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Good Habits Bad Habits Book Summary – Wendy Wood

Tristan Alexander

What you will learn from reading Good Habits Bad Habits:

– The psychological and neuroscientific processes that underpin habit formation.

– How habits are influenced by internal and external factors.

– How to intentionally form new habits, replace old ones, and modify current habits with practical strategies and techniques.

Good Habits Bad Habits Book Summary

Good Habits Bad Habits by psychologist Wendy Wood approaches habit formation from a psychological and neuroscientific perspective, offering insights into the brain pathways responsible for habit formation and how they develop over time. The book is informative rather than a manual, providing a deeper understanding of habit behaviour. I highly recommended it to anyone seeking to comprehend habits at a deeper level.

Persistence and Change

When we make decisions, we consciously attend to relevant information and generate solutions. When we exert willpower, we actively engage mental effort and energy. Decisions and willpower draw on what we call executive-control functions in the mind and brain, which are thoughtful cognitive processes, to select and monitor actions.

When we look at successful people, we tend to attribute their success to willpower and rational thinking, whereas in fact there are multiple factors responsible for people’s behaviour and success.

Decisions and willpower are tools suited for handling change but not for making continued sacrifices that require persistence. This is because it would be highly inefficient to think every time we act.

Persistence is a result of habit and does not reflect strong attitudes and plans. It is better suited for actions that need repeating, like recycling or taking out the bins, actions where intentions dont matter very much. In fact, people who consciously report strong attitudes and plans continue with their past actions regardless.

A defining feature that makes habits so successful is that they are unaware of how the habit itself is contributing to the overall goal. However, when desires are not met or there is low motivation, our conscious minds can interfere, easily coming up with justifications for quitting.

This highlights the key to habits, persisting despite our conscious intentions to do otherwise.

This applies to both good and bad habits, as both types are underpinned by the same mechanism, it’s just they have different goals.

E.g. Going to the gym regularly vs smoking a couple of cigarettes a day.

“When habits and goals are in line, they smoothly integrate to guide our actions. We mindlessly respond to environmental cues, in a kind of bottom-up processing of the world as we find it.”

The Depths Beneath

A true habit is one that is performed automatically, without conscious direction.

While we perform habits, our minds can be thinking about something.

This means that a lot of the time we are oblivious to our own habits because we are off thinking about other things, however, now and then our conscious minds can be triggered to focus on our behaviour, allowing us to reevaluate it.

One of these common triggers is being with others, as this can make us become self-conscious and turn the spotlight inward to monitor what we would normally do without much scrutiny at all.

When assessing people’s ability to achieve goals, both personality differences and character didn’t seem to matter. Instead, it was mostly explained by their habits.

The influence of others keeps people flexible, as other people introduce variability into routines.

For example, they get sick, get promoted, and go on vacation.

43% of the time, our actions are habitual.

Habits can be almost anything, as long as it is repeated the same way each time. This emphasises the fact that habit is about how you perform an action, not what an action is.

Introspection illusion: when we think that we perform an action because of our thoughts, feelings, or intentions, rather than just out of habit. This leads to cognitive bias and an overestimation of the extent to which our actions depend on our internal states.

“We are immersed in our own sensations, emotions, and thoughts. These compelling internal experiences drown out our ability to recognise other possible influences on our behaviour, especially non-conscious influences such as our own habits.”

When choosing a reason for our behaviour, we tend to ignore or discount non-conscious influences/ drives and instead choose a conscious reason that we can explain away and use to frame ourselves in the best light.

The issue with this is that it distorts how much we think our silent habitual self contributes to our actions, and in turn, we will never learn how to properly exploit this hidden resource.

Introducing Your Second Self

The cognitive revolution refers to a shift in interest within the field of psychology.

It was discovered that our brains engage in top-down executive control, meaning our behaviour isn’t simply a response to bottom-up associations between stimuli, responses, and rewards, but is also directed by our attitudes and beliefs.

This, however, is an issue as habits were overlooked, most of the interest was directed at cognitive control and not the more simple mechanisms responsible for behaviour.

