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

by Wendy Wood

If you have ever spent time in a university setting, you quickly learn that intelligence and motivation have little to do with getting things done on a regular basis.

we are not one single unified whole. In psychological terms, we do not have a single mind.

I didn’t actually set out to study habit; I wanted to understand how people persist.

With actions that could be repeated often, like recycling or taking the bus, intentions didn’t matter very much.

We now know that it’s habit that creates persistence.

Excuse making is a talent at which our conscious minds excel.

The truth is that many of your virtues are already habitual.

Habits proceed so efficiently and quietly, we think we must have consciously decided to perform them.

The mechanics of action were not taking up space in the conscious mind. This is not the repressed, Freudian version of the unconscious, but it is another way that our minds function outside of our awareness.

Fully 43 percent of the time, our actions are habitual, performed without conscious thought.

one important clue to what would come next: we learned that you can make pretty much any behavior more habitual, as long as you do it the same way each time.

What I began to realize was that habit refers to how you perform an action, not what the action is.

the key feature of habit: it works outside of our conscious awareness.

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

introspection illusion.3 With this cognitive bias, we overestimate the extent to which our actions depend on our internal states.

the belief that we do the things we do because we “will” them. It’s flattering and empowering, but it’s also false.

The illusion arises when we fail to recognize the nonconscious habits we are following and instead introspect and unwittingly confabulate explanations for our actions.

There is another way in which over-attribution to conscious intentions can be explained. In doing so, we reconcile ourselves to our choices. They make sense to us.

If our noisy, egotistical consciousness takes all the credit for the actions of our silent habitual self, we’ll never learn how to properly exploit this hidden resource.

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.

Psychology’s reigning preoccupation with how people think left little room for studying what people actually do.

It looked as if we had multiple ways of drawing on neural systems, one to make initial decisions and another to persist.

Our minds do not just consciously make initial decisions; they also respond repeatedly through habit.

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

What!?

These developments were fascinating, especially the implication that 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.

for repeated actions, people’s intentions and goals don’t predict what they end up doing. Instead, goals seemed important for the occasional runners in our study.

We concluded that the speed with which repeated actions are cued by contexts is central to habits. It can keep runners heading out to the track even when they feel tired.

When people slow down to think, anything might change. Speed of thought is a clue to how habits gain control.

And 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.

But a shorthand definition is this: automaticity in lieu of conscious motivation—automaticity that emerges as we learn from repeated responding.

A habit turns the world around you—your context—into a trigger to act.

The situation you’re in triggers the response from memory, and you act. It can essentially bypass your executive mind. The pleasure is in the thing getting done without your consciously lifting a finger.

your habitual mind is diligently at work. It’s not picky about what it learns. Just give it repetition, rewards, and contexts.

The information we learn as a habit is to some extent separated from other neural regions.

That’s a key aspect of why habits are crucial for long-term behavioral change. Brainpower is overwhelmingly costly.

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.

When they later reported their success at restraining themselves from temptations, distraction was one of the least effective strategies. The clear winner? Stimulus control.

Even for adults, successful self-control came from essentially covering up the marshmallow.

(You can see how you score by going to www.goodhabitsbadhabits.org. Check out “How Much Self-Control Do I Have?”)

participants who scored highest in self-control seldom reported resisting desires, period.

They were living their lives in a way that hid the marshmallow almost all the time.

High “self-controllers” achieved desired outcomes by streamlining, not struggling.

After all, this is what, until recently, we thought the “self-control” scale measures—sheer force of will. But even in these more controlled studies, the data did not support this idea.

It is thus mainly by establishing and maintaining stable patterns of behavior rather than by performing single acts of self-denial that self-control may be most effective.”17

It’s hard to give up the idea that people with good “self-control” achieve so much because of their willpower and self-denial.

Bill Gates uses a flying metaphor: “Pilots like to say that good landings are the result of good approaches.”

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

interesting experiment

Even small changes in the cue and response forced participants to make conscious decisions and to rely on executive control and willpower.

It’s when you stop to think that you might stray from your plans and goals.

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