I was writing some chapters, when I realized that I needed to see the preface to really set my focus on how I was going to fill the different steps.

The final preface might look very different – but this piece will give me inner focus. It’s not to the point yet – but you still might enjoy reading it. I am happy if you leave your questions and ideas in the comment section below.

Preface to “Change! – Use habits to effortless improve your life.”

The only constant in life is change – Heraclitus.

Therefore in order to be happy and live our life’s purpose to the fullest – we must constantly adapt to the change around us. Like a ship in stormy sea, we constantly need to reevaluate our position and adjust the bearing in order to reach our goal.

Change is not a smooth transition, but a sudden switch to a new mode. Once we start walking, we keep on walking. If you learn how to ride a bike without falling down you don’t need to relearn it every time you step on it.

Conscious thinking often is too slow and ineffective in order to cope with the speed of life. 99,9% of all out behavior happens automatically, without taking precious computing space in the “I am thinking about it and making a decision department” of your brain. It just happens. Imagine a pianist thinking about every next note to play or a tennis player making a conscious decision on how to hit the next ball. Or you ducking away, when the tennis player hit the ball in the direction of your head.

By putting together long patterns of such automatic behavior we can perform complex task on autopilot. Do you put “brushing my teeth” in your agenda right after “eating breakfast”? How aware are you of all steps involved in “unpacking the dishwasher”?

We are also “creatures of habit” (654.000 hits in Google.com)

Habits allow us perform benign to complex behavior without using our conscious thinking, therefore saving up precious resources.

However, the nature of habits also presents us with a challenge, whenever we want to consciously recreate the way we do things. Without the right tools it can be hard to kick bad habits like smoking or snacking away while watching TV (or stop watching TV all together).

As of August 2013, amazon.com lists 117600 books in the self help section. 1574 of which have been released in the last 30 days. Obviously there are many that feel the need to change their thought, emotions and behavior. But “creatures of habit” we are, that attempt is futile on a huge number of attempts. Often there seems to be a hidden force holding us back to accept the new behavioral reality of the choices that we have made. And even if we manage to fight our automatic behavior inclination, we often slip back to “autopilot mode” after some time. Creatures of habit we are. Truly.

Most of the self help books tell you why you should change your thoughts, emotions and behaviors and what is the perfect state of thinking, feeling, being. Some try to tell you how to do it. Some are successful. Most are not.

The principle that is mostly used to help you through that change is motivation. The fairy tale is that if you are just motivated enough, change will come easily. Most people realize every february of the year that the story is somewhat more difficult: When they look back on the new years resolutions for radical (or small) change, they made a few weeks ago.

Motivation needs attention. It needs mental resources. It needs you to be aware of your thoughts, emotions and behavior and to constantly monitor the level of motivation. Once you fall under a specific threshold, you need to put in energy. Constantly.

It takes about 30 days to make  new behavioral patterns stick. Motivation often only lasts a few days. And with every exception you grant yourself, it becomes more and more unlikely that you will change successfully – eventually.

There are two organizations that have perfected system to help people change, that are robust against the lack of motivation, we all encounter along the road. I am talking about the AA (anonymous Alcoholics) and the Weight Watchers.

The core of both systems is that they do not rely on motivation, but they help you to build very robust habits, that are incompatible with the old behavior. For this they employ a simple, but very effective system of behavioral shaping and social psychological effects.

This book is not a scientific article. It is the collection of what we have learned in our studies (behavioral science and behavioral change) and our own experience in applying those (proven to be effective) principles to our own life.

It’s a collection of the advice we gave to our family, friends and clients, that came to us for support in changing something in their life, in order to increase health and happiness.

During this process we will often ask you to do things that seem silly or futile. It is vitally important that you do not skip those steps, but that you perform them as if your life would depend on it (maybe it actually does!). The strategy we employ for change is not directed to the part of you brain that has a concept of what is to be considered silly or not (the same part that is able to self-talk and nagging you about it), but the older part of your brain, that is responsible for the 99,9% of (automatic) behavior. That part, that calls the shot most of the time. That part, that will resist most of the change those self-help books try to motivate you for.

We consider this book a tool. A tool to give you the power to change your life – one habit at a time – on the most effective and energy-efficient way there is.

