{"id":1320,"date":"2023-03-31T17:38:44","date_gmt":"2023-03-31T17:38:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/chapter\/16-5-1-learn-it-habits\/"},"modified":"2024-04-13T21:55:34","modified_gmt":"2024-04-13T21:55:34","slug":"16-5-1-learn-it-habits","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/chapter\/16-5-1-learn-it-habits\/","title":{"raw":"Healthy Habits: Learn It 1\u2014Habits","rendered":"Healthy Habits: Learn It 1\u2014Habits"},"content":{"raw":"<section class=\"textbox learningGoals\">\r\n<ul>\r\n\t<li>Understand the importance of habitual behavior in our daily lives<\/li>\r\n\t<li>Describe research done to learn about habitual behaviors<\/li>\r\n\t<li>Describe ways to develop healthy, new habits<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<h2>Habits: The Good, the Bad, and the Consequences<\/h2>\r\n<p>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 \u201cbad habits\u201d. And, in a world that prizes novelty and creativity, the idea that habits are \u201cautomatic\u201d suggests that we may be going through life like zombies, not mindful and not experiencing our lives deeply enough.<\/p>\r\n<p>But habits can be positive, too. Writer Gretchen Rubin notes that \u201chabits are the invisible architecture of our daily lives\u2026Our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.\u201d[footnote]The quotation comes from her book about changing habits: Better than Before.[\/footnote] Habits free us from always having to plan our next action and use willpower to get things done.<\/p>\r\n<section class=\"textbox connectIt\">\r\n<h3>Habits are Automatic<\/h3>\r\n<p>Think back across the last hour. What have you been doing?<\/p>\r\n<p>Which of the last hour\u2019s activities were habitual\u2014done at particular times of the day on a predictable schedule? How much of the time were you \u201con automatic\u201d, 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.<\/p>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<section class=\"textbox keyTakeaway\">\r\n<h3>habits<\/h3>\r\n<p><strong>Habits<\/strong> are automatic behaviors that are formed through repeated actions over time. They can be either positive or negative and can have a significant impact on our daily lives. Positive habits can help us build resilience, enhance our self-esteem, and lead to a more fulfilling life. In contrast, negative habits can lead to self-destructive behavior and impact our overall well-being negatively.<\/p>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<p>Developing healthy habits is a crucial aspect of positive psychology. These habits can help us become more mindful, achieve our goals, and enhance our overall well-being. For example, practicing gratitude daily can help improve our mood, increase our sense of well-being, and improve our relationships. Engaging in regular physical exercise can also help improve our physical health, reduce stress and anxiety, and enhance our self-esteem.<\/p>\r\n<p>Another example of a healthy habit is mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation can help reduce stress and anxiety, improve our emotional regulation, and enhance our overall well-being. By focusing on the present moment and being aware of our thoughts and emotions, we can cultivate a sense of inner peace and calm.<\/p>\r\n<p>Habits may be \u201cautomatic\u201d 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\u2019t become better by trying harder; we become better by eliminating the need to try\u2014we just do it.<\/p>\r\n<h2>How Much of Your Time is Guided by Habits?<\/h2>\r\n<p>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%?<\/p>\r\n<p>You probably found that it is not easy to come up with a number here. What counts as a \u201chabit\u201d? 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.<\/p>\r\n<h3>The Diary Method<\/h3>\r\n<p>Wood, Quinn, and Kashy (2002) used a different approach, one that did not rely so much on memory: the diary method. They didn\u2019t invent this research approach, but they were the first to apply it to the study of habits. This method doesn\u2019t really involve keeping a diary in the traditional sense. Instead, it involves periodically \u201csampling\u201d people\u2019s activities along with some personal reflections on what they are doing.<\/p>\r\n<p>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 buzzed[footnote]Today, cell phones are likely to be used for diary studies, but in 2002, only about 60 of students had clamshell-style cell phones, and the \u201csmart phones\u201d were still 5 years in the future.[\/footnote], the student recorded what they were doing. Then, the student answered a series of questions about this activity:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How often they engaged in that behavior.<\/li>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Their current physical location.<\/li>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The physical location in which they generally performed the behavior.<\/li>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Which other people\u2014if any\u2014were involved in the activity.<\/li>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The amount of attention needed for successful performance (1 to 4: almost none to constant attention)<\/li>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The degree of difficulty of the behavior (1 to 5: very easy to very difficult)<\/li>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The intensity of emotions felt as they engaged in the activity (1 to 5: much more negative than normal to much more positive than normal)<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>They also answered an open-ended question: what were you thinking about while you were engaged in the activity?<\/p>\r\n<h3>The Results of the Diary Study<\/h3>\r\n<p>The researchers analyzed the \u201cdiary\u201d reports of 279 students across two versions of this study. When they defined \u201chabitual behaviors\u201d as activities that regularly occurred at the same time and place, they found that 41% of the behaviors could be considered habitual. If this result actually generalizes the rest of us, then nearly half of our time is spent engaging in habit-driven activities.