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“In short, we learn habitually when our actions repeatedly bring us more pleasure than our neural systems expect. Beyond this, habits don’t crave variety. In fact, they hate it. Variety weakens habit. Variety attenuates its power to direct your behaviors.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Power of habit â€� that sneaky little force that shapes our lives more than we care to admit. It's like having a secret agent working behind the scenes, silently nudging us toward success or dragging us into the abyss of procrastination. With determination & a sprinkle of discipline, we can tame even the wildest of habits. So, let's embark on this journey of self-improvement, armed with the knowledge that every small change we make today paves the way for a brighter tomorrow.”
― Life is Positive

“They successfully play their parts in the sophisticated social process that my cousin is initiating: first, her commitments are shared with her peers, and therefore become stronger and more vivid for her. But there’s a second, less obvious step to it: she’s also raised the stakes of failing. Her public statements hold her accountable for succeeding.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“We need to stop overestimating our rational selves and, instead, come to understand that we are made up of deeper parts, too. Nike’s famous slogan may have begun with some irony, but the resolute quality of the message—and our receptiveness—has instead made it into the secular commandment that it is today: Just Do It. The corollary is this: if we aren’t (just doing it, that is), then we must be just choosing not to.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“When we exert willpower, we actively engage mental effort and energy. Decisions and willpower draw on what we call executive-control functions in the mind and brain, which are thoughtful cognitive processes, to select and monitor actions. We are mostly aware of these processes. They are our subjective reality, or the sense of agency that we recognize as “me.â€� Much as we experience the stress of exerting physical strength, we are aware of the heavy lift of exerting mental strength. Executive control must be paid its due. Many of life’s challenges require nothing more than this.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Good or bad, habits have the same origins. They result in very different experiences, of course, but don’t let that color how you think of them. In this regard, going to the gym regularly and smoking a couple of cigarettes a day are the same. The exact same mechanisms are at work.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“For a full 60 percent of actions, participants were not thinking about what they were doing. They were daydreaming, ruminating, planning.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“People who had full-time jobs lived slightly more structured days. A greater percentage of their actions were habitual. Working long hours created more repetition in recurring contexts. People who lived with others, especially children, had slightly fewer habits. The influence of others kept people flexible, it seemed. This makes sense. Other people in our life simply amplify the rate of chaos.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“When we act on habit, we are essentially retrieving our practiced answers to previously solved problems.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Luckily for us, habits are built on past rewards. In daily life, this is a handy feature. The basic logic of habits is that when we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll keep getting what we’re getting. Habits are a mental shortcut to obtaining that reward again: just repeat what we did in the past. Rewards can reach through time and continue to operate in the habit formula. This means that we don’t have to keep procuring those rewards for ourselves, and it means that even if our values and interests change over time, we don’t necessarily need to update the identity of those rewards to keep them current. It’s enough that once upon a time, you were rewarded for an action that became a habit.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“In psychology, we have a name for the automatic scripts our brains piece together when we repeatedly do the same thing in the same way: procedural memory. It’s such an important repository of information that only the most frequently repeated patterns get stored like this. It functions somewhat separately from other memory systems, and the specific information encoded isn’t accessible to consciousness. This kind of cognitive coding is a sort of mental equivalent of admin-only files on your computer. Your computer’s best functioning relies on you not naively messing around in its most fundamental code, which it stashes away behind several layers of obfuscation. This is why we don’t know much about our habits. The information we learn as a habit is to some extent separated from other neural regions. Procedural coding protects information from change. This is the advantage to the way our minds encode habits. You don’t forget how to ride a bike regardless of how well you learn to ride a skateboard or surf. You can do it years after stopping. You balance and push the pedals without thinking. While cycling, you can even talk to others or enjoy the scenery. Your bike-riding habit didn’t get overwritten by new thoughts and experiences. Other habits are almost as sticky. Speaking a second language, playing a musical instrument, or cooking a favorite dish are skills that fade only slowly as you fail to use them. Past procedural learning is well preserved.