The Psychology of Habits (Archive Episode)

0:00Hello. Thank you for downloading Everything Psychology. This is an archive recording from last year of some of the most popular episodes that maybe you haven't heard. I'm now busy recording brand new episodes which I'll release in the spring. And if there's any topic you'd like me to cover, then please email me directly on paul at everythingspsychology.com. I hope you enjoy the show. Coming up in this episode...

0:30In a way, it's quite liberating if you recognise that many of your own behaviours are habits, because that means sometimes some of the things that you do that you think, oh, I really shouldn't do that, and you feel guilty about them, well, they are actually habits. So, you know, you shouldn't feel so guilty. The main thing that people realised was they leave their phones in their rooms, and so they get into bed and get onto their phones. So the simple act of just leaving your phone outside the room can be really helpful. It removes that temptation. A parent is worried about their teenage daughter constantly being on her phone,

1:04scrolling through endless reels on TikTok and Instagram, and they would like to do something about it. Well, that's a tricky one. Could the young but realise how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits? They would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. That was a quote from father of psychology William James, writing in his book Principles of Psychology in

1:341895. James viewed habits as being the fundamental building blocks of what makes people who they are. But do we really understand what habits are today? We often hear people talk about wanting better habits, or their desire to break their bad habits. We even celebrate habits as having the power to make us more productive, more healthy, or even raise happier children. Books that claim to have the secret to harnessing habits, such as atomic habits,

2:07or the power of habits, go on to sell in their millions. So habits are both big business, as well as big in behaviour. But is what we hear and read about habits accurate? Are they something we should be aiming to harness? And do they really hold the key to the more perfect version of you? To help guide me through the world of habits and habitual behaviour, I am delighted to be joined by Professor Ben Gardner from the University of Surrey. Ben has studied habitual behaviour for over 15 years,

2:40and has published in excess of 180 papers on the subject. And he is the founder and co-director of the Habit Application and Theory Group. Hello, Ben. Hello. So let's start by separating fact from fiction. Is what people think of a habit true? And if not, what is it? Well, that's the killer question, isn't it? I mean, that's really what's kind of driven my entire career to date, is to try and work out what do we even mean by habit.

3:10And I should say that, first of all, I mean, there is no right or wrong definition. There are different definitions out there. There are different ways in which people use it. But you can roughly distinguish between habits, as it's often used in the public domain, to mean something that someone does in a kind of repeated way or a stable, settled pattern way. Or you can see habit as the psychologist sees it. And the psychologist sees a habit as a behaviour or a...

3:41Well, actually, the psychologist sees a habit as an association that we've formed between a situation or a trigger in our environment and the behaviour that we do when we encounter that trigger. So to give you an example, when I come down from my bedroom in the morning, the first thing I'll do is empty the dishwasher because I've put my dishwasher on overnight. It's a very simple habit. When I enter my kitchen, the first thing I do is go to my dishwasher. Now, you could see that as being a habit in that it's something I do frequently.

4:13It's something I do repeatedly. But to a psychologist, the reason that I'm doing it is because I've learned that as soon as I enter my kitchen, having come down from my bedroom in the morning, there is that kind of... That triggers this association that I've learned between entering the kitchen and doing the behaviour of emptying the dishwasher. And the reason that this is useful is that when you have these kind of associations, they allow you to do the behaviours that you normally do. They allow you to do them without thinking about what you're doing. I don't need to think, what shall I do now? I've just arrived in my kitchen.

4:45I arrive in my kitchen and I go straight to the dishwasher because it's something I always do. And that allows me the kind of thinking space to think about other things. I can be thinking about my day ahead. I can be thinking about a particularly challenging task or maybe something I watched on TV. Last night. But the point is, I can do that behaviour without having to think about it. Okay. So as you said, from a psychologist's perspective, are you saying habit is the process, not the behaviour? Well, I've struggled with this myself.

5:15And as I said, there's no right or wrong.

5:19I think the best way to think about it is the process that happens here. So let's go with this example of I arrive in my kitchen, I then go to my dishwasher. What's happened is, in the past, I would have arrived in my kitchen and thought, oh, I should go and do this behaviour. I should go and empty my dishwasher. So I had to put some thought into it. But then when I did that behaviour, it kind of satisfied the goal that I had. I needed to empty the dishwasher. So it ticked that box. And it meant that next time when I entered my kitchen in the morning, I decided to do the same thing.

5:49Now, at that point, there's conscious thought going into it, thinking, what should I do? But as this association develops, so it becomes something you can do without having to think about it. Merely entering the kitchen triggers me to go to the dishwasher because I have this very simple association that says, when I enter the kitchen in the morning, I will go and empty the dishwasher. Now, there's disagreement within psychology regarding how we should define habit. There is one school of thought that says habit should be seen as the behaviour that's done.

6:21It should be the emptying or the opening of the dishwasher because that's been triggered by an association. There's another argument that says, actually, habit should be seen as the association itself. So the habit here is the association between arriving in the kitchen, opening the dishwasher. And then a third argument is that habit should be used to describe the entire process, whereby going into a situation triggers an association which triggers the behaviour.

6:52Now, I've kind of flitted between seeing it as a process or seeing it as an association, but I think it's important not to see it as a behaviour. Because once you start defining habit as a behaviour, you then get into all sorts of kind of logical peril in that we talk about doing something out of habit. And if you're defining the habit as something you do, you can't say, I do something out of habit because you're then saying, I do something because I usually do something. It's got no true meaning to it. It's tortological in the end. Exactly.

7:22Seeing it as a process or seeing it as an association frees habit from behaviour and allows us to think about it as something that causes behaviour rather than being behaviour itself. So I'm kind of agnostic when it comes to defining it. I'm happy to see it as a process or to see it as an association. We're essentially talking about the same thing. It's just, do you prefer to define the association as the habit or do you want to see the entire process within which the association is a kind of core part as the habit?

7:52I see. Yes. But at the end of the day, the way that I think a lot of people think about habit is the behaviour, isn't it? They call that the behaviour, the habit. Whereas what you're saying really is just separate that behaviour away from the process or the situation, the cue, to from the action and the behaviour. Yes. And many people do see the behaviour as a habit. And that's fine if you want to do that. But as I said, once you start thinking about it and once you start trying to study habits,

8:25what they are and how they affect behaviour, seeing habit as a type of behaviour causes all sorts of problems. Now, here's an example.

8:33Years ago, there used to be a programme on TV. I think it was called The Biggest Loser. People would go away to, people who were kind of struggling with their weight would go away to a boot camp. They'd be put on a strict diet. They'd have to do loads of exercise. And then at the end of the show, you'd see that they'd lost loads of weight and they'd be saying, I'm much happier now. You'd see them wheeling their suitcase home. And that's the end of the show. Now, if you'd asked people about their behaviour at the point that they'd left the boot camp, if you're seeing habit as behaviour, you'd think, well, they've broken their habits because

9:06actually they're no longer doing the behaviours that cause the problem. They're no longer overeating. They're not eating a high calorie diet. They're doing lots of exercise. Therefore, they have changed their habits. But actually what happens is once these people go home and once they're re-exposed to their old cues, well, this can trigger those problematic behaviours again. Though if you're only treating the behaviour as the habit, it can look like you've broken the habit. But if you treat habit as an association that can trigger behaviours, well, then you know that even though the behaviour may have changed, there may still be something there.

9:38You've still got that association and that can trigger kind of relapse in the future. So I think there are lots of interesting examples of where you can actually have a habit, yet you don't necessarily act on it. And I think it's only once you start to separate out habit from behaviour that you can even entertain the notion of having a habit that you don't act on. Yes. OK. And we're sort of talking semantics already in the terms of habitual behaviour, habits, what have you. What about routine? Is routine different to habit?

