June 8, 2020 • 32 mins
We all have bad habits - things we eat, drink, do or say that cause us unhappiness. We repeat these behaviours over and over again - almost as if we are on autopilot. But we can break free from them, and use the mechanics of habit formation to make doing good things feel effortless.
Dr Laurie Santos meets a scientist who sleeps in her running gear and a former army doctor who went to Vietnam to fight a wave of heroin abuse in the military and discovered something startling about habits.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin for starters. It was the last thing I particularly
wanted to do. Like many young Americans back in nineteen seventy,
Richard Ratner wasn't all that excited about going to war.
I had just been married, and when I found out
that I was going to Vietnam, we tried to figure
out any way to get out of it, you know,
(00:37):
which involved oh, I don't know, talking to the military instcene,
whether it's a sign that could be changed. None of
it worked. They were well prepared for people who didn't
want to go. 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
(01:00):
American men who were plucked from their civilian lives and
forced into the armed services September fourteen, zero zero one.
There was even a televised lottery draw where young men
were selected from military service and a stint in Vietnam
based on their birthday. April twenty four is zero zero two.
(01:21):
Richard was lucky enough to delay his service until after
his medical training, but arriving in Psigon as a twenty
something new doctor was still a shock to the system.
We are in buses where they have this steel mesh
covering the windows, and I'm absolutely sure that any minute
someone who's going to toss a bomb at us. But
Richard wasn't a trained surgeon heading to Vietnam to take
(01:42):
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 our
habits don't always work the way we think. His findings
(02:04):
not only shocked scientists, but also change the way that
researchers think about the science of behavior. Your 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 hurt our happiness. Our minds are constantly
telling us what to do to be happy. But what
(02:24):
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. You gotta have those shoes shined. You
(02:46):
got to show up at formation. You know, you have
to have your bed made. Richard. 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
(03:07):
repetitive tasks that they didn't enjoy, shining boots, dealing with
annoying superior officers, and generally just 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. People would just kind of get high,
and you know, not necessarily that different from if you
(03:29):
come home from a hard day at the steel mill
and you know, going to the bar and have a
few drinks. It's not totally unlike 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. The first phase was where
soldiers were smoking marijuana. If you're smoking weed, it's not
(03:53):
going to take too long for it to waft down
to where the first sergeants which was and he'd come
up looking for you. Conveniently enough, soldiers had access to
a less smelly drug option. With the Golden Triangle, a
massive area of poppy production just across the order, suppliers
were ready and willing to sell an alternative drug to
US troops, heroin. They could do it under the nose
(04:17):
of their commanding officers, and it was a great deal
more potent. As one GI addict told The New York Times,
the skag was everywhere. Estimates vary, 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
(04:37):
of thousands of American troops stationed all over Vietnam, the
government was worried that gis would return to their families
as desperate junkies. 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
(05:01):
report to the Amnesty Center. They would not be arrested
or charged with criminal activities. They could come, they could
detox and then go home. You know, no harm, no foul.
The American public demanded action, and so, without a better plan,
the Army opted to force the gis to go cold Turkey.
(05:22):
When they 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. 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
(05:44):
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 was helping them avoid the behavioral
parts of their addiction, that habit of turning to heroine
in order to feel better whenever they were feeling depressed
(06:05):
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. Here we have these guys who are
eighteen nineteen, and when a little too much pressure is
put on them, they pop. At the time, Richard was
(06:27):
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 heroine. But like those soldiers, all
(06:49):
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 requires changing a lot
(07:09):
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 have a powerful mental
(07:30):
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. My name is Wendy Wood. I am
Professor of psychology and business here at the University of
(07:52):
Southern California. Wendy is the author of a new book,
Good Habits, Bad Habits, The Science of making positive changes
that stick. 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
(08:13):
us know what those things are. The problem, according to Wendy,
is that most of us mistakenly think that changing our
behavior requires willpower and hard work. 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
(08:38):
strong enough to resist temptations. But there's a problem with this.
Willpower is next to godliness notion, and that is that
willpower doesn't really work. 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
(09:00):
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 our way. So if willpower doesn't work,
what can we actually do to successively tame our bad habits.
The answer is that we need to be working smarter,
(09:21):
not harder. 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
(09:42):
is they 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. When we get
(10:03):
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.
(10:25):
I get up in the morning, I walk into my
kitchen and making coffee is the first thing that comes
to mind. Psychologist and behavior change expert Wendy Wood knows
that engaging in routine is the secret to changing our
bad behaviors. 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
(10:47):
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 cup of coffee. And that's how people who are
really successful at meeting their goals, that's how they do it.
(11:08):
Wendy 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. 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
(11:32):
get you the same reward as you got in the past.
Habits conformed 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.
(11:52):
They have a very particular structure, one that involves three
critical parts. The first critical part of habit formation is
the reward rewards. Here are just behaviors that meet your goals,
behaviors that make you feel good, behaviors that achieved some
outcome that you're looking for. For morning, Wendy, that reward
(12:15):
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 can serve as a reward
(12:37):
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 you're a yoga lover
(12:57):
like me, your routine might involve grabbing your mat and
driving to your favorite studio. The science shows that having
specific routine is critical to habit formation, in part because
our minds care about them a lot. In fact, when
your brain experiences something wonderful, it drops everything to remember
the exact sequence of whatever you just did to get
(13:19):
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 even uses a totally different neural
(13:40):
system to do so, when you're repeating a task that
you have practiced many times in the past, you are
relying on something called the sensory motor system, which involves
the putamen, which is part of the basic anglia. And
when you start a new task, in contrast, you're using
(14:02):
much more of the frontal lobes because those are the
active thinking parts of your brain. And these two things
are definitely connected, but they also function somewhat independently, and
that's why habits are such fantastic mental shortcuts, because we
don't need our conscious thinking frontal lobes to remember each
individual action. Whenever we want a reward, the unconscious bits
(14:25):
of our brain can just hit go and our minds
get the entire perfectly stored routine for free driving is
the prototypic habit, right. 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
(14:48):
we start just responding automatically based on what we 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. I
want to focus in on this lack of awareness for
a second, because it's really weird when you think about it.
(15:12):
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 whether you have
your radio set to your favorite podcast. It's amazing that
we can juggle all that information at all, let alone
(15:35):
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 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,
(15:59):
is that not all of our unconscious habitual behaviors are
good for us. 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
structured to us, and the other might look sort of
(16:21):
a bit lazier, but they're both habits in the same way. 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.
(16:43):
But Wendy's work shows that we do have some control
over when our habit routines get turned on, whether our
minds unconsciously decided 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
(17:07):
coffee habit, the context was a location, being in her
kitchen end, a time of day it was morning end,
a preceding event she had just woken up. For Richard's
Heroin Attics, the contacts might be their barracks or the
site of other gis, using drugs, or just being in Vietnam.
In our research, we've found that contexts can be pretty
(17:28):
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
a drink with, and if you see them again, that's
(17:49):
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
quite rude, you may find yourself checking your phone. You
(18:10):
don't want to be rude, but the idea of your
phone just comes to mind when you're bored. 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
(18:33):
that ques can ellicit habitual behavior even when the 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 watch 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
(18:54):
a movie theater. Wendy was interested in whether the movie
theater ques 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 reward to do that. She varied the deliciousness of
the popcorn she offered. Some people got popcorn that was stale,
(19:17):
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 popped. 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
(19:40):
who experienced all the normal cues of being inside a cinema, well,
it depended on how they normally acted when watching movies.
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
(20:00):
that they hated the stale popcorn. They ate it anyway.
People who didn't have habits deep popcorn in the movie
cinema 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 leave it.
When our brains see a cue that's been associated with
(20:21):
a 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
our habitual routines once the cues go away, and Wendy
(20:43):
has seen the negative effects of removing our habitual cues firsthand.
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 automatically.
(21:05):
Over time, you just stopped noticing them. When the car beeps,
you just automatically respond to that. 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.
(21:30):
The Happiness Lab will be right back. I am a
Vietnam veteran, a X Marine medic, and an X more
seen ADDI back. In nineteen seventy one, a documentary called
(21:51):
GI Junkie followed a group of returning soldiers going through rehab.
I don't need no peals, no warning. We're an needle
in my arm. I mean, like, I'm there, I know
what I want. I'm gonna go get it. 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
(22:13):
addicts actually existed. The kind of surprising key is that
I think, you know, once these soldiers got on the
plane and got back home, you know they were good.
Their cravings didn't kick in. They weren't trying to find
the stuff once they got back, exactly That's exactly right.
And no one, I don't think anyone could have predicted
that psychiatrist Richard Ratner had been sent to Vietnam to
diffuse what one newspaper called a time bomb. And that's
(22:36):
what made richard soldiers 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
they found pretty much stunned everyone, including Richard. Only a
very tiny percentage of soldiers continued their drug use after
(22:59):
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
slowly behavioral scientists like Richard were able to figure out
the soldier's secret. They were able to use their contextual
(23:21):
cues to break their bad habit. Probably the majority of
users would basically kind of detox on their own. They
would sell detox while they use this crutch to help
them get through military life over there. They understood that
the home environment is very different from this environment. Richard
(23:43):
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. Most of
these guys, they got home and they kind of reintegrated
(24:04):
into their previous lives. Richard's veterans success Us and kicking
heroine 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. We did
(24:27):
some research where we beaped 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 doing it without
(24:49):
thinking much about it. The idea that nearly half of
our waking 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
(25:10):
the ones we want to adopt. 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.
This is something you can do right now, whether in
(25:30):
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. In
one study, people had a bowl of apple slices and
(25:53):
a bowl of hot buttered popcorn. When the apple slices
were right in front of them and the popcorn was
arms reached, people ate a third less calories than when
the popcorn was right in front of them and the
apples were a reach. I mean, we're talking a minimal
distance that makes little sense to our conscious thinking cells,
(26:20):
but to our habits and our automatic reacting cells, that's
a big difference. We don't realize how much of a
difference proximity makes to our behavior. 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
(26:41):
engage in. There are forces on 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.
The same sort of friction help Vietnam bits avoid drug
use when they returned home. Many had never taken heroin
(27:02):
before going to war, so they'd actually have to find
a dealer, and the heroine 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
had shifted completely. Those feelings of boredom that drove them
to use opioids. Those were replaced by the excitement of
(27:23):
being home and just the pace of normal life. Each
and every one of the cues that prompted that heroine
routine was gone, and this is super important because these
contextual changes were more powerful than any of the detox
ideas the army came up with. The new cues meant
that soldiers just didn't think about the reward of a
quick heroine hit because their entire habit chains were disrupted.
(27:48):
But frictions can also be introduced to tackle the problems
associated with legal drugs. 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
(28:14):
so you can't afford them, as easily, banning 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
(28:34):
to a level of only fifteen percent of US smoke.
And that's because of friction. 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
(28:55):
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 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
(29:16):
to avoid the candy aisle. Or maybe you want to
try some of the new habits that we've talked about
in this season, like experiencing more gratitude, 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
(29:37):
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 conscious process when her daily
fitness habit took a nosedive 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.
Every time I decided two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock,
(30:00):
maybe a 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 Although it
was a really dreadful thing to start doing, once you
get used to it, it actually is very efficient. So
at six am, Wendy would be ready to exercise. But
(30:21):
what exercise? Wendy realized it had to be something with
as few frictions as possible. 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
(30:42):
me to do. And putting your running shoes on and
going out the door is probably the most frictionless kind
of exercise that you 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. Talking
with Wendy has really inspired me to think about how
(31:03):
I can use my conscious brain to hack the autopilot
of all my bad habits. I'm already 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 be willing
to form a new, happier habit and send up all
(31:24):
your contextcuse to remind you to come back for the
next episode of the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor Laurie Santos.
