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An Interview about Habit Formation - Part One
by Rick Hoogendoorn
Introduction If you want to change your financial situation, you will not be able to do so unless you address some, or many, of your existing financial habits. Habits of doing things and habits of NOT doing things. Many of our financial habits have been formed unconsciously, or mindlessly, over time. Nobody really ever sits down and, after much thought, decides that balancing a cheque book is stupid. It's more like they never really gave the issue any thought. As such, it hasn't become a habit. Our financial habits may involve how we save money. How we spend money. How we value money. How we think about money. Even how we think about our future. So what can we learn about habits, so that we can create some good, new ones? I went to Dr. Jim Ricks for some answers. He's been a practicing psychologist for over 34 years. To start, here's what he looks like:
Rick: How are habits formed? Dr. Jim: This sounds like a self-evident truth but habit formation is something that I think we're hardwired to do. It’s a learned behavior and it’s also a learned pattern of thinking. The way I look at it is, it’s meant to run in the background, sort of like a background program on your computer. You don’t have to have any attention on it. It’s more or less self driving and that’s good because that allows you to do a lot of different things at once while not having to pay attention to the specifics of each move. A good example would be—you’re out in your car, you change lanes, you have built up over the years an automatic habit of checking your rearview mirror, hitting your turn indicators and looking into your side mirror. You don’t have to think about that. Or if you’re hitting slippery pavement, if you’re an experienced driver you’ve got a habit built in of not hitting your brakes hard, but pumping them slightly to slow your car down or downshifting. So these are things that you don’t have to think about. They are more or less automatic to the circumstances. However, when you started them out, you had to think about them. You had to teach yourself how to do them and after a long period of time they get over learnt.
Rick: Do we actually, consciously, think about our habits, or did they just happen as a result of mindless repetition? Is that a possible way that a habit develops? You know, I gesture with my hands sometimes when I talk, and I’ve never mindfully decided I’m going to express myself in this particular way by moving my hands about. So might a lot of the habits been developed without any kind of conscious decision making, and therefore not be in our service, or not in our best interests? Dr. Jim: I think there are a lot of habits that come about as a result of classical conditioning. An example of this would be if you get a puff of air in your eye, you’ll blink. Or if food is put in front of you, you may salivate slightly. Your body will orient itself toward food if you’re hungry. If you tie another stimulus to those, for example, if I am shooting a little puff of air into your eye and before that I ring a buzzer, pretty soon the buzzer will start to trigger you to blink. So there’s a natural behavior, an expressive behavior, let’s say, like gesturing, and it may get tied to certain kinds of triggers. So it may start out to be something that is part of your behavioral repertoire, but after a while it gets linked to other kinds of stimuli. This is why habit formation is complicated. Because it’s really a mixture of intentional behaviors and behaviors that seem to naturally come out of our behavioral repertoire.
Rick: So, our habits are sometimes formed as a result of mindful intention, sometimes through happenstance, or a combination of the two? Dr. Jim: “Let’s take going to a place like Starbuck’s. If you go into Starbuck’s in the morning you’ll see people who are in there every day, and they’re in there pretty much at the same time. So on their way to work they stop, go in, get a coffee, or they come in, hang out at Starbuck’s, and then they go on to their job. They have a whole bunch of regulars like that. How does that become a habit? Where it’s almost like the car drives itself to Starbuck’s in the morning. Initially, you go in, you sample the product, you are given a lot of reinforcements for coming in there in the first place. The staff is pleasant. You’re well treated. The product is good. It’s always very, very consistent. There are other benefits to being there. If you like to go in and hang around in the chairs there is social contact with other people. There’s something to eat. It’s a warm place. So there are lots of triggers to behaviors that are motivating for us. The interest in food. The interest in stimulation. The interest in coffee. The interest in comforts. Especially, I think, the interest in comfort. So if you’ve gone there a few times pretty soon you start working that into your schedule and then after awhile it’s not even a thinking behavior. So is this a product of advertising? Partly. Is this a product of the design of the service and the products? Yes. And because Starbuck’s is so ubiquitous, it’s on the way to everywhere, in major cities. So that means you don’t have to work very hard to develop the habit. It’s not like you’ve got to drive across town to find this little, special coffee place that you like, and then go back across town to wherever you’re going to work. Starbuck’s is everywhere. And I think that the more accessible something is the easier it is for us to form a habit around it. Let’s take, for example, junk food. You go into the theatre and just walking into the theatre is going to trigger you on eating popcorn. There’s the smell, there’s the look of it, there’s the reminder of the taste and so forth. It gets so that I have to make a very conscious decision to not buy popcorn. If I don’t want it, particularly. If I’m full up from dinner. But even when I’m not hungry I’ve gone to the theatre and lots of times there I am, in line for the popcorn.” Rick: “For me it’s Twizzlers. Same thing.”
