By Caitlin Meredith

This time of year “boot camps” and other fitness programs compete for attention and dollars — they know that losing weight and getting fit are among the top five New Year’s resolutions. However while businesses boom in January, they tend to bottom out along with people’s resolve by June. Only 46 percent of resolution-makers stick with their goals by the six-month mark, according to a 2002 study in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. Changing habits, as it turns out, takes more than boot camp.

So how can people become part of the 46 percent?

The person to ask is UT’s Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing Art Markman who conducts research in his Similarity and Cognition Lab to find out about, among other things, how people make decisions and change their behaviors, including habits. 

Habits, be they mental or physical, are formed by the combination of consistent mapping and repetition, said Markman in a recent interview. And even though the bad habits get most of the attention, 98 percent of people’s habits are good. “Without habits,” Markman said, “life would be much worse.” Somewhat counter-intuitively, people’s brains are designed so that they do not have to think.

Art Markman

This way, Markman explained, people’s “precious cognitive resources” can be put to better use. Autopilot for pouring cereal and driving the car clears the decks for more rigorous calculations like the carpool schedule and health insurance. In many ways, good habits are the unsung heroes of people’s day-to-day existence.

That leaves two percent of daily routines to drive people crazy. Bad habits ranging from smoking, to eating queso, to leaving dirty dishes in the sink have one thing in common, said Markman. The bad habits are always a tradeoff between short-term gains — comfort, deliciousness, relaxation — and long-term pains — lung cancer, obesity, a dirty kitchen. Fighting that shortcut to happiness takes more than a midnight declaration.

But there is something even more nefarious at work: People’s brains actually distort their judgment in order to perpetuate habits. Markman tests people’s reactions to various products during different stages of their cravings. For example, he does not let them smoke for 30 minutes before he calls them in for coffee, a typical smoking trigger, where he regales them with smoking fantasies. He found that smokers who have already reached the stage of wanting a cigarette rate products that relate to smoking more positively than those that just smoked. However, there is no such distortion — a DVD can rate as positively as an ashtray — when they’ve had their smoke.

Based on this research, Markman said that once minds become goal-focused, their interpretations change to favor the satisfaction of that goal, rendering everything else irrelevant. Behavior-changing decisions need to happen before this goal-fixation sets in, not during it. It’s better to think about lung cancer and smoking-related health problems before one is yearning for a cigarette, not in the middle of a craving.

Another reason changing habits is much more difficult than starting them is that a different part of the brain is involved, said UT Professor of Psychology and Neurobiology and Director of the Imaging Research Center Russell A. Poldrack in a recent interview. As part of his research on learning, memory and decision-making, he looks at what happens inside the brain not only when someone learns a task, but also when they have to un-learn it.

Russell Poldrack

In one of Poldrack’s experiments he asks subjects to learn a task like pushing a specific button when they see a certain shape on a computer screen. So, for instance, each time the subject sees a circle they are supposed to push the red button, while a square requires the yellow button. Midway through the experiment, Poldrack changes it: The square goes with the red button, and the yellow with the circle. The result is an increase in the subjects’ response times because not only do they have to resist pushing the original button, they also have to remember the new one.

“The first thing you learn is really powerful,” Poldrack said. “You need to actively suppress your old habit to learn a new one.” While forced un-learning and re-learning goes on in his lab, Poldrack observes what happens in the subjects’ brains. He found that humans have an area of the brain, separate from the initial learning area, dedicated exclusively to overriding functions, and that some people are better than others at successfully activating it. Because of this, Poldrack emphasizes the importance of getting it right the first time.

Imagine the brain as one big record album spinning around, engraved with a thousand grooves, each representing a routine. It’s hard to imagine stopping the needle mid-spin while the turntable in the mind keeps revolving. Both Markman and Poldrack gave the example of having an errand to run while driving home. Since the daily commute usually requires so little thought, when the plan is to veer off the pre-programmed path to pick up milk, more often than not the driver inexplicably arrives home milkless.

Fortunately, all the mental free time created by people’s efficient routines affords them the opportunity, if done right, to come up with a game plan to handle this tricky business.

As tempting as it might be to fully immerse oneself in a program to start the new year, trying to stop old and create new behaviors outside the home is a bad idea. “Behavior change requires creating a new set of habits in your own environment,” Markman said.  Habits are formed and best re-formed in home environments, which are full of triggers, obstacles and traps that need to be actively tackled for real habit revolution.

The first thing an expert tells people is that habit change does not happen from one day to the next. Markman said it takes about two months for a repeated activity to go from forced march to second nature in one’s mental makeup. Backslides are inevitable, but Markman said that if by the third month a person starts to feel a nag when they do not go to the gym, it is a good sign that the habit has “taken.”

One should take time to make a plan before setting a target date. It should be treated like a trip to Africa instead of a trip to the mailbox. A detailed strategy to both promote the new behavior and suppress the old one, accounting for all predicted obstacles, is necessary.

A key ingredient to habit change is to keep the mind focused on the goal. “It’s critical not to be distracted,” Poldrack said. Remember that ride home when the driver arrived home without the milk? If the driver was forced to engage his mind, keeping that goal in the forefront, odds are he would have remembered.

One way of doing this, suggests Markman, is to change the physical environment. If one is trying to stop late night snacking, for instance, it might be a good idea to rearrange the kitchen. That forces one to consciously think about what shelf the Girl Scout cookies are on, and in the process realize that the activity is not in line with the larger goal. Better yet, the cookies should be disposed of altogether.

A common pitfall of New Year’s resolutions is when people try to simply stop what they are doing. “Instead of trying to replace something with nothing, we need to replace something with something,” Markman said. If one normally takes an afternoon break with a cigarette but forgoes the smoke and sits sadly on the park bench beginning Jan. 1, they will most likely not stick to it. The bench has become not only a goal trigger, but also an activity void.  If, on the other hand, one goes on a 15-minute walk instead of hanging out on the smoking bench, there is a much better chance they can give up the Marlboros.

Going on that afternoon walk with a friend increases the chances of permanent behavior change even more. Markman points out that the bright plan to awake early to jog on a Saturday morning might easily dim by daybreak unless a friend is waiting at the trailhead.

Even for the most determined it can be a long road to a successful resolution, but there’s lots of company. Even Mark Twain recognized the difficulty 100 years ago: “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.”