So why don’t we always do what we know we should?

1. Habit. Have you ever tried to correct bad posture? At some point you’ll notice that your shoulders are hunched and you’ll make a correction, only to notice them hunched again two minutes later. Habits are behaviors that are done automatically. Frequently, we’re not aware of doing them as they occur, so our conscious mind doesn’t have the chance to stop them in action. Intellectually knowing what you should do won’t help if you aren’t consciously aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it.

To permanently correct a bad habit, it often takes a large number of repetitions of a different behavior, in the context where you would normally engage in the habit. Eventually the old habit will be replaced with a new one. Ideally, you want it to be the case that the context automatically triggers the good habit.

Suppose that you are using an ineffective tennis swing. You would ideally practice a better swing a large number of times (starting without a ball, and then eventually doing it with a ball, and finally doing it while hitting back and forth with another player). Eventually, the correct motion would feel more natural than the incorrect one.

To give another example, suppose that you’d like to correct a habit of pronounce certain words incorrectly. Ideally, you would make a list of these words and the correction pronunciations, and practice saying each correctly a few times a day (to yourself, and then eventually in conversation) until the correct pronunciations no longer required thought.

An approach like this requires a lot of effort, and the willingness to put time into repetitive practice, but it can really pay off. Think about what habit you’d like to instill instead of the one you currently have. Now think about what you could practice to instill this new habit. For complex actions, the practice should be simple to start, and then grown in complexity as you master the basic components (e.g. practice your tennis swing without a ball before doing it with a ball). Finally, schedule time on your calendar to actually perform the practice. Note that one practice session very likely won’t be enough (you may need quite a lot of practice to overcome strongly ingrained habits).

Note that even if you don’t currently have a bad habit, it may be well worth it making an effort to install a good habit. Practice doing what you’d like yourself to do, in the context you’d like yourself to do it. Try to do this good behavior as consistently as possible, to make the new habit form faster.

2. Conflicting desires. You may want to lose weight, but you also want to eat that cupcake. To say you know you shouldn’t eat that cupcake, is to imply that overall, the weight loss is more valuable to you than the pleasure you’ll get from the cupcake. The problem is that when these two desires come into conflict at the moment while that cupcake is sitting in front of you, your desire for the pleasurable taste may win out. Since our desires shift due to context, it may well be the case that 5 minutes prior, when the cupcake hadn’t yet been placed in front of you yet, your desire to lose weight was in fact stronger than your desire to eat a tasty treat. But when you start to salivate at the sight of cupcake, your desires change in magnitude.

If conflicting desires cause you to do things that are not in your own long term interest, there are a few strategies you can try. First, you can try making your desire stronger for the good behavior. For instance, try vividly imagining yourself after having lost the weight and mentally basking in how good that will feel, and the benefits you will get from it. Immediately follow this visualization by a second one where you mentally contrast that desired state with how things currently stand. This second part is critical to help build motivation (rather than just basking in wishful thinking).

A second approach is to try to make your desire for the bad behavior weaker, for instance by imagining yourself gaining weight as you eat unhealthy food. The idea is to build a stronger association between your desire and the negative consequences associated with it, so that when the desire is triggered, the negative thought is triggered simultaneously, reducing your overall desire. One way to carry this out is to make a list of the negative consequences of the bad behavior, and then imagine each of these negative consequences occurring.

A third approach to dealing with conflicting desires is to try to arrange your environment so that your desires are unlikely to shift in a way that will yield behaviors that aren’t what you want. For instance, if you’re trying to lose weight, don’t keep unhealthy foods around your house, and don’t go to cupcake shops.

It’s worth noting, that sometimes we have conflicting desires that we aren’t consciously aware of. For instance, you might know that you should start searching for a job, but without having acknowledged it explicitly, be terribly afraid of rejection. Hence, you may find that you mysteriously become anxious every time you start looking at job postings, which leads you to procrastinate.

To better understand whether conflicting desires are involved in causing you to avoid what you know you should do, try the following exercise: Ask yourself “what are the benefits that I get out of NOT doing this good behavior?” Make a list of whatever you can think of. Doing this may make you realize that you have reasons for not acting that you weren’t even aware of. Now, make a list of the costs of not doing the desired behavior. Reflect on this list of costs and benefits, and reflect whether those benefits are really worth the costs.

