Bad Habits are Solvable

So that's a high effort sort of a process. For those of us who actually make fresh goals, fewer than half of us will stick with them. Many of us won't even get through January. But research psychologists Wendy Wood thinks that's because we're thinking about our goals upside down. A lot of goals aren't about making fresh habits. So we really are trying to change a habit that we've already formed, and that requires different strategies than willpower and motivation.

Doctor Wendy Wood is Provost Professor of psychology and Business at the University of Southern California, and she thinks persistent behavior change is solvable. Just to start out, Wendy to ask for perhaps obvious question, what is a habit? A habit is Actually it's an answer, it's a solution. It's a way that people stick with behavior. It's a way they persist. Habits. You can think of as a sort of learning mechanism. Something good happens, some good outcome happens.

You form habit memories that allow you to repeat it again in the nature. So when we talk about bad habits, and just about everybody I know I think would say they have some bad habits, however hard they're trying or not trying to change them. Is it that you're somehow getting rewarded or you've gotten into a pattern of being rewarded for that bad habit. Bad habits are habits that are inconsistent with our goals. They conflict with our goals. So there are things that we don't want to do

and they got rewarded in the past. Rewards are really important for forming a habit. They're not quite so important once you've formed one. And that's the real challenge. We keep doing what we did in the past that was rewarding, but right now we've changed our mind and we want to be doing something else. But the habit memory sticks, and so it keeps us doing that thing. You know,

you've reminded me. I grew up in Chicago and went to a school that was across the street from a zoo, and as a result, we had a course that I took which was called Patterns in Animal Behavior. And what we did was we went over to the zoo and watched animals for a long time, like an hour or two. And what you saw was repetitive habits. I don't know if you call them habits when they're animals and not humans, but these animals just did the same thing again and again.

And it might have been a complicated routine, but over tom you would see the repetitive behavior. And it's always made me think that, well, humans are animals and we do the same thing. We just have these repetitive grooves that we get into exactly what a great class. You're absolutely right. Habits are a form of learning that we share with all mammals. I mean, because it's how your dog learns, right, It's how you train your dog, giving them rewards for doing the same thing over and over.

The challenge for humans, though, is that we have this very elaborate, more thoughtful decision making parts of our brain as well as the habit systems that we share with all mammals, and those sort of more elaborate, thoughtful areas are what makes us decide geez, I wish I didn't do this, and that's where we get into conflict with the habits system. So it's that time of year when lots of people make New Year's resolutions, and I think the evidence suggests that most people won't keep most of

those resolutions. So what's your advice for changing habits that we want to change and having the change stick. Yeah, you're absolutely right that most people don't stick with them. At best, about half of us will be successful at keeping our New Year's resolutions. Most people say if I fail, I didn't have enough willpower. We tend to ascribe it to ourselves and our own limitations. But keep in mind that most of the resolutions we make are changing and

existing behavior. So we really are trying to change a habit that we've already formed, and that requires different strategies than willpower and motivation, because you're not going to stay motivated as long as your habit memory is going to persist. The best way to change a habit is to alter the cues in the environment what is activating that response. And let me give you an example. So I get up in the morning and I walk into my kitchen and I make coffee and I do so I don't

ask myself do I want coffee this morning? Am I tired enough? I just make it automatically without thinking about what I'm doing. You might have had this experience when you get in your car, right you just automatically put your seatbelt on. You don't think about all of the reasons why you should or shouldn't. It's something that's automatic. So that's what keeps us repeating behavior, and we want to change up those cues so that the old pattern

isn't activated. Well, that's an interesting example about seatbelts because there were a lot of people who didn't use seatbelts when it was purely a matter of choice. But we've actually taken that discretion away from people, at least for cars made and I don't know the last however many years, because legislation requires that there's that annoying beeping noise if you don't have your seatbelt on, and so you no

longer have the option of having a bad habit. Does that point the way to creating systems that take our choice, the element of will or willpower away from us when it comes to habits that we should want to change or break. Well, I wouldn't say so much. It takes our willpower away from us as encourages us to do the right thing. And we've done this already in public

health campaigns with anti smoking. Right, we have changed the environment, the smoking environment, to actually make it more difficult to smoke, and that's involved removing cues. So there are no longer cigarettes on shelves and stores, we don't get advertising for cigarettes, there aren't cigarette vending machines anymore. So they've taken away a lot of the queues to purchasing. But they've also made it more difficult to smoke, smoking bands and public places,

taxes on cigarettes make it harder to buy them. So that's sort of a two pronged approach here. One is changing the cues that kept people smoking, and the second is making it more difficult to smoke, adding friction on the behavior so it's more difficult, and our habits are very responsive to that. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to talk about smoking because obviously that's a behavior that involves

an element of addiction. Nicotine's an addictive chemical. And it's interesting, first of all, that changing the scenarios and the way you talk about still has an effect even though it's addictive. But for some people it doesn't because they're addicted to the chemical of nicotine and change Trying to do all the things you're talking about isn't going to get you across the line of quitting. Well, let me point out that in the middle of the last century, fifty percent

of Americans smoked, and now only fifteen percent do so. Yes, I'm not denying the effects of nicotine, but I'm saying that these forces on our behavior are very powerful, maybe more so than many of us want to admit. I mean, if I could be the guinea pig here for a minute, let me tell you about a habit, a bad habit I would like to break that I've had a really hard time breaking, which is having my phone in bed.

