How to Make Habits Faster

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

It seems to me that rewards help habits form faster, right? Like it's very easy to form a habit of eating candy every day because the candy is rewarding. It's much harder to create a habit of eat cardboard every day or something like that. So certain things that don't have any reward or any obvious reward anyway, you can and people have done this experimentally. You can created a habit in somebody just by making them do it over and over again.

Read the full transcript here.

How can we form good habits more effectively? What roles do reward and punishment play in the habit formation process? And what roles should they play? How should we structure our daily schedules around new habits to maximize the likelihood that they'll stick? If our goal is to do 100 push-ups a day, it's often easier to start with 10 and increase the difficulty over time; but at what level of difficulty should we start, and how quickly should we approach the target difficulty? How does willpower connect (or not) with habit formation? Why should we care about animal consciousness? When it comes to estimating how much good specific interventions will do, are bad estimates better than no estimates at all?

Dr. Jim Davies is a professor of cognitive science at Carleton University. He is the author of Imagination: The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power; Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make us Laugh, Movies Make us Cry, and Religion Makes us Feel One with the Universe; and Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are: The Science of a Better You. He co-hosts (with Dr. Kim Hellemans) the award-winning podcast Minding the Brain. Learn more about him at jimdavies.org or follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Staff