Wendy Wood || How to Make Positive Changes that Stick

It's great to have Wendy would on the podcast. Wendy is Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California. She has written for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine, and USA Today and on MPR. See lectures widely, and recently launched the website Good Habits, Bad Habits to convey

scientific insight on habits to the general public. Her latest book is called Good Habits, Bad Habits, The Science of making positive Changes that stick. So great to chat with you today, Wendy. Oh, it's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. My pleasure. So you're a world's leading expert on the science of habit change. But actually my introduction to your research was not through that topic. It was because I'm such a big fan of your

work on gender differences. Oh, thank you. Well, that's nice of you to say that. Yes, I also study gender, but my current focus is mostly on habits. Great. I got really inted in studying how people stick to the changes that they make in their lives. What can we do to make those things that we really want to do persist? That has captured my focus for the past few years. In fact, I've been studying it for thirty

years at this point. Yes, So was the gender differences thing kind of like a side hobby, Yeah, the extent that scientists have obvious? Yes, right, good point. So, yeah, so we're going to obviously if we're going to focus on have a change today and I was reading the press materials for your book and said, you know, we think we know how good and bad habits are formed, but we have it completely wrong. Now is that a marketing ploy or do you think that's right? That we

have it completely wrong? And who's we? What do I have wrong? We, as all of us. Habits are part of the unconscious, so we can't introspect about them. We don't have intuitions about them in the same way that we do other parts of our behavior, like when we make decisions to do something or have strong feelings about something in particular, those are conscious experiences that we have,

and we recognize habits are something very different. They're part of the unconscious and they learn in different ways than our more conscious thinking selves. So as our conscious thinking selves always the better one of the angel devil, can our consciousness be the devil sometimes and our unconscious be what we want to happen. Yes, that's actually a pretty common misunderstanding about habits, and that's because I think our bad habits are just much more salient than our good ones.

So we think about habits as things we don't want to do, but in fact, so many of our habits actually help us do things. Like when you drive, a lot of the time, you're not making active decisions, you're just doing what's worked in the past, which you've learned to do through repetition. And that's a great example of a habit because it's something that we do a lot, and we do without thinking, and we have bad habits

and obviously we have good habits. Now point here, I guess is to get as many of these good habits as I can get going, so I don't have to think about it consciously. Is that right? Exactly? Because habits

persist much more readily than our conscious decisions. You know, we've all had the experience of New Year's resolutions, where we are determined we're going to change our life around and do something different, maybe save more money, maybe we're harder at our jobs, maybe exercise, and we might do it for a few weeks, but then after a while it starts seeming less fun and less important, and so most of us quit. It's the failed New Year's resolution experience.

And that's in part because we're relying on our conscious decisions and will power to do it, which is what makes sense to most of us. How we think that we act and behave and get our behavior in line with our goals. But in fact, the way people who are successful at these things are doing it is they do it automatically. So they've figured out how to sync up their habits, that automatic part of them selves that

repeats what they've done in the past. They've figured out how to sync that up with their conscious decision making selves. I say, so they're integrated, yes, exactly. And all of this happens because we have multiple parts of our brain.

Our brain isn't like this unified whole. We have parts that are specialized for different functions, and part of our brains pick up on the repeated patterns that get us rewards in everyday life, and part of our brains, typically thought of as executive control or associated with the frontal lobes, is associated with making decisions and exerting willpower. And those two parts aren't always in aren't always compatible. They're not always doing the same thing, that's for sure, and that's

when we have bad habits. So how do you define a bad habit question? Habits are only good or bad in relation to our current goals. So things that we start doing because it seems like they're fun or they work for us in some way can become habits that then turn out to be problems. Like staying up late a few nights to watch Netflix or to play video games or to surf the web. You do that often enough and it becomes a how and you're developing a pattern of insomnia. So the first few times to do it.