I definitely as a result of having the phone. I don't do have it there every night, but when I do, I don't sleep as well. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I'm inclined to reach for the phone, and then I'm less likely to go back to sleep, And just in general, when I don't have the phone there, I feel better about things. But I keep having my phone in bed for you know, I have various reasons and excuses, but honestly, I think the bottom line is I want to check my phone like

it's something. You know, it's pleasurable or important or whatever it is. But even if I get in the groove of putting it in another room for a while, I somehow break the good habit and go back to the bad one. Can you help me, Well, you're responding to rewards. The phone is designed to keep you using it in a very habitual way if you use much social media.

Social media comes in a big scroll, and every once in a while you get this wonderfully interesting tidbit from a friend or something else that just keeps you scrolling. So what you have to do is you have to figure out how to reverse engineer those cues. You need to figure out how to change them or to put friction on them. Maybe you just need a little bit more practice repetition in leaving the phone in a specific place before you go to bed, so that it starts

to become automatic. I would say, probably just haven't practiced it enough. Well, that term friction you talked about is really interesting. You know, our company makes a podcast with doctor Lory Santos at Yale called The Happiness Lab, and she's done a number of episodes that have touched on this question of, you know, how you can create friction around the things you don't want to do. But then I guess a kind of you know less friction or a system of rewards around the things you do want

to do. And the thing about friction is we don't give it a whole lot of credibility simply because most of us think we're in charge right as you said earlier, We think we have free will. We think we are making decisions and doing things all the time. We're not aware of how much of the time we're simply responding

to the environment around. My favorite study right now on friction is one that was done in an office building as a four story office building, and it was done with researchers who wanted people to take the stairs and stop using the elevator. And it's a four story building, so that's possible. So what they started with is sort of how we start with our New Year's resolutions. They started off trying to convince people right, motivate them, get

them to do the right thing. So they put up signs, first, take the stairs, it uses many more calories than the elevator, good for your health. That had no effect. So they tried a different approach. They tried take the stairs, saves energy, good for the environment, save our planet. No effect. So what they did is they slowed the clothes closing of the elevator door by sixteen seconds, and that was enough

to reduce elevator trips by a third. So just the simple friction of having a slow door closing stopped people from taking the elevator. And the cool thing about the study is that four weeks later, when the researchers set the elevator door back to its normal speed, people kept taking the stairs. They still avoided the elevator because they had formed habits to take the stairs. See, and that's maybe four weeks every day it would be enough practice for you, Jacob in keeping your cell phone out of

the bedroom. Yeah, well, well that's a good example of adding how adding a tiny bit of invisible amount of friction health. So we'll give me some friction examples around exercise. For example, I have pretty good habits around exercise. I've aloys been a runner, and I get pleasure from doing it, so you know, but I know a lot of people, just especially this time of year when it's cold and most of the country, it's just really hard to get motivated.

How can you remove friction that will make it easier to get out and exercise. Well, I think that the motivation would come from finding ways to make it reboarding. I used to be a runner too. It's not easy for me to do. So I started using an elliptical and if you've ever used an elliptical machine, it is

the most boring thing in the world. So hated it for a while until I figured out I can watch really stupid TV shows that I would never normally watch, read trashy novels that I would never normally spend the time reading, just when I use the elliptical. And since I started doing that, which is about four years ago, five years ago, now I of it. I look forward to it, and I look forward to it because it's

that combined experience. I've been able to figure out how to add a reward to it that makes it rewarding. I mean that reward in another context might be a bad habit. Right, Watching trashy TV might be a habit you would want to break or change is part of your UNI Year's resolution. But why is it it's okay in the context of using it to create a good habit, or because it's limited by the good habit of What's how do you think about that? Habits are only good

or bad in relation to your goals. So my goal is to get myself exercising, and I'm going to spend the time exercising anyway, So what does it matter what I'm thinking about when I exercise? That's how I think of it. My priority is exercise how to get myself to do it. It's interesting what we think of as discipline versus a habit. I mean, I have in a few books, and I always just thought of it as

a button chair problem. You know, if I was in if I had my button the chair from nine to one every day, the book got written, and if I didn't, it didn't. So I guess I built the habit. But I would say, you know, I disciplined myself to sit there six days a week from nine to one, and when you thought about it. You know, nine to one, it's only four hours a day, So it wasn't you know, it wasn't like you could have a life outside of

doing that. The problem was if you didn't have the discipline of doing that, you'd have to be kind of doing it all the time exactly. But you know, you've touched on an interesting point I think, which is, so, what's the difference between a habit and discipline or willpower? How can we understand that? We always think of discipline a sort of self denial. It's the kind of white knuckling it through. We're going to make ourselves do it.

