April 13, 2026 • 33 mins
Breaking bad habits often feels like a test of willpower. We tell ourselves we’ll stop scrolling, eat better, or exercise more — and then fall right back into the same routines. So why is lasting change so hard?
As part of our spring cleaning series, we’re revisiting a powerful episode from The Happiness Lab archives that reveals a surprising truth about behavior change: it’s not about willpower at all. Dr. Laurie Santos sits down with psychologist Wendy Wood to explore what the science of habits really says about why we get stuck — and how we can finally change.
Along the way, we hear the remarkable story of American soldiers in Vietnam who abruptly overcame heroin addiction after returning home, offering a powerful clue about how habits really work. If you’re looking to break a bad habit or build a better one, this episode shows how small changes to your environment can make lasting change feel almost automatic.
Experts Mentioned:
- Wendy Wood, Provost Professor of Psychology and Business, University of Southern California.
- Dr. Richard Ratner, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences
Resources Mentioned:
- Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, by Wendy Wood (2019)
- “How Do People Adhere to Goals When Willpower Is Low? The Profits (and Pitfalls) of Strong Habits,” by David T. Neal, Wendy Wood, and Aimee Drolet (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2013)
- “The Pull of the Past: When Do Habits Persist Despite Conflict with Motives?,” by David T. Neal, Wendy Wood, Mengju Wu, and David Kurlander (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2011)
- “Ironic Processes of Mental Control,” by Daniel M. Wegner (Psychological Review, 1994)
- “How Permanent Was Vietnam Drug Addiction?,” by Lee N. Robins, Darlene H. Davis, and David N. Nurco (American Journal of Public Health, 1974)
- CBS News Lottery Draft 1969 (Archival Footage)
- "G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam" (The New York Times, 1971)
- G.I. Junkie (Documentary, 1971)
Related Episodes:
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, welcome back to our special
series on spring Cleaning Your Happiness. In honor of this
season of new beginnings, we're clearing out all our outdated
behaviors and mindsets so that we can refresh our emotional
(00:35):
junk drawers, so to speak. We'll also be doing our
own Happiness Lab closet refresh as we head back into
the episode archives to find throwback insights from past episodes
that you might have missed, And in today's episode from
the archives, we're diving into a very tough spring clean
up job. We'll be exploring how to freshen up our habits. Now,
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess
(00:57):
that there's at least one routine that you do on
autopilot all the time, even though it makes you feel
kind of crappy. Wouldn't you like to break free, to
toss out that bad habit like an old pair of genes,
and replace it with a routine that fits your current
goals a bit better. That sounds awesome in theory, you're
probably thinking, but is it really possible to break a
well learned bad habit? Turns out yes, totally possible, but
(01:21):
the process is way easier if you have a more
nuanced understanding of the way our brains structure habits and
how they really work. And that is what you're going
to learn in our episode. Today. You're going to meet
a scientist who sleeps in her running gear and a
Vietnam war doc who turned to heroin addicts to debink
some important misconceptions about habit change. By the end of
(01:42):
the show, you'll have gained some practical tips for dropping
your own not so great routines and for building healthier ones.
Sound good, We'll get ready to clear out all your
bad habits with this week's Spring Cleaning Happiness Lab throwback
coming up right after this quick break.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
For starters. It was the last thing I particularly wanted
to do.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Like many young Americans back in nineteen seventy, Richard Ratner
wasn't all that excited about going to war.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
I had just been married, and when I found out
that I was going to Vietnam, we try to figure
out any way to get out of it, you know,
which involved oh, I don't know, talking to the military
and Stane whether it's assignment could be changed. None of
it worked. They were well prepared for people who didn't
want to go.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
The army didn't want to hear Richard's excuses. As a
newly qualified doctor, he had just the skills that the
military desperately needed. Richard was one of many American men
who were plucked from their civilian lives and forced into
the armed services. September fourteen, zero zero won. There was
(03:02):
even a televised lottery draw where young men were selected
from military service and in Vietnam based on their birthday.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
April twenty four is zero zero two.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Richard was lucky enough to delay his service until after
his medical training, but arriving in Saigon as a twenty
something new doctor was still a shock to the system.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
We are in buses where they have this steel mash
covering the windows, and I'm absolutely sure that any minute
someone is going to toss a lamb at us.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
But Richard wasn't a trained surgeon heading to Vietnam to
take care of bullet wounds. He was a psychiatrist, but
he still wouldn't be treating depression or even PTSD. Richard
was about to use his training to wage a war
against bad habits, the kind of behaviors we really want
to change, but somehow can't. Richard would soon learn that
(03:51):
our habits don't always work the way we think. His
findings not only shocked scientists, but also change the way
that researchers think about the science of behavior change even
decades later, and his story provides some important hints for
how we can win our own personal battles with the
bad habits that her our happiness. Our minds are constantly
(04:13):
telling us what to do to be happy. But what
if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are
lying to us, leading us away from what will really
make us happy. The good news is that understanding the
science of the mind can point us all back in
the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab of
doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
You got to have those shoes shined. You got to
show up at formation. You know, you have to have
your bed made.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Richard's soldiers were trapped in Vietnam, far away from home.
Some were facing life or death situations on the battlefield,
but according to Richard, the biggest enemy many soldiers faced
was back in the barracks. It was boredom. Away from combat,
soldiers spent their days doing repetitive tasks that they didn't enjoy,
shining boots, dealing with annoying superior officers, and generally just
(05:06):
not having anything fun to do. And that's why many
of them wound up turning to a particularly bad habit,
one that the army really didn't approve of.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
People would just kind of get high, and you know,
not necessarily that different from if you come home from
a hard day at the steel mill and you know,
go into the bar and have a few drinks. It's
not totally unlike.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
That, yeah, but you know, what was available wasn't a
few drinks, at least for the soldiers who weren't twenty one.
What was available was like incredibly hardcore heroine exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
The first phase was where soldiers were smoking marijuana. If
you're smoking weed, it's not going to take too long
for it to waft down to where the first sergeants
Woch was and he'd come up looking for you.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Conveniently enough, soldiers had access to a less smelly drug option.
