How to Create Habits and Hack Your Health
You know those people who have it all together—their eating, their exercise, their work life—all seemingly with no effort? Well, it turns out it's not because they have amazing "self-control" or "will power." It's actually because they have really good habits. In this episode, we speak to Professor Wendy Wood all about how to create new habits, break bad ones, and the power of habit hacking and habit stacking.
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Guest
Wendy Wood is a professor of psychology and business at University of Southern California, whose research focuses on habits and habitual behaviors.
Learn more about her research on her social media and book below!
Academic Profile | Twitter | Book
The Takeaways
Habit - An automatic response formed by repeating the same behavior in the same context overtime.
Friction - The resistance you experience when you perform an action.
To promote a good habit, reduce friction. Reduce time, effort and distance. (E.g. leave gym clothes out and ready by your bed for the morning)
To break a bad habit, increase friction. Increase time, effort, and distance. (E.g. put ice cream in basement)
22:08 - 3 “Hacks” for Creating New Habits
Make it easy. Reduce friction as much as possible.
Make your habit fun! You are more likely to repeat a behavior that is enjoyable. Give yourself an immediate reward for performing the habit
“Stack” a new habit onto an existing one. This is called “habit stacking.” For example, take a new medication (new habit) when you brush your teeth (old habit).
31:50 - How many days does it take to form a habit?
There is no magic number. The more friction, the longer it will take to form the habit. In recent studies, it can
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Juna Hey, guys, if you're enjoying the show, it would really help us out if you could leave a five star rating and review. It just helps other people find the show and lets them know that's actually good Food, We Need to Talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health, home of Full Plate Living.
Juna Okay, Eddie, do you know those people who just seem to have their entire lives together?
Eddie Why are you looking at me?
Juna I don't know. I'll leave that up to you for interpretation. But these are the people that eat healthy all the time. They exercise all the time. They're on top of all their work. They never procrastinate. It just seems like they have incredible discipline. And then you sit there wondering, how are they doing it?
Eddie You lost me on the incredible discipline part, but I know exactly who you're talking about.
Juna Well, I think we all kind of aspire to be this type of person. And sometimes I'll go through these phases where I'm like, That's it. I'm going to be perfect. I'm going to exercise no more procrastinating. I'm going to take a cold shower every day and meditate.
Eddie What's up with a cold shower?
Juna It's a long story. Not that we should get into it today, but it turns out that it's not that these people actually have a ton of self-control.
Eddie Are you sure about that? I mean, how do they keep everything together? I know there must be a DNA sequence for the perfection gene.
Juna Eddie, trust me on this one is a lot less about self-restraint and discipline and a lot more about the best life hack ever. Good habits.
Eddie Oh, you know, I love when we talk about habits.
Juna Me too. Which is why we're going to be talking about it today. What are our habits? How can we use them to do more of what we want and stop doing what we don't want? And how can we become that person that everyone thinks has amazing self-control without actually having to? I'm Juna Gjata and
Eddie I'm Dr. Eddie Phillips.
Juna and you're listening to Food, We Need to Talk. The only podcast that helps you become that person who everyone thinks has everything together just by listening.
Juna And we're back. First, let's meet today's guest.
Wendy Wood My name is Wendy Wood, and I'm a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California.
Juna First things first. We should probably define habits. Eddie, what do you think a habit is?
Eddie Well, it's pretty straightforward, right? It's just something that you do all the time.
Juna So that's actually how we use the word habit colloquially. But in psychology, habit has a much stricter definition.
Wendy Wood Habits are a way of learning about the world. They're learning through doing. When you repeat a behavior over and over in the same context, then you start to form mental associations without even trying. You start to form mental associations between the context you're in and the response you just gave. And habits are those mental associations so that once you have a strong habit, all you have to do is be in that context and the response automatically comes to mind.
Eddie A habit seems to be a mental shortcut. Brushing your teeth is a habit. I hope most of us do it, but it really doesn't take much thought. We've just learned to do it around our bedtime from doing it so often in that context.
Juna Exactly. So if I asked you how much of the time we're acting out of habit versus conscious decision, what would you guess.