Habits reemerged in the cognitive revolution under an old Jamesian label, newly rehabilitated: automaticity.

People tend to start habits with rewards in mind, engaging in executive control to create intentions about what to do to snag that reward. However, over time, our reasons for acting become unimportant for habits and they become relatively insensitive to rewards.

“Goals and rewards, it seems, are critical for starting to do something repeatedly. They are what lead us to form many beneficial habits in the first place.”

Definition of a habit: a mental association between a context cue and a response that develops as we repeat an action in that context for a reward.

This is evident in a study that looked at how runners of different levels responded to associated words such as “running,” “track,” or “forest,” and found that frequent runners recognised the words quicker than infrequent runners, and that infrequent runners.

Suggesting that as we develop a habit, we acquire more and more associations of the context that can act as cues to trigger the action.

“A habit turns the world around you—your context—into a trigger to act.”

An interesting point about habits is that the reward that first motivated the development of the habit doesn’t need to remain relevant for the habit to be performed. Meaning that we don’t have to update our rewards as our identities and values naturally change over time. It’s enough that once upon a time, you were rewarded for an action that became a habit.

Each time we act in the same way, the memory trace incrementally strengthens until it becomes securely stored in the procedural memory. Procedural coding protects information from change, allowing us to not forget how to ride a bike regardless of how well we learn to surf.

What About Knowledge

The benefit of procedural memory is that it protects a mature habit from abstract knowledge and judgment, meaning it is less likely to be influenced by what we know.

When embarking on new actions, the brain’s associative loop, comprised of the basal ganglia, caudate nucleus, midbrain, and prefrontal cortex, lights up with heightened activity. This area is associated with self-control, planning, and abstract thought.

As these actions are repeated routinely, neural activation increases in the brain’s sensorimotor loop, comprised of the putamen in the basal ganglia, the sensorimotor cortices, and parts of the midbrain.

“Neural studies on habit can get muddled because our goal-directed and habit neural systems are interconnected, and they often work together.”

Parkinson’s attacks the motor control system in the basal ganglia, especially the putamen, meaning the ability to learn new habits and activate old ones is impaired.

A key aspect of why habits are crucial for long-term behavioural change is that they save brainpower. We are essentially on autopilot most of the time unless there’s a good enough reason to intervene with conscious thought.

When habit and decision align, you dont even recognise the habit, however, when there is conflict, then executive control is exerted over the habit itself.

E.g. driving is a habit, however, when something swerves in front of us, we engage executive control to respond accordingly.

What About Self-Control

Delay of gratification is a fundamental social-cognitive skill linked inversely to general impulsivity and directly to conscientiousness and executive control.

Self-restraint and distraction are ineffective strategies for avoiding temptations, whereas the best is stimulus control.

Most people who score high in self-control don’t report resisting desires, this is because they have acquired a habit of resisting the stimulus, so they no longer need to engage executive control.

“The good effects that we popularly ascribe to “self-control” are, it seems, more accurately captured by situational control.”

Context

Lewin’s famous equation, behaviour is a function of the person and the context/environment. To get technical, we would notate it like this: B = f(P,E).

“Whether an external force is driving or restraining, imposing friction or removing it, depends on the behaviour and forces in question.”

The simplest contextual influence is proximity, as it determines the external forces to which we are exposed to and therefore engage with.

Positive external forces can have an impact on our behaviour, however, they do not affect it as much as negative external forces.

We tend to underestimate the influence of the context and overestimate the influence of our own internal decision-making (Introspective illusion). This explains why our go-to approach is willpower and motivation.

“A belief in free will has many advantages. It gives us confidence that we can meet life’s challenges. But it also leads us to overlook the powerful influence of the physical and social worlds we inhabit.”

Repetition

Steps to habit formation:

You arrange your context.
You recognise the restraining forces, the driving forces, and the pitfalls of your introspection illusion.
Then you need to repeat.

A large element of succeeding in habit formation is trusting that the system will work.

Different behaviours required differing amounts of repetition to become automatic. We tend to learn simple behaviours faster than more complex ones. Actions with multiple components, like getting to the gym and working out, might be particularly difficult habits to pick up.

