• Sometimes people acquire habits overnight, and sometimes they drop longtime habits just as abruptly. Why?
• Why do some people dread and resist habits, while others adopt them eagerly?
• Why do so many successful dieters regain their lost weight, plus more?
• Why are people so often unmoved by the consequences of their habits? For instance, one-third to one-half of U.S. patients don’t take medicine prescribed for a chronic illness.
• Do the same strategies work for changing simple habits (wearing a seat belt) and for complex habits (drinking less)?
• Why is it that sometimes, though we’re very anxious—even desperate—to change a habit, we can’t? A friend told me, “I have health issues, and I feel lousy when I eat certain foods. But I eat them anyway.”
• Do the same habit-formation strategies apply equally well to everyone?
• Certain situations seem to make it easier to form habits. Which ones, and why?
I was determined to find the answers to those questions, and to figure out every aspect of how habits are made and broken.
Habits were the key to understanding how people were able to change. But why did habits make it possible for people to change? I found the answer, in part, in a few sentences whose dry, calm words disguised an observation that, for me, was explosively interesting. “Researchers were surprised to find,” write Roy Baumeister and John Tierney in their fascinating book Willpower, “that people with strong self-control spent less time resisting desires than other people did. … people with good self-control mainly use it not for rescue in emergencies but rather to develop effective habits and routines in school and at work.” In other words, habits eliminate the need for self-control.
Self-control is a crucial aspect of our lives. People with better self-control (or self-regulation, self-discipline, or willpower) are happier and healthier. They’re more altruistic; they have stronger relationships and more career success; they manage stress and conflict better; they live longer; they steer clear of bad habits. Self-control allows us to keep our commitments to ourselves. Yet one study suggests that when we try to use self-control to resist temptation, we succeed only about half the time, and indeed, in a large international survey, when people were asked to identify their failings, a top choice was lack of self-control.
There’s some debate about the nature of self-control. Some argue that we have a limited amount of self-control strength, and as we exert it, we exhaust it. Others counter that willpower isn’t limited in this way, and that we can find fresh reserves by reframing our actions. As for me, I wake up with a reasonable store of self-control, and the more I draw on it, the lower it drops. I remember sitting in a meeting and resisting a cookie plate for an hour—then grabbing two cookies on my way out.
And that’s why habits matter so much. With habits, we conserve our self-control. Because we’re in the habit of putting a dirty coffee cup in the office dishwasher, we don’t need self-control to perform that action; we do it without thinking. Of course, it takes self-control to establish good habits. But once the habit is in place, we can effortlessly do the things we want to do.
And there’s one reason, in particular, that habits help to preserve our self-control.
In ordinary terms, a “habit” is generally defined as a behavior that’s recurrent, cued by a specific context, often happens without much awareness or conscious intent, and is acquired through frequent repetition.
I became convinced, however, that the defining aspect of habits isn’t frequency, or repetition, or the familiarity of the cues for a particular behavior. These factors do matter; but in the end, I concluded that the real key to habits is decision making—or, more accurately, the lack of decision making. A habit requires no decision from me, because I’ve already decided. Am I going to brush my teeth when I wake up? Am I going to take this pill? I decide, then I don’t decide; mindfully, then mindlessly. I shouldn’t worry about making healthy choices. I should make one healthy choice, and then stop choosing. This freedom from decision making is crucial, because when I have to decide—which often involves resisting temptation or postponing gratification—I tax my self-control.
I’d asked myself, “Why do habits make it possible for people to change?” and now I knew the answer. Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control.
One day, after checking the time difference to make sure that it wasn’t too early in Los Angeles, I called my sister, Elizabeth, to talk to her about my research. She’s five years younger than I am, but I call her “my sister the sage,” because she always has tremendous insight into whatever I’m pondering at the moment.
After we talked about my nephew Jack’s most recent antics, and the latest news about the TV show that Elizabeth writes for, I told her how preoccupied I’d become with the subject of habits.
“I think I’ve figured out why habits are so important,” I told her. As I explained my conclusions, I could picture her sitting at her crowded desk, dressed in her unvarying outfit of running shoes, jeans, and hoodie. “With habits, we don’t make decisions, we don’t use self-control, we just do the thing we want ourselves to do—or that we don’t want to do. Does that sound right to you?”
“That sounds about right,” said Elizabeth agreeably. She’s used to hearing me talk about my obsessions.
“But here’s another question. How do people compare to each other? Some people love habits, and some people hate them. For some people, habits come fairly easily, other people struggle much more. Why?”
“You should start by figuring that out about yourself—you love habits more than anyone I know.”
When I hung up the phone, I realized that as usual, Elizabeth had supplied me with a key insight. I hadn’t quite understood this truth about myself before she pointed it out: I’m a wholehearted habits embracer. I love to cultivate habits, and the more I learn about them, the more I’ve come to recognize their many benefits.
When possible, the brain makes a behavior into a habit, which saves effort and therefore gives us more capacity to deal with complex, novel, or urgent matters. Habits mean we don’t strain ourselves to make decisions, weigh choices, dole out rewards, or prod ourselves to begin. Life becomes simpler, and many daily hassles vanish. Because I don’t have to think about the multistep process of putting in my contact lenses, I can think about the logistical problems posed by the radiator leak in my home office.
Also, when we’re worried or overtaxed, a habit comforts us. Research suggests that people feel more in control and less anxious when engaged in habit behavior. I have a long blue jacket that I wore for two years straight whenever I gave speeches, and now it’s quite tired-looking—yet if I feel particularly anxious about some presentation, I still turn to that well-worn jacket. Surprisingly, stress doesn’t necessarily make us likely to indulge in bad habits; when we’re anxious or tired, we fall back on our habits, whether bad or good. In one study, students in the habit of eating a healthy breakfast were more likely to eat healthfully during exams, while students in the habit of eating an unhealthy breakfast were more likely to eat unhealthfully. For this reason, it’s all the more important to try to shape habits mindfully, so that when we fall back on them at times of stress, we’re following activities that make our situation better, not worse.