sacrificed everything," so for me it just doesn't even make sense to contemplate trying. But that was another long answer. I do think that for each person they have to find their own path that makes sense.

SPENCER: It reminds me of this idea of bright line rules that I find quite useful, and I think a lot of people find useful, where let's say you're just trying to cut out junk food or something, and you could have this rule like, yeah, just lower the amount of junk food I eat, but a lot of people find it easier to just be like, "You know what, there's just no junk food, or maybe there's a certain kind I'm allowed, but I'm never allowed to have any other kind of junk food."

ERIC: Yep. There's a beautiful simplicity to zero. There's a beautiful simplicity to, "I just don't." There's none of the internal debates that have to happen. I know this from junk food. It's not like I'm not aware; I love sweets. I go through those phases, and I'm the same way. If I more or less cut them out, if the rule is just, besides dark chocolate, the answer is no. It's pretty easy. When I open the door and start having to decide on a case-by-case basis, that gets a lot harder. Everybody's brain is great at rationalizing. It's, "Well, it's mom's birthday; I probably should have that cake." Then three days later, "But it's Sally's work anniversary, so maybe I'll have those donuts." We can rationalize anything. Bright line rules work a lot for some people, but they don't work for everything. Not everything in life can be simplified that way. I think that's why eating problems, I'll call them that, are so hard. I can just cut heroin, alcohol, cocaine — it's just out of my life, whatever. No big deal, ultimately. But I can't cut food out of my life. I could potentially cut my phone out of my life, but I probably wouldn't because it brings a lot of benefits. A lot of these smaller addictions we talk about are tricky in that way because we may not be able to have the beautiful clarity of zero.

SPENCER: That's really interesting. So, if we go back to how you came out of your addictions and started applying ideas from your book, "A Little Becomes a Lot, could you walk us through it? How did you start incorporating those ideas that led to your creation of the book?

ERIC: Well, I think it was certainly a lot of those ideas I recognized in retrospect, obviously. By the time I wrote this book, I'd had about 30 years in recovery. I've been hosting a podcast for 12 years. I'd coached hundreds of people from around the world on making behavioral change. I had a lot to draw from.

SPENCER: I'm sure you had no idea what the names of the techniques were or anything like that. But you started using some of these icons.

ERIC: Yeah, but I did. There's one idea in the book that gets named explicitly, and it does form a lot of the thinking around the book. I learned it very early in recovery, and sometimes you can't think your way into the right action; you have to act your way into right thinking. That's a really beautiful idea; it's a really true idea in my life. It has happened again and again with almost everything. There are times my mind is just resistant to whatever the thing is. It's either I want to do this thing, I've decided I'm going to do this positive thing, and there's resistance to doing it, or it's the resistance on the other side. I've decided, "I'm not going to do this thing," and action is a really powerful way through that. If we can just get ourselves into action, then the feelings come afterwards. I tell a story in the book of when I was early in recovery. I had a sponsor, and he made me at every meeting stand by the door and shake everybody's hand as they came in and introduce myself. That was awful. I didn't want to be there. I was full of shame. I'm an introvert to a certain degree by nature. I did not like it, but I did it, and what happened by doing it is that I very quickly felt like I belonged there. I could not have thought my way into feeling like I belonged. I don't think I could have sat there isolated by myself and tried to talk myself into belonging in the same way. I'm not saying that you can't do that; I'm just saying that this action brought about that feeling state much more quickly. If I'd waited until I felt confident enough to do that, I never would have done it. I still wouldn't do it, for Christ's sake. If it was just a matter of putting me in a room and walking around and introducing myself to a whole bunch of people I don't know, I still don't like doing that. That's one example. Act your way into right thinking. That's one of the concepts from the book, and I can give more that are from recovery and the book, and where those tie together, if you want.

SPENCER: Yeah, that sounds great. But before we get into that, so acting your way into right thinking, I imagine part of that is by behaving, you start shifting your identity over time. Once you've done something enough times, could you elaborate on that?

