You Can't Think Your Way Into Better Habits
Willpower and mindset won’t change your behavior, but switching your environment might
Many of us want to change their behaviors in some way—we may want to procrastinate less, eat healthier, stop smoking, or go to the gym more.
While it’s easy to beat yourself up about not having enough willpower to simply make the change, the evidence shows behavioral change is hard for pretty much everyone. Most smokers want to quit but very few succeed, most dieters regain whatever weight they lost, and anyone who has been to the gym in January knows how quickly New Year’s fitness resolutions are abandoned.
Behavioral change feels so trivial, and we often see people who don’t struggle with the same behaviors we do, so it feels easy to believe if we just had more willpower or had the right trick, we could get ourselves under control. This understandable impulse is why there’s a cottage industry of TED Talks by people promising easy solutions that will change your life. Self-help is a multi-billion dollar industry.
A big problem with the easy solutions, though, is just that: they’re easy. The idea that we just need to form the right intentions or take the right mindset feels right, and might work for a little while, but as easy as these internal changes are to make, they’re just as easy to unmake, and leave us right where we started.
One common bit of advice is to take a “growth mindset” approach to doing difficult things. The issue is, after multiple large meta-analyses, there’s not much evidence growth mindsets actually do anything. It’s worth noting studies investigating growth mindset interventions involve actually sitting subjects down and having them do an exercise like writing an essay, not just watching a Ted Talk or reading an article. This is consistent with the broader findings that behavioral interventions that target beliefs and attitudes have very small impacts on behavior.
The idea that we just need more willpower or a simple mentality shift ignores the actual determinants of behavior.
Context is King
In the early 1970s, there was a scare about the rate of opiate addiction among servicemen in Vietnam. The United States was about to withdraw 200,000 troops, and there were reports that many of them were addicted to heroin. There were media portrayals of the “Addicted Army”, and worries about what such a huge addicted population returning would mean for America.
These worries weren’t overblown—it turned out about 43% (!) of veterans admitted to using some form of opiate in the year prior to returning home. 20% of veterans were heavy enough users to experience withdrawal symptoms.
What happened when they returned home? Basically all of them just stopped using. In the year following returning home, only 1% became re-addicted.
The low rates of relapse among Vietnam veterans were initially met with disbelief, but they held up under scrutiny. Why the extreme change?
Researchers interviewed the veterans to find out what made them turn to drugs in the first place, and why they didn’t continue using when they returned home. The reasons for using them while in Vietnam were what you might guess: boredom, homesickness, and being unable to sleep. On top of that, it was cheap, others were using it, and it was easily accessible.
But on returning home, they said they didn’t re-engage with it because they feared being arrested and knew it was strongly disapproved of by friends and family.
The returning vets didn’t just go home and not receive any help—those that tested positive for opium in their urine were given a 2-week detox period before they were allowed back.
But the relapse rate among inpatient centers treating people with addictions is extremely high—one study estimated the relapse rate of opiate users at 91%. This isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison with the Vietnam veterans (the form and frequency of use among the populations likely differed, for one thing), but it highlights how hard this change is. Removing the physiological cravings isn’t enough to prevent falling back into old patterns when you’re returned to the same context you initially started using an addictive substance in.
The difference between people treated at centers for their addictions and the returning soldiers is the complete shift in context for the soldiers. The incentives (social approval/disapproval) changed, the problems they were trying to solve (boredom) changed, and so did the friction (cost and accessibility) of acquiring drugs.
The Path of Least Resistance
For the returning veterans, opium wasn’t as easily accessible back home. If they sought it out they needed to find a new source, and it was more expensive. There were a bunch of new barriers to jump through, so only those very motivated to get drugs would jump through them.
Compare this to people coming home from a treatment clinic—they already know how to get the drug. There may be no change in how difficult it is to obtain opiates when they return.
Our environment sets which behaviors are easier or harder. Part of the difficulty with many of the behaviors we would like to be doing more of—eating healthier, cheaper meals made at home instead of eating out, or starting a gym routine—is that the alternative is just too easy. It’s always easier to just not go to the gym.
We often take the path of least resistance—especially when we’re stressed or busy. But one of the nice things about this is that we can change the relative friction of different paths.
Those that have fruits and vegetables around the house tend to eat fruits and vegetables at meals. This is obvious, but what you buy at the store during your weekly grocery trip affects what is easy and accessible all week. Similarly, if you prep lunches for the full week, you’ve changed the relative friction between eating a home-made lunch versus eating out.
