Habits - Page 2 of 2

A Trick To Help You Keep New Year’s Resolutions

The “question-behaviour effect” can help motivate you.

“Will you exercise this year?”

Just being asked that question could be enough to change your behaviour.

That’s the result of a survey of 40 years of research in this area.

The study found that the so-called “question-behaviour effect” can be powerful in many different areas of life.

Asking a question is probably better than making a statement for influencing behaviour.

Dr Dave Sprott, one of the study’s authors, said:

“If you question a person about performing a future behavior, the likelihood of that behavior happening will change.”

When people are asked whether they recycle, of example, it is a subtle reminder that it is good for the environment.

If they don’t already recycle, or exercise, or eat healthily, it can lead to uncomfortable feelings.

Recycling — or whatever the behaviour is — will alleviate those feelings.

Professor Eric R. Spangenberg, the study’s first author, explained:

“We found the effect is strongest when questions are used to encourage behavior with personal and socially accepted norms, such as eating healthy foods or volunteering.
But it can be used effectively to even influence consumer purchases, such as a new computer.”

The relatively simple technique has been found to work in a variety of different domains.

These include cheating less in college, reducing gender stereotyping, encouraging exercising and recycling.

Dr Sprott said:

“It is pretty easy to ask a question, and it can be done in a variety of means, such as ads, mailers, online media, and interpersonal communications.”

Sometimes, though, the technique does not work as well — usually when people already perform the target behaviour a lot.

For example, asking someone if they will be doing a lot of drinking or skipping classes can cause them to increase these behaviours.

Questions can work much better, the researchers found, than statements.

→ Read on: 10 Step Guide for Making Your New Year’s Resolutions

The study was published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (Spangenberg et al., 2015).

The Common Habit Slowing Our Brains By 20 Percent (M)

The habit is highly distracting and depletes our mental energy.

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The Simple Habit Linked To Weight Loss

The habit is linked to a 42% lower chance of obesity.

Eating more slowly is linked to lower obesity and a slimmer waist, new research finds.

People eating slowly were 42% less likely to be obese than those eating faster, the large study found.

Eating slowly may help people feel fuller more quickly because of how the body’s insulin levels respond to slower eating.

Two other simple habits were also linked to weight loss:

Avoiding after dinner snacks.
Not eating within two hours of going to bed.

The study followed almost 60,000 people in Japan for five years.

All categorised their eating speed as either slow, medium or fast.

Around one-third ate their food quickly, half at a normal rate and the rest were slow eaters

The results revealed that slow eaters were more likely to be healthy and to have a healthier lifestyle.

People eating at a normal speed were 29% less likely to be obese and those eating slowly were 42% less likely to be obese.

The slower people ate, the slimmer their waists.

The study’s authors concluded:

“Changes in eating habits can affect obesity, BMI, and waist circumference.
Interventions aimed at reducing eating speed may be effective in preventing obesity and lowering the associated health risks.”

Note: the study was observational, so firm conclusions cannot be drawn about cause and effect.

The study was published in the journal BMJ Open (Hurst et al., 2018).

How To Hit The Reset Button In Your Brain

Simple procedure enhances flexible thinking and shakes off old ideas.

Simply washing your hands could be enough to help let go of old ideas, new research finds.

A team of psychologists at the University of Toronto has found that cleaning your hands is enough to leave behind old goals and allow you to pursue new ones.

For the study people were ‘primed’ with a goal.

Priming involves unconsciously activating a goal in someone’s mind.

The results showed that when people subsequently wiped their hands, they forgot about this unconscious goal.

Ms Ping Dong, the study’s first author, said:

“For people who were primed with a health goal, for example, using the handwipe reduced their subsequent tendency to behave in a healthy manner — they were more likely to choose a chocolate bar over a granola bar.”

Other studies have shown that physical cleansing can help a person get over guilt from immoral behaviour.

Similarly, wiping the body clean also seems to help wipe the mind clean.

Ms Dong pointed out, though, that this study only tested the short-term effects of cleansing on goal pursuit.

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Dong & Lee et al., 2017).

The Secret To Building Exercise Habits Most People Forget

There is one thing that you need to develop an exercise habit that sticks that many people inexplicably discount.

Exercise is a difficult habit to pick up.

It is not enough just to set aside a particular period in the day and rely on willpower to follow through.

Part of the reason is that people don’t necessarily start exercising because they enjoy it.

