Good Life Project - How to Change Your Habits For Life | Katy Milkman

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

Ever struggled to turn your goals into lasting habits? Unlock the secrets of behavior change with Katy Milkman, award-winning author of How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. In this insightful discussion, Katy reveals counterintuitive strategies - from leveraging flexibility to temptation bundling - to overcome barriers like present bias and make positive change stick.You can find Katy at: Website | Choiceology podcast | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode, you’ll also love the conversations we had with Dr. Maya Shankar about the power of slight shifts, how small behavior changes can transform your life.Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So have you ever felt frustrated by your inability to make positive changes stick? I know I have. You set goals, you get motivated, you start strong, and then life happens. Old habits resurface and your momentum just kind of fizzles out. If this resonates, get ready because my guest today will share surprising research on behavior change that actually lasts. Katie Milkman is the award-winning author of How to Change the Science of Getting

from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. She's a professor at the Wharton School, the host of popular choiceology podcast, and a leading expert on why we so often struggle to turn our intentions into lasting positive habits. In our conversation, Katie shares findings that upend conventional wisdom about building routines. You'll hear how allowing flexibility can actually increase your chances

of making exercise or other beneficial behaviors stick long term. And she also dispels the myth that incentives undermine intrinsic motivation for enjoyable activities. But maybe the most fascinating are the powerful strategies that Katie reveals for overcoming present bias, that insidious force that lures us toward immediate gratification at the expense of our future selves. From temptation bundling to leveraging social influence, you'll get a bit of a roadmap for aligning your daily actions with your biggest desires and goals. So excited to share this best of conversation with you.

I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. I'm Joshua Jackson and I'm returning for the Audible original series, Oracle Season 3, Murder at the Grand View. 640-somethings took a boat out a few days ago. One of them was found dead. The hotel, the island, something wasn't right about it. Psychic agent Nate Russo is back on the case. And you know when Nate's killer instincts are required,

anything's possible. This world's going to eat you alive. Listen to Oracle, Season 3. Murder at the Grand View, now on Audible. I'm really excited to dive in with you because for a whole bunch of different reasons, I have been utterly fascinated with the exploration of human potential and behavior and behavior change for a lot of years and in a lot of different contexts. One, because I'm just fascinated by how we can live better lives. Two, as a business person, I have done a pretty extensive deep dive into language that enables and facilitates behavior change as a copywriter,

sort of like a long-form old school direct response copywriter. I've always been curious about what are the linguistic pattern scenarios that you can create that will allow somebody to experience some kind of shift that says, huh, this thing that I've been thinking about doing for a long time, it's actually time to do it. So I'm excited to dive into the psychology of behavior change in a lot of different ways. And I thought an interesting jumping off point for us might be something that was first described to me by BJ Fogg. And in the context of when we're talking about changing behavior, I think a lot of us wonder what that actually means. BJ describes sort of like three different time durations to it. He describes something that he calls spot.

So like, basically, you have to do something that would be a behavior change in a moment that would only last for a moment. Something he described as span. So it's like, I'm gonna quit smoking for a month. And something that he described as for life. You know, basically I'm done for life. I'm curious whether in your work you make similar distinctions. That's interesting. You know, BJ is such a great communicator and it's interesting. BJ is such a great communicator. And it's interesting. He doesn't do science, so I think

it's a little bit different than the work that my community does where we try to test a hypothesis rigorously and figure out whether or not it holds. But a lot of his ideas are influencing the hypotheses that get tested. So I admire his communication skills a lot. I've never seen evidence for any of those things that you just pointed to as distinct types of behavior change, which doesn't mean they're wrong, just that they aren't supported by data that I'm aware of.

I do think it's certainly the case that, you know, there are different strategies we might want to think about if we're going to create long-term behavior change versus short-term, right? If you deploy a tactic, say a nudge, which is something that I find really interesting and that can be studied, like you've changed the layout of a cafeteria. That is obviously only going to influence the decisions you make in that environment because it's not changing the way you think, it's not changing anything except the stimuli you encounter in that one setting. So that might be an example of what I think you're saying BJ Fogg is calling a spot change. And you'd want to think about a really different way of changing someone's behavior if you're

hoping they'll carry it with them outside of that environment. And it's actually a lot harder than to change those decisions because while you could restructure or reshape what someone encounters in one spot, you can't restructure and reshape their entire life for them without their engagement. So maybe that's a little bit of evidence that would support those ideas. But more generally, I would say that there's not a lot of distinction made in the research literature between those different types of change. Maybe there should be, but we don't have evidence that it is a substantially different challenge. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. It's sort of like, I think it's one of those things where when you just kind of think about it logically,

it makes sense that it would be different. But, and I wasn't aware of any literature also, so it's interesting to hear you say like that, that sort of like distinction or that testing doesn't really exist from a more of like an actual validation standpoint. Not that I know of, it doesn't mean it couldn't exist, but I haven't heard of it. And I think, you know, it's interesting, years ago, actually the very first conversation

we ever aired, which was on video back in 2012, The Good Life Project, was with Dan Ariely. And we had this conversation about, I think he used the phrase compliance, you know, and we were talking about, you know, people who will create some sort of substantial change in their behavior. And a lot of it is in the context of a current pain. I think we were talking about cardiac events. So somebody has a heart attack,

they go through full cardiac rehab, and a year later, they've returned to the exact same behaviors. And we were talking about the idea of sort of like, long-term compliance in the context of behavior change, even in the face of life-threatening events that terrify you in the moment that lead to profound and immediate change, that so often that change just kind of like fades with time as the pain of the immediate event or the inciting incident fades. All of the behavior change fades along with it. And I think it's such a curious phenomenon. Yeah, you know, I think another way of thinking about that is also just that regression to the mean is a really strong

force in all aspects of our lives. So anytime that we try to create change, we're fighting an uphill battle against that. It's also absolutely true that when something is more present in your mind, right, the more salient and immediate the reminder, the more likely you are to react to the stimulus. And so when you have a life altering event, like a heart attack, right afterwards, you're going to be the most motivated and the most attentive to all the things that you need to do. But you know, it is one of the great puzzles of human nature that when we face such steep costs in the long term for making a choice, like a choice to smoke or not to take our medications, that that is not enough to motivate the

kind of behavior change that you'd not enough to motivate the kind of behavior change that you'd expect to see given the cost benefit analysis. And I think what research points to is really, this is all about present bias. This is the tendency we have to be impulsive, to overweight the instant gratification we get from an action.