ERIC: Yeah, certainly. I think identity is part of it, for sure. At a certain point, I identified more as a person in recovery than I did as an addict. We all go through this. We identify in different ways, and identities are interesting because they are useful right up until they're not. There was a point for me where I still relate. If you ask me, if I went to a meeting, I'd say, "My name is Eric, and I'm an alcoholic." I still relate that way, but there were a lot of sub-identities under that, which ultimately ended up getting jettisoned because they were no longer useful for me. Taking the behavior does a couple of things. One is it starts to shape your identity. Secondly, we get better at whatever the thing is; it becomes easier. The third thing is that motivation tends to go up when we feel good about ourselves and our chances of success, and it tends to go down when we feel bad about ourselves and our ability to do something. By doing this, I have now probably helped my motivation a little bit, particularly if I take the time to go, "Okay, good job, nice work," and bring that in. That's why "little by little" kind of works. By doing the little action, you get to be successful, which raises your motivation and also makes the activity slightly easier as you go on. That's why it works.

SPENCER: One idea that you touched on, I think, is really interesting: people can get stuck on trying to increase their motivation, but sometimes there's an easier path, which is just to make the action easier. Can you elaborate on that?

ERIC: Yeah, there's been a lot in behavioral science. You follow this stuff as well as I do, perhaps even more closely. There's been a trend over the last period of time where motivation has sort of been cast to the side. It's all structural; there's all these things you can do. Motivation isn't really that important, and I think it's a counteraction to a view that says motivation is everything. I think it's a balancing of that scale, but you can't throw motivation out the window. It is ultimately the driving factor. The problem is that I think we have multiple selves, in a sense. I have a podcast talking about two wolves in us. Motivation is a fickle creature, and depending on which sort of self is sitting in the driver's seat at that moment, it may be more or less motivated to do something. It is often much easier to just get the action done than to figure out how to get motivated. I don't know why I face resistance to exercise nearly every time I do it. It makes zero sense to me because every time I've ever done it, I've been like, "Oh, that was great, I'm glad I did that." You'd think it would be very easy; I just run to exercise, yet I do not. I face resistance or lack of motivation. It's usually much easier for me just to say, "Just go put on the bike shoes and clip into the bike" than it is to try and give myself a pep talk sitting on the couch. Just putting on the bike shoes, breaking the thing that feels big and hard into something tiny, tends to work more effectively for me. That said, sometimes I do need to go into motivation. As I'm sitting there on the couch, I do need to go, "Why does that even matter?" "Oh, yeah, because if you exercise, you're going to have more energy all the rest of the day, you're going to feel better about yourself. Okay, now I'm sort of working on my motivation," and sometimes that's the play. Part of what I'm doing in the book is laying out different tools that can be used at different times based on what you need.

SPENCER: When you tell your story, it sounds like you struggled with what might be called anhedonia, or a lack of enjoyment and meaning in life. Maybe drugs were part of an answer to that for you to some extent, but then I'm curious, when you stopped using, how did you start actually creating that meaning that had never really been there in the first place?

