PDF Summary:How to Change, by Katy Milkman

Positive behavior change is one of the most persistent challenges of personal growth—and in How to Change, Katy Milkman draws from the latest research and presents a powerful strategy for creating lasting change. She argues that real behavior change comes from a deliberate, scientific understanding of how human nature gets in our way and how we can leverage it to our advantage.

Milkman, an economist and professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, explains how to tailor solutions to your specific challenges, subvert common human failings, and cement lasting change. In this guide, we’ll detail her evidence-based approach to behavioral change and discuss her “playbook” for overcoming human foibles ranging from a lack of self-confidence to forgetfulness and procrastination. In commentary, we’ll look at adjacent perspectives on behavioral change from books such as Atomic Habits, Nudge, Awaken the Giant Within, and Hooked.

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In the following sections, we’ll discuss the perennial problems posed by human nature, including our tendency to seek instant gratification, our laziness and procrastination, and the all-too-common experience of forgetting about our good intentions. Alongside these discussions, we’ll present Milkman’s advice for overcoming these challenges within yourself—as well as how you can help others to do the same.

(Shortform note: In reading through the following sections, note that Milkman frames these aspects of human nature as problems to be solved. Since how we frame things influences our choices and our emotions, consider an alternative framing from Stoicism—view these things as opportunities to be learned from. This can reduce frustration as you’ll see yourself not as riddled with flaws to fix but as ripe with opportunities to grow.)

Barrier #1: Instinctively Seeking Pleasure

First, let’s look at the one obstacle to change that underlies most others: The human tendency to seek instant gratification. As Milkman puts it, we instinctively want immediately gratifying experiences and thus favor behaviors that produce present-moment pleasure over those that would benefit us in the long run. We impulsively overeat, overconsume media, have just one more drink, or scroll just another minute. This tendency is a scientifically established feature of human nature—scientists call it “present bias.”

(Shortform note: To get a direct sense of how present bias works, we can look to how businesses make use of it in their products. In Hooked, Nir Eyal explains how designers build variable rewards (unpredictable pleasures) into their products so that people form habits of using them. Think of Facebook: When you open the app, your feed presents you with a selection of novel, unpredictable content that keeps you scrolling and coming back. Each upward swipe of your finger might produce another reward, and that’s all it takes to form a habit loop and get habituated to the product.)

Often, says Milkman, this instinct to seek pleasure stands in the way of positive behavioral change. Experts typically advise that you can overcome it with willpower—that is, by pushing through the urge to do what feels good now and instead performing a healthier behavior (such as passing on the sugar-laden coffee and instead hitting the gym). However, Milkman argues that to overcome our pleasure-seeking nature, we can’t rely on willpower alone. This is because we’re prone to another cognitive bias: We’re too confident in our future selves, and we thereby overestimate how effective our willpower is.

In other words, we tend to assume that we’ll be able to overcome our pleasure-seeking impulses when the moment arises—but research shows that we most often don’t, such that this confidence is misplaced. For instance, when you’re planning a habit change, it’s easy to assume that you’ll manage to roll out of bed at 6 a.m. and go for a run. But in reality, you probably won’t (at least not so easily), and your future self will probably give in to the siren song of the snooze button.

(Shortform note: While we’re all prone to cognitive biases, we can also learn to recognize them and prevent them from worsening our decisions. This starts with awareness: Learn about a bias, and then practice recognizing it. For instance, you might sit down to plan a new habit and keep an eye out for overly optimistic appraisals of what you can do. Then, you can use a variety of thinking strategies—such as taking an outside view or using probabilities to logically assess possible outcomes—to make better decisions.)

Because you need more than just willpower, Milkman describes two strategies that we’ll explain in the following sections—pairing temptations with good habits and gamifying your behavior changes.

(Shortform note: In Mastery, George Leonard takes a different stance on willpower. Whereas Milkman emphasizes our habitual overestimation of our future willpower, Leonard explains that we often misunderstand how to use our willpower. Instead of forcing yourself through some change, he says, you need to use willpower to gently yet firmly push, stretch, and grow at your edges. Willpower isn’t perfect, but it’s still an important tool in our kits.)

Link Temptations With Habit Changes

To solve the problem of our instinct for instant gratification, Milkman recommends that instead, you can use your pleasure-seeking nature to your advantage by making a positive change feel more gratifying. In practice, this means using something you find pleasurable—like watching TV or gaming—as motivation to practice a good habit.

For instance, you could enjoy a few TikTok videos while you brush your teeth, or practice deep breathing while you play your favorite video game. The key is to weave together the pleasurable activity with the new habit. In time, you’ll end up craving the habit because it also represents your chance to enjoy that temptation.

