What's Changing? - Habit

Please see below selected recent habit-related change.

See also:

November 2023

Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money, made a strong argument that financial decisions are driven less by maths-derived data and spreadsheets than by subjective human characteristics and behaviours, such as ego and hype. He has since developed this thesis in Same As Ever by suggesting it's better to make predictions based on how people behave rather than by trying to anticipate events. Greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations and social persuasion are all common traits to take into account. While change captures the attention because it is surprising, the most powerful behaviours are those that never change, and provide pointers to the future.

August 2023

An observational study presented at the American Society for Nutrition's annual meeting examined data on more than 700,000 U.S. veterans and how their life expectancy shifted improved on the number of healthy habits followed. The findings? Adopting eight healthy lifestyle habits by middle age can result in a substantially longer life than those with few or none of the habits. Those habits are: being physically active; being free from opioid addiction; not smoking; managing stress; having a good diet; not regularly binge drinking, having good sleep hygiene and having positive social relationships.

December 2022

Further reading:

July 2022

Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better suggests that every habit consists of three elements: a cue, a routine, and a reward. The cue is what triggers the habit, the routine is the habit itself, and the reward is why we do the habit in the first place - because it provides some sense of pleasure or relief. To change a habit, we must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine. See also@
- How To Start New Habits That Actually Stick - James Clear
- How to Change Unhealthy Habits - Psychology Today

June 2022

Habits are automatic behaviours. Instead of requiring intention, they occur in response to environmental cues like time of day or location. Essentially, our brain forms an association between a specific context and a specific behavior. We then execute that behaviour - the ritual or habit - in that context without even thinking about it.
Big Think claimed that our habits are stored in a memory system that we don’t have access to, and that we can’t interfere with. If true, this means that educating people about how to eat more healthily is unlikely to change their diets and even providing financial incentives does not generally lead to lasting habit change after the incentive ends. The only sustainable way to change a habit is to replace it with a new one. This means we must complete a new behaviour in a given context, get a reward, and repeat. This is easier said than done, because forming new habits is challenging because of what psychologists call “friction”—the barriers that get in the way of completing a behaviour, like distance, time and effort.
Further reading:

May 2022

Habit is the foundation of the routines that comprise the vast bulk of our everyday lives. When we are not disturbed, we live our practical lives without engaging in anything like a cautious assessment of what it is we are doing at any given moment. No conscious deliberation or reflection is required to brew morning coffee, or to catch the morning train to work. As the late philosopher Hubert Dreyfus said, habits are a part of our ‘everyday coping practices’. However, pragmatist philosopher John Dewey denies that, as we become experts at carrying out everyday routines, our habitual responses always become entirely automatic response patterns. Habits, seen through a pragmatist lens, are far from being blunt reflexes, and rather amount to a treasure trove of possible responses to our situated environment, highly constrained by circumstance, but genuinely open to the world.

March 2022

In On Habit, Clare Carlisle noted that the of characterisation of habit as unintelligent and ‘a degradation of life, reducing spontaneity and vitality to mechanical routine’, has been held by many influential philosophers of the mind throughout history, including Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant and Henri Bergson.
However, Psyche noted that even our most mundane habitual routines actually display a great deal of intelligence. Indeed, they are often intelligently context-sensitive and flexible in such a way as can support and structure our goals and projects. Consider the example of driving the same route to work every morning. You might often find yourself wrapped up in thoughts about how your day will unfold, or how you might explain to your boss why you failed to complete some task, and yet you still easily navigate the roads that lead you to your destination. However, despite completing this task on something like autopilot, your drive will still be intelligently adjusted to situational intricacies, such as how fast or slow the driver in front of you is going, or when the traffic lights change.

July 2021

Habit is the foundation of the routines that comprise the vast bulk of our everyday lives. When we are not disturbed, we live our practical lives without engaging in anything like a cautious assessment of what it is we are doing at any given moment. No conscious deliberation or reflection is required to brew morning coffee, or to catch the morning train to work. Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus said, habits are a part of our ‘everyday coping practices’, reported Psyche.
In On Habit, Clare Carlisle noted that the characterisation of habit as unintelligent and ‘a degradation of life, reducing spontaneity and vitality to mechanical routine has been held by many influential philosophers of the mind throughout history, including Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant and Henri Bergson, again reported Psyche.

July 2020

There wasn’t just one coronavirus lockdown, argued the BBC – we all had our own experience. Some people were forced into months of unbroken solitude, others trapped for weeks on end with an estranged spouse. Some saw it as a positive experience – a welcome opportunity to slow down, go for walks and relax with a loving partner, or enjoy quality time with the children. Whichever way the lockdown played out, there has been one near universal aspect to the past months – it abruptly disrupted people's daily routines and living arrangements in ways that would not normally occur.

May 2020

Our habits guide our decisions, and they’re hard to change, according to Kris De Meyer, a researcher in neuroscience at King’s College, London, warning that even during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic that the “period of lockdown hasn’t been long enough to change deeply ingrained patterns of behaviour. Most people will probably fall back into old habits.” There is evidence to support this theory: for example, reports from Germany, when some small businesses reopened, showed higher-than-expected foot traffic ad in China, popular tourist sites were quickly packed again following the easing of restrictions.
In an updated edition of the late Stephen R. Covey's bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Sean Covey draws on ancient wisdom, modern psychology and 20th century science and wraps the mix in a can-do programme of easy-looking steps calling mostly for self-discipline. The book argues that you are what you habitually do, so adopt productive habits, You have the ability to improve your habits and your life and should focus on developing character, not personality and also choose sound principles - integrity, dignity, quality, service, patience, perseverance, caring, courage and endeavour.

