How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

by Katy Milkman

You’ll learn how important it is to get the timing right for kick-starting a new habit. You’ll learn that forgetting is the silent killer of even our most ardent resolutions. You’ll learn that making hard things seem fun is a much better strategy than making hard things seem important.

would have spent at the café into a savings account. You know your goals should be specific and measurable. You know the power of positive thinking and incremental progress. You know it’s helpful to have a support group.

Behavior change is similar. You can use an all-purpose strategy that works well on average. Set tough goals and break them down into component steps. Visualize success. Work to create habits—tiny ones, atomic ones, keystone ones—following the advice laid out in self-help bestsellers. But you’ll get further faster if you customize your strategy: isolate the weakness preventing progress, and then pounce.

The chart broke down why most Americans die earlier than they should. It turns out that the leading cause of premature death isn’t poor health care, difficult social circumstances, bad genes, or environmental toxins. Instead, an estimated 40 percent of premature deaths are the result of personal behaviors we can change. I’m talking about daily, seemingly small decisions about eating, drinking, exercise, smoking, sex, and vehicle safety. These decisions add up, producing hundreds of thousands of fatal cancers, heart attacks, and accidents each year.

if you want to change your behavior or someone else’s, you’re at a huge advantage if you begin with a blank slate—a fresh start—and no old habits working against you.

while fresh starts are helpful for kick-starting change, they can also be unwelcome disruptors of well-functioning routines. Anyone seeking to maintain good habits should beware.

We think “future me” will be able to make good choices, but too often “present me” succumbs to temptation.

Fresh starts are great for helping us take the initiative to begin pursuing a tough goal. But they can prevent us from pursuing it wisely if we don’t take into account other obstacles, such as present bias.

we can make more progress if we recognize that we struggle to do what’s distasteful in the moment and look for ways to make those activities sweeter.

economic theory generally assumes cash is king. But Jana’s own experience had taught her that people care about much more than cash rewards. Enjoyment and the prospect of earning recognition from colleagues had often proven far more motivating to her than a paycheck.

a common mistake companies make with gamification. Gamification is unhelpful and can even be harmful if people feel that their employer is forcing them to participate in “mandatory fun.” And if a game is a dud (and it’s a bit of an art to create a game that isn’t), it doesn’t do anyone any good. It would be like temptation bundling your workout with a boring lecture.

Research has proven time and again that rather than relying on willpower to resist temptation, we’re better off figuring out how to make good behaviors more gratifying in the short-term. Big payoffs far down the road just aren’t enough to keep us motivated. The Mary Poppins approach takes the fun that might typically distract us from our goals and uses it to transform an obstacle into an enticement—suddenly we want to go to the gym, focus at work, eat a healthier diet, and study harder. That kind of desire is a powerful motivator for change.

Present bias (a.k.a. impulsivity)—the tendency to favor instantly gratifying temptations over larger long-term rewards—is a pernicious obstacle to change. Mary Poppins has it right. When goal pursuit is made instantly gratifying by adding “an element of fun,” present bias can be overcome. Temptation bundling entails allowing yourself to engage in a guilty pleasure (such as binge-watching TV) only when pursuing a virtuous or valuable activity that you tend to dread (such as exercise).

Temptation bundling solves two problems at once. It can help reduce overindulgence in temptations and increase time spent on activities that serve your long-term goals. Gamification is another way to make goal pursuit instantly gratifying. It involves making something that isn’t a game feel more engaging and less monotonous by adding gamelike features such as symbolic rewards, a sense of competition, and leaderboards. Gamification works when players “buy in” to the game. It can backfire if players feel the game is being imposed on them.

It’s infuriating when brilliant students shoot themselves in the foot by missing class deadlines that I know they could meet if they’d just stay focused.

rather than always preferring flexibility and freedom, sometimes people want just the opposite because they know it will help them avoid temptation.

Whenever you do something that reduces your own freedoms in the service of a greater goal, you’re using a commitment device. Telling your boss you’ll finish an optional report by a certain date is a commitment device to get that work done. A traditional piggy bank—the ceramic kind that you have to break open if you want to access the money inside—is a commitment device that makes it ever-so-slightly harder to dip into your savings. Stocking your kitchen with small plates is a commitment device to help you eat smaller portions. Downloading an app like Moment that lets you set daily limits on your smartphone use is a commitment device aimed at reducing your technology addiction.

