How to Use Implementation Intentions to Create New Habits

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The idea is that with an explicit idea of what you need to do after, you know, that gives you a leg up. And over time, if it works out all right, it'll be a habit and then you can start working on something else in your life. The more specific you can get, the easier it is to do it, right? You know when you're done, you don't have to worry about it. Also, people pick, people have goals that are way too hard sometimes. If you can break up a major life change into smaller chunks that are achievable over time and you slowly build up toward it, then that makes you feel better about yourself.

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