Speaking of Psychology - How the Science of Habits Can Help Us Keep Our New Year’s Resolutions, with Wendy Wood, PhD

Episode Date: January 6, 2021

Many of us are brimming with good intentions right now, determined to eat more healthily, get organized or fulfill our other New Year’s resolutions. But by February we’ll have reverted back to our old ways. Why is it so difficult to make these lasting behavioral changes? Wendy Wood, PhD, of the University of Southern California, discusses the research on how habits drive our behavior, why habits are so difficult to break, and how we can harness the power of habit to make the behavioral changes we want. We’d love to know what you think of Speaking of Psychology, what you would change about it, and what you’d like to hear more of. Please take our listener www.apa.org/podcast survey. Links Wendy Wood, PhD Music Jazz Music Loop by anechoix via freesound.org   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to January and our first episode of 2021. By now, some of you are a few days into a new diet, determined to finally lose 10 pounds, or maybe you downloaded a new language learning app and you're planning to resurrect your high school French or Spanish. Perhaps you're working on the household budget so you can find new ways to save money. Whatever your goals are for this year,

many of us are brimming with good intentions right now, but by February, it's likely that many of us will have reverted to our old ways. days. Why do so few New Year's resolutions stick? And more broadly, why is it so difficult to make lasting behavioral changes? Is it just a lack of willpower or is something else at play? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. If you enjoy speaking of psychology, the conversation doesn't have to stop when the podcast is over.

Get unlimited access to hundreds of videos about the latest in psychology for just one low price by registering for access to APA's 2020 virtual convention. Start with some of our selected videos featuring psychology's biggest names discussing topics such as racism, stigma, and COVID-19, or use our on-demand library to explore any psychological or behavioral topic. Go to convention.ap.org slash podcast. That's convention. APA.org slash podcast. Our guest today is Dr. Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology and business at the

University of Southern California. She has spent decades studying how people form habits and how habits drive our behavior. In her recent book, Good Habits, Bad Habits, the Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick. She explains how understanding the science of habits can help us make the lasting changes to our behavior that we want. Welcome to speaking of psychology, Dr. Wood. Oh, thank you. It's great to be here, Kim. Your research has found that a full 43% of our behavior is habitual, a number that might surprise some people. How did you arrive at that statistic and what kinds of behaviors count as habits? When I started doing research on habits, I thought, like most people, that habits were just the simple little things we do,

like brushing our teeth or putting on our seatbelt when we get into a car. But we did some research where we actually followed people and beeped them once an hour and had them tell us what they were doing and what they were thinking. And then we later had them tell us how often they do whatever they were doing in that circumstance. And what we found, this is where the 43% comes in, is that. that about 43% of the behaviors that people reported were ones that they were doing almost every day in the same circumstance, and they were doing them without thinking about what they were doing. So there's some non-conscious process there that is guiding our actions because we don't have to

consciously think about them. And that's the definition of habit, is habit that's the definition of habit. are behaviors that you form through repetition, that you repeat relatively automatically, so you don't have to think about them when you do them. 43% is a big number. But, you know, an awful lot of our behavior is pretty repetitive, much more than we realize, because when we repeat things, we're not thinking about it. what we're doing, we're just doing it. And we're typically doing it in the same way that we did before. So that's sort of the way most of us live our lives. And if you had to really think about all

of these things, it would slow you down, right? I mean, like, you know how to drive a car, that's habitual. It's not as if you have to open the door, get in, turn the key, you know, whatever the movements are. You don't think about them, right? That's what we're talking about. Yep, that's it. If you did have to think about it, it would be exhausting because you'd be constantly having to think about what is the next thing I do now after I've done that. And that kind of decision making is just most of us, none of us, can do it. Our brains are not set up for that. Well, let's talk about New Year's resolutions since it's that time of the year. Many of us have made some resolutions and many of us will, fail to keep them. Now, in your book, you talk about how people think it's just a matter of having enough willpower, but that's not it, right? What are we doing wrong? Well, starting with your first question about how much of our behavior is habitual, habits are a memory system that is very

slow to change. After you repeat a behavior over and over in the same way, say you make, you you may drink coffee in the morning and you probably make it in the same way each morning. And I'm guessing that when you stand in front of your coffee maker in the morning, you're not asking yourself how to do it or what to do. It just happens automatically. You're not even asking yourself if you want coffee this morning. If you're a coffee drinker, that's what you do. So since so much of our behavior is like that, and it has It's part of this habit memory system that learns slowly over time and only changes slowly if you want to alter the behavior. It's very hard to alter our habits once we've formed them.