Eddie Yes, I would like to think that we are creatures of consciousness more so than creatures of habit.
Juna While Professor Wood wanted to answer this exact question, but it turns out it's kind of a hard question to answer in research.
Wendy Wood The thing about habits is that they're not accessible to consciousness, which means we can't introspect. We're not aware of habit memories. We don't know when we have a really strong habit and when our habit is weaker. Usually we're just not aware of that. So in order to try to figure out what percentage of our behavior is a habit, we followed people for several days and we beeped them once an hour and asked them, What are you thinking about and What are you doing?
Eddie All right, so this study sounds just a bit annoying, you know, but maybe it's not so different than my watch and my phone serving up these notifications and reminders. So, all right, she's asking them, you're going about your day and "ping" once an hour. What are you doing? What are you thinking about? So what did the researchers find?
Wendy Wood What we found is that about 43% of the time people were repeating the same behavior in the same context that they did yesterday and the day before and the day before that. And they were doing it without thinking. So they were thinking about something else while they're brushing their teeth, putting their seatbelt on, taking the bus, even making food, studying. All of these things are things that we do out of habit.
Eddie Whoa. Almost half of what we do we're doing subconsciously?
Juna Okay. The funniest part of this study was when they talked about people who watch TV. So they would have this habit of watching TV, let's say, after work or something. And they were almost never thinking about the show they were watching. It's like they just put on the TV and then they were doing something else. They were thinking about other things, so it was just their habit to have it on. This totally makes me think of my mom like that is my mom too a tee? Sorry mom I'm outing you on the air? Sorry. So, Eddie, I have to say, the more I learned about habits, the more I was starting to question why we're even doing this podcast.
Eddie Wait, what do you mean?
Juna Well, a big takeaway of the habit literature is that information is not what controls people's behaviors. Habits do. And I was thinking I was like, wait a minute. All we do on the podcast is give information.
Eddie Oh, my God Juna, are you announcing on air that you're breaking up this show?
Juna Eddie, I'm sorry. I thought this would be the most appropriate place to do it, but the show is over. Just kidding, guys. It's true that information is kind of useful for short term change, but eventually you revert back to your habits. But that's why I said to myself, Let's provide the information.
Eddie About the habits.
Juna Yes, you get it. So we need both of them and I get to keep my job. I think its a win-win. Professor Wood likes to use two public health campaigns to illustrate this point a fruit and veggie campaign and the anti-smoking campaign. So let's start with the fruits and veggies.
Wendy Wood In the 1990s, the National Cancer Institute and fruit and vegetable producers got together, decided to put together a public information campaign, letting people know that they should be eating five servings of fruit and vegetables every day.
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Wendy Wood Most of us have heard of this at this point. But, you know, when it started, they hadn't. And only a very small percentage of the population, less than 10%, knew this. But a few years later, after this campaign had been going on, over a third of Americans knew they should be eating five servings a day. So that's great. We can convince people we can get the health news out there. But the problem was it had no effect on people's behavior.
Juna This is why I had an existential crisis about this podcast. Guys, if info doesn't change anything, then what's the point?
Wendy Wood People generally know what they should be doing to be healthier. We should be eating more fruits and vegetables. We should be exercising more. We should be getting more sleep. We should reduce our stress. Quit drinking. I mean, all of these things that's not new, it's not novel, but we don't do it. And part of the reason for that is we know it's good for us, but we have habits, we formed habits to do something else. And changing those habits is tough.
Eddie Aha. It's not just about creating new habits that makes new healthy behaviors challenging. It's also that we already have these existing habits that get ingrained and they're really hard to replace with something new.
Juna Exactly. So now let's get to the second public health campaign.
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Wendy Wood In the middle of the last century, half of Americans smoked and it became clear that smoking was linked to cancer. It's really not good for our health. People tried to stop, but there wasn't a whole lot of change in how much people smoke because just knowing isn't enough. It took the U.S. government doing some very specific things. They started taxing cigarettes. So cigarettes cost more. They banned smoking in many public places. Hard to believe, but used to be there were smoking sections on airplanes. Everybody was smoking at work.
