How to form good habits and achieve your goals

In this course, you are learning about strategies that can dramatically improve your learning. But for
the strategies to work, you must want to use them—and actually use them. That requires changing
your current behaviour, which is hard to do. Just look at these statistics:

* Every year, 40% of people in the U.S. make a New Year’s resolution.

* 8% of them succeed.

We can assume that people do not make resolutions without the intention to do their best to achieve
them. So, what happens? Why is there such a big gap between what we wish to do and what we
actually do? What’s the secret of the 8% who manage to fulfil their goals?

In the previous module, you have seen that to become better at achieving your goals, you need to:

1) set achievable, near-term, relevant, and specific subgoals

2) make a plan that incorporates your resources, strategies, and criteria for monitoring progress
towards your goal.

In this module, you will learn two techniques that increase your chances of goal achievement by
helping you stick to your plans.

The first technique, mental contrasting (MC), is designed to increase your motivation to pursue
the goals you set. The second technique, implementation intentions (II), helps you create lasting
habits out of behaviors you choose to reach the goals.

Mental contrasting
While you may really want to achieve your goals, it can be hard to force yourself to pursue them.
This problem often arises from the way we think about our goals. There are two main patterns of
thinking that people employ with respect to their goals: indulging and dwelling. Unfortunately,
neither of these patterns helps goal achievement.

Indulging
People who indulge tend to focus only on what it would feel like to achieve their goals. This pattern
of thinking follows the conventional wisdom in many self-help books that encourage you to think
positively, to "focus on your dreams." While indulging in fantasies of achieving your goals can
make you feel good momentarily, it can be so satisfying on its own that you will not channel it into
any concrete action.
Dwelling
The opposite of indulging is dwelling. People with tendencies to dwell focus only on the obstacles
to their goal achievement. When they think of a goal, they instantly come up with a ton of obstacles
that could prevent them from reaching the goal. No wonder that those who solely dwell on the
obstacles are no more likely to achieve their goals than those dreamers who solely indulge in the
fantasies of goal achievement.

While none of these thinking patterns works on its own, combining them does. The technique that
combines indulging and dwelling is called mental contrasting.

Mental contrasting
Mental contrasting consists of mentally contrasting the positive outcomes of achieving your goals
with the obstacles to the goal achievement. Basically, you first get excited about reaching your
dreams but then channel this excitement into concrete plans to combat obstacles that might
otherwise prevent the accomplishment of your goals.

Note that the order is important: you indulge first, and dwell later. If you dwell before indulging,
your goal pursuit will end right there because thinking of obstacles first will sap your energy. In
contrast, if you start with the dream, you will be more likely to view the obstacles constructively
and create plans to conquer them.

To summarize, mental contrasting has these three steps:

1) Decide which goal you want to achieve.

2) Imagine what it would feel like to achieve the goal.

3) Imagine the obstacles that might prevent you from achieving the goal.

Implementation intention
Have you ever set a goal but failed to follow through on it? If you are like 92% of new-year's-
resolution-makers, you may have vowed to read more books, launch a start-up project, stop
smoking, exercise more frequently, spend less impulsively, or begin working on course assignments
earlier than the night before they were due. At the beginning, you got very enthusiastic about your
goal, but over time you found that your initial enthusiasm didn't translate to the actual behaviors
needed to follow through on the resolution. Despite your best intentions, you were unable to act on
what you set out to do. What do you think happened?

Sometimes, people simple say that their willpower was not strong enough. Luckily, there is an
easy fix for this willpower trouble—plan your behaviors, so that you do not need to rely on your
willpower, which tends to be hard to keep strong! An implementation intention is a technique you
can use to help you enact the plans you make when your willpower isn't strong enough to drive you
to stay on track.

An implementation intention is based on the idea that you can convert all those effortful
behaviors you want to do into habits – routines that are carried out with little thought or
effort. Much of who you are is a result of your habits. Habits can influence how you study, work, or
interact with others. Because habits are basically automatic, you do not need to apply much mental
energy to start habitual behaviors or to maintain these behaviors over long periods of time. Of
course, habits can be both good and bad, but making implementation intentions can help you to
break bad habits and to create good ones.

What is an implementation intention?

An implementation intention, otherwise also known as an if-then plan, is a plan that takes the form
of "If I am in a situation X, then I will do Y."

EXAMPLE: "If I finish reading a textbook chapter, then I will self-test on what I have

learned."

You can see that an implementation intention consists of two parts: a situational cue and a
response. A situational cue says where and when a behavior should happen; a response
says what the behavior should be in response to that situational cue. 