In fact, many of us think that we should be able to make a decision, right? I am going to lose weight this year. I'm going to make more friends this year. I'm going to be nicer to my family, my partner this year. I'm going to save more money. All of those great New Year's resolutions that you mentioned in the introduction. But the problem is that so many of those behaviors are habits, and that memory sticks. It sticks long after our decisions to change have fallen away and we've given up.

So habit memory is great because it gets us that coffee every morning in the way we like it. But it's also a challenge because it is resistant to change. And when we want to change, it's very hard. So are some types of New Year's resolutions more likely to succeed than others? How can we craft resolutions that we're going to be more likely to be able to keep? There's actually some great data on this, and it's not my data. It was done with people who had formed New Year's resolutions, and then were contacted three months later to see which ones they stuck with. And people were asked to rate two things.

One is how much fun it would be, to how enjoyable they'd find the resolution. That was one thing they rated. And a second is how life-changing or how important the resolution would be. And, you know, that's why we make resolutions. We make resolutions because they change our lives. So you'd think that people would stick with the ones that were more life-changing and important. But that's not true. Instead, they stuck with the ones that were more fun, more enjoyable.

And part of the reason for that, is because our habits form when we repeat a behavior and get a reward for that. That reward triggers a release of dopamine in our neural systems, and that dopamine works to tie together what we're doing into habit memories so that we start to consolidate and learn to repeat that particular behavior. So figuring out what you can do as a resolution that is to you enjoyable is going to be very important in whether you actually stick with it, probably much more important than most of us realize. How long does it take for something to become a habit?

I know there's been some data regarding what sounds like a pretty short period of time for something to become a habit, but I think you have found something that's a little bit surprising in that area. So because habit memories are learning systems, habits are part of a learning system, things that are easier to learn, you pick them up faster than things that are more difficult. So there's not a single number of repetitions that you have to do in order to form a habit. That said, there are data suggesting that a simple health behavior like taking a walk after dinner or eating fruit with your lunch, that those can take, those kinds of simple behaviors can take, oh, maybe two months, three months, to start to become a habit in the sense that they start to feel automatic.

So you don't really have to make a conscious decision and struggle anymore. Instead, there are things that you just do automatically. So give yourself two to three months of repeating things as often as possible, and you should be able to form a habit. Now, some habits that we now have have have taken really years to, to settle in to become habits for, basically for the population, I'm thinking of wearing seatbelts or smoking less or not smoking at all. Can you talk about how they became habitual but why it took as long as it did? Well, smoking has an interesting history because around the middle of

the last century, we started to learn that smoking was really bad for us. And there was was the landmark 1965 Surgeon General's report outlining exactly all of the health risks of smoking. And that had an effect, some effect, on people's behavior. But not a whole lot. I mean, smoking is a habit. It's also addictive. Nicotine is highly addictive. The U.S. government, though, put into place several policies that helped people control those habits. And one was that they banned smoking in public places. So they made it more difficult for people to smoke. So you have to start thinking every time you take out a cigarette.

Is this a place where I can smoke? They put taxes on cigarettes, so it was harder to buy them. They took the packets off store shelves so that it was harder to actually purchase them. you have to go ask somebody behind a counter for the particular brand and type that you smoke. All of these things put what we call friction on the behavior and made it more difficult. Made it more difficult, made it more thoughtful. And that cut smoking rates, all of these things together, cut smoking rates from 50%, which is what it was the middle of last century, to about 15% now, only about 15% of American smoke currently, which is wonderful.

It's an amazingly positive success story for a health intervention. But it also gives us some insight personally about how to control unwanted habits. I said earlier that your decisions aren't going to last as long as your habit memories. And so making decisions and exerting willpower is a good short-term fix, but is not likely to persist long enough for you to actually change your behavior. What can help, though, is putting friction on that habit, that you want to change. Make it more thoughtful, make it more difficult,

and that gives you some control over it. This is a common idea. There's a saying in marketing that when you go into a store, eye level is buy level, meaning what you can see easily is what you're most likely to buy. They put the cheap things way down by your feet or weigh up high, put the things that they want you to buy at eye level.

That's friction. It works in the marketplace. It works online. So Amazon, for a while, had a monopoly on this one-click purchasing app. Two clicks and you lose customers. One click, you're more successful at selling. things. Friction is really a powerful force on our own behavior, and it's not one that we recognize. It's not one that most of us think of when we say, I'm going to change my behavior. We go inward.