After you have grasped the full power of this concept you are welcome to change and mold it in a way that you feel suits you best. But be warned. We advise you to first complete at least one cycle of habit change in EXACTLY the way we propose.

Right from the start we wanted to make a DO-IT, not a UNDERSTAND-IT book. This is why we mostly touch on the subject of neurological change only very briefly during this book. If you want to know more about it, grab a book about biological psychology. Just to be clear: Every step in this book, in this system, is geared towards bringing about neurological change: To rewire your brain – in the most elegant and effective way possible.

As most brilliant concepts, we did not invent the idea of using habits to improve your life. It’s a universal constant that has been rediscovered by bright thinkers in every generation. We have merely taken the abstract idea and put it into a system that will require a minimum of time, motivation and energy.

As we stand on the “shoulders of giants” (Newton), let me close this plea for (re)taking control of your own destiny with the words of one of our greatest inspiration, the psychology WIlliam James (Habit, 1890)

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.

Welcome to the key for effortless and lasting change.

Welcome to the system.

Welcome to the power of habits.

May this book guide you to live the life that you deserve

August 2013

Judith & Martin

The Blog-Health-o-Meter reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2010. That’s about 24 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 8 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 58 posts. There were 9 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 868kb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was January 5th with 131 views. The most popular post that day was Unconscious perceptual processes.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, digg.com, itp.nyu.edu, search.conduit.com, and google.co.in.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for behavioural science, heterotypic continuity, behavioral science, behaviour science, and behavioural sciences.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Unconscious perceptual processes February 2009
3 comments

Heterotypic Continuity & Comorbidity October 2008

How do biases affect decision making in mental health? October 2009

Can People who lack Self-Regulation Skills still have Satisfying and Well-functioning Relationships? June 2008

Ego Depletion & Executive Functioning October 2007
1 comment

Evolutionary reasons such as a lack of genetic relatedness and kin selection have previously been used to explain the higher rates of child abuse and homicide observed in stepfamilies (Daly & Wilson, 1988). The research team from Stockholm University and Mid Sweden University investigated whether an evolutionary explanation sufficiently explained this higher prevalence.

The research team analyzed Statistics Sweden records of parental child homicides in Sweden for the period 1965–2009. They included data from two biparental family types in their study: families with two genetic parents and stepfamilies. The group also analyzed the proportion of stepfamilies and families with two genetic parents in the general population for 1987, the midpoint of the study, to determine whether children in stepfamilies were statistically more likely to be murdered.

Dr. Temrin’s team used contingency tables to compare the observed frequencies of parents from the two family types committing child homicide with the frequencies of parents in the two family types in the general population. They found that on average there are 3.2 perpetrators per million parents for stepfamilies, and 1.9 per million parents for families with two genetic parents.

The team also investigated perpetrators in stepfamilies specifically, by finding the ratio of biological parent and stepparent child homicide perpetrators in stepfamilies and comparing it to an expected 1:1 ratio using a Chi-square test.

There were 152 perpetrators of parental child homicide in the two family groups used over the 45 year study period: 125 perpetrators were in families with two genetic parents and 27 were in stepfamilies. Of the 27 stepfamily murderers, 13 killed their genetic children, 13 murdered their stepchildren, and 1 perpetrator killed both. This means that the risk of a stepparent or a genetic parent in a stepfamily murdering a child is not significantly different from a 1:1 ratio (Chi-square = 0, p > 0.99).

“Our study suggests that the risk of being killed is not associated primarily with the non-genetic relation stepparent and stepchild but rather by living in a stepfamily,” said the paper’s lead author, Dr. Hans Temrin from Stockholm University.

Data on the criminal record of all Swedish parents in both genetic parent families and stepfamiles was also taken from the The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention dataset for the midpoint of the study, 1987.

Dr. Temrin’s team found that rates of crime across Sweden were higher for adults in stepfamilies than in biparental families, with general crime 1.5 times higher (28.2% vs. 17.8%), and violent crime twice is high (4.4% vs. 1.9%). These findings agree with previous studies that found that there is a higher incidence of unemployment, psychiatric problems and anti-social behaviors for parents in stepfamilies than parents in families with both genetic parents (Belsky, 1993; Turner, Finkelhor & Ormrod, 2007).