Eddie When I was in medical school, there was still smoking allowed in the hospitals and in some cases you can actually buy cigarettes in the hospital store.
Juna No.
Eddie Here's a frightening story. I had a hospitalized patient who reported to me that he started smoking while he was in the hospital.
Juna Oh, my.
Eddie So much for coming to the hospital to get healthier.
Juna Yeah.
Eddie But back to those smoking regulations. What do these laws have to do with habits?
Juna While policies like a tax on cigarettes or getting rid of the smoking section. It adds something psychologists call friction.
Wendy Wood And friction psychologically, where it's very much like friction in the physical world. It stops movement. So friction made it harder for people to automatically smoke. And that friction decreased smoking levels so that now it's 15% or less of the population that smokes.
Juna Friction makes it a little harder for you to engage in a previous habit. And even that tiny difference stops you from performing an automatic behavior.
Eddie The key word here seems to be automatic. A habit is almost like your brain's default patterning, and anything that interrupts your default program, even it's something insignificant, like having to go outside to smoke, that seems to decrease the automaticity.
Juna Here's one of my favorite experiments that shows how powerful habits can be and also how friction can be a tool to interrupt them. The experiment was run by Professor Wood at a cinema.
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Juna Professor Wood and colleagues had subjects watch a movie and eat some popcorn.
Eddie Wait, this sounds awesome. Way more fun than our previous rat diet and treadmill experiments. Can I be in this study?
Juna Well, hold on. You might want to hear the entire thing first. Half the subjects in this experiment got freshly popped popcorn. I'm guessing that's the group you would want to be in and the other half got week old popcorn. So literally, the researchers popped it a week ago and they left it in a bag.
Eddie That is not the most appetizing thing.
Juna No. And when the researchers asked participants, So what do you think of this popcorn? Everyone agreed the stale popcorn is disgusting. It's nasty.
Eddie Yeah, that makes sense.
Juna Okay, that makes sense. But when the researchers weighed the bags of popcorn to determine how much people had eaten, they found that the people who said they ate popcorn all the time at the movies ate the same amount of stale popcorn as fresh popcorn. Didn't matter which bag they were given.
Eddie You mean even though the subjects said it was stale, they still ate the same amount?
Juna Exactly.
Eddie And I'm guessing that those without this popcorn eating habit didn't do that.
Juna No. The people who reported not usually eating popcorn acted the way you would think a rational human being would act, which is if you got good popcorn, you ate a lot of it. If you got stale popcorn, you stopped eating it.
Eddie So the habit of eating popcorn was so powerful that it really didn't matter what it tasted like. If you were used to doing it, you just kept on doing it.
Juna Yes. And that was only the first part of the experiment. This is the other part. I like this part even more.
Wendy Wood We had another version of the experiment in which we had participants hold the bag of popcorn with their dominant hands. If you eat with your right hand, you'd hold the bag with your right hand. And then they had to eat the popcorn with their left hand. When you did that, what you're doing is you are making it a little bit more difficult to eat the popcorn because it's not automatic. And it made people think about what they were doing and when there was that little bit of friction on eating, even people with strong habits to eat popcorn in the movie cinema, they didn't eat the stale popcorn anymore because they had to think about it.
Eddie Well, that's it. Problem solved. We all just start eating with our non-dominant hand end of overeating.
Juna You would think so, wouldn't you? So when Professor Wood and colleagues came out with this study, that's what a lot of magazines and media organizations said. They had published these articles that said, Oh, my God, weight loss, heck, eat with your non-dominant hand and you will eat less. But that's actually not the case.
Eddie You mean it's a little bit more complicated?
Juna Shocking for this podcast? I know, but it's actually not that simple. The reason that this worked is because the popcorn was bad. So eating with your non-dominant hand doesn't make you eat less. It makes you become more mindful or pay attention to what's happening.
Eddie And when you paid attention, you were like, Oh, this is nasty. I don't like it. I don't need to eat it. I will not eat it.
