CAN
TECHNOLOGY REALLY CHANGE YOUR HABITS?
HATE
TO BREAK IT TO YOU BUT DOWNLOADING AN APP WON'T GET YOU TO YOUR HABITS. HERE'S
THE SCIENCE OF WHAT WILL.
If you want to lose weight, improve your
memory, even stop
using technology so much, as the saying
goes: there's an
app for that.
There are hundreds if not thousands of apps designed
to help you change behaviors and drop bad
habits.
There’s the Freedom app, which blocks you from the
Internet so you can focus on work; the Fitocracy app, which uses gamification to reward you with
points, and allows you to accept challenges from other users and advance to
other levels; the Lift app,
which allows users to choose what behavior they want to achieve, such as “run”
or “eat breakfast.” Once the behavior is completed, users can check-in and
track their progress.
These apps are efficient when delivering “rewards” to
users, whether that’s a simple check-in or seeing the progress you’ve made on a
graph. Many of these technologycompanies
are teaming up with psychologists to understand what kind of rewards drive
people to use their products.
Rewards are key to long-lasting behavior changes.
“What we’ve learned in the last 10 to 15 years
is that there’s an automatic behavior and then there’s a reward after, which is
really important because that’s how our brains latch on to behaviors,” says
Charles Duhigg, business reporter at the New York Times and
author of the book The Power of Habit.
A habit forms because you have repeatedly practiced an
activity and your brain creates a neural pathway, made up of neurons, and this
exists for the rest of your life. These behaviors become unconscious habits and
only when you stop practicing the behavior does your brain destroy the
connecting cells that formed that original pathway.
To change a behavior, you need to receive an even
greater reward than the one you get with the old habit. For example, when you
exercise and you give yourself a reward like a piece of chocolate, that
behavior, after some time, becomes automatic. But if your schedule changes and
exercise makes you late, then the reward of not exercising (not being late)
becomes greater than the reward of exercising.
THEY’RE NOT CHANGING YOU. THEY’RE TRAINING YOU TO DO
SOMETHING DIFFERENTLY, SO ONCE YOU’VE TRAINED YOURSELF, YOU CAN STOP USING THE
APP.
A reward will lose its effect over time so to make
your behavior long-lasting, the reward needs to be intrinsic, not extrinsic. An
intrinsic reward is a sense of achievement that comes from within you, such as
the endorphins and pride you feel after exercising. It’s a conscious
satisfaction that can’t be taken away. On the other hand, an extrinsic reward
is something that is tangible or physically given to you for doing something,
such as that piece of chocolate you eat after exercising or the trophy you get
for winning a race.
If technology can provide the rewards needed to change
your behavior, what happens to your behavior after you stop using the app or
program?
The answer comes down to the behavior you were originally
trying to change, says Arun
Sundararajan, a professor at NYU’s Stern
School of Business whose research program
focuses on how information
technologies transform business and society.
According to Sundararajan, there are three
kinds of behavioral changes.
·
The first includes changing
behaviors that you learned through experience, such as the way you manage your
time.
·
The second involves retraining
your biomechanical system to behave differently, such as not pressing the
breaks constantly while you’re driving.
·
The third has to do with
physiological behaviors such as smoking and exercising.
The behaviors that have the highest chance of changing
even after app usage are the second and third. Why? “Because they’re not
changing you. They’re training you to do something differently, so once you’ve
trained yourself, you can stop using [the app],” says Sundararajan. When it
comes to learned behavior (the first one), there’s a greater chance you’ll
revert back to your old behavior after using the app.”
If the app only changes your reaction to feedback,
such as reprimanding you for checking your social media,
then there’s a good chance you’re only changing your behavior because you’re
using the app. When it comes to changing, Sundararajan says your best bet is to
not put too much stock in the digital and technology.
“Over the last decade, we’ve started to overestimate
the power of technology and we reduce the importance of things like community,”
he says. “A big part of behavior change has to do with changing the environment
that you’re in and changing the interactions that you have with people.”
There’s no pill or app that will stop you from
gambling or stop you from checking Facebook every hour. Technology can
certainly help you track your progress and remind you when things need to be
done, but, at the end of the day, we’re complex people and the only way you can
really change is to do it yourself.
BY VIVIAN
GIANG
http://www.fastcompany.com/3033986/the-future-of-work/can-technology-really-change-your-habits?partner=newsletter
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