And it explains why we see people smoke. It explains why we see people not adhere to life-saving medications. That instead of doing this calculation of costs and benefits that is carefully weighted over our lifespan, which is what an economist says we should do, instead we dramatically overweight the present in that calculation, underweight the future costs.

And so one of the things that I've found most fascinating to study is what are the things that really can counter that particular tendency, that particular present bias that is so costly to us. And I would say, you know, there's sort of two things that I have found that I think are most valuable in countering present bias. One of them is sort of fighting fire with fire,

which is figuring out a way to make it instantly gratifying to do the thing that is in your long-term best interest. And, you know, we can talk a bit more about some of the tactics that help with that, but I think people under-appreciate the importance of doing that because they expect, I'm going to be able to make the choice that's best for me in the long run.

Of course, I'll be able to just push through. We under appreciate how much present bias actually shapes our decisions. And the second is literally changing your own incentive structure and putting more costs upfront to align the cost benefits with what is important in the long run. So anyway, we can talk about both of those tactics as much as you want, but Dana has also studied some of these topics. And I think, you know, we have very similar interests in encountering present bias in our research. Yeah. And I know you write about impulsivity in your recent work. And it's, um, and actually,

I kind of do want to talk about those two different things, but there's also something else that popped into my head as you're sort of describing this is, you this is where is the line between impulsivity and addictive behavior? Because some people, like if we take smart devices, for example, these days, you see people making claims that say, okay, so this device in your hand, large companies have spent billions of dollars developing algorithms that leverage, you know, intermittent reinforcement, all of the touchstones that we know exist in effectively installing quote addictive behavior in an effort to try and keep you interacting with these devices, with their

platforms, with their apps as long and as often as humanly possible. So I do have this curiosity, like where do we cross from impulsivity over to true addiction? And when you cross that line, does everything change in the context of trying to reel back in or make constructive behavior change? Yeah, it's a fantastic question. I should also say I have zero training as a clinical psychologist. My background is in computer science and economics. But you're a smart person, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

I want to point out I'm well outside my core area of expertise in talking about addiction. I'm actually pretty careful in my book not to touch on addiction with the exception of mentioning a couple of really interesting studies done by others that do look at strategies for reducing smoking. But from my outsider vantage point,

when I've talked to people who do know, what they generally explain to me is that chemical dependency, just a whole lot of different things that start happening in your brain when you develop a chemical dependency to something like a cigarette or alcohol. And I don't believe there's evidence

that our smartphones have those same chemical addiction properties. And I don't believe a clinician would say that we should use the term addiction to refer specifically to the very same patterns that happen with smartphones, although I will say it feels like a tug, you know, there must be some, it feels like there must be some continuum, but it's not a chemical dependency in the same way. And so probably applying impulsivity and thinking about the research on present bias is a bit

more appropriate when we think about things like smartphone use and that there's a bit of a blurring and some other things coming into play when we look at chemical dependencies. Yeah, I mean, that also brings up this question of, you know, in the context, we'll stay on the smartphone thing for a hot minute. You know, when we talk about behavior change, I feel like there's a distinction also, and I'm curious whether you would agree with this, in chains that is for the purpose of stopping something versus for the purpose of starting something. And whether that's sort of like measurably different in the way that it lands in your

brain and also in the way that you would approach them. That's such an interesting and important question. I have primarily in my research looked at starting things as opposed to stopping things. And I do actually think though I have zero data to support this and I would love to study this. It's actually something that some of my collaborators and I have talked about a lot, but we've never run the study to try to figure out how do you, you know, it's, it's tricky because there's a continuum of things that you might start and might

stop and they're different and sort of how do you scientifically isolate that. But in general, I think we see that habits are brittle. Yeah. It's easy to break good ones and hard to stop bad ones. And that's sort of one of the things that's most frustrating. It's like, well, why, why isn't a smoking habit brittle? Why isn't nail biting brittle? Why isn't using my smartphone constantly brittle?

And yet the good ones are. So there does seem to be a brittleness to the good habits that is not there for the bad. I think it's related to this present bias tendency, right? That the good habits, they give us little reinforcement in the heat of the moment and that, so we're constantly fighting an uphill battle and the bad habits, it's just the opposite. They give us so much reinforcement in the heat of the moment, so we're constantly fighting a downhill battle if we are continuing to keep them. But beyond being able to make that observation, there's not great data that distinguishes. And I think, again, part of

that is that each and every behavior that we want to change has its own signature. And, and to be able to categorize and understand what are the distinctions and to say these two behaviors, they're identical except for one is a stopping and one is a starting. It's really tricky. And the science of all of this is tricky because we want to treat it like physics, and yet it comes with so much more baggage. Yeah, no, we are complicated beings. It would be a lot easier if we could just create the formula and then run the script, but we don't function that way. And's unique even if we had that for one person. But the notion that it may be tied to the time to reward is really fascinating to me. If a lot of the negative things that we quote want to stop or feel like we should stop because it would be better for us, we don't do that because they're more likely to make us feel

better or get a hit of dopamine, whatever it may be in the moment. And the reward for the longer term change, like, yes, I know if I exercise on a regular basis, you know, like over a period of months, I'll start to feel a lot better. And my, you know, like disease markers were changing and all this, but it's sort of like, it's a much longer term reward cycle. So delayed. Yeah. Then that makes a lot of sense that that would probably be sort of like an

