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Wendy Wood Biography

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“Major life events—starting a new job, moving, getting married, having children—have the same effect, many times over. They take away our habit cues and remove the predictability of life. They shake everything up, and for a moment, all of your behaviors—habitual and otherwise—are in the air, waiting for you to direct their placement. Yes, major life changes are stressful times full of uncertainty. But they are also opportunities to reimagine ourselves and restructure our lives. We are freed up to practice new behaviors without interference from established cues and our habitual responses to them.”

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“In psychology, we have a name for the automatic scripts our brains piece together when we repeatedly do the same thing in the same way: procedural memory. It’s such an important repository of information that only the most frequently repeated patterns get stored like this. It functions somewhat separately from other memory systems, and the specific information encoded isn’t accessible to consciousness. This kind of cognitive coding is a sort of mental equivalent of admin-only files on your computer. Your computer’s best functioning relies on you not naively messing around in its most fundamental code, which it stashes away behind several layers of obfuscation. This is why we don’t know much about our habits. The information we learn as a habit is to some extent separated from other neural regions. Procedural coding protects information from change. This is the advantage to the way our minds encode habits. You don’t forget how to ride a bike regardless of how well you learn to ride a skateboard or surf. You can do it years after stopping. You balance and push the pedals without thinking. While cycling, you can even talk to others or enjoy the scenery. Your bike-riding habit didn’t get overwritten by new thoughts and experiences. Other habits are almost as sticky. Speaking a second language, playing a musical instrument, or cooking a favorite dish are skills that fade only slowly as you fail to use them. Past procedural learning is well preserved.”

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“Participants who scored high on self-control said that they automatically went out to exercise without thinking much about it. They usually did it in the same times and places. It had become part of their routine. Once again, people high in self-control were achieving success without exerting much effort. They weren’t white-knuckling their way to being healthy. Here’s the very happy implication: the worst, most effortful run will be that first one. Or the second, perhaps. But effort doesn’t last (in fact, if it does, you’re doing it wrong). Habits will form and take the effort off your hands.”

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“You can miss a day or two and you will not be set back to zero. An omission is not a license to cheat or keep failing. Your habit-in-formation is not so fragile that it requires perfection. If you miss a day or fall off the wagon, don’t despair. Instead, use it as an opportunity to make your context tighter, stronger, and clearer.”

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“They were not struggling with themselves to play just one more round of a computer game or keep reading their Twitter feed. For them, sleep was not a battle of self-control. Instead, high “self-control” people performed better at the more habitual, automatic tasks than low “self-control” ones. High “self-controllers” were simply proficient at automating.”

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“Unanticipated rewards in the future, such as a paycheck bonus in two weeks or an athletic trophy you get at the end of a season, will not change neural connections in the same way. Rewards have to be experienced right after we do something in order to build habit associations (context-response) in memory. Given this timing, the most effective habit-building rewards are often intrinsic to a behavior, or a part of the action itself. This could be the feeling of pleasure you get when you read an engaging story to your kids and see their enjoyment; or maybe the warm glow of generosity you experience when doing a good deed, like volunteering at the soup kitchen. You aren’t a rat. If you volunteer, don’t then go and buy yourself a big chocolate bar and expect the habit to start forming. Let the warmth intrinsic to the activity be the reward. Take advantage of your built-in humanity. As you’d expect, those who liked to exercise—who rated it a fun activity that made them feel good—exercised more often and reported that it was more habitual and automatic. They didn’t have to think much before heading out to the track or gym. Most interesting is that students who exercised just as often, but who indicated that they went mostly out of guilt or to please others, failed to form a robust habit.”

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“Repetition, then, should be thought of not as some kind of magical primer for habits, but rather as a way to induce speedy mental action. The second time you do something takes less time and mental effort than the first. The third takes less than the second. And so on. This creates a favorable mental condition for a habit to come in and take over. By the tenth time (or the sixty-sixth), you’re barely thinking about it at all, and presto: a habit has been created.”

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“Only twenty-one mornings of planning your daily budget before your frugality becomes automatic. This is a myth. The number seems to come from self-help guru Maxwell Maltz’s speculation in his 1960 bestselling book, Psycho-Cybernetics. He was guessing how long it took people to adjust to self-changes such as plastic surgery. This is a concept with much longevity but little truth. A new action is difficult to sustain when the only driving forces are internal motivators of (a) wanting to do it, (b) knowing it’s good for you, and (c) wanting to get the study payment”

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“It’s exhausting and fruitless to live by motivation and willpower alone. You’ll only fail yourself, time and again. You’ll have all your goals and all your intentions, and you’ll watch them get higher and higher and more out of reach. Your ideal life and your actual life will start to diverge more and more, and you’ll feel that distance to be an indictment of your weakness and smallness of character.”

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“A classic 1950 study evaluated the friendships that developed among 260 married veterans in a student housing project at MIT. People were randomly assigned to live in apartments in small two-story housing blocks at the beginning of the school year. Researchers measured the distance between everyone’s front doors. Then they tracked who became friends with whom. Students did not randomly link up and form friendships. They were much more likely to become friends with their next-door neighbors and with people who lived on the same hallway than with those on another floor. Residents of units separated by as little as 180 feet never became friends. Those living in end-of-corridor units were also less popular, because they didn’t meet up with as many people in passing. And the only students who made friends with people on other floors were the ones who lived close to stairwells.”

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