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Acting on habit has additional benefits. It frees our conscious mind to do the tasks it was designed for, like solving problems. The executive system no longer has to manage life routines. Once we surrender to our habits, our minds are free to perform higher tasks”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“One of the early discoveries in neuroscience that helped to rekindle the field’s interest in habit came from a 1990s study that separated habit learning in humans from conscious understanding. Twenty participants had Parkinson’s disease, which attacks motor control systems in the basal ganglia, especially the putamen, and impedes the ability to learn new habits (even non-motor ones) and to activate old ones. Twelve participants were patients with amnesia who had dysfunction in a different brain area (the hippocampus), one that interfered with their ability to remember recent events. Parkinson’s patients could explain the task and the instructions. They knew consciously what to do. But it didn’t matter how much they practiced. They could not learn the connections between cues (cards) and rewarded responses (rain/sun forecast). They could not form a habit. In contrast, the amnesiacs acquired habits more readily as they practiced the task. After taking fifty chances at predicting the weather, they could make accurate forecasts based on the cards. But when they were asked about what they were doing, they could not remember the instructions or details of what they had seen. This research provided some of the first insights into the neural mechanics of habit formation. It suggested that, in humans, habit learning isn’t superseded or subordinated by more thoughtful learning systems, as assumed by many researchers during the cognitive revolution. Habits live in resilient, deep-seated neural structures—ones that are fundamental to mammalian life.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“We’d expect that participants who scored high on the self-control scale would be a big part of the 83 percent. Self-control is white-knuckle denial, right? And we believe that, starting at a young age, some of us are simply stronger than others. That’s not what the team found. Instead, participants who scored highest in self-control seldom reported resisting desires, period. They just didn’t experience many unwanted desires in the first place. They didn’t have many urges that conflicted with their goals. It looked as if they were able to avoid temptations altogether. They were living their lives in a way that hid the marshmallow almost all the time.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Participants who scored high on self-control said that they automatically went out to exercise without thinking much about it. They usually did it in the same times and places. It had become part of their routine. Once again, people high in self-control were achieving success without exerting much effort. They weren’t white-knuckling their way to being healthy. Here’s the very happy implication: the worst, most effortful run will be that first one. Or the second, perhaps. But effort doesn’t last (in fact, if it does, you’re doing it wrong). Habits will form and take the effort off your hands.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“They were not struggling with themselves to play just one more round of a computer game or keep reading their Twitter feed. For them, sleep was not a battle of self-control. Instead, high “self-controlâ€� people performed better at the more habitual, automatic tasks than low “self-controlâ€� ones. High “self-controllersâ€� were simply proficient at automating.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“A habit happens when a context cue is sufficiently associated with a rewarded response to become automatic, to fade into that hardworking, quiet second self. You’re not a part of it, not as you probably think of yourself. You—your goals, your will, your wishes—don’t have any part to play in habits. Goals can orient you to build a habit, but your desires don’t make habits work. Actually, your habit self would benefit if “youâ€� just got out of the way.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Informing smokers of the risks had only a mild impact on smoking rates. Even after the Surgeon General’s landmark 1964 report of the dangers, U.S. tobacco sales continued to climb until 1980. In taming habits, knowledge is just not a powerful lever. Willpower also isn’t much help—not when stacked up against nicotine. The Centers for Disease Control report that 68 percent of smokers say they want to quit completely. However, each individual attempt usually fails. Only about one in ten actually stop smoking for good. Most end up relapsing, typically within a week. The conflict between habit (smoke here) and conscious awareness (it’s now illegal) should decrease over time. As people repeatedly comply with a prohibition, their habits become linked to new places, ones where they now repeatedly smoke. Thus, in Lewin’s famous equation, behavior is a function of the person and the context/environment.