10:09Again, there's no right or wrong, but I think generally speaking, psychologists would see a routine as a kind of sequence of behaviour or behaviours. That sequence can be triggered by one or more habits, or there may be some kind of flexibility within that routine as well. So let's say, for example, you could think of a fairly kind of abstract routine, how you get to work. Now, if we think about habits as things that we do automatically or associations that trigger

10:42us to do things automatically without needing to think about what we're doing, it's highly unlikely that you get to work. You know, you leave your home and you get to work with no idea of what you're doing, having made no choices whatsoever. Habit can't really get you that far. It can help you with many of the decisions. But let's say you get to the railway station and you find, well, my train's been delayed. OK, well, you have to do something different. Or maybe, you know, there's someone sitting in the usual seat where you sit on the train or, you know, there are all sorts of things that can come up. But at that point, you then need to kind of focus on what you're doing, you know, get

11:17back into the flow of that routine. But still, you would say you've done your morning commute routine. So I see a routine as a kind of sequence of behaviours where habit probably plays some role in that. But a habit is not the same as a routine. A habit is an input into a routine. A habit is something that can sustain or help people progress through a routine. But I don't think they're the same concept. This is what I've been trying to do throughout my career is to really narrow down and define what these concepts mean in a way that is meaningful and helpful for helping us to understand

11:49our own behaviour. I'm interested in your research. As I said, in the introduction, you've been conducting a huge amount of research into habits over the past 15 years. Can you give some sort of highlights of the experiments that you feel stand out? And that would be interesting for the listeners to hear about. One thing that I've always struggled with is a lot of research that was done into habits in the 1990s was done into real world habits was done in the domain of travel mode choice.

12:19So how do people choose how to get to work? And there was a lot done on car use being habitual. And this was when I came to the field, I just thought, you know, I kind of understand it, but I don't fully understand it in that, as I said, you don't really get to work and think, how did I get here? If a habit is something you do without thinking, well, you must be thinking when you're driving, for example, there has to be some level of thought. You can't do the entire thing on autopilot. And probably about 10 years into my career, I finally kind of satisfied my, you know,

12:57I resolved this issue in a way that I was satisfied with in distinguishing between what I call an instigation habit and an execution habit. Now, what this means is for something like driving to work, an instigation habit is where you have an association that means that it triggers you to kind of habitually decide to do something. So you do that behavior without having to make a decision that you want to do that behavior. So it's time to go to work.

13:27So you get into your car. You don't have to think, how shall I get there? You get into your car because it's what you normally do. So that triggers a kind of an episode of behavior. We can think of that behavior as, you know, driving to work. So instigation habits are about triggering a kind of episode of behavior. Execution habits, on the other hand, are more akin to routines. These are much lower level habits or kind of triggers that come up within a routine that can get you through that routine. So something like driving to work, once you've made that decision, whether out of instigation

14:02habit or deliberatively, once you've made that decision to drive to work, you then have to do a series of actions. You have to leave your home. You have to lock the door. You have to get into, you know, open the car door. You have to get into the car. You have to put your seatbelt on. So within that episode, I would see execution habits as being the very minor triggers and associations that get you through that. So automatically, when you've got into your car, that triggers you to sit down. Sitting down triggers you to habitually put your seatbelt on.

14:32Having put your seatbelt on triggers you to start the car and so on. So I think this instigation and execution habit distinction is really important because it helps us understand the ways in which a behavior may be habitual.

14:48You know, is the behavior habitual in that you're triggered to start doing it automatically? Or is it something that once you've started doing it, whether you've been triggered to do it automatically or not, you can do it in a way that means you don't have to think about what you're doing? And that's been really useful because within the literature, there has been, there's been these kind of different ways of thinking about habits. There's been research showing that people can do habitual behaviors without thinking. And then there's also been literature talking about how people can, you know, commit to doing something without thinking about it as well.

15:18And I think they're slightly different things. I think we need to distinguish between the habit that triggers a sequence and then the multiple kind of smaller mini habits that help you through that sequence. And going, sorry, to go back to your question, we did a piece of research about 10 years ago now where we simply asked people to report on how habitual the decision to engage in physical activity was for them. You know, how automatically did they decide to do physical activity? And then how automatically did they actually do physical activity?

15:52And the main thing that was important was those two. Yes, they were, they were kind of related to each other, but they were separate things. And what this means is you can have a habit for deciding to do something, yet you might do that thing in a kind of more mindful way. Or you can deliberately choose to do something. So you start doing it non-habitually, but then you actually execute it or do it in a habitual way. And I think that for me has been a real kind of, yeah, it's unlocked doors in terms of understanding habits. So like you were given the example of your dishwashing habit in the morning, you said you

16:25started that as a intentional, mindful thing to do because you wanted to clear the dishes, get that out of the way. But that became a habit. Yeah, that, yes, that is a behavior that became a habit because I'd repeatedly done it. But I think going back to the instigation and execution thing, you know, if you apply that to the dishwasher example, when I get through my kitchen door in the morning, that triggers an episode of emptying the dishwasher. Yes, okay, it's only got a few steps involved, but it's still a multi-step behavior.

16:59You know, you don't just instantly do it. I have to walk towards the dishwasher, open the thing, take the cutlery and take the dishes out and so on. And the instigation execution thing will play out here in that it's the most crucial part for me is the going through the door, arriving in the kitchen. That triggers the sequence. But then I do have multiple mini habits within that particular sequence of, you know, first I do the, I don't know, the bowls and then I do the cutlery or whatever it is. Um, but the important thing that we've found in our research is the habits that people should

17:30focus on are the habits that trigger a kind of episode of action. That's the most important thing. And that has really profound implications. So if, for example, you want to go to the gym to get, to get fit, um, or, you know, be more active, it's not necessarily the case that you have to find a routine and do things in a routine way in the gym. Actually, the habit that you've got to form is the habit of starting to go towards the gym. Once you've formed that instigation habit that says, for example, I don't know, when it's your lunch break at work, you will go to the gym.

18:01If you start doing that, it triggers that sequence of behavior and it, it really just kind of kickstarts the whole thing. So we think that instigation habits are the most important form of habit for getting people to do behaviors. OK, could the perception of the series of actions, the execution behaviors, put people off the instigation? And I'm thinking of an example. I worked with Sustrans a few years ago and they were very keen on basically motivating

18:34people to cycle to work, to choose to take the bike to work instead of choosing to take their car to work with the idea of if they can form a habit in that, then people will consistently do it. But what we found when we interviewed people was, was that they had the intention as in they really wanted to. They thought it was healthier for them. They thought it was better for the environment. They really felt that this behavior was something they should be doing. But then they thought ahead and went, what if it's raining when I come home? It might be nice now, but later on.

19:04So I have to take all of this gear. I'm sweaty when I get to work and I haven't got a shower. So all these little sort of execution behaviors that would have to go along the way actually put them off from the instigation behavior in the first place. Is that something you found in the research? I mean, that's a broader issue that, yeah, once, you know, you can lead a horse to water and all that. You can get someone to start doing something. But if once they've started doing it, they have an unsatisfactory experience of it, then yes, they're not going to want to keep doing it.

19:36But actually, I mean, the instigation execution distinction is helpful for differentiating between different types of habits. But you're right. If you want to form an instigation habit, then actually you've got to make sure that you can do the behavior in a way that is satisfactory to you. You know, if, for example, you do want to go to the gym more, as I said, the most important thing is to form that habit for leaving the house or leaving wherever you are and starting to go towards the gym. But then if once you're in the gym, you know, you find a horrendous experience where you're not going to want to keep doing that. Well, you don't know how to use the machines.

