Stress, Lifestyle, and Health
Psych in Real Life: Habits
Learning Objectives
- Examine the importance of habitual behavior in our daily lives
Habits: The Good, the Bad, and the Consequences
Think back across the last hour. What have you been doing?
Which of the last hour’s activities were habitual—done at particular times of the day on a predictable schedule? How much of the time were you “on automatic”, guided by well-practiced routines that require little thought? Often, as we drive a car or walk to our workplace, work out at the gym or shop for groceries, our actions are unconscious and stereotyped as we think about something unrelated to what we are doing.
Habits have gotten a bad reputation in popular literature. Eating too much and chatting online too much and so many other things we supposedly do too much are blamed on “bad habits”. And, in a world that prizes novelty and creativity, the idea that habits are “automatic” suggests that we may be going through life like zombies, not mindful and not experiencing our lives deeply enough.
But habits can be positive, too. Writer Gretchen Rubin notes that “habits are the invisible architecture of our daily lives…Our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.”[1] Habits free us from always having to plan our next action and use willpower to get things done.
Habits may be “automatic” in the sense that they free up our conscious minds to think about other things, but they can be changed and they can be chosen. For millennia, religious teachers and moral philosophers have urged us to choose who we wish to be by shaping our own habits. We don’t become better by trying harder; we become better by eliminating the need to try—we just do it.
How Much of Your Time is Guided by Habits?
One obvious way to find out what people do during the day is to ask them. In fact, pause to do that now. How much time do you think you spend in habit-driven activities? What percentage would you say, between 0 and 100%?
You probably found that it is not easy to come up with a number here. What counts as a “habit”? And how well can we remember how long we were engaged in one activity or another? It is easier to remember interesting things than dull things, so there may be built-in biases in our memories to recall the engaging activities rather than the repetitive, habitual ones.
The Diary Method
Wood, Quinn, and Kashy (2002) used a different approach, one that did not rely so much on memory: the diary method. They didn’t invent this research approach, but they were the first to apply it to the study of habits. This method doesn’t really involve keeping a diary in the traditional sense. Instead, it involves periodically “sampling” people’s activities along with some personal reflections on what they are doing.
Here is how it worked. Wood and her colleagues recruited college students and provided each one with a programmed wristwatch that buzzed once every hour. When the wristwatch[