According to Michael Inzlicht, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto, the most recent research suggests that conscious decision making plays a much more minor role in people’s actions than previously thought, and long-term behavior patterns largely aren’t created by stringing together a series of conscious choices. In the past 20 years, the field’s tune has begun to change. You can see how this logic permeated culture: The self-help and diet industries boomed, the government slashed the social safety net’s tires, the 1970s became the Me Decade. Individuals do certain things and not others mostly because of their own conscious decisions your fate is largely in your own hands. Attitude leads behavior, the theory went, and the circumstances in which you exist aren’t that important to the choices you make. In her book Good Habit, Bad Habit, she explains that for the latter half of the 20th century, psychological scholarship more or less affirmed its righteousness. Or at least, many researchers have concluded that it does not account for an enormous amount of observed human behavior, according to the psychologist Wendy Wood. Now, as anyone who has ever tried anything might suspect, it sure seems like that idea might be bullshit.
Read: The false promise of morning routines
SIMPLY BEING WHO THEY ARE HOW TO
If you can’t figure out how to get up at 4:30 in the morning to make sure you get five miles in before commuting to work every day, which my dad somehow did for 30 years, you’re not trying hard enough, or you don’t want it badly enough, or you’re not motivated enough. Americans especially tend to see ourselves and one another as individuals with identical reservoirs of willpower, which some people choose to use and others do not. The conventional wisdom on changing habits goes something like this: You can change if you really want to. If some people can just get up one day and decide to behave differently for the rest of their life, why do most people fail at it again and again? But we all want things-human longing knows no bounds-and plenty of people do genuinely throw themselves into trying something new, without much success at converting those behaviors into lasting habits. Stories like my dad’s often serve as pop-psychological proof that you, too, could become a runner, if you really wanted to. You tell yourself that, this time, you’re really going to do God-knows-what differently, but all too soon you’re reminded that forever is a pretty long time to keep it up. New beginnings are seductive, and so is our own capacity for change. And it’s a salient dynamic at the beginning of a new year, resolution or not. My experience is extremely common among people who want to change how they do all kinds of things: to waste less money, to floss, to quit smoking, to drink less, to learn a new language.
I’ve tried to form various exercise habits over the years-I bought the equipment, I made a plan, I got out there and did it-and never quite reached the automatic stage, even though I observed it at close range for my entire childhood. Right now, I work out once or twice a week, which is less than I’d like to. It’s a deceptively simple fantasy-and, so often, an impossible one. Now, when my dad doesn’t run, “I feel like I’ve lost something,” he told me.įor a lot of people, this is, without exaggeration, the dream: You decide you’d like to start doing something, you get past the initial phase of this new activity being hard and bad and a huge bummer, and then you do that thing for 40 years. “It was the cool thing to do at the time for people like me,” he said of the 1980s fitness boom. When I asked him why he started all those years ago, there was no great motivator, no epiphany. One day he wasn’t a jogger, and the next day he was, even if he didn’t know at the time that the change was indeed permanent.
He started a few years before I was born. My dad will turn 75 next week, and whenever you’re reading this, he has probably already been out for a run today. He was just running, like he had basically every day since time immemorial. There was no specific goal, no endpoint, no particular reason he couldn’t take the week off while in the greater Disney World metropolitan area, which, in July, is hotter than the surface of the sun. Every day, at least four or five miles, rising before the sun and before anyone else was awake. When I was a kid, my dad did something on family vacations that perplexes me to this day: He ran.
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