It could be fun, it could be fine. It's just when it becomes a repeated pattern that it's a problem and that's a bad habit. So don't we have all sorts of bad habits that we're doing all throughout the day that become these kind of habitual things like checking email and checking all sorts of playing on our iPhones and things like that. If we step back sometimes we might realize, holy cow, I've really been caught up in

these bad habits. Yeah, we supposedly all check our cell phones over fifty times a day, and it's hard to imagine that most of us need to be doing that. I think we do it when we're bored. We check our cell phones when we're in social situations we don't want to be in. Maybe get in the elevator. There's people that you don't really want to talk to, so you check your cell phone. We use it. It's cute by all kinds of different experiences in our life, and

so we tend to overuse it. That's an interesting idea of overusing it. And there's no thing is objectively bad habits. And you said it's relative to your goals, and but you know, we have so many goals that are always competing within ourselves. You know, we're cybernetic systems with so many conflicting goals. How do you know which are going to bring out the best version of your whole self?

That's another good question, Thanks, Wendy. Would I think that the question of what goals to use to develop new habits has to do with what behaviors you want to repeat on a regular basis. I see the behaviors like eating healthfully, saving money, particularly as we all get closer to retirement, eating healthfully, going to the gym, and being responsive to our children and being there to listen to them.

Those are all goals that we endorse pretty much every day, and it would be wonderful to not have to think about doing those things, but just do them automatically. And that's what the regular exercisers, the people with happy families, the people who are saving money effectively and living within

their means, that's what they do. And that's the fascinating thing is until recently, we thought that self control was required in order to not respond to temptations to exert self denial, make sure that you are living a healthy, financially stable life. But instead it turned out that the people who are doing these things on a regular basis are doing it automatically out of habit. And that's why I wrote this book is I wanted to explain to people how they can do this too. Most of us

don't know really a whole lot about our habits. I know there are lots of books out there. I know that there's lots of blogs and other sorts of posts about habits. And when I've done surveys and I've asked people, so, how much do you know about your habits? And about eighty percent of people in my surveys say I understand my habits, I know how they work. But then you ask them, so how successful are you at changing your behavior and making it stick? And those same people say

not so great. So whatever we know about habits, it's not helping us. I think the science really can What do you think of James Clear's new book. I don't comment on other people's other people's work. I will say that there's an absence of books out there that actually are informed by the science that can tell us something true. For most of us, there's lots of books out there that tell us what works for the writer, or what the writer thinks might work for us, but there's little

hard data on what actually works. That's what I think is the difference between my book and the other books out there. Got it? Because there is thirty years of hard data. You're just not distilled in a way that people can take into part of their lives so easily. Exactly, So you have this idea of friction and stacking. Could you please go into a little bit of detail about that. Yeah, So form a new habit is you have to repeat

a behavior. It's not enough to make a decision. You can't just decide, Oh, I usually eat cookies on the sofa at night, and I'm going to change that. I'm going to do something else. I'm going to do jumping jacks instead or push ups when I would normally eat cookies. It doesn't work that way. You develop a habit as you repeat the action. So your habit memory depends upon what you have done in the past, not your decision making. You want to repeat the behavior in a supportive context.

That's going to make it easy for you to keep doing the same thing over and over, and you want to make sure that it's rewarding, because people simply don't repeat things if they don't like them. So if you really hate exercising at the gym and you want to increase your fitness, then finding something else to do is what's going to be most helpful or add some reward

to going to the gym. So for me, I find working out on the elliptical really boring, but I watch stupid TV shows when I do it, and there's no other time of the day do I do that. So working out on the elliptical has actually become a lot of fun for me. And that's what people need to do in order to get a behavior that might not others wise be rewarding something that they actually enjoy. That's interesting. Friction is the part of the context that makes it

more difficult to do something. So we don't realize how much in fluence context has in our lives. And context is just everything around us. It's the situations we're in, it's the time of day, it's the other people around us. Proximity, how close things are to you, is an important feature of contexts, and that can be real friction. Let me give you an example. A study tracked cell phones. Our cell phone used is being monitored all the time. You

