3 Takeaways - When Willpower Isn’t Enough: Psychologist Wendy Wood Reveals Keys to Success (#101)

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

The research is in, and it shows that a large part of being successful is understanding how to form the right habits. In fact, forming habits can be more important than willpower and self-control.Wendy Wood, noted USC Psychology Professor, shares some of her research findings and simple strategies that enable many people to live successful, satisfying lives. She is the author of Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick. 

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. Today, I'm excited to be with Wendy Wood. She's a professor of psychology at USC. I always thought that willpower and effort were the most important things, that if you just had enough willpower that you could accomplish anything.

Turns out I was wrong. Early in her career, Wendy was fascinated by fellow grad students and professors who were all smart, motivated, and had tons of willpower, but they were failing to meet deadlines and also failing to accomplish their personal goals. So she started to study what makes some people successful, and it turns out that how we structure our surroundings and our habits are enormously important. I'm excited to learn more. Wendy is the author of Good Habits, Bad Habits, which is wonderful. Welcome, Wendy, and thanks so much for our conversation today.

Thank you, Lynn, for your kind words. This is really my pleasure. Wendy, should we start by just talking about what are habits? Yeah. And I think that's the basic issue that many people have with changing their behavior and meeting their goals is they don't really understand what habits are. And that makes sense. We probably shouldn't understand what they are because they are part of the non-conscious automatic processes that work outside of what we understand and what we're aware of. Our habits are, it's a memory system, first off, just like we have memories of what happens in our lives our habit memories record repetition what we repeat and so you can think of habit memories as recording the most important things in our lives because those are the things that we are likely to repeat over and over. And habit memories, once they form, have us

repeating behaviors without having to think much about them. So it's a very efficient, streamlined memory system. All you have to do is get in your car and you just put on your seatbelt. You don't think, oh, my gosh, I might be in an accident. Oh, my gosh, maybe I'm run up against some police officer somewhere. So I should make sure to wear it. Instead, you just do it automatically without thinking of the reasons why or even how, because you've done it so many times before. And that's the nature of our habits. And how much of our day is subject to habit?

How important are they? That was one of the first things I looked at in my research on habits. And it's kind of hard to estimate because you can't ask people. If I asked you how much of your behavior is habitual, I'd be asking you to report on something that you're not aware of, that is not part of our conscious understanding. So what we did instead of asking people is we beeped them once an hour for two days. And we asked people when they got the beep, they had to report, what are you doing right now? And what are you thinking about? And then how often have you

done this in the past? And what we found is that our estimate is 43% of the time, people are repeating behaviors that they've done in the same context in the past without thinking about what they're doing. So almost half of our behaviors are repeated in a habitual way, automatically without thought. I would have guessed that most of my time was spent on intentional things, things I thought about and planned and intended to do. No, that's not true. Well, that's what we're aware of. When you're acting habitually, you're taking a shower, you're not thinking about picking up the soap and how to wash.

What you're thinking about is the rest of your day or what happened yesterday or some specific thing you're planning. So we are consciously aware of a lot of things, but our habits allow us to think about what we're not doing right now. So you're right. We are thinking a lot, but it's not about our habits. It's not about our behavior, our current actions. Wendy, how much do our intentions predict what we end up doing? Well, for one-offs, for things like important decisions that we think a lot about, that are things like what car to buy or what school to put your kid in, what job to take.

Those are the kinds of one-off decisions that we don't make very often, but we think about a lot. And so intentions are important then, but for the day-to-day things like how much you eat at every meal, when you eat, when you get up in the morning, whether you brush your teeth. Those things, intentions, don't matter so much. We found in research that actually intentions don't predict repeated behaviors very well. They predict one-offs, but not repeated behavior. Why is repeated behavior based on intention so hard? Because our habit memory system forms through repetition. It forms slowly over time, incrementally.