important distinction in our ability to actually make those changes or not. Huge distinction. Huge, huge issue. Maybe the most important behavior change issue there is, I think. Yeah, which makes me really curious. Like, could we, and this is where my writer's brain kicks in again and the copywriter's brain, right? Because I'm thinking, okay, so part of what I've been trained to do in the past life is to create language where the pain or the reward, no matter what the reality of it is, are hyper-present in the moment of experiencing the message. You know, and I wonder, and you know,

the best advertisers, the best storytellers are world-class at doing that. So I wonder if there is a way to actually craft language, to craft stories, craft circumstances, to make a future reward feel more present or feed out little taste, like enough of a taste of it now so that you could string somebody along to the behavior to a point where they would actually be doing it on a sustained enough basis where they would feel that bigger long-term reward. I mean, I think that is what the master behavior changer does in a sense, is they find a way to bring that long-term value forward.

One of the tactics I've studied and write about in my book is temptation bundling, which is an attempt to do exactly that. It's linking the thing that has delayed rewards that feels like a chore to something that is instantly gratifying. So you get that hit of dopamine immediately. So to be more concrete, the way I use this as a graduate student,

which is sort of how I first stumbled upon it. And many people do it naturally. I should note it's not as if like I invented something since time immemorial. People have been temptation bundling. I just gave it a label. But my strategy for temptation bundling was I only get to indulge in my favorite entertainment while I'm exercising at the gym so that there's suddenly a hook.

I'm looking forward to finding out what happens next. I'm enjoying the exercise in the moment because of its linkage. And then, you know, all of a sudden it's a temptation rather than a chore. And of course you can do this with many other things, right? Only allow yourself to pick up your favorite snack on the way to hit the books at the library or listen to your favorite podcast while doing household chores. There's all different ways we can create those kinds of bundles. It's not always possible, but that is exactly sort of what your copywriter mind was saying. How do we make that future award more present? One way is by associating it literally with something that is tempting in the moment.

And I think there are other ways too. One of my favorite studies of the last few years, which is not one that I did, it's a study that was done by how her she felt the UCLA and schlomo bonarcy and steve shoe is a study where they found a way to make saving more appealing and i think it had a bit of this. they invited people to save $5 a day, and they compared that to inviting people to sign up for literally the same program, but reframed as $150 a month, right? If you do the multiplication, it's the same offering, but the $5 a day, sort of the dopamine hit, is it's small, oh, I can see that incremental progress,

but it doesn't feel painful. Whereas $150, you're sort of thinking about what else you could spend that $150 on, what are you giving up, that accumulation, the framing changes the attractiveness of achieving your long-term goal. And so I think there are probably many more strategies that sort of lie undiscovered or maybe they're discovered by some people but scientists haven't studied them yet that have similar features where we create a way to make it feel more instantly gratifying to do the thing that in the long run will have all those payoffs so that present bias doesn't kick us in the pants and lead us to make bad decisions. Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense and I feel like

that's also, you know, like Dan Kahneman's like early work on loss avoidance versus pleasure seeking I think ties into that in a really interesting way as well because, you know, like if you can, like we keep saying, it would be so much more like easier if we were just rational things, but we're just not. I actually, it's interesting that you say that it's, humans would be less interesting to study. I wouldn't have a job if we were just not. Well, actually, it's interesting that you say that. Humans would be less interesting to study. I wouldn't have a job if we were perfectly rational.

But I actually do ascribe to, and this is a sort of, it has to be a philosophical point rather than an empirical one, again, I should say. But I think, you know, I buy that heuristics and biases evolved probably as an efficiency strategy. And so they do serve a function. The fact that we have these quirks that we are loss avoidant, that we are present biased, present bias might have evolved in a totally different era and be no

longer useful, right? Like back when, if you could get a really big meal or a really big pleasure hit, you want to like take all you can because you don't know when the next one will arrive. But at least some heuristics and biases still probably add a huge amount of value in terms of efficiency and thinking and thought processes. So I'm not totally sure I'm ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Yeah. And a lot of those biases are very likely kept us alive for certain windows of time. And help us now. One thing that I write about in my book is laziness and how important... That's a negative term, but it's so great that we're creatures who crave shortcuts. It surely

helps us immensely that we're a little bit lazy and won't just sort of like, you know, do all the paperwork in the world all day to get everything we ever want, right? If you filled out every offer where you send in your receipt and you get a rebate or, you know, if you did every piece of paperwork the government could throw at you to get a little benefit, you might literally do nothing but paperwork all day. So there are some benefits to these features we come with that also turn out to be bugs in certain circumstances. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, in the context of laziness, I guess, I think this is also where you sort of like explore the notion of habit, which is effectively

like, it's funny, I think the word lazy triggers so many people because it's like we take it as this sort of like social judgment. Like, you're a lazy person. It's like, I think the word lazy triggers so many people because we take it as this sort of social judgment. You're a lazy person. It's like, well, what if there was some good in there? What if there's actually some utility? What if it allows our brain to function more effectively by actually figuring out what is- I would like to rebrand laziness.

I'm totally with you. I'm so enthusiastic I have to interrupt you and say, yes, let's take laziness back. It's a good feature. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Good Life Project is sponsored by NutriFall. So let me share something personal. And with my wife's permission, of course, she's actually been taking NutriFall women's

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So tell me like in your mind, how does, what's the relationship between laziness and habit? Yeah, so there's sort of two ways that I think about laziness and write about it in the book. One is that in general, we take the path of least resistance when it comes to something like a default. So if there's a default setting, your phone comes with a certain background or a certain ring, most of us will never change it. And that is probably actually not a bug of human nature. It's probably very efficient to not spend all your time worrying about these things.