With the Golden Triangle, a massive area of poppy production
just across the border, suppliers were ready and willing to
sell an alternative drug to US troops heroin.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
They could do it under the nose of the commanding officers,
and it was a great deal more potent.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
As one GI addict told The New York Times, the
skag was everywhere. Estimates very, but it's generally thought that
around twenty percent of low ranking soldiers used heroin. The
Times called the addiction rates an epidemic. With hundreds of
thousands of American troops stationed all over Vietnam, the government
was worried that gis would return to their families as
(06:35):
desperate junkies.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
This notion that we had a whole army full of
drug crazed people who were going to be unleashed on
these communities truly had people frightened. The Army announced that
anybody who was dependent on heroin could report to the
Amnesty Center. They would not be arrested or charged with
(06:59):
criminal activities. They could come, they could detox and then
go home. You know, no harm, no foul.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
The American public demanded action, so, without a better plan,
the Army opted to force the gis to go cold
turkey when they.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Came into the detox center. We did not taper them
off on heroin. I really had no idea, and I
was sort of frantically trying to get information on how
does one properly detox somebody.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
But what Richard had even less of an idea about
was how he was going to help soldiers stay clean
once they got home. I mean, heroin isn't just any
old bad habit, It's an incredibly addictive substance. By making
his soldiers go cold turkey, Richard could help his men
get through the withdrawal phase, that first step to breaking
the physical part of their addiction. But the bigger challenge
(07:48):
was helping them avoid the behavioral parts of their addiction,
that habit of turning to heroin in order to feel
better whenever they were feeling depressed or bored or stressed,
the almost automatic urge to reduce their craving with a
quick hit. Simply hoping that these men would have the
willpower to avoid heroin wasn't going to be enough.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Here we have these guys who are eighteen nineteen, and
when a little too much pressure is put on them,
they pop.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
At the time, Richard was worried that there was no
way to avert this wave of addiction. Sure, the men
could detox at his center, but no one seemed to
know what to do to help them and overcome their
awful habit so that they could become healthier and happier. Now,
I'm guessing most people listening to this podcast won't ever
face a behavioral challenge as hard as kicking heroin. But
(08:38):
like those soldiers, all of us have bad habits that
detract from our health and happiness. You don't need to
be an opioid drug user to understand that it can
be difficult to change are not so good ways, and
the science suggests that the everyday habits that plague us
can sometimes be just as hard to overcome as the
addictive kind. The problem is that the path to happiness
(08:59):
requires changing a lot of these habitual bad behaviors. We
need to stop griping, we need to put down our phones,
and we need to stop craving material possessions. But how
do we do that? If you're like me, it probably
feels like changing these repeated behaviors is really really challenging.
But what our lying minds don't realize is that we
(09:20):
have a powerful mental tool that really could help us
achieve lasting behavioral change with ease, if only we understood
how that tool worked. I wanted to learn more about
why our intuitions about behavior change were so bad, and
I knew just the person to ask.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
My name is Wendy Wood. I am Professor of Psychology
and Business here at the University of Southern California.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Wendy is the author of a new book, Good Habits,
Bad Habits, The Science of making positive changes that stick.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Most of us are very good at understanding what we
need to do better to be healthier, to be more
financially stable, to have happier families. Most of us know
what those things are.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
The problem, according to Wendy, is that most of us
mistakenly think that changing our behavior requires willpower and hard work.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
I think that we admire willpower and we view it
as a very positive attribute. The way that the Puritans
thought they would go to heaven is through self denial
and showing that they were strong enough to resist temptations.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
But there's a problem with this. Willpower is next to
godliness notion, and that is that willpower doesn't really work.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
When you exert willpower and control your behavior, what you're
doing is you are thinking about the thing that you
don't want to do, and in doing so, you give
it energy to keep re emerging. So there's a sort
of a self defeating aspect to willpower that gets in
(11:03):
our way.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
So if willpower doesn't work, what can we actually do
to successfully tam our bad habits. The answer is that
we need to be working smarter, not harder.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
When you observe people when they are being effective at
controlling their behavior and doing the right thing, say eating
healthfully or saving money for the future, what they're doing
is they're not exerting willpower. What people do is they
(11:34):
set up the situations around them to make it easy
to repeat the desired behavior, and they repeat it over
and over so that it becomes automatic. We don't realize
how much of that we really could harness if we
just knew how it worked.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
When we get back from the break, we'll do just that.
We'll take a deep dive into how habits work and
how you can harness them to behave in ways that
promote your health and your happiness. The Happiness Lab will
be right back.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
I get up in the morning, I walk into my
kitchen and making coffee is the first thing that comes
to mind.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Psychologist and behavior change expert Wendy Would knows that engaging
in routine is the secret to changing our bad behaviors.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
I don't ask myself how to do it. I don't
need to do that. I've done it so often in
the past. I don't ask myself whether I want coffee?
Am I really tired this morning? Do I need coffee?
I don't ask those questions. I just do it, and
then in the end I get the reward of repeating
what I've done in the past, which is that great
(12:52):
cup of coffee. And that's how people who are really
successful at meeting their goals, that's how they do it.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Wendy's morning coffee making illustrates a willpower free strategy that
all of us can use to change our behavior for
the better. It's called habit formation.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
Habits are just the behaviors we repeat until they become
sort of mental shortcuts. There's shortcuts about what you can
do that's likely to get you the same reward as
you got in the past.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Habits canform for any repeated behavior that gets us a reward,
whether that reward is ultimately good for us, like a
nice cup of coffee in the morning, or bad for us,
like a shot of heroin. But Wendy's work has shown
the good habits and bad habits work exactly the same way.
They have a very particular structure, one that involves three
(13:47):
critical parts. The first critical part of habit formation is
the reward.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Rewards here are just behaviors that meet your goals, behaviors
that make you feel good, behaviors that achieve some outcome
that you're looking for.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
For morning, Wendy, that reward was having the positive taste
of a nice cup of coffee. But habit formation can
involve lots of other kinds of rewards too. The endorphins
that kick in after a good exercise session, the reduced
boredom we feel after we do a quick social media check,
or the satisfaction you get learning something new from your
favorite podcast. Anything that feels nice or meets a goal
(14:27):
can serve as a reward that leads to a new habit.
But habits not only require a reward at the end.