As you do things, it forms from what you do, not from what you think, which is kind of an odd way to think about memory systems, but it's a memory system that captures repetition, not decisions. And it forms slowly. It also decays slowly so that you might make a decision. I'm not going to sit on that couch when I come home anymore. I'm going to go out and take a walk. I'm not going to sit on that couch when I come home anymore. I'm going to go out and take a walk. I'm going to do some exercise. But tomorrow when you come home, that habit will still be there. And the next day, your habit memory will still be there. So it's difficult and it's not much fun to exert willpower and act on our intentions over the long term. And most people, few people are able to, most of us aren't able to continually fight our

habits and instead act on our current intentions. Can you give some examples of high performing people taking advantage of habits to free up their conscious mind? ties and shirts. Mark Zuckerberg apparently does the same thing. He wears a hoodie though, not a suit, and t-shirts. And so their explanation for why they do this is so they don't have to make decisions about things that aren't important to them. And they conserve their resources to focus on the things that are really important. But most of us who are able to perform well in a job or keep up an exercise routine, eat healthfully, most of us are acting on habit. And we do it, let's say your job is writing. And what we know is that successful writers, they have certain times of day that they write. They tend to have certain places that they write. And they write for certain amounts of time or pages or words that they've set out a pattern that they follow.

Now, the writing is not always easy, right? I mean, you can write in garbage and have a good habit. So part of the trick is to set up a context, set up a pattern, a lifestyle pattern that allows you to easily and automatically repeat behaviors that meet your goals. And that's why I wrote this book is I wanted to help people understand that being successful, a huge part of that is understanding how to form the right habits. So really prolific writers, they're not fighting themselves to make themselves get to the computer and start writing. Instead, they do that part automatically and they can then put the effort into the creativity of writing itself. I love that about your work. That's so important. I was also fascinated that the people that are high in self-control are not living lives full of

self-denial and deprivation. Can you tell us about that? This has been a real change in the past few years in the way psychologists think about self-control. So as you say, we used to think that people who seem to have really good self-control, who are making all of the right choices in life, that they were exerting willpower and they were actively making decisions to do these things. But what we've learned in the last couple of years is that's not true. That people who score high on scales of willpower and self-control, they actually know how to form habits. So they do the right thing. They eat healthy. They save money. They are thoughtful and listen to their children. They do this without struggle and without sort of white knuckling it

through. Instead, these are people who have understood how to construct routines, lifestyle patterns that work for them. We all have habits. These people know how to create habits that support their goals. So habits are a much more important part of our lives than most people think. We all know we have habits. We brush our teeth. We wear seat belts, we might put a napkin on our lap before we eat at a restaurant, all habits. But habits also contribute to other aspects of our lives. We form habits every time we repeat behavior. So it suggests that we need to be pretty careful about the behaviors we repeat. How can people arrange their lives for success?

That's something that we are still learning in research. It's a very active area of research for my students and myself. But what we're finding is that people who understand how to form habits are able to set up contacts so that the behaviors that are likely to be successful for them are easier, and the behaviors that are not likely to be successful are more difficult. And we call this friction. Friction on your behavior is very similar to friction in the physical world, right? It stops motion.

And the frictions on our behavior are time, distance, and effort. So there's good research not my research but great research on people who go to the gym people who are going to a paid fitness center and this was from tracking cell phones we all know our cell phones are being tracked for all kinds of things but these researchers tracked cell phones to see how far people were willing to travel, how far people typically travel to go to a paid fitness center. And what they found is that people who traveled about three and a half miles went to a paid

fitness center on average five times a month. People who traveled a little over five miles on average went only once a month. And that's not at all how we think about going to work out, right? We think going to work out is something that we make a decision to do. We're concerned about our health. We exert self-control. But something as simple as distance can make it more or less likely that you'll repeat the behavior and it becomes a habit because habits form from repetition. And so friction on the behavior makes behaviors less likely. But you can use that to your advantage too. So silly example, but I have a thing for chocolate cake and I'm not going to stop eating it, but I don't want it sitting there in the house, just inviting me. So when I buy pieces of chocolate cake, I freeze them. And then I have to make a decision to actually defrost them before I eat them. So

that effort and time, it's a little bit of effort, a little bit of time is friction on the behavior. It doesn't stop you from doing it, but it just makes it slightly less likely. And if you're trying to eat healthfully, you know, that's all you need. And there was a great health campaign that was based very much on friction. And that is anti-smoking. In the middle of the last century, about 50% of Americans smoked. And now only 15% do. And that's an amazing change. That's a wonderful, wonderful intervention that we've made in people's lives.

How did that happen? Well, we removed many of the cues to smoking, the cues, the environments, the context that activates smoking habits, and we made it more difficult to smoke. We added friction. We added taxes to cigarettes so you can't buy them as easily. Money can be friction as well. And we instituted smoking bans in most public places.