Juna Professor Wood says when you're eating something that's really tasty, eating with your non-dominant hand would actually draw attention to how good it is and maybe make you even more.
Eddie Oh, darn it. I thought we were really on to something here.
Juna Okay, but I'm on to something when I tell you this does make really nasty tasting food all the time. Like, if you just eat only stale food and eat with your left hand, then you will also eat less.
Eddie Okay episode and we can just leave that. So this idea of adding friction, it seems like a really powerful way to stop habits said you're already doing that you don't want to continue. I guess in a way we have to find ways of adding our own cigarette taxes.
Juna Exactly. So here's a really simple illustration of that.
Wendy Wood There was a great study done where people were in an experiment and they had two bowls of food. Some people had a bowl of popcorn, buttered popcorn right in front of them and apple slices, they had to reach for them. And others had the apple slices right in front of them and they had to reach for the bowl of popcorn. Everybody said they liked the popcorn better than the apple slices, but people with the apple slices right in front of them, ate more of them than they did the popcorn. In fact, they ate a third less calories.
Eddie So Professor Wood has a thing for popcorn, right?
Juna She loves the popcorn.
Eddie But, you know, they actually done this at hospital cafeterias. The food is labeled red, yellow and green. The green best for you. Veggies are up front and the red chocolate eclair treat well, it's still there, but just in the back of the cooler. Juna, I've shared the story on here before, but, you know, I have quite an affinity for coffee icecream.
Juna I am quite aware.
Eddie So I put the coffee ice cream in our downstairs basement freezer. When I want it. I have to go all the way down there to get it. I get. Some adding the friction of having to take the stairs. And it's not just they are staring me in the face.
Juna While guys are ahead of the curve. Even how they hear the episode, you already knew about friction. But your ice cream thing also brings up an interesting point. Putting an ice cream in the basement freezer increases the friction, but it also takes it out of sight. Kind of removing the temptation altogether.
Eddie Right. I don't really see it every time I open the freezer just looking for a bagel.
Juna So it turns out this is the secret of those people that seem to just effortlessly eat healthy and exercise. And in general, are on top of all their stuff. It's not because they're constantly denying themselves and living this life of like, you know, like restraint, like all the time. It's because they either don't have the temptations around or if they do, they don't even see them or perceive them as temptations.
Wendy Wood We do tend to think in our society that people who are successful must have great willpower and self-control, and we admire them for that. But I think we should be admiring them for something a little different, which is they know how to form the right habits, because research has shown in the past couple of years that people who have high levels of self-control and who are living these very healthy lifestyles don't do so by struggling with themselves and by fighting off temptations and self-denial. Instead, what they're doing is they're acting on habit.
Eddie Well, there have been times when I've had the ice cream in the kitchen freezer, and the reason I had to move it downstairs is because it just made it that much harder to eat.
Juna Okay, so how often are you having ice cream now?
Eddie I'd say a few times a week. But I want to add something really important here. In the interest of science. Yeah. Last night I ate my ice cream with my left hand.
Juna What a sacrifice and devotion to research, guys. Now there's a study that you actually want to join. So how did the left handed ice cream eating go?
Eddie Well, Professor Wood is right. The process was less habitual, and it gave me a chance to really savor the flavor. Now, the last few chocolate chips with the left hand, that was tough, but I got them.
Juna You soldiered through, you follow through, and you've got the chocolate chips. So maybe all the more reason guys keep your icecream in the basement. And if you're going to use your left hand, it's going to taste so much better. I'd say keep it as far away as possible. But the point is that it's not because you have amazing self-control, although I'm sure you do, and you would never slander your name on the podcast. But because you have created the habit that includes a lot more friction to get the ice cream, you have to go all the way downstairs, you are able to better control it. So for me, I think this definitely applies to the gym.
Eddie How so?
Juna Well, my gym time is blocked off in my schedule every day. It's what I do when I first wake up. Like no ifs, ands or buts about it. Doesn't matter what day it is, the weekend, the holiday. It doesn't matter right. It's like my morning activity. So sometimes I find myself on the bus on the way to the gym. This happened to me this week and I'm sitting on the bus. I'm like, How did I get here? Like, I don't want to go to the gym today. I just don't feel like it.
