{"id":"600aa5496cee070008e3bb58","slug":"good-habits-bad-habits-en","title":"Good Habits, Bad Habits","audio_url":"https://hls.blinkist.io/bibs/600aa5496cee070008e3bb58/600aa5496cee070008e3bb5a-T1611310518.m4a?Expires=1642719256&Signature=fp5MXApqviUX69xNOXUjc1tqaLxUzFS39Wmr7LQBjdqmz3aeTQcCyPkU0v~XPeKNwfSbO6xsNPCWiaSWnaRAlDWIwRa-bQMi75sRPitcyOOulwkRpFoGmsvb-1TJKhrIR9ZxYXpL386Vfw6gv-Qz8L2RfKXgJn-9WAwxEHuOAaBGVOwMvydup0bR7T3rVKKIPcyQGbeQUit~HJ~3ohg~VPElgekx~ChqcJEaJeuIMHMsGoKdLS5jm5-G5vImBELRZIsI7ks3fKyc-~08kVe9yBYu9yHvW8WBbekzXntI1vLWKW9TsWQXumJr4scUc5CV0ELoTTfpaRjqnjux9UlOqQ__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJXJM6BB7FFZXUB4A","chapters":[{"id":"600aa5496cee070008e3bb5a","title":"Habits control our lives – whether we notice them or not.","text":"

What are the first things you do when you wake up? If you’re like most people, your morning routine is probably fairly fixed.

You might just shower, dress, and hit the road. Or maybe you have to feed and dress your kids before you start your own day’s work.

Whatever the case, you probably didn’t actually decide to do many of the things you found yourself doing this morning.

There was no inner debate about whether to shower, or whether or not to make a coffee. Without any conscious thought, you just went ahead as you always do – showering, dressing, and brewing yourself a drink. In other words, you acted out of habit.

The key message here is: Habits control our lives – whether we notice them or not.

Whether it’s our morning routines or our exercise regimens, habits influence our behavior more than most of us know. So why do we so often overlook them? Because habits operate below the level of conscious thought.

You see, habits differ from other mental processes, like decision-making and willpower. These occur at the conscious level of the mind. When you hem and haw about which cereal to buy, you’re fully aware of the thought process you’re experiencing – it’s a thoughtful cognitive process.

Habits, on the other hand, work below the level of conscious awareness. They don’t really involve thought. Instead, they’re nonconscious repetitions of actions you’ve performed many times before.

Many of the things we do from day to day – both good and bad – are habits. It’s habit that makes you signal before you turn. It’s habit that makes you kiss your spouse when you get home from work. And it’s habit that keeps you eating the junk food you’ve been meaning to cut down on for months.

Recognizing the outsize role that habits play in our lives doesn’t strip us of agency, though. After all, habits are malleable – you can always lose the ones you don’t like and gain a few you do.

In order to do that, however, we need to take a look at how habits work.

"},{"id":"600aa5496cee070008e3bb5b","title":"Habit influences our actions more strongly than self-control does.","text":"

Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution? Most people have. Whether you promised yourself that you’d quit smoking, start jogging, or save a few grand over the coming year, you probably woke up January 1 brimming with confidence and enthusiasm.

But did it last? If you’re like most of us, not really. Bit by bit, your eagerness faded. You failed once, and then twice, and pretty soon you stopped trying altogether.

Unfortunately, that’s just the way many resolutions go. But why? Do we lack self-discipline? Do we not want to achieve our goals? Or do we simply not know what’s good for us?

It’s actually none of the above. There’s another answer.

Here’s the key message: Habit influences our actions more strongly than self-control does.

One of the problems with the way we approach change is that we focus on willpower and self-discipline. Because these are conscious processes, we imagine that they’re the most important ones. If only we had a bit more self control, we could cut our spending, ditch the cigarettes, and finally go on that jog – right?

Well . . . maybe not. The problem with focusing on self-control is that it overlooks the importance of habits. Breaking bad habits and forming good ones is a far better way to change your lifestyle than hoping you’ll develop steely self-discipline overnight.

There’s research to back this up. One study examining self-control enrolled over a hundred teenagers in a meditation retreat. At the end of their five days of meditation, researchers asked the participants about how much they planned to meditate in the future. Some said less, some more.

As you might guess, teens with the highest self-control were the most likely to meet their meditation goals. No surprise there. But what is interesting is how they met their goals.

Researchers discovered that the students who met their goals didn’t do it by continuously exerting their high self-control. The difference was that meditation quickly became automatic for them. In other words, they were just quick to form habits.

