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Habit, Stephen R. Covey reminded us, is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).
Everyone has habits. Many of them are insignificant, like always putting on your left shoe before the right one. Other habits have consequences. Walking 10,000 steps every day is good for your heart. Eating a calorie-laden dessert and smoking a cigar after every dinner will likely clog your arteries, pollute your lungs, and shorten your life.
Judging by the constant barrage of advertising for health-related products and services, proper care of the human body is top of mind for many people. And that same barrage of advertising is evidence that something is not working.
Michelle Segar says that “something” is the way many (most?) people approach the subject of habits. Dr. Segar is a lifestyle coach and award-winning behavior change researcher at the University of Michigan. For the past 30 years she’s pioneered methods to create sustainable behavior change to boost patient health and employee wellbeing.
She reports her research findings in The JOY Choice: How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise.
Most people, she says, are either Habiters or Unhabiters. A Habiter is innately more wired for disciplined living and has a dependable schedule. But a lot of people are Unhabiters.
Here’s how you can tell if you’re an Unhabiter:
- You juggle multiple roles and responsibilities
- Your life tends to be busy and unpredictable
- You need a more flexible approach to behavior change
Regardless of where you land on the habit scale (no pun intended), Dr. Segar’s research-based approach to managing your behaviors is worth a close look.
Rodger Dean Duncan: How does your approach to behavior change differ from “traditional” approaches?
Michelle Segar: Traditional approaches tend to rely on logic, presume we need willpower to stay the course, and inadvertently encourage all-or-nothing thinking. But it’s important to understand that this Old Story of Behavior Change reflects a narrative that is outdated, simplistic, and misguides many.
For example, we’ve been taught that creating automatic habits for our healthy choices is the ideal. If we offload our need to think or resist, the thinking goes, sustainable success will ensue. Yet not only is successful habit formation based on assumptions that many people can’t meet when it comes to complex behaviors like exercise and healthful eating, there’s little evidence to suggest it actually produces change in behavior that can be sustained, even for simple behaviors like flossing.
Like any approach, mine is also based on assumptions! So, let’s be explicit about what they are so people can decide if they meet them or not.
One of the main assumptions of my approach is that the plans we make for healthful eating and exercise will go awry because of the disruptions and unexpected events that occur within our daily lives. This New Story of Behavior Change assumes that most people can’t stick with healthful eating and exercise over time if their goal reflects hitting a bullseye every time. In fact, this New Story is based on the mounting science showing that aiming for imperfection, and switching things up when we need to, better predicts behavioral persistence than trying to rigidly stick to the plan, something that encourages all-or-nothing thinking. Most of all, my approach aims to infuse our daily choices with joy—not just because we are finally able to succeed long-term, but because every time we make a decision that supports our greater eating and exercise goals we know we’re supporting our core selves and values and fueling ourselves for the people and projects we care about most.
Michelle Segar
Duncan: What are some of the most common disruptors that get people sidetracked from their eating and exercise goals?
Segar: Over the last decades of health coaching and research, I’ve categorized disruptors into four Decision Disruptors. They form the acronym TRAP:
Temptation: This Decision Disruptor reflects the visceral pull we feel to eat that glistening chocolate cake at the party when it’s not on our eating plan or to sink into the couch with our remote instead of taking the walk we had planned. (Note Temptation is not about “addiction”—which is an extreme situation that needs a different type of solution.)
While we consider the seduction as coming from the cake or the couch, it’s really coming from our memories of past experiences with the cake and couch. Knowing how temptation and desire really work can empower us to think more strategically at moments that challenge our healthy plans. But as we’ll soon see, the Perfection and Rebellion Decision Disruptors actually set Temptation up to be stronger than it needs to be.
Rebellion: We’ve been socialized in society to change our eating and exercise most often to “lose weight.” Unfortunately, when we do, this converts our eating and exercise plans into giant “shoulds.” Research shows that when we feel like we “should” do something, that we’re being controlled by the rule we decided we should follow, we are deeply motivated to rebel against it. Understanding how to escape Rebellion is crucial to preventing it from continuing to sabotage our lifestyle plans and goals.