Eddie Wow, that is really a habit. The reason I find this so interesting is because objectively it is way more work to go to the gym than to stay home. But because you've been doing it for so long, it seems like it's just actually easier to get go into the gym.
Juna Yes. I don't even know what to do if I don't go to the gym in the morning, like I have all this extra time and I get so confused, like, when do I get my coffee? When do I start working? I really like this is why, guys, my rest day is the most stressful day of my week.
Eddie I just don't know.
Juna I don't know what to do. It's like, yeah, it's ridiculous. So even if it's objectively more work, people will default to their habits.
Wendy Wood One of my favorite examples of that is a friend of mine who was a professional cyclist, and she used to go out with me cycling on days when she was supposed to be resting and not getting her heart rate up. Because I'm not a good cyclist. And we go and we talk and we'd we'd do just fine for a while at my pace, and she would be resting and it's fine. But then after about an hour, she always sped up and I wondered why? Why waste? Why? Why did she stick with me only for a short amount of time and then just speed up? She said that it was so hard for her to keep going at my speed because it wasn't her habit she had to slow down to go to at my speed. And it was only it was after an hour. She just couldn't do that anymore.
Eddie Maybe Professor Wood and her friend could just go for a walk. But it's so interesting she couldn't handle going at a normal pace. Now, that's a problem to have.
Juna I know. Imagine it's just too exhausting. To go slower.
Eddie So if habits are so powerful that they make you eat stale popcorn, even though you know it is nasty and they make you bicycle faster, even though it's way more work. I'm thinking we can use them to help us do more of the things we actually want to be doing.
Juna Exactly where I was about to go. So we're going to talk about three main ways. Three hacks, if you will, of increasing the likelihood that you'll form a new habit that sticks. And the first one has to do with something we've already talked about, which is friction. If we can use friction to interrupt old habits, then we can also use friction or more accurately, removing friction to create new habits.
Wendy Wood If you want to form a new habit, as we've said, you want to make it easy. You want to reduce friction as much as possible. And what does that mean? Well, friction is time, effort and distance.
Juna So, for example, researchers have consistently found that how close your gym is to your house is a great predictor of how often you'll go to the gym.
Eddie Okay, so reducing friction might be something like leaving your running shoes out by the door. Yeah, having your running clothes on underneath your work clothes, anything that reduces the work you have to do. We could even do the opposite of the ice cream in the basement freezer. If you want to eat more fruit, leave a fruit bowl out on the table where you can see it all the time and you don't have to like go. Remember, go open the fridge. What's inside the drawer? Is it still good?
Juna Yeah.
Wendy Wood I made the mistake for a long time of buying raw vegetables because I thought they were cheaper and they were fresher, which is probably true, but I didn't use them because it takes effort and time to cut them all up, wash them, start to cook them if they're already partially cooked or if they're at least washed and cut up, I am much more likely to use them and so they're are much better deal for me.
Juna Hack the broccoli bag at Trader Joe's. I think they're pre steamed. So you just want to, like, saute them. It takes like 5 minutes, guys. I use that all the time. They're precut, presteamed anyway, sorry, that was just my little note. Basically, you just want to make whatever you're doing easier and as little effort as possible. Which explains why drastic changes, like I'm going to start running five miles a day,
Eddie When you're already running zero.
Juna Or I'm going to stop eating sugar altogether. They just don't stick because they're hard as heck, first of all. And the friction to doing them is just massive.
Eddie Juna, not to increase the friction of learning more about habit, but we're going to have to take a quick break now. It's quick, I promise.
Eddie Food We Need to talk is funded by a grant from the Ardmore Institute of Health, the home of Full Plate Living. Full Plate Living helps you add more whole plant based foods to meals you're already eating. These are foods you're already familiar with apples, beans, strawberries and avocados. It's a small step approach that can lead to big health outcomes. Full plate living includes weekly recipes and programs for weight loss, meal makeovers and better blood sugar management. Best of all, full plate living is a free service of the Ardmore Institute of Health. Sign up for free at full plate living.org.