20:07Are they just too complicated? Exactly. So I think the instigation execution distinction is more helpful for thinking about the habits that you've got. I think when it comes to forming habits, I think the instigation execution distinction is important for identifying which one may kind of unlock the most success in terms of encouraging you to most frequently do it. But yeah, it's really important to make sure that you have a pleasant experience of doing that behavior. Otherwise, you won't continue doing it. You know, habits are built on repetition and you won't repeatedly do something if it doesn't

20:40kind of help you or you don't find it satisfactory or enjoyable in some way. Yeah. And that becomes a reinforce at the end of the day, doesn't it? You know, positive reinforcement or negative punishment on the other side of it. And that sort of leads me to the thinking about, I know BJ Fogg talks about tiny habits and the way that he talks about habits, especially for people who are wanting to, you know, take on healthier lifestyle. Maybe you want to go jogging in the morning and that's the thing you set yourself. I can do that. I have the time.

21:11Instead of lying around in bed until I have to get up and go to work, I'm going to go for a jog. So he says, instead of going for a jog for the first sort of two weeks almost, get yourself in the trainers and your jogging kit, go to the front door, stand out on the porch and then come back in, take your trainers off, have a shower, go to work. Don't actually go ahead and do the jogging aspect. And his reasoning is that the pain you feel, especially if you're somebody who hasn't run for a long time in their life, going for a run is going to be difficult.

21:44You're going to be out of breath. It's going to hurt. And if you have that punishment associated with the behaviour too early, as well as getting up at a time of the day that is not usual for you, you should start getting into the habit of getting up at, let's say, 6am, which you don't normally do. And then get your body used to that. But there's no pain associated with that. And then later introduce the pain in there. What's your thoughts on that? Yeah, I agree with that principle.

22:15I mean, whether or not you would do that specific sequence, I think exactly what you do when you're trying to form a new habit will have to be tailored to you. So for me, for example, I've always been relatively fit and healthy. So if I wanted to start up a running habit, I wouldn't be satisfied at just putting on, you know, trainers are standing by the door and so on. But I think, as you said, for someone who may not have been running for some time or, you know, who would feel that pain, yes, that's going to be important because you don't want to make it a painful experience for someone.

22:45But I think what really stood out for me and what you were just saying is this notion of, you know, trying to find the key habit that will unlock everything else. And I think that idea of, you know, getting up early, for example, that may be the key habit that for a lot of people means that they will do physical activity actually chimes with with my own personal experience, because for, well, three years now, I've I've had a habit of waking up early to do a workout before anyone else's is up in my house.

23:15And yeah, I think the key thing that that got that up and running is that I would I would set an alarm, and then I would get up at that particular time. So actually, you know, I can vary what I do within this particular routine. Sometimes I don't even do it in the morning, I'll get up early. And then I think, actually, I've got something else to do. And I'll push it to a later, you know, push my workout to a later time. But I think that idea of, you know, working with that one particular behavior of for me,

23:45it's waking up early, you know, working with that and forming that as I think what Charles Duhigg calls a keystone habit, I think that's really important. And what those habits will be what those kind of key behaviors will be will differ for different people. I mean, for some people, it may not even be about setting an alarm because they may press snooze on their on their alarm when it when it when it goes off, it may be the action of putting their alarm in a kind of inaccessible place on the other side of the room so that when it goes off, you have to get up and do that. And maybe that works for them, because once they've got up,

24:20you know, that that will trigger this sequence of behavior. But yeah, I think that idea of find the right behavior for you that will unlock progress. I think that's really important. And what did you call that again? I mean, you said Charles Duhigg calls it the keystone behavior and you called it the something else. Yeah, no, sorry. Duhigg calls it the keystone habit, the idea of if you can work with this one behavior that will unlock progress in in other areas. Another example is, you know, there's there's been research done on leaving your gym bag by the door in the morning, you know, last thing at night, so that in the morning, it's there and

24:52it makes it more accessible. And so you're more likely to go to the gym and so on. But those keystone habits are all important. Yeah. And then that also then leads me into think about willpower. And I think a lot of people talk about habits in in in relation to adopting new, healthier behaviors like we've been talking about. But what role does willpower play, if any, in adopting new behaviors?

25:16Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, I'm, I'm trying not to get into the whole notion of what do we even mean by willpower? I have had lots of conversations about can we try and define willpower? But I mean, if we understand it as you know, what psychologists call self regulation, the ability to translate your your kind of desires, your wants into action. I mean, that's going to be really important, especially if we if we go back to that example of, you know, I get up in the morning, and I do a workout. If I get up in the morning, and it's cold and miserable, then I need that willpower. Despite the fact I have that habit, I may need a bit of

25:51willpower to help me act on that particular habit. So I think willpower is is very important. But another example, actually, I've recently stopped biting my nails, which has been a huge accomplishment. I've done this for my entire life. So over 40 years, I've been biting my nails. But it's been a really insightful process, because willpower was important. But actually, willpower for me was important in taking the first steps towards bite that stopping biting my nails.

26:21And for me, the first steps as I saw it were was to buy some of that stuff that you paint on your nails that makes it unpleasant to put in your mouth. And so the willpower came in actually buying that thing. Once I'd done that, you know, I painted it on my nails that I kind of didn't need willpower, because anytime my nails went near my mouth, I thought, Oh, that's, that's quite unpleasant.

26:43But that's been an interesting experience, because it's given me, you know, insight into, for example, nail biting, that it's not just about that one simple, single habit of, you know, putting your nails in your mouth, you realize there's a lot more to it. You realize, for example, that it's quite uncomfortable having long nails or longer nails, if you've been biting your nails all your life. Therefore, you have to include other strategies, I have to carry, you know, nail clippers with me at all time, because I don't like having long nails. So, you know, you need some willpower in order to get those and put them in your bag. So yeah, I think with a lot

27:19of behaviors, habit is important. It's one part of the process. And willpower is important. But actually, we need to recognize there are other behaviors that surround a particular behavior that you may need to tackle as well. That's really interesting. It's almost like there's a point of willpower, and identifying the point of willpower. And again, it reminds me of a project, it was a self initiated project, I thought about a while ago, where people were wanting to eat healthier, maybe less fizzy, carbonated drinks, sugar based foods. And I sort of made the point of the point of willpower

27:53is at the 30 minutes they visit their supermarket each week. And they do their weekly shop, because if they can be strong in that 30 minutes, then they don't have it in the house. And not having it in the cupboard, which just makes it a lot harder for them to access it. Obviously, they could go to their local shop. But the point of getting out, putting your shoes on, going to the shop, it's just harder to get. And we initiated an idea, we approached a supermarket with a shop, it was a hashtag shop strong initiative. But actually, the supermarket was

28:27promoting people to shop strong, and not buy things they didn't want to buy, not specifying what, but and, and then promoting some healthy things as well. But you can imagine that the supermarket wasn't overly keen on telling people not to buy their products. So it never went anywhere. But yeah, that point of willpower, which is very interesting. One of the things I read, and it's a wonderful paper by Robert Epstein on BF Skinner, and how he, he basically, all the theory and the things that he studied, he tried to put into his own

29:01life. And he was a very good self manager. And one of the things he said, it's really important if you want to be a good self manager, is to accept your personal mediocrity. And he said, he said himself, it sounds quite harsh. But the first lesson to becoming a better self manager is to know you're not naturally a great self manager. And once you're humble enough to acknowledge that, you can then put things in place to do better. And if but if you think, Oh, no, I'm strong

