Don't Stress It! - Lesson 5

Reward Yourself: The Effective Way to Creating Habits

Oct 27, 2023

Welcome to The Feel Good Life! A newsletter about health, prevention, empathy, and hope. I’m Dr. Mariana and you have just arrived to my practical and medically-guided course on managing stress. (To get started with the course, go here.)

Hello! This is lesson 5 of Don’t Stress It!

(If you missed the four previous lessons, do not worry. Just click here to catch up.)

Now, Lesson 4 showed us the wrong ways of drinking water and why habits can fail quickly.

In today’s lesson we will dig deeper into the topic of hydration and how we can effectively create those healthy habits that will help us tackle stress in the best ways possible. And the best part? By the end of this lesson you’ll get a nice reward!

Get ready for today’s learning:

Water in the Human Body
Reward Yourself: The Effective Way to Creating Habits
Challenge #5: Claim Your Reward

Water in the Human Body

Today, I’d like you to imagine you’re a freshly-filled glass of water.

(For example, the glass of water you drink during every Pee Challenge. You’re keeping up with that, right?).

So! Please act like a glass of water.

Relax like you’ve never relaxed before. Feel a sense of peace and serenity wash over you as the ripples on your surface subside, leaving nothing but the tranquil, loving calm of….

ARGH OMG suddenly you’re slopping all over the place - and now you’re tipping to one side. What’s going on? EUWW. That’s someone’s mouth! Which means….oh no no NO...

Prepare yourself: you’re about to be drank.

Okay. Freeze-frame! Let’s pull ourselves out of this story before it gets too disturbing, as that glass of water thunders down someone’s gullet.

Let’s watch from afar, while asking the seemingly simple but actually kinda tricky question:

What happens to the water we drink?

The first thing that happens? It plunges over the back of your throat, drops straight down the esophagus and into your stomach - *splash*.

Your stomach isn’t very big (clench your fist, then imagine it tapered at one end - that's the volume of your stomach) so it fills up surprisingly quickly. How fascinating is this for a fact:

“The empty stomach is only about the size of your fist, but can stretch to hold as much as 4 litres of food and fluid, or more than 75 times its empty volume, and then return to its resting size when empty.” (Source: Lumen, Biology of Aging).

A full stomach will make you uncomfortable - plus, if it’s full, your stomach acid can burst its banks when you lay down, giving you acid reflux.

All excellent reasons for not drinking huge quantities of water in one go.

However, the water you drink isn’t processed in the same way as the food you eat - ie. digested in your stomach. Instead, it’s absorbed.

If you haven’t eaten for a few hours and your stomach is empty, the water you drink can be absorbed through your stomach lining and into your bloodstream in a matter of minutes. If there’s food in your stomach, it slows absorption down to a trickle (so, if you’re dehydrated or want a better hydration, drink water on an empty stomach for the fastest results).

Water that doesn’t get sponged up by the stomach will exit through the lower end and pass into the moist labyrinth of your small intestine. Only 1% of the water you drink will escape absorption by the end of this organ - which is understandable, as your small intestine is a colossal 16 to 20 feet long on average. (It’s wound up tightly, like an elastic band scrunched up in your hand.)

So - where now, water?

Answer: absolutely everywhere.

You are a machine built of water (which is maybe why we're so happy when we're surrounded by it). Remember those stats I mentioned last time - muscle tissue 75% water, the lungs an astonishing 83% water, and so on. If you sum all the organs together, you get the startling fact that humans are around 60-70% made of water.

On average, you are in fact a huge, human-shaped glass of water - and comprised mainly of the glasses of water (and other water sources) that you ingest in your lifetime.

And yet most people forget this. They focus on the excitingly fleshy, bony bits. They point to those and say, “That’s the REAL you.”

Sorry, but that’s not true.

The real you is mainly a tasteless, odourless liquid with a hint of blue about it.

Here’s a fun analogy. We live on a planet called Earth. But our planet is 70% seawater - so a much fairer name for our world would be “Sea”. Alas, nope. It seems like homo sapiens sapiens is determined to downplay the importance of water, every single time.