By establishing the forces that push you to repeat a habit in the same way each time, such as bigger and louder cues, you can reduce the amount of time it takes to form a habit.

“Along with the challenges of adopting new behaviours, you still have to fight off the old ones. But after a while, conflict resolution starts to favour the new behaviour.”

There are two main factors in play that help to speed up the formation of habits.

Processing speed – with each repetition the action takes less time and mental effort.
Streamlined decision-making – the more we repeat an action, the more likely we are to use it as a default action and think less about alternative options that may interfere.

Although streamlined decision-making can improve the speed at which we form habits, it can also make us overlook any other options that may be more appropriate.

If we consciously arrange our context, then we can engage in streamlined decision-making that is rooted in the best decision.

Repetition changes our experiences and perceptions of an activity as it can make it seem easier. This means we don’t have to consult our intentions as much and can just keep acting.

Reward

“Context will smooth the way, and repetition will jump-start the engine, but if you aren’t getting even a minor reward for your initial effort along the way, you won’t get that habit to start operating on its own.”

Unexpected rewards are particularly good at leading to a release of dopamine. This is known as a reward prediction error.

The bigger an unexpected reward, the more dopamine gets released (along with other chemicals), and the more efficient synapses in that pathway become in sending and receiving a signal.

“Dopamine also helps us learn from our mistakes. When we act in ways that don’t get us the rewards we were expecting, dopamine neurons decrease activity, signalling to avoid that action in the future.”

Initially, dopamine acts as a means of signalling salience or something to pay attention to, however, as we continue to pursue a habit, dopamine’s function becomes a signal for the reward, thus invigorating us to pursue action.

This means that dopamine sets a timescale to habit learning.

Studies have found that dopamine promotes habit learning for less than a minute, meaning that rewards have to be experienced right after we do something to build habit associations (context-response) in memory.

Given the reward has to occur so quickly, the most effective rewards tend to be intrinsic to a behaviour or part of the action itself.

E.g. brushing teeth and the sensation you get while doing it/ straight after.

This is why, if you can make the process of performing a habit more enjoyable then you are likely to increase that dopamine reward response.

Extrinsic rewards can also help to form good habits, however, these tend not to be built into the behaviour. A classic example of extrinsic rewards is being paid for something.

However, an issue with extrinsic rewards is that they can sometimes undermine the other reasons that may be contributing to the performance of an action.

For dopamine to do its work in forming habits, there cannot be too long of a lag between action and reward.

Dopamine responds most to uncertainty and reward prediction error, in other words, we learn the most from unusual or unexpected rewards that are bigger than or different to what we are used to.

Think of dopamine as a compass that uses a feedback mechanism of rewards to guide it.

Consistency Is For Chaos

Although variable rewards can be used to improve habit formation, variability of the action itself can weaken it. This is because variability is the enemy of stable contexts.

With a change in context cues, you have to engage in executive control and actually think about your actions.

“To our conscious minds, stable cues aren’t a big deal. Taking pills at different times of day shouldn’t matter if you’re sufficiently motivated.”

Dopamine helps to direct our attention towards the cues that got us rewards in the past by quickly sending signals to influence our reactions.

For this reason, habit cues grab our attention faster than many other aspects of our everyday contexts. However, they can also be distracting when trying to focus on something different.

Contextual cues also take on a different meaning when they are in a context that it is not associated with.

E.g. a shaving brush, soap, glass, and comb in our kitchens or living rooms.

Contextual cues can be harnessed to adopt new behaviours. By substituting an old behaviour for a similar new one, the same contextual cues can activate it.

Stacking is most successful when the new behaviour is compatible with an existing habit.

Total Control

Although variability can cause friction when building habits, this friction can also be utilised to break habits.

By making decisions that would lead to further friction to perform an action, we can in advance avoid engaging in bad behaviours.

As we have seen, behaviour change through self-control isn’t as effective as behaviour change through altering contexts. In addition to this, controlling our actions by continually fighting our desires isn’t fun.