probably know this. A study tracked cell phones how far they went to the gym. This is hundreds of thousands of cell phones over several months, how far they traveled to a paid fitness center. What they found is that if people traveled three and a half miles, they went five times a month on average, But if people traveled over five miles, they only went once a month on average. And what this suggests is that, I mean, first off, that difference of a mile and a half it doesn't

make much sense to our rational thinking conscious self. Right, if you want to go to the gym, you're going to go to the gym, and it doesn't matter how far away it is. But it makes it more difficult, takes a bit more time, you have to think more about how to get there. All of that adds friction to going to the gym, and so you're making it harder on yourself. If you go to a gym that's a distance from your house or your job, you're much less likely to go. It's the difference between an exercise

habit and not having one. I see. So what differentiates those who have to score well in these self report measures than those who don't. What are the self control people have. Yeah. Self control is an interesting concept because we think that that's what determines whether we're going to be successful at changing our behavior or not. Right, if you have good self control, strong ability to resist temptations, then you should be somebody who is able to make

decisions and stick with them. If you have poor self control, then you won't be able to do that. That's the way most of us think. So when we fail at our New Year's resolutions, when we're not able to meet our goals, then we tend to assume it must be something wrong with my self control. I didn't want it enough. Instead, what science has shown is that people who score high on self control scales actually know how to form habits, and they've automated the experience so that they don't need

to rely on self control. They're not even making decisions. It's their automatic response when they're in a situation. It's like you driving a car. When you're in that car, you're driving your familiar automobile. You don't have to make decisions most of the time unless something unusual happens in the traffic, and then we hope you are paying attention. But most of the time we're not. So that kind of autopilot is what high self controlled people use to

meet their goals. They understand about friction and they understand about making it easy for them to achieve goals in line. Well, that's very interesting, so I'm naturally curious. So your thoughts about ego depletion theory then, have you done work on that at all? Kind of viewing this self controls this kind of limited resource that is tied to like glucose in our brains. Yeah, I have not done anything with the glucose mechanism. I think there's a good question about that.

The idea that self control is a muscle that it's depleted with use that was very popular for a while and is now being questioned by many researchers. My explanation, I have done research in the area, and I sometimes do get ego depletion effects so that people who have performed difficult tasks and are mentally tired, mentally depleted, they tend to fall back on their habits more than when

people are more actively in control. And I think some of the controversy has come because the experimental work is not always ideally set up to capture that phenomenon. It's a bit more elusive than many of us imagined initially. Well, yeah, I think that talking about such a complex mechanism, you'd sort of expect that. So why doesn't white knuckling through temptation work. It's hard, it's not fun. No, most of us don't enjoy it. It's a hard approach to stick

with simply because we don't enjoy it. And there was a very famous experiment done about twenty or thirty years ago by Dan Wegner with the difficulty of not thinking about white bears. Are you familiar with this, Oh, definitely yes. What he showed in that study for listeners who aren't familiar with it, but he showed in that study is if you are trying not to think of something, it gives that thing energy, so that when you are allowed to think of it in the future, you do so

with great frequency. You think about it even more often after you've been trying to inhibit it. So the point to the study was to suggest that we have this sort of boomerang response, this counterproductive response. When we try to inhibit something, it activates it further and we have a hard time not thinking about it, and we've all done this right. When you diet, you think about food constantly.