<\/p>\r\n<p>In a separate analysis, the researchers approached the idea of a habit in a different way. They reasoned that if habits are somewhat automatic, then we can think about something else while we are engaged in the habitual behaviors. Because they asked the students what they were doing and what they were thinking about, the researchers were able to determine how often there was a mismatch between behavior and thoughts. Approximately 47% of the time, thoughts were about something other than what they were doing, a percentage very close to the 43% estimate from the previous paragraph. However, even though the data support the idea that we can and often do think about other things while engaging in habitual behaviors, we\u00a0are not zombies\u2014about 40% of the time, people were thinking about activities they labeled as habits while engaging in them. The experimenters explain that this is \u201cconsistent with the idea that this mode of behavior is best characterized by minimal or sporadic cognitive monitoring and not by the complete absence of thought.\u201d[footnote]Wood, Quinn, &amp; Kashy (2002), page 1281.[\/footnote]<\/p>\r\n<p>The researchers report one other interesting finding about habitual behaviors. When people engaged in habitual behaviors they reported lower negative emotions than when they were performing non-habitual activities. Specifically, habitual behaviors were associated with lower stress, reduced likelihood of feeling overwhelmed, and lower probability of feeling out of control. Happily, people did not feel less interested or less motivated while engaging in habitual behaviors, so reduced emotional reactions were not caused by becoming disengaged or less attentive.<\/p>","rendered":"<section class=\"textbox learningGoals\">\n<ul>\n<li>Understand the importance of habitual behavior in our daily lives<\/li>\n<li>Describe research done to learn about habitual behaviors<\/li>\n<li>Describe ways to develop healthy, new habits<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/section>\n<h2>Habits: The Good, the Bad, and the Consequences<\/h2>\n<p>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 \u201cbad habits\u201d. And, in a world that prizes novelty and creativity, the idea that habits are \u201cautomatic\u201d suggests that we may be going through life like zombies, not mindful and not experiencing our lives deeply enough.<\/p>\n<p>But habits can be positive, too. Writer Gretchen Rubin notes that \u201chabits are the invisible architecture of our daily lives\u2026Our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.\u201d<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"The quotation comes from her book about changing habits: Better than Before.\" id=\"return-footnote-1320-1\" href=\"#footnote-1320-1\" aria-label=\"Footnote 1\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[1]<\/sup><\/a> Habits free us from always having to plan our next action and use willpower to get things done.<\/p>\n<section class=\"textbox connectIt\">\n<h3>Habits are Automatic<\/h3>\n<p>Think back across the last hour. What have you been doing?<\/p>\n<p>Which of the last hour\u2019s activities were habitual\u2014done at particular times of the day on a predictable schedule? How much of the time were you \u201con automatic\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<section class=\"textbox keyTakeaway\">\n<h3>habits<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Habits<\/strong> are automatic behaviors that are formed through repeated actions over time. They can be either positive or negative and can have a significant impact on our daily lives. Positive habits can help us build resilience, enhance our self-esteem, and lead to a more fulfilling life. In contrast, negative habits can lead to self-destructive behavior and impact our overall well-being negatively.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<p>Developing healthy habits is a crucial aspect of positive psychology. These habits can help us become more mindful, achieve our goals, and enhance our overall well-being. For example, practicing gratitude daily can help improve our mood, increase our sense of well-being, and improve our relationships. Engaging in regular physical exercise can also help improve our physical health, reduce stress and anxiety, and enhance our self-esteem.<\/p>\n<p>Another example of a healthy habit is mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation can help reduce stress and anxiety, improve our emotional regulation, and enhance our overall well-being. By focusing on the present moment and being aware of our thoughts and emotions, we can cultivate a sense of inner peace and calm.<\/p>\n<p>Habits may be \u201cautomatic\u201d 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\u2019t become better by trying harder; we become better by eliminating the need to try\u2014we just do it.<\/p>\n<h2>How Much of Your Time is Guided by Habits?<\/h2>\n<p>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%?<\/p>\n<p>You probably found that it is not easy to come up with a number here. What counts as a \u201chabit\u201d? 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.<\/p>\n<h3>The Diary Method<\/h3>\n<p>Wood, Quinn, and Kashy (2002) used a different approach, one that did not rely so much on memory: the diary method. They didn\u2019t invent this research approach, but they were the first to apply it to the study of habits. This method doesn\u2019t really involve keeping a diary in the traditional sense. Instead, it involves periodically \u201csampling\u201d people\u2019s activities along with some personal reflections on what they are doing.<\/p>\n<p>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 buzzed<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Today, cell phones are likely to be used for diary studies, but in 2002, only about 60 of students had clamshell-style cell phones, and the \u201csmart phones\u201d were still 5 years in the future.