Even if they do contradict a golden rule of economic theory, commitment devices can be something of a godsend. They help us change our behavior for the better by locking us into choices we make when we’re clearheaded about what’s good for us, not when we’re hotheadedly reacting to an imminent temptation, and they keep us from indulging in the temptation to misbehave later on.

an unusual type of commitment device—one that helps you stick to your plans by literally making you pay if you don’t. I call these “cash commitment devices,”

The biggest challenge with cash commitment devices isn’t their effectiveness; it’s getting more people comfortable with the idea of using them. And it’s reasonable to have some hesitation. As great as these results sound, maybe you’re just not ready to impose costly restrictions or fines on yourself in case you don’t hit all of your goals.

some of us have come to terms with our impulsivity and are willing to take steps to rein it in. Behavioral economists call these people “sophisticates.”

Lots of people are instead overly optimistic about their ability to overcome their self-control problems through sheer willpower. These types of people are “naïfs.”

This and a great deal of other data suggest that many of us choose not to adopt commitment devices because we undervalue them or are naïve about how much we need them, not because we don’t need them or are unwilling to risk the penalty.

Present bias often causes us to procrastinate on tasks that serve our long-term goals. An effective solution to this problem is to anticipate temptation and create constraints (“commitment devices”) that disrupt this cycle. Whenever you do something that reduces your own freedoms in the service of a greater goal, you’re using a commitment device. An example is a “locked” savings account that prevents you from accessing your money until you’ve reached your savings goal. Cash commitment devices are a versatile form of commitment device. They allow you to create a financial incentive to meet your goal by letting you put money on the line that you’ll forfeit if you don’t succeed.

Public pledges are a form of “soft” commitment that increase the psychological cost of failing to meet your goals. They are surprisingly effective, though not as effective as “hard” commitments, which involve more tangible penalties or restrictions. The costs we can impose on ourselves to help with goal achievement range from soft penalties (such as announcing goals or deadlines publicly) to hard penalties (such as having to hand over cash should we fail). There are also soft restrictions (such as eating from a smaller plate) and hard restrictions (such as putting our money in a locked savings account). The softer the penalty or restriction, the less likely it is to help with change, but the more palatable it is to adopt. Making smaller, more frequent commitments is more effective than making larger, less frequent ones, even when they amount to the same commitment (like saving 5 dollars a day as opposed to 1,825 dollars a year). Not everyone recognizes how much they could benefit from a commitment device. Those who don’t (“naïfs”) tend to overestimate their ability to avoid temptation with willpower alone. Those who do (“sophisticates”) are better positioned to make change in their lives.

According to one recent study, the average adult forgets three things each day, ranging from pin numbers to chores to wedding anniversaries. We’re so forgetful, in part, because it’s difficult for information to stick in our brains, especially if we’ve only thought about it once or twice. The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus demonstrated how quickly humans forget in a classic study published in 1885. He attempted to memorize different sets of nonsense syllables and then tested his recollection at varying time intervals. With data from this experiment on his own memory, Hermann estimated that forgetting follows a roughly exponential decay function. We forget nearly half of the information we’ve learned within twenty minutes. After twenty-four hours, about 70 percent of it is gone, and a month later, we’re looking at losses of approximately 80 percent. This basic pattern has also been replicated in more recent studies using similar experimental procedures.

Reminders work far, far better when we can act on them immediately.

implementation intention.” This fancy term actually refers to a fairly straightforward strategy the group of students with the higher success rate used: making a plan for achieving a goal and linking it to a specific cue that will remind you to act. A cue can be something simple, such as a date and time (say, 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday), or more complex, such as passing a specific Dunkin’ Donuts on the way to the office.

“planning prompt.”

When you have a goal that you’re afraid you might flake out on, you can create cue-based plans on your own now that you know the formula. Just remember to consider the how, when, and where: How will you do it? When will you do it? Where will you do it? Be strategic about the cues you select—if you can, choose cues that are out of the ordinary. When I’m lying in bed at night and realize I have an important task to remember the next day, I try to think of something atypical that I’ll encounter in the morning (maybe the Lego structure my son just built and left in our living room). That becomes the cue I use when I form a plan to follow-through. And if you can arrange to schedule a reminder that will appear at the very moment when you should act, do so posthaste. Finally, if your cue-based plans start to get complicated, consider developing a checklist.

