Good Habits, Bad Habits

A profoundly insightful and helpful book on the power of habit and how to change your behaviour for a lifetime.

Reviews

In Good Habits, Bad Habits . . . the social psychologist Wendy Wood refutes both [William] James’s determinism and glib exhortations to be proactive, and seeks to give the general reader more realistic ideas for how to break habits. Drawing on her work in the field, she sees the task of sustaining positive behaviors and quelling negative ones as involving an interplay of decisions and unconscious factors . . . Even people who score high on self-control questionnaires may owe their apparent virtue to situational factors rather than to sheer fortitude . . . This observation leads to the crux of her book’s thesis: the path to breaking bad habits lies not in resolve but in restructuring our environment in ways that sustain good behaviors.