Debunking Popular Self-Improvement Advice Using SCIENCE

So today we’re going to do something new. I’m going to react to content about healthy habit formation on YouTube and we’re going to look at the question, is it really backed by science or is it a load of If you don’t know me, my name is Spencer. I’m the founder of clearerthinking.org and we run lots of studies on human psychology, including some studies on habit formation. I’m going to be pedantic with these videos because I really want you to understand

The actual detailed truth. But a lot of times people who make these kinds of videos, they’re speaking loosely. They’re trying to give you helpful information. So, I’m not meaning to pick on them, but I just want you to know what’s actually true in detail and get the definitions right. This video is by Mel Robbins. She has 4 million subscribers on YouTube, and she puts out tons of self-improvement content. >> So, let’s just start with the basics.

What is a habit? A habit is something that you do so often that it’s automatic. >> Okay, so that’s not not actually true. It’s not totally wrong. I mean, it could be useful for some people to think of a habit that way, but what is a habit actually? A habit is a learned behavior that happens automatically in response to a Q. So there’s some cue in the world like you see a certain thing or your clock hits a certain time and then

You’ve learned a behavior to do automatically subconsciously when that queue occurs. That’s what a habit actually is. She describes a habit as something you do so often that it becomes automatic. But you could actually have a habit that you learned many years ago. you literally haven’t done the behavior for years and then you see the queue again for the first time in many years and then you do the behavior. So, it doesn’t have to be something you do often.

If you’re somebody who’s struggling to change, like maybe you’re trying to become a better student or you want to be better with your money or more organized or you’d love a rockolid morning routine or how about carving out the time to put yourself first, that’d be a great habit. I think she’s pointing at something very important there, which is that habits are such a general and powerful tool that we can apply them to almost any area of our life, whether

It’s improving our sleep, our work, our relationships. So once you kind of have this idea of a habit and how to form them, you can then start thinking, well, what do I want to improve my life? And you can kind of direct the habit at that area. So this one’s a video by Big Think. They have 8 million subscribers on YouTube. Let’s see what they have to say about habits. The ability to form habits is one of the

Most important and amazing. >> You know, it’s funny they say a habit is a regular tendency or practice that usually is hard to give up. It’s not what a habit is. Um, and in fact, we often have a habit and then the habit goes away. You know, a change in our environment can make a habit go away. Or seeing a cue that normally triggers a habit, but then not doing the habit enough times can sometimes make a habit

Go away. So, I don’t think it’s true that a habit automatically is hard to give up. In fact, I think we lose habits a lot. Um, there are certain types of habits that are hard to give up, and that’s another matter. >> When you form a habit, you can execute a fairly complex series of behaviors without having to think really, really hard about it. And what that means is that it lets us think about other things. But the

Downside of a habit is that you stop thinking while you’re doing a habit. So, as a result, you become less aware of the negative consequences of that behavior. I think that’s a really critical point because habits are automatic. They’re essentially implementing a behavior again and again without reflection. And sometimes that’s really good. A healthy habit is going to get propagated into the future. But an unhealthy habit will also get propagated into the future. And

Because it’s automatic, we’re going to think less about it. And therefore, if we have the wrong habits, we might end up having a bunch of behavior that’s bad for us that we’re not really reflecting on. >> There is a woman named Wendywood who did a study when she was at Duke. And what she found was that about 45% of all the behaviors that someone did in a day was habit. It wasn’t decision-m. Okay. So, I wanted to figure out where

The heck this 45% number comes from cuz I heard that sometimes people say 43% of your behaviors are habits. It’s like where does that come from? It’s so oddly specific. It makes it seem like it was from one study. And indeed, it was from one study. But the funny thing about it is that this number is not the percentage of habits that people were engaging in. So what did the study actually measure? What is this famous

45% number? So this is the paper habits in everyday life, thought, emotion, and action by Wendy Wood and at all. And so let’s see what they actually measured with this 45%. And we can see here in table two, the number they’re referring to is actually this number. It’s 43%. And it says very clearly habitual performed almost daily, usually in the same location. So what they did is they had people take diaries every hour of what they were doing and then they had

Them write down answers to questions about that behavior they were doing every hour. And one of the things that they wrote down is about whether it’s habitual. In other words, is it performed almost daily, usually in the same location. But what’s funny about that is that is not a habit. That’s not the definition of a habit. A habit is a behavior that’s learned and it happens automatically when there’s a Q, right? So something happens in the world, a Q,

