Wendy Wood > Quotes

“A habit happens when a context cue is sufficiently associated with a rewarded response to become automatic, to fade into that hardworking, quiet second self. That’s it. Cue and response. Notice that there’s no room in that mechanism for, well, you. You’re not a part of it, not as you probably think of yourself. You—your goals, your will, your wishes—don’t have any part to play in habits. Goals can orient you to build a habit, but your desires don’t make habits work. Actually, your habit self would benefit if “you” just got out of the way.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“In short, we learn habitually when our actions repeatedly bring us more pleasure than our neural systems expect. Beyond this, habits don’t crave variety. In fact, they hate it. Variety weakens habit. Variety attenuates its power to direct your behaviors.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Speed of thought is a clue to how habits gain control. By repeating an action, we change the way that it’s represented mentally. We turn an initially motivated action—one that we do to achieve a goal such as physical fitness—into a habit built of strong mental links between performance contexts and our response. When we think of that context, the response snaps rapidly to mind. The payoff of mental speed is that the habitual action is already cued up and ready to go while your slower, conscious mind is still deciding to do something else. Habit formation works a lot”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“We discovered that people learn concepts faster and remember them better when they can categorize them into groups. That’s prototypical top-down cognition.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Fully 43 percent of the time, our actions are habitual, performed without conscious thought. We had provided the first scientific estimate of how often people act out of habit. It turned out to be a lot higher than science at the time had assumed.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“They successfully play their parts in the sophisticated social process that my cousin is initiating: first, her commitments are shared with her peers, and therefore become stronger and more vivid for her. But there’s a second, less obvious step to it: she’s also raised the stakes of failing. Her public statements hold her accountable for succeeding.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“If we are in the right situation, we can achieve similar results to those who are more disciplined. Even if we don't have "it" at a young age, we can arrange our world in a way that enables our success”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“They have a set pattern, and they follow it. They are not making decisions. Here’s the very happy implication: the worst, most effortful run will be that first one. Or the second, perhaps. But effort doesn’t last (in fact, if it does, you’re doing it wrong). Habits will form and take the effort off your hands.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Informing smokers of the risks had only a mild impact on smoking rates. Even after the Surgeon General’s landmark 1964 report of the dangers, U.S. tobacco sales continued to climb until 1980. In taming habits, knowledge is just not a powerful lever. Willpower also isn’t much help—not when stacked up against nicotine. The Centers for Disease Control report that 68 percent of smokers say they want to quit completely. However, each individual attempt usually fails. Only about one in ten actually stop smoking for good. Most end up relapsing, typically within a week. The conflict between habit (smoke here) and conscious awareness (it’s now illegal) should decrease over time. As people repeatedly comply with a prohibition, their habits become linked to new places, ones where they now repeatedly smoke. Thus, in Lewin’s famous equation, behavior is a function of the person and the context/environment.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“As Wegner explained, “We stay awake worrying that we cannot sleep, and we spend all day mentally in the refrigerator when we are hoping to diet.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“The diminutive chains of habit are seldom heavy enough to be felt, till they are too strong to be broken. —Samuel Johnson”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power.”
― Wendy Wood

“And we found one particularly interesting common trigger for people to become self-conscious of their habits: being with others. Just being around people is enough to turn the spotlight inward and to start to monitor what you would normally do without much scrutiny at all.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“It was something they did without thinking. They had formed meditation habits. High “self-controllers” achieved desired outcomes by streamlining, not struggling.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Repetition, then, should be thought of not as some kind of magical primer for habits, but rather as a way to induce speedy mental action. The second time you do something takes less time and mental effort than the first. The third takes less than the second. And so on. This creates a favorable mental condition for a habit to come in and take over. By the tenth time (or the sixty-sixth), you’re barely thinking about it at all, and presto: a habit has been created.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“More than half of all auto accidents occur within five miles of home, during a local trip—going to the grocery store, the laundromat, or any of the countless stops in our own neighborhoods. Of course, we have accidents mostly close to home, because that’s also the locale where we do most of our driving. Still, we should be most familiar with the blind corners and challenging intersections in our own neighborhoods—we should be safest there. But in familiar surroundings, habit takes over. We stop paying attention and start ruminating about today’s events or planning tomorrow’s.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Acting on habit has additional benefits. It frees our conscious mind to do the tasks it was designed for, like solving problems. The executive system no longer has to manage life routines. Once we surrender to our habits, our minds are free to perform higher tasks”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“They were not struggling with themselves to play just one more round of a computer game or keep reading their Twitter feed. For them, sleep was not a battle of self-control. Instead, high “self-control” people performed better at the more habitual, automatic tasks than low “self-control” ones. High “self-controllers” were simply proficient at automating.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“In psychology, we have a name for the automatic scripts our brains piece together when we repeatedly do the same thing in the same way: procedural memory. It’s such an important repository of information that only the most frequently repeated patterns get stored like this. It functions somewhat separately from other memory systems, and the specific information encoded isn’t accessible to consciousness. This kind of cognitive coding is a sort of mental equivalent of admin-only files on your computer. Your computer’s best functioning relies on you not naively messing around in its most fundamental code, which it stashes away behind several layers of obfuscation. This is why we don’t know much about our habits. The information we learn as a habit is to some extent separated from other neural regions. Procedural coding protects information from change. This is the advantage to the way our minds encode habits. You don’t forget how to ride a bike regardless of how well you learn to ride a skateboard or surf. You can do it years after stopping. You balance and push the pedals without thinking. While cycling, you can even talk to others or enjoy the scenery. Your bike-riding habit didn’t get overwritten by new thoughts and experiences. Other habits are almost as sticky. Speaking a second language, playing a musical instrument, or cooking a favorite dish are skills that fade only slowly as you fail to use them. Past procedural learning is well preserved.