Forming good habits, breaking bad habits: what works?

Changing behaviour is hard, even when it’s life or death. Patients undergoing heart bypasses risk another bypass – or death – unless they change how they eat and exercise. However, just one patient in ten is behaving differently two years after the operation (Deutschman, 2005), because much of our behaviour – at least 40% (Wood, Quinn and Kashy, 2002) – is habitual: our breakfast, commute and start of the work day may not change for years. The elusiveness of change is therefore “not surprising”; programmes may:

successfully educate and motivate people, especially in the short run. However, when push comes to shove, they often fail at changing actual behaviors and long-term health habits (Wood and Neal, 2016).”

We know we should eat better, exercise more and so on; we do, at least briefly. But old habits reassert themselves. For students, sustaining success requires habits of attention and effort, not isolated bursts of energy: helping them form good habits is crucial.

Habits: the challenge

Habits are more automatic than intentional: we have less control over them than we might believe (Gardner, 2014; Webb and Sheeran, 2006). Habits develop when we repeat an action in a specific context: the context begins to generate the impulse to act (Gardner, 2014; Wood and Neal, 2007): if we have a snack whenever we visit the staff room, the staff room cues a snack. Intentions help initiate habits (Gardner, 2014; Kaushal and Rhodes, 2014): our snack may be motivated by wanting a boost before our next lesson. But we maintain habits after our intentions change (Gardner, 2014), snacking even though we now intend to eat healthily: once we’ve formed a habit, our past behaviour predicts our actions better than our intentions; if we snacked all last year, we’ll probably do so today, whatever we might hope.

This makes it hard to change habits. Few rigorous studies have sought to do so (Gardner, 2014), but approaches which rely on intentional control of behaviour in the moment seem not work, for example:

Increasing self-belief or perceptions of control is ineffective: telling ourselves we can resist snacks achieves little (Webb and Sheeran, 2006)
A big gap between deciding and acting is problematic: deciding on New Year’s Day to snack less may have little effect by mid-January (Webb and Sheeran, 2006).
Self-restraint may work, but is hard to sustain- for example, going to the staff room and trying not to snack (Gardner, 2014; Wood and Neal, 2007)

So how can we change habits?

Forming new habits: what works?

Wood and Neal (2016) suggest that “habit creation involves repeated performance of rewarding actions in stable contexts”. There are three ‘central components’:

Behavioral repetition: practising the activity
Context cues: practising in a stable context, such as a place, time, or social situation; ‘piggybacking’ on an existing habit can help by adding a new behaviour to an existing routine
Rewards: the activity must be rewarding, either for its own sake or because it confers rewards

Social support – the encouragement of others – may reinforce these changes (Webb and Sheeran, 2006).

One example of a successful habit change intervention encouraged regular gym attendance (Charness and Gneezy, 2009). Participants were offered $175 (reward) for eight trips (behavioural repetition) to the gym (stable context). After earning the reward, participants continued to attend the gym more frequently, and their fitness increased.

Breaking habits; what works?

Wood and Neal (2016) also offer a model for breaking bad habits:

Cue disruption: using changes in context to remove existing behavioural cues (moving house is a chance to travel differently)
Environmental reengineering: adding friction (making smoking harder by banning it indoors), reducing friction (making the behaviour easier), or encouraging people to reengineer their own environments (shopping differently, for example)
Vigilant monitoring or inhibition: using prompts when temptation arises

How can we use this in practice?

Making habits

We can help students form habits by explaining and practising these methods with them. Students need a clear, uncomplicated action to pursue, such as an effective revision strategy like self-quizzing. Whether we want students to revise, do their homework or use knowledge organisers, we may want to model this for them. Then:

1) Repetition

We can give students multiple opportunities to practise the desired behaviour, self-quizzing for ten minutes a week, in lessons, for example. This takes more time than we usually offer: one study suggests people take an average of 66 days to form a new habit (Lally et al., 2010); another suggests an exercise habit requires four gym sessions a week for six weeks (Kaushal and Rhodes, 2015).

2) Stable context

We can ensure students are practising in a stable context. This may be a time (when the lesson starts we always write silently), a place (when we enter the lab we always hang our bags at the back), or a cue (when I play this music, it’s time to tidy up). If we want students to pursue the habit a home, we may ask them to choose their own cue for action, using implementation intentions: ‘I’ll do my self-quizzing in my room, as soon as I’ve got home’.

3) Rewards

While there’s some evidence for the effectiveness of rewards in schools (Gneezy, Meier and Rey-Biel, 2011), they may undermine intrinsic motivation or encourage pursuit of the reward, not the learning. We may promote intrinsic rewards by helping students find value and satisfaction in the activity; if we offer extrinsic rewards, they should be intermittent, and for specific actions (Gneezy, Meier and Rey-Biel, 2011; Wood and Neal, 2016). We may also encourage students to commit to their actions to others.

Breaking habits

As with habit formation, we can explain the components of breaking habits with students once they have formed an intention to change:

1) Cue disruption

We may encourage students to use context changes to cease undesirable activities, whether individually (moving sets, for example) or as a group (such as beginning a new school year). Some moments are especially powerful, such as temporal landmarks, whether individual (like birthdays) or collective (like the new year).

2) Environmental reengineering

We can reengineer the environment for students:

Adding friction, making undesirable actions harder by removing distractions and temptation, for example; or,
Reducing friction: make desirable actions easier (discussed here)

We may also encourage students to reengineer their own environments, identifying what is making an undesirable behaviour easier and changing it:

“Who could you sit with who might be a good influence?”
“What is distracting you from doing your homework? How can you avoid the source of distraction?”

3) Vigilant monitoring or inhibition

We may monitor students’ behaviour, invite them to monitor it themselves or asking parents to do so. However, controlling behaviour can evoke negative reactions, so this is best approached with caution.

Conclusion

Sometimes, we want students to take isolated actions which make a big difference, like applying for university or choosing GCSE subjects. But, on an ongoing basis, what makes a lasting difference are students’ habits of attention and effort and avoidance of negative patterns of behaviour. Students who study habitually no longer need to choose to do so: this makes it far easier for them to do so. We can help students form positive habits through repeating desired activities, in stable contexts, with rewards; we can help them break problematic habits by disrupting cues, reengineering the environment, and encouraging students to monitor their behaviour. Habits are a significant part of what we do and who we are: forming the right ones is crucial.

However, this pursuit of habit raises more questions. Given how long it takes to form habits, students are likely to falter as they pursue them; while social pressures can limit the effect of their good intentions (Webb and Sheeran, 2006). Habit formation is gradual and tricky: my next post discusses what we can do to encourage it. Moreover, the time and effort it takes to form a habit means choosing the most powerful habits to form is crucial; this will be another topic for future posts.

This is a draft excerpt from Habits of success: getting every student learning. It’s available from Amazon & Routledge.