(Shortform note: To further enhance the effect of a rewarding temptation, try varying the temptation. Research has found that variable reward systems reinforce habits more effectively than one consistent, predictable reward. So you might mix it up a bit by pairing a different pleasure each day or week with your positive behavior change. To keep it unpredictable, you could assign a different pleasure to each side of a six-sided die, and then roll the die each day to decide which you’ll get to experience.)

Motivate Yourself With Gamification

Another strategy is to gamify the hard-but-beneficial behaviors you want to perform. Gamification involves adding motivating, engaging features to a task, such as integrating badges, bonuses, a level-up system, and leaderboards with, say, your weightlifting habit. Each time you go to the gym, you’d earn points toward an upgrade or a level-up, and you might track your progress on a leaderboard with friends or fellow gym-goers.

Crucially, gamification requires that you buy into the game—if you feel it’s contrived or forced, it won’t work. Research has found that poorly implemented gamification systems can actually lower performance at work.

(Shortform note: Successfully gamifying your company’s work can have huge benefits—but as Milkman suggests, doing so requires finesse. According to Yu-Kai Chou (Actionable Gamification), companies often create gamification systems that backfire. He argues that this is because companies fail to properly diversify and balance the motivating aspects of these systems. In other words, businesses often mistakenly feel that leaderboards and bonus systems are enough—when in reality, effective gamification systems involve complex features including community structures, mystery rewards and randomization, and opportunities for players to be creative and establish unique identities within the framework of the game.)

Barrier #2: Avoiding the Effort

Keeping in mind the human tendency to seek instant gratification, Milkman turns next to procrastination—a common way that we avoid hard things in favor of an easier present.

Milkman suggests overcoming procrastination by placing constraints on yourself that will penalize you if you continue to avoid important tasks or behavior change efforts. In other words, you can commit to follow through on your good intentions and devise a personal cost that you’ll pay if you fail. You can make “hard” or “soft” commitments:

• Hard commitments use serious, often material penalties, such as losing money. Milkman recommends using services that hold you accountable to these costs.
• Soft commitments involve less serious penalties, such as the psychological cost of breaking a promise to yourself or an accountability partner.

As a rule of thumb, Milkman says that the harder a commitment is, the more effectively it’ll prevent procrastination. This is because we find it easier to pay psychological costs, such as guilt or shame, than material costs, like $1,000 cash.

The Psychology of Procrastination

While it’s common to associate procrastination with laziness, psychologists have come to consider procrastination a complex psychological phenomenon that may involve having a poor grasp of time and difficulty regulating emotions. In this sense, it’s similar to depression—depressed people can’t “just cheer up,” and procrastinating people can’t “just do it already.”

Above, Milkman’s strategies work by getting at one of the roots of procrastination—an inability to self-motivate. That is, when it comes time to perform some task, the typical procrastinator experiences a breakdown of self-regulation in a positive or negative direction:

• Positively, some procrastinators love novelty and struggle to stay focused, preferring the joy of new things.

• Negatively, many procrastinators struggle with self-image, fear of failure, and perfectionistic tendencies.

Milkman’s strategies attempt to undercut these patterns by placing something important at risk, thereby generating the motivation necessary to perform that task. If you tend to procrastinate, consider whether you’re the positive or negative type before trying one of these strategies:

• Hard commitments may create more motivation, but they could also exacerbate a tendency to self-defeatism or aversion to starting—and then create a loop of worry and failure to start that just worsens the problem as stress mounts.

• Soft commitments might be less risky, but if you’re prone to happily bouncing between various activities, soft commitments might not grab your attention enough to get you started. In this case, you might need to risk something harder to get yourself moving.

Barrier #3: Lacking the Energy

Sibling to procrastination is the simple fact that we often lack the energy or motivation to make positive behavioral changes. As Milkman explains, this is human nature: We’re wired to find the easiest way forward, and, in the modern world, this often means that we avoid doing effortful things that are good for us.

Much like her earlier advice to use your pleasure-seeking nature to your advantage, Milkman suggests leveraging laziness. Specifically, she explains that if we can make good behaviors our default choices—our paths of least resistance—then our instinct to coast will help us improve.

To do this requires that you create and automate new habits. Milkman suggests that you can do this fast by drilling the behavior you want to perform each day, sticking to it until it becomes your default. To reinforce the habit, reward yourself immediately after performing the new behavior. For instance, you might train yourself to go for a morning walk by committing to do so each day at 8 a.m. and ending each walk with a fresh coffee made to your tastes.

