The Role of Context in Habit Development

When a cue occurs only with a behavior and not otherwise, then you're more likely to develop habits for the sauna that's different than other public settings. So I think that sometimes internal states can be cues. So uncertainty, anxiety might activate a certain behavior. But again, there's not a great deal of research on that. And I'm not sure how I don't know if that works in the same way as habit association.

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This episode is special. It features a conversation with the world-renowned habit researcher, Wendy Wood. Wendy has devoted the last 30 years to researching how habits work and recently published the fantastic book Good Habits, Bad Habits.

The episode is packed with insights, and we cover all things habits, from the difference between habits vs. routines to the impact of reward and context on habit formation. If you're curious to understand habits better, this episode is for you!

Links:

Wendy's website (where you can find here book) and her Twitter
Wendy's labs habit research
Habit Weekly Pro 🚀

Key points:

Changing attitudes is often not enough – even when we change people's attitude, their behavior doesn't always follow. And it's the behavior we care about, what they do.
The average person rarely distinguish between habits, behavior, intentions, beliefs and attitudes. "It's all all the same, all part of me and my decision making". It's important to differentiate these things as our brains consist of different systems that helps us accomplish different things.
There's a habit learning system designed specifically to pick up repetition of behaviour in a given context that generated some form of reward. We can think of reward as not money, but what makes you feel good. Habits are the context response associations that you form in memory, when you repeat a behaviour, often enough for the for it to become automatic. Additionally, routines are simply sequences of habit.
We can can change people's attitudes and beliefs for short periods, but these changes can disappear once they go back to real life if we fail to change the system. We need to understand the broader influences on someone's behavior in order to design contextual cues and rewards that helps them respond in new ways long-term.

Timestamps:
00:16: Episode overview

01:33: Interview starts

02:00: Wendy details her background and how she got started researching habits

03:55: Differentiating habits and behavior

06:50: Distinguishing between routines and habits

08:10: The automaticity of bias associations compared to the automaticity of habits

10:50: Can one-off trainings really be used to create new habits

13:16: Changing day-to-day environments and systems to change habits

16:28: Sam tells an anecdote about the influence of context on habits

18:30: The temporal dynamic of habit activation

20:42: Recurring contextual associations with a habit

21:27: Internal states as context cues for habits