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

by Wendy Wood

imagine trying to “make the decision” to go to the gym every single time you went? You’d be condemning yourself to rekindling the ardor of Day One every single day. You’d be forcing your mind to go through that exhausting process of engaging with all the reasons that you felt you should be going to the gym in the first place—and, because our minds are wonderfully, irrationally adversarial, you’d have to run through the reasons not to go, too. Each time. Every day.

Decision and will simply aren’t the tools to use for making continued sacrifices in order to persist at our new goals. It’s too taxing, and would leave

We can change unwanted habits and form good ones that are consistent with our goals. When our automatic response is the desired one, our habits and goals are in harmony. We no longer have to rely on will.

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.

“I’m standing in my kitchen in front of the refrigerator, so I’ll open the door,” you process, somewhere deep in your brain. You are no longer consciously deciding that you need something to eat right then: it’s habit.

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.

When we act on habit, we are essentially retrieving our practiced answers to previously solved problems.

the worst, most effortful run will be that first one. Or the second, perhaps. But effort doesn’t last (in fact, if it does, you’re doing it wrong). Habits will form and take the effort off your hands.

Instead of beating yourself up when you fail to will yourself healthier, or wealthier, or wiser—rearrange your kitchen. Get a fruit bowl. Make it prominent. Walk to the office the slightly longer way that avoids the coffee shop with the 20-ounce Frappuccinos. Avoid your coworker who brings brownies. Forgive yourself, first, and then start making your life easier by addressing the contexts in which you live.

This is a crucial point. You can miss a day or two and you will not be set back to zero. An omission is not a license to cheat or keep failing. Your habit-in-formation is not so fragile that it requires perfection.

Any such major upheaval provides a window of opportunity to undo bad habits and let some needed light and air into ones that have become stale.

Through exposure, we can become reconciled to behaviors that are not ideal. We keep procrastinating, eating too much, exercising too little, because that’s what we’ve always done. We persist with little reason except for the pull of previous repetition.