The same principles hold for other behaviors we want to change. Many of us use our phones more often than we would like. People claim it’s an addiction, but the real problem is the lack of friction. Phones provide entertainment and are incredibly frictionless. They’re with you at all times, you can simply whip it out and start scrolling any time you’re the slightest bit bored. Turning on the TV to watch Netflix is a gargantuan task compared to phone use.
It’s no surprise, then, that studies show increasing the friction to using your phone leads to lower phone use. Apps that introduce a brief delay before an app opens reduce the time spent in those apps. Hard lockout apps don’t seem to work as well as ones that add friction to actions taken, for the simple reason that usually they have some frictionless way of dismissing them.
Anecdotally, people talk about scrolling their phones when they wake up in the morning and fixing that by just leaving their phones somewhere they can’t reach from bed. No one is going to get out of bed, get their phone, and get back in bed. When you add friction to the phone-in-bed habit, you reduce the behavior.
More broadly, research on the efficacy of various policy-level interventions meant to promote public health show that policies that promote access (i.e. reduce friction) have the largest effect, while policies that target knowledge or beliefs have limited to no impact.
This isn’t to say that our behavior is all determined by whatever is easiest. But especially with long-term, ongoing behaviors, you have to consider what you default to when stressed or not thinking about it. Which leads us to another major determinant of our behavior: habits.
Habitual Creatures
It’s a cliche to say that we’re creatures of habit, but… we’re creatures of habit.
Habits are associations between a context and a response. Given a specific context we do a specific habit without much thought. When I wake up, I grab some clothes from my dresser, head downstairs, make tea, and then come to my office to do some writing. Typically I don’t consciously deliberate about any of these things.
When context is stable, our past behavior becomes very predictive of our future behavior. A time-use study found that 43% of the time, college students were doing something they do everyday and usually in the same location. Many of these behaviors were things like hygiene, getting ready for the day, getting ready for the night. Most of the time while doing these behaviors, the students were thinking about something else. This leads to one of the benefits of habits: when you automate behavior, you don’t think about them, so you free your mind up for other things.
Habits are a double-edged sword. Because they’re reflexive and based on context, without a change in your context they push you toward habitual behavior. We tend to fall back on habits in times of stress—when we’re preoccupied, we rely on the automated responses we have.
If the habits we have are aligned well with what we want, they can keep us doing those actions without thinking about it. If you go to the gym three times a week, and have an established routine around it, you’re more likely to keep doing it even if work is suddenly stressful. But if our habits are in conflict with what we want, they can work against us—if you’re trying to quit smoking, but have a habit of taking a smoke break at a particular time, when life gets stressful you’re more likely to fall back on that habit. Your mind is too preoccupied to go against the flow of the automated routine.
Habits don’t rule all of our behavior. Our conscious intentions are important determinants of many behaviors. Making an intention more specific, like writing down a plan, makes people more likely to do things like get vaccinated or vote.
But the hard thing about many of the behaviors we want to change is that they are ongoing. Research has shown that intentions are strong predictors of one-off or occasional actions, but not actions that are ongoing. Motivation and intentions are fleeting, and rarely keep us doing something long enough to actually drive lasting change in our habits.
Easy tricks that change your intentions or attitude can help for the short term but not the long-term. Reviews of interventions designed to promote healthy behaviors all seem to have the same message: it’s pretty easy to get people to exercise regularly or eat healthier during the intervention, but when you check back in later it’s rare these new habits “stuck”.
A recent megastudy targeted 61,293 members and used 30 scientists to design 54 different four-week programs or interventions to encourage exercise. While almost half of these interventions led to small increases in gym visits during the 4-week intervention period, this shrunk to almost nothing looking at the 10 weeks that followed the intervention.
Long-term weight loss is difficult. Study after study shows a specific trajectory of calorie-restriction interventions: an initial loss, followed by a gradual regaining of weight. The reason is pretty simple: appetite increases during weight loss. You have all of the normal environmental factors that lead to obesity in the first place—our environments tend to be low activity, high calorie food is abundant. Researchers have suggested that with the increased appetite, there may be a slow, unconscious drift up in consumed portion sizes. They go on to say:
Long term behavioral changes and obesity management require ongoing attention.
[...]
The importance of long-term intervention has been codified in the obesity treatment guidelines, which state that weight loss interventions should include long term comprehensive weight loss maintenance programs that continue for at least 1 year.
Despite what you might hear in a TED Talk or in a self-help book, there isn’t some simple way of changing your mentality to suddenly approach everything differently. If there was, behavioral scientists would have found it and the failure rate of obesity interventions wouldn’t be so high.
There’s an idea that some people just need more self-control. If they could just overcome those temptations, they would be better off, and perhaps they can develop self-control like a muscle.