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
(31:46):
Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. Pete Notaton also helped
with production. Joseph Friedman checked our facts and our editing
was done by Sophie Crane mckibbon. Special thanks to mie
La Belle, Carl mcgliori, Heather Fame, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor,
Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. Inslav
(32:09):
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor
Laurie Santos
Pushkin for starters. It was the last thing I particularly
wanted to do. Like many young Americans back in nineteen seventy,
Richard Ratner wasn't all that excited about going to war.
I had just been married, and when I found out
that I was going to Vietnam, we tried to figure
out any way to get out of it, you know,
(00:37):
which involved oh, I don't know, talking to the military instcene,
whether it's a sign that could be changed. None of
it worked. They were well prepared for people who didn't
want to go. 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
(01:00):
American men who were plucked from their civilian lives and
forced into the armed services September fourteen, zero zero one.
There was even a televised lottery draw where young men
were selected from military service and a stint in Vietnam
based on their birthday. April twenty four is zero zero two.
(01:21):
Richard was lucky enough to delay his service until after
his medical training, but arriving in Psigon as a twenty
something new doctor was still a shock to the system.
We are in buses where they have this steel mesh
covering the windows, and I'm absolutely sure that any minute
someone who's going to toss a bomb at us. But
Richard wasn't a trained surgeon heading to Vietnam to take
(01:42):
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 our
habits don't always work the way we think. His findings
(02:04):
not only shocked scientists, but also change the way that
researchers think about the science of behavior. Your 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 hurt our happiness. Our minds are constantly
telling us what to do to be happy. But what
(02:24):
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. You gotta have those shoes shined. You
(02:46):
got to show up at formation. You know, you have
to have your bed made. Richard. 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
(03:07):
repetitive tasks that they didn't enjoy, shining boots, dealing with
annoying superior officers, and generally just 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. People would just kind of get high,
and you know, not necessarily that different from if you
(03:29):
come home from a hard day at the steel mill
and you know, going to the bar and have a
few drinks. It's not totally unlike 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. The first phase was where
soldiers were smoking marijuana. If you're smoking weed, it's not
(03:53):
going to take too long for it to waft down
to where the first sergeants which was and he'd come
up looking for you. Conveniently enough, soldiers had access to
a less smelly drug option. With the Golden Triangle, a
massive area of poppy production just across the order, suppliers
were ready and willing to sell an alternative drug to
US troops, heroin. They could do it under the nose
(04:17):
of their commanding officers, and it was a great deal
more potent. As one GI addict told The New York Times,
the skag was everywhere. Estimates vary, 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
(04:37):
of thousands of American troops stationed all over Vietnam, the
government was worried that gis would return to their families
as desperate junkies. 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
(05:01):
report to the Amnesty Center. They would not be arrested
or charged with criminal activities. They could come, they could
detox and then go home. You know, no harm, no foul.
The American public demanded action, and so, without a better plan,
the Army opted to force the gis to go cold Turkey.
(05:22):
When they 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. 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
(05:44):
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 was helping them avoid the behavioral
parts of their addiction, that habit of turning to heroine
in order to feel better whenever they were feeling depressed
(06:05):
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. Here we have these guys who are
eighteen nineteen, and when a little too much pressure is
put on them, they pop. At the time, Richard was
(06:27):
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 heroine. But like those soldiers, all
(06:49):
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 requires changing a lot
(07:09):
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 have a powerful mental
(07:30):
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. My name is Wendy Wood. I am
Professor of psychology and business here at the University of
(07:52):
Southern California. Wendy is the author of a new book,
Good Habits, Bad Habits, The Science of making positive changes
that stick. 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
(08:13):
us know what those things are. The problem, according to Wendy,
is that most of us mistakenly think that changing our
behavior requires willpower and hard work. 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
(08:38):
strong enough to resist temptations. But there's a problem with this.
Willpower is next to godliness notion, and that is that
willpower doesn't really work. 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
(09:00):
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 our way. So if willpower doesn't work,
what can we actually do to successively tame our bad habits.
The answer is that we need to be working smarter,
(09:21):
not harder. 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
(09:42):
is they 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. When we get
(10:03):
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.
(10:25):
I get up in the morning, I walk into my
kitchen and making coffee is the first thing that comes
to mind. Psychologist and behavior change expert Wendy Wood knows
that engaging in routine is the secret to changing our
bad behaviors. 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
(10:47):
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 cup of coffee. And that's how people who are
really successful at meeting their goals, that's how they do it.
(11:08):
Wendy 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. 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
(11:32):
get you the same reward as you got in the past.
Habits conformed 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.
(11:52):
They have a very particular structure, one that involves three
critical parts. The first critical part of habit formation is
the reward rewards. Here are just behaviors that meet your goals,
behaviors that make you feel good, behaviors that achieved some
outcome that you're looking for. For morning, Wendy, that reward
(12:15):
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 can serve as a reward
(12:37):
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 you're a yoga lover
(12:57):
like me, your routine might involve grabbing your mat and
driving to your favorite studio. The science shows that having
specific routine is critical to habit formation, in part because
our minds care about them a lot. In fact, when
your brain experiences something wonderful, it drops everything to remember
the exact sequence of whatever you just did to get
(13:19):
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 even uses a totally different neural
(13:40):
system to do so, when you're repeating a task that
you have practiced many times in the past, you are
relying on something called the sensory motor system, which involves
the putamen, which is part of the basic anglia. And
when you start a new task, in contrast, you're using
(14:02):
much more of the frontal lobes because those are the
active thinking parts of your brain. And these two things
are definitely connected, but they also function somewhat independently, and
that's why habits are such fantastic mental shortcuts, because we
don't need our conscious thinking frontal lobes to remember each
individual action. Whenever we want a reward, the unconscious bits
(14:25):
of our brain can just hit go and our minds
get the entire perfectly stored routine for free driving is
the prototypic habit, right. 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
(14:48):
we start just responding automatically based on what we 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. I
want to focus in on this lack of awareness for
a second, because it's really weird when you think about it.
(15:12):
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 whether you have
your radio set to your favorite podcast. It's amazing that
we can juggle all that information at all, let alone
(15:35):
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 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,
(15:59):
is that not all of our unconscious habitual behaviors are
good for us. 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
structured to us, and the other might look sort of
(16:21):
a bit lazier, but they're both habits in the same way. 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.
(16:43):
But Wendy's work shows that we do have some control
over when our habit routines get turned on, whether our
minds unconsciously decided 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
(17:07):
coffee habit, the context was a location, being in her
kitchen end, a time of day it was morning end,
a preceding event she had just woken up. For Richard's
Heroin Attics, the contacts might be their barracks or the
site of other gis, using drugs, or just being in Vietnam.
In our research, we've found that contexts can be pretty
(17:28):
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
a drink with, and if you see them again, that's
(17:49):
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
quite rude, you may find yourself checking your phone. You
(18:10):
don't want to be rude, but the idea of your
phone just comes to mind when you're bored. 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
(18:33):
that ques can ellicit habitual behavior even when the 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 watch 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
(18:54):
a movie theater. Wendy was interested in whether the movie
theater ques 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 reward to do that. She varied the deliciousness of
the popcorn she offered. Some people got popcorn that was stale,
(19:17):
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 popped. 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
(19:40):
who experienced all the normal cues of being inside a cinema, well,
it depended on how they normally acted when watching movies.
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
(20:00):
that they hated the stale popcorn. They ate it anyway.
People who didn't have habits deep popcorn in the movie
cinema 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 leave it.
When our brains see a cue that's been associated with
(20:21):
a 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
our habitual routines once the cues go away, and Wendy
(20:43):
has seen the negative effects of removing our habitual cues firsthand.
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 automatically.
(21:05):
Over time, you just stopped noticing them. When the car beeps,
you just automatically respond to that. 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.
(21:30):
The Happiness Lab will be right back. I am a
Vietnam veteran, a X Marine medic, and an X more
seen ADDI back. In nineteen seventy one, a documentary called
(21:51):
GI Junkie followed a group of returning soldiers going through rehab.