This completely changes our understanding of how self-control leads to success. Instead of allowing us to resist temptations at every turn, self-control actually comes in handy at the initial stage of habit formation.

In other words, self-control can lead to success when we use it to form good habits – not when we rely on it to guide every action we take.

"},{"id":"600aa5496cee070008e3bb5c","title":"Your environment can shape the habits you develop.","text":"

If you’ve ever streamed a TV show on a site like Netflix or Hulu, then you probably know what happens whenever you finish an episode. As soon as one ends, another immediately begins to load – and without lifting a finger, you’re propelled into the next installment of your favourite series.

Maybe you find yourself watching more TV as a result. Maybe you develop the habit of binge-watching TV shows, going through a season or more in a single day.

In psychological terms, we can call the automatic queuing of episodes a driving force. Put simply, a driving force is an aspect of your environment that encourages you to behave in a certain way – in this case, to watch more TV. But what does that have to do with habits?

This is the key message: Your environment can shape the habits you develop.

The term driving force was coined by the German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin. Lewin argued that behavior is a function of a person and her environment. That’s a memorable phrase, sure – but what exactly does it mean?

Well, according to Lewin, human behavior is determined by two types of forces: internal forces – like fears and desires – and external – environmental forces exerted by the world around us.

Now, we’ve already come across one type of environmental force – the driving force that encourages you to act in certain ways. The opposite type of influence is a restrictive force, which acts as a deterrent.

To take one example, think of laws against smoking in bars and workplaces. By making it less convenient to smoke, these laws work as potent restrictive forces on smoking.

It’s not difficult to harness the power of driving forces and restrictive forces to change your habits. For example, do you find that you keep reaching for your phone while you’re trying to concentrate? Try putting it out of arm’s reach – in a drawer, say, under a stack of files and stationery.

The minor inconvenience of having to root around for your phone will make checking your messages a little less appealing, giving you a chance to address your bad habit.

You can also use driving forces to change your lifestyle. If you’re trying to eat more healthily, for example, start leaving a well-stocked fruit bowl on your table.

The trick is to make your environment an ally of your good habits, not their enemy.

"},{"id":"600aa5496cee070008e3bb5d","title":"Consistently repeating an action is a key step in forming a habit.","text":"

So step one is out of the way. You’ve redesigned your environment to make good habits easier to fall into and bad habits harder to practice. You’ve hidden your phone and displayed your fruit bowl. So what comes next? How long will it take for your new behavior to become habitual?

Not 21 days – although that’s a popular answer. The truth is a little more complex.

What’s clear is that repetition is vital. It’s only by consciously performing actions again and again, day after day, that they eventually start to become habitual.

The key message here is: Consistently repeating an action is a key step in forming a habit.

There’s no exact number of times an action needs to be repeated before it becomes a habit. Like anything else, it varies a lot from person to person – and also depends on the difficulty of the habit in question.

All the same, researchers have tried to clarify the question of how long, in general, it takes to form habits.

To find out, Dr. Pippa Lally of the University of London tracked a cohort of students trying to adopt new, healthy behaviors. Every day the participants reported two things: first, whether they’d performed their chosen action, and secondly – if they did carry it out – how automatic the behavior had felt.

Having a healthy drink every day became automatic after just under two months. Eating something healthy took about nine weeks. And exercise took quite a bit longer – on average, about 91 days.

That might sound like quite a lot of time, but considering how durable habits are, it’s often an investment worth making.

This is especially true where your desired habits come into conflict with a preexisting tendency – if your new habit of going to the gym, for example, clashes with your old habit of curling up in front of the television.

At the start, it’ll be difficult to opt for the new and unfamiliar behavior instead of your old, ingrained response. But if you persist, you’ll notice a gradual reversal – and bit by bit, the desired behavior will start to come naturally, and the old habit will begin to lose its grip.

There’s no trick to avoid this step, unfortunately, or even to speed it up. But there’s a kind of comfort in its simplicity. Just keep practicing the behavior, day after day – and before long, the habit will take over.

"},{"id":"600aa5496cee070008e3bb5e","title":"In order to form a habit, you need to experience a sense of reward.","text":"

There’s one other key factor in helping habits to grow: rewards.

The idea that rewards can make a habit stick is actually grounded in recent neuroscientific research. That’s because dopamine, a neurotransmitter crucial to the experience of reward, plays an essential role in forming habits.

How? Well, it has to do with making experiences memorable. When you get a reward, the spike of dopamine in your brain helps stamp the experience into your memory – making your desired habit take root more easily.

This is the key message: In order to form a habit, you need to experience a sense of reward.