Um, it, it can create problems and frictions, but it means that if we construct our lives, so the path of least resistance, the defaults are the things we want them to be, right? So the food in your pantry is healthy. And the easiest route to work is one that, that, you know, involves a walk rather than a drive. If you sort of construct your life in a way where you're aware of defaults in your home pages, the New York times and not Facebook, you, you can get a lot of

value out of this and it's probably smart that we were built this way. Well, now I'm sounding like a creationist. I'm a big fan of evolutionary theory. So by built, I mean, you know, that natural selection created these features in us, that they make a lot of sense. Okay, so that's one form of laziness. The other though, is the decisions that we make over and over again, the circumstances that we face repeatedly. And this is where habit and laziness, I think, are closely related. If we wake up in the morning and have sort of built a habit around how to make our coffee, which is something that one of my heroes in the habit research area, Wendy Wood of USC likes to talk about that habit that we've built. We go on autopilot when you make the coffee after a certain amount of time.

You don't even remember, did you already press the button? Because it just happens without conscious awareness. You do it so often. And that, in a sense, is another form of laziness. Whatever your autopilot is, your routine, you're not having to think through it. It's become mechanical, it's become automatic, and that allows you to focus on other things, right? Instead of thinking, you know, what button do I push in what order and how many

scoops, your mind is wondering, you're contemplating what else you want to do today. You're having a conversation with someone else. And so that's very, again, efficient that your operating system is designed to create these kinds of habits and autopilots so you can focus attention and resources elsewhere. The challenge becomes when that habit is working against you, it's a bad one and so you don't need any resources and you're just doing unhealthy things like eating too much or failing to

exercise or yelling at someone who you don't want to yell at. If you can create, again, auto pilots by thoughtfully, like a gardener, building habits, right, that are useful. You nurture them and figure out how to make them grow. Then all of this laziness can work to your advantage. So, you know, coffee is actually probably decent for us. It's probably not a bad habit to have that you can do that in the morning. But what are the other habits we want to have on autopilot? And how do we construct them? And that's sort of, I think, a really important, interesting question.

And many people, Wendy Wood really being the leading thinker there, I think, have offered us a lot of useful tools. Yeah. And I think habit has become sort of like a focus of a lot of popular lore and popular writing as well. Some of it based on science, some of it not. There's an interesting quirk in habit where, for example, if we talk about exercising on a regular basis, I know you've done some fairly extensive work on this. I think it was a Google study where you were sort of looking at commitment to a fixed time every day versus building

kind of like some wiggle room into building this habit. And the results were kind of eye open. Share a bit about that work because I think it's really fascinating. Yeah, I'd love to. And I should say that this is one of the most surprising studies I've ever run to me in that, you know, I went in with a strong hypothesis. I was pretty sure what I was going to find and I found just the opposite. But then once I did and unpacked it, it was so enlightening. So this was a project I did along with John Bashir's of Harvard Business School and Sunny Lee who's a Wharton PhD student, Rob Mislawski of Johns Hopkins and Jesse Wisdom who was at Google at the time. Anyway, I just want to acknowledge the amazing people. It's a big team effort that went into this project and it was in partnership with Google

to try to help about 2,500 of their employees kickstart a lasting exercise habit. That was our explicit goal. And we divided that group really into two key cohorts. We randomly assigned with a flip of a coin what group people would be in. Everyone who signed up for the program knew that the goal was to kickstart a healthy habit. Everyone told us the time when they most liked to exercise at on-site gyms. We did this pre-coronavirus when everybody was going into work and using the gym all the time and so on. But we were interested in whether or not it would be really important for people who were trying to build a habit to have consistency in their routine.

So really going almost always at the same time, or if it would be better to have more flexibility. So sometimes going at that best time for them, but sometimes trying out other times. We were pretty sure that consistency would breed habit. And there was some research literature suggesting that habits are generally built around cue response consistency. So we ended up building an incentive system that led to two, these two groups going to the gym in different ways. The first group went about 85% of the time at the same time of day, whenever they went over the course of a month, which was when, how long our program lasted.

The other group only went half the time at a consistent time. Their other workouts were more varied. And as a result, you know, we have this differentiation, both groups went at the same frequency, but in different patterns. And then the question we were interested in was what happens when we let go? So we've been offering rewards to get people going in these different patterns. We're gonna stop offering rewards and we're just gonna watch for the next year

and see what happens, which group goes more consistently ever after. And what happened was really surprising to us. The group that had been less consistent in the time of day when they visited the gym actually had built a more stable habit. And here's, here's sort of the reasoning or the logic that we were able to unpack by looking at the data. So say you're a 7 a.m. exerciser and you miss your 7 a.m. slot because something comes up.

What we found is for the group that had been really consistent around the 7am workouts, they just throw up their hands. You know, that was my time for working out. If I can't make it at 7am, I'm not going at all. But the more flexible group that had spent half of their workouts going at their regular time, half going at other times, they had built the ability to come up with a backup plan. So if they missed their 7am workout, they still went.

So actually, interestingly, just as we had suspected, the people who were more consistent did end up going a little bit more frequently at the usual time, but they went less overall because if they missed that usual time, they didn't go. So it turned out to prove to us that flexibility is actually really critical to consistent engagement and a behavior that you value. It might actually not sort of fit the definition of a habit.

If you, it may not be literally on autopilot, the way we're talking about, if you have sort of your 7 a.m. and then your noon back up and your 5 p.m., you may actually have to think about it. But if the goal is really about engaging in the behavior on a regular basis, then it's better to build flexibility

when we're sort of in the habit startup phase into the way that we approach these kinds of goals. And so to us, that was a huge surprise. We actually did a survey of psychologists at top universities and just asked them which of these will be better. And 80% thought that consistency was the right answer. And this is why I think science is so important because, you know, we can build theories, we can say it makes sense until you see the data and really understand the intricacies of what it shows you. You don't know for sure what's right. And this was a big surprise,

but I think a really important surprise. And it gave me an appreciation for how critical in general it is with behavior change broadly to recognize that we are going to have failures and that we need backup plans in order to figure out how are we going to succeed no matter what instead of just under perfect circumstances. Yeah, I love that study. And it's funny because I'm wondering whether I would have been among the 80% or been like the weirdo who's like, no, actually I think people are stranger than that and they need more freedom.