We focus on the things that we're aware of, the things we know, which is willpower and decision. We'd be more successful, though, if we focus on friction in our environment. trying to make the things that we want to do easier, things that we don't want to do harder. So friction has more of a negative connotation. I mean, that's how I would see it. So it's making it more difficult instead of easier. I'm kind of thinking in terms of, I know in your book you wrote about your cousin, right, who periodically announces on Facebook her intention to lose weight, which inevitably fails after a while. And this is something that a lot of us do. We tell our friends and family about our resolutions in an effort to hold ourselves accountable. So does that sort of, what you're expecting is positive reinforcement, will that help people more than friction, which sounds more negative, like taking things away,

making it harder for you to do something as opposed to easier? The habit that you want to change becomes more difficult. The habit that you want to instill becomes easier, right? Yeah. So friction really has two sides. You're absolutely right in the way you described it. It is a resisting force that you can use to help control behaviors you don't want, but it's also a force that reduces resistance, right? You can reduce that resistance, make it a driving force for behaviors that you do want. Your question about sharing your resolutions with other people, that's helpful. I mean, other people can help us meet our goals, certainly.

And having a great support network is good for our mental health. It's something we should all strive for. But if you're trying to change your own behavior, setting up some sort of public accountability is only minimally successful. The research that has been done on accountability, suggests that it has great short-term effects? The problem is longer-term, it's harder to keep accountability influencing your behavior in the way you wanted to. So accountability is something like our decisions and our willpower that works in the short run, but not so much in the long run.

Let me give you an example of how friction can work for us, not. just as a resisting force, but is something that can help us do the things we want to do. It was a great study done with our cell phones, tracking cell phones, and you know that your cell phone is being tracked all the time for all kinds of things. This particular study tracked hundreds of thousands of cell phones to see how far people and their cell phones traveled to a paid fitness center. So how far they traveled to a gym? And what they found is that people who travel about three and a half miles on average

went to a gym five times a week. But people who traveled over five miles went only once a week on average. So if you're trying to get yourself to exercise more, you probably aren't thinking that much about how far your gym is. You're probably thinking all the reasons why you should exercise, trying to convince yourself, get your willpower to make yourself go. But one of the important factors that influences whether we actually go is how easy or difficult it is.

Can you find a gym that's close by your work so that, After work, you can easily stop by there. Or close by a store that you usually go to, your grocery store, close by your house. That matters. That reduces the friction, makes it easier to go, and then you're much more likely to actually follow through on your resolution. You've also written about how times of discontinuity are particularly conducive to habit change.

People are more likely to change their habits when they're in the middle of a life, change, like a move or a breakup that disrupts many of their old routines. Now, because of COVID-19, most of us have been living a good year, about a year in a state of disruption and upended routines. Does that mean that this is a particularly good year for making life changes because we're all in a state of flux and will the changes we're making now be more likely to stick when life returns to normal, whatever that is? Yeah, this is hard to know. We have seen some pretty broadly shared changes in people's lives. Some of them are good, right? So people are eating out less often. So diets have become slightly healthier since the pandemic started. But we're moving less. So there's been less exercise and people have

have, on average, tended to gain weight. We've picked up new hobbies, so there's increasing interest in gardening. And people have started cooking, so there are now memes about sourdough starters and all kinds of things. Will people continue doing those things after the pandemic restrictions are over? That's less clear. Because we're all going to get back to our old lives with our old environments and forces in our lives that we had habits for before the pandemic started. And one possibility is that as we launch ourselves back into picking up our lives as they left off a year ago, we're going to start picking up the same habits as well. Because those habit memories are still there. So they're still there to be activated.

It is an opportunity for us to think about what we want to bring from the pandemic and what we want to change in our old behavior. So it's an opportunity for us to think, well, how do we keep gardening if we enjoy that? How do we keep cooking at home a bit more? How do we keep doing things with our family more maybe than we did before the pandemic? These are opportunities for us to think about behavior change and which ones we want to keep, which ones we don't. But don't be surprised if you find yourself just falling back sort of mindlessly into your old routines because that's your habit memory. It takes actually changing context, as you said, disreaching.

disrupting the context that activate your habits in order to provide that sort of window of opportunity to make new decisions and to establish new habits. It's interesting to think about it, though, in terms of, you know, so many of us are teleworking right now and our employers have become accustomed to that and realize that we can actually be more productive in some cases. So perhaps we won't be going back to our lives as we knew them before. And maybe some of these habits will stick. So perhaps this is an area for future research for you, Dr. Wood. Exactly. Thank you. One thing I thought was interesting was a study that you published a few years ago on stress and habits. And there's this idea that a lot of us have that when people are under stress, they do unhealthy things like stress eat.

But you found out that when people are stressed, they may. actually double down on whatever their habits are, whether they're good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. Can you talk about that a little bit? Most of us think that when we're stressed, we're going to fall back into doing things that make ourselves comfortable. And most of those are bad habits. We will watch too much TV, we'll surf the web, we'll eat too much. But in research that we've done and other people on stress and fatigue, feeling fatigued and overwhelmed, not having much decision-making capacity left, sort of the way you feel drained at the end of a hard day, when you're in those circumstances, you expect to fall back on bad habits because they're comforting.