29:32enough, I can do this. I don't need, I don't need to put my gym kit by the door. I will remember in the morning and do it. Then you're probably setting yourself up for failure anyway. So as soon as you go, actually, I probably will forget, or I will forget to take my own sandwiches instead of going to the cafe and buying things each day, then you can start to put things in place. So his idea was very much don't rely on willpower, acknowledge you don't have it, and then start shaping your environment a little bit more, so that you makes it easier to do what you want to do and harder to

30:06do what you do not want to do. Is that a fair thing to say? And I see Skinner was writing in the 60s and 70s. Yeah, I think it's a very fair thing to say. And I mean, I think, as I said earlier, you know, a lot of this stuff, I can only make it make sense if it can chime with my own personal experiences and what I see other people doing. And in fact, I think in a way, it's quite liberating if you recognize that many of your own behaviors are habits. Because that means that, you know, sometimes some of the things that you do that you think are really shouldn't do that, and you feel guilty about them. Well, they are actually habits. So, you know, you shouldn't feel

30:40so guilty if you're doing things that you don't want to do, if you have these particular habits. But it's, I mean, we shouldn't just use habits as excuses. I think the point is, when we recognize what our habits are, that can help us think, okay, so what should I actually do about this? So you can't just think, okay, well, I'm going to do things differently. You can think, well, if there is a, you know, if I'm doing this automatically, there must be something that's triggering me to do it. And then once you know what the trigger is, you can think about, you know, turning on the willpower button, you know, as it were, when you, when you were experienced to that

31:13trigger, or, you know, avoiding the trigger, or making the behavior less accessible, or, you know, what some people call adding friction at the point when you're triggered to do something. And so I think it's, it's really important. And there hasn't actually been a great deal of work on this. But this idea of what's been called cue monitoring, you know, keep a record of your behavior. If there's a behavior that you don't want to do, first of all, keep a record of that behavior, because that can give you insight into what you're doing. I mean, the whole point about

31:44habits is we can do them without thinking. So often, we don't know that we've done something, you know, when it, for me and my nail biting, I just think, oh, my, my fingers hurt. Oh, I've bitten it to you. I wasn't aware that I was doing it. I was doing something else. But it's only after you've done it, that you may get some kind of feedback from somewhere making you aware that you've done it. So I think if you can record instances in which you've done this particular behavior that you don't want to do, and then record information about the setting that you're in, what have you just been doing? What mood were you in? Who were you with? Where were you? You know, these kind of

32:15things. Actually, if you do that for a certain amount of time, you may be able to then look back at it and think, okay, I'm seeing a pattern here. Because the other thing, as I said, we need to recognize with habits is, once they're automatic, they can happen without us knowing about them. And so we like to think we know exactly what we're doing at all times. But trust me, doing this exercise will give you real insight into what you do, what may be triggering it. And then that equips you to think about how you want to change it. So yes, I think this idea of accepting your own

32:46mediocrity, or at least just accepting that you have very many Q response associations, in other words, habits that guide what you do each day, that is really important as the first step for trying to change your behavior. Yeah, brilliant. And even as you're saying that, I'm thinking of my treat cupboard. And we've got a cupboard in the kitchen, which has the M&Ms and whatnot in it for Friday night. And there are several times, several times I'm making a cup of tea, for instance, and I'm waiting that three minutes for the kettle to boil. And then I suddenly, without thinking, find myself in the

33:20cupboard, just on my tiptoes looking to see what we've got. And I think, oh, gosh, I didn't even think consciously that I need to go and look for something. I've just found myself there. And that then reminds me back to your dishwasher example. If, I mean, do habits have a memory? I mean, that's the Q, that's the environment. If you had a new kitchen put in the house, and suddenly your dishwasher was moved, or you moved house entirely, does that habit break?

33:53That is a brilliant question. I mean, it's difficult to answer, because it depends on what you mean by breaking the habit. And going back to what we were talking about earlier, if you see the habit as the behavior, then yes, if you move to a new home, for example, and your dishwasher is in a different room, or it's in a different place, maybe you'll, you know, do your dishwashing in a different way. So you might think that the habit's been broken, in that the behavior has changed. But as I said earlier, I think one thing that's really fascinating to me is what happens when

34:24someone is kind of removed from their everyday context, so their old habits you can think of as being kind of broken, you know, they're not, they're not doing the behaviors anymore. But what happens when they go back into that old context? Are they then triggered to do the behaviors that they used to do? And I mean, one thing that's always fascinated me is, you know, I moved out of my parents' home when I was, I think, 19 or so. But for several years afterwards, when I went back to my parents' home, you know, I was kind of aware afterwards that it's like I regressed to being a

34:5519-year-old. You know, even once I'd be, once I was married and so on, but if I go back on my own, you know, I just, just acting exactly the same way that I used to do. And I think that's because I had habits for acting in that particular way in that particular environment. And so, yeah, I think we carry these habits with us. And what's particularly important about that is, yes, if you want to break a habit, it will be satisfactory to change the behavior or, or if you, if you change

35:27your context, then such that your behavior changes, and you no longer do the habitual behavior, behavior, that is a long-term solution as long as the old context is not going to be encountered again. But it's not a long-term solution if you're going to find yourself going back into your old context, because that's likely to trigger some of the old habit associations that you had or that you still have. And this reminds me of a paper we did a few years back where we looked at responses of

35:57people who'd successfully lost weight, um, you know, over six months after they'd initiated weight loss and they'd still maintain their weight loss, but they were talking about still struggling against habits, you know, against their bad habits. And, you know, at times of stress, for example, they'd find themselves going, you know, being more tempted and so on. And what I think is interesting about that is, again, you just look at, if you only look at the behavior, it looks like they've broken their habits because they're not, they're, they're acting in a healthy way and that's showing in their weight. Therefore, you'd think, fine, we don't need to support these

36:31people anymore. But actually, when you talk to them, you find out they still are struggling against unwanted, old, bad habit associations. And the crucial point is that means they will continue to need support until they either, either no longer have those associations or are kind of feeling fully equipped to deal with those. So yes, I think we carry habits with us. So in the same sort of process, but on the opposite side, are there natural opportunities where people's queue association changes and they could consciously then think this is my

37:05opportunity to change? So for instance, if someone's, let's go back to that transport choice again. If someone drives into work every day, it's easy. They sit in the queue. They don't particularly like it. They don't feel it's environmentally sound. Plus it's not doing their health any good, but actually they do find it hard to make that decision to get on their bike. And then they move house. They've got a different house. Could they then think, actually, this is the opportunity to change because all of my queue associations have changed. If I cycle to work in the first week,

37:40again, that point of willpower, do you think that then will start to build that association and make it more likely that they might cycle into the future? Yeah, exactly. And there's actually a great deal of research on this. It's called the habit discontinuity hypothesis. There are key moments or kind of transit. Some people call them moments of change. Other people call them life transitions. Other people call them context changes. But these are kind of, yeah, major life events typically that involve a change of context such that those old

38:12Q response associations, I think you've still got them somewhere. But the point is, if your context has changed in quite a kind of significant way, then actually this will mean that you will have to form new habits because you can't act in that old habitual way. And so this has been studied for exactly the reasons that you say that it's been recognised that these are real windows of opportunity for helping people to change their behaviour. And on that habit discontinuity, and I love that phrase you use, windows of opportunity for better habits there. We were meant to record this last week and I postponed it because I was ill. And I've

38:50been thinking about that since. So I was taken into hospital with gallstones and wasn't very well for about a week whilst I was on the antibiotics. Whilst I was on that medication, my appetite went. I just didn't want to eat. And after the pain of having gallstones, the fear of it coming back was enough for me to go, well, I certainly don't want any fatty foods. But actually, I was off my food quite a lot anyway. But I sat there and I thought, is this an opportunity? Because I'm in my environment, my normal

39:21Q associations are here. As I said, the treat cupboard is still exactly where the treat cupboard is. But I hadn't looked at it and I didn't want to look at it for over a week. Is that also a window of opportunity where the Q associations are still there, but something else has happened to naturally break that habit? Yeah, I completely agree. I think it is a window of opportunity. I mean, you can think of it as being kind of smaller in a sense than, you know, moving house or something like that. But the key point is something's happened that's disrupted your everyday context.