And then you engage in the behavior automatically and you’ve critically you’ve learned that behavior. A habitual behavior is something different. A habitual behavior is a behavior you do regularly. And you could think of habitual behaviors as coming to two broad categories. There’s habits, so they’re behaviors that are automatic. And then there’s routines. Routines are behaviors that you simply do by default at a certain time or a certain place, but they’re not a habit because they’re not subconscious. they’re not triggered

Automatically. So, for example, maybe on Sundays you like to go to the gym, but maybe it’s not a habit in the technical sense because maybe you’re not just subconsciously automatically queued into going to the gym. Maybe every Sunday you wake up and you’re like, “Oh yeah, this is the day I go to the gym.” And you think about it and you decide to go to the gym and that’s what you do every Sunday. Specifically, this paper was not

Measuring what percentage of their behaviors were habits. It was measuring what percentage of their behavior was habitual, which is a different thing. So this brings us to this other paper which the video doesn’t mention. How habitual is everyday life? And in this paper they do something quite interesting. They randomly ping people at different times of day and they ask them for the behavior you’re doing right now was it kicked off by a habit? And also does

Executing the behavior involve a habit and they found different numbers. They found 65% of the behaviors people reported them as being habitually instigated and 88% reported as being habitually executed. And this raises an interesting point. What does it really mean for a behavior to be a habit? So let’s go back to going to the gym every day. It might be a habit that gets you thinking, oh, I’m supposed to go to the gym today, right? So maybe there’s a cue

In your environment that reminds you that you want to go to the gym. Well, that’s the habit piece. But then actually going to the gym that might be consciously executed, right? You’re actually like thinking about the fact you need to go to the gym, but then when you’re driving, that might become a habit again. So in real life, often times we’ve got these behaviors that are complex. There might be habits that form parts of them, but the whole behavior

Might not be a habit. There’s this thing called the habit loop. There’s three parts to it. There’s first a cue, which is a trigger for a behavior, and then the behavior itself, which we usually refer to as a routine, and then there’s the reward. And the reward is actually why the habit happens in the first place. how you >> that’s an interesting perspective and I think it’s a useful perspective that you’ve got the cue, you’ve got the

Routine and you’ve got the reward. But notice he said that the reward is the reason that the habit happens and that’s not actually true. You can totally form a habit without any reward simply by repeating the same behavior when you have the same queue. A good example of this is martial arts. In martial arts, your teacher might tell you, you know, after I do this punch, I want you to do this parry. You practice punch, parry,

Punch, parry, punch, parry, and eventually it becomes a habit. There doesn’t need to be a reward. Now, there could be a reward. Maybe you feel good about yourself every time you do it. But there doesn’t have to be. Simply forcing yourself to do it over and over again in response to the same cue, it will start to become a habit. That being said, I I don’t hate the way he’s presenting this because a reward can be a powerful way

To make a habit stick. If there is a reward, that may make the habit stickier. It may make it faster to produce the habit. It’s just not a necessary feature and it’s often presented as necessary. I don’t know why that is. >> And there’s this thing that’s known as the golden rule of habit change which is if a habit is made up of a cue, a routine, and a reward, you can’t change all three parts at once. In fact,

You shouldn’t even try. What you really want to change is you want to change the routine. >> So this is this is an interesting idea that suppose you have a bad habit, right? There’s some cue that occurs. You have a routine. I don’t like the word routine because the word routine often actually doesn’t refer to a habit. But let’s just call it routine because that’s what he’s calling it. You got the queue, you got the routine or the

Behavior you engage in, and then you’ve got the reward. And he’s saying what you should try to do is change the routine. So, for example, if every day at 3 p.m. you go down and get a donut, and that’s an unhealthy behavior you want to change. Well, you still have the cue of it being 3 p.m., you’re not going to be able to change that. Then you’ve got the reward of, you know, what you’re getting out of it. He’s saying change the

Routine, change the behavior. So maybe if you’re what you’re seeking there is just, you know, dealing with a little bit of hunger, what you could go do is eat something else that’s healthier instead. So you still get the reward of reducing the hunger, but you’ve just shifted the routine. And I think that’s a perfectly fine strategy. And often that can be a really good thing to do. So nothing wrong with that, but there are other solutions. You can often just