But what we found actually is that people fall back on good habits too. And the reason is this, that when you are stressed or when you're fatigued, you are not as able to control your behavior. Executive control functions are sort of tapped. They are not able to control behavior in quite the same way. And so without our decision-making capacity, we fall back on what we would typically do. And that typical could be something good, right? It could be that you work a whole lot, and that's your habit.

Or it could be that you exercise or go for long walks or call somebody who's a good friend that you can talk with and end up feeling better. All of those things are beneficial habits that you're more likely to repeat when you're stressed and fatigued than when you're not. It makes perfect sense that there would be that pattern if you understand how habits work. But it doesn't always fit our understanding of our own behavior. And part of that is we don't notice the good habits. that we engage in. In fact, most of us think we are acting in ways that are consistent with our intentions, so we must have wanted to do that all along.

We must work out when we're feeling stressed because we know that that's going to help relieve the stressful experience. Instead of recognizing, oh, that's my habit, and that's why I fell back on it when I was trust. People underestimate their good habits and they tend to focus too much on their bad ones. And that's why we know so much more about bad habits than we do about good ones. What can your work, your science, tell us about some of the issues related to COVID-19, like getting people to wear masks and keep their physical distance? I mean, these are habits that we're trying to instill in people. And we're having a lot of put.

in some parts of our country. What can the science of studying habits tell us that would, that policymakers could use to convince people to do the good things? So part of the reason for the pushback, I think, is political as much as anything. And it's based on a misunderstanding of the severity of the virus. But there are absolutely things that policymakers can do to help people stay safer. And we do know at this point that the virus is as much a behavioral science challenge as it is a medical challenge, right? We can control the virus by wearing masks and keeping physical distance from others. We can also control it through vaccines. There's two routes, both are important.

Estimates are that with the best vaccines, we're still not going to be able to get back to normal until we start bringing the virus levels down in the broader population. At least we're not going to be able to do that very quickly. So using the idea of friction, you want to make it easy for people to wear masks And something that retailers, stores, communities can do is make them free and available when people need them.

So when you walk into a store, there should be a bunch of masks, disposable masks available that people can use. So they don't have to remember to bring their own. Make it easy for people to keep using masks. Individuals themselves can do things to make it easy. remember to use a mask. Hang it in your car, hang it by your door so that it just becomes part of your habitual every day leaving the house. You pick up your keys, you put on your mask, you leave. Same thing with physical distancing. Help people do it on a regular basis. So the marks that you see in pavements and stores about how far to stay away from other customers,

from other people, they're great. They're very helpful. They remind people what to do, and they make it the norm so that we're much more likely to just learn to do this and keep doing it in the future. There are a lot of things that people can do to apply behavioral science knowledge, to help themselves change this behavior,

so that they're able to keep them. themselves and others safe. Last question. Have you applied your research in your own life? Do you make New Year's resolutions and can you keep them? I don't make New Year's resolutions, to be honest. But like everybody else, I try to change my behavior. And given the knowledge that we've all gained in the power,

couple of decades about habits and how they work, it is possible to apply that in your own life to help with behavior change challenges. So one of my favorite studies was done with eating, and it was done with people sitting in a room with two bowls of food. Some of them had a bowl of apples right in front of them, sliced apples, and then buttered pop. was there in front of them, but they had to reach for it. Other people had the buttered popcorn right in front of them, and the apple slices they had to reach for them. And what the researchers found is that people who had apple slices close by ate a third fewer calories than people who had the popcorn close by. And it's not that they were less hungry or didn't like the popcorn.

It's just having to reach for it was enough for. friction so that they were more likely to just eat the apples. So when I go to the grocery store, I typically buy fruits and vegetables that are already prepared or cut up in some way. And they're a little bit more expensive, but I know that I'm more likely to eat them if I do that. So if I'm trying to clean up my diet, if I feel like there's some need to do that, I will fill my refrigerator with fruit and vegetables all ready to eat so that when I open it,

that's what's there. And I make sure that there are things that I like. So I don't buy things that are just because they're good for me. I try to get things that are rewarding and easy. And with those two keys, it makes it much easier to change your behavior. behavior. And we all have to do that. We all have periods where we eat too much, where we don't exercise enough, where we might be a little short with our spouse. Trying to figure out ways to make it easier to do the right thing is a good approach and works better than willpower because it's more long-lasting. Well, this has been some great advice. I really appreciate it. and I'm much more determined now to keep my resolution.

So thank you for joining us today, Dr. Wood. It's been really a pleasure talking to you. No, it's good fun. Thank you so much. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.org or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org.

Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Our sound editor is Chris Kondyin. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.