This morning I was backing out of my driveway thinking about about how much of our behavior is “automatic,” when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a woman on the sidewalk, who had stopped to let me by. “How ironic,” I thought. “Here is the very example of the danger of operating on “autopilot” that I want to write about, and I could have easily fallen prey to it, if this pedestrian had paying as little attention to her surroundings as I was.”
We are all aware that much of our daily lives are governed by this kind of automatic behavior. Most of us don't have to consciously think about how to fry an egg or what route to take to work, and if by chance, we have a doctor's appointment first thing in the morning, we might find ourselves going in the wrong direction, as our brain automatically directs us to drive off to work as usual.
It's a very convenient function of our brains until the moment when we back out of the driveway and don't notice the cyclist behind us, and we find that habit has gotten us into serious trouble.
But even if we have a potential near miss, like I did this morning, it's unlikely that our vigilance will last very long. Within a day or so, backing out of the driveway will become as habitual as it always has been, and we won't be giving much conscious thought to doing it.
In fact, a study conducted at Duke University found that about 45% of our decisions are primarily based on habit rather than a conscious consideration of possible pros or cons.
Retailers know this and target the young accordingly to take up smoking, prefer Coke to Pepsi, and establish a thousand other little habits that will affect how much they consume and what brands they buy.
Recognizing that we are creatures of habit, however, does not mean that we are prisoners of habit. We can break patterns of behavior that are harmful, like giving up smoking or alcohol, and we can even create new habits, like going to the gym every weekend or drinking mineral water instead of soda.
In recent years there has been an explosion of research in neurology and psychology about habitual behaviors and an equal upsurge in the number of statisticians and programmers engaging in “predictive analytics” to exploit these behaviors. A detailed and rather scary article about how Target does this appears in the February 16th edition of The New York Times Magazine.
The author of the article, Charles Duhigg, has a book called The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business forthcoming from Random House on February 28th, and I am eager to read it in full. But what I found so fascinating in his article was his description of how habits are formed and how they can be broken.
In essence, the operation of any habitual behavior is relatively simple. The brain is stimulated by a particular cue (a location, a time of day, an emotion, interactions with other people) and that triggers the desire for a particular reward that the brain associates with this cue. What happens in between is that our brains prompt us to engage in a certain routine behavior that repetition has led us to believe will lead to the reward we are seeking.
Duhigg gives his own example of how he broke his 3:00 p.m. cookie break when he realized it was contributing to gaining a fair amount of weight over the years.
The cue for this habit was easy to identify. Every day around the same time, Duhigg felt the craving for a cookie. The way he satisfied this craving was to go up to the cafeteria, buy a cookie, and spend time chatting with colleagues while he ate it.
It might seem obvious that the sweetness of the cookie was the reward. But Duhigg recognized that there were other factors associated with his routines, so he set out to explore various hypotheses to test what he was really craving. One day he took a walk instead of buying a cookie, on another he went to the cafeteria but only talked to colleagues, and on yet another, he bought a cookie but took it back to his desk to eat.
It didn't take him long to realize that the real reward he was seeking was conversation. Every day around 3:00 p.m. he wasn't actually hungry; he was bored and restless. Once he figured this out, he was able to create a new habit that involved going over to chat with a colleague for a few minutes and then returning to his desk. He didn't miss the cookie at all, and he lost weight.
As Duhigg explains:
Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically.
As a example of creating a positive habit, Duhigg talks about how members of a health insurance plan were encouraged to exercise, but a smaller set of them were also taught about habit formation as well. The results were dramatic. Those who left themselves a visual cue every morning (putting their tennis shoes next to their bed or packing a gym bag) – and a specific reward (a treat or a record showing their progress) had far more success in establishing an exercise routine than those who didn't receive the training on how to change or form a habit.
We often think about changing habits in terms of willpower, making it a moral or ethical issue, when research increasingly demonstrates that habits are dependent on the pursuit of pleasure and the way our brains have become wired to seek it.
For example, over the past month or so, I've been trying to establish an exercise habit, and it's working. But Duhigg's article gives me insight into why I've been successful at creating one habit but not so successful at obtaining my goal in exercising: to take off the extra pounds I've put on in my 40s.
For me, the rewards of exercise are simple: I almost always do it with someone, whether it's my husband, or in a class, or with a friend, and the sociability I associate with exercise makes me feel just as good as the endorphins my body produces.
But when it comes to figuring out what to put in my mouth, or when to keep my mouth shut when my kids are trying to provoke me, it's much harder to change my habitual response. Am I stressed? Then it must be time for some sweets. Tired? Coffee, no, make that a latte. Impatient that my kids arent taking out the trash? Repeat myself, only louder.
Sure, I could reach for an apple instead of a granola bar, or order the decaf version of my drink, or count to ten, and maybe check to see if they're playing video games or in the bathroom.
But sometimes I just don't care enough to ignore the habitual response.
Maybe changing some habits does come down to willpower. But I'll have to think about that for another blog.
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