3. Lack of motivation. Sometimes you’ll know intellectually that something would be a good idea to do, but for some reason feel an utter lack of motivation to actually do it. For instance, you may be aware that it is much more efficient from a learning perspective to take notes on articles and non-fiction books you read, and review those notes later (or better yet, make flashcards from them), than to merely read passively. But there’s a good chance that you don’t feel any significant motivation to actually take notes while you’re reading.

When lack of motivation strikes, it may help to perform a cost benefit analysis. Make a list of the benefits and costs of doing that action (compared to the baseline state of not doing it). Read this list over again. If the action really is worth doing, this list of reasons why you should do it may give you greater motivation.

You also might find it helpful to try to boost your desire through visualization (as in the conflicting desires case above). Visualize your future after you have done the desired behavior, and imagine the benefits that you are likely to get out of it. Now, remind yourself of how things currently stand, and mentally contrast this with the desired future.

4. Forgetting. You might know what is good for you, but simply forget to do it. For instance, for the last two months you may have been in desperate need of a haircut, but what with your busy life, you never think to make an appointment. Or maybe you made an appointment, but forgot to show up for it.

There are at least four strategies you can use to combat forgetfulness. First, write down whatever you want to remember, and put that note somewhere that you’ll be forced to notice it (e.g. stick it on your sock drawer).

Second, put the thing you need to remember in your calendar. So if you think to yourself that you need a haircut, but right now its after business hours, put a reminder in your calendar to book one tomorrow at 10am.

Third, for important things that you keep forgetting to do (especially major things that you really aren’t looking forward to doing), you can ask a friend to act as an enforcer. Tell them how important it is for you to do this thing, and when you want to have it done by. Ask for their help with making sure you get it done, giving them free reign to nag you as much as is necessary. This social pressure can be very effective for some people.

The fourth, and best strategy, is to (whenever possible) act immediately at the moment when you do remember what you should do. So when you happen to recall that you need a haircut, don’t assume that you’ll remember to make an appointment tomorrow, just pick up the phone immediately and book it. You’ll likely be better at getting yourself to act immediately if you start viewing your brain as a buggy machine, which occasionally forgets important things for long periods (I know mine does, at least). Taking this perspective means that when you remember something important that you should do, you can’t just assume that your brain will eventually take care of it. If you don’t act now, who knows when you’ll remember to do it again, if you ever even remember to act at all. So act now, to save yourself from your buggy brain later!

5. Lack of knowledge. Even if you know what you should do to improve your life, you may not know how to do it. For instance, you might want people to view you as being more confident, but have little idea how to get yourself to act in a more confident manner. If you keep telling yourself what you “should” do, but you don’t know the steps to carry it out, you’re unlikely to change your behavior for the better.

When you lack sufficient knowledge as to how to achieve a behavior, take steps to correct your lack of knowledge. Ask someone who knows more, or do some research online, or try breaking down the action by taking twenty minutes to write down the small, simple components that make up whatever you’re trying to do. Even very complex actions can usually be broken into simple steps, each of which is fairly straightforward. For instance, suppose you want to learn to write computer programs, but you don’t know the first thing about programming. You might break this task up as follows: Step 1. Talk to friends who are knowledgable about computer programming, and ask them what programming language you should learn based on your goals. Step 2. Install the required software on your computer in order to be able to write programs in the language that your friends suggested. Step 3. Google to find a few tutorials on the language. Run them by your knowledgable friends to see which tutorial they think looks best. Step 4. Complete one of these tutorials on the language. etc.

To get yourself to do what you know is good for you, the first step is to diagnose what is holding you back form acting. Are you trying to break a bad, sticky habit? In that case, you may need to devote time to practicing a better habit to replace it. Are you dealing with a case of conflicting desires? If so, use visualization to increase your desire for the good action and reduce your desire for the bad action, while you try to avoid contexts that cause your desires to flip in a way that is counterproductive. Are you feeling a lack of motivation to behave how you know you should? Write down a list of pros and cons for the good action, and try visualization to increase motivation. Do you keep forgetting to do the desired behavior? Put notes in places where you’ll be forced to see them, use your calendar to schedule when you’re going to do your helpful behaviors, and try to build a habit of acting immediately when you remember something important to do. Know what you want to do, but lack the knowledge how to do it? Ask those who know more than you do how to start, do some research, and try to break the task down into simple, easy steps.

