Book SummaryGood Habits, Bad Habits, by Wendy Wood

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Good Habits, Bad Habits

Have you ever tried to change a habit, only to find yourself reverting to your old ways no matter how hard you try? Do you believe that your inability to change is due to a lack of willpower or self-control? According to psychologist Wendy Wood, this isn’t the case.

In Good Habits, Bad Habits (2019), Wood argues that you’re fighting a losing battle when you rely on willpower alone to change habits—because the harder you try to overcome unwanted habits, the stronger those habits become. She suggests that understanding how habits form can help you easily and effectively change your unwanted habits or introduce new ones without having to rely on constant willpower.

(Shortform note: Similarly, economist and professor Katy Milkman (*[How to...

Good Habits, Bad Habits Summary Part 1: You Don’t Consciously Control Your Habits

While you may assume you consciously choose your behaviors, Wood argues that 43% of your daily actions are automatic habits. It’s difficult to be aware of or control these habits because they operate on a system that’s independent from your conscious mind.

(Shortform note: While many authors agree that habits are unconscious decisions that influence many of your daily behaviors, their opinions differ on the extent of this influence: Like Wood, Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit) asserts that unconscious decisions steer more than 40% of your daily behaviors. However, James Clear (Atomic Habits) argues that this influence extends to over 50%, and developmental biologist Bruce Lipton (The Biology of Belief) suggests that it drives 95% of your daily behaviors. Though the numbers may differ, it’s clear that you engage in many of your daily behaviors without thinking about...

Good Habits, Bad Habits Summary Part 2: How Behaviors Become Habits

Although willpower alone is insufficient for changing habitual behaviors in the long term, and your habitual system is built to be resistant to change, Wood suggests that it is possible to control habits. To achieve this, you first need to understand the specific conditions required for behaviors to become habits. She explains that to solidify as automatic actions in your habitual system, habits require three interdependent elements: context cues, repetition, and rewards. Let’s explore each of these.

Element #1: Context Cues

Context cues are environmental triggers that prompt your habitual system to execute a specific habit. These cues encompass everything surrounding you when you perform a behavior, like the physical location, an object, the time of day, people present, or preceding actions. Wood explains that when you repeatedly perform a behavior within a specific context, your habitual system associates that context with that behavior—turning it into a habit. For example, if you regularly reach for the TV remote when you sit on the sofa, your habitual system associates your sofa (the context cue) with reaching for the remote (the behavior). As a result, you...

Good Habits, Bad Habits Summary Part 3: How to Change Your Habits

We’ve just explained the three elements that fuel habits: context cues, repetition, and rewards. Now, we’ll explore how you can apply that information to change unwanted habits or create entirely new ones.

Change Unwanted Habits

Since established habits are permanently stored in your habitual system, you can’t simply delete the ones you no longer want. However, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with them.

Wood suggests that you can break free from an unwanted habit by manipulating its context cue and replacing the associated behavior with a more productive one. This process doesn’t involve manipulating rewards since, as previously explained, established habits operate independently of rewards—removing the reward you receive for a habit won’t weaken its context-behavior association.

(Shortform note: Neuroscientists confirm that once your brain permanently stores an automatic pattern, it’s impossible to delete it. But it’s possible to weaken this pattern so that your brain no longer relies on it for instructions about what to do in a given situation. As Wood suggests, this...

Shortform Exercise: Change an Unwanted Habit

Wood suggests that you can change unwanted habits by removing context cues, making it inconvenient to engage in your default behavior, and replacing your default behavior. In this exercise, we’ll explore how you can apply these methods to redesign one of your habits.

Think of one habit you’d like to change and identify the specific context cue that triggers it. (For example, you might have a habit of eating chips every time you open the pantry door, with “seeing the bag of chips” being the context cue.)