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

by Katy Milkman

potboilers

indulgence.

the people we’d found it hardest to schedule for an initial workout—those whose lives were packed with many commitments—increased their exercise most when they were able to bundle gym visits with a tempting audiobook.

relying solely on willpower to get things done is particularly hopeless because we have so little energy left at the end of a long day.

“gamification,” or the act of making an activity 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.

On the face of it, gamification might seem like a no-brainer: Why wouldn’t a corporation want to make work more fun? But as a top-down strategy for behavior change it can easily backfire,

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.

We just need to “flip the script” so that instant gratification is working for us, not against us.

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

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.

Gamification works when players “buy in” to the game. It can backfire if players feel the game is being imposed on them.

in the United States,

one in three families in 2015 had no money saved whatsoever, and 41 percent of families would have been unable to cover an unexpected 2000-dollar expense.

a basic economic principle; namely, that people prefer flexibility over constraints and freedom over penalties.

a behavioral scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) named Dan Ariely

proffered

in The Odyssey, Odysseus asks to be bound to the mast of his ship so he won’t succumb to the temptation of the Sirens’ song and steer his ship off course.*

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

“commitment devices.”

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.

And at the extreme, putting your name on a gambling self-exclusion list (an option in some states, like Pennsylvania) so you’ll be arrested if you set foot in a casino is a commitment device to keep you away from the card tables.

What makes commitment devices weird is that they’re self-imposed—we’re handcuffing ourselves!

floored.

Compared with the control group, those offered locked accounts saved 80 percent more over the next year.

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.

(You can specify if you’d like the money to go to a certain individual or charity, and to ensure failing will really sting, you can even pick a charity you hate—an “anti-charity”—such as a gun rights or gun control group, depending on your politics.) You can wager as little as a few bucks, but bigger stakes, unsurprisingly, correlate with higher rates of success.

Nick Winter,

lucid dream,

The Motivation Hacker.

The biggest challenge with cash commitment devices isn’t their effectiveness; it’s getting more people comfortable with the idea of using them.

They asked doctors to sign a formal pledge not to prescribe antibiotics unless they were necessary and then to display that pledge publicly in their waiting rooms.

as soon as you sign a commitment and post it on your wall, you’ve created a mental cost for writing an unnecessary prescription. If you’re tempted to write that script, you’ll now be hyperaware that doing so means breaking your word. After all, you signed your name to a framed letter promising not to do this very thing. In short, the “price” of prescribing an unnecessary antibiotic has gone up.

“hard commitments”

“soft commitment”—a

soft penalties, such as announcing our goals or deadlines publicly so we’ll suffer humiliation if we miss them, to hard penalties, such as having to hand over cash should we fail.

soft restrictions

hard restri...

“cognitive dissonance,”

Cognitive dissonance can help explain why cults are so hard to leave (after you’ve joined and invested so much of yourself, it’s difficult to admit that you’re unhappy)

In each session, Karen made small, manageable, short-term diet and weight-loss commitments and plans for achieving them.

Karen’s soft commitment was small and recurring. She wasn’t pledging to lose forty pounds in one fell swoop but rather setting weekly, healthy, achievable weight-loss targets. Lots of research on commitment supports the benefits of this “bite-size” approach.

it’s more effective when people are asked to set aside 5 dollars in savings daily rather than 35 dollars weekly or 150 dollars monthly even though these amount to the same thing.) If a commitment is bite-size, it appears less daunting to us, and we’re more likely to stick to our word.

sophisticates.”

“naïfs.”

our intentions are only loosely predictive of our behaviors.

Good old laziness and inattention are a couple of them. But perhaps the biggest, most surprising, and easiest-to-overcome reason for flake out is that people simply forget.

the average adult forgets three things each day, ranging from pin numbers to chores to wedding anniversaries.