When it comes to cultivating a new habit, not all rewards are equal. Believe it or not, uncertain rewards actually work best.

This might seem counterintuitive. Surely predictable rewards motivate people better than uncertain ones, right? Well, no – they don’t.

In one study, students who played a challenging game were both more accurate and willing to play for longer periods when the points they won were determined by the roll of a dice. When the points were fixed, their performance and willingness to play dropped.

The attraction of uncertain rewards is actually one of the things that keeps you reaching for your phone. Often, your notifications are just uninteresting noise – trivial emails, insignificant reminders, and endless memos. But the chance of finding a diamond in the rough – a funny tweet, say, or a flirty text – is both attractive and uncertain enough to keep you hooked. So, when looking for a reward to help a habit stick, it’s best that the reward be uncertain.

Another thing to bear in mind when considering rewards is that timing matters. In brief, the reward should follow the action as quickly as possible. Far-off rewards, like the promise of being able to sleep in the next morning or have a chocolate bar the following day, might motivate you to act – but because of the delay, they won’t actually help your habit to take root.

Because timing is so important, it’s best if the reward is intrinsic to the action itself. In other words, it helps if you can find pleasure in the behavior you’re trying to cultivate. So if you’re trying to eat healthily, you might make the experience rewarding by choosing the tastiest healthy meals you can find. Or if you’re trying to exercise, you could choose to play football with close friends.

In short, if you want to write your new habit in stone, make sure to mingle your actions with something rewarding.

"},{"id":"600aa54a6cee070008e3bb5f","title":"When we’re under stress, we naturally rely on our habits.","text":"

Stress seems difficult to escape these days. The majority of Americans say they experience more stress than is healthy, and almost a quarter actually report extreme stress. It seems the lives we’re living often bring us to the brink of crisis.

Chronic stress is more than just unpleasant. In fact, one consequence of stress is that it interferes with what are called the executive processes of our minds. These are the higher-order types of thinking we make use of when we think about the future, make plans, and weigh up decisions.

Luckily, however, when our ability to engage in this type of thinking suffers, we still have one reliable resource to fall back on.

Here’s the key message: When we’re under stress, we naturally rely on our habits.

In stressful circumstances, our habits come to the fore. Unlike our conscious mental processes, habits don’t suffer when we undergo stress; on the contrary, stressful spells are actually their time to shine.

This is an observable phenomenon. One study looked at how the behavior of university students varied between stressful exam periods and normal weeks of class. What the authors found was that rather than interrupting habitual actions, times of stress actually boosted students’ reliance on habits – good ones and bad ones alike.

For example, students who habitually ate healthy breakfasts were even more likely to eat healthy breakfasts during exam season. And the students who typically ate unhealthy breakfasts? They were even more likely to eat unhealthily during periods of academic stress.

There’s a lesson to be drawn from this study. In a world of seemingly inescapable stress, we need to be very careful about the habits we develop.

Good ones will help us to behave wisely even during periods of intense stress. Bad ones, however, will keep us acting foolishly when we really need to be performing at our best.

That’s one more reason to make sure that the habits you have are the habits you actually want.

Remember to repeat your actions, reward yourself, and shape your environment – and you'll find yourself building better habits in no time.

"},{"id":"600aa54a6cee070008e3bb60","title":"Final summary","text":"

The key message in these blinks:

Every day, almost half of our actions are outsourced to habit – and whether that helps or hinders us depends on the specific habits we’ve cultivated. Exercising, smoking, procrastinating, and working – so many of our everyday actions are essentially automatic. Improving our habitual actions is vital, then, and there are three key factors to keep in mind: rewards, repetition, and our environment.

Actionable advice:

Take advantage of disruption to interrupt your normal habits.

Moving house. Changing jobs. Having kids. All of these are big changes, and all of them disrupt the everyday details of our lives. That can be troubling – but it can also provide us with the opportunity to shape our habits for the better. Disruption shakes us out of our complacency and allows us to try new things, ending bad habits and starting new ones. Next time your context changes, take it as an opportunity to make your habits work for you.

Got feedback?

We’d love to hear what you think about our content! Just drop an email to remember@blinkist.com with Good Habits, Bad Habits as the subject line, and share your thoughts!

What to read next: Tiny Habits, by BJ Fogg Ph.D

So you’re ready to start changing your life through the power of habits. You understand the basics. You know what to do. But maybe you still find the task overwhelming. Maybe you feel like you don’t know where exactly to begin. That’s where our blinks to Tiny Habits come in. They argue that instead of upending your life, you’re better off building habits gradually – one tiny step at a time.

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