Dr. Jim: “There was another example I was going to give. There’s the elicitation of a behavior. You know, like I was talking about around the coffee place. You elicit a behavior or you start a new behavior without a lot of experience. What comes to mind for me is learning to play the fiddle. When I started out about 12 years ago, everything was painful. For listeners especially! Starting out to learn how to coordinate holding the bow, and the fiddle, and getting the tune right, and the tone right, and all that stuff. Now what I’ve done is I’ve built up a whole hierarchy of different kinds of behaviors that I’m now practically unaware of. So I had to learn them over and over again. There’s a lot of muscle memory that goes into it. I have to be careful because I’m still new enough at it, I think. It’s not hard for me to intrude on that habit. On that series of habits. Like, let’s say, I’m playing a particular tune and if I get distracted and get off track then I’ll break the sequence and I almost have to go back to the beginning, rather than restart where I was. It doesn’t take much to do that. Like if somebody talks to me, or my mind wanders in a performance situation, there’s a lot of noise and activity going on, if I were to ever try to sing a song as well as play it, somehow I can’t work on two channels at once. Some people can do that.” Rick: “So the habit isn’t fully ingrained yet?” Dr. Jim: “I’ve got the habit, but the habit is kind of fragile. It can be tipped over. It can be interrupted and I’ve got to go back and start at the beginning, practically, to get the sequence right again. So I think that points to one of the things. We’re unconscious about a lot of habits but if we break up the sequence then we start to change. You know if, for example, you started getting up in the morning and you’re brushing your teeth, which is a highly habitual activity, you started brushing your teeth with your left hand, it would be an entirely different experience. If you read the newspaper then made coffee in the morning. Or if you didn’t go down and check your email until after all of that. Or if you broke up the sequences. If you changed the habit structure there you would discover you’d have a whole new level of awareness and you’d have to learn some new things.” Rick: “I’ve always wondered about that approach. You know, brushing your teeth with your left hand. I don’t see the usefulness in that. How that would be useful? I mean, if it’s not a problem me brushing my teeth with my right hand, how would it be an advantage learning to brush my teeth with my left? Dr. Jim: “I think breaking up habits is probably good for us generally. Somebody’s written a book about this. About a whole bunch of things that you can do, like that, to change habits. I think though what that does is, that starts to create new brain structures, and new neural pathways. And I think it helps us to learn how to be more flexible.” Rick: “I’ve never thought about this in those terms. That changing a minor habit will actually give you more facility to change other habits. I mean, that’s what you’re saying. Effectively, if you were able to, for example, take some little, minor thing and work on just brushing your teeth with your left hand, that would maybe give you more facility in terms of changing how you dealt with your money, for example. That you wouldn’t, maybe, be such an impulse buyer so much. That you could actually use what you learned in the one thing and apply it to the other. I mean, in and of itself, changing the hand you brush your teeth with has no inherent value. But you’re saying that in terms of your ability to learn how to change habits of any kind, then it has a use.” Dr. Jim: “Speaking of money, take a very ingrained habit in most of us and that is to reach for your credit card when you buy something. Now we know from the research on credit card spending, and there’s a lot of interesting psychological research about this. We know that people will spend more when they’re buying with a credit card. They will tip higher when they’re paying for a meal by credit card. Another interesting thing is, and this is such an astounding result it’s hard to believe, but in a study where people were brought in and they were given a list of consumer items such as video players, stereos, cameras, that kind of thing, and they were simply sitting in the presence of a credit card charge plate sign, it was just sitting there on the desk, those in the presence of that stimulus would routinely underestimate the cost of those consumer items. Whereas a group that didn’t have that stimulus was closer to the mark. So there’s something about credit card buying that makes it easy for us, in a conditioned kind of way, to underestimate the price of objects. Now, if you stop buying with a credit card, you know you just take the thing and you leave it at home, you don’t even have it, you’ve got to really reorganize your life. You’ve got to really think about having cash on you. Hardly anybody’s going to take a cheque anymore. It’s too much of a bother to do that. Or if you leave your debit card at home. So now you’ve got to have money on you, which means you’ve really got to pay attention to how much money is in the account. Presumably you’re going to do that. Some people don’t. But it will certainly change the quality of attention to have on the money you have available and how to spend it.”
