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

by Wendy Wood

A habit happens when a context cue is sufficiently associated with a rewarded response to become automatic,

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.

Only about one in ten actually stop smoking for good.

To quit successfully can take thirty or more attempts.

“perceive cue; perform response” mechanism of a habit.

For each 10 percent increase in taxes levied on a pack of cigarettes, adult smoking drops on average 4 percent.

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.

Lewin used these force field principles to explain when we will change our behavior.

Lewin’s insight about contexts as force fields has more power than he ever imagined.

There’s perhaps no simpler context influence we can engineer in our lives than sheer proximity.

Grocery stores recognize this external pressure. We are its pawns every time we shop. As the saying goes, “Eye level is buy level.”

We tend to underestimate how much our actions are affected by the contexts around us. Instead, we focus on our own internal decision-making.

A new action is difficult to sustain when the only driving forces are internal motivators

On average, it took participants sixty-six days of repeating a simple health behavior until they experienced it as automatic.

An implication is that you can lower your magic number by establishing forces that push you to repeat in the same way each time.

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.

Repetition has another important effect for our purposes: it actually changes our experience of an activity, so that it seems easier.

Context will smooth the way, and repetition will jump-start the engine, but if you aren’t getting even a minor reward for your initial effort along the way, you won’t get that habit to start operating on

the most effective habit-building rewards are often intrinsic to a behavior, or a part of the action itself.

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.

There’s another reason to question the usefulness of extrinsic rewards. They crowd out, or undermine, our sense that we are acting for any other reason.

if we want to form habits, we need to repeat actions enough so that they become automated.

Single large rewards are not designed to build habits.

Given the way that dopamine works to create habit associations in memory, immediate rewards for lots of repetitions are key.

We are all pawns of uncertain reinforcement. This gets clearer when we think outside the context of the workplace. When was the last time you checked your phone? Americans check them 8 billion times a day, which means an average of 46 times per person.18 Smartphone use is highly habitual.

For scientists, insensitivity to reward is the gold standard for identifying a habit.

A well-chosen reward is like a really solid, steady investment.

Consistency Is for Closers

Stability is not immobility. —Klemens von Metternich

Variety weakens habit.

If you set up your world to be constant, recurring, and unwavering, then cues can be the jet fuel to make your new habits take off with stupendous speed.

patient beliefs had no impact on repeated medication compliance.4 Instead, stable time cues were what kept patients compliant.

“context” definitely does not just mean “physical environment.” Location is important, but your context can also consist of intangible things: the time of day, for instance, or your state of mind. One of your most important possible contexts is other people

Our minds are designed to miss the forest for the trees.

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.

responses themselves can become cues . . . for additional responses.

Tying a new behavior to existing cues is a useful life hack for forming a new habit. The new behavior quickly becomes automated.

Stacking is most successful when the new behavior is compatible with an existing habit.

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

Mise en place reduces friction in the kitchen. It removes the restraining forces that get in the way of making a recipe and sets up the driving forces to cue it automatically.

“My first thought is mise en place: ‘What do I need to make this?’”

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

habits are more likely to form when we act repeatedly without planning and deliberating.16 Then we are able to relinquish control to the context, allowing our actions to be cued automatically.

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks. —Warren Buffett

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.

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.

When people told stories of successful life changes, more than a third mentioned changes in context: 36 percent of the successful stories involved picking up and moving house,

Stories of failed change often involved feeling stuck in one’s current environment. Fully 64 percent of the failed changers noted external circumstances that made change impossible.

We all tend to organize our life histories into story lines more intelligible than they really were at the time.