5 books to help you build better habits

8/12/2019 5 Books to Help You Build Better Habits

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5 Books To Help You Build Better HabitsChange is difficult, especially when it comes to overarching standards for ourselves, like

health and finances. These five books have wisdom for making moves toward better

choices.

By LearnVest-

Theres an oft-quoted rule of thumb that says it takes21 days to change a habit.

Meanwhile, its day 23, andyou still cant forgo your morning croissant in lieu of ahealthier granola bar. Seems easy enough to do, and yet, your autopilot has you

entering the bakery every morning, like clockwork.

Does that make you feel down? Well, it shouldnt. Habit change is dependent on a lot

of factors, all of which may feel like they are conspiring against you. And besides, that21-day rule seems largely to be the stuff of legend: One University College London study

found, on average, it took 66 days to form a new habit.

And whos got that long? To save you time, we read five of the best behavior-changebooks out there to help you apply these expert ideas to your financial life.

Consider it a sort of CliffsNotes to developing far better habits you wont break.

1. Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do

Things, Why We Dont, and How to Make Any

Change StickbyJeremy Dean

The Big Idea:Dean, a British psychologist and

author ofPsyBlog,describes the purpose thathabits serve in our lives: In essence, they give your

brain a rest from having to make difficultdecisions by putting some things on autopilot.

(Imagine how mentally drained youd be if youhad to rethink how to back out of your driveway

every morning?)

But overcoming this automaticity (doingwithout thinking, in laymans terms) is preciselywhy it takes so long to make or break a habit.

Dean cites the aforementioned UniversityCollege London research, which showed the

range in time it can take to actually effectchange: Drinking a glass of water with breakfast

took about 20 days to become automatic, but
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something harder, like doing 50 sit-ups a day, took more than 84 days!

His Big Secret:Dean says one key to adopting a better habit is to create a connectionbetween a specific situation and a resulting action, and then practice repeating that

process. One way to do this is to put the desired outcome into an if thenstatement. For instance, if youre trying to be a kinder person this year, say, If I see aperson struggling with a stroller, then I will offer to help. Dean calls this implementationintention.

How It Can Work for You:You can apply implementation intention to just about any

money habit you want to adopt. Just make sure the if trigger is not so specific that itgives you few opportunities to try out your new habit, says Dean, and not so wide that

its too vague. For instance, if you want to chip away at credit card debt, try somethinglike this: If I am buying something that is less than $30, then I will use cash.

RELATED:How the All-Cash Diet Changed My Life

2. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health,

Wealth, and HappinessbyRichard H. Thaler and

Cass R. Sunstein

The Big Idea:We know what decisions we should

make in our lives--like reaching for the broccoli over

the bacon, or buying the sedan over the sports car--but actually doing it is another matter. How can

we make it easier on ourselves to make the right

choice?

Thats the question authors Thaler and Sunstein seekto answer in their New York Time bestselling book.

The two economists, at the University of Chicago

and Harvard, provide examples from the world of

public policy to show how small nudges in humanbehavior can help improve individual and societal

behaviors.

Their Big Secret:They give the example of a

manager in a school cafeteria who wants her students to eat healthier. She achieves

this by simply moving the salad to eye level and puts the greasy pizza further back and

out of reach. According to the authors, changing how the foods are displayed couldup the consumption of healthier food by as much as 25%.

Best of all? Its actually the easiest move. She hasnt eliminated anyones freedom ofchoice; shes simply made a small tweak that makes the healthier food decision a littlemore user-friendly. Thaler and Sunstein call this choice architecture, or influencingdecisions by changing the context of how the choices are presented. They argue that,
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in a similar fashion, we can nudge other people, and ourselves, to make the bestdecision simply by making, or architecting, small tweaks to our own environments.

How It Can Work for You:In a nutshell, make it harder not to do the smart thing. Letstake your 401(k) as an example. When you first enroll, you probably tell yourself thatyoure going to increase your contributions by 1 percent gradually over time. Thats notbad advice, and were all for it.

microresolutions -- setting goals that are sorealistic and manageable that you couldntpossibly talk yourself out of them.But making a change to your contribution

doesnt happen with the snap of a finger.You have to tell human resources, remind

yourself of when youll up the contributionitcan require a lot of legwork, so it becomes

easy to stick with what youve got. (This is

what experts call the status quo bias.)

So try the opposite. Start with a highernumber first. If you were originally going to

contribute 2 percent, but think you can make5 percent work, start with your reach goal. It

might feel like a bit of a stretch at first, but

due to inertia, youre unlikely to make theeffort to decrease the contribution, opting to

adjust your budget instead. Youve made itharder to save less for retirement, and easier to save aggressively.

3. Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconsciousby Gerd Gigerenzer

The Big Idea:Lets say youre trying to choose between two job opportunities. You havea hunch that youll like working at Company A instead of Company B, but youre notsure why. So you consult your friends, make a pros and cons list, and then choose A

based on the results. By the end of the first month, you realize youve made the wrongdecision and say to yourself, I totally overthought that. I should have just gone with mygut.

Gigerenzer, managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in

Berlin, would probably agree with you. The common belief is that the best conclusion isthe most informed one. But in his book, he argues that information overload and doing

mental gymnastics doesnt usually help you arrive at the right or most satisfying result.

Thats because what you call your gut, your instinct, or your intuition is helping youcome to a conclusion based on heuristics (the fancy way to say rules of thumb) thatyour brain has absorbed as a result of time, experience and evolution.


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His Big Secret:When you go with your gut, youre not just working off emotion; youreactually disposing of information that your brain instantly and intuitively deems

unnecessary. In other words, youre unconsciously separating the wheat from the chaffin order to make a lightning-fast decision (Its how baseball players, for instance, knowto catch a ball). Gigerenzer tells us that the theory that you can make a right decisionba

sed on one good reason, rather than many, is dubbed take the best

.

How It Can Work for You:When it comes to your finances, is it really possible to trust your

gut so readily? Admittedly, saying you should manage your money based purely on gutinstincts would be poor advice. But you can use your own set of heuristics to make

money decisions in a smart way, especially if you have to make them on the fly.

Consider impulse-buying: It may seem instinctual, but how many times have you had

that little nagging voice tell you, You dont need this right now, so you really shouldntbe buying this? You dont have to go over your budget in your head to convinceyourself to step out of the register line. Your gut tells you that your impulse purchase isntworth it in the long run, and its usually right.

RELATED:6 Times We All Blow Too Much Money

4.Small Move, Big Change: UsingMicroresolutions to Transform Your LifePermanentlyby Caroline L. Arnold

The Big Idea:When you make resolutions, how

do you describe them to yourself? Do you say, Iwill be happier! I will be more organized! I will be

better with money!

But having goals like that may actually mean

youre less likely to fulfill them, according toCaroline L. Arnold, a technology leader on Wall

Street, who wrote the book after becomingfrustrated that she wasnt reaching her own self-imposed goals. Thats because desiring a futurestate of being is more of a wish than a call to

action, which isnt an effective way to incitebehavior change.

She uses the example of acting to explain thedifference: To act, she writes, means to do,not to be. An actor cant convey a character

just by deciding that hes tough, angry or flighty. He has to behave in a way thatconveys those traits through actions. He cant become until he does.

Her Big Secret:Thats why Arnold champions the idea of microresolutions--settinggoals that are so realistic and manageable that you couldnt possibly talk yourself out
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of them. Arnold stresses that the microresolution should be a precise, explicit action for

it to be successful. So I want to become fluent in Chinese gets broken down into I willlearn two new Chinese words every day on the subway on my way to work.

How It Can Work for You:Find a way to break down your financial goals to go fromaspiration to execution. I will be better with money, may become I will take a MoneyMinute on myiPhone every morning before I leave the breakfast table. And dont gooverboard by piling on the microresolutions. Practice only one of them for the next two

weeks. Once that one becomes more automatic, add a second, such as I will walktwo extra blocks to go to the non-fee ATM.

5.Switch: How to Change Things When Change IsHardBy Chip Heath and Dan Heath

The Big Idea:Major change strikes fear in the

bravest of us, but it neednt be so foreboding,say the Heath brothers, who are both businessschool academics. Big change, they argue, just

requires you to overcome the tension betweenyour rational mind (the part of you that wants to

stop smoking) and your emotional mind (the partof you that wants to reach for another

cigarette).

Their metaphor for this dynamic is the relationshipbetween an elephant and its rider. The rider isthe rational mind that sees the long-term goal,

does its best to motivate the emotional elephantand shapes a path that removes the obstacles

like procrastination and pessimismthat gets thelumbering animal there.

Their Big Secret:So how can you train yourself to

embrace intimidating, nerve-wracking,procrastination-inducing change? Switch is chock full of smart insight and direction,but heres a tip you can use right away: Instead of asking yourself how to fix whatyoure doing wrong, ask yourself how you can expand what youre doing right.

How It Can Work for You:The Heaths explain that our default setting is to look at thenegative. In fact, they tell us, a psychologist once analyzed 558 common emotion

words used in the English language and found that only 38 percent of them were

positive. Just like we tend to remember bad gossip over the good, we harbor more onthe wrong results than the right ones.

So the next time you flog yourself for not saving enough for your 401(k), remind yourself

instead that youve cut $25 off your grocery bill by sticking to a very intentionalshopping list--and that its a strategy you will embrace going forward.

This articleoriginally appeared in LearnVest and is reprinted with permission.
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5 books to help you build better habits

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