ERIC: I guess a few things. Yes, I do suffer from... I don't even know what to call it anymore. For years, I would call it depression. I am on antidepressant medications, so I guess you would say "depression" in some form. At first, that depression was evident. I think it was a driver of the entire addiction process. All of a sudden, I don't have the thing that made me feel better, but what I started to have was real meaning. What I mean by that is that I wasn't having the feeling of feeling good all the time, but I had a life that felt meaningful all of a sudden. I was on the right path. That feels inherently good, and I think that's part of why I talk about "little by little" and behavior, because when we do what we say we're going to do, when we make and keep promises to ourselves, there is an internal congruence that feels good, and we can tune into that at any point. The converse is true. We all know what it feels like when we say we're going to do something and we don't do it. It just doesn't feel good. In the beginning, for me, what it was was that I started to have meaning, because I felt like I was on the right track, and I started to have hope, because I saw other people who were like me, whose lives looked completely different. Very quickly, I also started to be able to help other people, because I'm intrigued. Now, I'm on day 21, but in comes Bob, who's on day two, and while I may not have a lot to share about recovery, I know what it's like to get from two to 21, and immediately I can now be of help and service to someone else. My life started to have real meaning. Fast forward to today, part of the problem with anhedonia and an inability to feel pleasure is you don't feel those things, and so I then kind of come back to, "Does my life have meaning? Is it important?" For me now, that question is always yes. I feel like I'm on the right track. I feel like my life has purpose and meaning. I do things that feel valuable to me. There's an interesting — you may have heard this — but I think maybe it was Paul Bloom, the psychologist, that I got this idea from, which is basically you can measure people's happiness. They tend to do it two ways. One way is that you ping people a lot and ask them, "How happy are you right now?" Essentially, it's one way of doing it. The other way is you ask people questions about life satisfaction, and psychologists will debate which of these is the more real measure of happiness. One school would say, "Look, I just ask you, you give me points, I total them all up, and the more points you have, the happier. Simple as that. Nothing else to calculate." The other school would say, "That's not really it, because there's something deeper and more satisfying." I tend to, by nature of a fluctuating mood system, subscribe to the second theory, that there is meaning to life, even when it doesn't feel meaningful. That's kind of been my approach to anhedonia. It still happens, it still occurs. I sometimes have it. It's very discernible to me. I notice it when all of a sudden I can't think of anything that I want to listen to, and I don't come alive at the sight of a bookshelf. If either of those two things are true, that is a descent to whatever degree into anhedonia, because normally there are more things to listen to than there's time to, and the same with books. I feel like, "God, I wish there were 100,000 books I want to read. I can only read one at a time." When that goes away, that's an anhedonia signal for me. I just don't worry about it very much anymore.

SPENCER: On this podcast, I talk a lot about values. I kind of have my own way of thinking about values, but I want to talk a little bit about your approach to values. How do you define them? How do you think about why they're important to consider?

ERIC: I think values are ultimately the guide to life. If you don't know what's valuable, you don't know what direction to go in at all, and that means any progress you make may be completely in the wrong direction, or maybe not even the wrong direction, but just in an unsatisfying direction. I think they're really important. In a chapter in the book about motivational complexity, I sort of try to boil it down to values and desires. I think that's an oversimplification of the psychological world and what's going on inside of us, but I think it's kind of a useful oversimplification. I think values are really important. People define them differently. I think they're hard to suss out. I have one exercise in the book itself, and then a whole bunch in the exercises at the end of the book of different ways of trying to figure out some of what you value. I see the way most people do it is not very effective, which is they're given a list of about a hundred values and they're asked to pick. For me, that's like, "Well, all of them, right? How do I choose between honesty and freedom and responsibility and kindness?" I agree with all of them.

SPENCER: In our research, we found that people actually have a huge number of values, tons of values, it's just that they have very different amounts that they care about the different values.

ERIC: Exactly. And that's hard to suss out. In the book, what I then do is, once you sort of have your values, you run into a couple of conflicts that we all run into all the time. The first is the simple values versus desire conflict. Call it "what do you want most versus what do you want now," that's me sitting on the couch exercising. "What do I want most? I want to be healthy for a bunch of reasons. What do I want now? I want to sit on the couch and keep reading Substack, because there's lots of great stuff on it." Those can be tricky to resolve, but they're pretty easy to identify. The much harder kind, and I'm sure you spend a lot of time thinking about this, is when you have values to values conflicts, particularly if those values are on opposite sides of something called the values wheel that plots values. If you've got values on the opposite side of that wheel, they're hard to reconcile. A lot of people have the classic one, if they have children, which is the work and family value. They value their career, and I'm not saying they value it for money; they might value it for lots of very real and good reasons, but they also value their kids, and those things are in conflict. I don't think they're ever not going to be in conflict to a certain degree. I have two values that are fairly diametrically opposed. One is adventure. I just know that when I'm out doing something new or different, or that's pushing me, that's when I feel most alive, and that is important. I also have a value of being content wherever I am with the way things are. These things are in tension all the time, because the first value is yelling, "Get out there, go, do this, go do that. You need to do this." The other value is, "Would you just settle down? Everything's okay. You don't need to constantly be doing something." These are just in tension in my life, and knowing that they're in tension allows me to work with them a little bit more skillfully.