When you are trying not to spend money, you can't help but notice all the new things that other people are buying that you are denying yourself. This counterproductive quality makes it very hard for us to be successful at self denial. It's not a good way to try to change our behavior. It's not going to work. I see, Well, it's good to know that there's other ways of getting

it what you want to get at. Yes. One of the benefits of having a mind that has many different systems, interconnected systems, is that we have many different ways of learning and thinking. Some of them are accessible to us, we're aware of them, and some are not. And the habit system is not available for us to introspect about. We're learning habits all the time and we're not aware of it. Doesn't the habit system kind of operate in

an if then sort of code source code in a way? Yes, because because the habit system really is a sort of mental shortcut. If I'm in this context, what should I do to get a reward? That's what the habit system answers, And it's actually the question it asks is what have I done in the past that has gotten a reward. So when you wake up in the morning, you go to your kitchen. I go to my kitchen, I make coffee without even asking myself how or do I want it today or will my day be better with it

or without it? I just make it. I do what I did in the past to get that reward of a morning jolt to help you wake up. But the problem is that this is where you get into bad habits. That the habit system is very backward focused. It focuses on past rewards, what you experienced as a reward in the past. It doesn't recognize so well what you want

to get as a reward today. So if you decide that coffee isn't good for your health, you may still find yourself thinking about it as soon as you get up in the morning, because that's what you've typically done, and that's what your brain is organized to focus on first thing in the morning, making coffee. That's your habit. So I want to change a habit, do we know how many do we have a certain idea of how many days such a thing it will take. People say

you could change any habit in twenty one days. Is that another thing that people just pull out others that's not informed by science. But yes, that is not very scientifically based. In fact, we think that if you're interested in the origins, we think it comes from a self help book in the nineteen sixties on along it take to get used to a plastic surgery, change in your face or appearance of some kind. Oh, that's amazing, you

track that down. Yeah, it doesn't have much to do with habit formation or change more changes in our appearance. To form a habit takes much longer, typically than three weeks. Two to three months is a better estimate. If you're doing it reasonably consistently and you're getting rewarded for it, so you like what you're doing, and you're likely to do it again in the future, then two to three months is probably the best estimate we have at this point.

For actions to become so automated that there's so of second nature. They're what you do without having to think or make decisions. That's how long it will take. Changing habits is something very different, and this is odd to think about for our conscious decision making self. But once habits have formed, rewards don't make a whole lot of difference. In fact, the consequences of the action become relatively unimportant. And that's what researchers call the gold standard for knowing

whether something is a habit. If you change the context, will people still keep doing it? If you change the reward, will people keep doing it? Change the outcome of the behavior. That's the gold standard of whether something is a habit or not. And let me give you an example of that. I did a study a few years ago in a local movie cinema and we gave people stale popcorn to eat. Actually, some got a bag of fresh, some got a bag of stale. They didn't know that they were getting that

anyone was getting stale popcorn. They thought it was all fresh. And people who had habits to eat popcorn in the movie cinema, they ate it whether it was stale or fresh. It could tell us they hated the stale and it was awfully stale, so it was really not good popcorn. But they ate it anyway because they were in a movie cinema with all of the cues around them activating the habit and the outcome, the taste, the reward didn't matter that much. People who didn't have habits to eat

popcorn in the movie cinema. They ate the fresh stuff and avoided the stale. So they were acting rationally the way we'd expect people to act. But the people with habits were just repeating what they did before because in the past it had been rewarding, and so the habit perpetuated. Well, it's a great study for a sadistic psychologist to administer. You're a sadistic psychologist, but I say, I enjoy that. Yeah.

The whole idea was to test the limits to which people would go to repeat habits, and that was the idea behind the study. And what it suggests is that you can't change habits by changing rewards, right, by finding some new reward that might work for some other behavior. That's a common meme that is suggested in the popular litters, sure for changing habits, but in fact habits don't work that way. You have to change the cues that activate

the behavior. Yeah, so in order to change a habit, you have to add friction or remove the cues so that it's harder to do and it doesn't come to mind automatically. Can you give like an example on how I can stop picking my nails. Well, let me give you an even more impressive one, which has to do with smoking. Our country decided about fifty sixty years ago to start putting friction on smoking. We started taxing the

purchase of cigarettes. We removed advertising cigarette advertising. We banned smoking from most public places, and we've removed it from the storage olves. You can't buy cigarettes by picking up a pack in the store. Someone has to check your