Sometimes we flake out and fail to follow through on our intentions. Flake out has many causes, including laziness, distraction, and forgetting. Forgetting may be the easiest of these obstacles to overcome. Timely reminders, which prompt you to do something right before you’re meant to do it, can effectively combat forgetting. Reminders that aren’t as timely have far smaller benefits. Forming cue-based plans is another way to combat forgetting. These plans link a plan of action with a cue and take the form “When ___ happens, I’ll do ___.” Cues can be anything that triggers your memory, from a specific time or location to an object you expect to encounter. An example of a cue-based plan is, “Whenever I get a raise, I’ll increase my monthly retirement savings contribution.”

The more distinctive the cue, the more likely it is to trigger recall. Prompting people to form cue-based plans is particularly useful when they are unlikely to have already formed plans and when forgetting is a make-or-break affair (as is the case with voting on Election Day). Planning also has other benefits: It helps you break your goals into bite-size chunks, relieves you of the need to think about what you’ll do in the moment, and acts like a pledge to yourself, thereby increasing your commitment to your goal. If you form too many cue-based plans at once, you may be discouraged and your commitment may dwindle. So be choosy about which goals you’ll plan for at any given time. When plans get too complex to remember easily, rely on checklists.

He called out, “Hello! Hello! Fire department! Anyone here?” just as he’d been trained to do. But that was the easy part. “The hard part,” he explained, “is to teach people to shut up afterward and create a moment of silence . . . so you can look and listen and hopefully see or hear something.” Your natural instinct in that kind of situation is to keep yelling, which prevents you from searching effectively. Thankfully, Stephen and his team had practiced that silent, unnatural pause until it became second nature. It was during just such a habituated pause to look and listen that they noticed something critical—a

It’s safe to say that well-crafted habits have saved countless lives in fire emergencies, war zones, hospitals, and other high-stakes environments. But good habits are important for more than heroic rescues. When we need our autopilot to generate good results and can’t rely on a default, the next-best option is to engineer a helpful habit. Drilling good behavior until it’s second nature can help with everything from running a successful business to getting and staying healthy.

Monotonous as it may sound, research in humans and other animals has proved that habits come from repeated drilling. Habit building is often less intentional than firefighters training to suit up or to pause and scan for signs of life, but it always involves many repetitions of an action, until it becomes not just familiar but instinctive. More often than not, the repetition that builds habits (such as nail-biting, smartphone checking, or coffee making) is accidental or mindless. If you want to develop good habits, or to replace bad habits with better ones, you’ll be well-served to deliberately and repeatedly drill them, like a firefighter training to do the right thing in a high-pressure environment.

The beauty of good habits is that, like defaults that you can “set and forget,” they take advantage of our inherent laziness.* Once honed, habits put good behaviors on autopilot so we engage in them without even thinking about it. In fact, in a fascinating series of six studies conducted with children and adults, psychologists Brian Galla and Angela Duckworth proved that positive habits are key to what we often mislabel “self-control.” Those around us who seem to have tremendous willpower—people who run three miles every morning, are focused at work, hit the books hardest at school, and generally seem to make the right choices—are not actually endowed with a preternatural ability to resist temptation. Instead, good habits keep them from facing temptation head-on in the first place. They don’t even think about making the wrong decision.

And fascinating research on rats has offered convergent evidence for this model of habit. It turns out that rats who have developed a heroin dependency react very differently if they receive an overdose of the drug in their familiar injection environment versus outside of it. If they’re injected with an overdose in an unfamiliar environment, they’re two times more likely to die. Why? When the rats are surrounded by their usual cues, their bodies react more habitually to the drug (the drug tolerance they’ve built up protects them), but in a foreign setting, their bodies underreact, which can be deadly. This research, though a bit macabre, vividly shows how a familiar environment affects the way mammals respond to familiar stimuli. We respond more habitually to drugs or eating popcorn or taking medication or exercising when we’re in familiar circumstances. Familiarity breeds habit.