They also have a second critical component, the routine. A
routine is the specific sequence of actions that gets us
to a reward. For Wendy's caffeine habit, that might be
each step she takes to make her morning coffee. If
(14:48):
you're a yoga lover like me, your routine might involve
grabbing your mat and driving to your favorite studio. The
science shows that having a specific routine is critical to
habit formation, in part because our minds care about them
a lot. In fact, when your brain experience is something wonderful,
it drops everything to remember the exact sequence of whatever
(15:09):
you just did to get that reward, and when it
lays down a new memory of that sequence, it definitely
doesn't want to screw anything up, and so it doesn't
just remember what you did as a bunch of individual
action steps. Instead, it stores your whole sequence of behaviors
as a single solitary routine, what researchers call chunking. It
(15:29):
even uses a totally different neural system to do so.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
When you're repeating a task that you have practiced many
times in the past, you are relying on something called
the sensorymotor system, which involves the protament, which is part
of the basic anglia, and when you start a new task,
in contrast, using much more of the frontal lobes, because
(15:56):
those are the active thinking parts of your brain. And
these two things are definitely connected, but they also function
somewhat independent line.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
And that's why habits are such fantastic mental shortcut because
we don't need our conscious thinking frontal lobes to remember
each individual action. Whenever we want a reward, the unconscious
bits of our brain can just hit go and our
minds get the entire perfectly stored routine for.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Free driving is the prototypic habo. It's something we have
to think about when we first learn to do it,
but then over time that thought becomes less and less necessary,
and we start just responding automatically based on what we
(16:43):
did in the past, and that achieves the goal of
getting us somewhere we want to go, and it does
so efficiently and quickly most of the time, unless you
live in la and then there's nothing efficient about driving.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
I want to focus in on this lack of awareness
for a second because it's really weird when you think
about it. I mean, our driving routine involves tracking lots
of complicated stuff, from where your right foot is to
how fast your car is going, to whether there are
pedestrians about to cross the street, to where other cars
are moving, to when a traffic light might change, to
when you need to click your turn signal, and to
(17:19):
whether you have your radio set to your favorite podcast.
It's amazing that we can juggle all that information at all,
let alone that we can do so easily and unconsciously.
But that is the amazing psychological power of habits. Once
we form a new habit, we get to engage in
all kinds of complicated behaviors without a moment's thought. And
(17:39):
that's why habits are so much more effective than willpower
for changing our behaviors. Once we make the things we
want to do habitual, they don't require any more work.
The problem, though, is that not all of our unconscious
habitual behaviors are good for us.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
So sitting on the couch when you get home at
night and eating potato chips that's just as much of
a habit as going home and then just heading out
to the gym. One looks habitual and star structured to us,
and the other might look sort of a bit lazier,
but they're both habits in the same way.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Sadly, those lazier, not so good for us routines are
just as automatic as our positive habits, which means that
our bad habits, the ones that inhibit our happiness, are
really really hard to shed. We might want to shut
those habits off, but we can't because our minds are
on autopilot, but Wendy's work shows that we do have
some control over when our habit routines get turned on
(18:40):
whether our minds unconsciously decide to execute that sit on
the couch and munch behavior or the throw on our
gym closed one. The answer comes from the third critical
part of our habit loops, the context. The context is
any part of our situation or environment that cues our behavior.
For Wendy's coffee habit, the context was a location, being
(19:01):
in her kitchen and a time of day it was morning,
and a preceding event she had just woken up. For
Richard Heroin addicts, the context might be their barracks, or
the site of other gis using drugs, or just being
in Vietnam.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
In our research, we've found that context can be pretty
much everything around you that's not you. It can be
the people that you're with. There are certain people who
trigger certain behaviors that we've done with them in the past.
You may have friends that you typically go and have
(19:37):
a drink with, and if you see them again, that's
what tends to come to mind. The moods we're in
can also be triggers, so I think that one of
the most common triggers for checking your cell phone is
being bored. Even if you're in a meeting and it's
(19:58):
quite rude, you may find yourself checking your phone. You
don't want to be rude, but the idea of your
phone just comes to mind when you're bored.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
When our brains notice a context that's associated with the habit,
one that goes with a particular routine and a certain
kind of reward, we get an incredibly strong urge to
execute the habitual behavior, even if it's a behavior that's
no longer useful or relevant. In fact, Wendy's work has
shown that cues can elicit habitual behavior even when the
(20:27):
rewards from those behaviors aren't even there anymore. She tested
this out in a clever study involving movie trailer screenings.
One group of subjects watched the movie trailers on a
computer in Wendy's lab, just like a typical study, but
a second group of subjects got to watch the trailers
inside a movie theater. Wendy was interested in whether the
(20:49):
movie theater cues spurred on a habitual movie going behavior,
popcorn eating, but she also wanted to know whether her
subjects would engage in that habitual behavior even when it
was no longer rewarded to do that. She varied the
deliciousness of the popcorn she offered.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Some people got popcorn that was stale, and it was
really stale, so it had been sitting in our lab
for a week in a plastic bag. It was pretty gross.
Others got popcorn that was fresh that had just been pomped.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Very few people who watched the film in the lab
ate the gross popcorn. They didn't have any cues that
pushed them to engage in an otherwise yucky behavior. But
what happened to the subjects who experienced all the normal
cues of being inside a cinema, Well, it depended on
how they normally acted when watching movies.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
People who had habits to eat popcorn in the movie
cinema ate just about the same amount of stale popcorn
as fresh. They could tell us when we asked them
that they hated the stale popcorn. They ate it anyway.
People who didn't have habits deep popcorn in the movie cinema,
(22:00):
they did just what you'd expect, but rationally we think
we would all do, which is eat the fresh popcorn,
but if they got a bag of stale, just lave it.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
When our brains see a cue that's been associated with
the habitual behavior, we can't help but execute that behavior,
even when the behavior is no longer rewarding. But despite
the power of these cues, Wendy has found that we
don't often realize how much context affects our behavior, and
that means we often forget that we can't count on
(22:30):
our habitual routines once the cues go away, and Wendy
has seen the negative effects of removing our habitual cues firsthand.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
I bought a new car a few years ago that
has all kinds of wonderful safety sensors, so it beeps
when I get close to an obstacle, and I hated
that at first. It really irritated me because I wasn't
used to it, But I started responding to those signals automaticly.
Over time, you just stop noticing them. When the car beeps,
(23:00):
you just automatically respond to it. And I didn't realize
how automatic that had become, how much of my driving
habit that had become, until I rented a car and
it didn't have that warning sensor system, and the first
thing I did is I backed into a brick wall.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
The Happiness Lab will be right back.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
I am a Vietnam veteran, a ex marine medic, and
an ex morphine addic.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Back in nineteen seventy one, a documentary called GI Junkie
followed a group of returning soldiers going through rehab.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
I don't need no pills, no warning or a needle
in my arm.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
I mean, like, I'm there, I know what I want.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
I'm going to go get it.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
The film argued that nearly forty thousand hardened GI junkies
were about to return to American soil and would soon
become a major problem, but in reality, no such army
of drug addicts actually existed. The kind of surprising key
is that I think once, you know, once these soldiers
got on the plane and got back home, they were good,
Their cravings didn't kick in, and they weren't trying to
(24:14):
find the stuff once they got back.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Exactly That's exactly right. And no one, I don't think
anyone could have predicted.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
That psychiatrist Richard Ratner had been sent to Vietnam to
diffuse what one newspaper called a time bomb. And that's
what made Richard's soldier's outcomes all the more surprising. A
team of researchers followed addicted Vietnam vets after they came home.
