How Habits Can Get in the Way of Your Goals
Habits are key to achieving your goals—but only if you don’t get
tired of them, research suggests.
Along the Pacific Crest Trail, hikers who set
out to complete the entire 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada are especially
vulnerable to quitting at two points: around mile 100 and mile 1,000.
Those who make it past mile 100 are the
hikers who carve out new habits amid the challenge of their new lives: wake up,
eat Pop-Tart, stuff tent into pack, walk. Wearing clothes clammy with
yesterday’s sweat, squatting behind a tree to go to the bathroom, and eating
ramen for dinner every night become the norm.
But hikers who establish those useful
on-trail habits tend to get bored of them as soon as the novelty and challenge
are gone. This disenchantment often hits around mile 1,000, at the beginning of
Northern California.
Hiker Claire Henley Miller, who ended up
quitting at mile 1,232 in 2015, described this phenomenon in her book: “It
began as something new and invigorating and had lasted in this way for many
suns and moons. But now, after participating in mile after mile of this one
continuous event, the journey had turned into a mundane chore of waking,
walking, and setting up camp; an ongoing cycle of wash, rinse, repeat.”
“Why did I end my hike with only 250 miles
until Canada?” 2015 hiker Brett Pallastrini asked in his journal. “I was done
hiking. I was mentally over it.”
Whether hiking a trail or pursuing other
projects, the feeling of being “over it” can be so strong that we abandon goals
that once excited us, even goals that we have the potential to achieve.
Research into our emotional experiences around habits can help explain this
phenomenon and keep us on track with our goals.
The
downside of habits
Habits, those automated actions we repeat at
regular intervals, help us achieve goals. Want to lose weight? Make a habit of
eating breakfast instead of skipping it. Want to write a novel? Make it a habit
to wake up a half hour early and write. The link between habits and goals is so
compelling that it has generated multiple bestselling books.
What no one mentions—but those Pacific Crest
Trail hikers saw—is that those same habits that you establish to achieve your
goals can turn on you. When we get too accustomed to a particular
behavior we perform en route to a goal, we are more likely to quit. Like a
marriage that has gone stale after too many years together, our goal becomes
boring, and we look for new thrills.
In one study,
University of Southern California psychology and business professor Wendy Wood
and her colleagues asked college students to record what they were doing at
one-hour intervals for a day or two: studying, exercising, or socializing, for
example. They also asked students how they felt about that behavior on a scale
that ranged from very negative to very positive.
Wood found that when performing habitual
behaviors, students reported feeling less intense emotions—and, in particular,
less pride. This was true even when the behaviors had once been enjoyable, like
watching TV or hanging out with friends. It was also true for behaviors that
were important to achieving long-term goals, Wood says. Working and studying,
two activities that contribute to a future career, were not especially pleasant
or unpleasant for students when performed habitually.
Wood explains this phenomenon, the so-called
“double law of habits”: “Repetition has multiple effects,” she says. “One is to
strengthen the memory trace for an action, so that habitual tendencies get
stronger. The other is to weaken your emotional response (boredom starts), so
that you are no longer getting much kick from what you are doing.”
Even habits as longstanding and simple as
brushing your teeth are plagued by the habituation problem, Wood says. If you
give people toothbrushes that monitor when they brush their teeth, you find
that most people brush consistently in the morning, to eliminate bad breath,
but evening tooth-brushing gets neglected when they are too tired or busy.
“We speculate that people whose lives are
characterized by large proportions of habitual behavior can find that their
emotional experiences become dull and subdued over time,” write Wood and her
colleagues. One of Wood’s graduate students is currently investigating this
question further.
How to combat habit boredom
While there is plenty of advice on
how to establish habits to help you meet your goals, there is little research
about what to do when those habits get boring. So what do we do in the
meantime?
One way that people overcome this challenge
is by figuring out how to add interest, fun, or passion back into those habits
that move them toward their goal. You add passion back into a marriage by doing
things you find fun together: going on date nights, for example. You can make
habits compelling again in the same way.
For their 2015 hike, Catie Joyce-Bulay and
her group downloaded a smartphone app with riddles—some of which took a day or
two to solve. Her group also tried thinking of all the word combinations that
PCT could stand for (Pina Colada Time, Partially Castrated Tiger). Other hikers
turn their focus to blogging about the hike, or spend their hiking hours
listening to books on tape they had always wanted to read—in other words,
sharing their experiences with others or keeping their minds occupied.
But beware: Paradoxically, we sometimes reduce our
enjoyment even further in attempting to reinvigorate our drive. It can be
tempting to challenge yourself with new behaviors that set the bar higher; for
example you might push yourself to work on your novel for 45 minutes every
morning, instead of a half hour. But just making any change, even if it is a
change that is beneficial for achieving your goal, doesn’t make an activity
more engaging.
“You want to change things up to make it more
fun again, not less fun,” Wood says. Thinking hard about what makes something
fun for you is vital.
Focus on changing your behaviors so they
bring you intrinsic joy, that sense that you love what you are doing and it is
right for you. Université du Québec à Montréal professor Robert Vallerand’s work on
harmonious passion finds that when we are engaged in activities that bring us
that sense of joy, we tend to work harder and perform better. If you are able
to introduce joy into the habits you perform en route to your goal, you may
have greater success at reaching it.
If your goal has gone stale, take a cue from
the hikers and think about how to make it more compelling again.
For example, say your goal is to eat more
healthfully. After deciding to add more vegetables and whole grains to your
diet, you’ve gotten into a good routine of cooking healthy dinners for the last
few months. Suddenly, you find yourself ignoring your planned recipes and
stopping by McDonald’s after work more and more often. Your habit of cooking a
healthy dinner has turned on you; it became boring and drove you to
McDonald’s.
The solution? Sit down and brainstorm new
ways to eat vegetables and whole grains that you would find appealing. Do you
love going out to restaurants? Plan to go out to dinner twice a week for the
next month and order only vegetable dishes. Do you think trying new recipes is
fun? Challenge yourself to cook every grain recipe in the Joy of Cooking.
Of course, we don’t want to adopt behaviors
that will compromise our ability to achieve our goals. “The challenge,” Wood
says, “is to figure out how to change things up enough in your head while still
keeping up efficiency.” If every vegetable dish you order at restaurants is
loaded with cream and cheese, the additional fat you’re adding to your diet
might compromise your original goal to eat more healthfully.
It is normal to be “over it” at some point as
you work toward your goals. When this happens, you can decide to gut it out, or
try to liven up the process. Adding fun back into a dull routine is a more
successful strategy, especially when you’re further away from the finish line
BY CAROLINE BENNER
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_habits_can_get_in_the_way_of_your_goals?utm_source=Greater+Good+Science+Center&utm_campaign=ec1bb2e5f0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_GG_Newsletter_June_20+2018&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5ae73e326e-ec1bb2e5f0-51482775
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