age and give it to you. All of those things added friction to smoking, and in so doing we cut smoking from almost fifty percent of the population smokers to only fifteen percent today, which shows the power of the context we're in to change our behavior, because it changed what was easy. It was no longer. It was like everyone was now in that five miles away from the gym study and they it was hard to get there. It just starts being too much work, and after a while,

the discouragement makes it easier to change. So what would you do to add friction to biting your nails or picking at them or that's a habit that many people have, putting cyanide on my fingernails, Yeah, there you go, So I wouldn't bite them, or it would be what we call one trial learning. Yeah. Yeah, put something unpleasant, unpleasant tasting on your nails, or wear gloves so you have to take them off, particularly at times when you know

that you typically bite your nails. It could be that you do it because you get anxious, maybe when you're working or during difficult conversations. Those times are the times to practice automating. Sitting on your hands, wearing gloves, painting your nails with something that tastes bad. All of those things will help you in the future to stop biting. They add friction. Well, thanks for this free advice here,

I appreciate it. I would try to think, what's the difference between habits and addiction or is just addiction just a habit that has become so repetitive that you feel like it's interfering with your longer term goals. I mean, how would you define the distinction between the two. Well, I think habits are a component of most addictions, but addictions are something more. Addictions are at least with substance, using substances to a point where you sort of lose

control over the rest of your life. Addictions hijack this habit learning system, but addictions have many other components as well. So they're like really bad habit run amok. They are. They take over people's lives in ways that most habits don't. Most of our habits are just much more circumscribed to specific contexts, so that when we're in the context, the response we've practiced comes to mind, and that's just a shortcut for what to do, and we usually just do it.

I see. So you're talking about I mean, you're talking about a lot of using friction to change our habits. How do companies like Uber reduced friction in user experience? Well, if you remember a few years ago, Uber had this pricing schedule where you would get this lightning bolt, it would say that prices have increased, say one point five percent, and you would be you would get this surcharge, this additional charge for every for the ride that you wanted

to take. And the problem with that is those of us who have an Uber habit, that made us start to think it was a very bad idea. And Uber quit that because I figured out that it was friction on people. Using Uber, You're making people think and making people make decisions about whether to take the ride right now or not. And that's the last thing Uber wants. As any company, you just want people to be using your product automatically and not wondering, huh do I really

want to go in this ride right now? So that pricing structure has since changed and we only get a standard price for the Uber ride. That's sort of an average. They have average, they have better data, so they're averaging the cost. I see, well, I now understand this link. I was trying to see what's in common between that gender differences research you've done in this topic. And I mean you're really big into the content. You're big into

context and the environment. You could imagine like Robert Pullman would be like, you know, it's about it's about the genes, it's about it's a trade perspective. There are people with self control and that's influenced by the genes. You know. But it sounds like you'ven't invoked the G word once. No. I everyone has the ability to learn habits. In fact, that is common across all the mammalian species. So rats have habits, dogs have habits, cats have habits, whales have habits.

We are all genetically in down to form habits in similar ways. What we find pleasurable and enjoyable and what our goals are. Those might be influenced to some extent by our genetic structure and certainly by our child rearing and developmental experiences. But the habit mechanism itself is pretty basic and it's common to all mammalian species. As I said, this really gets this research program really gets the heart

of how much we can change our personalities. Our personality traits just repeated habits of emotional functioning, behavioral manifestations, et cetera, motivational processes. I mean you must take a habit of perspective on personality as well. I guess no, I wouldn't argue that I don't think habits are personality traits. No, habits are the repeated behaviors that we've learned to do in certain situations because we've been rewarded for them in

the past, and personality traits are something quite different. You'll need to ask a personality psychologists. Well, I'm a personality psychologist, you okay? But I was thinking that William Fleeson's his approach. He's like, you know, he has this idea. He's like, you're you're only more extroverted, or more agreeable, or more moral to the extent to which you repeatedly are those things.