The scientists interviewed the men about their recent opioid habits
and even conducted drug tests using urine samples, and what
(24:43):
they found pretty much stunned everyone, including Richard. Only a
very tiny percentage of soldiers continued their drug use after
they got home. More than ninety percent of soldiers stayed clean.
Compared to the typical heroin user, Vietnam vets seemed to
have little trouble kicking the habit. The study was so
shocking that at first researchers didn't even believe it, but
(25:06):
slowly behavioral scientists like Richard to figure out the soldier's secret.
They were able to use their contextual cues to break
their bad habit.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Probably the majority of users would basically kind of detox
on their own. They would self detox while they used
this crutch to help them get through military life over there.
They understood that the home environment is very different from
this environment.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Richard realized that a few hours on an airline and
a change back into civy clothes was enough to break
his soldier's habit routine. They weren't bored or stressed anymore,
and they weren't hanging out with their drug taking buddies.
They also didn't have easy access to cheap heroin. Nearly
every single one of their habit cues was different.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Most of these guys, they got home and they kind
of reintegrated into their previous lives.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Richard's veteran's success in kicking heroin has now become a
classic example in the science of behavior change. Because of
a simple context switch can be powerful enough to help
someone overcome heroin addiction. Imagine how powerful it can be
for changing simpler behaviors like the ones many of us
want to change.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
We did some research where we beeped people once an
hour to figure out what they were thinking, feeling, doing,
and what we found is that about forty three percent
of the time, people are doing what they did yesterday
and the day before in the same context, and they're
(26:39):
doing it without thinking much about it.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
The idea that nearly half of our working day is
on autopilot, that we're constantly governed by cues and context
is pretty shocking. But if that's true, then it gives
us a powerful opportunity to change some of our daily behaviors.
If we can use our conscious minds to exert some
control over the context we find ourselves in, then we
can shift our bad behaviors to the ones we want
(27:02):
to adopt.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Our environments can do the same thing for us in
pushing us to help us meet our goals and making
it hard for us to stray from the good behaviors
that we're trying to practice.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
This is something you can do right now, whether in
your home or at your workplace. Think of it as
feng shui for habits, but with an actual scientific basis.
Make small changes in your environment that provide the cues
you need to promote good behaviors. Wendy's research has shown
that simple changes like these work time and again.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
In one study, people had a bowl of apple slices
and a bowl of hot buttered popcorn. When the apple
slices were right in front of them and the popcorn
was arms reach, people ate a third less calories than
when the popcorn was right in front of them and
(27:59):
the apple slices were a reach. I mean, we're talking
a minimal distance that makes little sense to our our
conscious thinking cells, but to our habits and our automatic
reacting cells, that's a big difference. We don't realize how
(28:20):
much of a difference proximity makes to our behavior.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
But context doesn't just affect what we reach for when
we're hungry. There are lots of simple ways we can
use the cues around us to disrupt the autopilot behaviors
we don't want to engage in.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
There are forces in our environments that make some actions
more difficult and other actions easier, and those resisting forces
can be termed friction. It just becomes too difficult.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
The same sort of friction help Vietnam bits avoid drug
use when they return home. Many had never taken heroin
before going to war, so they'd actually have to find
a dealer, and the heroin available in the States was
a far lower quality, which meant that soldiers would have
to inject it rather than snort or smoke it. The
price was also far far higher, and the GI's mood
(29:08):
had shifted completely. Those feelings of boredom that drove them
to use opioids. Those were replaced by the excitement of
being home and just the pace of normal life. Each
and every one of the cues that prompted that heroin
routine was gone. And this is super important because these
contextual changes were more powerful than any of the detox
(29:29):
ideas the army came up with. The new cues meant
that soldiers just didn't think about the reward of a
quick heroin hit because their entire habit chains were disrupted.
But frictions can also be introduced to tackle the problems
associated with legal drugs.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
In the middle of the last century, we all learned
that smoking was bad for US. About half of America
smoked at that point, but smoking still didn't go down.
Smoking rates continued reasonably high until the US decided to
put friction on smoking by taxing cigarettes so you can't
(30:06):
afford them as easily, bannings smoking in public places, and
by making it difficult to purchase cigarettes so that you
actually have to ask somebody. And all of those things
combined put enough friction on smoking so that the smoking
rates in the US are now down to a level
(30:26):
of only fifteen percent of US smoke. And that's because
of friction.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Even if you don't smoke or use illegal drugs, there's
a lesson here for you. Think about the things you
want to change in your life, the bad habits you
want to stop or the good habits you want to adopt.
We can use the conscious part of our brain to
increase friction to inhibit our bad habits and break down
the barriers that prevent us from doing the good ones.
Are there social media apps that drive you nuts but
(30:53):
you can't help checking whenever you pick up your phone,
Well delete them. Do you want to call your mom
more often, well, then choose a photo of her as
your screensaver. Don't want to buy certain items in the store,
plan your shopping trip to avoid the candy issle. Or
maybe you want to try some of the new habits
that we've talked about in the season, like experiencing more gratitude,
(31:15):
Then download a gratitude app and stick it front and
center on your phone. Or maybe you want to make
better use of your time, Then put that time windfall
list somewhere you can see it easily. In all of
these examples, you can hack the cues around you to
help promote the kinds of behaviors that you want in
your life. Wendy had to go through this exact same
(31:36):
conscious process when her daily fitness habit took a nose
dive thanks to motherhood. Rather than powering through or giving up,
she analyzed where her growing family was adding a bit
of friction to her workout plans.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
Every time I decided two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock,
maybe six o'clock tonight, i'll exercise, something always comes up
when you have little children. So I decided I would
have to start exercising early in the morning. Although it
was a really dreadful thing to start doing, once you
get used to it, it actually is very efficient.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
So at six am, Wendy would be ready to exercise.
But what exercise? Wendy realized it had to be something
with as few frictions as possible.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
I didn't have much time to drive to a gym
or do any fancy workout thing. I couldn't go to
a class. I just didn't have that level of control
over my time. So it had to be something that
was very efficient and easy for me to do. And
putting your running shoes on and going out the door
is probably the most frictionless kind of exercise that you
(32:41):
could imagine. I actually used to sleep in my running clothes.