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“One day when you stop by for the study, the bowl of popcorn is on the table within easy reach, about a foot away, while the apple slices are on a counter—visible, although you’d have to stand up to take one. On another day you stop by, the apples are on the table and the popcorn is on the counter. Participants ate about 50 calories when the apples were within easy reach, but about three times more when the popcorn bowl was within reach. Friction in this study was pretty simple—distance. Just putting the high-calorie snack slightly out of reach was substantial friction. Participants could still see and smell the popcorn, but the distance was enough to discourage eating. By putting desserts at the end of the line (instead of at the beginning) and making healthy foods easier to see, restaurants can influence what people eat. As the saying goes, “Eye level is buy level.â€� If we have to bend low or reach high, we’re less likely to bother.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Only twenty-one mornings of planning your daily budget before your frugality becomes automatic. This is a myth. The number seems to come from self-help guru Maxwell Maltz’s speculation in his 1960 bestselling book, Psycho-Cybernetics. He was guessing how long it took people to adjust to self-changes such as plastic surgery. This is a concept with much longevity but little truth. A new action is difficult to sustain when the only driving forces are internal motivators of (a) wanting to do it, (b) knowing it’s good for you, and (c) wanting to get the study payment”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“You can miss a day or two and you will not be set back to zero. An omission is not a license to cheat or keep failing. Your habit-in-formation is not so fragile that it requires perfection. If you miss a day or fall off the wagon, don’t despair. Instead, use it as an opportunity to make your context tighter, stronger, and clearer.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Repetition, then, should be thought of not as some kind of magical primer for habits, but rather as a way to induce speedy mental action. The second time you do something takes less time and mental effort than the first. The third takes less than the second. And so on. This creates a favorable mental condition for a habit to come in and take over. By the tenth time (or the sixty-sixth), you’re barely thinking about it at all, and presto: a habit has been created.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Unanticipated rewards in the future, such as a paycheck bonus in two weeks or an athletic trophy you get at the end of a season, will not change neural connections in the same way. Rewards have to be experienced right after we do something in order to build habit associations (context-response) in memory. Given this timing, the most effective habit-building rewards are often intrinsic to a behavior, or a part of the action itself. This could be the feeling of pleasure you get when you read an engaging story to your kids and see their enjoyment; or maybe the warm glow of generosity you experience when doing a good deed, like volunteering at the soup kitchen. You aren’t a rat. If you volunteer, don’t then go and buy yourself a big chocolate bar and expect the habit to start forming. Let the warmth intrinsic to the activity be the reward. Take advantage of your built-in humanity. As you’d expect, those who liked to exercise—who rated it a fun activity that made them feel good—exercised more often and reported that it was more habitual and automatic. They didn’t have to think much before heading out to the track or gym. Most interesting is that students who exercised just as often, but who indicated that they went mostly out of guilt or to please others, failed to form a robust habit.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Major life events—starting a new job, moving, getting married, having children—have the same effect, many times over. They take away our habit cues and remove the predictability of life. They shake everything up, and for a moment, all of your behaviors—habitual and otherwise—are in the air, waiting for you to direct their placement. Yes, major life changes are stressful times full of uncertainty. But they are also opportunities to reimagine ourselves and restructure our lives. We are freed up to practice new behaviors without interference from established cues and our habitual responses to them.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“When it’s easier to eat more, when portion and package sizes are larger, we simply do it. After all, it’s already on our plate. And once we start eating more, we start liking to eat more, and our biology further adjusts so that greater consumption becomes the norm.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“It’s exhausting and fruitless to live by motivation and willpower alone. You’ll only fail yourself, time and again. You’ll have all your goals and all your intentions, and you’ll watch them get higher and higher and more out of reach. Your ideal life and your actual life will start to diverge more and more, and you’ll feel that distance to be an indictment of your weakness and smallness of character.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Mental toughness isn’t about how you feel, it’s about what you do despite how you feel.”
― Glody Kikonga, MENTAL TOUGHNESS: Unbreakable Mind

“When you do the right thing day in and day out, it’s habit forming. The converse is also true.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, BECOME: Unleash the Power of Moral Character and Be Proud of the Life You Choose