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

by Wendy Wood

The storm is a good opportunity for the pine and the cypress to show their strength. —Ho Chi Minh

With a habit, you are never left without a response, even when stress, distraction, or mental tiredness is derailing your conscious mind.

In business jargon, anxious executives continued to exploit what had made the company successful in the first place and avoided exploring new innovations and growth.

The habit mechanism does not discriminate between responses that are likely beneficial in the current situation and ones that aren’t.

Mental tiredness, much like stress, boosted habit performance, reflecting the limited capacity of conscious thought and the hardiness of automaticity.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse defines addiction as a brain disorder involving compulsive drug seeking and use.

This power of contexts suggests that substance abuse is partly an adaptation to environmental circumstances.

[People] become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. —Aristotle (translated by W. D. Ross)

Yes, we repeatedly do the things we love doing. But we also grow to love the things that we repeatedly do.

is “out of the context of concrete acts of religious observance that religious conviction emerges.”16 This famous quote from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz captures the spiritual meaning that emerges from rituals.