Instead, they start exercising to lose weight or look better.

When the changes are minimal, or not what they had hoped for, then it is easy to give up.

Internal rewards key to exercise habit

New research finds that one key to getting the exercise habit is tapping in to intrinsic rewards.

Intrinsic rewards are things like the pleasure we get from the activity itself.

This could be through socialising with others, the endorphin rush, or something else.

When intrinsic, internal rewards are linked up with a particular, regular slot in the day for exercising, then the habit can flourish in the long term.

Finding the missing key, then, is all about identifying those highly personal intrinsic rewards.

What is it about the exercise that makes you feel good?

If the answer is nothing, then it is time to think about different types of exercise that do make you feel good.

For example, gyms are not for everyone, some people prefer to play sports in teams, others prefer exercising alone.

Some people like rigid goals and structure, others prefer a more free-form approach.

Find your pleasure and the habit is much more likely to stick.

Dr Alison Phillips, who led the research, said:

“If someone doesn’t like to exercise it’s always going to take convincing.
People are more likely to stick with exercise if they don’t have to deliberate about whether or not to do it.
[…]
If exercise is not habit, then it’s effortful and takes resources from other things you might also want to be doing.
That’s why people give it up.”

The study was published in the journal Sport, Exercise and Performance Psychology (Phillips et al., 2016).

Really Easy New Method For Changing Habits

Psychologists find first experimental evidence for new way of getting out of a rut.

It may be possible to deliberately ‘forget’ long-standing habits, according to new experiments carried out at Regensburg University in Germany.

According to this new research, merely telling yourself to forget about the habit after performing it may prove helpful.

This adds to the techniques for changing habits which have support from psychological research.

Two types of these are:

Quick reactions: noticing that you are performing a bad habit and changing the response.
Implementation intentions: making a specific plan in advance about how you are going to behave in a particular situation. For example, if I get hungry between meals, then eat an apple not a cake.

But what about after you’ve performed the habit you want to change? Is there anything you can do then?

In the experiment, participants were taught a habit which involved connections between words and particular responses (Dreisbach & Bäuml, 2014).

Sometimes, though, halfway through learning the habit, participants were casually told to forget what they’d learnt so far.

The results showed that deliberately forgetting about a newly formed habit affected how that habit was performed.

When people were told to forget that habit, they duly did as they were told.

Naturally, this study only tests the procedure in controlled laboratory conditions, rather than in everyday life.

Also, the habits were newly formed, rather than long-standing.

Nevertheless, the technique could prove a useful addition to the other methods of habit change that are well-established.

Image credit: frank fani

Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Paperback Out in the US

Making Habits, Breaking Habits explains how to bend habits to your will—and become happier, more creative, and more productive.

My book, Making Habits, Breaking Habits is out now in paperback in the US.

Here is the publisher’s blurb for it:

“Say you want to start going to the gym or practicing a musical instrument. How long should it take before you stop having to force it and start doing it automatically?
The surprising answers are found in Making Habits, Breaking Habits, a psychologist’s popular examination of one of the most powerful and under-appreciated processes in the mind. Although people like to think that they are in control, much of human behavior occurs without any decision-making or conscious thought.
Drawing on hundreds of fascinating studies, psychologist Jeremy Dean busts the myths to finally explain why seemingly easy habits, like eating an apple a day, can be surprisingly difficult to form, and how to take charge of your brain’s natural “autopilot” to make any change stick.
Witty and intriguing, Making Habits, Breaking Habits shows how behavior is more than just a product of what you think. It is possible to bend your habits to your will—and be happier, more creative, and more productive.”

And you can read my blurb here.

→ Check out the reviews and get the first chapter on Amazon.com.

Get the First Chapter of ‘Making Habits, Breaking Habits’ for Free

Extract: This book started with an apparently simple question that seemed to have a simple answer: How long does it take to form a new habit?

Say you want to go to the gym regularly, eat more fruit, learn a new language, make new friends, practice a musical instrument, or achieve anything that requires regular application of effort over time. How long should it take before it becomes a part of your routine rather than something you have to force yourself to do?

