Best Content — Habit Edition
The best habit related content to get your 2020 off to a good start
Happy New Year and Happy New Decade! If you were ever looking for a fresh start, this is your chance 😊
I put this list together as part of the most recent issue of my newsletter and thought it could be valuable for people beyond my mailing list. In this post you'll discover some of the best research and content on this topic + a tool that I’m excited to share with you. I hope it will prove valuable and help you bulid good habits in 2020!
— Samuel
INTRODUCING THE HABIT CANVAS
The Habit Canvas is a tool to help you plan, implement, and track new habits, all on one page. I’m excited to share this with you all as it’s been a passion project of mine for a long time. Every component of the Habit Canvas is based on behavioral science research, and it’s now gone through several rounds of iterations and user testing.
I was tired of seeing simple habit trackers recommended as a way to build habits, or online articles, providing long lists of science-backed recommendations that were hard to implement. I’ve identified through my work that while many have good intentions, most simply struggle with turning those good intentions into action and implementing them into their messy lives (yes, like it or not we all live a more or less messy existence).
This tool provides no guarantee of making behavior change and building habits a walk in the park. However, this is my attempt to spread more effective use of insights from behavioral science in this domain. I sincerely hope that the Habit Canvas will make it easier for you to plan, implement, and track new habits in 2020. Happy habit building!
You have three options:
- You can use the Habit Canvas builder that guides you through the process and gives you further details and support along the way.
- You can Download the Habit Canvas and fill it out by yourself
- You can fill it out with the help from the chat-bot version of me by clicking start below.
HABIT ARTICLES
Here’s How to Make a New Year’s Resolution That Will Stick
This is a short article, but it contains a valuable lesson: we tend to repeat the things we enjoy doing. We should, therefore, perhaps spend a little more time thinking about how we can go downstream instead of fighting upwards.
Three-Step Method for Creating New Habits
In this article, Stanford professor BJ Fogg shares his best habit related insights and tips based on his work with the Tiny Habits program.
Why Breaking a Streak Feels So Awful
Streaks are a fascinating concept often use for building habits. This article does a good job of summarizing the psychology behind why we care about streaks. While Prof. Wendy Wood argues the streaks are ineffective, I would personally disagree. I’ve seen through my work and with examples like Duolingo, that if used right, streaks can provide an effective booster towards lasting-habits.
Stop Confusing Habits for Routines: What You Need To Know
When people say habits, they are often talking about routines. Even the Habit Canvas could arguably be called the Routine Canvas. This article does an excellent job of explaining the difference between habits and routines and why not all behaviors can become habits = automatic behaviors develop as people repeatedly experience rewards for a given action in a given context (I know, kind of a mouthful).
HABIT MEDIA
Building Better Habits And Breaking Bad Ones
I love Hidden Brain, it’s a great podcast. The most recent episode, consider the everyday things we do, over and over and over again, often without thinking (hint: habits).
How to Use Brain Science to Break Bad Habits
In this podcast episode of You Are Not So Smart, Dr. Jud Brewer, a neuroscientist and addiction psychiatrist, discusses the biological origins of our bad habits and how we can change them using new techniques derived from his lab’s research.
Why Most Resolutions Fail & How To Succeed
This YouTube video covers common pitfalls of New Year’s resolutions and how I plan to avoid them. While it doesn’t get all the research right *cough, willpower*, it’s well-made and covers some important points.
HABIT BOOKS
I recommend all of these books below. Each provide a slightly different perspective on habit formation and what it takes to build good habits
- Good Habits, Bad Habits by Wendy Wood
- Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg
- Atomic Habits by James Clear
- The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
HABIT RESEARCH
Some of you might be eager to get into the nuts and bolts of habit formation research. For you, I’ve done my best to assemble below some fantastic academic articles to check out. There’s a lot of research on habits, but this is a good start.
A Randomized Trial Comparing Two Approaches to Weight Loss — Carels, et al. (2017)
Very well-designed study comparing two interesting interventions for long-term behavior change.
Habit Formation and Behavior Change — Gardner & Rebar (2019)
This one is simply a wonderful summary of all things habits — what they are, how they are formed, and what behavior change techniques should be used to create them.
How Are Habits Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the Real World — Lally, et al. (2010)
This is a classic study on how long it takes to form habits. The conclusion of the paper somewhat anti-climatic states the average time is 66 days, but the range was from 18 to 254 days.
Holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym: An Evaluation of Temptation Bundling — Milkman, Minson, & Volpp (2014)
This paper introduced the concept of temptation bumbling, an alternative approach to deal with hard to stick habits. PS. Probably the best name of a research paper.
Psychology of Habit — Wood & Rünger (2016)
This could be seen as the ultimate summary of habit formation research, especially when combined with the Gardner and Rebar paper above.
Samuel Salzer is a behavioral designer, author & keynote speaker helping value-driven organizations around the world to create habit-forming products and services using insights from behavioral economics and applied behavioral science.
For questions or queries, get in touch here.