I hate to admit this, but that was another thing
that reduced the friction.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Talking with Wendy has really inspired me to think about
how I can use my conscious brain to hack the
autopilot of all my bad habits. I'm already planning strategies
I can use to increase or reduce friction so I'll
be able to reach my own well being goals literally
without thinking. I hope you've gotten some insight into how
you can hack your own habits, and I hope you'll
(33:12):
be willing to form a new, happier habit and set
up all your context cues to remind you to come
back for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me,
Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, welcome back to our special
series on spring Cleaning Your Happiness. In honor of this
season of new beginnings, we're clearing out all our outdated
behaviors and mindsets so that we can refresh our emotional
(00:35):
junk drawers, so to speak. We'll also be doing our
own Happiness Lab closet refresh as we head back into
the episode archives to find throwback insights from past episodes
that you might have missed, And in today's episode from
the archives, we're diving into a very tough spring clean
up job. We'll be exploring how to freshen up our habits. Now,
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess
(00:57):
that there's at least one routine that you do on
autopilot all the time, even though it makes you feel
kind of crappy. Wouldn't you like to break free, to
toss out that bad habit like an old pair of genes,
and replace it with a routine that fits your current
goals a bit better. That sounds awesome in theory, you're
probably thinking, but is it really possible to break a
well learned bad habit? Turns out yes, totally possible, but
(01:21):
the process is way easier if you have a more
nuanced understanding of the way our brains structure habits and
how they really work. And that is what you're going
to learn in our episode. Today. You're going to meet
a scientist who sleeps in her running gear and a
Vietnam war doc who turned to heroin addicts to debink
some important misconceptions about habit change. By the end of
(01:42):
the show, you'll have gained some practical tips for dropping
your own not so great routines and for building healthier ones.
Sound good, We'll get ready to clear out all your
bad habits with this week's Spring Cleaning Happiness Lab throwback
coming up right after this quick break.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
For starters. It was the last thing I particularly wanted
to do.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Like many young Americans back in nineteen seventy, Richard Ratner
wasn't all that excited about going to war.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
I had just been married, and when I found out
that I was going to Vietnam, we try to figure
out any way to get out of it, you know,
which involved oh, I don't know, talking to the military
and Stane whether it's assignment could be changed. None of
it worked. They were well prepared for people who didn't
want to go.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
The army didn't want to hear Richard's excuses. As a
newly qualified doctor, he had just the skills that the
military desperately needed. Richard was one of many American men
who were plucked from their civilian lives and forced into
the armed services. September fourteen, zero zero won. There was
(03:02):
even a televised lottery draw where young men were selected
from military service and in Vietnam based on their birthday.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
April twenty four is zero zero two.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Richard was lucky enough to delay his service until after
his medical training, but arriving in Saigon as a twenty
something new doctor was still a shock to the system.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
We are in buses where they have this steel mash
covering the windows, and I'm absolutely sure that any minute
someone is going to toss a lamb at us.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
But Richard wasn't a trained surgeon heading to Vietnam to
take care of bullet wounds. He was a psychiatrist, but
he still wouldn't be treating depression or even PTSD. Richard
was about to use his training to wage a war
against bad habits, the kind of behaviors we really want
to change, but somehow can't. Richard would soon learn that
(03:51):
our habits don't always work the way we think. His
findings not only shocked scientists, but also change the way
that researchers think about the science of behavior change even
decades later, and his story provides some important hints for
how we can win our own personal battles with the
bad habits that her our happiness. Our minds are constantly
(04:13):
telling us what to do to be happy. But what
if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are
lying to us, leading us away from what will really
make us happy. The good news is that understanding the
science of the mind can point us all back in
the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab of
doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
You got to have those shoes shined. You got to
show up at formation. You know, you have to have
your bed made.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Richard's soldiers were trapped in Vietnam, far away from home.
Some were facing life or death situations on the battlefield,
but according to Richard, the biggest enemy many soldiers faced
was back in the barracks. It was boredom. Away from combat,
soldiers spent their days doing repetitive tasks that they didn't enjoy,
shining boots, dealing with annoying superior officers, and generally just
(05:06):
not having anything fun to do. And that's why many
of them wound up turning to a particularly bad habit,
one that the army really didn't approve of.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
People would just kind of get high, and you know,
not necessarily that different from if you come home from
a hard day at the steel mill and you know,
go into the bar and have a few drinks. It's
not totally unlike.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
That, yeah, but you know, what was available wasn't a
few drinks, at least for the soldiers who weren't twenty one.
What was available was like incredibly hardcore heroine exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
The first phase was where soldiers were smoking marijuana. If
you're smoking weed, it's not going to take too long
for it to waft down to where the first sergeants
Woch was and he'd come up looking for you.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Conveniently enough, soldiers had access to a less smelly drug option.
With the Golden Triangle, a massive area of poppy production
just across the border, suppliers were ready and willing to
sell an alternative drug to US troops heroin.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
They could do it under the nose of the commanding officers,
and it was a great deal more potent.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
As one GI addict told The New York Times, the
skag was everywhere. Estimates very, but it's generally thought that
around twenty percent of low ranking soldiers used heroin. The
Times called the addiction rates an epidemic. With hundreds of
thousands of American troops stationed all over Vietnam, the government
was worried that gis would return to their families as
(06:35):
desperate junkies.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
This notion that we had a whole army full of
drug crazed people who were going to be unleashed on
these communities truly had people frightened. The Army announced that
anybody who was dependent on heroin could report to the
Amnesty Center. They would not be arrested or charged with
(06:59):
criminal activities. They could come, they could detox and then
go home. You know, no harm, no foul.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
The American public demanded action, so, without a better plan,
the Army opted to force the gis to go cold
turkey when they.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Came into the detox center. We did not taper them
off on heroin. I really had no idea, and I
was sort of frantically trying to get information on how
does one properly detox somebody.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
But what Richard had even less of an idea about
was how he was going to help soldiers stay clean
once they got home. I mean, heroin isn't just any
old bad habit, It's an incredibly addictive substance. By making
his soldiers go cold turkey, Richard could help his men
get through the withdrawal phase, that first step to breaking
the physical part of their addiction. But the bigger challenge
(07:48):
was helping them avoid the behavioral parts of their addiction,
that habit of turning to heroin in order to feel
better whenever they were feeling depressed or bored or stressed,
the almost automatic urge to reduce their craving with a
quick hit. Simply hoping that these men would have the
willpower to avoid heroin wasn't going to be enough.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Here we have these guys who are eighteen nineteen, and
when a little too much pressure is put on them,
they pop.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
At the time, Richard was worried that there was no
way to avert this wave of addiction. Sure, the men
could detox at his center, but no one seemed to
know what to do to help them and overcome their
awful habit so that they could become healthier and happier. Now,
I'm guessing most people listening to this podcast won't ever
face a behavioral challenge as hard as kicking heroin. But
(08:38):
like those soldiers, all of us have bad habits that
detract from our health and happiness. You don't need to
be an opioid drug user to understand that it can
be difficult to change are not so good ways, and
the science suggests that the everyday habits that plague us
can sometimes be just as hard to overcome as the
addictive kind. The problem is that the path to happiness
(08:59):
requires changing a lot of these habitual bad behaviors. We
need to stop griping, we need to put down our phones,
and we need to stop craving material possessions. But how
do we do that? If you're like me, it probably
feels like changing these repeated behaviors is really really challenging.