Like I tend to be the outlier with things like that, but it also, you know, that brought up two things for me. One is years ago I sat down with a guy named Brad Feld who has built this habit with his wife over years and years and years of what they call life dinner. So every month, you know, like they go out, they make a reservation, a nice restaurant, they sit down, they have a bottle of wine, and they talk about their life together and how it's the good stuff, the stuff that needs change.

Sometimes it's laughter, sometimes it's tears. But the tie in here is not just the fact that they built this ritual, but they've also negotiated preset tolerances about when Brad can miss those. So I think it was like, you know, it's gotta happen every month, but there's like 15% of the time, like over the course of a year, he's allowed to miss a dinner

because he knows like work is gonna get crazy, he's gonna be on a plane somewhere. And that way it accommodates, it allows for humanity, allows for life to happen rather than saying, oh, I broke the streak, I broke this rigid thing, it has to be this way. And if it's not, then it's kind of like over.

So it actually makes a lot of sense to me that to create something that would really be sustained for years, you would do that. And yet also, you see in at least some of the habit literature that I've seen, one of the really strong recommendations if you want to form a lasting habit is find an anchor behavior, whether it's brushing your teeth, whatever it may be, something that happens every single day at the same time and tack on this behavior that you want to the tail end of that so that you know it's always going to happen exactly after this other thing. But this research suggests that, well, maybe most of the time, but that may not be entirely true if you really want it to last for a long time.

Yeah, it's so interesting. And you know, what you're just describing in the academic literature, it's called piggybacking. There is, as far as I can tell, one study that really has been done that looks at this specifically, the idea of trying to create a habit by attaching it to something else. And it's a tiny study, it was done with flossing and tooth brushing. And it does show evidence that you can get people to floss more effectively if you encourage them to tack it on after a tooth brushing habit. But we don't have great research showing that this kind of piggybacking works. There's a large literature on plan making, which shows that in general, if we want to

make, achieve our goals, we do better if we think about a cue that's going to trigger a behavior. And so that is true, but that literature is really largely focused on one-time behaviors like will you get a flu shot or will you remember to get a colonoscopy or go vote as opposed to these repeated behaviors which is where it's often applied and so I also I hope there will be more research into this and into the you know when does that work when doesn't it it's part of what motivated the project we did with Google frankly and again we found that this flexibility turned out to be more key than that consistency. We were thinking of time of day in that context as

the cue that we were sort of piggybacking on top of. But maybe it would have worked better if the piggyback had been to a specific action, like always at the end of my workday, I do X, but I recognize that end of my workday varies. So it may have been the brittleness of time that was the killer in that case. So one of the things that's fascinating to me is that despite all the public interest, all the great books that have been written about habit, we actually don't know nearly as much as you might think about some of the most basic premises that we think are true. So, and piggybacking is one of them. I think there's a lot more research to be done.

Yeah, that's so fascinating. I had there's a lot more research to be done. Yeah, that's so fascinating. I had always just assumed that there was a stronger body of research around that because I've seen it repeated so many times. It's become sort of a pop culture phenomenon, but we need more evidence to see if it's really right. And again, I think of the study we did with Google

as one of the studies that tries to look at it and actually finds just the opposite, which is not to say that I wouldn't advise people to try piggybacking. It makes intuitive sense. We know that cues, that habits that already exist, it's an opportunity to build a new habit because you've already got one going. But we don't have the evidence that it can be this hugely useful tool yet and we need it. Yeah, I wonder if it'd be interesting to say, well, what if I actually took a hybrid where the rule for you was I will, I'll actually use an example from my own life. I wake up in the morning before I get out of bed. My commitment is I meditate every morning and I've been doing it

for over a decade now and I open my eyes and it's the first thing that I do but I also have a tolerance built into it whereas I you know like my commitment is I open my eyes I meditate first thing in the morning but if for some reason something is happening in my life that doesn't allow me to do it you know I've been traveling recently or I'm in a different environment or I have a 7 a.m. meeting because I'm in a different time zone and I have to be and I just can't do that. My built-in tolerance is that and if I can't do that then my commitment is before I close my eyes at night then I will have like that is my commitment to like the broader

practice so it's sort of like a hybrid thing Like I try and anchor it to this thing that happens every morning. I open my eyes, God willing. And, but if, if something happens that throws me off, you know, I have this, I've already made a secondary commitment to a fallback. I love that. And you know, it really aligns with what we saw in our study, which is, you know, even, even the group of people that was building a flexible habit in our work, half of their gym visits were anchored to a specific time. So it's not as if they were cue free or completely free of any kind of piggybacking. It's just that having that backup plan, having some flexibility built in seemed to be really important. So I like that a lot. And again, you know, this is one of the reasons I'm excited to wake up in the morning as a scientist studying these questions.

There's so much we don't know yet and so much more to do. And one of the things that makes this research just to get really nerdy for a second challenging is it's super hard to measure success and habit and habit research. It's one of the reasons actually so many studies, I don't know if you've noticed this, but so many habit studies are done at the gym. It's like our fruit fly because it's actually a measurable behavior where you don't have to rely on self-report

and people's memory and so on, right? If I asked you and tried to put you in a study about meditation, it's really hard for me to collect that data and know if you're, you know, do you remember accurately? Are you gonna tell me one thing? like, yeah, I meditated that day, even though you didn't, because you like the idea that you're getting to it more frequently. So these things are really hard to pin down.