How does an implementation intention work?

The strength of an implementation intention is in its specificity and, eventually, its automaticity.
Because you identify the opportunity to act beforehand, you do not need to deliberate about where
and when to enact the behavior. You just do it when the situational cue arises. Imagine you want to
study more frequently. If you merely decide to do so, you are still left with the task of deliberating
every single day whether now is a good time to study or not. Such deliberation quickly gives rise to
thoughts of all the other things that you might want to do instead. Once that happens, it takes a lot
of willpower to convince yourself to study rather than, say, watch TV or go out with friends. If
instead you select the time and place for studying in advance, this exhausting decision-making
process gets greatly reduced. You know precisely whether to study or not at this particular time;
there is no need to make this decision again and again. Moreover, tying your behavior to a
situational cue makes it more likely that you will remember to perform the behavior. This is
because the thought of the behavior will automatically become highly accessible to you when you
find yourself in the specified situation.

As you might have guessed, an implementation intention is not just a study tool. It can be a tool to
improve your whole life. Let's take a look at one more example, this time outside of an academic
context. Imagine that you want to exercise more. You create the following implementation
intention: “Whenever I get home from school, I will exercise for 20 minutes.” There is very little
ambiguity in this plan. You get home (the situational cue), and you perform a set of exercises (the
response). If instead you just decide to exercise several times a week, you will be much more likely
to forget or justify delaying the behavior because of some obstacle such as feeling tired or having to
work on an assignment.

In other words, your willpower may be limited but that is not a problem—because you identified a
situation that trigger an automatic behavior you know to begin, even before you consider what other
activities you might choose instead.

Beware: implementation intentions are not goal intentions!

When you are learning to make implementation intentions, it is important to realize the difference
between goal intentions and implementation intentions. Goal intentions are statements that merely
specify what you wish to do—think the response part of implementation intentions. People
frequently make goal intentions but research shows that compared to implementation
intentions, goal intentions are ineffective.

CONTRAST : goal intentions vs. implementation intentions

Goal intention: "I will self-test on what I have learned."

Implementation intention: "If I finish reading a textbook chapter, then I will self-test on what I have
learned."

How do you make effective implementation intentions?

- Select a situational cue

Your situational cue should be 1) specific and 2) one you can visualize. To select a situational cue,
try to think of situations that provide a good opportunity to enact your desired behavior. Since you
are building a habit, think in particular of situational cues that you wish were regularly followed by
the your target response and not some other response. Let's say that you wish to make this
implementation intention: "If I enter the library, then I will open my calculus textbook." For this
implementation intention, "entering the library" would be a good situational cue if
you always wanted to immediately begin to study calculus when you entered the library. However,
if you frequently need to do other things after entering library (for example, attend a group study
session), then you can't really carry out this intention each time you enter the library. Instead, it
might be better to make your situational cue more specific (e.g., "If I sit down alone at the library
with the intention to study, I will immediately open my calculus book."). The extra situational detail
here make the cue more specific, and can help you get straight to studying, rather than leave you to
decide to study right away, or whether you should first check email, text a friend, and so on.

Let's take a look at some examples of situational cues. As you are reading the examples, note that
the situational cue can be a specific time and place but also a mental state (like boredom or
confusion). Notice that you can adjust the wording of the situational cue, as long as the wording
makes clear which situations will trigger the behavior.

"If I feel bored while I study, . . ."

"If it is 4 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, . . ."
"If I am about to give up working on a math problem, . . ."
"When I get back home from work, . . ."
"If I open a restaurant menu, . . ."
"If I feel confused by a section of my assigned reading . . ."
"Whenever I feel tired while I work, . . ."
"After I leave the lecture hall, . . ."
"Before I start reading a textbook chapter, . . ."

If you are setting a strictly time-based cue (such as Friday 5 p.m.), don't forget to set a reminder for
it. The sound or visual of the reminder will serve as your cue.

- Specify your response to the situational cue

Now that you have seen how to choose a situational cue, let's take a look at how you should
formulate your response to it.

If you wish to create a new habit, you simply specify a situational cue and then the new behavior
you wish to perform in response to that cue. Here are a few examples of implementation intentions
that you could formulate to improve you studying:

EXAMPLES:

"If I leave a lecture hall, then I will summarize the main points of the lecture."

"If I study a solution to a math problem, then I will self-explain each step of the solution."

"If I go to the library to study, then I will turn off social media notifications on my laptop."