Imagine that you’re trying to develop a daily meditation routine. Ideally, you’d specify a time and place to meditate, such as in your office after lunch. As discussed in the last chapter, making a plan will help you remember to follow through. And research on habits shows that repeatedly meditating at the same time and in the same place, and rewarding yourself for it, will make it more automatic. But sometimes meditating in your office after lunch just won’t work. Maybe you’ll have a lunch meeting with a client off-site or a doctor’s appointment during your lunch break. My research with John shows that if you can find a way to be flexible and meditate anyhow, under whatever circumstances you find yourself in, and reward yourself for getting it done, your meditation habit will become even stronger. By cultivating flexibility in your routine, your autopilot will become more robust: Your routine will be to meditate even under unideal circumstances. On the whole, you’ll build a stickier, more lasting habit.

I remain convinced that by deliberately building good habits, we can harness our inherent laziness to make positive changes to our behavior. But it’s now clear to me that to put good behavior on autopilot, we can’t cultivate it in only one, specific way. The most versatile and robust habits are formed when we train ourselves to make the best decision, no matter the circumstances.

Laziness, or the tendency to follow the path of least resistance, can stand in the way of change. A default is the outcome you’ll get if you don’t actively choose another option (such as the standard factory settings that come with a new computer). If you select defaults wisely (say, setting your browser’s homepage to your work email instead of Facebook), you can turn laziness into an asset that facilitates change (say, wasting less time on social media). Habits are like default settings for our behavior. They put good behavior on autopilot. The more you repeat an action in familiar circumstances and receive some reward (be it praise, relief, pleasure, or cold hard cash), the more habitual and automatic your reactions become in those situations. Too much rigidity is the enemy of a good habit. By allowing for flexibility in your routines, your autopilot can become flexible, too. You will find you respond consistently even under unideal circumstances. Overall, you’ll build “stickier,” more lasting habits. Tracking your behavior can facilitate habit building. It helps you avoid forgetting to follow through and ensures that you celebrate your successes and hold yourself accountable for failures.

Aim for streaks. Anything more than a short lapse in a behavior you hope to make habitual (say, multiple missed visits to the gym, as opposed to just one) can keep a new habit from forming or disrupt an existing one. Piggybacking new habits on old ones can help with habit formation. Link whatever you hope to start doing regularly (such as push-ups or eating fruit) with something you already do habitually (such as drinking a morning cup of coffee or leaving for work).

Research confirms the obvious: when we don’t believe we have the capacity to change, we don’t make as much progress changing.

The study’s key revelation was simple, but profound: Our expectations shape our outcomes. This turns out to be a good summary of one of the most influential discoveries psychologists have made in the past fifty years—that how we think about something affects how it is.

Research on the aptly named “what-the-hell effect” has demonstrated that even small failures, such as missing a daily diet goal by a few calories, can lead to downward spirals in behavior—such as eating a whole apple pie.

Unfortunately, the more ambitious your goals, the higher the risk of a small but ultimately devastating failure.

Self-doubt can keep you from making progress on your goals or prevent you from setting goals in the first place. Giving people unsolicited advice can undermine their confidence. But asking them to give advice builds confidence and helps them think through strategies for achieving their goals. Giving advice can also help us act, because it can feel hypocritical not to do the things we advise other people to do. Consider forming advice clubs with friends or colleagues attempting to achieve similar goals or consider becoming a mentor to someone. By giving (solicited) feedback to others, you can boost your confidence and unearth helpful ideas for making progress in your own life.

Your expectations shape your reality. So, convey to people that you believe in their potential, and surround yourself with mentors who send those same positive signals to you. Set ambitious goals (say, exercising every day) but allow yourself a limited number of emergency passes when you slip up (say, two per week). That strategy can help you stay confident and on track even when you face the occasional, inevitable setback. Adopting a “growth mind-set”—recognizing that abilities, including intelligence, are not fixed and that effort influences a person’s potential—can help you bounce back from setbacks. You can also teach other people to adopt a growth mind-set. Focus on personal experiences that make you feel successful or proud. This kind of self-affirmation makes you more resilient and helps you quash self-doubt.

strategy I use myself when I want to master a new skill: “copy and paste.” She watched peers who had managed to achieve a goal she wanted to achieve and then deliberately imitated their methods.

the “false consensus effect.” The paper describes a general tendency humans have to incorrectly assume that other people see and react to the world the same way we do.

coercive uses of social pressure tend to be less effective when we aren’t face-to-face with the person pressuring us to act, when we have a chance to reflect, and when we can consider our intended actions with a fellow skeptic.