“The Cinderella effect – the observation that adults are more likely to kill their stepchildren than their biological children – has long been a staple of evolutionary psychology-informed homicide research, and this study suggests that this explanation is likely too simple,” said Dr Damon Muller from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University.

Dr. Temrin explains that “most parental child homicides are not caused by conflicts with the child but rather by problems that parents have.”

“Giving help to people with psychiatric problems and to families with problems in my opinion is the only way to decrease child maltreatment and the risk of children being killed.”

The research team hopes to replicate their study in other countries to investigate whether their observations hold.

References

Belsky J, 1993. Etiology of child maltreatment: A developmental-ecological analysis. Psychological Bulletin 114: 413-434.

Daly M, Wilson M, 1988. Homicide. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Fergusson DM, Fleming J, O’Neill DP, 1972. Child abuse in New Zealand. Wellington, New Zealand: A. R. Shearer, Government Printer.

Turner HA, Finkelhor D, Ormrod R, 2007. Family structure variations in patterns and
predictors of child victimization. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 77: 282-295.

Dan Ariely is a behavioural economist. He studies irrationality and tries to understand why humans act as they do act. In this video he focuses on the role of morality. In some clever studies he looks at why we think that it’s OK to cheat and steal (sometimes).

The Intelligence of the Unconscious

Gerd Gigerenzer is one of the stars in the realm of decision-making. He has written many articles about decision-making that has been cited many times. In this video he gives a lecture at the University of California about the intelligence of the unconscious.

Be aware: This is an enormously inspiring video, that might change the way you look at decision-making – not only in a scientific way, but also in daily life. this might shake your foundation of what you believe is true, so don’t watch this if you’d like to hang on to “usual logic thinking”.

fMRI Video Interview #1

• Introduction
• What is fMRI?
• fMRI Research
• fMRI Method
• fMRI Signal
• The Salmon
• Corrections & Thresholds
• The Black Box
• The Press

fMRI Video Interview #2

• fMRI & Behaviour
• Understanding Behaviour
• Getting Started
• Use of fMRI
• Future of fMRI
• Brain Pacemakers

Well let’s take a look at them:

So there are about 10 million hits for that keyword and this page is ranking #3, just behind Wikipedia (no chance to beat them) and the FBI (probably better not to provoke them). This is actually pretty incredible. Thank you Google!

We will do our best to deliver high quality content.

PS: If you wonder: This picture was taken using a proxy – so no faking with the results, but they might look different on your computer, because Google does track you *creepy…I know*.

Those are the stats of the Behavioural Science Blog for the last few week, with the normal dip around Christmas holidays.

In this chart, showing the blog from the beginning to now, you can see that it has been around 800 views monthly for a while now. Well I guess that this is going to change, considered that there are some really good articles coming up.

I also find it interesting to look at the search terms, that people entered into Google (or other search engines) to arrive at this site. Every combination of “behavioural science” is doing pretty well, but also “heterotypic continuity” – a very specific search term. Actually the most search terms only appeared once, but it would have been a too-long list to publish them here.

2009-10-18 to 2010-01-16

Pamela Smith is writing on an article about power. She is a powerful woman and it’s also her topic of expertise. Thanks Pam – I am really looking forward to reading your article!

Sanne Nauts just called me about an article we have written together (ready to be published – yeah!). But that’s not what you are gonna get to read (however thinking about it…that might also be interesting) – she really knows all about the backlash effect and what women on a job interview should and should not do.

Fred Hasselman is my personal hero of Nonlinear time series analysis & Dynamical modeling. Don’t worry – he says he has come up with an ingenious way to communicate these topics to people with an IQ lower than 150 (world première!).

Hubert de Mey did give the best lecture I have ever had the opportunity to listen to (about why Skinner got it right and Chomsky got it wrong – such a pitty that battle was lost a few decades ago). He is going to write about why it is really really important to have a theory when doing research (and why mapping brain regions to “something” – does not make sense).

I have also been talking to Daniel Fitzgerald about a possible contribution to this blog. I can tell you more about it in a couple of weeks, but it will most probably be a series of short video interviews on fMRI research and technology.

I am really excited that this blog is growing and attracting such high quality writers. However if you are reading this and you are a student (=like me) I would like to tell you this: Don’t be scared – we’re all a big family. Your contribution is just as valuable – so keep it coming!

Your pretty excited

Martin Metzmacher