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

by Katy Milkman

setting defaults wisely is a great way to create big wins.

Unfortunately, “set-it-and-forget-it” systems can’t solve every behavior change problem. When you need to take an action, and particularly when you need to do it repeatedly, it’s hard to rely on defaults.

When we face repeated decisions, laziness is harder to tackle. You can certainly set wise defaults to encourage some of those regular decisions, such as keeping only healthy food in the fridge

parts of our brain that are used for reasoning (the prefrontal cortex)

parts that are responsible for action and motor control (the basal ganglia and cerebellum).

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.

When behavioral scientists talk about habits, we often liken them to shortcuts.

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 ma...

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...

we can intentionally train ourselves to have good habits, and we can help others train, too. The recipe is simple: the more we repeat an action in response to consistent cues and receive some reward (be it praise, relief, pleasure, or even cold hard cash), the more automatic our reactions become.

they recruited more than a hundred university students for a study about gym attendance and randomly assigned them to different groups. Some students were told they would earn 175 dollars if they attended an information session and two subsequent meetings, allowed the researchers to track their gym attendance, and visited the gym at least once in the next month. Others were told they would be paid the same 175 dollars only if they attended the information session and subsequent meetings, allowed their gym attendance to be tracked, and hit the gym at least eight times in the month ahead. Unsurprisingly, the students who had to make eight gym visits to get paid exercised more than the others during that month. But what’s really interesting is what happened after the payments stopped. The students who had just finished a month of unusually high exercise activity (those who had been offered 175 dollars for working out eight times) kept going to the gym much more often than the students who were paid to make only a single gym visit, even though no one was being paid to work out anymore. In fact, the eight-visit group members worked out roughly twice as often as the students in the other group over a seven-week follow-up period.

Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit

James Clear’s Atomic Habits

When a given behavior is repeated (or drilled) over and over in a consistent environment, and when positive feedback of any kind accompanies its execution, it tends to become instinctual.

Once honed, habits put good behaviors on autopilot so we engage in them without even thinking about it.

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. They hit the gym each day because it’s a habit, not because they carefully evaluated the pros and cons. They grab a smoothie for breakfast because it’s their routine, not because they contemplated a greasy sausage biscuit but chose to exercise willpower.

In an ideal world, you would also put good decisions on autopilot. Once a good habit is successfully ingrained in your life, wise decisions become mindless. Then your tendency to take the path of least resistance helps you achieve your goals instead of standing in your way.

Unfortunately, adopting new habits isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. Rewarding yourself for desirable behaviors and hitting repeat until your willpower is no longer needed to actively make the right decision is a strategy that sometimes works well. But I learned the hard way that this system operates seamlessly only in a world that’s very predictable, which, unfortunately, is not the world most of us live in.

burgeoning

macabre,

Familiarity breeds habit.*

if we wanted to help people build good habits

getting them to develop consistent, stable, and familiar routines could be valuable.

forming stable routines is key to habit formation. But if we want to form the “stickiest” possible habits, we also need to learn how to roll with the punches, so we can be flexible when life throws us a curve ball. Too much rigidity is the enemy of a good habit.

routine, your autopilot will become more robust:

lob,

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.

“Well done is better than well said”?)

wastrel

debauchery.

tracking a behavior helps you avoid forgetting to do it until it becomes second nature. It’s also a nice way to ensure you celebrate your successes and hold yourself accountable for failure.

The ideal solution to any problem stemming from our inherent laziness is a single-dose solution—a default. If you can “set it and forget it,” whatever change you’re trying to create will be quite easy to make.* Unfortunately, we often can’t rely on onetime solutions. When laziness is working against us and a default can’t produce lasting change—when there’s no onetime vaccine to cure what ails us—the next-best option is to engineer a habit. Engineering habits means relying on repetition or “drilling” to develop a consistent response to familiar cues, while rewarding ourselves for each success.

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.

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.

dejected

lamented.

emblazoned

“The worst thing you can do is sit on bad news.”

No one likes to be lectured.

everyone knew what to do to overcome their problems; they just weren’t doing it. Lauren began to suspect that this failure to act wasn’t related to a lack of knowledge, but rather to self-doubt—what the legendary Stanford psychologist Al Bandura has called “a lack of self-efficacy.” Self-efficacy is a person’s confidence in their ability to control their own behavior, motivation, and social circumstances.

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

Encouraging someone to share their wisdom conveys that they’re intelligent, capable of helping others, a good role model, and the kind of person who succeeds. It shows that we believe in them.

prodded

when someone asks for guidance, we tell them to do what we would find useful. And after offering that advice to others, we feel hypocritical if we don’t try it ourselves. In psychology, there’s something called the “saying-is-believing effect.”

after you say something to someone else, you’re more likely to believe it yourself.

turn advice giving inside out when you’re facing a challenge. Ask yourself: “If a friend or colleague were struggling with the same problem, what advice would I offer?” Taking this perspective can help you approach the same problem with greater confidence and insight.