The reason altering contexts is so effective is that we are lazy creatures that like to do what is easiest in our environments.

This emphasises a key point about habits: they are more likely to form when we act repeatedly without planning and deliberating. Then we can relinquish control to the context, allowing our actions to be cued automatically.

The four basic building blocks of habit:

Creating a stable context
Reducing friction
Making it rewarding
Repeating until it becomes automatic

Jump Through Windows

Habit discontinuity – a term that describes how our habits are disrupted by changes in context.

When habitual cues disappear, we are forced to think and make fresh decisions, this allows us to open up to change which can sometimes lead to improvements.

This discontinuity can disrupt our “just good enough” habits and make us explore newer more effective ways of doing things.

The double law of habit – repetition strengthens our tendency to act, but it also weakens our sensation of that act.

“We tend to keep doing things long after they have lost meaning for us, however, habit discontinuity can expose us to the underlying reality behind our actions.

You can create minor discontinuities with new experiences.

In new contexts, we can choose behaviours that fit with our current goals and identity, making us more genuine integrated versions of ourselves.

“Once we understand how discontinuity works, we can use these same dynamics selectively, protecting our valued, beneficial habits and altering unwanted ones.”

By understanding disruption, you will be able to:

Protect your good habits so that they can weather change.
Use disruptions to pierce your bad habits at their most vulnerable places.

The Special Resilience of Habit

Stress impairs our higher cognitive processes involved when we plan, think ahead, and flexibly act to achieve our goals.

Habits act as anchors through stressful times. While our conscious minds are drained by life, our habits thrive and even perform better as there is nothing to interfere with them.

“Just as habit discontinuities disrupt the cues to habit performance, so too does stress disrupt our conscious selves.”

The conscious mind focuses on pain, stress, and fatigue, so habits can be performed in the background.

During stress, the neural activity in the brain shifts from areas involved in decision-making and goal pursuit to areas involved in habitual responding and rewards.

It is important to note that when stressed we engage in habits, whether good or bad, the habit mechanism doesn’t discriminate.

Habits are a welcome option for older people as they dont require them to think and instead allow them to act automatically.

When we are stressed we should not despair, and instead trust the parts of us that will continue to work on our long-term problems and long-term solutions.

Happy With Habit

The mere exposure effect – refers to the phenomenon that we like things simply because we have grown used to them. It suggests that our preference is for what we are used to seeing.

By repeating an action we acquire a sense of predictability which can make our experiences less taxing on the mind and also allows us to evaluate what is happening.

Although we prefer things we have been exposed to, this effect can also distort our sense of reality as we interact with them based on our past experiences rather than the reality they convey.

“Mere exposure happens without our realizing it. When we repeat actions, our preferences change. The effects are subtle and not always apparent to our conscious minds. We think that we make decisions to act, not that our actions influence our decisions.”

This emphasises the importance of aligning our habit self with our conscious self if we want to achieve our goals.

“Habits, it turns out, are a two-way street. They achieve our goals and they become our goals, too.”

Rituals and habits differ in one important way, rituals lack a direct, immediate reward and require meaning to be imposed on them. However, considering 80% of professional athletes have reported having superstitious behaviour, it suggests that merely repeating an action may indeed serve some kind of purpose, especially in times of uncertainty and anxiety.

In fact, EEG studies have found that students who performed rituals before doing a task, responded less extremely to their errors compared to students who did not perform a ritual. Suggesting that rituals act as a buffer against distress when failing.

“The repetitive actions may satisfy our need for order and predictability. Rituals might also distract us, blocking negative thoughts and stopping us from ruminating.”

In reality, an ineffective action is ineffective, however, in our intuitive beliefs, we tend to favour actions that we repeat, regardless of how maladaptive they are.

This highlights a key point with habits, that they are partly responsible for our happiness as they reduce uncertainty and promote feelings of coherence and comprehension of our experience.

Actionable Ideas

Decisions and willpower are tools suited for handling change but not for making continued sacrifices that require persistence.

Persistence is a result of habit and does not reflect strong attitudes and plans. It is better suited for actions that need repeating.