Creating and breaking habits

November 10, 2010

Overview

• What is a habit?– How do they form?

• How can we change bad ones? • How can we start good ones?

Popcorn at the movies

Neal, Wood, Lally, & Wu. 2009

What is a habit?

• “A specific type of automaticity characterized by a rigid contextual cuing of behavior that does not depend on people’s goals or intentions”– Something we do because we always do it,

whether we want to or not• About 45% of people’s behavior is repeated

almost daily and usually in the same context– Consumption, especially• Where we buy groceries, when we eat, how we

dispose of things, etc.

Cues in context

Start out with… Becomes…

Context

Behavior

Context

Behavior

Intention

Kinds of context

• Place• Time of day• Mood• Other people• Situation• A combination of any of these…

How to break a habit?

• It’s hard!– You have to make a new plan and override old one,

again and again• How about temporarily overriding a habit?– Also hard, but not quite as much

• Overriding old pattern requires effort, which means it is easily overridden itself– Under time pressure– Under distraction– When self-control resources are limited

So then what?

Context

Behavior

Context

Behavior

The weak link Work with this!

Add a good cue

• What do you do when you want to remember something?

• An unavoidable reminder– In front of the door– Set an alarm

• Associate it with a habit, to make it its own habit– Brushing teeth– Eating dinner

Subtract a bad cue

• The key to quitting smoking is not certain things one should do, but certain things one should not do– Avoid other smokers– Avoid alcohol– Avoid social situations where you tend to smoke– Change your schedule or routine to alter those

times when you usually smoke

Take advantage of new contexts

• For yourself:– When you start something new, make sure you

make plans to be the person you want to be• Start saving when you start a new job• Install thermostats, CFLS, etc., when you first move in

• For others:– Take advantage of shake-ups• Bus passes for people who just moved to town• Get new employees recycling

Commuting habits

Verplanken, Walker, Davis, & Jurasek, 2008

How long does it take to form a habit?

• Repeated behaviors with an associated cue take about 66 days, on average, to become automatic– A missed day here or there does not seem to have a

strong impact– Simpler behaviors (new eating or drinking habits)

don’t take as long as more complex ones (exercising)– Effort required to remember behavior plateaus with

time; the first few days show the greatest reductions in effort

Lally et al., 2010

What about starting a new habit?

• Do:– Provide a small reward with behavior– Make sure the behavior is repeated often– Make sure the behavior is repeated in the same

context– Form an explicit, simple, concrete implementation

intention to start and repeat the behavior

Summary

• Habits are nonconsciously held links between a situation and a behavior

• They are hard to change, but it can be done:– Keep the focus on the situation, not the behavior• Intentions don’t really help; implementation intentions

do

• They are hard to start, but it can be done:– Keep at it; always link the cue to the behavior,

and eventually it will stick• Again, intentions don’t really help; implementation

intentions do