Unfortunately, all of this advice is problematic: what if you don’t feel like taking the advice, or you do want to take it but will likely forget to do so? What if you have existing habits that will make taking this advice difficult? In other words, how do you get yourself to do what this article says you should? The solution is to set the stage right now for following this advice in the future. Namely, apply the advice of this article, right now, to get yourself to take this article’s advice in the future.
Perform the following steps (right now!) so that you can benefit later:

Step 1. Consider the following reasons for not acting. Which of these do you think is most likely to prevent you from acting on the advice from this article?

(1) Habit (you have existing habits that may stand in the way).
(2) Conflicting desires (you have desires that conflict with your desire to take this advice).
(3) Lack of motivation (you don’t feel motivation to do what this article says).
(4) Forgetting (you are likely to forget to follow the advice of this article).
(5) Lack of knowledge (you don’t know how to follow this article’s advice).

Step 2. Go and reread the section of this article corresponding to whatever you selected in Step 1.

Step 3. Schedule at least two different times on your calendar for when you are going to do what that section you reread suggests.

Step 4. Schedule a time on your calendar when you are going to reread this entire article.

Step 5. When the scheduled events come up on your calendar, actually do them!

These circumstances can be explained, at least partially, in terms of desires changing and conflicting with each other. What we want when we consciously reflect on a situation sometimes differs from what we want when we are actually in that situation. And our desires can oppose each other, either simultaneously, or at different times. Desires push our actions in one direction for a while, only to push them in the opposite direction later on.

Tourette Syndrome can provide a particularly striking example of simultaneously wanting and not wanting. A small fraction of people with this syndrome have an extremely strong urge to yell obscenities (which apparently can feel almost like the desire to scratch an itch). In some cases they are able to learn to hold off the impulse (for instance when the social context makes it particularly inappropriate), but the desire to curse may still win out a few seconds later. The conscious desire not to offend people by cursing is at war with another, very powerful desire.

Let’s consider the case of a woman who eats excessively and hates this about herself. When she’s full, but good tasting food is sitting in front of her, does she actually want to keep eating? When she thinks about it consciously she probably experiences a strong feeling of “not wanting” associated with the idea of eating large quantities. At the same time, when she looks at the food, there is likely an intense desire to keep consuming it. She also may have habits which promote overeating: going to restaurants that serve large portions, selecting foods with high calorie density, eating quickly, eating the entire amount on her plate, eating while distracted by other activities, and so forth.

If we consider the fact that desires change from moment to moment and can come into conflict with each other, it is not hard to see why people get stuck in loops of oscillating desires. You don’t want to do X when you reflect on it, then end up doing X anyway because a new desire arises at the moment of action, then you regret it afterwards when you reflect further. This cycle can repeat for months or years.

Let’s again consider the case of the woman who overeats. Her experience might be as follows. When reflecting consciously, she doesn’t want to overeat, but when food is in front of her, a new desire springs to life. The desire to eat more is now suddenly greater than the reflective desire to not overeat, so she eats too much. In fact, if she is not actively thinking about her desire to not be someone who overeats, that desire to eat less may not be engaged at all. And if she is consciously reflecting at the time, she may start to make excuses for herself, such as “I’ll eat whatever I want now, and just eat less tomorrow to make up for it.” Afterwards, the desire to eat has diminished or disappeared, so when she consciously reflects again she regrets the fact that she eat too much and vows not to do it again. Then the entire pattern repeats because the vow is not enough to make her reflective desire win out over those momentary urges to eat.

Why is it that at times your conscious, reflective desires beat out your momentary desires, and other times they get trumped? A variety of factors likely affect the outcome, including:

• The relative “strengths” of the two desires
• Your present mental state (including level of hunger, fatigue, discomfort, emotional arousal, and so forth)
• The frequency with which you engages in conscious reflection, and whether you happen to apply it during the current situation
• Your propensity towards delaying gratification
• The number of times (and how recently) you let this momentary desire trump your reflective desire (i.e. the strength of the habits you’ve formed)
• Your overall ability to override impulses with conscious thought

Why do our actions conflict with our conscious desires in the first place? It’s a necessary consequence of the fact that many different forces compel us to act. These forces include:

• Primal drives. We yearn for food, sex, social status, etc.
• Emotional responses. We want to avoid situations that makes us anxious, and attack people that make us angry.
• Instinctual and automatic responses. We pull our hand away from a hot stove, turn to look when a loud noise occurs, and scratch our skin when it itches.
• Habit. When we’ve taken the same route to work twenty times in a row, we continue taking that route without even thinking about it.
• Conscious reflection. We may long for a world where people don’t starve, and so volunteer at a non-profit organization, or want to be a person who exercises more often, and so buy a gym membership.