Unfortunately that’s not how things work. It isn’t the in-the-moment self-control that drives successful outcomes, but “trait self-control”—which turns out to be the same thing as conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is a personality trait characterized by organization, dutifulness, and goal-directed behavior. Those with high conscientiousness actually engage in less moment-to-moment self-control. It isn’t that they’re better at resisting temptation, they’re better at avoiding it altogether. And unfortunately, we don’t know any good way of changing conscientiousness for the long-term, so if you’re hoping to become more conscientious so you can change your behaviors long-term, behavioral science can’t do much.
Our environmental context creates our incentives, the friction to doing things, and contains the cues that drive our habits and routines. This might all sound pessimistic, as if we’re all helplessly driven by our environment. But we have a lot of control over our environment. Our motivation is probably better spent shaping the environment, because we are finite creatures with finite attention. When motivation inevitably fades, we’ll be left with whatever context we’ve shaped.
Change and Fresh Starts
It’s possible to change your behavior through internal changes, but they’re not easy. Cognitive behavioral therapy involves working with an experienced therapist over a period of time to reshape our habits of behavior or thinking. It takes multiple sessions and is personalized. Inner changes are hard and require time, support, and sustained effort.
As leading habit researcher Wendy Wood puts it:
[C]hanges in intentions, beliefs, and attitudes have little long-term impact on habitual responses. Enduring changes require directly influencing behavior performance through intensive therapeutic interventions or structural changes of new reward systems, context shifts, and friction on unwanted responses.
Changing the reward systems, context cues, and friction in our environments can be hard—if it were easy, behavioral change would be easy and everyone would do it (and there would be no more money for those hawking easy “fixes”). For the addicted Vietnam veterans, all of these things changed for them simply by going back home. The rest of us are unlikely to have a similarly disruptive event happen, but we can create or take advantage of smaller scale opportunities in our own lives.
Big life changes, like getting married, starting a new job, or moving, all lead to new routines and contexts. These changes open up an opportunity where habit formation is more directly related to our intentions. Successful attempts to change behavior more often involve moving to a new home than unsuccessful ones. So it seems possible to take advantage of these transitions to set up routines and habits better aligned with our goals.
Moving (or getting married) just for the sake of shaking your life up enough to establish new habits probably isn’t a great solution. But we also mentally think of certain temporal landmarks as opportunities for “fresh starts”. It’s been suggested that events like New Year’s lead to a motivational boost (and aspirational “New Year’s resolutions”) because they give a landmark to relegate past imperfections to. This mental accounting might give an opportunity to change our context.
.jpg){kind=link}
Of course, this is an easy “inner change”, hence the quick decline in gym attendance past January. But these boosts in motivation, wherever they come from, can still help, since attitude shifts can lead to new habit formation. They need to lead to repeating a behavior enough in a stable enough context for it to become the routine. You can’t rely on motivation alone to perform a behavior indefinitely, but you can use it to change your context to improve your chances of doing it enough for it to stick.
The goal is to make changes to your environment that are costly to undo. If you automate savings, cancel a subscription, or remove an app on your phone, you now have to actively do something to set the undesired behavior as your “default”. Eliminate friction from things you want to do, add friction to things you don’t want to do, and make those changes costly (in effort, time, or money) to reverse.
Anything that you make costly to reverse is going to pull you in the right direction. Contrast this with easy fixes like “taking the right mentality” or “forming an intention”: these are easy to reverse. They offer no friction against changing your behavior back, and that backsliding is sure to happen as soon as you need your attention on something else.
All of this is easier said than done. If there was an easy way to change context to encourage healthier habits, it would be known by now and we wouldn’t continue to see such weak effects in studies of behavioral interventions. But what’s more important is to ignore the stuff that doesn’t work—no single neat trick is going to change your behavior. Sheer motivation or willpower likely won’t get you there. Changing your context—so you don’t face the same habits and frictions that shaped your behavior in the first place—might.
If you enjoyed this, please hit the “Like” ❤️ button, restack, or share this article to help others find it.
If you enjoy Cognitive Wonderland, consider supporting it by becoming a paid subscriber at whatever level feels comfortable for you.
If you’re a Substack writer and have been enjoying Cognitive Wonderland, consider adding it to your recommendations. I really appreciate the support.
What I especially liked here is that it shifts the conversation from morality to architecture.
So much failed behavior change gets interpreted as weakness, lack of discipline, or some defect of character, when often the deeper problem is that a person is trying to sustain a fragile intention inside an environment that is constantly training them in the opposite direction.
That feels important not only psychologically, but humanly. We become harsher with ourselves when we mislocate the difficulty. A badly designed context can look, from the inside, like a badly designed self.
“How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.” - Annie Dillard