But what our lying minds don't realize is that we
(09:20):
have a powerful mental tool that really could help us
achieve lasting behavioral change with ease, if only we understood
how that tool worked. I wanted to learn more about
why our intuitions about behavior change were so bad, and
I knew just the person to ask.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
My name is Wendy Wood. I am Professor of Psychology
and Business here at the University of Southern California.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Wendy is the author of a new book, Good Habits,
Bad Habits, The Science of making positive changes that stick.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Most of us are very good at understanding what we
need to do better to be healthier, to be more
financially stable, to have happier families. Most of us know
what those things are.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
The problem, according to Wendy, is that most of us
mistakenly think that changing our behavior requires willpower and hard work.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
I think that we admire willpower and we view it
as a very positive attribute. The way that the Puritans
thought they would go to heaven is through self denial
and showing that they were strong enough to resist temptations.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
But there's a problem with this. Willpower is next to
godliness notion, and that is that willpower doesn't really work.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
When you exert willpower and control your behavior, what you're
doing is you are thinking about the thing that you
don't want to do, and in doing so, you give
it energy to keep re emerging. So there's a sort
of a self defeating aspect to willpower that gets in
(11:03):
our way.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
So if willpower doesn't work, what can we actually do
to successfully tam our bad habits. The answer is that
we need to be working smarter, not harder.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
When you observe people when they are being effective at
controlling their behavior and doing the right thing, say eating
healthfully or saving money for the future, what they're doing
is they're not exerting willpower. What people do is they
(11:34):
set up the situations around them to make it easy
to repeat the desired behavior, and they repeat it over
and over so that it becomes automatic. We don't realize
how much of that we really could harness if we
just knew how it worked.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
When we get back from the break, we'll do just that.
We'll take a deep dive into how habits work and
how you can harness them to behave in ways that
promote your health and your happiness. The Happiness Lab will
be right back.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
I get up in the morning, I walk into my
kitchen and making coffee is the first thing that comes
to mind.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Psychologist and behavior change expert Wendy Would knows that engaging
in routine is the secret to changing our bad behaviors.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
I don't ask myself how to do it. I don't
need to do that. I've done it so often in
the past. I don't ask myself whether I want coffee?
Am I really tired this morning? Do I need coffee?
I don't ask those questions. I just do it, and
then in the end I get the reward of repeating
what I've done in the past, which is that great
(12:52):
cup of coffee. And that's how people who are really
successful at meeting their goals, that's how they do it.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Wendy's morning coffee making illustrates a willpower free strategy that
all of us can use to change our behavior for
the better. It's called habit formation.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
Habits are just the behaviors we repeat until they become
sort of mental shortcuts. There's shortcuts about what you can
do that's likely to get you the same reward as
you got in the past.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Habits canform for any repeated behavior that gets us a reward,
whether that reward is ultimately good for us, like a
nice cup of coffee in the morning, or bad for us,
like a shot of heroin. But Wendy's work has shown
the good habits and bad habits work exactly the same way.
They have a very particular structure, one that involves three
(13:47):
critical parts. The first critical part of habit formation is
the reward.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Rewards here are just behaviors that meet your goals, behaviors
that make you feel good, behaviors that achieve some outcome
that you're looking for.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
For morning, Wendy, that reward was having the positive taste
of a nice cup of coffee. But habit formation can
involve lots of other kinds of rewards too. The endorphins
that kick in after a good exercise session, the reduced
boredom we feel after we do a quick social media check,
or the satisfaction you get learning something new from your
favorite podcast. Anything that feels nice or meets a goal
(14:27):
can serve as a reward that leads to a new habit.
But habits not only require a reward at the end.
They also have a second critical component, the routine. A
routine is the specific sequence of actions that gets us
to a reward. For Wendy's caffeine habit, that might be
each step she takes to make her morning coffee. If
(14:48):
you're a yoga lover like me, your routine might involve
grabbing your mat and driving to your favorite studio. The
science shows that having a specific routine is critical to
habit formation, in part because our minds care about them
a lot. In fact, when your brain experience is something wonderful,
it drops everything to remember the exact sequence of whatever
(15:09):
you just did to get that reward, and when it
lays down a new memory of that sequence, it definitely
doesn't want to screw anything up, and so it doesn't
just remember what you did as a bunch of individual
action steps. Instead, it stores your whole sequence of behaviors
as a single solitary routine, what researchers call chunking. It
(15:29):
even uses a totally different neural system to do so.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
When you're repeating a task that you have practiced many
times in the past, you are relying on something called
the sensorymotor system, which involves the protament, which is part
of the basic anglia, and when you start a new task,
in contrast, using much more of the frontal lobes, because
(15:56):
those are the active thinking parts of your brain. And
these two things are definitely connected, but they also function
somewhat independent line.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
And that's why habits are such fantastic mental shortcut because
we don't need our conscious thinking frontal lobes to remember
each individual action. Whenever we want a reward, the unconscious
bits of our brain can just hit go and our
minds get the entire perfectly stored routine for.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
Free driving is the prototypic habo. It's something we have
to think about when we first learn to do it,
but then over time that thought becomes less and less necessary,
and we start just responding automatically based on what we
(16:43):
did in the past, and that achieves the goal of
getting us somewhere we want to go, and it does
so efficiently and quickly most of the time, unless you
live in la and then there's nothing efficient about driving.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
I want to focus in on this lack of awareness
for a second because it's really weird when you think
about it. I mean, our driving routine involves tracking lots
of complicated stuff, from where your right foot is to
how fast your car is going, to whether there are
pedestrians about to cross the street, to where other cars
are moving, to when a traffic light might change, to
when you need to click your turn signal, and to
(17:19):
whether you have your radio set to your favorite podcast.
It's amazing that we can juggle all that information at all,
let alone that we can do so easily and unconsciously.