Rick: “Now this issue of attention in terms of habit change is something that was talked about in this book that I just read, ‘The Mind & The Brain’. According to the book, the number one thing is applying attention to what you’re doing. Is this what you want to be doing or is this not? And wherever your attention goes so goes these new neural pathways, and actually creating those. That your brain is actually changing as your behavior changes.” Dr. Jim: “That’s right. But if we think about change coming about, let’s say, around spending patterns, we have to ask ourselves ‘where is the attention focused?’. So the first thing it’s focused on is just the automatic behaviors. Reaching into your pocket, pulling out your wallet and pulling out your credit card. That’s a behavior that you can do without paying attention to it and it’s so background from us. That’s one of the reasons we sometimes lose our credit card or our wallet, because if something interrupts that little track of programming it’s very easy to walk away and leave your credit card behind in a restaurant, or even leave your wallet there on the counter if you go to rent a car. Both these things I’ve done in the past and it had something to do with interrupting the pattern. Interrupting the sequence. So you’ve got to pay attention to the automatic sequences because they drive a lot of our behavior. They are so powerful. The second thing you have to do is pay attention to some of the emotional reactions you have around money. Fear, for example, is a big one that all of us have. “Oh no, I can’t spend above this amount of money on such and such because I’m afraid it will…” and there’s usually some thing in our background like “we’ll go into the poor house”. So this is overspending. It might be an investment in the future. It might be a really good purchase. It might be, in the long run, a very rational purchase to buy. A better quality car. Going into more debt, etc, “oh no, I can’t do that because…”. So now you’re no longer working in the rational area, you’re working in the realm of emotion and fear. That is a long cultivated habit for a lot of us, especially around money.” Rick: “We see, for example, a lot of people who think all debt is bad debt. So you would see patterns of behavior repeating over and over and over and over and over again in a person’s life because of habits that they have come by either mindfully or mindlessly.” Dr. Jim: “Well they work. They serve a purpose.” Rick: “They work to protect the person, but often times are they not merely, with regard to emotional habits, designed to give the person temporary relief from distress?” Dr. Jim: “Sure. If you’re a shopaholic, you want to have your credit card handy. I mean if I were to suggest to somebody who shops to feel better, which a lot of us do. A lot of us, you know, when the going gets rough then it’s time to go shopping. If you do that kind of thing. If buying behavior becomes a kind of sedative, or a mood elevator for you, then the last thing you want to do is give up your credit card. Or not have cash in your pocket. Or have your cheque book handy, or any of those other kinds of things. If you are fearful about spending money. If you are at the other extreme, or a better example is a lot of people don’t want to know about their financial situation. They don’t want to have to pay attention to money because there’s fear attached to it. “I’m going to discover that I’m in trouble financially. Or I’m going to discover that I’m not going to have any retirement funds.” So it’s kind of like not paying attention to your symptoms sometimes. You know, when you’re sick ‘I don’t want to find out I might have a serious disease.’ People are that way about money. So that’s why they won’t balance their cheque book. ‘Oh, it’s too much trouble.’ Well, they’re avoiding seeing the reality. They’re avoiding looking at their spending patterns. They’re avoiding looking at how much money that they really have on hand. That sort of avoidance habit is very easy and credit cards really facilitate that because you have no idea where you’re at until the end of the month.” Rick: “One of the things that I’ve been thinking about recently is the common pattern so many people have where their spending always rises to meet or exceed their income. So, for example, I’ve seen people with a $2,000/month income, it grows to $7,000/month and they’re now spending $7,000 a month. And they’re complaining that they don’t have enough money! We’ve also encountered people with combined incomes of $150,000 or $200,000 a year complaining that they can’t get by. Or we see somebody who inherits or gets a windfall, and there are statistics that bear this out too. Most of these folks have nothing to show for it just a few years later, and many are in even worse financial shape than they were before the chunk of many came in.” Dr. Jim: “Because they didn’t have a habit system designed to manage that kind of money. They didn’t have the habits of monitoring it. They didn’t have the habits of spending. They didn’t have the habits of exerting self control.”
Rick: “By the same token, very wealthy people, who have gotten there through thrift, they get to retirement or they’ve got enough money and now they actually can’t bring themselves to spend the money that they have. So again, there’s a habit of not spending that seems so ingrained. So my point is, ‘how you come by these habits you have, who’s to say. Whether they developed mindfully or mindlessly is kind of irrelevant. The question is, ‘are the habits you have now helping you or hindering you, and if they’re hindering you, how might you change them?’. What are the best methods available for changing a crappy habit into a good one?” Dr. Jim: “Well, you know, unfortunately it starts with your basic desire for change. I say unfortunately because if you’re quite happy living in this mess that you’ve created for yourself, and you’re willing to juggle it and keep on playing the game. Kind of like an alcoholic who says ‘well, drinking isn’t good for me but it sure beats the hell out of being sober.’ You’re not going to have any great success with that individual. But, if somebody comes in and says ‘I’m really in distress about the way my financial situation is.’ Or they say ‘I’m 50 years old, I’m looking down the road and I want to retire in 15 years, I don’t think it’s very likely that I’m going to be able to live the kind of lifestyle I want to live’, then now, as they’re driving down the road the horizon begins to loom up and so what happens is the context changes and a new set of emotional reactions takes over. ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to do something about my money!’ It’s kind of like the guy who’s had a heart attack and some of the people who are eating the healthiest and exercising the most, I mean, those people didn’t like broccoli or enjoy running marathons before, but by gosh when they had a heart attack they realized that they’d had a wake up call and they dodged the bullet so they’d better change their habits if they want to live longer. So the context is shifted around those new behaviors. And that hooks into a new set of emotional responses that are very, very powerful and that creates the desire to get in there and do something in a persistent way.” Rick: “So that’s about circumstances dictating and as a strategy, as a life strategy to wait around for some circumstance to force some enlightenment upon you is probably not a good strategy. I mean, you’re probably better to take the bull by the horns. I don’t know if everybody has the idea that they can actually control or dictate or change at will, their own personal habits.” Dr. Jim: “No, I think there’s a lot of people, the other side of what I was saying is there are a lot of people who are very unhappy with the way their life is going or they’re unhappy with their health and they really don’t know how to change their habits. They don’t know how to quit smoking. They don’t know how to get past a terrible trauma in their life that has coloured everything that they do with people since then. They’d sure like to change. They’d like to stop their habits but they don’t have the skills or an understanding to do that, and that’s where therapy or counseling or some kind of intervention like that comes in to their benefit.” Rick: “Then we’re looking at two things. We’re looking at the desire to change, and whether or not action is being taken.” Dr. Jim: “And the skills that are required.” Rick: “And skill, okay.”
Dr. Jim: “I mean, you are not going to be able to change anything in your life unless you acquire some new skills. You can’t bootstrap yourself into this. And I think circumstances, in some way, have to change. I don’t think you wake up one day and say ‘holy cow, I’m going to quit smoking, I’m going to eat vegetarian, and I’m going to start running 5 miles a day’. I just don’t think that happens. I think there’s some kind of process that’s running that wakens desire in you to these things and that’s partly conditioned by circumstance.” In Part Two of our interview, we'll talk about some of the key ingredients involved in habit change, including things like persistence and patience. These aren't exactly common traits in a world so devoted to the principles of 'instant gratification'.
A special 'thank you' to Jim for agreeing to do this interview ! You can find out more about Jim and what he has to offer by visiting his website at:
To read an interesting article on how the brain changes as habits change, click on the link below. The Brain and Habit Formation - click here
Financial planning, estate planning, retirement planning, insurance planning, tax planning, insurance products, segregated funds, and tax preparation services mentioned herein are offered through Cheri Crause & Associates Inc. . |
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Counter established Nov.7th,2003 copyright
2004 Cheri Crause & Associates Inc.
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"Mmmm. Twizzlers!"