SPENCER: One thing I find really helpful when there's a difficult situation or difficult decision is just clarifying what values are at stake. Even just that often makes the decision easier, because, "Oh, I can see why this is hard for me. If I choose this one thing, I get adventure; if I choose this other thing, I get acceptance of what I have, and I actually care about both of those," so of course, it's hard.

ERIC: Yeah, I think that's really well said. I'm really looking forward to talking with you about your book. In our previous conversation, we talked about values, and I love hearing different people's opinions and thoughts, but I think where everybody kind of comes together is you've got to know what's important to you if you're going to end up with a life that feels good.

SPENCER: Yeah. It almost seems so obvious to say, but how can you make a really good decision if you don't know what you're trying to get right?

ERIC: Yeah, 100%. I think our decision problems are, I mean, there's a lot of them, but that's one of the big ones. If you don't know where you're going, it's very difficult to choose a direction. The other is, when I think about decisions, it is just the fact that we don't even realize we're making decisions all the time. We're just doing. Things are happening through conditioning, through habit, through the outer world. It's just happening, and we're not aware that there actually are decisions that we could make at lots of different points to move towards what's important to us.

SPENCER: It's not always worth it to spend lots of cognitive energy on every little micro decision. But there are hundreds of these little decisions throughout the day. It's like every time you choose something to eat versus something else, every time you choose, "Do I call my friend or do I not?" In each of those, I think you would say it is a choice where you're pitting values against each other, essentially.

ERIC: Hundred percent. In the book, I defined values as what the best part of us has decided is worth wanting. Desires are just the things we want, whether we want to want them or not. They just show up, and you just, "I want that." So, yeah.

SPENCER: So desires, from your point of view, are not necessarily endorsed, right? If you want them, you truly want them, but they're not necessarily endorsed. If you think about it, you're like, "I don't endorse the fact that I want this."

ERIC: They can be, and I think the more our values and desires overlap, the far better the situation. But yeah, I don't think I control desire. Let me say that differently: I don't think I can necessarily control what I desire directly, because it just appears, and I want it. If we go back to Buddhist psychology, they're talking all the time about greed, hatred, and delusion as these three root poisons. Greed is just the grasping; it's the wanting mind. I don't think I have control over what I do with what the wanting mind pops up, but I don't choose what I suddenly want. Now, I can make it more likely that I'm going to want the things I think are worth wanting by feeding my world around me with those things. I run into this all the time. If I truly value, say, a long-term relationship, but all I follow on Instagram are hot young women, my values and desires are going to be out of whack. I can fix that to a certain degree by what I choose to allow to come into my sphere, because I am heavily influenceable, and so that's part of trying to get values and desires to align.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's interesting. I think of most desires as things that we do actually value, but the thing is, we're often not making a conscious choice about what we're sacrificing, what we're giving up by pursuing it. For example, let's say we have a desire to just lie on the couch and scroll our phone. Often that reflects some value, like we need relaxation, we need stimulation, or whatever. It's just that we're not being mindful of, "Oh wait, there's something I value more that I could be doing with this time, and I'm not paying attention to that."

ERIC: Yeah, back to your point that if you give people a list of values, they value all of them just to differing degrees. In that sense, you could probably say that all of our desires are emerging from one of those values, and what you're saying is the contemplation is which of these do I value more? If we go back to my very mundane example of sitting on the couch and reading Substack, I value what I get when I'm on Substack. I'm getting great ideas, I'm getting great writing, I'm stimulated; I value that. It's just that when it goes from being the thing that I value for 20 minutes to the thing that I value for two hours, all of a sudden, now there's a problem. So many of these things are a matter of degree. I've got a whole chapter on the middle way, because that's exactly the point with so much of this: it's not that the thing itself is a problem, it's how far we take it one direction or the other.

SPENCER: In these kinds of situations, where people are acting on their desires rather than their values, often the answer that comes to mind is, "Oh, I'm just going to use more willpower." What's wrong with that approach?