Change the queue. So for example, like if you move to a new job, maybe now during 3 p.m. you’re going to be in a meeting and you’re going to be distracted. you’re not even going to think about getting a donut, right? So, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say sometimes we can just change the queue or change your environment so the queue happens less often or doesn’t happen at all. So, this is a video about habits

From Ted Ed and they have 22 million subscribers. >> A seemingly automated morning routine, for example, saves you both time and precious mental energy. Still, many people have habits that no longer serve them. Yet, research shows that intentions alone often fail to lead to long-term behavior change. Well, that’s absolutely true. Intention is an important part of behavior change. It’s not everything there’s to behavior change, but if you don’t even intend to change, then you’re probably not going

To. In our framework for behavior change called the 10 conditions for change, you can actually see where intention fits in. We have intention as the third part of a behavior change. So, you first consider the behavior, then you desire to engage in it, and then you intend to engage in it. And these are key elements that can help a behavior actually happen. But so intention is part of it, but there’s a lot more to behavior change than just intention. Let’s go to

Huberman. This is from Andrew Huberman. You’ve probably heard of him. He has 7 million subscribers. He’s famous for talking about self-improvement, but also bringing in neuroscience into the discussions. >> Now, many people think that habits are just like reflexes. But pure reflexes are things like the eyelink reflex. you know, something comes toward your eye and you don’t want it to get in your eye, you’ll blink. Those aren’t habits. Those are what we call hardwired reflexes. Habits are things that our

Nervous system learned, but not always consciously. Sometimes we develop habits that we’re not even aware of. >> That’s also a good point. We have many habits that we don’t learn consciously, right? We just when a queue happens, we engage in behavior. It happens again and again. Eventually, it’s a habit. You know, an interesting example of this would be let’s say you have a foot injury and you get some pain walking a certain way. And so what happens is over

A period of a week, you start walking a bit differently than normal to avoid the pain. As you’re walking, you keep doing this over and over and over again. You could actually develop a habit of walking in a different way than you normally do. None of it was conscious. You never tried to do it, but you’ve learned a new habit of how to walk. >> Now, this is absolutely critical to understand for the following reason. Another thing that you’ll hear out there

In the literature is that it takes 21 days to form a habit. Some people say 18, some people say 21, some people say 30 days, some people say 60 days. So which one is it? Does it depend on the habit that one is trying to form or does it depend on the person that’s trying to form the habit? Well, it turns out that there’s excellent peer-reviewed data on this. There’s a study published in 2010 first author Lai Ly. This study found

That for the same habit to be formed, it can take anywhere from 18 days to as many as 254 days for different individuals to form that habit. >> The study he’s talking about is one where you have different individuals trying to form the same habit. And yes, there can be a wide variety of times it takes to form the habit. That’s absolutely true. But habits can also happen much faster. Let’s say, for instance, you want to form a habit that

Every time you walk through a doorway, you want to be mindful. Well, you could actually practice that habit. You could do it hundreds of times today purposely walking through a doorway and then being mindful. Walking through a doorway being mindful. And also every time you do it naturally, just when you happen to walk through a door, you try to be mindful as well. You could actually form the habit in one or two days. So thinking in terms

Of number of repetitions is probably a more natural way to think about habits forming than in terms of number of days. But there are other factors that matter too. How consistent is that Q that sets off your behavior? If the Q is the same every single time and it’s always going to be the same, then you can form a habit more easily. But if the Q is really varied, it might be harder to form the habit because you have to learn

An association between that Q and that behavior and you have to learn all the different variations of that Q that might occur. If you’re trying to learn to every time you walk through a doorway to be mindful, it’s easier to do that if the doorway is always the same exact doorway. But if you’re going to be in different places every day, it may take longer to form the habit because your brain has to learn to associate all

Kinds of different doorways that all look different that present different stimuli to go along with that habit. If you sometimes miss the queue and don’t engage in the behavior, it’s going to take longer for it to become a habit. So, I really recommend if you’re trying to form a new habit, try to hit the queue every single time with that behavior at the beginning, right? Try not to miss a single instance of the queue. just to always engage in that

Behavior when you hit the queue and that will make it go faster. If you’re interested in forming a new healthy habit, you can use our app Thoughtsaver. It’s available for iPhone, Android, and web, and it helps you design and stick with your perfect daily routine. This is my first time ever doing this format, so if you enjoyed it, please let me know in the comments and I’ll do more. If you want to learn more about psychology, I’d

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