So it just had me thinking that it seems like the habit approach could probably be integrated with the William Fleeson sort of way of thinking about personality traits as density distributions. People who are more introverted just are more introverted. There's not like they're always introverted. They're just more on the four or five out of five, you know, like our scale during the course of their data average. So isn't that essentially like their habit is to be more introverted?

I think probably what could frame it that way? Yeah? Possibly the habits that we have studied thus far are more discreete specific behaviors. Yeah, yeah, I see, and that introversion might lead people to practice certain behaviors that could be helpful or could be hurtful to them in the long run. So they might form good bad habits because of who they are, their preferences, their likes, their attitudes,

their approach to life. Yeah yeah, I mean your research gets to the heart of so much of what people really care about in their lives, which is how much can they change? How can culture? I mean again, I'm going to keep going back to your generative stuff because I thought it was really I mean, your gender difference work actually made an impact on my research. And you did this work and there was this kind of like

the evolutionary hypothesis, there's a cultural role hip. That's what explains me preferences across different cultures, and you sort of have this hybrid model. Yes, so the basic idea in our approach, this was with Alice Abley that I did this work. The basic idea behind our approach was that, yes, men and women have potentially different genetic orientations. Men might

be oriented to do certain things, women other things. But what makes the human species, So what's made us so successful is culture and the ways that culture determines men and women's activities in our society is really a huge determinant of what we think men and women are like. So in our society, women work good percentage of women work, maybe sixty seventy percent, almost as much as men, but they tend to work in slightly different jobs, not as

well paid. They tend to work in caretaking jobs. You still see them more than men as elementary school teachers, nursery school teachers, nurses. Those distributions are changing, but it's still the case that women tend to be in more caretaking positions, So we make the inference women must have those attributes, and men tend to be in more higher status, higher paying positions and workforce, and they're less likely to be stay at home dads than women are being stay

at home moms. So we make the inferences about what men should be like based on our experience of men in our culture, And the basic argument is that our stereotypes reflect our understanding of what men and women do in our specific culture. Do you think that motivation plays a role there. Surely more women on average than men on average are interested in the caretaking professions, right, Yeah, but we've seen those that change radically in the last

couple of decades. Many more women than men are now graduating from college. We see women being interested, equally interested, or more interested than men in biology, biological sciences. Graduates in biology are leaning starting to lean more towards women than men. That's true at the undergraduate level. That's becoming true also at the graduate level. The idea that we have these fixed interests just doesn't seem to match very well the historical data. Yeah, so I'm just trying to

understand the position. I thought that your physician was that you shouldainly don't deny that there are some biological contributions. Sure, but yeah, but you're talking about this interaction effect because I think that one could probably make a good case that that something hasn't changed. I don't think that that women are just as interested in social status and dominance, you know of like a leadership things as men are on average. Seems that seems to be a pretty robust

sex difference. And I'm wondering, I mean, would you argue there's no biological contribution whatsoever to that sort of thing. No, I would never argue that, but I would out that an arm do not have access to those positions as much as men do. Is that because of the patriarchy. Because of patriarchy. So it's very hard to tease apart what is actually due to an inherited disposition and what is actually due to the social circumstances that we find

ourselves in. And I think that right there is just this common thread throughout your whole career that I now see. I now clearly see it. I was I was trying to figure it out. I was like, how did how

does this the gender difference research link to this? But I think that you know, you really have spent your career showing that regardless of all these other theories and things about and UH and inheritability research, behavioral genetics, and and other aspects, there's still quite a bit of wiggle room there in terms of how we can change and particular our habits that we may feel like are cast and stone forever. You're kind of take another look at that?

Is that right exactly? Yay? I could summarize that well. Thank you for your tremendous career, Wendy. Seriously, it's a very impressive putting it all together in this book that's very digestible and very very easy to read and apply to one's life. So thank you so much. Oh, thank you for having me. I hope people have a chance to read the book. And thanks again for being on the Psychology Podcast. Thanks for listening to this episode of

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