So you can't smoke easily in a restaurant or at work or in public transit anymore. Used to be, you could, but all of this is friction that doesn't stop people, but just makes the behavior less likely. And that had a tremendous impact on our health. The example that I found the most stunning was your example of soldiers in Vietnam and drug use. Can you tell us about that? Back in the 60s, when the U.S. was involved in a war in Vietnam, a number of the soldiers, while they were overseas, started using heroin. It was readily available.

It was cheap. It was easy to use. You could just smoke it. You didn't have to shoot it up or needles weren't necessarily involved. So a number of the soldiers in Vietnam started to use heroin. And there was a real concern that they would be bringing that addiction back to the U.S. with them. But it didn't happen. And part of the reason it didn't happen is because when you change context like that and heroin is no longer readily accessible. It isn't of a grade where you can just smoke it so easily that it involves actual injections and other things. It wasn't as easy to use it. It put friction on the action of using drugs. And surprisingly few soldiers ended up addicted when they came back to the States. It suggests that there's a major influence of friction in our environment on behaviors, even behaviors that we think are chemically addictive. you make them harder people are less likely to do them it didn't stop everyone but it did most of the soldiers who returned it stopped if i remember your numbers somewhere over 75 percent of them or so exactly yeah so if people want to build a good habit, if they want to accomplish a specific goal, what are the three or four most important things they should do to build habits to accomplish those goals? Well, first thing, remove the frictions.

Make it easier on yourself to do it. If you are trying to start exercising, then find a gym close by or just take a walk. Make sure that your running shoes are always by the door if you want to start running. Make sure that your gym clothes are always clean and in a kit, ready to go if that's what you plan to do my older son who is a highly motivated cyclist and he competes regularly he found that even though he's so motivated when he would come home from work at night he was tired and didn't feel quite as like working out, not in the same way as he did in the morning. So what he ended up doing is he put his trainer, his bike trainer, right in front of the couch. So he would have to move it in order to sit on the couch or he could get on the trainer and actually work out. And that was enough friction. So they didn't always make him work out, but it increased his workout regularity,

which is what he was looking for. So that's an example of controlling friction so that you make the behaviors that you want easier and the ones that you don't want harder. And there's a second thing too, which is rewards. All of us are more likely to repeat behaviors that are immediately rewarding. Maybe we'd like to think that we follow long-term rewards and that we're motivated to do what's good for us in the future. But the best reward to get to repeat a behavior is something that's immediate. So if you really hate working out and going to the gym, you're probably not going to repeat it often enough for it to become your habit. There are some things that you may not just may not like enough,

but there are ways that you can add rewards to things. You can listen to podcasts when you're working out, or you could walk with a friend who you find particularly entertaining so that your friend, both encouraged by showing up, encourages you to go, and then also you have a good time when you do so. Figuring out what is rewarding for you is important in forming habits.

Wendy, before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today, is there anything else you would like to mention that you haven't already touched upon? First, that people don't really understand how much of their behavior is due to habit, sort of repeating what you said to begin with, that we think that self-control is how we achieve our goals instead of understanding that it doesn't have to be tough. In fact, it shouldn't be tough. If you're struggling with something, then you've kind of already lost because it's difficult then and you're not going to repeat it. So trying to make these things easy and enjoyable is really the way you're going to be able to successfully change your behavior. Wendy, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today well friction control the friction in

your life so that it's working for you not against you rewards make sure that the things that you're trying to do you can figure out some way to make them a little bit more fun or enjoyable and then finally don't blame yourself if if you're not successful. Habits are very forgiving. Habit memories we found, even if you quit for a while, habit memories are still there when you start again. So the fact that you do something for a little bit and then drop off, you've still started to develop a habit memory. So that's all good. It sets you up to pick up again and continue in the future. You're then going to be in a better situation than you were when you started. I love that optimism from your book, Good Habits, Bad Habits. This has been terrific.

Thank you so much. Oh, thank you so much, Lynn. It's great fun talking with you. And great fun talking with you too. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new fresh weekly episodes, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3takeaways.com or follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Note that 3takeaways.com is with the number three. Three is not spelled out. See you soon at 3takeaways.com.