ERIC: Well, I've said this, and I'd be curious if you would agree. I have said that if you gathered all the behavior scientists in the world into a room and forced them to agree on one thing, the one thing they might agree on is you don't want to rely on willpower more than you have to. So, I don't know if you would agree with that statement. Would you?

SPENCER: That's interesting. I think one thing we can definitely say about willpower is that it fails way more often than we would like it to. I think for one person, they can use willpower to accomplish a particular thing, and then, great, do that. But we know it's just a general-purpose strategy; it's not the best.

ERIC: Yeah. The way I think of it is this: I break these change things into two spheres. The first I would call structural, and this is what a lot of behavior science is about. It's what James Clear's book is about. It's what BJ Fogg's book is about, to a large degree. You know what you're doing, you know how you're doing it. You stack the deck to make it as easy as possible to do whatever the thing is that you want to do, or you make it as hard as possible to not do the thing that you want to do. There are all kinds of techniques and things that you should do there. I spend a couple of chapters on it in my book; that's all enormously valuable. To skip that step is a real problem. You will fail more often than not. But even when you do it all, there comes a point where you have to make a choice. In that moment, self-control, or willpower, or whatever you want to call it, is the best word for what we need. So, I then go on to say, "Do all that stuff first, give yourself the best chance," but then I talk about a chapter called Moments of Action, which is about these moments, me and the choice. I identify, because when you write a book, you have to come up with clever little frameworks. I came up with one called The Six Saboteurs of Self-Control. What I was doing was analyzing when we sit at that choice point and go the direction that our better self didn't want to go, what are the common things that are happening? Because that's an internal game; at that point, it's about what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling, what I'm saying to myself. At that moment, at that choice point, it is an internal thing, and some people we would say have a lot of discipline or willpower seem to know how to negotiate that moment pretty easily. They just have the tools. I doubt they could even explain it, but for the rest of us, if we've done all the structural stuff and we're still struggling, we then want to examine that choice point. We want to pay really close attention to that exact time. "What am I saying? What am I feeling?" And then learn to rescript it. In that way, I do think willpower ultimately is needed, or the term I use is self-control. I don't really love it, but it's kind of what behavioral scientists will use, even though they'll argue forever about what it actually is. But we all understand it. It's that I'm torn in two directions here. How do I get myself to go the direction I want? I think we can get better at it. I think we can train in negotiating those situations so that we're more skillful and have a better chance of making the choice we want.

SPENCER: And what does that look like to train in that?

ERIC: I think it is exactly what I'm saying, it's understanding what is going on inside of me and what I could do differently. So, I'll just give a very simple example. Writing this book was really interesting for me because I ended up using so many of the tools in the book to actually write the book. It was hard for me when I had more self-doubt about writing this book than I've had about anything in a long time.

SPENCER: Why is that? You could say, "Well, look, you've gone through this incredible transformation experience, you've coached a huge number of people, you've done all these podcast episodes with so many interesting people. Yeah, why was it so challenging?"

ERIC: Well, because I get to interview some of the best writers on the planet, and I look at what they do, and I look at what happens when I sit down to write out an idea, and I'm like, "Huh, these things are very different from each other." It's not that I wasn't a competent writer; I knew I could write a book, but I wanted to write a great book, and I really doubted that I could do that because the evidence I had of writing was of being an okay, probably better than average writer, but that's it. I think that's part of what made it really hard.

SPENCER: How did that manifest? Was it thoughts of self-doubt that would come up for you?

ERIC: Yeah, it was a lot of self-doubt. For example, if we want to talk about these choice points and self-control, let's say it's okay, I carved out Monday afternoons to write. It's time to start writing, and I'm just feeling all kinds of resistance, almost dread. If I examine what's happening, I've done all the structural things. I know that I'm going to write, I'm only going to make myself do it for 15 minutes. I'm going to set a timer. I'm going to block all my distractions. I've done all the structural stuff. I'm positioned, but I'm resisting. When I paid attention to that resistance, most of it was based on self-doubt going in the background. It was essentially feeling like what you're going to do is going to suck, and that's going to feel terrible. So, just don't do it. What I had to learn to do was, what can I do with self-doubt in that moment, not to eliminate it, but to just turn it down enough so that I could write, because that's the point. I had different ways of doing that, but the basic one was just a short mini pep talk to myself. It wasn't all positive affirmation; it wasn't me going, "You are an amazing writer, you're awesome," you know. "Look out, Hemingway, here comes Zimmer." It wasn't any of that because it wasn't true then. But what I could say to myself is, "You know what? Do you know that you can't be a good writer?" The answer to that was no. I don't know that. Do I believe that if I put in the effort, I'll get better? Yes, I do believe that. And do I know that all writers feel self-doubt at points? Yes, I know all that. Okay, with that, do you think you could just get started? And then I could. That's what I mean by training at that moment. I understood what was happening in that moment; that was self-doubt. There are other times where it might be something like insignificance. It's not that I doubt I can do it; it's just that I doubt that it really matters. This is one you can run into with anything that you're doing as a lifestyle change, like, "Well, does it really matter? If I write today, I could just do it tomorrow. Does it really matter today? Does it matter for one day of exercise?" On one hand, that is true. It doesn't really matter, except that that's failing to connect the dots of how a little becomes a lot. By knowing what it is that's happening in that choice point, I can get better at negotiating it.

SPENCER: I think it's really powerful noticing the thoughts you're having when you're avoiding something or struggling to do something. I've been working on myself. There are certain kinds of tasks I avoid, and I try to pay attention. What am I feeling in my body as I sit down to do it? What are the thoughts that are appearing for me? As I start to notice that, I can sit with those feelings and say, "Oh, okay, I'm noticing stress rising in my body, I'm noticing resistance to starting," and I find it really useful to be like, "Okay, maybe I'll sit, and I'll just do a little meditation where I just focus on how I'm feeling. Maybe I'll sit and think about why this matters. What's my motivation for doing it?" That can help me get over the hump. It sounds like we kind of converge on somewhat similar approaches.

ERIC: A hundred percent. That's exactly it. It's examining what is the problem here. Sometimes I'm just tired. If I examine, I'm just tired. Depending on what it is, our response to it is different. For you, it might be a couple minutes of sitting, noticing, and a pep talk. For someone else, it might just be different. But when we understand what's happening, as you're saying, we have much more ability. It becomes less this mysterious thing, "Oh, self-control," and it becomes more, "Oh, I can get better at doing that," which is one of the core ideas that underlies the entire book, which is that I believe change is a skill. The ability to change is a skill that we can learn. We treat it as character issues: I'm not motivated, I'm not disciplined, I'm lazy, I'm whatever the things are, I just can't do this, I just can't do that. The point I make is that we can do more than we often think if we treat this as skills to learn.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's interesting. So often when people have behaviors they don't want, they kind of chalk it up to their character. But we know that you can get better at just about anything, right? If you want to get better at math, even if you're not very good at math, you can get better. You can practice. If you want to get better at spelling, you can practice spelling.

ERIC: Exactly.

SPENCER: This is a skill. You can get better at change, you can get better at motivation, you can get better at all these different things.

ERIC: A hundred percent, that's very well said.

SPENCER: Final question for you, before we wrap up, what do you want people to remember from this conversation?

ERIC: I think the last point we made is what I would ultimately want people to remember. I end the book by saying, "Keep coming back," and that's something that's said in 12-step meetings around the world. Keep coming back, and I don't mean keep coming back to 12-step meetings, I mean keep coming back to your belief in yourself and your ability to go in the direction that you want. Keep coming back to that, keep learning, keep trying something different, keep attaining skills, but keep trying, because I do believe we can all make steps in the direction of what matters to us. I'm not saying we can all become amazing, incredible at x, y, or z, I'm saying we can all move in the direction of what matters to us, and so I just say keep coming back to your ability to do that.

SPENCER: Eric, thanks so much for coming on the Clearer Thinking Podcast. It's a pleasure.

ERIC: Thank you, Spencer. It's lovely to see you, and I will see you soon for the flip side of this conversation.

SPENCER: I can't wait, and we'll put a link to your new book in the show notes, How a Little Becomes a Lot.