Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick
Wendy Wood, 2019
Why does a decision made on Sunday fail to survive until Tuesday? Social psychologist Wendy Wood has studied habits for thirty years and shows that character is usually not the problem. You will discover how much of the day runs on autopilot, why strong-willed people struggle with themselves less, and how surroundings, friction, and repetition change behavior more reliably than motivation.
Who it is for
For anyone whose resolutions to change usually fail before the week is over, leaving weak willpower to take the blame. And for everyone curious about why we so often act on autopilot.
Living on motivation and willpower alone is exhausting and futile.
A Sunday resolution, a Tuesday phone
Imagine Olya. On Sunday evening, she makes a firm decision: starting Monday, no phone before bed, just a book. Monday goes wonderfully. On Tuesday, Olya is tired, lies down, and her hand finds the phone on the bedside table by itself. By Friday, all that remains of the resolution is embarrassment and a familiar thought: once again, there was not enough willpower.
Wendy Wood, a social psychologist at the University of Southern California, has studied habits for more than thirty years. Her answer sounds unfamiliar: weak character is usually not the problem. We try to change our behavior through determination and motivation, but a substantial share of what we do barely responds to these tools. It is governed by habit, and habit has its own rules.
This book explores those rules. Why does a Sunday decision fail to survive until Tuesday? Why do people we consider strong-willed actually struggle with themselves less? How do place, distance, and a couple of extra steps matter more than vows? And how long does a new action really need to be repeated before it starts happening effortlessly? Wood builds all this on her own experiments and her colleagues’ research, rather than other people’s success stories.
Let us begin with a question that rarely occurs to us: how much of your day is actually under your conscious control?
Almost half the day runs on autopilot
Wood and her colleagues asked students to keep an unusual diary. Every hour, participants recorded what they were doing, thinking, and feeling at that moment. This diary study captured ordinary life rather than laboratory behavior. The researchers then looked for actions people repeated almost daily in the same surroundings while thinking about something else.
There were a great many. According to Wood’s calculations, about 43 percent of what we do each day happens out of habit: our hands do one thing while our minds do another.
This includes much more than brushing teeth. Showering, commuting, the first minutes at the computer, a snack at the same time, a phone in your hand while the kettle boils. Someone drives home, replays a conversation with the boss, and the steering wheel seems to turn at the right junctions by itself. It resembles a dance learned so well that your feet move automatically while you chat with your partner.
Wood explains it this way. We seem to have two systems working within us. The conscious one thinks, sets goals, and weighs alternatives, but it works slowly and requires effort. Habit memory learns slowly and quietly: it remembers which action brought a reward in which setting, then offers that action first when the setting returns. It stores neither goals nor promises. So a new intention simply does not reach it.
The trick is that consciousness barely notices. Ask people why they did something, and they can easily give a reason. Wood notes that our conscious minds are brilliant at inventing explanations. So we keep believing we decide everything, then blame ourselves for weak willpower when habit wins again.
This system also has a major advantage. While our hands do something familiar, our minds are free for other things: thinking, talking, inventing. In acting habitually, we are effectively retrieving ready-made answers to problems we have solved before, rather than spending energy solving them again. Without habits, every morning would become an exhausting chain of decisions.
Here is the book’s first practical conclusion. Talking a habit into changing is pointless. Speak to habit memory in its own language: surroundings and repetition. To begin, spend one evening noticing which of your actions were your decisions and which simply happened.
About the author
Wendy Wood is a social psychologist and professor at the University of Southern California. She has spent more than thirty years studying how habits form and govern behavior.
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