Making Habits, Breaking Habits
How to Make Changes that Stick
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The founder of the hugely popular PsyBlog demonstrates how to bend habits to your will
Habits are more powerful than your will – if you know how to make them work for you
Two strings are hanging from a ceiling, one at the centre of the room, one near the wall. You’re asked to tie the strings together, but you can’t reach both at the same time. You look around the room and see a table and a pair of pliers. How would you solve the problem?
When confronted with challenges, most people let habits rule them (in this case, ignoring the pliers, the creative tool at your disposal). That is not surprising when you realise that at least a third of our waking hours are lived on auto-pilot – ruminating over past events, clicking through websites trawling for updates and the like. Such unconscious thoughts and actions are powerful. But the habits of the mind do not have to control us – we can steer them.
Drawing on hundreds of fascinating studies, psychologist Jeremy Dean – the mind behind the hugely popular and insightful website PsyBlog – shares how the new brain science of habit can be harnessed to your benefit, whether you’re hoping to eat moreveg, take an evening run, clear out your email backlog, or be more creative when faced with challenges at work and at home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the epigraph to this examination of habitual behavior, Montaigne describes habit as a "violent and treacherous schoolmistress"; but though we are all her pupils, Dean opines that we have a say in what goes on in the classroom. In an effort to get readers to be more aware of their habitual behavior and therefore better able to guide it to productive ends, Dean, a psychologist and the founder of PsyBlog (where he writes on an assortment of psychology-related topics for professionals and laypeople alike), addresses the numerous stages of habits how they're formed, indoctrinated, maintained, and changed. Although some habits, good or bad, obviously stem from intention (e.g., exercise or smoking), many are the products of unconscious processes that rarely surface long enough to be dealt with. As such, Dean elucidates mindfulness techniques to refocus bad habits and demonstrates methods to establish and retain good habits. What unifies all of the techniques is the understanding that habits, regardless of their origin, take work and motivation to control. Supplemented with analyses of contemporary research and case studies, Dean's is an accessible and informative guide for readers to take control of their lives.