Struggling to entrench habits and good behaviours?
Maintaining good habits is hard. Implementing good new habits can often feel near impossible. Fortunately, the wonderful lineup of speakers at the Habit Day conference were around to offer some tips on forming good habits, the psychology behind habits and the role of behavioural science in helping you entrench them.
Big shout-out to organisers/hosts Samuel Salzer and Peter Judodihardjo and the wonderful speakers which included David Perrott, Clare Purvis, Ashley Whillans, Wendy Wood, Scott Young, Dominic Packer, Logan Ury and Liz Fosslien.
With so many topics covered, here are a few key takeaways from the day in the hope that they make your efforts at implementing behaviour change that little bit easier!
Did you know?
Approximately 43% of everything we do is habit based!
Habits are so much more than the actions we associate them with! Habits are actually a system for learning (once entrenched they trigger an almost autopilot prompted by context and response).
We love to think we’re rational creatures and so even when it comes to habits, we overvalue our introspections (thoughts, feelings) and rationalise our behaviours and habits as intentional behaviours to feed our own narratives.
Entrenching new habits
We prioritise what we know which means we naturally resist new behaviour patterns. The level of resistance and how likely you are to succeed in implementing a habit will depend on:
Frequency
Try to flip the balance and repeat your new desired habit a lot more than your existing behaviour. If you can do so in the same environment/context over and over, it also becomes much easier to entrench as you’ll naturally look to your environment for cues or prompts to encourage that action.
Friction
The bigger the change, the greater the natural resistance and amount of effort required to overcome it. Similarly, consider how many hurdles you’d have to overcome to implement the new habit (how much temptation is working against you letting go of the old and moving onto the new). This friction can be used to help or hinder you (ie remove all junk food from the house vs hang out with friends whose idea of socialising is catching up over ice cream).
Forward momentum
There are lots of ways to help encourage you to persist.
Habits anchored to existing habits or rituals are easier to stick to as they act like building blocks on the familiar.
Rewards can encourage motivation but the type and significance of the reward needed will vary depending on the effort and desire to entrench a habit.
Willpower alone will fade when you’re stressed and mentally depleted but core values and being of service can help boost your efforts.
Find people seeking to achieve the same outcome. Collective identity sets expectations of norms so if you identify strongly with a group, you’re more likely to embody their behaviours and habits. As such, if you want to adopt a new habit, look for like-minded people to drive momentum and support you. Similarly, group norms can more strongly drive behaviour than individual perception. If you want to belong in a group, your perceived expectations of what you think those in the group desire can heavily influence behaviour.
Choosing your solution
Adding vs subtracting
When identifying your solution, consider what the outcome you’re after really is. It’s so easy to look at new activities to transform your life but before you look at what you can add to fix a problem or embed a new habit as your solution, pause to consider what you can remove and whether this may have an even greater effect. While loss aversion can tempt us to add or at least stay as we are, subtracting things (ie time wasters) can often be exactly the solution you need to get the outcome you want!
Recognising and overcoming biases & heuristics
To illustrate this point, having noted it just above, we’ll use the example of how we spend our time. Below are just a few examples of why we struggle to make good use of our time:
We value things we can see over ones we can’t (ie money vs happiness).
We value busyness more than effectiveness or productiveness.
We have a strong aversion to idleness and when busy and stressed prioritise ‘urgent’ tasks over genuinely important or value add tasks.
We struggle to enjoy our free time not just because of the guilt associated with taking time for ourselves but also because we can’t set up adequate boundaries to give ourselves enough time to enjoy ourselves without technology disrupting us.
We underestimate how much time our future selves will need to complete tasks (part of the planning fallacy) and so overcommit our future selves, discounting the value of time in the future despite likely having more tasks to complete in less time.
To overcome these psychological challenges, Ashley Whillans recommends strategies like auditing your time to identify where it’s wasted. With a wealth of research behind her, she also notes that activities that invest in social relationships and enjoyment lead to far more happiness than saving a bit of money so actively prioritising these things through time blocking and scheduling is incredibly effective. In one example discussed, actively prioritising and scheduling time for important tasks over urgent ones proved an effective strategy in a 6 week experiment which led to a 14% increase in employee efficiency. To overcome urgency challenges, she also suggests asking for more time to complete a task as despite our perception, over 30% of deadlines are actually adjustable.
The role of others
As the saying goes: no man is an island. This is especially true when it comes to our habits and behaviour patterns. So how exactly do others influence our behaviour? From social norms to cultural alignment, collective identity and problems like groupthink, the below are a few of my favourite takeaways from the day’s speakers:
Our identity is the combination of three things: our individual nature (what we think makes us unique), our relational identity (who we are relative to others ie parent/doctor) and collective identity (who we are as part of a bigger group). While 50% of our identity is usually individual, the amount can vary based on what we need most and where we’re best placed to get it (ie status, belonging, uniqueness).
When it comes to group dynamics, we often look at those who form the minority as black sheep just looking to rebel. Interestingly though, those most likely to offer dissenting views in a group are likely the ones most passionate and strongly identifying with the group. They speak out not because they feel they don’t belong but because they’re passionate about protecting and acting in the best interests of the group.
Want to better align behaviours with a desired group? Many behaviours are based on perceived rather than actual norms (we’re all great drivers and reasonable drinkers after all). The novelty/shock of realising how big a gap there is between the reality and perceived norm can therefore be a great prompt to drive behaviour change in others as they’re forced to recalibrate and reassess how the wider group behaves.
Speaking about biases and heuristics like confirmation bias, endowment effect, status quo bias and groupthink, Scott Young’s biggest recommendation was to put on your scientist/lawyer hat and examine everything sceptically and with doubt. Unfortunately, critical thinking is becoming a lost art, but with a bit of guidance and the right frameworks or nudges in place, this doesn’t have to be the case. Nominating experts, devil’s advocates, collecting points of view anonymously and keeping caps on numbers (too many cooks spoil the broth after all) are just a few of the tips he suggested for countering complacency and group dynamics gone awry.
Liz Fosslien spoke about how group identity in a workplace is solidified by micro-actions (so be mindful that you’re likely to become like the people you’ll end up working with). For those looking to transform a culture from the inside, instead of looking at drastic changes, look for little tweaks. A culture of belonging can be nurtured through little things like ensuring everyone has the opportunity and ability to be heard, having a team contract to make social norms salient and even just knowing how to pronounce someone’s name.
Which of these tips did you find most eye opening and how do you plan to use them to help you implement positive behaviour change in the future?