Our conscious reflections about what we want can conflict with each of these forces, and with each other. For instance:

• You want to think of yourself as a good person who doesn’t steal but also want to download music files without paying for them.
• You don’t want to cheat on your girlfriend, but you feel strongly attracted to a particular woman.
• You want to make more friends, but it stresses you out being in social situations with new people.
• You want to be a great boxer, but you flinch whenever your opponent feints a punch.
• You want to walk with better posture, but you keep falling into your habit of slouching.

What can we do when we find ourselves stuck in a loop where we don’t want to do X, then do X anyway due to momentary desires, then regret it? In other words, how do we get our actions to more closely align with what our conscious, reflective mind wants? Here are some techniques that can be useful:

• Social reinforcement. Tell someone else how you want to act, and get them to check on you regularly to make sure that you act that way. This can be especially effective if you have a strong desire not to let this person down. This creates a secondary desire (pleasing another person) that works in the same direction as your conscious, reflective desire.
• Avoid acting while in fragile mental states. When you’re feeling tired, uncomfortable, hungry, stressed, or emotional try to avoid those situations where your conscious mind will need to override strong conflicting desires. In these delicate states it may be harder to get your thinking to control your actions.
• Activate your conscious mind more often. The more frequently you can get yourself to engage your conscious mind during an action and reflect on what you value and why you value it, the better chance you’ll have of overriding momentary desires that come up. One strategy is as follows: If there are times when you expect to experience strong momentary desires, you can setup phone alerts/reminders to snap you into a conscious state. For instance, if you’re going to a business meeting at a restaurant where the wine will be flowing, and you’re worried you might drink too much, set your phone to vibrate with a message ten minutes into the dinner to remind your conscious mind that you shouldn’t have more than a glass or two. You might even include in the phone reminder the reasons why drinking more would be a bad idea (to increase your motivation).
• Positive reinforcement. Reward yourself for acting in ways that are in closer alignment to what your conscious mind values. To boost effectiveness, try to make these rewards come as quickly as possible after you do your good behavior. For instance, if you know that you should get to work right away every morning, but have trouble doing so, take that first sip of delicious morning coffee right when you sit down to begin you’re work (and don’t let yourself drink any before then).
• Break old habits. During times when your conscious mind happens to be in particularly strong control, start to break bad habits by putting yourself in the situation where your momentary desires typically take over, and purposely override them. So, if you’re feeling powerful, go to the store that sells those amazing cupcakes you usually can’t resist. Look at one closely, take a whiff of its delicious smell, and feel yourself salivating. Now walk out without buying one!
• Build new habits. Sometimes undesirable habits can be subverted without fighting them directly by simply forming new habits to replace them. If you’re accustomed to spending two hours watching TV every night starting at 8pm, and this is something you don’t like about yourself, try to create a habit of sitting down to read a useful book at 7:45pm. After you’ve done this for enough nights in a row you will have replaced your watching habit with a reading one, and it will no longer be difficult to avoid watching two hours of TV a night .

Our actions can substantially deviate from what our conscious, reflective desires imply we should do. But our conscious mind doesn’t have to take this lying down. By planning ahead, and applying techniques like those mentioned, you can give your conscious desires an improved chance of trumping competing forces that compel you to act. While your conscious mind is in control, you can make arrangements to handle situations where it most likely won’t be.

We can program ourselves with new habits by following a very simple procedure. If you want to regularly do behavior B after stimulus S occurs, then for a certain number of repetitions you simply need to force yourself to do B just after S every time that S occurs. Over time, the behavior B will start occurring after S automatically and without thought. The more unvaried and frequent the stimulus S is the faster the habit will be to learn. And the more repetitions you do, the stronger the habit will tend to become. If there is no obvious stimulus for you to link the behavior B to, just pick any stimulus that occurs with roughly the frequency that you want to do B. So if you want to do B four times a week, pick a stimulus that naturally occurs about four times a week. You can even use previously learned habits as stimuli. So the habit of combing your hair can use the habit of brushing your teeth as its stimulus.

