Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

by Wendy Wood

intelligence and motivation have little to do with getting things done on a regular basis.

our minds are composed of multiple separate but interconnected mechanisms that guide behavior. Some of these mechanisms, it turns out, are suited to handle change.

Decisions and willpower draw on what we call executive-control functions in the mind and brain, which are thoughtful cognitive processes, to select and monitor actions.

We have little conscious experience of forming a habit or acting out of habit. We do not control our habits in the same way as we do our conscious decisions. This is the under-the-surface, hidden nature of habit.

You have to somehow become committed to the consistent procedures of doing things.

With some behaviors, people’s attitudes and plans had little impact on how they acted.

Five years after taking part in a typical weight-loss program, only about 15 percent of participants have kept off even ten pounds.6 The vast majority are back to their original weight, or have even gained more.

the strong-intentions-and-willpower theory of self-change drastically underestimates the likelihood of backsliding.

We have the ability to introspect, but we run into the philosophical conundrum of applying our own perceptual and cognitive apparatus to understand itself. We can only know the knowable parts of our experience.

The world of habit is so self-contained, it makes sense to think of it as a kind of second self—a side of you that lives in the shadow cast by the thinking mind you know so well.

you can make pretty much any behavior more habitual, as long as you do it the same way each time.

Only occasionally do we realize that we acted out of habit. Usually, we notice the habits we don’t want

The habits that are really driving your behavior go largely unrecognized.

Psychologists call this overriding confidence in our own thoughts, feelings, and intentions the introspection illusion.3 With this cognitive bias, we overestimate the extent to which our actions depend on our internal states.

we are overconfident that we are acting on our intentions and desires. It seems likely that this phenomenon underlies the mystery of our habits.

Context pervades our understanding of habit. If the context remains stable—you keep living in the same place, you keep driving the same route to work, you keep sitting on your couch every evening—then you repeat past actions automatically. These are rich environments for the cultivation and perpetuation of habits.

Persistence, put to the test, didn’t wear down. It just kept on producing.

Habits are a kind of action that is relatively insensitive to rewards.

we can do something once and it’s a decision, but if we do it many times in the same way, it becomes something totally different, even recruiting different areas of our brains.

Goals and rewards, it seems, are critical for starting to do something repeatedly. They are what lead us to form many beneficial habits in the first place.

Speed of thought is a clue to how habits gain control. By repeating an action, we change the way that it’s represented mentally.

Habit formation works a lot like learning math.

a working definition of habit emerged: a mental association between a context cue and a response that develops as we repeat an action in that context for a reward.

a shorthand definition is this: automaticity in lieu of conscious motivation

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.

Procedural coding protects information from change. This is the advantage to the way our minds encode habits.

Once we surrender to our habits, our minds are free to perform higher tasks.

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.

What’s fascinating is that our judgments of how much we are eating are so often wrong.

in humans, habit learning isn’t superseded or subordinated by more thoughtful learning systems,

Outside of the lab, our motivation and ability to think carefully like a scientist is drained by the many distractions of work, social media, negative people, the news, traffic, bills, and our families, to mention a few.

In daily life, it is just easier to act on habit than to make a decision based on our best intentions.

exerting control is inherently draining, making us feel tired, stressed, and overwhelmed. Control also presents an opportunity cost. We can react to only a few things simultaneously, and when controlling one thing, we necessarily overlook others that could be important.

Habits, by virtue of their location deep in the rudimentary machinery of our minds, are relatively cheap. They hum along on barely any bandwidth at all.

What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so. —(mis)attributed to Mark Twain

Delay of gratification, as it was called, seemed to be a fundamental social-cognitive skill, linked inversely to general impulsivity and directly to conscientiousness and executive control—a skill that could provide a lifetime of benefits.

Being able to wait longer when the treat was hidden did not lead to more successful life outcomes. Waiting was something that was achievable by many. Only when the marshmallow was available, visible, and tempting did waiting signal resiliently high performance throughout life.

Effortful self-denial, it seems, is the recourse of people who score low on the self-control scale.

controlling impulses is like the proverbial finger in the dike. It is a short-term solution that works in the moment.

people high in self-control are not living a life full of self-denial and deprivation. Somehow they are managing their lives better.

Habits did something special, and with such simplicity. They had essentially replaced self-control.

The good effects that we popularly ascribe to “self-control” are, it seems, more accurately captured by situational control.