Well, not me. And not this course!

Every 50 days (or thereabouts), you completely refresh all the water in your body. Within two months, you would naturally use up or flush out every drop of that water - and lose 60% of yourself in the process.

(Of course, without fresh supplies of water, you’d be dead long before that date.)

Your body is ravenous for water. It needs litres of it every day just to perform basic functions - and that has profound implications for those of us trying to manage stress.

Here’s a short list of ways your body uses the water you drink:

Digesting food (as we’ve seen), by turning it into nutrients and venting all the waste products in a southerly direction...
Enabling vital chemical reactions that turn nutrients into energy, help build and repair every part of your body, and create utterly vital bodily substances like bile and saliva…
Keeping your body topped up with lubricants, so your joints can flex, absorb impacts and generally do their thing...
Controlling the temperature of your body - most dramatically using sweat, pumped out of your skin for the sole purpose of dragging the heat away from it using evaporation.

And lastly, and most critically for us stress-busters:

Allowing electrical signals to pass back and forth between cells.

That’s the biggie.

Without those electrical signals firing, you (the You inside your brain) cannot exist.

You just shut down. You lose the ability to think. Without water, your brain starts to malfunction, making you less able to deal with everything, intellectually and emotionally. You lose control of your mood, your rational thought processes, your sense of physical coordination - everything you need to negotiate normal life.

And of course, these are perfect conditions for stress to flourish.

If lack of water impairs your brain function, it’s not immediately irreversible, but it’s miserable, painful and will completely shut down your ability to do anything except suffer.

This happens because your brain shrinks.

Yes, really.

(But not to the size of a walnut, no.)

And the result of your brain shrinking is a massive headache, in every sense.

(Not-so-fun fact: while working on this course in the north of Portugal back in summer of 2016, my partner lost 3 days of work because he drank too little extra water - less than a litre a day - in temperatures of 35 to 38 Celsius. He ended up with a 3-day dehydration headache in the emergency room right before he started vomiting, nearing a serious condition called hypovolemic shock. Trust me, not fun.)

Oh, and if you’re already stressed out? Dehydration can be terrifying.

The symptoms of dehydration - headaches, feeling faint, fuzzy thoughts, racing heart, nausea - are extremely common triggers for people prone to anxiety attacks. Your confused brain is much more likely to go into meltdown if it's water-deprived.

To summarise, I hope I’ve convinced you of a few things:

Your body needs extra water. Not 8 tall glasses, but a little (and more than a little if you’re somewhere too hot/too cold or if you’re physically active).
You should take that water in small amounts. On a normal day indoors, a glass every hour is perfect.
Dehydration is the perfect breeding-ground for anxiety. It multiplies your stress levels dramatically.

Controlling your hydration means controlling - or even preventing - your stress. It’s that simple.

So, stick with the Pee Challenge - or replace it with something that works even better for you. Either way, create a habit that works, using everything I’m teaching you about habit-making in this course (more on that side of things in a minute)...

And make sure you take water seriously.

Your health depends on it. Deal? Yay. :)

Reward Yourself: The Effective Way to Creating Habits

Dan Ariely is (in no particular order) a TED speaker, a bestselling author and a Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Economics.

When he was young, he suffered a terrible accident that resulted in 70% burns and a decade of hospital treatment.

During his recovery, he was diagnosed with Hepatitis-C, a disease that can lead to liver failure. The treatment was Interferon, a medication used to tackle various cancers - and Ariely was told he'd have to take it for a year and a half. He’d also have to do the injections himself, three times a week.

Taking Interferon is often a life-saver, but it always comes with a price. The side effects are punishing. An hour after injecting himself, Ariely could expect to be hit by all the symptoms of a bad head-cold: chills, fever, vomiting, the works.

In other words, he had to inject himself 3 times a week with something that was guaranteed to make him feel terrible - and he had to stick to that habit for 18 months.

Incredibly, he did it.