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“By separating habitual cues from conscious awareness, the study showed that we eat in response to available cues: as long as there’s food on our plate, we keep going.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“One day when you stop by for the study, the bowl of popcorn is on the table within easy reach, about a foot away, while the apple slices are on a counter—visible, although you’d have to stand up to take one. On another day you stop by, the apples are on the table and the popcorn is on the counter. Participants ate about 50 calories when the apples were within easy reach, but about three times more when the popcorn bowl was within reach. Friction in this study was pretty simple—distance. Just putting the high-calorie snack slightly out of reach was substantial friction. Participants could still see and smell the popcorn, but the distance was enough to discourage eating. By putting desserts at the end of the line (instead of at the beginning) and making healthy foods easier to see, restaurants can influence what people eat. As the saying goes, “Eye level is buy level.” If we have to bend low or reach high, we’re less likely to bother.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“When it’s easier to eat more, when portion and package sizes are larger, we simply do it. After all, it’s already on our plate. And once we start eating more, we start liking to eat more, and our biology further adjusts so that greater consumption becomes the norm.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Participants who scored high on self-control said that they automatically went out to exercise without thinking much about it. They usually did it in the same times and places. It had become part of their routine. Once again, people high in self-control were achieving success without exerting much effort. They weren’t white-knuckling their way to being healthy. Here’s the very happy implication: the worst, most effortful run will be that first one. Or the second, perhaps. But effort doesn’t last (in fact, if it does, you’re doing it wrong). Habits will form and take the effort off your hands.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“He called it the double law of habit.3 Basically it means this: repetition strengthens our tendency to act, but it also weakens our sensation of that act.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“One of the early discoveries in neuroscience that helped to rekindle the field’s interest in habit came from a 1990s study that separated habit learning in humans from conscious understanding. Twenty participants had Parkinson’s disease, which attacks motor control systems in the basal ganglia, especially the putamen, and impedes the ability to learn new habits (even non-motor ones) and to activate old ones. Twelve participants were patients with amnesia who had dysfunction in a different brain area (the hippocampus), one that interfered with their ability to remember recent events. Parkinson’s patients could explain the task and the instructions. They knew consciously what to do. But it didn’t matter how much they practiced. They could not learn the connections between cues (cards) and rewarded responses (rain/sun forecast). They could not form a habit. In contrast, the amnesiacs acquired habits more readily as they practiced the task. After taking fifty chances at predicting the weather, they could make accurate forecasts based on the cards. But when they were asked about what they were doing, they could not remember the instructions or details of what they had seen. This research provided some of the first insights into the neural mechanics of habit formation. It suggested that, in humans, habit learning isn’t superseded or subordinated by more thoughtful learning systems, as assumed by many researchers during the cognitive revolution. Habits live in resilient, deep-seated neural structures—ones that are fundamental to mammalian life.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“People who had full-time jobs lived slightly more structured days. A greater percentage of their actions were habitual. Working long hours created more repetition in recurring contexts. People who lived with others, especially children, had slightly fewer habits. The influence of others kept people flexible, it seemed. This makes sense. Other people in our life simply amplify the rate of chaos.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Self-control is simple when you understand that it involves putting yourself in the right situations to develop the right habits.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Unanticipated rewards in the future, such as a paycheck bonus in two weeks or an athletic trophy you get at the end of a season, will not change neural connections in the same way. Rewards have to be experienced right after we do something in order to build habit associations (context-response) in memory. Given this timing, the most effective habit-building rewards are often intrinsic to a behavior, or a part of the action itself. This could be the feeling of pleasure you get when you read an engaging story to your kids and see their enjoyment; or maybe the warm glow of generosity you experience when doing a good deed, like volunteering at the soup kitchen. You aren’t a rat. If you volunteer, don’t then go and buy yourself a big chocolate bar and expect the habit to start forming. Let the warmth intrinsic to the activity be the reward. Take advantage of your built-in humanity. As you’d expect, those who liked to exercise—who rated it a fun activity that made them feel good—exercised more often and reported that it was more habitual and automatic. They didn’t have to think much before heading out to the track or gym. Most interesting is that students who exercised just as often, but who indicated that they went mostly out of guilt or to please others, failed to form a robust habit.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“A habit happens when a context cue is sufficiently associated with a rewarded response to become automatic, to fade into that hardworking, quiet second self. You’re not a part of it, not as you probably think of yourself. You—your goals, your will, your wishes—don’t have any part to play in habits. Goals can orient you to build a habit, but your desires don’t make habits work. Actually, your habit self would benefit if “you” just got out of the way.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“We need to stop overestimating our rational selves and, instead, come to understand that we are made up of deeper parts, too. Nike’s famous slogan may have begun with some irony, but the resolute quality of the message—and our receptiveness—has instead made it into the secular commandment that it is today: Just Do It. The corollary is this: if we aren’t (just doing it, that is), then we must be just choosing not to.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick