Take yourself back to the 2008 presidential campaign. America is in the grip of Obamamania. Young campaigners across the country are going out of their way to help Barack Obama in his seemingly unstoppable rise from unlikely candidate to presidential frontrunner. Much was made at the time, and in the aftermath of his victory, about the way in which he was able to connect with voters online. It was even dubbed ‘the Facebook election’.1 Yet while it is undoubtedly true that this was the first presidential election truly to embrace the social media revolution, there was another revolution going on behind the scenes that garnered next to no attention, but which campaigners around the world would be wise to pay attention to.
Obama’s team had realized that, for years, campaigners had been encouraging people to get out and vote using the same method – by contacting those who’d expressed sympathy with their cause and asking them whether or not they’d be voting this year. Most of the previous research in this field had focused on whether it makes a difference contacting people by phone and, if so, whether it’s best to adopt a chattier or more formal style.2 But given that one of the central premises of the behavioural science literature is that the way in which you frame a question can have a dramatic impact upon how someone responds, the campaign team reasoned that there might be more effective ways of getting people to show up on election day.
Enter Todd Rogers, now at Harvard and collaborating with the Behavioural Insights Team on various education projects, and his colleague David Nickerson, from the University of Notre Dame. Rogers and Nickerson had become fascinated with a set of findings from psychology that showed that if you encourage people to make simple plans, then they’re much more likely to follow through on their intentions. The premise is simple. Rather than just asking someone if they’re going to vote, you prompt them to think about where, when and how they’re going to do so. So they set about running one of the largest voting trials ever run – on almost 300,000 people who took part in the 2008 Democratic Primary election in Pennsylvania – to see just how effective planning prompts could be.
One group of people were the standard group. They got a routine call reminding them of the upcoming election and of their duty to vote.3 A second group also got a call, but this time they were asked whether they intended to vote. The third and final group were asked what time they would vote, where they would be coming from and what they would be doing beforehand. These additional questions – where, when and how – were deliberately designed to encourage plan making. The voters were being asked to make a simple, cognitive link between moments in their day and the action of voting.
So what was the most effective way of getting people to vote? Well, those who received the standard phone call (reminding them of the election) were no more likely to vote than if they’d received no call at all. Those asked if they intended to vote were roughly 2 per cent more likely to vote. But the effect of the planning messages was the most potent. The people receiving these calls were some 4.1 per cent more likely to vote. And most surprising of all was the effect on people living in households with only one eligible voter – here the increase was 9.1 per cent– perhaps because this was the group least likely to have existing plans, particularly ones that relied on others.4 These results are huge for anyone who thinks and cares about electoral results. As Rogers and Nickerson have pointed out, in the 2012 presidential election increasing voter turnout among eligible voters by 2.1 percentage points for one candidate’s supporters would have changed the outcomes in Florida, North Carolina and Ohio. Similarly, in 2008 the state outcome would have changed in Florida, Indiana, North Carolina and Missouri. When an election is relatively tight, in other words, simple plan making has the ability to change the electoral outcome.
We believe that plan making is a key ingredient in helping you to achieve your goals. But, as we will see, the small details of how you set these plans matter greatly. The three golden rules in this chapter will help ensure you get these details right. They are:
Keep it simple. You should create simple, clear rules that reduce the mental effort required to stick to your goal and let you know when you are transgressing from your objective.
Create an actionable plan. You’ll find that being able to state how, when and where you’re going to take the actions needed to achieve each of these steps will make it more likely that you’ll follow through.
Turn the plan into habits. By repeating the same actions in response to the same cues, you’ll be able to create habits that make it much easier to achieve your goal.
Rule 1: Keep it simple
A couple of years ago, Owain decided to cut down the amount he drank. He was finding that he was regularly getting back from work and pouring a glass of wine for himself and one for his wife Sophie as he prepared dinner. He’d sometimes wash down dinner with another glass, and if it was close to the end of a bottle, perhaps finish it off while watching a bit of TV. He wasn’t a heavy drinker. But there was a danger that he was slipping into a bad habit described in the media as ‘middle-class drinking’5 in which a glass of wine or beer was no longer an occasional treat, but part of the daily routine. In the UK at the time, the advice was that regular consumption of three to four units of alcohol per day for men would not pose significant health risks, but that consistently drinking four or more units a day was not advisable. A bottle of red wine typically has nine to eleven units, so regularly coming back from work and having a couple of glasses risked stepping over these thresholds. Cutting back, Owain reasoned, would improve his health and might even reduce his waistline a bit in the process.
Owain also knew that just setting himself the objective of ‘cutting back the amount he drank’ wouldn’t be good enough. As we have seen, setting yourself vague goals is not the best way of helping yourself to achieve an objective. The obvious thing to do would have been to adhere to the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines of not regularly consuming more than three to four units of alcohol per day. But there are a number of challenges involved in sticking rigidly to these guidelines. The first challenge is a mental arithmetic task. What do three or four units actually look like? What if you have a bottle of beer; how many units have you had then? And it can be even more challenging with wine, since alcohol content varies and most people do not pour precise or standard measures. The second challenge is more psychological. It might seem reasonable to set a limit that can be calculated using a simple equation (it’s not that difficult, for example, to divide 750 by 125). But there’s a big difference between setting yourself a goal in the cold light of day and then following through once you’ve already had your first glass of a nice Rioja. This is a problem in any area that requires a degree of self-control, but it’s heightened further when you are consuming a substance that has the effect of depleting your cognitive functioning.
So Owain decided that, rather than setting himself a goal which required him to get out a calculator every time he wanted to have a drink, he would set some very simple, transparent rules that make it easy to know whether he has transgressed. Psychologists have dubbed these ‘bright lines’, and they are effective because they’re unambiguous. You know instantly when you’ve stepped over a bright line, which significantly reduces the cognitive effort required to put the rule into practice. The bright line that he set himself was no drinking at home during the week. If he ever opened a bottle of wine on, say, a Monday while at home, he’d immediately know he’d broken the rule. Simple. But this didn’t mean total abstinence, which would likely have ended in failure. For example, having a drink with a colleague in the pub after work was OK, as was having a drink at the weekend. Alongside the simple, transparent rule, he set a clear deadline: he would stick to the plan for a month. If that worked, he’d keep to the plan for another eleven months. And the good news is that it did work, very well indeed. What started as a one-month goal two years ago has now turned into a long-running habit. With only one or two exceptions, the no-drinking-at-home-during-the-week rule has continued to this day. Owain estimates that, over this period, it has reduced his alcohol consumption by the equivalent of around eighty bottles of wine.
If bright-line thinking feels like a novel psychological trick, it shouldn’t do. As Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chair of Ogilvy & Mather who has pioneered the use of behavioural science in advertising has explained, it is exactly the same set of principles that underlie many age-old cultural and religious practices.6 Think about the commonly practised doctrine of ‘not working on the Sabbath’. Now compare this simple rule with the rather less simple EU Working Time Directive, which limits weekly working hours to forty-eight hours on average over a seventeen-week period, and stipulates a minimum rest period of eleven consecutive hours in every twenty-four. The ‘no working on the Sabbath’ rule is very simple to understand. It requires next to no work on the part of an individual to work out how to implement it (beyond knowing what day it is). It also has the added benefit of enabling the rest of your religious community to help keep you on the straight and narrow, should you ever be tempted to transgress. The Working Time Directive rules, however, require you – or more likely the organization you work for – to keep tabs on how many hours you have worked over a seventeen-week period, from which you can work out the weekly average. It will never be immediately obvious, if you are close to the limit, which side you are on until you’ve done the maths.
Similarly, think about the difference between diets that require you to count calories through the week, and those that specify simple rules – such as the 5:2 diet, which Rory (Gallagher) and his wife used in the run-up to their wedding. This encourages you to eat normally for five days of the week, and then to reduce your calorie intake to 500 calories (for women) and 600 calories (for men) for two days. In the words of its advocates, it’s ‘easy to comply with a regime that only asks you to restrict your calorie intake occasionally. It recalibrates the diet equation.’7 The evidence seems to support these claims. When researchers randomly assigned dieters to different regimes that varied in the complexity of the rules, they found that ‘perceived rule complexity was the strongest factor associated with increased risk of quitting the cognitively demanding weight management programme’.8 We’ve adopted similar approaches to work: for example, setting aside Friday mornings for weekly feedback sessions with staff and quick touchdown sessions to celebrate success, or never doing any work on Sundays (this one isn’t too hard to stick to!).
Bright lines are one example of the single most important lessons advocated by the Behavioural Insights Team, which we have applied to hundreds of parts of government policy and that should be at the heart of any good ‘think small’ strategy: make it easy. If you want to get someone to save for retirement, for example, you could provide them with access to a database containing all known pension plans, their historic pension contributions record and the advice of leading financial advisors. If you did all of this, however, lots of people would still fail to save for retirement and, by the time they got round to it, it might be too late. So instead, you could do what the UK government began doing in 2008. You could automatically enrol people onto pension plans and give them the ability to ‘opt out’ if they want to. You could make it easy. Automatic enrolment is now helping 9 million people in the UK to save billions more between them for their retirement. Making it easy, including by introducing bright lines, is a good example of how you can use your slow, reflective system to make changes that enable your fast thinking system to operate more effectively. As we saw in the Introduction, we are not capable of taking on board all available information, weighing up all the conceivable pros and cons, and then taking the optimal decision on the back of it. But if we acknowledge this fact, we can take decisions that reduce the cognitive burden of future decisions, so that we can focus our attention where it’s needed most. It was exactly this kind of thinking that former US president Obama had in mind when he explained why he only wore grey or blue suits when in office. ‘I’m trying to pare down decisions’, he explained to Vanity Fair. ‘I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.’
So we want to encourage you to think about how you might set your own bright lines, and to consider other ways of making it easy for you to do the things you need to do to reach your goal. This is the first step towards setting yourself a plan that will ultimately make it more likely that you will be able to follow through on your good intentions. Some of these will be relatively straightforward. If you’re trying to lose weight, for example, alongside simplifying your diet rules you should remove tempting snacks from your home or office (or at the very least, keep them out of sight). The additional effort required to reach them will make it less likely that you ever do. If you are trying to do more exercise, you might think about how you can start to make it easier to do so, for example by integrating exercise into your trip to work (can you get off your bus or train a stop before you usually do and walk briskly?), or by laying out your exercise gear when you go to bed to encourage you to go for an early-morning jog. If your aim is to spend more quality time with your family, but you find it hard to switch off from your work email, you could set yourself a bright line around using your mobile phone – perhaps by never logging onto your email after 8 p.m. or during the weekend. Conversely, you might identify the things that get in the way of achieving your goal and how these can be removed. In the story that opened this book, for example, one of the keys to ‘making it easy’ for Paul to get back into work was removing some of the frictions in the existing system (like loads of paperwork) that were preventing him from finding work sooner.
Making it easy and setting bright lines for yourself are the first step in the process for creating simple plans. They will also help you to think about how to move to the next step of planning; namely, to start making cognitive links between moments in your day or week and the actions that need to follow.
Rule 2: Create an actionable plan
Influenza is likely to have affected us all at one time or another during our lives. You’ll no doubt have experienced the fever and tiredness, the aches and pains and the throbbing headaches at some point. But partly because it seems so common, and partly perhaps because these symptoms start off in a similar way to the common cold, we have a tendency to overlook how serious flu can be. So while most of us will be fortunate enough to make a full recovery after a week or so, some people aren’t quite so lucky. Children and the elderly, pregnant women and people with underlying health conditions can easily get a much more severe case of flu, which can develop into serious complications like chest infections and then what looks like a bad cold can turn into a silent killer. In the United States alone, influenza leads to more than 200,000 hospitalizations and more than 8,000 deaths every year.9
The good news is that there is a vaccine for the flu virus that has been shown to reduce mortality, morbidity and healthcare costs. The trouble is that many of the people who would benefit most from the vaccination often fail to take it up. Some of these no-shows are likely the result of people carefully considering the pros and cons and deciding that the side effects – a slight temperature, aching muscles and pain where the jab is administered – outweigh the potential benefits. But many more fail to get their jabs because they never get round to making an appointment in the first place or simply fail to show up even when they do make a booking. In situations like these, when you know you should get round to doing something but fail to follow through, a simple plan can work wonders. And this is exactly what Katy Milkman, an amazingly productive professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, set out to test. Milkman and her colleagues teamed up with a big Midwestern utility firm to see if they could prompt more of the company’s 3,300 employees most at risk of influenza-related complications to go and get vaccinated. All the eligible employees received a reminder letter about the upcoming times for vaccination clinics. But only some of them were prompted to make a very simple plan. In addition to the dates and times of the clinics, this group was encouraged to fill in the date and time they would go to the clinic. This small change led to a 13 per cent increase in the number of people who showed up. The kind of change that, if it were adopted throughout the US and across the Western world, would help save thousands of lives.10
The core principles at the heart of Milkman’s plan-making letters were the same as those that we saw in the Obama voting prompts at the beginning of this chapter. They both derive from an idea developed by Peter Gollwitzer, a professor of psychology at Ne w York University, which he calls ‘implementation intentions’. Gollwitzer’s research focuses on those situations in which individuals seem to have an intention to do something, but then fail to implement the actions required to fulfil their goals. He realized that we are more likely to follow through on our intentions if we are able to make a cognitive connection between our anticipated future situation and the actions needed to fulfil our objective. In Milkman’s example, she encouraged people to create a cognitive connection between a specific time and date, and the need to show up to the appointment. It was, in this case, as simple as writing down the time and date by filling in the gaps. The Obama voting example was a stronger version of exactly the same idea. Would-be voters weren’t just asked to confirm that they were going to vote on election day. They were encouraged to think about what they would be doing immediately beforehand, and where they would be coming from. This prompted people to think about voting, for example, straight after having breakfast at home. More broadly, ‘when’, ‘how’ and ‘where’ questions play the roles of situational cues, which encourage you to take action by cognitively linking the situation (having your breakfast) with the action (going to vote). As with all think small strategies, they don’t require you to make huge changes to the way you go about your life, just minor tweaks that will make it more likely you will ultimately meet your goal.
Gollwitzer and a growing range of young academics following in his wake have used implementation intentions in all kinds of areas. In one of our favourites among Gollwitzer’s many studies, he mischievously asked his students to write a report of how they spent the afternoon and evening of Christmas Eve. The students were asked to describe how they felt about this time and how much it met their idea of pleasant leisure. They were to complete these reports during the Christmas break, to ensure that their memories remained as vivid as possible. Gollwitzer says that they deliberately chose this assignment because it was ‘awkward enough to guarantee a low base rate of completion’. In other words, it was ripe for testing whether students might be willing and able to follow through on their intentions, when faced with the temptations of the holiday season. He then got half of the group of students to form implementation intentions focused on when and where they intended to sit down and start writing. For example, one of the students said that they would do the assignment straight after church on Sunday at their father’s desk. Gollwitzer found that those who’d been asked to form implementation intentions were more than twice as likely to complete the task within the specified time period as those who had not made these plans.11
If this slightly quirky example sounds far removed from your own goal, you will be pleased to learn that Gollwitzer has recently reviewed results from ninety-four studies that used the technique and found that they can help in relation to just about any kind of goal you might want to set yourself.12 Making a simple plan that sets out when, how and where you are going to follow through on your intentions has been shown to be effective at helping people to eat more fruit, increase public transport use, reduce discrimination, get more exercise, diet, improve academic performance, quit smoking and recycle more.13 This includes the identification of obstacles to achieving these goals through so-called ‘if-then’ plans. These take the form ‘If I encounter situation X, then I will do Y’ – for example, if I get home after 8 p.m., I won’t log on to my work computer. These if-then plans are ready-made ways of helping you to think of how, when and where you will take the required action.
One of the ways to use implementation intentions to help you achieve your personal goals is to focus on the ‘chunks’ that make up your goal (introduced in the previous chapter). For a long-term goal, these should ideally be things you need to do on a regular basis, like sitting down to do forty-five minutes of practising your musical instrument or foreign language; or doing sixty minutes of training for your upcoming marathon. This will form the ‘how’ part of the implementation intention. Once you’ve got a clear idea of each of the chunks you need to perform, you can start thinking about the situations that might best trigger these actions. The easiest way to do this is to think through your daily routine: the best triggers are things that you will regularly encounter at specific moments and places. This will enable you to be clear about the ‘when’ and the ‘where’ of your implementation intention. The trigger for your goal could be your alarm clock waking you up in the morning, or getting back from work in the evening. So, for example, your implementation intention then starts to take the form: ‘When I get back from work on Wednesday, I will do sixty minutes of marathon training’; or ‘When my alarm clock goes off, I will do forty-five minutes of French reading.’ As we will see in the next chapter, and as we saw with the vaccination plans, you can strengthen these plans further by writing them down and actively committing to undertaking them.
An alternative method for forming implementation intentions is especially valuable in helping us to avoid temptations that might otherwise derail our progress – a subject that happens to be the specialism of Gollwitzer’s wife, Professor Gabriele Oettingen. The starting premise of Oettingen’s work is that we spend too much of our time either indulging in our dreams, or dwelling on the negatives. What we should be doing is a little bit of both. She calls this ‘mental contrasting’ and it works by thinking about the benefits of realizing your goal and then contrasting these with the obstacles that may stand in the way.14 For example, you might be trying to diet and imagine the extra confidence that losing some weight would give you when going on your summer holidays, but you also know that every time you go out for a meal, even if you opt for a relatively healthy main course, you’ll fall for that delicious-looking slice of chocolate cake with a hot fudge sauce. If you’re able to generate these mental contrasts (summer holiday vs desserts), you can then formulate an implementation intention and ‘if-then plans’ to help you avoid the obstacles that you face along the way. So, having realized that you will succumb to the dessert trolley whenever you go out for a meal, you might decide: If I’m in a restaurant and the waiter asks if I’d like to see the dessert menu, I will order a single espresso instead. Or if you recognize that you tend to be more defensive in your emails when challenged and responding late in the day, you could decide: If I’m writing sensitive emails, I will leave them in my drafts and then review and send them first thing in the morning. Mental contrasting and implementation intentions, when combined in this way, are especially powerful.15 At the Behavioural Insights Team, we are using this technique to tackle complex social issues such as childhood obesity, helping offenders back into work and reducing domestic violence reoffending.
Whether or not you make use of all of these techniques, the basic premise remains the same: if you want to achieve your goal, you’re much more likely to follow through on the things you need to do to achieve it if you create a simple plan. And the best way of doing this is to create connections between moments in your daily routine and the actions you need to take. This will enable you to go from thinking about doing something (going for a run, eating healthy food) to thinking about when, where and how you are going to do it (when I get home from work, when I’m in the office canteen). If you can do this, you’re well on the way to turning your plans into habits.
Rule 3: Turn the plan into habits
In 1971, the American army undertook an extraordinary study. Almost a thousand men returning home from war in Vietnam were interviewed and had urine samples collected. These tests uncovered some very uncomfortable truths. Of the 943 men, 495 tested positive for opiates and, of these men, three-quarters admitted that they had become addicted to narcotics while in Vietnam. Now, it goes without saying that quitting opiates is difficult – the clinical guidelines for heroin addiction include a sense of compulsion to take the drug; difficulties in controlling drug-taking behaviour; and a physiological withdrawal when the drug use is stopped. So it might come as some surprise that when the group of drug users were contacted again eight to twelve months after their return from Vietnam, only 7 per cent showed signs of dependence, and only about a third of the men had used opiates again. The study was contrary to much of the conventional wisdom: it seemed possible for a large group of people who had previously been dependent on narcotics to quit en masse.16
So why were the relapse rates for these men so much lower than for other young addicts during the same period? One of the most intriguing explanations is also deceptively simple. The soldiers’ drug use was linked to the highly unusual context in which they found themselves. When they were in Vietnam, they experienced an abundance of environmental cues that triggered their drug use. But when back in the US, these cues were largely absent and this meant that these same behaviours were never subsequently triggered. In other words, the returning soldiers never again found themselves in situations that would have resulted in their drug use. And this, rather than their collective willpower, was enough to ensure that almost all of them quit.17 If this explanation is correct, it could provide clues which might help those trying to break any kind of drug addiction. Indeed, researchers have subsequently found that long-term use of all kinds of substances is much lower among those who experience significant changes in their environment and that relapse rates among drug addicts are especially high when addicts are exposed to situational cues related to past drug consumption. This is one of the reasons why treatment programmes often advise recovering addicts to move to new locations and to avoid places where previous consumption took place.18 In the ‘Share’ chapter, we will see that there can also be a powerful social component to these effects too.
We’ve already seen how important situational cues can be in helping us to create simple plans – by creating ‘implementation intentions’ that cognitively link our intended actions with moments in our daily routine. But the Vietnam veterans’ story holds the key to a new kind of tool that will help us to achieve our goals: it shows how we can break long-held habits, and begin to build new ones. In order to see how this can be done in more everyday contexts than returning from Vietnam, we need to travel to the cinemas of the United States and specifically to American popcorn eaters. Americans eat a lot of popcorn – around 16 billion litres, or enough to fill the Empire State Building eighteen times.19 For many people, eating popcorn at the cinema constitutes a habit – a regular practice, developed over time, that is hard to give up. To test just how strong a habit eating popcorn in the cinema is, researchers devised a fun experiment in which people entering a cinema were given a bucket of either fresh or stale popcorn. Nobody would claim to like stale popcorn. But the researchers surmised that those who had developed a popcorn-eating habit would be impervious to the taste, whereas those who rarely bought popcorn wouldn’t be so quick to reach for the next handful. Just to make sure that the stale stuff did actually taste worse, they got everyone to rate the taste of the popcorn they’d eaten: the fresh popcorn, unsurprisingly, won hands down.
The headline findings of this experiment were completely in line with the researchers’ predictions. People who infrequently ate popcorn at the cinema ate much less of it when it was stale. But those with a strong popcorn-eating habit ate the same percentage of stale as fresh popcorn. It seemed that just going to the cinema prompted those with established habits to eat popcorn, whether they liked the stuff or not. But you might argue that it wasn’t the cinema per se that was prompting them to eat; it was the popcorn. These people might, in other words, just have a popcorn habit rather than a popcorn-at-the-cinema habit. And to test this principle, the researchers did something clever. They set up a couple of parallel studies. In one, they changed the context of the film-watching experience. They gave people popcorn on the way into a campus meeting room, rather than a cinema, and got them to watch music videos rather than films. When people were in this unusual context, even those with a strong popcorn habit ate less stale popcorn.20 As David Neal, who led the study, subsequently pointed out: ‘When we repeatedly eat a particular food in a particular environment, our brain comes to associate the food with that environment and makes us keep eating as long as those environmental cues are present.’21
The popcorn-eating behaviour of American cinemagoers and the narcotic abuse of Vietnam veterans might feel like a world away from one another. But they give us important insights into how habits are operationalized and how they can be broken. If we can understand these two components, we will be well on the way to helping ourselves establish new, positive behaviours that can help us to achieve our own goals, and to break any bad habits that are getting in the way. As with a lot of academic questions, there remains a debate about certain aspects of habit formation, but there is a growing consensus concerning three components, all of which were present in the Vietnam and cinema studies. The first is that habits require a cue or a trigger (going to the cinema). The second is that habits require a ‘routine’, the act that is performed (buying and eating the popcorn). Third, and most important, the routine needs then to be repeated in a consistent context, and it is this repetition that starts to create an automatic link between the situation that you encounter and the behaviour you perform.22 This is why habits have the potential to be so powerful: as behaviours are repeated, they no longer require so much active attention or mental energy. Over time, they become automatic responses to the environmental cues that we encounter so that we start conducting the routine in the absence of conscious control, mental effort and deliberation.23 This is why we’ll have all found ourselves occasionally taking the same route to work that we always have done, without realizing that the location of the new office is different.
Contrary to popular belief, there isn’t a magic number of repetitions that result in a habit forming. Some say that you need to repeat an action fifty times or for twenty-one days, but very few researchers have actually looked at this question systematically. And those that have done tend to find that there isn’t a clear-cut answer to the question. In one of the few studies to have tracked the formation of healthy habits in real-world settings, researchers studied ninety-six students who had just moved to university and were encouraged to repeat behaviours in response to consistent cues (such as ‘going for a walk after breakfast’). They found that habits formed in some of the students after eighteen days, but for some it took much longer – up to 254 days. The average was sixty-six days. But what they also found was that, in most cases, the same pattern emerged: initial repetitions caused large increases in automaticity, but with each fresh repetition, the automaticity gains reduced.24 In other words, habit strength increases steadily, but by a smaller amount each time you repeat the action in response to the same cue in a consistent context, until it reaches a plateau.
So how can we use all this new evidence on habits to help us achieve our goals? Well, there are three techniques you can use – which you choose will in part depend on whether you’re trying to break old habits or start new, positive ones. The first is to build on your ‘implementation intentions’ from the previous section. You should focus on identifying potential cues that you will encounter in your everyday life (alarm going off, leaving the house, arriving at work), and then start to use these cues as the triggers for your new routines. What turns the plan into a habit is the repetition of the new routine over and over until a new habit begins to form. Want to get better at flossing your teeth? Well, keep doing so every time you have finished brushing your teeth before you go to bed. Remember that repetition in a stable context is key – flossing whenever you feel the urge will not result in the same outcome. Want to get round to writing a book? Well, programme in forty-five-minute writing stints after your alarm goes off every morning and before you head into work. It’ll feel like a pain at first. But after a while, the cue (alarm goes off) will start to trigger an automatic response in your mind to perform the action (have breakfast, go to study to write).
The second technique is to disrupt the cues that encourage bad habits. We saw this in action with the American servicemen coming back from Vietnam: the cues that were prompting their drug taking were disrupted and resulted in very quick changes in their drug use. And we saw it at play in the popcorn study: by watching music videos in a meeting room, rather than films in a cinema, the cue was disrupted and the behaviour was changed. The key to disrupting the cue is to think about ways of altering your day-to-day environment. For example, if you are trying to lose weight, try getting rid of all the unhealthy food from your fridge and cupboards and replacing it with food that will help reinforce more positive eating behaviours. Or if that sounds like too much of a strain in the first instance, at the very least try moving the unhealthy stuff to the top shelf so that it’s out of reach – you will be surprised by the effect that this has in disrupting the automaticity of your response to the cue. There is a strong link here to the ‘make it easy’ principle we outlined at the start of the chapter. One very effective strategy for disrupting cues is to latch on to natural changes in your life. Studies have shown, for example, that the perfect time to change the mode of transport you use to get to work is when you change jobs or offices. But you can also think about cue disrupters if you are about to go to university, getting married or having a baby for the first time.
The third technique involves keeping the cue stable, but disrupting the routine instead. There are a couple of ways in which you might go about doing this. The first is to do something that results in you becoming much more conscious of the habitualized behaviour, which should reduce your tendency to do it. For example, in an unusual twist to the popcorn experiment, the researchers got some moviegoers to eat popcorn with their non-dominant hand (right-handed people ate with their left hand and vice versa). The effect was dramatic: habitual popcorn eaters ate much less of the stale popcorn.25 The second tactic is to substitute the old routine for a new one. Electronic cigarettes, for example, are being used increasingly by smokers to substitute a more pernicious habit (smoking tobacco) for one with much less severe health implications (vaping electronic cigarettes). In these instances, note that the cue that triggers the behaviour can remain. It’s just your response to the cue that changes. This of course can be especially useful in those situations in which it’s going to be tricky to change the cue – for example, if you smoke in response to stressful situations.
Habits are behaviours we perform automatically in response to a cue or trigger, in situations in which that behaviour has been performed ‘repeatedly and consistently in the past’.26 In many ways, habits are the holy grail of behavioural change because they herald the possibility of automatic behaviours – reducing the amount of cognitive effort required to perform them.
This chapter has been about making plans. But not in the sense of spreadsheets and huge to-do lists. Instead we have encouraged you to make a series of small changes, each of which will help make it easier to complete the steps required to reach your goal. One of the most important lessons, perhaps the most important lesson in thinking small, is to keep it simple. By setting really clear ‘bright lines’ you will find it much easier to stick to your plan and will avoid many of the transgressions that can result from rules that are too complicated to follow effectively. We saw that, in order to help you then follow through on each of these separate actions that you need to take, you can use implementation intentions. This involves thinking about how, when and where you will undertake the tasks you’ll need to complete, which in turn will enable you to link particular moments cognitively with the things you need to do or avoid (‘When I get home from work, I will go for a 5km run’). And finally, we saw that we can take this to a whole new level by turning these one-off actions into habits by repeating them frequently in response to the same situational cues. Forming habits will ultimately make our task far simpler by reducing the amount of cognitive effort required to do the things we want to do – especially if, at first, they seem more like chores than enjoyable activities. Planning out our goals in this way should set us up nicely for the chapters that follow.