Accommodation: This Decision Disruptor goes deep. It relates to the beliefs and values we hold about our fundamental role in taking care of other people’s needs. While it’s important to help others meet their needs, if we always subsume our own self-care choices to fulfill the needs of others (or our work), we all too easily sacrifice ourselves to an extent that compromises our own health and wellbeing. Becoming more aware of this is the first key step to addressing its strong pull on our choices.
Perfection: The Old Story of Behavior Change worships “doing it right.” Yet for most people, the limited definition of “right” is not attainable most of the time. When we think we have to hit a bullseye, it makes every choice high stakes—amplifying Temptation, Rebellion, and Accommodation.
Duncan: How do eating and exercise changes differ from other types of behavior changes?
Segar: Eating and exercise often get grouped together with other changes in behavior. Despite this convention, healthful eating and exercise are in a class of their own when it comes to behavior change because in our society both behaviors are inextricably tied to losing weight.
In contrast to other behaviors, weight loss commonly infuses our better eating and exercise projects with negative and complicated associations that our life experiences have embedded in our memories, minds, and bodies, including things like stigma, failure, angst, shame, stress, and even trauma.
When eating and exercise get lumped in with other behaviors in narratives about behavior change, these powerful underlying issues don’t get addressed because they aren’t relevant to the other behaviors. But when they don’t get addressed, their energies continue to disrupt our hoped-for choices and changes.
Duncan: You recommend what you call a three-step POP! decision tool for helping people make the consistent choices that underlie sustainable behavior change. Tell us about that.
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Segar: It’s really important to get precise about what abilities or processes lead to lasting success, what supports those things, and what could get in the way. Making decisions that consistently favor our behavior change goals is what we should be focusing on. So, making sure we have the beliefs and strategies to successfully navigate the things that can thwart those decisions is key.
We already discussed some of the issues related to the value of habit formation for complex lifestyle behaviors. So, if many of us can’t count on putting our healthful choices on autopilot, what should we do? We can look to the brain-based system that has evolved specifically to help us solve problems and make decisions in novel circumstances. That’s our executive functioning. It kicks in when we find ourselves in unanticipated situations or needing to solve unexpected problems. Given how important this system is, let’s aim to support it, especially the three primary executive functions that emerging science about lifestyle changes is focused on: working memory, flexible thinking, and inhibition. And I developed the POP! decision tool to do just that!
POP! is the antidote to the all-or-nothing thinking that tends to drive ineffective solutions, especially those related to our healthy behaviors.
It’s both a metaphorical action, we “POP! our Plan” when it’s no longer feasible (instead of letting life burst our bubble and watching our plans and goals go down the drain). But it’s more than a metaphor. POP is an acronym that guides our thinking to a workable alternative through what science would suggest can support our three primary executive functions. Here’s how POP! makes things workable:
Pause: This initial step creates the space for more tactical thinking. When we pause to figure out how to solve a problem or get past an impasse in our health-related plans, we can take a few deep breaths, supporting our working memory and helping us focus in preparation for the next step.
Open up your options and play. This step invites people to explicitly reject all-or-nothing thinking and consider the myriad of alternatives and options that exist when their plan faces a conflict. This step aims to evoke curiosity, the positive emotion that cultivates creative thinking and problem solving. The goal of this step isn’t to get it “right,” but just to generate possibilities in ways that reduce stress and can even be fun.
Pick the Joy Choice. When we Pick the Joy Choice, we are making the perfect imperfect choice that lets us do something instead of nothing. This final step gives us grace, redefining success away from ideals to the perfect imperfect option that keeps us moving forward despite and through the challenges.
When it comes to changing behavior in sustainable ways, this type of imperfect, flexible strategy is more likely to produce on-going persistence than the rigid alternative that we’ve seen for decades hasn’t worked for most of us.
Duncan: When people successfully manage their choices related to eating and exercise, how does that success affect other areas of their lives?
Segar: Feeling successful in one area can boost more general feelings of mastery. When people develop greater confidence in their general self-care abilities, especially those that are relevant for other life arenas, they can choose to use them there too.