But that is the amazing psychological power of habits. Once
we form a new habit, we get to engage in
all kinds of complicated behaviors without a moment's thought. And
(17:39):
that's why habits are so much more effective than willpower
for changing our behaviors. Once we make the things we
want to do habitual, they don't require any more work.
The problem, though, is that not all of our unconscious
habitual behaviors are good for us.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
So sitting on the couch when you get home at
night and eating potato chips that's just as much of
a habit as going home and then just heading out
to the gym. One looks habitual and star structured to us,
and the other might look sort of a bit lazier,
but they're both habits in the same way.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Sadly, those lazier, not so good for us routines are
just as automatic as our positive habits, which means that
our bad habits, the ones that inhibit our happiness, are
really really hard to shed. We might want to shut
those habits off, but we can't because our minds are
on autopilot, but Wendy's work shows that we do have
some control over when our habit routines get turned on
(18:40):
whether our minds unconsciously decide to execute that sit on
the couch and munch behavior or the throw on our
gym closed one. The answer comes from the third critical
part of our habit loops, the context. The context is
any part of our situation or environment that cues our behavior.
For Wendy's coffee habit, the context was a location, being
(19:01):
in her kitchen and a time of day it was morning,
and a preceding event she had just woken up. For
Richard Heroin addicts, the context might be their barracks, or
the site of other gis using drugs, or just being
in Vietnam.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
In our research, we've found that context can be pretty
much everything around you that's not you. It can be
the people that you're with. There are certain people who
trigger certain behaviors that we've done with them in the past.
You may have friends that you typically go and have
(19:37):
a drink with, and if you see them again, that's
what tends to come to mind. The moods we're in
can also be triggers, so I think that one of
the most common triggers for checking your cell phone is
being bored. Even if you're in a meeting and it's
(19:58):
quite rude, you may find yourself checking your phone. You
don't want to be rude, but the idea of your
phone just comes to mind when you're bored.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
When our brains notice a context that's associated with the habit,
one that goes with a particular routine and a certain
kind of reward, we get an incredibly strong urge to
execute the habitual behavior, even if it's a behavior that's
no longer useful or relevant. In fact, Wendy's work has
shown that cues can elicit habitual behavior even when the
(20:27):
rewards from those behaviors aren't even there anymore. She tested
this out in a clever study involving movie trailer screenings.
One group of subjects watched the movie trailers on a
computer in Wendy's lab, just like a typical study, but
a second group of subjects got to watch the trailers
inside a movie theater. Wendy was interested in whether the
(20:49):
movie theater cues spurred on a habitual movie going behavior,
popcorn eating, but she also wanted to know whether her
subjects would engage in that habitual behavior even when it
was no longer rewarded to do that. She varied the
deliciousness of the popcorn she offered.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Some people got popcorn that was stale, and it was
really stale, so it had been sitting in our lab
for a week in a plastic bag. It was pretty gross.
Others got popcorn that was fresh that had just been pomped.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Very few people who watched the film in the lab
ate the gross popcorn. They didn't have any cues that
pushed them to engage in an otherwise yucky behavior. But
what happened to the subjects who experienced all the normal
cues of being inside a cinema, Well, it depended on
how they normally acted when watching movies.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
People who had habits to eat popcorn in the movie
cinema ate just about the same amount of stale popcorn
as fresh. They could tell us when we asked them
that they hated the stale popcorn. They ate it anyway.
People who didn't have habits deep popcorn in the movie cinema,
(22:00):
they did just what you'd expect, but rationally we think
we would all do, which is eat the fresh popcorn,
but if they got a bag of stale, just lave it.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
When our brains see a cue that's been associated with
the habitual behavior, we can't help but execute that behavior,
even when the behavior is no longer rewarding. But despite
the power of these cues, Wendy has found that we
don't often realize how much context affects our behavior, and
that means we often forget that we can't count on
(22:30):
our habitual routines once the cues go away, and Wendy
has seen the negative effects of removing our habitual cues firsthand.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
I bought a new car a few years ago that
has all kinds of wonderful safety sensors, so it beeps
when I get close to an obstacle, and I hated
that at first. It really irritated me because I wasn't
used to it, But I started responding to those signals automaticly.
Over time, you just stop noticing them. When the car beeps,
(23:00):
you just automatically respond to it. And I didn't realize
how automatic that had become, how much of my driving
habit that had become, until I rented a car and
it didn't have that warning sensor system, and the first
thing I did is I backed into a brick wall.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
The Happiness Lab will be right back.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
I am a Vietnam veteran, a ex marine medic, and
an ex morphine addic.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Back in nineteen seventy one, a documentary called GI Junkie
followed a group of returning soldiers going through rehab.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
I don't need no pills, no warning or a needle
in my arm.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
I mean, like, I'm there, I know what I want.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
I'm going to go get it.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
The film argued that nearly forty thousand hardened GI junkies
were about to return to American soil and would soon
become a major problem, but in reality, no such army
of drug addicts actually existed. The kind of surprising key
is that I think once, you know, once these soldiers
got on the plane and got back home, they were good,
Their cravings didn't kick in, and they weren't trying to
(24:14):
find the stuff once they got back.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Exactly That's exactly right. And no one, I don't think
anyone could have predicted.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
That psychiatrist Richard Ratner had been sent to Vietnam to
diffuse what one newspaper called a time bomb. And that's
what made Richard's soldier's outcomes all the more surprising. A
team of researchers followed addicted Vietnam vets after they came home.
The scientists interviewed the men about their recent opioid habits
and even conducted drug tests using urine samples, and what
(24:43):
they found pretty much stunned everyone, including Richard. Only a
very tiny percentage of soldiers continued their drug use after
they got home. More than ninety percent of soldiers stayed clean.
Compared to the typical heroin user, Vietnam vets seemed to
have little trouble kicking the habit. The study was so
shocking that at first researchers didn't even believe it, but
(25:06):
slowly behavioral scientists like Richard to figure out the soldier's secret.
They were able to use their contextual cues to break
their bad habit.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Probably the majority of users would basically kind of detox
on their own. They would self detox while they used
this crutch to help them get through military life over there.
They understood that the home environment is very different from
this environment.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Richard realized that a few hours on an airline and
a change back into civy clothes was enough to break
his soldier's habit routine. They weren't bored or stressed anymore,
and they weren't hanging out with their drug taking buddies.