Yeah. And we'll be right back afterward from our sponsors. Agent Nate Russo is back on the case and you know when Nate's killer instincts are required anything's possible Listen to Oracle season 3 murder at the grand view now on audible Piggybacking on the meditation thing also and and this kind of speaks to another thing that you You reference I have for years And this kind of speaks to another thing that you reference. I have for years used an app as a timer, basically. And every time I complete my session, automatically I get one more day.

And then when I get 10 days in a row, I get a gold star. And then when I get 50 of those, I get a green star. And then when I get five of those, I get a red star. And then when I get five of those, I get a red star. And I have found myself, and the fundamental instruction for meditation is you don't gamify the practice. There's no goal when you sit. And somehow my brain has said,

okay, so my work around is there's no goal when I sit other than just to sit, but I am getting my star in terms of the number of times that I sit and the just to sit, but I am getting my star in terms of the number of times that I sit and the streak that I have. To the extent where there have been times where I'm 140 days into a streak, something happens where I miss a day and I'm having this moral dilemma of like, should I just like, you know, like there is a button which lets me just add a session. Like, I don't want to admit that there was a miss. Right. Yeah. My stars and like there's something about there's I know you talk about like gamification in certain contexts as like this really fascinating thing. to what we were discussing earlier related to present bias and how do we make something rewarding in the moment

that has long-term value primarily, and gamification and these stars and these streaks, and this is all a way of packaging something. So it gives us that instant dopamine hit because we are wired to like the star and the, oh, I can pat myself on the back. And it does seem to be pretty effective when it comes to goals that we care about and that we're trying to help ourselves achieve.

If those things are gamified, there's decent evidence that it helps us. When gamification sometimes seems to backfire is when we're not that intrinsically motivated and someone else seems to be imposing these features to try to these features to try to get us to change our behavior, that can backfire because forced fun actually isn't that fun if it's a goal we don't intrinsically value, we can feel manipulated and react against that. But for something like exercise or meditation where you are intrinsically trying to create

a habit or look at an app like Duolingo where lots of people go and they're trying to create a new skill for themselves, building language skills. They have done, I think, an ingenious job incorporating all of these gamification components. It seems like those are the right places to do it based on the research because, again, I'm bought in. So that manipulative feeling isn't going to be working against me. Yeah. I mean, but wouldn't that be also kind of like a common thread with everything that

we're talking about? I mean, I know from the outside looking in, it seems like a lot of what you're writing about and I don't know if this is true of the larger context of the research that you're doing is less about the question of desire to change and more about once you have made a decision that something is meaningful to you, that you want to create some sort of effective behavior change, what are the ways to make that happen? But if the underlying desire isn't intrinsically there,

does that have a meaningful effect on all the things that we're talking about? You know, it's a mixed bag, I would say. And some of the things that we've talked about will work even if you are not intrinsically motivated. Let me give you an example. We talked about defaults. So a default is the option that you end up

with when you take no action. So if you start working in a new company and they have a bunch of policies, they automatically enroll you in a retirement savings account and in this health insurance program, but you can go on a website and change it. It turns out whatever they set up, whatever those automatic settings are, you're very unlikely to change most, you know, huge number of people just stick with them because it's

effort and we're lazy. That's the kind of thing where it really doesn't matter if you're intrinsically motivated. It's such a powerful force of human nature that intrinsically or motivated or not, it's going to change behavior. Another one is the power of social pressure, for instance, right? When I see what everyone else around me is doing. Now that can be a force I can harness to try to motivate better outcomes, right? I can surround myself very intentionally with the kinds of people who reinforce what I'm

aiming for, who have similar goals and sort of show me this is the norm and that you know if I'm trying to run a marathon I start hanging out with other marathon runners that is going to lift me up because I'll be able to copy some of their life hacks and just see what they're achieving it's gonna push me forward but it can work in the other way so there's research showing that the roommate you're randomly assigned in college affects your own grades, right? And that isn't necessarily going to be something

that's aligned with your intrinsic motivation. If you end up with a roommate who's really a poor student, it's going to affect you whether you're intrinsically motivated to be a good student or not, because you're gonna see, oh, well, they're going out and partying on Thursdays and Fridays and Saturdays, and I feel left out if I don't do that and I stay home and work. So it sucks you in.

So there are a lot of forces that you can harness to achieve the goals you want to achieve, but that will also push you in the wrong direction when they naturally are set up in a way that works against your goals. Yeah, that makes sense to me. And, you know, it's interesting, you bring up the notion of, you know, having a social context to all of this and how that can be both positive and negative. I've wondered whether part of the social context is not just seeing exposure to other behaviors that are maybe like more impulsive that you perceive as being enjoyable. And then you're

like, it's just around you all the time. You're like, I'm going to give into it because that's fun. And versus, you know, both in a positive and a negative context, the sort of like primal urge to belong, to be part of a group. Whereas, you know, like if that group happens to be a group of people who study on a regular basis, or a group of people who are committed to nutrition or a group of people who are committed to some

theoretically positive or constructive behavior versus negative that I'm curious about the role that our impulse to just feel like we wanna be accepted, we don't wanna be outcast. It's almost like the primal need to not be outcast for survival. How much that actually influences both our willingness to change our behavior or our willingness to not change,

like being dug in? Social norms are an incredibly powerful force of behavior change. And I think the early work on this was done in the 1950s by social psychologists who were trying to make sense of what happened in the Holocaust and how so many, I'll say, normal people could have been complicit in these mass killings. like Stanley Milgram and Solomon Ash was that social forces, when everyone around us is exhibiting a behavior, are just incredibly, incredibly intoxicating and powerful. We feel left out.