Eddie And we're back. So far, we've talked about how reducing the friction of doing your new habit is going to make it more likely to stick. So what's the next thing we can use to create new habits?
Wendy Wood Make it more fun because people are also more likely to repeat behaviors that are enjoyable.
Juna And I know what you're thinking goes. This is so obvious. We've all heard this a million times. Make things more fun, make them more enjoyable, blah, blah, blah. But here's the thing it's not what we do.
Wendy Wood Instead, we think of all the reasons why we should do it. We get into this self-denial thing. Self-control. I'm going to make it happen. Make it more fun.
Juna So how do you do that?
Wendy Wood If you hate going to the gym, then that's not the right exercise for you. You need to find something else. If you don't like walking, maybe finding a partner to walk with to talk to while you're doing it, that could make it more fun. I use an elliptical to stay in shape and I read trashy novels when I'm on the elliptical and I don't have time to do that normally. But I hated using the elliptical until I figured out I can actually do something fun while I do it.
Eddie I love the idea of reading trashy novels as a positive, healthy behavior. But you know it is working for her.
Juna I know. I think we need like a Wendy Wood reading list for all of us. Did you take those to the gym or something?
Eddie Go to foodweneedtotalk.com guys.
Juna Go to our website to find Wendy Wood's trashy novel list? So the cool thing about this is that it's not just frou frou. Enjoy your life, you know, don't suffer type of just feel good stuff. This actually has to do with your brain and your brain's reward systems.
Wendy Wood When you experience a reward, when you do something that makes you feel proud or that it tastes good or is fun in some way, then your brain releases dopamine. And dopamine is a neurochemical. I mean, we know it as the feel good chemical, right? But it does a lot of things. And one of the things it does is it helps to connect the context and the response that you just gave that got you that reward. So it's helping you form a habit in memory. And dopamine seems to be closely involved in habit formation.
Eddie The hard part is that a lot of bad habits like binge watching TV or eating junk food also release dopamine. These habits are really rewarding in the short term, but probably not the best for you over time. But eating well or being active, those can be initially hard in the short term.
Juna Yeah they suck.
Eddie Just to get started, but finding ways to make them more fun is helping you create more of that woo hoo feeling you get from those typically bad habits.
Juna So the important thing about dopamine is that it's immediate. It gets released in the few seconds after you perform a behavior.
Wendy Wood It's not like a reward at the end of the week. If you've worked out three times, you're going to take yourself out to dinner, go to a movie, go hang out with friends. It's not going to do it for you. It has to be immediate, which is why you have to enjoy the behavior in some way.
Juna In other words, you're more likely to succeed if you really enjoy the healthy dish you're making. You're like, Oh my God, this is awesome. This tastes so good. Then if you're, like, suffering all week long and are like on Friday, I'm going to get myself a burger and a shake. Our third hack, which I think might be the coolest one because I think it's a really cool shortcut, is something called habit stacking.
Juna So we are going from habit hacking to habit stacking.
Juna Yeah.
Juna So how does professor would explain habit stacking?
Wendy Wood It's another way of starting a new habit and that is to take an existing habit and use that automaticity to try to activate the new behavior. And many people do this already, right? When you get a new medication or if you're taking vitamins. A lot of us put the pill bottle by your toothbrush or maybe on your nightstand. Because if you can connect it to something that you're already doing, your nighttime routine, brushing your teeth in the morning, if you can connect that to taking the pills, you're much more likely to remember to take the medication or to take the vitamins.
Juna Okay. I thought I was the only genius who had thought of this because I wanted to be more consistent with washing my face. And I was like, Oh, I brush my teeth every night. I'll just wash my face right after I brush my teeth. And that way I'll never forget. But it turns out it's not just my idea. It's not, like a Juna thing.
Eddie Habit stacking. Explains my recent successes and challenges with setting aside time to meditate.
Juna Oh, how so?
Eddie Well, my morning meditation is becoming part of my routine. Shower, shave, brush, teeth, meditate. Breakfast. I am doing the meditation most mornings.