"If I finish studying for a given learning objective, I will mark in my calendar a future time to
review the content in order to space my studying."
If instead you desire to change an existing habit, there are several ways you can formulate your
response:

Replacement-oriented
When you are making a replacement-oriented implementation intention, you identify the
situational cue that habitually triggers an unwanted behavior and replace it with a desired
behavior. For example, if feeling lonely while you study normally makes you stop studying and
start checking social media, you could use "feeling lonely" as your situational cue and couple it
with more desirable behavior such as "take a 5-minute walk" or "summarize what you've learned."

EXAMPLES:

"If I feel lonely, then I will summarize what I've learned so far." (replacement behavior for logging
to Facebook)

"If I get home from work, then I will start studying." (replacement behavior for turning on TV)

Ignorance-oriented

For situational cues eliciting unwanted emotional reactions, you can create implementation
intentions that ask you to ignore the cues.

EXAMPLES:

"If I feel anxious, then I will tell myself to ignore that feeling."

"If I see a spider, then I will ignore it." (Yes, implementation intentions plans have even been
shown to alleviate the fear of spiders!; Gallo & Gollwitzer, 2007)

Suppression-oriented (Beware... these are INEFFECTIVE!)

It might seem that a simple way to change an unwanted behavior would be to create an
implementation intention that negates the behavior: "If X happens, then I will not do Y." However,
making implementation intentions that include negation has been shown to not be particularly
effective. In fact, if your habits are strong, trying to negate them by using negative wording might
ironically strengthen them. This is because humans tend to process the statement in positive terms
first and the apply the negation second. So, for example, a statement "If I feel bored, I will not listen
to music" would first be understood as "If I feel bored, I will listen to music," which would
strengthen the association between the feeling of boredom and listening to music. So in practice,
trying to get yourself to avoid something would increase your attention to that very thing. See, if
you were asked not to think of a huge purple polar bear right now, it might be quite hard to get the
thought of a purple polar bear out of your head.... You can try it.
Two more tips
Two more tips to make your implementation intentions more effective:

1) Visualize! Once you make your implementation intention, repeat it to yourself and spend

a few minutes visualizing how you perform the plan—imagine the situational cue and
your response to it.

2) Less is more. While the effectiveness of implementation intentions could make you want to
make many of them, try to resist the temptation. The research is still emerging on the topic of
multiple implementation intentions but it appears that making many implementation intentions
in a single domain (e.g., setting 3 or 4 intentions around making healthy food choices) may not
be as effective as making a single one. That said, it may be OK to create multiple
implementation intentions as long as they are in different domains. For example, you may
create one or two implementation intentions to study and another one to exercise but you
shouldn't attempt making multiple ones just for studying or just for exercising at the same
time.

Because mental contrasting supplies motivation for implementation intentions, the two
techniques are frequently taught together as a combined* technique: mental contrasting
with implementation intentions (MCII). Read the four-step guide below to learn how you
can use MCII!

* While it is better to combine the techniques (your implementation intentions will be

stronger if you do a mental contrasting exercise beforehand), you can choose to do the
techniques separately and still benefit from them.

Step-by-step guide on how to use MCII

1) Decide which goal you want to achieve.

Note: make sure that you choose a goal that you believe to be achievable.

Mental contrasting (contrast the imagined outcome of achieving the goal with the obstacles
that might prevent achievement):

2) Imagine what it would feel like to achieve the goal.

3) Imagine the obstacles that might prevent you from achieving the goal.

Remember: the ordering of these two steps is important! Imagine the positive outcomes of
goal achievement first, and only then think about the obstacles.
Implementation intentions (create if-then plans):

4) Make an implementation intention.

Please take a moment and memorize these four steps. You will soon have a chance to
practice using them!

Evidence supporting MCII

MCII sounds like a very simple technique but it is extremely effective. Scientific research
has shown that MCII produces substantial effects across a variety of goals:

Students who practiced MCII increased the number of practice problems they completed by
60% in preparation for a standardized test (Duckworth, Grant, Loew, Oettingen, &
Gollwitzer, 2011).

MCII helped patients suffering from chronic back pain to exercise more despite their fears
of pain due to exercise (Christiansen, Oettingen, Dahme, & Klinger, 2010).

Women who used MCII doubled their amount of weekly moderate-to-vigorous physical
exercise (about 1 hour more per week); the effect was sustained for four months (Stadler,
Oettingen, & Gollwitzer, 2009)!

Give it a try and see what employing MCII can do for you as you pursue your goals!