If we're not following along, we see information in the herd. If they're doing it, they must be right. There must be some knowledge they have that I don't. We start to look at the world in a completely different way very quickly when everyone around us is taking a given action. And you can see, of course, how that can be harnessed for horrible effects. But you can also see why it would be evolutionarily adaptive to behave that way, to create cooperation in society. So it's a really, really powerful force, but one with a lot of ethical challenges associated with it. And I touch on that very briefly in my book. Mostly I'm focused on how can we harness it to change for good, because that's the focus I'm interested in. But

it is just fascinating to think of the pernicious uses and really important to recognize, especially, you know, we're seeing some social norms used for ill in this era, certainly. Yeah. And I mean, just the way that it really profoundly can change behavior purely because you don't want to be seen as an outsider. It's just like this is how I need to conform and like I said, for both good outcomes and bad outcomes. I don't have any sense for how you even begin to address or unwind that. I think you leverage it, and certainly it's been leveraged for good behavior change in a lot of different ways too.

I've never actually seen the research on this, but I've seen people mention the research on fitness and nutrition and how much more successful long-term sustained outcomes are when people do it in a group format. And some of the biggest commercial programs out there are built around that. And certainly when people are training, like for 30 years I was a New Yorker and New York Roadrunners Club is one of the biggest running

organizations in the world. And you would see them out there, like groups of all sizes, shapes, ages, and supporting each other, fast, slow, fit, super fit, unfit. And there was something about, you know, like these people were out there cheering each other, like I remember just being in the park and like they're just, everybody who was with them were just cheering each other on

and holding each other up. And when they wanted to quit, and I wonder sometimes how powerful that is. And also, if you don't have access to that, is there a way to recreate it in a meaningful enough a way that it would make a difference in your ability to make and sustain a positive behavior change? Yeah. Well, first of all, there's so many different individual forces that make groups powerful motivators of change. We've already talked about the sort of looking around and the peer effects and I want to fit in.

You mentioned just also the support and and how great it feels when someone else congratulates you and sees your success and you you know, it's not just the gold star from the app anymore, but it's like applause or a pat on the back from a friend. And of course, that's a much more powerful form of positive reinforcement than a gold star. And then another element of it that I think shouldn't be underestimated is also just generally accountability, right? That someone else will notice if you fail. And so you don't want that experience. It's essentially an incentive because failing

in front of other people feels like getting a penalty. So all of those things I think are part of why groups are so powerful. I've also been involved in some research on what you gain when someone else comes to you for advice. And I think that's another feature of groups. And this is work that was led by Lauren S. Chris Winkler at the Kellogg School showing that surprisingly,

when we're asked for advice and we then give it, it boosts our confidence, it boosts our outcomes because once we tell someone else, well, here's how I would suggest doing it, we're more likely to introspect and think of things we might not have thought about if we were working on our own. And we're going to feel hypocritical if we then don't take the advice ourselves.

So there's all of these benefits of groups that have been isolated in different research studies. It's hard to sort of say which of them is the most important, but they all come together. And I think that's part of why finding ways to do things socially is important. But it also gives us some tips when we get to your question, which is, okay, imagine you can't create that social group. Well, if we start to understand what are the individual components of the group that make it so powerful, maybe we can harness some of those to our benefit, even if we're sort of in a more isolated environment.

So, you know, I have an email group that I use, I call it an advice club to make career decisions. We've all we're all at similar career stages, we aren't living in the same community, but we can reach out to each other in that environment and ask for advice. We get social support. Through our emails, we give each other advice and that builds our ego and our confidence and our, our likelihood of figuring things out for ourselves when we face a similar challenge. So again, it's not literally a group that meets and gathers and supports each other and cheers each other on, but we have a virtual group that creates some of the same good systems. And you know, we talked about stars, the stars you've got in your app. It's not quite as good as the pat on the back, but you can choose to use systems that give you that reinforcement that you can't get socially, digitally. So I do think technology has a lot to offer.

It's not nearly as good as waking up in the morning surrounded by people who are working towards a similar goal, certainly. But we can start to try to recreate some of those features that are so important and create accountability in other ways too. Yeah. The notion of creating virtual cohorts, I think is really fascinating to me, especially over the last year and a half, two years where like so many people couldn't do stuff in person, you know, I think it's been interesting to see how the forced change in the way that you socialize that the way you might like

engage in behaviors or activities has required people to just really abruptly change the way that they relate to other people. And I almost feel like a lot of us thought it was completely, like this would never work. And we're starting to realize, well, if this is the reality that I have to exist in, and I have technology available to me, how can I make it work or how can I at least come way closer than I thought was even possible? I think it's been surprising, at least for me and folks that I've been talking to, how effective it's actually been. I think it's certainly allowed me to challenge a lot of my assumptions about what is and

is impossible. I want to circle back to a couple of other things, but one thing which comes up in, I guess, in the research world and also I've seen it in the fitness world, I've seen it in the nutrition world, and that is, we've talked about gamification. Sometimes in that context or sometimes in a work context, we talk about trying to install an initial behavior that we want to become a long-term sustained behavior by creating incentives. Sometimes it's paying for it.

Sometimes it's raising stakes for like if you don't do it. And I've seen different things around what happens if you create the behavior by quote paying for it. And then, you know, especially if there's an intrinsic urge to do this before that, intrinsic crowdout basically. Somebody is a reader and then you reinforce, you want to make reading a lifelong habit so effectively, you're paying them, it's $5 a day if you read 20 pages. Or we see this, some of the work that's been done in work and then I've seen mixed claims about whether then when you stop paying for that behavior like does the fact that you've now paid for something that people would

Intrinsically do but now you're paying for them to do it on a more regular level or higher level Does that effectively extinguish the impulse that when you stop paying them to do it, the impulse is gone. I'm curious where the research is on that. Yeah, well I love that you asked it, because it is I think actually one of the most misunderstood findings sort of out there. My read of the research literature is there's almost no evidence that there's something that has been called

intrinsic motivation crowd out. Most of this idea comes from a study that was done of small kids doing puzzles or other tasks like that, um, where there was ambiguity and whether this was a task that was a game or work. They weren't quite sure. And when money was introduced into the equation, it gave them a cue. This is work. This is not fun.