39:52And so that gives you an opportunity to do something new. It's just, I think, we just think that that window is going to be a bit smaller. I mean, talking about that, I think the same thing would apply to, you know, for example, the weight loss injectables that, you know, a lot of people are finding that they're losing weight because their appetite's being suppressed and so on. What happens when, you know, once they finish their course of the injectables, well, they're going to be tempted back into doing, you know, into their old eating patterns and so on. So I think, again, that's something where it's so relevant now. We can see that as a window of opportunity,

40:27that it shouldn't just be use this particular injectable. It should be use the injectable and quickly try and get into new patterns of action so that once you come off it, you know, it's going to be something that you can sustain. Really good. Yes. And talking of sustain it, I've read in quite a few papers, and it's normally the popular press, the idea that habits take 60 days to form. Where does that idea come from? And is it true? Okay, so this comes from a paper done by a

40:59colleague of mine, Dr. Pippa Lally. What she did in her paper, it was published in 2010, she recruited 96 participants on the basis that they wanted to make changes to their health behaviour. So they either wanted to do more physical activity or drink more water or eat a healthier diet. And for each of these participants, you had them form a particular plan of when they encounter a particular cue that they had identified, and one that only occurs once a day, but every day, when they encounter that cue,

41:32they will do the behaviour that they've chosen. And so for the next 12 weeks, the participants had to log into a study website every day and report, first of all, did they do the behaviour on the previous day? And if they did, how automatic did it feel? In other words, how habitual did it feel? And what was found in that study was, I mean, scientifically, the main thing of interest to me was the way in which habit developed, that yes, people's habits developed over time, but they developed in a kind of, we call it an

42:02asymptotic curve. In other words, habit grew very strongly and quickly at the start, but then these gains kind of levelled off. So it looked a bit like a, you know, half of a, like an inverted U shape. Yeah. So I kind of like that, like the letter R, the first few times it goes up and then it kind of levels off. Um, but the point was that the, the, the average time it took for people to reach their own personal peak, the point at which it, at which their habit strength leveled off, the average time was 66 days. Um, so that's where the 66 days thing comes from, but there are huge caveats to that

42:40particular study. And, and, uh, Pippa Lally would say this herself as well, that first of all, that was just an average among these 96 participants. One person reached their peak in 18 days. Another person didn't reach their peak at all in the 84 day period, but it was forecast if they kept going after 254 days, they would get there. So there was massive variation. Also the level at which habit peaked was quite different for different people. So this was based on people's responses to a question saying, you know, this behavior is something that is automatic for me. To what extent do you agree

43:13or disagree with that statement? And there was some people whose habit curve was such that they had started to agree more or rather they started to disagree less, but overall they still weren't saying this behavior was habitual. So it had gone from, they were saying, I strongly don't feel this is habitual to, well, you know, it's starting to feel a bit like that. So a lot of these people who supposedly formed habits actually were just saying, it's feeling a bit more habitual now. So it's very difficult when you look at the kind of nuances of that, it's very difficult to say, this is how long

43:46it takes to form a habit because we think it differs according to characteristics of the person, characteristics of the behavior that they're doing. You know, if it's a simpler behavior, it's probably going to become habitual more quickly or maybe it will reach a higher peak and probably the environment as well, you know, the stability of the environment. But yes, that study said that overall, on average, it's 66 days. And you can sort of see that papers are very good at picking out a very simple headline like that and sort of running with it rather than the complications.

44:18It's almost like that. Everyone has 2.4 children, isn't it? You know, that's the average. Nobody in the world has 2.4 children, but the average is 2.4 children. So what does it really mean? Yes. And there's that other statistic as well, that everyone has, on average, fewer than two legs. Because, you know.

44:40Not many people have more. No, no, exactly. Very few. Just to go into the theory a little bit more, how does your view of habitual behavior compare to other theories? Because in psychology, there are quite a lot of theories of behavior change, such as the theory of reasoned action, the stages of change modeled by Prochaska and Prochaska. How does yours compare with those? Well, I don't think that I have a kind of radically different take on habit to other people. But, for example, from a reasoned action perspective, I mean, the reasoned action perspective is that

45:15people do things because they consciously want to do things. And in other words, they intend to do something. And we intend to do things according to the theory of reasoned action, because we're favorably disposed to doing it. So we've got positive attitude. We think other people would approve of us doing it and we feel able to do it. So on the basis of that, we form an intention and then we do the behavior. And there has been debate or around 20 years ago, there was debate in the literature saying, you know, is habit really a valid construct? Is it just that people are

45:46automatically acting on their intentions? But I think that the habit theory, as I kind of understand it, and as I talk about it, is about doing things that occasionally you may not intend to do. So it differs from that in that it recognizes that sometimes we'll do something purely based on an association, even if it conflicts with our own particular intentions. But I think we can incorporate the concept of habit into that reasoned action perspective by using what people have called a dual process model. So this is one where when you're in a particular situation, you may well think

46:21about what the best option would be and so on. And that's the kind of reflective route to action or sometimes called system two, whereby you think about what will be best for you. And on the basis of that, you act. But then the other route to behavior, sometimes called system one, or the automatic route, is where you go into a situation that just triggers some non-conscious associations, such as these habit associations, and then you act on the back of it. So I think all of these things can be reconciled. I don't think habit theory is at odds with anything else. It's more just we need to

46:54recognize that we aren't kind of purely rational at all times. But sometimes we do just do things on the basis of simple associations. Yes, okay, that makes sense. And you mentioned there the challenges in the field that came out around 10, 20 years ago. It's still going on though, isn't it? I know the paper by Cigar in 2022, where they called for the abandonment of all habit-based approach to behavior change. So there's still debate going on, isn't there, about the usefulness

47:26of a habit-based approach? There is debate, yeah. And we responded to that particular paper. So Cigar's point was, as you said, you know, habit-based interventions don't seem to work that well. And, you know, maybe this whole concept of habit is overblown, and therefore we should abandon it. But we responded to that with our own paper saying, actually, the reason that habit hasn't, you know, we haven't had the results that we might be thinking of, that we might have expected, is that habit is a more complex concept than most people think about. The way I see it is

47:58that habit is one input into behavior, but it's not everything. And going back to it, this is why it's important to separate out habit from behavior. Because if you just think of a behavior that you do often as being a habit, well, you can't start thinking about this idea of habit as being one input. But again, I mean, going back to my nail-biting example, from a pure habit perspective, you might think, right, well, a way to do that is recognize that it's a habit and then just stop yourself acting when you're triggered or, you know, do something else instead. But actually, my own personal experience has been that, you know, habit's important, but you need to use other methods as

48:34well. You need to draw on other concepts to try and change the behavior. And so what we argued in our paper was that actually we shouldn't say that a behavior is either habitual or it's intentional. I mean, many of our behaviors are done with both automatic and intentional processes working at the same time. So if we go back to the example of, you know, how we get to work, it may well be that you're habitually triggered to leave the house and so on. But actually getting your way through that entire sequence of behavior will require quite a few habits, but it will also require quite a few kind of

49:08reason, deliberations over the circumstances that you find yourself in. So I don't think it's as clear cut as just saying something is habitual or it's non-habitual. And if something is kind of neither habitual nor non-habitual, therefore we should abandon habits. I think what I've been trying to do so far in my career is really, as I said, try and identify what is this concept and what role does it play in a particular behavior? So just to kind of summarize that, and I think what I've argued before is we need to go beyond just saying,

49:39is this behavior a habit? And say instead, in what way does habit manifest in this particular behavior? Yes. Okay. Can I give an example? And I'll try and give it as a question. And it's a project I've worked on so many times with so many different clients. And I work in the finance industry quite a lot. And I have done research, qualitative interviews with customers who sit with me and say they have the intention to save more money. It might be for short-term goals, a wedding, a holiday

50:12in the next couple of years. It might be long-term, such as saving for their retirement. So the intention is there. They can sit there and tell me why that would be a better thing for them to do. But they do not do it. And they struggle with actually doing it on a day-to-day basis. And what we've tried, I guess, to help with is once they have that intention, and once we've established they have that intention, is to say, would you like us to put some interventions in place to make it easier for you to do what you want to do and harder for you not to do it? And we're

50:46very consciously telling them this so that it's very transparent. And it is things, whether it be called nudges, insights, whatever it may be, but it's certainly changing their digital environment quite a lot to make it easier to do what they want to do. And therefore, that could become a habit. So they constantly start to save, save small direct debits and things like that, setting up can work in that way. Is that an example of combining the idea of intentions and habits?

51:18Yeah, I think it is. I think, you know, it's an interesting example because really what we're talking about here is kind of different levels of specificity. If you say, I intend to save money, okay, great, it's a positive intention, but it's quite vague. So then what you've got to do is think, okay, what exactly is it that you're going to do? And what exactly is it that you're not going to do? So I think key to changing any behaviour is to identify what is it exactly that you're planning to do or what may you need to do to achieve that particular goal? I mean, saving money is an

51:49interesting one, because it could even be argued that that isn't a behaviour, it's an outcome of a behaviour. But either way, it's quite an abstract concept. So I think key to all of this is to identify, you know, keep getting more granular and think, okay, if the goal is to save money, what are your current behaviours? I mean, saving money is a great one, because you should have a bank statement somewhere that, you know, is an objective record of what you've been spending. So I think engage with that to think about, okay, where is my money going? And then you can start

52:20to think, okay, what are the particular situations in which I spend money? Then you can start thinking about what happens in those situations? What are the specific triggers? What are the specific behaviours within those situations? So yeah, I think that, but I think this notion of these kind of different levels is all important, because what we've argued in our work is you can have a behaviour that is intentional at quite a high level. But when you look at the specific behaviours that you're doing, they may be habitual. So another example that we've written about in the past is

52:54sedentary behaviour or sitting. So there's been this great movement in the past 15 to 20 years to recognise that actually, the time we spend sitting down is bad for us, largely independently of whether we're physically active. But what my colleagues and I have said is, okay, there's likely a habitual element to this in that when you enter a room, you're triggered to sit down, for example. But actually, we've got to recognise what is it that people are trying to achieve when they're actually sitting down. So we looked at the example of office workers.

53:26And our assumption is, for many people, when they're at work, their goal is to get their work done. And how do you actually serve that goal? Well, you go to work, and then once you're in the building, you sit at your desk and do your work. So sitting is something that no one thinks when they get to work, what shall I do now? You know, it's an automatic response to the environment. So it's habitual in that sense. But it is actually serving this higher order goal. So it's both intentional in that it's being done to achieve the goal of getting work done. Yet it's also habitual

53:58in that no one, you know, you haven't made a conscious decision to sit down. So then the solution to that is going to be, okay, well, how can we encourage people or support people to work, so they still achieve their higher order goal, yet in a way that doesn't require them to sit. So things like sit stand workstations, for example, can be can be really helpful for that. But yeah, that's a prime example of something that can be both intentional and habitual, depending on the kind of level of analysis that you're that you're looking at. Okay. And does identity play a role in habits and habitual behaviour as well?

54:30Yeah, that's a really, really interesting question. Identity plays a really important role in maintaining behaviour. There has been work that has linked identity to habits in terms of, you know, cue behaviour associations. But I think it's probably most useful to separate out habits from identities. And one of the reasons for that is some of our more mundane habits, you know, we wouldn't think of them as kind of reflecting our identity. So, for example, if I come downstairs and empty the

55:06dishwasher, I don't see that as an important part of who I am, I could, I could, you know, I could do that at a different point of different time in the day, and it wouldn't kind of threaten my self concept or anything like that. But I think we should think of identity as being a separate process, but that is really, really important for maintaining behaviour. And the reason for that is that when we see ourselves as the kind of person who does a particular behaviour, that behaviour becomes kind of locked into our sense of who we are. And we need a consistent sense of who we are in order to,

55:39you know, navigate our environment, predict our own behaviours, think about how other people are going to respond to us, kind of process information. So our self concept, this kind of entire idea of who we are, is really central to us. And we cling to identities because they are part of our self concept. But yeah, it's been shown that when someone changes their, well, when someone changes their behaviour, and they start to build an identity in which that behaviour is key, then actually having that identity will maintain that behaviour over time, or it will help them to maintain it. So there's been a

56:13great deal of research done in smoking, for example, that's shown that people who start to identify as being a non-smoker or an ex-smoker, but who used to smoke, having that identity will predict the likelihood that they'll carry on, you know, having, you know, their cessation will continue versus whether they'll relapse. And the reason for that is, when you have these identities where behaviour is a central part to that, from that identity flows a set of rules of what you should and shouldn't do.

56:47And for something like a non-smoker identity, it's clear, the main rule is you won't smoke. And so as soon as you smoke, you violate that core rule. And then you can't, you know, it's difficult to justify to yourself that you still have that identity. So then you lose a slight, it's like you lose a piece of you, you lose a set, you know, part of who you are, part of your self-concept. So yeah, identity is really important. And that can form alongside the formation of habits.

57:15And I'm interested now to almost to go a bit philosophical, because if somebody forms an identity as somebody who, let's carry on the smoking analogy, or example you started, as they, it's part of them, it's their concept now that they are somebody who does not smoke. It's therefore more likely that they may run a marathon for a cancer charity that supports non-smoking. And it's therefore gets stronger and stronger and stronger, until it almost becomes an attitude, a belief. And it reminds me then of, again, William James, at the very beginning,

57:50I gave the quote from William James. But his idea was that we are just bundles of habits that have been built up over time. And everything we do is just a habit, really. And from that perspective, and again, going back to the example of finance, one of the things we try and do, we try and try and tell financial organisations, is help your customers once they've started to do something, even if it's a small behaviour, setting up £20 each month to go into a saving behaviour,

58:21reinforce that by telling them it is a good thing to do, to try and build their identity as somebody, they are somebody who's made a good financial decision. Therefore, they are more likely to therefore do something else, which is a good financial decision. And if they do that, it strengthens it again. And all of this starts to form an identity as they are somebody who makes good financial decisions for them and their family. Then they start on, it's almost a snowball, isn't it? Starts off small, and suddenly they're rolling and rolling. And then they have an attitude later on as somebody who's a good financial decision maker.