So that's a high effort process. And up until very recently, psychologists thought some people have high self control, like that they're just able to do that better than others. And what we've learned instead from observing people is people who self report who say they have high self control, they actually know how to form habits. So they start as you did. If they want to write a book, they figure out what time of day they're best at writing,

or how many pages. Some people who are prolific writers write a certain number of pages every day. Some people write for a certain number of hours every day. I mean the habit itself that they're forming has to do with those markers. Of course, writing itself isn't a habit. The habit is getting there and making yourself do it effortlessly, and that is the automaticity of habit. Of course, then you have to do the cognitive work of writing on top of that, but that's a whole different thing. Yeah,

does it change with age? I mean, given that this is this is you're looking at what's happening inside our brains, and our brains change as we get older. You know, does it get easier or harder to change your habits as you get older? Everything gets harder as you get older. Taker that was sort of an obvious question, wasn't it. But I did. But but on the other hand, there is sort of the habit of having habits, and you know, the confidence that if you've changed habits in the past,

you know you can do it. And I often do observe that it may be more settled when you're older, but it may be more settled in a positive direction. Well, I think there's pretty good data that all of our brains, all parts of our brains, all parts of our neural systems do age, and they get a little less efficient, a little less effective as we get older. Research shows that older people have a harder time of forming new habits.

That might seem like it is inconsistent with our observations of a lot of older people who seem to do things out of habit a lot. And the thing is is that as you get older, you have a harder time learning new habits, but you're still relying on all of the old ones that you learned earlier in life. And that may be where your sense of older people are more stable, more sort of routine in their behavior. They may be relying more on older habits and they

just had less variability in their behavior in general. So let's wrap up with some advice for listeners who presumably do have some habits they want to change. And it's a little after New Year's now, so we don't have to worry about the deadline. But what are three things to think about just to get started. Is one of them applying or removing friction? Yes, one of them is

identifying the behaviors. First, you have to know what behaviors are giving your problems and have a very clear sense of what new behaviors you want to become part of your habits, and then figuring out how to repeat those on a regular basis those new behaviors, understanding the cues that drive behavior, and understanding how to make the behaviors

you want easier. So we talked about friction getting in the way of behaviors you don't want, but the friction in your life can also help you repeat behaviors that you do want. So, for example, there was a study done with cell phones, tracking cell phones how far they traveled to a paid fitness center. What they found is that if you travel five point one miles to a gym on average, you only go once a month, but if you travel three and a half miles on average,

you go five times a month. So figuring out ways to streamline it so it becomes easier, make it more rewarding, so that you'll do it more. Those are the keys to forming a new habit. And when it's when you're not thinking about doing it anymore at the habit, right, I mean, when does it become a habit Exactly when the struggle ends and it's just cued by the environment around you and you're not even noticing that you're doing it,

that's when it's a happen. So you cite these examples of friction that's mostly invisible to people, But then there is friction that is visible, fure friction you create. How can you be conscious of friction and the way that it's affecting your habits if so much of it is like the increment on how long it takes the elevator door to clothes, something we're not aware of at a

conscious level. That is a challenge that many of us have because we believe in our own agency, right, we think that we are making decisions, and so that leads us to overlook many of the things that are actually influencing us in our environment. But I do think people can answer the question what would make it easier for me to do something and what would make it more difficult, Like if you want to save money taking your credit card out of automatic pay sites like Amazon or other

sorts of online retailers. That makes sense, and most of us would be able to predict that that would make it a little harder for us to buy things. So once we start noticing these things, and once we're willing to say, okay, maybe I'm not completely in charge. Maybe there are a few things around me that also influence my behavior, and are they helping me. Once we start noticing them, I think that we can start to identify

what they are for us personally. For you, Jacob, I would say, you already know your phone has this impact on you. You just keep hoping you're going to follow through on your best intentions and not take it with you tonight to bed. But over time, you'll probably learn how to keep your phone regularly in another room, put the charger in another room, do something to make it easier for you to remember to leave it there before you go to bed, and that's going to help you

form that habit. Doctor Wendy Wood is Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California. Solvable is produced by Joscelyn Frank, booking by Lisa Donne. Our managing producer is Katherine Girardell and Pushkin's executive producer is Mia Lobell. I'm Jacob Weisberg.