I don't need no peals, no warning. We're an needle
in my arm. I mean, like, I'm there, I know
what I want. I'm gonna go get it. 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
(22:13):
addicts actually existed. The kind of surprising key is that
I think, you know, once these soldiers got on the
plane and got back home, you know they were good.
Their cravings didn't kick in. They weren't trying to find
the stuff once they got back, exactly That's exactly right.
And no one, I don't think anyone could have predicted
that psychiatrist Richard Ratner had been sent to Vietnam to
diffuse what one newspaper called a time bomb. And that's
(22:36):
what made richard soldiers 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
they found pretty much stunned everyone, including Richard. Only a
very tiny percentage of soldiers continued their drug use after
(22:59):
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
slowly behavioral scientists like Richard were able to figure out
the soldier's secret. They were able to use their contextual
(23:21):
cues to break their bad habit. Probably the majority of
users would basically kind of detox on their own. They
would sell detox while they use this crutch to help
them get through military life over there. They understood that
the home environment is very different from this environment. Richard
(23:43):
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. Most of
these guys, they got home and they kind of reintegrated
(24:04):
into their previous lives. Richard's veterans success Us and kicking
heroine 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. We did
(24:27):
some research where we beaped 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 doing it without
(24:49):
thinking much about it. The idea that nearly half of
our waking 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
(25:10):
the ones we want to adopt. 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.
This is something you can do right now, whether in
(25:30):
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. In
one study, people had a bowl of apple slices and
(25:53):
a bowl of hot buttered popcorn. When the apple slices
were right in front of them and the popcorn was
arms reached, people ate a third less calories than when
the popcorn was right in front of them and the
apples were a reach. I mean, we're talking a minimal
distance that makes little sense to our conscious thinking cells,
(26:20):
but to our habits and our automatic reacting cells, that's
a big difference. We don't realize how much of a
difference proximity makes to our behavior. 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
(26:41):
engage in. There are forces on 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.
The same sort of friction help Vietnam bits avoid drug
use when they returned home. Many had never taken heroin
(27:02):
before going to war, so they'd actually have to find
a dealer, and the heroine 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
had shifted completely. Those feelings of boredom that drove them
to use opioids. Those were replaced by the excitement of
(27:23):
being home and just the pace of normal life. Each
and every one of the cues that prompted that heroine
routine was gone, and this is super important because these
contextual changes were more powerful than any of the detox
ideas the army came up with. The new cues meant
that soldiers just didn't think about the reward of a
quick heroine hit because their entire habit chains were disrupted.
(27:48):
But frictions can also be introduced to tackle the problems
associated with legal drugs. 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
(28:14):
so you can't afford them, as easily, banning 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
(28:34):
to a level of only fifteen percent of US smoke.
And that's because of friction. 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
(28:55):
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 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
(29:16):
to avoid the candy aisle. Or maybe you want to
try some of the new habits that we've talked about
in this season, like experiencing more gratitude, 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
(29:37):
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 conscious process when her daily
fitness habit took a nosedive 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.
Every time I decided two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock,
(30:00):
maybe a 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 Although it
was a really dreadful thing to start doing, once you
get used to it, it actually is very efficient. So
at six am, Wendy would be ready to exercise. But
(30:21):
what exercise? Wendy realized it had to be something with
as few frictions as possible. 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
(30:42):
me to do. And putting your running shoes on and
going out the door is probably the most frictionless kind
of exercise that you 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. Talking
with Wendy has really inspired me to think about how
(31:03):
I can use my conscious brain to hack the autopilot
of all my bad habits. I'm already 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 be willing
to form a new, happier habit and send up all
(31:24):
your contextcuse to remind you to come back for the
next episode of the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor Laurie Santos.
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
(31:46):
Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
mixing and mastering by Evan Viola. Pete Notaton also helped
with production. Joseph Friedman checked our facts and our editing
was done by Sophie Crane mckibbon. Special thanks to mie
La Belle, Carl mcgliori, Heather Fame, Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor,
Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. Inslav
(32:09):
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor
Laurie Santos
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