But not through some superhuman feat of willpower. (Nobody’s that strong.) Instead, he found the secret behind all great habits that stick:

They're enjoyable

In his case, suffering the side-effects of Interferon was obviously way over at the other end of the scale to enjoyable - so he found a way to rewire the whole experience until it became positive for him.

He rewarded himself with one of his favourite activities, every time he had to inject. He loved watching movies.

So he went to the local video-store, he rented a bunch of videos, he kept them in his bag all day, to really build anticipation...

Then when he got home, he curled up on the couch, put the first video on Play, injected himself, and an hour later, when the side-effects struck, he was so far into the film that he barely cared.

He then made sure this was the only time he watched movies. Movies without the injection? Not allowed.

After a while, his brain learned the following habit:

[Interferon injection] + [Videotapes] = [Video night! Yay!]

And after a while he actually started to look forward to those injections, because of what they meant in terms of the reward he gave himself.

Awesome stuff. He's a very clever man.

So, let's return to the habits we're trying to build here.

What was the big flaw with the Phone Challenge I outlined in the last lesson?

Answer: the reward it gave you would come along next morning in the form of a good night's sleep - but not immediately.

You had to rely on your ability to be motivated by delayed gratification - by the promise of a reward, not the reward itself.

In a motivational sense, well, this sucks.

And because it sucks, it doesn’t usually work. We’re just not designed this way - and when we do get it to work for us, it requires huge amounts of willpower, which we’ve previously established is fickle and untrustworthy.

For an action to turn into a habit, you have to be rewarded somehow, and rewarded quickly - or you’re not going to stick to it. End of story.

So, here are the three ingredients of a healthy habit that sticks:

Trigger + Habit + Reward

- The Trigger (or cue) is the thing that always happens, come rain or shine. It reliably happens as often as you want to do the habit attached to it.

- The Habit (or routine) is the thing you build. It has to be easy - either physically easy, requiring no physical effort, or mentally easy, requiring no decision-making at all.

The results of your habit can be complicated and world-changing - but the habit itself is almost stupidly unambitious, and may even look kinda dumb if you didn’t understand the long-term impact it would have….

(“Drink a glass of water?” Seriously, that’s it? How will that help me with my stress levels?”)

- The Reward is something you can look forward to, and ideally, it’s something you get as soon as you complete the habit.

Get those 3 parts of the habit nailed down, and you will have a habit that sticks.

And as you’re about to find out, working out what your reward is will require a little lateral thinking but that’s easy peasy.

Check out the challenge ahead.

Challenge #5: Claim Your Reward!

You may have struggled with the Pee Challenge or the Phone Challenge. If you didn't, that's fantastic - I'm enormously proud of you! - but I'm betting you struggled. It’s okay.

Reason being: you didn't have the complete habit equation:

[Trigger] + [Habit] = [HEY, WHERE'S MY REWARD *grumble grumble*]

Without a Reward in place, habits are really difficult to stick to - so you're forgiven if you didn't. I hadn’t given you the entire formula yet.

SO, let's fix that now.

Go back to the Pee Challenge and the Phone Challenge, and fix them by adding a Reward that kicks in instantly, the moment you complete the habit.

For example: let's say you lovvvvveeee that first strong, sweet cup of coffee in the morning. Let's say you can't start your day without it. Ok! Perfect.

Simply put that cup of coffee at the end of the Pee Challenge. You aren't allowed to have that cup of coffee until you drink that glass of water - but when you drink the water, you unlock the coffee. That's your special morning gift, to you.

I'm leaving the rest of these Rewards to your imagination. Use the things you really love (chocolate? A book? Netflix? Ice cream? A run?) to bribe yourself into sticking to your habits. Go bribe yourself silly.

I’ll see you again in Lesson 6. ;)

Best of luck!
Dr. Mariana

P.S.: If there’s any question you’d like to ask about the lessons or the challenges so far, please, just hit Reply to this email or message me at thefeelgoodlife@substack.com. I’ll be right with you! :)

Image Credits: Pixabay & Unsplash
Photo by Thomas Schütze on Unsplash