Typically, people let their habits form automatically. They learned to brush their teeth as soon as they enter the bathroom in the morning because they happened to do that enough times in a row. They learned to get dressed automatically as soon as they pick up a pair of pants because that’s typically what you do after you pick up a pair of paints. They learned to walk a particular route to work without thinking about it because they consciously chose to take that route a sufficiently large number of times. They stop having to think “I should brush my teeth this morning”, or “I should put these pants on that I’m holding on”, or “I should take this particular street to work.” They don’t need to remember to do these behaviors, nor do they need to motivate themselves to do them since they happen automatically without thought.

We tend to view ourselves as being in control of our future decisions. For example, we imagine that we can choose, if we so desire, to suddenly start engaging in healthier eating. And yet, for many of us, years will go by with us failing to make or maintain many of the life changes that we believe to be important. We simultaneously maintain both the view that we want to behave in a healthier fashion and that we have the ability to consciously control our behavior, and yet this pair of beliefs ends up being inconsistent with the way we actually behave.

One of the reasons we fail to change is that controlling future conscious behavior is much more difficult than pledging to change future behavior. Sure, when there is no cake in front of you it is easy to tell yourself that you will eat healthier. But when you begin to salivate your priorities change. The closer your face is to chocolate cake, the more you are likely to value the deliciousness of that cake compared to your health. You right now sitting far away from cake is sacrificing little to make a pledge to avoid it. You right now aren’t giving up anything tangible to make that pledge. But in order to keep that pledge, you when you are in front of the cake has to give up delicious enjoyment. It is easy for you who just eat the cake half an hour ago to regret the decision. That version of you doesn’t get to experience the deliciousness of the cake (except as a faint memory), but does have to live with the extra empty calories. But for you currently staring at the cake, the decision is much harder.

Sometimes where willpower fails, subconscious behavior can succeed. If telling yourself day after day that you should exercise more doesn’t work, try turning exercise into a habit instead. Buy some weights or an exercise video, and every morning as soon as you leave the bathroom having just brushed your teeth, immediately begin your exercise routine. At first, you may not remember to do this, or may find it difficult to muster up the willpower. So post a big, noticeable piece of paper on your bathroom door as a reminder, block the time out in advance in your calendar, tell your roommate to remind you, and whenever you aren’t in the mood to do the exercise, remind yourself that skipping it this one time may significantly reduce the habit formation (so there is more at stake than just this one day of exercise). Make sure that you begin the routine immediately after exactly the same stimulus each day (teeth brushing in this example). Once you’ve done this enough days in a row (ten or fifteen times is probably enough) you will find yourself automatically getting ready to exercise as soon as the stimulus is over. You no longer will have to worry about remembering to do it, and you won’t have to fight with yourself to get in the mood. When the habit is strong enough, you’ll just find yourself walking over to your weights and picking them up.

Or suppose that you want to start eating healthier. This begins with keeping healthy food around the house. So train a habit of immediately buying your five favorite very healthy foods as soon as you enter the supermarket. Always grab them from the shelves in the same order, as that will make the habit form faster, and make you less likely to forget any of the items. Once you’ve completed enough repetitions, you’ll start doing it automatically as soon as you come through those supermarket doors. As far as training yourself to eat these foods goes, design a habit so that, right after you finish your exercise routine each morning, you immediately go to the fridge and grab one of these healthy foods for your breakfast. Only these five pre-selected healthy foods are allowed. You don’t want to have to think carefully about which foods are acceptably healthy (habit formation should involve tasks that don’t require conscious analysis). Soon you’ll find yourself eating at least one healthy meal per day without effort.

Want to raise your mood in the mornings? Build a habit of smiling for twenty seconds just as you get out of bed (make the smile as realistic as possible, including the crinkling of skin around the eyes, and you’ll notice your mood rise immediately). Want to remember to shave exactly once a week? Always do it just after you get home from your Saturday yoga class. Want to read more? Do it for 20 minutes immediately upon arriving home from work each day.

Habits are quite easy to form, and are capable of powerfully altering future behavior. With only a bit of effort, we can purposely design habits that will improve our lives.