Juna Yeah. You can also log on to our website for the Eddie Phillip's Morning Routine, Millionaire Success Morning Routine.
Eddie But at the afternoon it's not tied to any routine. The instructor said Do an afternoon meditation, but every day seems different. I'm supposed to meditate right before dinner. But that's when I'm hungry. And I need to be helping to make dinner.
Juna You can't meditate if you're hungry. How can you sit still with your thoughts if you're hungry? Right.
Eddie I could do it in the morning because I know breakfast is coming.
Juna Right? Right.
Eddie So we've talked about a few different ways to start new habits, reducing friction, increasing the immediate reward by making it more fun and pairing it with other habits. But I think it's important to remember here, Juna, that starting something new is always going to take work. Especially in the beginning, a lot of it.
Wendy Wood When you start something new. It's always going to seem a little bit more difficult than it will two or three weeks from now after you've practiced it a lot. And once you've formed a habit, it's just going to start seeming normal and typical and what you always do.
Juna So I know what you all want to know. How long, how long does it take to create a habit? Because I know there's a myth out there. It's a 21 days. It's a very old myth. Then when they researched it later it came out. It was more like 66 days. And the reason there's all these different numbers is because the answer is it depends.
Wendy Wood It would be lovely if there was a number. Right. Okay. Day 50. I've now formed a habit, but habits form incrementally over time, which means each day you do it, you're strengthening habit memories slightly. It's not one day you wake up and all of a sudden your habit is there.
Juna It turns out the more friction there is in performing a new habit, the longer time it will take you. So when researchers looked at this recently, they found that things that had a lot of friction, like adding 50 sit ups to your lunch time or something like that, that took people like 200 something days for it to become automatic. Or if it was a habit that was really simple, like adding a glass of water that took subjects only like 20 something days. So it really just depends on what you're trying to do. But there's also an upside to habits taking so long to form.
Wendy Wood Habits form slowly, but they also decay slowly. So if you go away on vacation, if you stopped exercising for a while, for some reason you have an injury, you're going to find it much easier to get back into it than somebody who didn't ever have the habit to begin with. Because that old habit memory is still going to be there. It just needs you to reactivate it and to to re-energize it so that it will help control your behavior in the future.
Eddie So all in all, I think the moral of the story is not that information is useless. It's more like once we get the information, we need to be strategic about how we implement it in our lives. Juna, I have a great idea for a new habit for our listeners that is fun, good for them and easy to start.
Juna What is it?
Eddie If you haven't already done so? Subscribe to the podcast on whatever service you use so it appears automatically when a new episode is released.
Juna Guess what? A great and novel idea. Totally unself serving. I think that's such a good, good plan for everyone. And also you can add a dopamine release by sharing it with a friend. Adding the social aspect guys.
Eddie I love it. Podcast. Listening as a positive health behavior, I sense the start of the next scientific publication novel Positive Health Behaviors. Listening to podcasts, reading trashy novels, hiding ice cream in the basement.
Juna I sense the start of another publication, Crafty Ways to tell people to subscribe on your podcast while they're listening to your podcast. Okay guys, I guess we don't have to shut down the podcast after all, and I get to keep my job. Got close there, but it was touch and go. And that's it for today's episode, we will link to Wendy Wood's book Good Habits, Bad Habits, The Science of Making Positive Change That Sticks on our website. Food. We need to talk. Dot com. That's also where you can find all of our show notes. You can find me @theOfficialJuna on Instagram and JunaGjata on Tik Tok and YouTube. Let's be friends. You can find Eddie sitting at his meditation every morning, potentially in the afternoon.
Eddie Working on it. Working on.
Juna Food, We Need to Talk is a production of PRX.
Eddie Our producer is Morgan Flannery.
Juna Claire Carlander is our associate producer and Tommy Bazarian is our mix engineer.
Eddie Jocelyn Gonzales is executive producer for PRX Productions.
Juna Food, We Need to Talk was co-created by Carey Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me.
Eddie Always remember to consult with your health professional for your personal health questions. And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review and tell a friend.
Juna and Eddie Thanks for listening.
