Creatures of
“Most habits are good. They are working for you; you just don’t realize it.” - Wendy Wood
Our days are filled with choices. Important ones, and not-so-important ones. What we eat, how we exercise, how we wind down after work, we are constantly orchestrating our lives for better or for worse… right?
Not exactly. Thanks to leading researchers like Wendy Wood and Charles Duhigg, the science of habits is revealing a reality quite different from that which common wisdom suggests.
How many decisions have you made today? It’s estimated that roughly 45% of our behaviors are habitual (outside of conscious choice), but I’m willing to bet that if I told you to take some time to write down all of your active choices from today, you would cover far less than that. So, even if we’re playing it safe, we could reasonably say that most human behavior is habitual.
Think about how you get to work, if I’ve a regular commute, I’m probably driving entirely out of habit; there are little to no decisions being made. Or, from another perspective, imagine the energy it would take to actively choose each step in the process. First thing in the morning. Everyday. Choose my car over my bike– to put it in reverse instead of drive, and drive over neutral– to turn left rather than right– to stop– to go, etc. etc. It would be an intense cognitive task before I even open the first spreadsheet of the day. Now how much is left for the real work?
Of course, this is precisely why our brains developed the ability to form habits in the first place. Our capacity for active, executive functioning is limited and we can’t just use it for everything. Consider how much less productive the human race would be if we couldn’t automate the simple things like eating, drinking, washing, and communicating. We’d still be drawing up the blueprints for that wheel thing. Habits– real habits– remove the burden of choice and give our brains the space for more complex (important) tasks.
The unfortunate thing is, given Mother Nature’s blissful indifference, these subconscious inclinations can very easily go awry. She wants you eating and reproducing, and the source of those calories and mates are less than trivial to her. We must set things up so that the more positive habits are the ones that stick.
How do we do that though? How can we take a conscious behavior and make it an inherently subconscious habit?
The easy answer is self–control. Have some self-control! Just do it! Discipline, discipline, discipline! But, again, science suggests this isn’t necessarily the most helpful approach. Who would’ve thought that, for a long time, most of our culturally accepted ideas about behavior and productivity have been misguided…
Self-control, as it turns out, is less about sheer willpower and discipline, and more about our habits. That is, those who exhibit high levels of “self-control” aren’t doing much more work than those who exhibit the opposite, in fact, they’re doing far less– less fighting with temptation. In other words, almost none of us are really great at regularly deciding between healthy and unhealthy behaviors; but some of us are better at eliminating the decision. It makes sense logically; if I don’t have soda in my house, it becomes a whole lot easier to choose water, because I’m in fact not choosing.
Not to mention, decisions are exhausting. We can try to maintain control as that hyper-disciplined person unphased by the lure of indulgence, but it likely won’t last. Decision-making is, in this sense, comparable to a boxer’s heaviest overhand right. When it connects, it does damage, but he’ll never make it the whole twelve rounds with just that.
So, for starters, set your environment up for success. Reduce your options. The strongest way to introduce and maintain a good habit is to make the healthy choice the easy choice. We shouldn’t be so proud to assume that we can just muscle our way through all the distractions and temptations that constantly surround us. We are only human. Our environment can be our greatest contributor, as well as our greatest inhibitor.
When we make the undesirable behaviors less accessible, we’re on our way to positive change. Wendy Wood brilliantly highlights this concept in her book, “Good Habits, Bad Habits”. She cites the fact that the greatest reduction in smoking didn’t happen after it was linked to cancer, it was when laws banned commercials and made it publically inconvenient. At this point smokers couldn’t just light up at the high top in Applebees, they had to actively leave their friends for a few minutes. And if there’s anything we humans fear most, it’s social displacement.
We will be better off if we stop relying so heavily on boot-strapping our self-control— if we stop kidding ourselves— and use psychology to our advantage. It isn’t cheating to rearrange your pantry, or throw away the vape, or leave later so you don’t have time to stop at Starbucks. This isn’t a game; there’s no winning or losing… there are only behaviors. Make the good ones easy and the other ones difficult.
