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

by Wendy Wood

After a lot of starts and stops, I heard of a research technique called experience sampling, in which participants report on what they are doing as they are doing it. It was a novel way to collect data. The in-the-moment quality of this approach suggested that it could capture the experience of acting out of habit, assuming that such a thing really did exist.

cool research method

Habits make the wildly challenging and difficult seem easy and safe.

Only new drivers, relying on their conscious decisions, feel the adrenaline and rush of fear that all of us rationally should experience on the road.

We know that our executive efforts wear down over time. We simply get tired of thoughtfully trying to control our behavior and make decisions. Our attention ebbs and our motivation wanes. But our habitual selves—where persistence sits—are made of totally different stuff. And it’s stuff we can put to work. All of us can make better use of our 43 percent. We can sync up the deep and workmanlike pull of habit with our conscious intentions and long-term goals.

James famously said, “The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.”

At about the time of the cognitive revolution, habits fell out of favor, at least with book authors. As you can see, authors started to use the word less in the middle of the previous century, as “goal” and “evaluation” gained favor. Psychologists were apparently describing people more as thinking about their aims and purposes than as acting out of habit. The years 1980–2000 were low points for “habit.”

Relevance to AI?

Habit formation works a lot like learning math. When most of us first learn to compute 2 + 2, we get the answer by totaling up 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. But after some homework, we no longer need to do the computations, and instead retrieve the answer directly from memory. That’s the feeling of 2 + 2 just “looking” like 4. Or of the path by the lake just “looking” like it’s time for a jog. When we act on habit, we are essentially retrieving our practiced answers to previously solved problems.

habits are ways of seeing

The basic logic of habits is that when we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll keep getting what we’re getting.

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.

Their insights echo those of Alfred North Whitehead, the renowned mathematician and philosopher of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when talking about the benefits of math notation, like a plus sign or an equals sign. His 1911 math text explained, “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.”16 With the right notation, something as philosophically complex as the nature of “plus-ness” becomes a simple, known part of an equation.

Habits are notation for our behavioral selves.

The famous early psychologist Kurt Lewin believed that our behavior is influenced by forces, much like objects in the physical world are subject to gravity and other fundamental forces.22

behavioral physics engine

René Magritte’s fanciful painting here illustrates this feature of habit cues (Les valuers personnelles/Personal Values, 1952). The cues that activate our habits have outsize influence. Morning in your bedroom? The shaving brush, soap, glass, and comb loom large. The bed dwindles in comparison. Today, this would perhaps depict your phone on your bedside table, blaring out the alarm. Time to wake up. Your mind registers nothing else (at least until coffee).

You can program the HUD in your new car. Similarly, by forming habits, you can train your mind to select for cues in the world that you have chosen, and these, too, will loom large in your view at all times.

The rigidity of habitual responding is offset, it seems, by its specificity.

Cues and contexts are paired in our minds in a sort of habit-inspired caricature of the real world in which we live.

Forming habits, it seems, is about establishing stable cues that support your desired actions.

We can stack, or piggyback, the behavior of replacing batteries on top of adjusting clocks.

A related strategy of building new behaviors onto existing cues involves swapping one behavior for another.

Mise en place works for chefs, but is it possible for you and me to control the friction on our own behaviors?

But behavior change through self-control, as University of Pennsylvania students experienced, isn’t as successful as behavior change through altering contexts.

As you set out to develop new habits, you’re going to quickly rediscover something that you intuitively knew in advance: the greatest source of friction in this world is other people.

If you leave this book with one word and one idea, I hope it’s friction.

The forces created by the contexts in which we live come closest to drawing in ideas from all parts of habit science. Their results are constantly on display.

You established the four basic building blocks of habit by: (1) creating a stable context (one night a week, 6:30 p.m. sharp); (2) reducing friction (with you as a driving force; removing restraining forces by initially doing all the cooking and cleaning yourself); (3) making it rewarding (serving everybody’s favorite foods on those nights; letting the kids invite friends if they want); and (4) repeating until it becomes automatic (even when the rest of the family was ready to mutiny against your bright idea).

Context Friction (reduce or increase) Reward Repetition

The closure of the Underground made this “adequate” way of doing things briefly impossible. This is called habit discontinuity—a term coined by researcher Bas Verplanken to describe how our habits are disrupted by changes in context.2 When habitual cues disappear, we can no longer respond automatically. We have to make conscious decisions.

The little-known nineteenth-century French philosopher Félix Ravaisson was able to put this concept into concrete terms. 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. In other words, we habituate. It’s a deceptively complex process, and one that has power to sap force and meaning from our lives.

But the point, after all, wasn’t about claiming to like vegetables; it was about eating them.

You don’t have to like it, you just have to eat it

All rituals are grounded in repetition and rigidly fixed action sequences.17 But they differ from habits in one important way. Rituals lack a direct, immediate reward. Instead, we have to invent a meaning and impose it on them.

Brazilians, for example, use simple rituals, called simpatias, to address everyday problems.20 In a study, U.S. college students, along with Brazilians who themselves used the rituals, rated how effectively twelve simpatias would deal with problems such as quitting smoking, lack of friends, infidelity, and depression. As examples: “Wear a white T-shirt for five days in a row. After that, wash the T-shirt using salted water. Put the T-shirt to dry in the shade. After it has dried, fold the T-shirt and take it to a church.” “In a metal container, put the leaves of a white rose. After that, set fire to the leaves, get the remaining ash from the leaves and put it in a small plastic bag. Take the small plastic bag and leave it at a crossroad. Repeat the procedure for seven days in a row.”

In a survey of daily routines, people who reported that they do “pretty much the same things every day” found life more meaningful.27

Life meaning can come from maintaining a tidy office, keeping a daily schedule, having weekly dinners with friends, or walking the same path to work or school every day. This is the coherence of an ordered life. And it’s a coherence attainable by all of us.