Summary: Researchers debunk myths about habits, showing they are mental links between situations and actions. Habits compete with other impulses, like intentions and emotions, to influence behavior.
Forming habits aids change but doesn’t guarantee it. Effective strategies and backup plans are essential for overcoming disruptions and breaking bad habits.
Key Facts:
- Habits are mental links between cues and responses.
- Competing impulses can override habitual behavior.
- Backup plans are crucial for maintaining new behaviors and breaking bad habits.
Source: University of Surrey
By ditching ‘pop psychology myths’ about habits, we can better understand our habits and take more effective action, according to researchers at the University of Surrey.
Pop psychology tends to portray all stable behaviours as habitual, as well as implying that forming new habits will always lead to positive long-term change.
New analysis by Surrey researchers argues that a habit is simply a mental link between a situation (cue) and an action (response). When someone with a habit is in the situation, an unconscious urge prompts the action. However, whether this urge leads to habitual behaviour depends on other competing impulses that influence our actions.
Dr Benjamin Gardner, co-author and Reader in Psychology from the University of Surrey, said:
“Forming a habit means connecting a situation you often encounter with the action you usually take. These connections help by creating impulses that push us to do the usual action without thinking. But the pushes from habits are just one of many feelings we might have at any time.
“Impulses are like babies, each crying for our attention. We can only tend to one at a time. These impulses come from various sources – intentions, plans, emotions, and habits. We act according to whichever impulse demands our attention by crying the loudest at any given moment.
“Habit impulses usually cry the loudest, guiding us to do what we normally do, even when other impulses are vying for our attention. However, there are times when other impulses cry louder.”
Other impulses can overrule your habits – like cold weather derailing your habitual morning run.
The paper points out that forming a new habit creates an association that can help keep you on the right track, but it does not ensure that a new behaviour will always stick.
Dr Phillippa Lally, co-author of the study and Senior Lecturer in Psychology from the University of Surrey, said:
“Think of someone who has developed a habit of eating a healthy breakfast every morning. One day, they wake up late, leave the house without having time for breakfast, and then grab a sugary snack on their commute.
“This single disruption can make them feel like they’ve failed, potentially leading them to abandon the healthy eating habit altogether. When trying to make a new behaviour stick, it’s a good idea to form a habit and have a backup plan for dealing with setbacks, such as keeping healthy snacks on hand that you can quickly grab on busy mornings.”
As for breaking bad habits, the Surrey researchers suggest several methods.
Dr Gardner explains:
“There are multiple ways to stop yourself from acting on your habits. Imagine you want to stop snacking in front of the TV. One way is to avoid the trigger – don’t switch on the set. Another is to make it harder to act impulsively – not keeping snacks at home. Or, you could stop yourself when you feel the urge.
“While the underlying habit may remain, these strategies reduce the chances of ‘bad’ behaviours from occurring automatically.”
Dr Lally adds:
“In principle, if you can’t avoid your habit cues or make the behaviour more difficult, swapping out a bad habit for a good one is the next best strategy.
“It’s much easier to do something than nothing, and as long as you’re consistent, the new behaviour should become dominant over time, overpowering any impulses arising from your old habit.”
About this psychology and behavioral neuroscience research news
Author: Dalitso Njolinjo
Source: University of Surrey
Contact: Dalitso Njolinjo – University of Surrey
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“What is habit and how can it be used to change real-world behaviour? Narrowing the theory-reality gap” by Benjamin Gardner et al. Social and Personality Psychology Compass
Abstract
What is habit and how can it be used to change real-world behaviour? Narrowing the theory-reality gap
Habit change is often seen as key to successful long-term behaviour change. Making ‘good’ behaviours habitual—that is, ensuring a behaviour is prompted automatically on exposure to situational cues, based on cue-response associations learnt through context-consistent repetition—is portrayed as a mechanism for sustaining such behaviours over time.
Conversely, disrupting ‘bad’ habits is expected to terminate longstanding unwanted actions. Yet, some commentators have suggested that the role of habit in real-world behaviour and behaviour change has been overstated.
Such critiques highlight a gap between habit theory and the reality of human behaviour ‘in the wild’. This state-of-the-field review aims to narrow this gap.
Building on a core distinction between habit and habitual behaviour, our review seeks to offer interpretations of habit theory and evidence that will better manage intervention designers’ expectations regarding how modifying habit can realistically be expected to promote behaviour change.
We emphasise that habit is just one potential influence on behaviour at any given moment, and highlight instances in which habit may dominate over intention, and in which intention may dominate over habit, in determining behaviour frequency.
We suggest that, while it may assist behaviour maintenance, habit formation may be neither necessary nor sufficient to sustain real-world behaviour change.
We draw attention to the various ways in which habit may be ‘broken’ (i.e., disrupted), and discern the implications of each habit disruption mechanism for long-term cessation of unwanted behaviours.