They also didn't have easy access to cheap heroin. Nearly
every single one of their habit cues was different.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Most of these guys, they got home and they kind
of reintegrated into their previous lives.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Richard's veteran's success in kicking heroin has now become a
classic example in the science of behavior change. Because of
a simple context switch can be powerful enough to help
someone overcome heroin addiction. Imagine how powerful it can be
for changing simpler behaviors like the ones many of us
want to change.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
We did some research where we beeped people once an
hour to figure out what they were thinking, feeling, doing,
and what we found is that about forty three percent
of the time, people are doing what they did yesterday
and the day before in the same context, and they're
(26:39):
doing it without thinking much about it.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
The idea that nearly half of our working day is
on autopilot, that we're constantly governed by cues and context
is pretty shocking. But if that's true, then it gives
us a powerful opportunity to change some of our daily behaviors.
If we can use our conscious minds to exert some
control over the context we find ourselves in, then we
can shift our bad behaviors to the ones we want
(27:02):
to adopt.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Our environments can do the same thing for us in
pushing us to help us meet our goals and making
it hard for us to stray from the good behaviors
that we're trying to practice.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
This is something you can do right now, whether in
your home or at your workplace. Think of it as
feng shui for habits, but with an actual scientific basis.
Make small changes in your environment that provide the cues
you need to promote good behaviors. Wendy's research has shown
that simple changes like these work time and again.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
In one study, people had a bowl of apple slices
and a bowl of hot buttered popcorn. When the apple
slices were right in front of them and the popcorn
was arms reach, people ate a third less calories than
when the popcorn was right in front of them and
(27:59):
the apple slices were a reach. I mean, we're talking
a minimal distance that makes little sense to our our
conscious thinking cells, but to our habits and our automatic
reacting cells, that's a big difference. We don't realize how
(28:20):
much of a difference proximity makes to our behavior.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
But context doesn't just affect what we reach for when
we're hungry. There are lots of simple ways we can
use the cues around us to disrupt the autopilot behaviors
we don't want to engage in.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
There are forces in our environments that make some actions
more difficult and other actions easier, and those resisting forces
can be termed friction. It just becomes too difficult.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
The same sort of friction help Vietnam bits avoid drug
use when they return home. Many had never taken heroin
before going to war, so they'd actually have to find
a dealer, and the heroin available in the States was
a far lower quality, which meant that soldiers would have
to inject it rather than snort or smoke it. The
price was also far far higher, and the GI's mood
(29:08):
had shifted completely. Those feelings of boredom that drove them
to use opioids. Those were replaced by the excitement of
being home and just the pace of normal life. Each
and every one of the cues that prompted that heroin
routine was gone. And this is super important because these
contextual changes were more powerful than any of the detox
(29:29):
ideas the army came up with. The new cues meant
that soldiers just didn't think about the reward of a
quick heroin hit because their entire habit chains were disrupted.
But frictions can also be introduced to tackle the problems
associated with legal drugs.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
In the middle of the last century, we all learned
that smoking was bad for US. About half of America
smoked at that point, but smoking still didn't go down.
Smoking rates continued reasonably high until the US decided to
put friction on smoking by taxing cigarettes so you can't
(30:06):
afford them as easily, bannings smoking in public places, and
by making it difficult to purchase cigarettes so that you
actually have to ask somebody. And all of those things
combined put enough friction on smoking so that the smoking
rates in the US are now down to a level
(30:26):
of only fifteen percent of US smoke. And that's because
of friction.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Even if you don't smoke or use illegal drugs, there's
a lesson here for you. Think about the things you
want to change in your life, the bad habits you
want to stop or the good habits you want to adopt.
We can use the conscious part of our brain to
increase friction to inhibit our bad habits and break down
the barriers that prevent us from doing the good ones.
Are there social media apps that drive you nuts but
(30:53):
you can't help checking whenever you pick up your phone,
Well delete them. Do you want to call your mom
more often, well, then choose a photo of her as
your screensaver. Don't want to buy certain items in the store,
plan your shopping trip to avoid the candy issle. Or
maybe you want to try some of the new habits
that we've talked about in the season, like experiencing more gratitude,
(31:15):
Then download a gratitude app and stick it front and
center on your phone. Or maybe you want to make
better use of your time, Then put that time windfall
list somewhere you can see it easily. In all of
these examples, you can hack the cues around you to
help promote the kinds of behaviors that you want in
your life. Wendy had to go through this exact same
(31:36):
conscious process when her daily fitness habit took a nose
dive thanks to motherhood. Rather than powering through or giving up,
she analyzed where her growing family was adding a bit
of friction to her workout plans.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
Every time I decided two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock,
maybe six o'clock tonight, i'll exercise, something always comes up
when you have little children. So I decided I would
have to start exercising early in the morning. Although it
was a really dreadful thing to start doing, once you
get used to it, it actually is very efficient.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
So at six am, Wendy would be ready to exercise.
But what exercise? Wendy realized it had to be something
with as few frictions as possible.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
I didn't have much time to drive to a gym
or do any fancy workout thing. I couldn't go to
a class. I just didn't have that level of control
over my time. So it had to be something that
was very efficient and easy for me to do. And
putting your running shoes on and going out the door
is probably the most frictionless kind of exercise that you
(32:41):
could imagine. I actually used to sleep in my running clothes.
I hate to admit this, but that was another thing
that reduced the friction.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Talking with Wendy has really inspired me to think about
how I can use my conscious brain to hack the
autopilot of all my bad habits. I'm already planning strategies
I can use to increase or reduce friction so I'll
be able to reach my own well being goals literally
without thinking. I hope you've gotten some insight into how
you can hack your own habits, and I hope you'll
(33:12):
be willing to form a new, happier habit and set
up all your context cues to remind you to come
back for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me,
Doctor Laurie Santos
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Bleep! with Ana Navarro
Fear thrives in silence and confusion. Ana Navarro rejects both. Her voice is an antidote to today’s chaos. Her new podcast, Bleep! with Ana Navarro, takes on today’s most pressing issues with the voices most connected to it: decision-makers, political leaders, cultural shapers, and people on the frontlines of the story. The conversations acknowledge the emotions we all feel—despair, sadness, fear— but emerge with knowledge, perspective, and hope. The belief is simple: fearless dialogue can transform fear into courage, and courage into change. When fear dominates the headlines, this show digs deeper. Because information, debate, and conversation don’t just ease fear, they give us power to shape the future.
Hey Jonas!
Hey Jonas! The official Jonas Brothers podcast. Hosted by Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas. It’s the Jonas Brothers you know... musicians, actors, and well, yes, brothers. Now, they’re sharing another side of themselves in the playful, intimate, and irreverent way only they can. Spend time with the Jonas Brothers here and stay a little bit longer for deep conversations like never before.