December 2019

According to the Harvard Business Review, breaking habits is hard. We all know this, whether we’ve failed our latest diet (again), or felt the pull to refresh our Instagram feed instead of making progress on a work project that is past due. This is largely because we are constantly barraged by stimuli engineered to make us crave and consume, stimuli that hijack the reward-based learning system in our brains designed initially for survival.
Examining how contemporary culture inherits habits of thought from previous generations and what can we do to change them, Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct, has traced the historical origins of our modern ways of thinking and has shown how we cannot change the destination until we change the path.

July 2019

Procrastination can works, temporarily, to protect people from self-criticism, shame and anxiety. However, it’s largely an ineffective way of coping with problems we create. Psychologist Neil A. Fiore believes procrastination is an outdated habit we use to protect ourselves from fear of failure and self-criticism.
According to Farnam Street, the difference between habits and goals is not semantic. Each requires different forms of action. For example:
- We want to learn a new language. We could decide we want to be fluent in six months (goal), or we could commit to 30 minutes of practice each day (habit).
- We want to read more books. We could set the goal to read 50 books by the end of the year, or we could decide to always carry a book with us (habit).
- We want to spend more time with our families. We could plan to spend seven hours a week with them (goal), or we could choose to eat dinner with them each night (habit).

June 2019

Daily or weekly habits aligned with your long-term goals can keep people on track even when it’s hard to think ahead.. Each of us have regular practices we try to maintain to give our lives structure, to remain mentally and physically healthy, and to assure we’re approaching life consciously. A key step in maintaining regular habits can be to articulate and track them. We find the key is to keep this simple. What are the 5-10 things you need to do daily or weekly to keep life on track? Once you’ve written them down, track them - certain apps, for example, can be an easy way to set daily and weekly habits and be reminded of them.

March 2019

The School of Life argued that human beings are generally very good at acquiring habits. It’s just that various cultural forces have conspired to make habit formation look like an unimpressive, unexciting undertaking. At times ‘habit’ has even seemed like a dirty word - the name of something a bit shameful, boring and pitiful. The creature of habit is the man with his slippers by the fire puffing on a pipe, always reading the same pages of the newspaper, always switching on the television news at the same time.

February 2019

Repetition appears to be the key to developing a new habit. The study bases its conclusions on the habits of digital rodents. Just keep at it and the desired habit will eventually stick. A paper, Habits Without Values, published in Psychological Review, suggested that forming habits is a matter of simply repeating the desired behaviour until it sticks, not matter how little pleasure you derive from it. This conclusion comes from observing the habit-forming process of what the study refers to as "digital rodents" - computer models of mice - in a simulated environment of the authors' design.

December 2018

Further reading:
- How do I change my habits? - FT

January 2019

From counting our steps to tracking our alcohol intake, new technology allows us to quantify our own behaviour. However, it is not clear whether the trend for tracking our habits actually make our lives better? Analysis found that a quarter of active users were using these apps more than 10 times a week and that younger people with higher incomes were the most hooked. The impetus might be about control, reflection suggests the thing really being controlled is ourselves: companies like collecting our data: so they can sell it to other companies, warned Prospect.
Further reading:
- How do I change my habits? - FT

November 2018

For Quartz, morning routines set the tone for the day, and how we spend our days is how we spend our lives; thus, our seemingly insatiable fascination with the routines of the admired and admirable. If we start the morning with an early workout like Barack Obama, will we too stay calm and focused in a crisis? As with everything from exercise to spring cleaning, social media has turned the morning routine from a private practice into a public show of productivity. (Daily 5:30 am mindfulness practice, anyone?) But just as there is no single path to success, there’s also no one-size-fits all morning routine, added Quartz.
Food waste could rise by almost a third by 2030 when more than 2 billion tonnes will be binned, researchers claimed, warning of a "staggering" crisis propelled by a booming world population and changing habits in developing nations. The UN has set a target of halving food loss and waste by 2030. But the Boston Consulting Group study found that if current trends continued, it would rise to 2.1 billion tonnes annually - an amount worth $1.5 trillion.

Pre 2018

Positive addictions may prevent violence. Getting children into the habit of participating in activities such as school sports or music can, according to researchers lead to less fighting and fewer court referrals and gang-related activities. Such programmes cultivate the development of protective assets, such as stronger relationships with family members and mentors and the pursuit of "positive addictions" such as fitness, learning a musical instrument etc.
Human beings, suggests Vincent Deary in How We Are, are driven by our desires - the evolutionary process has made us into a living concoction of beaten paths. ‘You are the record, the embodiment of life’s ceaseless desiring, written in tiny molecular hand, transcribed and translated into flesh, from dust and water.’
Academic research underlines the power of ritual, in business as well as in personal life, in helping individuals pay attention and be fully present in the moment.

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