I looked for an answer the same way most people do nowadays: I asked Google. This search suggested the answer was clear-cut. Most top results made reference to a magic figure of 21 days. These websites maintained that “research” (and the scare-quotes are fully justified) had found that if you repeated a behavior every day for 21 days, then you would have established a brand-new habit. There wasn’t much discussion of what type of behavior it was or the circumstances you had to repeat it in, just this figure of 21 days. Exercise, smoking, writing a diary, or turning cartwheels; you name it, 21 days is the answer. In addition, many authors recommend that it’s crucial to maintain a chain of 21 days without breaking it. But where does this number come from? Since I’m a psychologist with research training, I’m used to seeing references that would support a bold statement like this. There were none.

My search turned to the library. There, I discovered a variety of stories going around about the source of the number…

→ Now click here to read the first chapter for FREE (PDF format).

~~~~~~

Kindle owners: If you would like the first chapter delivered to your Kindle device then visit Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk and click ‘send sample now’. It will be sent to you for free.

How to Banish Bad Habits and Control Temptations

Psychological research suggests bad habits can be controlled by vigilant monitoring.

Anyone who has ever found themselves trying to turn on the bathroom light seconds after phoning the power company to ask how long the power cut will last, knows how easily habits bypass our conscious thought processes.

Part of the reason habits are so difficult to change is they are triggered unconsciously, often by situations we’ve encountered time and time again. Before going into the bathroom: turn on the light. After getting new email: waste 10 minutes aimlessly surfing the web.

Temptations, on the other hand, play more on visceral factors like hunger, sex or thirst. We see a muffin and can’t resist.

New research published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Quinn et al. (2010) suggests a different strategy for changing a bad habit than for resisting a temptation.

“Don’t do it!”

First, though, the researchers wanted to find out what habit-control strategies people use in everyday life. Ninety-nine students kept diaries of their battles with bad habits and temptations. Over 7 or 14 days they recorded each time they felt like giving in to a temptation or a bad habit they were trying to get rid of.

Top of the list for unwanted activities were excess sleeping, eating and procrastination (no big surprises there in a sample of students). The top strategies to combat these were:

Vigilant monitoring: watching out for slip-ups and saying “Don’t do it!” to yourself.
Distraction: trying to think about something else.
Stimulus control: removing the opportunity to perform the habit, say by leaving the bar, fast-food restaurant or electronics store.

For strong habits it was the vigilant monitoring that emerged from self-reports as the most useful strategy, with distraction in second place. While for strong temptations rather than habits, participants reported that stimulus control was the most effective strategy while monitoring dropped to third place behind distraction.

For both weak habits and weak temptations the strategy used mattered less, although for weak temptations the monitoring strategy emerged as the best.

How to defy a bad habit

As you’ll be gathering from reading PsyBlog, though, psychologists are suspicious of what people say. Instead they like experiments to see what people do. So, in a second study they used a lab-based analogue of real life, to see if vigilant monitoring really is an effective strategy for controlling strong habits.

Sixty-five participants learned one response to a word, then in a second study had to change this response in defiance of the habit they’d built up.

Backing up the first study, the experiment found that vigilant monitoring was the most successful short-term strategy for suppressing a strong habit. Once again for weak habits the type of strategy used made little difference.

Habits versus temptations

So, why does vigilant monitoring work for habits but not for temptations? Quinn et al. argue that it doesn’t work for temptations because watching out for slip-ups heightens our attention to the temptation which we are, ironically, once again tempted by. Stimulus control, though, removes the opportunity: out of sight, out of mind.

Unlike temptations, habits are learnt by repetition and so they can sneak in under the radar. We find ourselves repeating them without thinking. Vigilant monitoring probably works because it helps us notice the habit and remember that we wanted to change it.

The bad news

But, as anyone who has ever tried to change a long-held habit will know, continually monitoring for bad habits is tiring and some days your self-control is weaker than others.

This isn’t helped by what are known as ‘ironic processes of control‘ which I cover in my series ‘10 more brilliant social psychology studies‘. This is the idea that monitoring a thought in the hope of getting rid of it only makes that thought come back stronger.

In the long-term it may be necessary to try and replace the old habit with a new one. Unfortunately this new habit is likely to be much more unstable than the old one.

I’d like to leave you with better news but sometimes it’s good to know the worst. We are often slaves to our habits and many of these habits are extremely hard to change because they are triggered outside our conscious awareness. Anyone who tells you different is either lying to themselves or trying to sell you a quick-fix that probably won’t work.

→ Continue reading: 8 Ways to Get Rid of Unwanted Negative Thoughts

Image credit: Gabriela Camerotti