How do we change if we’re hard-wired for habits?

“The brain is a habit machine” one of the founders of Do Something Different, Professor Ben Fletcher, often tells us, before going on to remind us how recent scientific discoveries have changed views about the adult brain.

 

Professor Ben Fletcher says 'the brain is a habit machine'
but says doing something different is the antidote.

For many years it was thought the brain was fixed and immutable, that it was incapable of restructuring itself. Then, in the early twentieth century, evidence emerged showing that the brain is more malleable than ever thought possible. It can and does change.

Novel stimuli cause the brain to create new neural pathways or reorganize existing ones.

We’re talking here about the principle of neuroplasticity. It is now recognised that the brain is constantly changing in response to new experiences, new behaviors and different environments. Novel stimuli cause the brain to create new neural pathways or reorganize existing ones, fundamentally altering how behaviour is created and how information is processed.

A ground-breaking study into neuroplasticity involved scanning the brains of London taxi drivers (Maguire et al., 2000). Typically, a London taxi driver spends around two years studying the complex layout of the city and its myriad of streets. This long, rigorous period of training causes structural changes in the taxi drivers’ brains. When their brains were exposed to fMRI scanning, the taxi drivers’  hippocampuses were found to be significantly larger than those of a control group of 50 healthy men. The hippocampus is the brain area involved in memory and navigation. And the longer the time spent as a taxi driver the larger it was.

Repetition of an activity (in other words, habits) results in the brain falling back on the same set of existing neural pathways.

Further examples of brain neuroplasticity are less dramatic, but they demonstrate the same principle. They have shown that some activities impact the brain more than others (Mechelli et al., 2004; Gaser and Schlaug, 2003; Draganski et al., 2006) and that repetition of an activity (in other words, habits) results in the brain falling back on the same set of existing neural pathways. Therefore, to continue changing, the brain must be challenged to work in new ways. It must be exposed to novel experiences and new behaviours.

To continue changing, the brain must be challenged to work in new ways. It must be exposed to novel experiences and new behaviours.

DoSomething Different draws on this idea, by helping everyone on our programmes to create experiences that challenge their existing habits. Because brain science also tells us that experiences change the brain, not thoughts. It’s about acting, not thinking.

The Do’s we create tackle the individual’s habitual ways of behaving and responding. Doing something different exposes the person to regular, novel experiences. This reduces the likelihood of the brain falling back on old neural pathways. Not only does this mean that life gets better, it also means old maladaptive behaviours – overeating, excessive drinking, bias, stress - are less likely to get repeated. This is behaviour change in action, one Do at a time.

This is a copy of a blog I (Karen) wrote for the Do Something Different website over at http://dsd.me. Many of the principles discussed here apply to people's money habits too!

Small changes you can make for a big difference

One of my favourite quotes is

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it”.

I think it was H D Thoreau who muttered those wise words. And it got me thinking.  

Thinking about how much life gets wasted on meaningless self-lobotomising activities. 

If you add up the hours you’ve spent watching mind-numbing TV, or waiting in for tradesmen, playing Angry Birds or even sleeping, it would add up to years, even decades of your life.

OK, we’ve all got to sleep and personally I love my bed as much as the next woman (or should I say man?). But I worked out that if I made a few small changes to my life the impact could be enormous.

For example, did you know that:

1. If you get up 15 minutes earlier every day you will gain ninety one extra hours of waking life in one year. That’s days and days of extra time!
2. If you save £1 a day every day for two years, you'll be able to travel anywhere in the world.
3. If you write one hundred words a day in two years you will have a full-length novel.
4. If you show real interest in everyone you meet every day, in two months you could have 60 new friends.
5.  If you over-pay on your mortgage by £20 pounds a month you’ll pay off your mortgage 20 months earlier  - and save £5515 in interest alone. (based on 100,000 mortgage over 25 years at 5% interest)
6. If you do one extra press-up every day you'll double your fitness level in 3 months.
7. If you photograph one small thing every day, after a year you'll have boosted your levels of awareness - and have an awesome photojournal.
   
8. If you donate £1.25 a week to Oxfam you will buy 288 buckets of pure, clean drinkable buckets of water a year for a family.
9. If you cut out one can of fizzy drink every day you'll lose 10 pounds in 6 months (without making any other changes).
10.  If you cut out one hour of TV from your life you would have an extra 7 hours free time a week, or the equivalent of two full days extra every month.

It all adds up doesn’t it? Small changes equal big difference. That’s exactly the philosophy beind our Do Something Different behaviour change technique. People make one small change regularly and they tell us a big shift soon happens in their life.

Today I’ve been talking on the radio about me-time. I was supporting a campaign by Palmolive to encourage women to claim back me-time. Unlike blokes, not many women have a shed to retreat to. So the idea is that we can pamper ourselves for 20 minutes a day in the shower (with their yummy Ayurituelsshower gels) and restore our health and well-being. Scented candles, nice music, petals and a glass of fizz are optional extras of course. But think about it, if you have a pampering experience for 20 minutes in the shower every day, you’ll save the cost of going to a spa…

HAVE YOU ever changed one small thing and found it's added up to a big difference?

CHANGING CULTURE IN OUR BANKS

A GUEST BLOG FROM DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT ABOUT WHY IT'S TIME FOR OUR BANKS TO CHANGE - AND QUICKLY:

It’s been a rough week for the UK banking sector. Again.

Fines for Barclays fixing the LIBOR rate, with at least two other major banks rumoured to have been up to the same tricks. Mis-selling interest rate swaps to small and medium sized businesses. A new proposal for a European banking union, setting the rules from outside London.

The Radio 4 chatter this morning was about culture change. Separating investment banking from retail banking – taking the casino out of the supermarket – is considered a step in the right direction, but banks need to refocus their culture. They need to put ethics back at the heart of their operations.

This was then picked up by Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King, who said: “We can see we need a real change in the culture of the industry.”  Prime Minister, David Cameron, speaking from the EU summit in Brussels, also added his weight to the argument: “British people are crying out for a return to good old-fashioned banking… That’s why the governor is so in favour of changing culture at the banks and so am I.”

So if you are in charge of change management at a big bank, how do you do that? Change management consultants are fond of telling us that it takes seven years to change a culture. The banks simply don't have that long.

What is culture change?

Essentially, it’s people taking different actions. 

That may be based on a new set of values. Or, as is more often the case, it might be about trying to get people to behave in-line with existing values that have been forgotten or ignored in the commercial frenzy. 

Either way, the key is – actions. For culture change to be real and sustainable, it has to be about what people physically do, not just what they think.

Reminding people about old values, or teaching then new ones, and then letting them go back to their desks, their trading screens or their customer service counters is not enough. We’re habit machines. The old ingrained behaviours will soon rise to the top. Most people will go back to doing the same things they’ve always done and nothing will change.

Culture change is not about telling people about new values. It’s about getting them to live new values. 

To evolve a new culture by doing things differently. Put ‘doing’ at the heart of a culture change strategy, and change can happen in seven weeks. Not seven years.