58:55Yeah, yeah, I completely agree with that. And the other thing that's really important here is that when you do have an identity, as I said, from that identity flows a set of rules or a code of conduct as to what you should and shouldn't do in accordance with that identity. And that's really important for those situations where, say, having a habit isn't enough. So, for example, if I go back to that example of doing a workout each day, you know, I've formed this habit whereby I wake up and the first thing I think is, you know, workout, because I have this simple association between

59:29waking up and then going to do my workout. But on those times when it's challenging to do that, for example, maybe it is a cold and miserable day, or, you know, I don't know, maybe if there's building work going on in the house or something like that, and it makes it difficult, actually having that identity that says you are the type of person who does a workout or, you know, a more abstract identity, you are the kind of person who looks after his health, that's really useful in helping me to fill in the gaps that are left when habit isn't enough. So I think having identity is

1:00:02really important. That's one of the reasons why it's important for maintaining behavior, because it can fill in the gaps. So I think habit and identity, when they're both in the same kind of direction, they can really work well complementing each other. It's really strong, isn't it? Is it almost, would you say that teaching should take on the ideas of habit formation, for instance? Now, if you think of, again, William James wrote in, he wrote a book called Talks to Teachers on Psychology, where he said the teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life.

1:00:39And so if you can start to think of actually teaching as more of a link between cues and responses rather than just passing information from one person to another, it changes teaching altogether, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. I think that, I think you're right. I think with teaching, I mean, I think it's only when you get older that you realize that the aim of teaching is not necessary to just give you a load of facts and knowledge and so on. It's to actually equip you with the tools to learn and to kind of deal with situations that will arise later in life.

1:01:12And so, yeah, I think that's exactly what teachers should be doing, is teaching people in or educating people in the process of how we go about learning and what are good processes to follow in order to, you know, get into good patterns and help build resilience for later in life. And I think habit is going to be a key part of that, you know, working out what are the key habits that we can put into place that will help people in later in life. Yeah, that's really important. Okay. Let's come back out of the philosophy side of it and the thing deep thinking, although I could

1:01:46talk about that for a long time, back into more personal use of habits and how people can use the theory in their own life. And you've already given examples for yourself, your dishwasher, your fitness, nail biting. But when someone is trying to form habitual behavior, what should they do when they experience failure? Because it's inevitable that it's going to happen, isn't it, at some point?

1:02:10That's a really good question. I think it probably depends on how you define failure and success. So I've already talked about having a morning workout habit. But actually, if I'm to get into more detail on that, often I don't do it in the morning, and often it's not a full workout. So then you might think, well, how can you say you've got a workout habit? What I've actually developed is this kind of cognitive architecture that tells me I have to do some exercise each day. Now, there have been times when I haven't, when I started doing this first, I set myself a target of first thing in

1:02:45the morning, once I've woken up, I would do a 20 minute workout. Now, actually, that I've been kind of flexible with regards to the behavior in that it's become, you know, I will do something. So it's become a kind of, you know, I've reshaped what the behavior is, so that it means that actually, there's been times when I've only been able to do like a two minute thing. But I think that still counts. And it's, you know, who's to say that I'm right or wrong, it's my, I'm setting my own rules. But I think as long as there are rules, and you can, but they can be flexible to some extent,

1:03:18I think that will mean that it's unlikely that someone's going to experience failure. So I think, from my own personal experience, I think it's important to be clear on what is going to be your cue or your trigger, and what's the behavior that you're going to do. And then maybe to have what a researcher called Marko Stojanovic has called an emergency habit, you know, what's your backup plan for if this isn't going to work. So for me, my emergency habit is a two minute workout, maybe a two minute plank or whatever it is. That means that I can satisfy myself thinking,

1:03:50I've done the behavior, I haven't done it in the way that I really wanted to. But I've managed to do a form of that behavior. Because I think the key part to your question is this notion of failure. I think as soon as you start saying, I have not done this, I have failed, it's been showed that that that leads to a whole kind of cascade of negative emotions, you feel like you've violated your rules, and you've broken your streak. And then that just leads you to think, well, you know, I can't do this, I'm not good enough. And then you go back to what you're doing. So I think building

1:04:22that kind of flexibility in there to say, okay, if I can't achieve the exact form of behavior that I want to do, what's my minimum viable, you know, form of behavior that I can do so that I can say, I've tried to do it. Because that is going to be really important for maintaining that instigation habit. Because again, in my case, what I found is I'm not doing a morning 20 minute workout every day anymore, three years down the line. But what I have actually developed is this cognitive architecture, this association that makes sure I do some exercise every day. It's just it's kind of evolved

1:04:56over time. And does that also work if you're trying to break a habit? I mean, that emergency habit is is good technique thought when you're building one. But if you're giving up smoking, for instance, and then Friday night comes around, you've not smoked for three months, but Friday night comes around and you have a cigarette, you could feel like a failure. And you'd like to say broken your streak of doing that. Is it simply to make sure you have a growth mindset that having an experiencing a failure isn't the same as failing or being a failure? Yeah, I think anything that keeps you away

1:05:33from that idea of I have failed is important. I think at the same time, what's really important is to, you know, don't don't start fooling yourself thinking, well, actually, I've had a cigarette, and it's fine, I can just carry on. And actually, well, I'm having, you know, two or three a day, but I'm, you know, I'm still on my quitter tent. So there has to be, as I said, there has to be some kind of elasticity to it. But there also need to be boundaries. So for me, for example, going back to my workout example, if I haven't done at least two minutes, I have not done a workout. So therefore, I do I do, you know, that I do have clear boundaries in terms of what constitutes and what does not

1:06:08constitute doing this behavior. It's just that I've had to shift those from the original goal. But I think, yeah, the same the same could work for for breaking habits. Just be clear on what the parameters are, what are your boundaries? And what what's the line beyond which when you cross that line, actually, you probably have, you know, failed to keep this up, in which case you need to start again. Yeah, okay. What are your thoughts on using using digital aids, such as smartphone apps to help

1:06:38increase the likelihood of creating or maintaining habitual behaviors? Yeah, I think anything that can help you get these behaviors up and running is really is, you know, it's going to be helpful. And I think, yeah, I think using apps, whatever it takes, that's really important. I think that the risk there, though, is that you don't want to become wholly dependent on an app to, for example, trigger you to do something because, you know, what happens if, say, you're on holiday, you've forgotten your charger, you don't have a device with you anymore, that may

1:07:11mean that you then fail to do the behavior and it kind of unravels. So I think there is this danger that what you're doing there is actually forming another habit that let's say if it's for exercising, if you have a habit of setting an alarm or responding to alarm to an alarm or an alert, and then you have the habit for actually doing the exercise, just be mindful that you have set up kind of two habits here. And it may mean that the digital app habit is quite important. So I think really, you need to

1:07:43kind of aim to wean yourself off that. But I think at the start, being realistic, I think anything that can help you to remember to do this behavior is going to be important. It reminds me of a long time ago, we worked together on a project, didn't we? Copperfeel. And it was a Copperfeel, a wonderful cancer charity. And I do recommend if you haven't heard of them, for everyone listening to go and check them out. They're amazing. And they came to us and said, we'd really like to help young women get into the regular habit of checking their breasts for signs

1:08:15of cancer. And we're thinking of an app. This was 2012. So apps were just, you know, everyone wanted an app back then, didn't they? And I remember one of the things we said to them was, don't get your customers relying on an app, build in a natural decay over time so that they do not rely on the app. But the app has brought things to them, which are going to stay with them for life. And one of the many sort of little features it had, we introduced the idea of Copperfeel on the first.