Behavior Change From Within and Without

In this section, Milkman references the mainstream model of habit formation as popularized by Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit) and later modified by James Clear (Atomic Habits). That model—cue leads to behavior leads to reward, thus reinforcing the habit—evokes in turn the research of B.F. Skinner. Skinner was a 20th-century psychologist who developed the concept of operant conditioning, a behavior change technique wherein a consequence (a reward or punishment) works to reinforce or dissuade the preceding behavior. He discovered this by training rats to navigate maze-like boxes, hit levers, and receive rewards or punishments.

Skinner focused purely on measurable, external dynamics because, along with many psychologists at the time, he felt that the mind was a black box unamenable to scientific study. He explicitly rejected the relevance of beliefs, emotions, or other mental processes to behavior.

Milkman doesn’t quite follow Skinner’s lead, instead opting to approach behavior change through analysis of internal conditions—for instance, by explaining procrastination as a built-in feature of human nature—and devising responses to them. However, she also doesn’t address how beliefs or emotions might influence our habits and habit change efforts.

Clear, though, does: He recommends that you build lasting habits on the foundation of new, identity-based beliefs. In other words, you’d decide that you want to be a particular kind of person, and then you’d practice the habits that make it true until you deeply believe you are that kind of person. This way your habits will root more deeply in your psychology and you won’t have to convince yourself to keep up with them as you’ve already become a person for whom they’re second nature.

The takeaway: Behavior change is probably more complex than treating yourself like a rat hitting a lever for a reward. Rewards help reinforce behaviors, but it’s also likely important to reflect on your internal state—on the beliefs you hold about certain behaviors, the emotions that are tied in with them—so that when you recondition your habits, it doesn’t stop at the surface.

To help reinforce your new habits, Milkman offers a few additional tactics:

• Favor flexibility—research shows performing a behavior at a set time forms a more rigid, breakable habit than doing it regardless of timing. For instance, do your morning routine whenever you get up, and it’ll stick better than if you do it strictly at 7 a.m.
• Chain together good behaviors—once you have one default habit in place, build another one off the end of it. For instance, you might extend your morning walk and coffee habit into a morning journaling session.
• Track your streaks—people who watch their progress build day by day tend to stick to their habits better than those who don’t. As an example, imagine the motivation that would come from seeing you’ve gotten up early for nine weeks in a row.

(Shortform note: While habit-chaining and tracking your streak are commonly advised by habit experts, Milkman’s perspective on forming flexible habits is new. Often, experts recommend linking habits to set times—such as meditating for 10 minutes every day at 7 p.m. But because life doesn’t always give you the perfect day, routines that depend on rigid timing can be easily thrown off. In contrast, flexible routines help you develop what Leo Babauta calls “habit resilience,” or the ability to get shaken up, adjust, care for yourself, and persevere. This, Babauta says, determines who can form habits that last and who slips backward.)

Milkman says that once you’ve set new default habits into place, you’ll no longer struggle with laziness—because the path of least resistance will be to keep doing what you’re already doing.

(Shortform note: Note that while some simpler behaviors can become habits—it’s possible to autopilot an evening routine of brushing your teeth, reading, and heading to bed—not all are so easy. If you do work that requires difficult, creative thinking, for instance, you won’t be able to autopilot getting your to-do list done. Instead, consider scaffolding your more complex behaviors with simpler ones you can turn into a habit: Couch your deep work between work-start and work-end rituals, or couch a difficult workout that demands presence between gym-going and gym-leaving rituals. With these touches of second-nature structure, you can make even the harder stuff a bit more automatic.)

Barrier #4: Forgetting Your Intentions

In a related vein to procrastination and laziness, we face the obstacle of forgetfulness. As Milkman puts it, our working memory (the amount of information we can hold in our heads at one time) is limited, and in the hustle and bustle of our busy lives, many of us blank out on our intentions to develop better behaviors. She suggests two tactics to solve this problem:

• Set timely reminders that cue action. Reminders work best when they come right before you’re supposed to take action. When you prompt yourself to, say, prep lunch for the week right before you meant to do so, you’re far more likely to follow through.
• Link your cues to specific action steps—for instance, you could define a sequence of behaviors that compose the morning routine you want to build. Then, link a cue (such as your alarm clock ringing) to the first step and carry out your plan from there.

Cues and reminders work best the more vivid, unique, and otherwise memorable you can make them. Engage your memory by using all your senses—sight, taste, sound, texture, and smell—to develop cues that won’t let you forget. For example, you might associate the sight, smell, and taste of a hot, fresh, aromatic cup of coffee with your alarm clock sound. This way, the cue becomes more vivid and spurs you out of bed more effectively.