\" id=\"return-footnote-1320-2\" href=\"#footnote-1320-2\" aria-label=\"Footnote 2\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[2]<\/sup><\/a>, the student recorded what they were doing. Then, the student answered a series of questions about this activity:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How often they engaged in that behavior.<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Their current physical location.<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The physical location in which they generally performed the behavior.<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Which other people\u2014if any\u2014were involved in the activity.<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The amount of attention needed for successful performance (1 to 4: almost none to constant attention)<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The degree of difficulty of the behavior (1 to 5: very easy to very difficult)<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The intensity of emotions felt as they engaged in the activity (1 to 5: much more negative than normal to much more positive than normal)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>They also answered an open-ended question: what were you thinking about while you were engaged in the activity?<\/p>\n<h3>The Results of the Diary Study<\/h3>\n<p>The researchers analyzed the \u201cdiary\u201d reports of 279 students across two versions of this study. When they defined \u201chabitual behaviors\u201d as activities that regularly occurred at the same time and place, they found that 41% of the behaviors could be considered habitual. If this result actually generalizes the rest of us, then nearly half of our time is spent engaging in habit-driven activities.<\/p>\n<p>In a separate analysis, the researchers approached the idea of a habit in a different way. They reasoned that if habits are somewhat automatic, then we can think about something else while we are engaged in the habitual behaviors. Because they asked the students what they were doing and what they were thinking about, the researchers were able to determine how often there was a mismatch between behavior and thoughts. Approximately 47% of the time, thoughts were about something other than what they were doing, a percentage very close to the 43% estimate from the previous paragraph. However, even though the data support the idea that we can and often do think about other things while engaging in habitual behaviors, we\u00a0are not zombies\u2014about 40% of the time, people were thinking about activities they labeled as habits while engaging in them. The experimenters explain that this is \u201cconsistent with the idea that this mode of behavior is best characterized by minimal or sporadic cognitive monitoring and not by the complete absence of thought.\u201d<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Wood, Quinn, &amp; Kashy (2002), page 1281.\" id=\"return-footnote-1320-3\" href=\"#footnote-1320-3\" aria-label=\"Footnote 3\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The researchers report one other interesting finding about habitual behaviors. When people engaged in habitual behaviors they reported lower negative emotions than when they were performing non-habitual activities. Specifically, habitual behaviors were associated with lower stress, reduced likelihood of feeling overwhelmed, and lower probability of feeling out of control. Happily, people did not feel less interested or less motivated while engaging in habitual behaviors, so reduced emotional reactions were not caused by becoming disengaged or less attentive.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"before-footnotes clear\" \/><div class=\"footnotes\"><ol><li id=\"footnote-1320-1\">The quotation comes from her book about changing habits: Better than Before. <a href=\"#return-footnote-1320-1\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 1\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-1320-2\">Today, cell phones are likely to be used for diary studies, but in 2002, only about 60 of students had clamshell-style cell phones, and the \u201csmart phones\u201d were still 5 years in the future. <a href=\"#return-footnote-1320-2\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 2\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-1320-3\">Wood, Quinn, &amp; Kashy (2002), page 1281. <a href=\"#return-footnote-1320-3\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 3\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"author":20,"menu_order":28,"template":"","meta":{"_candela_citation":"[{\"type\":\"cc\",\"description\":\"Psychology in Real Life: Habits\",\"author\":\"Patrick Carroll for Lumen Learning\",\"organization\":\"Lumen Learning\",\"url\":\"\",\"project\":\"\",\"license\":\"cc-by\",\"license_terms\":\"\"},{\"type\":\"cc\",\"description\":\"Habits and positive psychology\",\"author\":\"Lumen Learning in conjunction with ChatGPT\",\"organization\":\"Lumen Learning\",\"url\":\"\",\"project\":\"\",\"license\":\"cc-by\",\"license_terms\":\"\"}]","pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"part":1292,"module-header":"learn_it","content_attributions":[{"type":"cc","description":"Psychology in Real Life: Habits","author":"Patrick Carroll for Lumen Learning","organization":"Lumen Learning","url":"","project":"","license":"cc-by","license_terms":""},{"type":"cc","description":"Habits and positive psychology","author":"Lumen Learning in conjunction with ChatGPT","organization":"Lumen Learning","url":"","project":"","license":"cc-by","license_terms":""}],"internal_book_links":[],"video_content":null,"cc_video_embed_content":{"cc_scripts":"","media_targets":[]},"try_it_collection":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/1320"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/1320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6746,"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/1320\/revisions\/6746"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/1292"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/1320\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=1320"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=1320"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=1320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}