And then after the money is removed, those kids do the puzzles less. But most of the time in life, we're not unsure whether or not something is work or fun, or whether we're doing it because we think it's good for us or for just for cash. Right? So take exercise or meditation even. We're pretty sure that normally when we're doing that, we're doing that for ourselves. And the evidence really does not support any kind of intrinsic motivation credit. Sure.

You do see a decline in the behavior after you take the incentive away, but that's just a simple cost benefit change, right? So, um, the behavior was rewarded and now it's not, I do it less, because part of the reason I was doing it was to get the cash, but actually you still see people, for instance, in the exercise studies, if I pay you to do something repeatedly for a month, there's actually about, you know, 33% of that behavior can, that lift that you see for that group relative to a group that isn't paid, sustained afterwards. So generally when we pay for a behavior, if it's an intrinsically rewarding behavior,

we see crowd out. There's one other really famous study where I think people get confused and think that has to do with intrinsic motivation. I think it has to do with that, but also with something else. And this is, it's a great study that was done in Israeli daycare centers where late pickups were becoming a problem and they introduced a fine for some daycare centers. If parents came late, they said, you know, okay, now you're gonna have to pay $3 if you show up late to pick up your kids.

And actually, all of a sudden, the number of people showing up late increased. I don't think that was intrinsic motivation crowd out. It was actually just conveying, this is a service, it's a fee for service. And people were like, this is a great price. I would love to pay for that extra child care. Right, it's like $3 for an extra 20 minutes of my life.

Boom, done. Yeah, absolutely. I would love that extra childcare. I know I don't have enough and I need a little bit more and this is really cheap. So that's just creating a price. I think that, in fact, the title of the paper is a fine as a price. And so I think that's really different

than intrinsic motivation crowd out it. It's a reconstruction of our understanding of a relationship with someone else and whether or not it you know, it's acceptable or appropriate to behave in a certain way, whether or not that's a service that's being offered. It's really different than what I think most people have taken away from this literature and said, oh no, you know, there's this thing called intrinsic motivation crowd out. The evidence for that is pretty limited. But there's some really interesting new research that's been done by Oleg Erminsky,

who's a UChicago marketing professor that I think helps to explain, maybe there's some very short-term crowd out in the form of what he's seen as like, people just get tired. If you have them do a task in a lab and you pay them a lot, they do it more, then they sometimes can get a little bit tired because they did so much hard work

and they'll sort of do a little bit less for a bit right after the payment is reduced. But it's probably almost exclusively driven by exhaustion due to exertion and then quickly it comes back to the old levels rather than what people were labeling as crowd out. And it's really only been detected in the lab and not in the field.

So I think basically my hot take is, and based on evidence, intrinsic motivation crowd out, not really a thing, wildly overblown. Got it. It's interesting to me because as you were speaking, I think a variation on that scenario popped into my head, which is that when our daughter was very young, she was a quote reader. She loved to read. She would just steal away with books and read, read, read, read, read. And then in like fourth grade or something like that, she came home one day and she said, the teacher said, we have to read 45 minutes a day. And literally from that moment on, this thing that was a joy that she loved to

do and would often do for hours became a burden. And it was like it was given something flipped in her brain where it was framed as something that you shouldn't like to do. And because of that, you had this mandatory, it was like a sentence. And it took, then it becomes this thing where literally it was like, you know, 45 minutes and a second, boom, book closed. You know, and as soon as that year was over, that behavior actually took kind of took years to return on a more joyful, extensive way. And we were always so fascinated by that phenomenon. Yeah. And that really fits the sort of one situation where it seems like this is a problem, which is again where there's true ambiguity. A kid is learning, you know, is this fun or is this work that's different? And so in that kind of

context, but that's normally not where we worry about intrinsic motivation credit. We often are talking about it with adults with behaviors like meditation or exercise or recycling, things where there's not ambiguity about why I'm doing it. And so that's where I really think we should worry less. Yeah, and I think zooming the lens out, when we're talking about adults also, one of the big messages that I've sort of taken

from your work is I think what a lot of us think about behavior change, especially things that we perceive as being hard, where we have to exert effort, where there's a cost to it, where there may be a sacrifice to it, and maybe we think we have to do it for life. There's this notion of self-control plays a huge part of a self-regulation, and that it's a muscle that you build or you don't build.

And if you don't build it, there's also a certain amount of shame associated with that because you haven't lived up, you're letting yourself down. Whereas a lot of what I take from the work that you do is there's actually a lot more to it than that. There's a lot of scaffolding, there's a lot of structure, there are a lot of systems and processes and things that can help get you a lot closer to it without having to rely on what of like what feels like a very old and not entirely correct notion of it's all about self-control.

Absolutely. I think that's a really nice way to put it. And the more scaffolding we can build, frankly, the better so that we don't have to rely on this really challenging process that so often, you know, present bias wins and we in the long run lose. Yeah. So this feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this container of a good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life,

what comes up? For me, it's really about finding meaning and purpose in what you're doing each day. And that can make sure that when you wake up, you're excited about what you'll be doing, that present bias is actually working for you rather than against you. Because if you find meaning and purpose in the work, you're also likely to find joy in what you're doing. And so that's what I think of when I think of a good life is one that's filled with meaning and purpose and enjoyment of the things you're doing each day for those reasons. Thank you. Hey, if you love this episode,

say you'll also love the conversation we had with Dr. Maya Shankar about the power of slight shifts, how small behavior changes can transform your life. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young. Christopher Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project

in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor, a second favor, share it with just one person. I mean if you want to share it with more that's awesome too but just one person even, then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

I'm Joshua Jackson, and I'm returning for the audible original series Oracle season 3 murder at the Grandview. Six forty somethings took a boat out a few days ago. One of them was found dead. The hotel, the island, something wasn't right about it. Psychic agent Nate Russo is back on the case and you know when Nate's killer instincts are required anything's possible. This world's gonna eat you alive.

Listen to Oracle Season 3, Murder at the Grandview, now on Audible.