Develop Durable Memories

As Barbara Oakley explains in Learning How to Learn, the key to efficient use of your memory is to integrate what you want to remember into your long-term memory, which can hold memories indefinitely.

Working memory holds new connections for about 10 seconds, and these memories grow more durable the more you connect them to existing networks in your brain. Hence, Oakley recommends that to develop lasting memories, you need to:

• Avoid distractions, since shifting your attention for even a minute can cause you to forget what you had in mind.

• Stop multitasking, which causes your brain to constantly load different items into your working memory, pushing out what was there before.

Much like Milkman, Oakley also argues that you’ll form stronger memories when you use all of your senses. This is somewhat like creating vivid cues insofar as both involve creating and strengthening the synapses in your brain that will help you to recall that information. The more connections you’ve made between a piece of information (like the sight of your calendar) and its related context (such as checking your day’s tasks), the more easily you’ll recall and perform the right behaviors when the cue memory is triggered.

To apply this to Milkman’s tactics, try setting out a focused period of time—say, 30 minutes—in which to develop and memorize your reminder and your action steps. Get specific, get vivid, and then try using active recall, another memory technique that reinforces existing memories, to further cement the plan in your brain by firing and refiring the right neural pathways.

Barrier #5: Following the Group

Pivoting to behavioral change at scale, Milkman next discusses how social norms have a strong influence on our behaviors. In short, we tend to go along with what our peer groups do, for at least one of two reasons:

• We want to fit in. Historically, being ostracized from the group could’ve meant death, so we’re wired to place a high value on group belonging.
• We assume the group knows something we don’t, and it’s probably beneficial to go along with them. For instance, you’d want to go along with your peers if there seems to be an office evacuation in progress, even if you don’t know why.

(Shortform note: In Behave, Robert Sapolsky explains that the cultures we’re born into condition us to behave in certain ways, value certain things, and obey the unspoken norms of the groups we belong to. Perhaps the core example of this is religion, which has been historically central to human cultures across the world. It also demonstrates both of Milkman’s points. First, religions create strong in-group out-group dynamics, such that belonging is deeply important. Second, religious groups generally assume that there is some special or privileged knowledge, perhaps held by the priest class, and that it’s best to go along with those in the know.)

According to Milkman, social influence can have both positive and negative effects on our behaviors. To the positive, peers that we admire can motivate us to improve our behaviors. But if the gap between them and us is too large—if, for instance, you’re out of shape and friends with a dedicated gym rat—that sharp contrast could instead be demotivating.

You can use positive social influence to your advantage by surrounding yourself with peers who model behaviors that are just beyond your comfort zone. This way, you’ll find it possible to work up to their level. For instance, someone without any productivity habits might look to learn from someone who manages a few solid hours each morning—but not from the hardcore deep worker who’s been at it for years.

(Shortform note: Here, Milkman’s thinking relates somewhat to an ancient philosophical idea: friendships of virtue. According to Aristotle, who distinguished friendships of virtue from those of pleasure or utility, a friendship of virtue arises when you and another share mutual admiration for one another’s positive qualities or character traits. In effect, you motivate each other to become better. So when looking to use social influence to change your behavior, try thinking through your friends and relations to find someone with whom you might be able to grow and improve in tandem.)

Make Change That Lasts

If change doesn’t last, then great strategies and proven tactics will all be for naught. Lasting change is possible, Milkman argues, and it simply requires that we don’t let up on our efforts to maintain positive behaviors.

To do this, she suggests that you understand the challenge as you would a chronic illness: To stay in good health, you need to constantly keep up with treatment. To keep positive behaviors in shape, you need to constantly evaluate the challenges you face and take them on with effective strategies.

When one strategy starts to fall short, reassess your approach and seek out alternatives. Anticipate that what works will change over time, remain committed, and adapt to every bump in the road. Change is much easier to maintain than it is to create in the first place—so stick to it, and you’ll soon find yourself living a better life.

(Shortform note: Here, while Milkman offers great advice about adapting and keeping up your efforts, she also seems to contradict an earlier point. Namely, when you form habits, they become your defaults and allow you to maintain set behaviors with relative ease. As a possible resolution to this apparent contradiction, we could infer that while habits can become our defaults, human nature doesn’t change—so for instance, you could train yourself not to procrastinate on a specific behavior, like getting ready for work, but you might continue to encounter the temptation in other areas of life. Those persistent features of human nature, then, may be what Milkman recommends you view as chronic challenges to perpetually treat.)