Chapter 2

Creating smart habits and changing behavior

Smart Thinking — Art Markman, PhD

• The mind is designed to think as little as possible.
• Habits are created by consistent mapping and repetition.
• Habit change requires replacing bad habits with good ones.
• Formula for smart habits. Just as there is a formula for Smart Thinking, there is a formula for Smart Habits, which requires only two ingredients:
• Mapping between an action and the environment consistently
• Performing that action repeatedly

Get a good night sleep

Sleep influences your ability to learn new things and develop new habits. While you are awake you have many different experiences. While you are asleep, brain processes help you integrate those new experiences into your memory in ways that make you more effective in the future. Sleep helps in learning habits.

There are many different stages of sleep. The stage of sleep that is most familiar to people is rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. In addition, there are four stages of non-REM sleep. Each of these stages show different patterns of electrical activity when monitored using an electroencephalograph (EEG). Research on the relationship between sleep and learning shows that different kinds of learning are associated with different stages of sleep. Some stages of sleep are good for learning habits, whereas other stages are good for learning new facts or relationships among facts. So, it is important to make sure you are going through all of the stages of sleep during the night. In addition, there are actually some kinds of learning that benefit most from the sleep you get toward the end of your sleep cycle. If you do not get a good night’s sleep, then you will ultimately be less effective at learning and less effective at developing habits. To maximize the effects of your practice, get your sleep

The takeaway

The mind is constantly looking to create habits. The main benefit of a habit is to take a process that required attention to start with and to turn it into something that can be retrieved effortlessly from memory. Because your mind is a habit-creating machine, any time there is a consistent and repeated mapping between your physical and mental world and some behavior, you have the conditions to form habits. It is crucial to remember that most of your habits are good. They allow you to perform actions without having to think about them. As a result, you can focus your mental effort on issues of interest to you rather than on the routine aspects of your life. To engage Smart Thinking, you want to ensure you have consistent mappings between your environment and desirable behaviors that will support Smart Habits. Make sure that you are not spending valuable time and mental energy on tasks that could and should become automatic. While habits (good or bad) can be created unconsciously, there are three cases in which acquiring good habits requires some effort. First, you may have to organize your environment to create consistent mappings. Second, you may need to develop a practice schedule to provide enough repetitions of the behavior to generate a habit. Third, when you need to change an existing habit, you will have to make a conscious effort to do so. There are two critical components of habit change. The first is to find ways to stop performing the old behavior. The mental processes that stop old behaviors are effortful and can be interfered with easily. Thus it is important to change the environment that triggers a bad habit in the first place and reduce or eliminate the stress and strenuous continual self-regulation that interfere with your ability to change. The second crucial part of habit change is to replace the bad habit with a good one. Because habits are actions that are retrieved from memory, you cannot be successful with habit change if you try to replace something with nothing. Sheer willpower alone is not effective. Instead, replace one habit with another. The new habit interferes with the old one and gradually allows it to replace the undesired behavior. Finally, because you carry out habits automatically, you need to become mindful of mindless behaviors to support habit change. It helps to create a habit diary to identify what triggers your habits so you can change elements of your environment to minimize the number of situations in which the habit will be engaged and so you can prepare to use your willpower when a situation that promotes the bad habit cannot be avoided.