1:08:45Where everyone was asked to check their breasts on the first day of each month and get into the habit of doing that. And the app supported that by one, reminding them to do it. But also on the end, I think it was the second day of each month, it told them how many people also check their breasts on the same day. So it said like 28,000 people check their breasts with you yesterday, and so on and so forth. But the Copperfeel on the first thing was really powerful. And they still use that to this day, even though the app no longer exists, that concept is very clear in their idea. And the other thing

1:09:21was that app users got sent a shower sticker through the post to pop it in the shower on the tiles. And it just gave them the guides of what to do when you're checking your breasts for signs of cancer. And that is a very Q dependent stimulus, isn't it? It's in the place you can do it. It's right in front of you. And it's a reminder to do it every day. Yeah, I mean, but but being realistic, I think that stuff's really important. Because as we talked about earlier, there's no point trying to set to

1:09:53trying to form a habit for something that you're not going to do in a kind of satisfactory way, you'll only repeat a behavior. If you feel that you've, you know, kind of met the goal of doing it. And actually, if you know, if you're motivated to check your breasts, but then you don't know how to do it. Well, you'll just feel like, well, I'm probably not going to do that again, because I don't think I did it correctly. So I think all of these things are really useful for getting things up and running. I think where habit becomes useful is for maintaining that once you've kind of settled on a way of doing things and where you're going to do it, and so on. I think it's at that point that

1:10:26you can start thinking, right, now I can form a habit. And I need to be consistent in where and when and with whom and, you know, all of these contextual elements, you need to be consistent there. And that will help you to maintain that behavior. Yeah, that makes sense. Just to finish off, can I fire some real world scenarios at you to get your advice, really, with regard to applying that theory of habit into practice? And these examples are sort of, I think, common that most people will sort of recognize and maybe in themselves, maybe in their friends and family. So first of all, someone is trying to lose weight,

1:11:01maybe they're trying to get their summer beach bod, but struggling to maintain their healthy diet and their fitness routine. What should they do? Again, I think there needs to be more specificity with regards to what the particular behaviors are. When you talk about maintaining a healthy diet, is it about continuing to eat the right things or is it about stopping eating the wrong things? So I think if it's about stopping eating the wrong things, I think I'd recommend what some people call adding friction. In other words, don't buy the wrong foods,

1:11:31try and clear out your kitchen cupboards or clear out your treat cupboard or whatever it is. And also make sure that you buy the right foods and you have all of those in the house. So for example, maybe you could do an online shop so that you've locked in that you will buy those foods rather than having to go to a supermarket where you may be tempted by other things. I mean, online shopping is really good for that, that you'll be less distracted by temptations. And then with regards to kind of exercise, I think, yeah, I think it's about identify a point

1:12:04in your daily routine where you can reliably and consistently do some exercise. For me personally, it's been first thing in the morning. It's a great way of kind of, you know, starting the morning, you get a real kind of righteous feeling of you started the day in the right way. So they'll be my main tips for that. The next scenario I've got is a parent is worried about their teenage daughter constantly being on her phone, scrolling through endless reels on TikTok and Instagram, and they would like to do something about it.

1:12:35Well, that's a tricky one. I mean, because I'm thinking from personal experience, it depends how much control you can have over the child's phone. I think if you can set screen time limits, that'll be really useful. Because, yeah, I think that's a clear habitual behavior. And in fact, I think smartphone use is one where it's habitually instigated and it's habitually executed. You know, you'll be triggered to pick it up, you know, at certain points. And then once you've picked it up, you'll do certain things in a certain order. And the way that these apps have all been designed

1:13:09are such that, you know, they're designed so it's endless. You can keep using it and keep using it. So I think kind of, I think recognising what the particular bad habits are within that. Is it the use of social media? Is it screen time in general? Is it the use of the phone? I think that could be really helpful. And also, I think agreeing with, you know, working with your teenager to come to some sort of agreement of, you know, what is a realistic or what's a reasonable amount of time to

1:13:42spend on a device and what is reasonable for them to be doing during that time. I think getting that buy-in for them, from the teenager is going to be really important. Because if you just go in there finger wagging and saying, you mustn't do this, you mustn't do that, then, you know, that's not going to work. And I think also by pointing out, it could work as well by pointing out what things could be done in that time. You know, what other things will be more productive? You know, for example, revision or whatever it is, working out what is it that this person likes to do

1:14:13that their screen time is taking time away from. And then working with them to come to that kind of arrangement or that agreement that they will limit it in a particular way. Or I think that's going to be useful. And one other thing is, I think definitely leaving devices outside the bedroom is really important. We did a study during the COVID pandemic, actually, about sleep hygiene and trying to understand people's pre-bedtime routines and then work with them to, you know, work with these very small habits that they had. And in fact, the main thing that people realised was

1:14:46they leave their phones in their rooms and so they get into bed and get onto their phones. So the simple act of just leaving your phone outside the room can be really helpful. It removes that temptation. And also, if you've got an alarm on the phone, you've got the added bonus that it means that you're likely, you're going to have to get up in order to turn that alarm off in the morning rather than press and sneeze. Oh, good point. Yeah. That's a really good point, isn't it? Again, that's changing the environment again. But in that scenario, I guess you would want to get the buy-in from the teenager as well. If it comes across as a punishment, and I'm thinking going back

1:15:19to, you know, real behaviourist punishment and reward structures, positive reinforcement is a good thing in the fact that if you do this, then you can have this. Or negative reinforcement, if you do this, then you won't have to do something you don't like anymore. And therefore, it's still a reinforcer. But the punishment side of it, which I think a lot of parents do tend to go down, doesn't work so well. And certainly doesn't then form what we were talking about, the identity

1:15:51in that teenager as somebody who doesn't want to rely on their phone and doesn't want to be that type of person, and maybe can be sort of bigger and stronger than that. So again, if a parent's trying to think about how to do that, as you say, screen time, have you get that buy-in, but also have one eye, I guess, on how am I going to form an identity in my teenager? So they themselves want to see themselves as being more than just a screen zombie. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's really

1:16:21important. I mean, the other thing to point out is that different strategies are going to work for different behaviours. And, you know, it may be that, say, with phone use, maybe you can't do anything with identity. Maybe you can't do a great deal with habit. So I think it's probably not what you want to hear at the end of this podcast. But my key point is, you know, with concepts and ideas like this, all they are, all habit is, is it's one particular input. It's there are a load of methods and techniques that surround it. But I think my key point is, habit isn't everything. It's really

1:16:53important. But often we need to think beyond habit and think of other, you know, other techniques, other ideas, such as identity, for example, which may give us more leverage. So I think coming at everything and thinking, right, what's the habit here? And how do we break that habit? It might not be the answer. It may be that, for example, identity is the best way here. Or actually, it could be a kind of, you know, an education based approach that, you know, by talking to your, you know, your teenage child and explaining that actually, the things that they are doing are taking time away

1:17:27from other activities that they enjoy doing more, you know, maybe, maybe that's going to be more effective. All of these things are, you know, you have to tailor them to the situation. So no two teenagers are the same, and no two situations are the same. So I think it's really about work out which of these strategies would work best with you. But I agree, generally speaking, this notion of just punishing people and saying, you mustn't do this, that's not really the best, best way to change someone's behaviour. Yeah. And I think that's a nice sort of ending for us really there, because it's, it's habits,

1:18:00it sounds like it's one of the tools in your psychological toolbox, but it's not the only one. So if people are reading books, and I'm not going to mention any in particular, but that say habits are the panacea of behaviour change, then they're probably just selling a book more than actually talking to you about real behaviour change. But it's certainly one thing you can consider. And of my notes that I've made, as we've been talking, I think it's very interesting for people to start thinking about the instigation habits and execution habits, you know, what triggers

1:18:30the behaviour, and what are the series of actions that go along with that instigation. I think the windows of opportunity for better habits is something, again, I know personally, I would pick up on, whether it be the habit discontinuity hypothesis that, you know, I mentioned when I was ill, it was the natural opportunity for me to do something different from that point onwards, spotting those consciously, and then saying, okay, I'm going to take advantage