by Adam Alter
To understand why abstinence doesn’t work, try this simple exercise: For the next thirty seconds, do your best to avoid thinking about chocolate ice cream. Every time your mind’s eye conjures the forbidden dessert, wiggle your index finger. If you’re like me—and practically everyone else—you’ll wiggle your finger at least once or twice. The problem is baked into the task: how can you know whether you’re thinking about chocolate ice cream unless you repeatedly compare your thoughts to the one thought you’re not allowed to have? You have to think about chocolate ice cream to know whether you were just thinking about chocolate ice cream a second ago. Now substitute chocolate ice cream for shopping, checking your email, checking Facebook, playing a video game, or whatever vice you’re trying to suppress, and you’ll see the problem.
A psychologist named Dan Wegner first described this puzzle in the late 1980s. The problem, Wegner saw, was that suppression is unfocused. You know what to avoid, but not what to do with your mind instead. When Wegner asked people to ring a bell every time they thought about a forbidden white bear, their bells dinged constantly. But when he told them it might help to think about a red Volkswagen instead, their bells rang half as often. Suppression alone doesn’t work—but suppression paired with distraction works pretty well. And what’s more, when they were given permission to think about a white bear later, those who had struggled to suppress their thoughts earlier were consumed with the image of the white bear. It was all they could conjure. Meanwhile, the people who were offered a distraction in the form of the red car thought of the white bear occasionally—but they had plenty of other thoughts as well. Suppression isn’t just unsuccessful in the short run; as Freud expected, it also backfires in the long run.
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The key to overcoming addictive behaviors, then, is to replace them with something else. That’s the logic behind nicotine gum, which serves as a bridge between smoking and quitting. One of the things that smokers miss about cigarettes is the comforting sensation of having the cigarette balanced between their lips—a signal that nicotine will arrive shortly. That sensation continues to give comfort for a while after the smoker quits, which is why you can spot a recent non-smoker by his trail of chewed-on ballpoint pens. Nicotine gum is an effective bridge in part because it administers declining doses of nicotine, but also because it’s an oral distraction.
Distraction works just as well if you’re trying to overcome a behavioral addiction—if not more so, because you aren’t also grappling with substance withdrawal. Take the case of nail-biting. Millions of people bite their nails, and many of those people try a range of remedies that just don’t stick. Some paint their nails with a foul-tasting polish, and others swear they’ll overcome the habit by willpower alone. The problem with both approaches is that they don’t offer a replacement behavior. You might avoid biting your nails because they taste terrible in the short run, but you’re really just forcing yourself to suppress the nail-biting urge. We know that suppression doesn’t work, so as soon as you stop painting your nails you’ll go back to biting them as much if not more than you did before you tried to quit. The urge is so strong in some people that they just go on biting right through the nail polish, forming an oddly positive association between the horrible taste and the relief of satisfying the urge.
A distraction, on the other hand, works quite well. Some people keep a stress ball or a key chain or a small puzzle nearby, so their hands are redirected elsewhere whenever they have the urge to bite. In his book, The Power of Habit, the writer Charles Duhigg described this form of habit change as the Golden Rule. According to the Golden Rule, habits consist of three parts: a cue (whatever prompts the behavior); a routine (the behavior itself); and a reward (the payoff that trains our brains to repeat the habit in the future). The best way to overcome a bad habit or an addiction is to keep the cue and the reward consistent while changing the routine—by replacing the original behavior with a distraction. For nail-biters, the cue might be the fidgeting that goes on just before they begin chewing—a subtle search for rough nail-ends that can be smoothed by chewing. Instead of chewing at that point, they might adopt the new routine of playing with a stress ball. And finally, since the reward might be the sense of completeness that comes from chewing the rough nail ends, the nail-biter might complete ten squeezes of the stress ball. So the cue and the reward stay the same, but the routine changes from nail-biting to squeezing the stress ball ten times.
An innovation agency called The Company of Others seems to understand the value of replacing bad routines with good. The agency explains on its website that “we live and think ahead of the trend,” and one of those trends is the rise of smartphone addiction. In 2014, The Company of Others launched a product called Realism. Billed as “the smart device for the good of humanity,” Realism was designed to treat smartphone addiction. The simple device is an attractive plastic frame that looks like a smartphone without a screen. On one level it’s a wry critique of how smartphones remove us from the here and now. Instead of looking at a screen, you could look through a screen-sized frame at what’s actually in front of you. And that’s how many people respond when they first encounter the device. In a video on the product site, one man says, “Smart devices do get in the way of my relationships with my wife, children, and friends.” A woman says, “We don’t need to Instagram about our dessert. Nobody cares about our cheesecake.”
On a deeper level, though, Realism is to smartphone addicts what nicotine gum is to smokers, and what stress balls are to nail-biters. It’s a fitting replacement for a genuine smartphone, because it’s roughly the same size, it fits in your pocket, and it gives you many of the same physical feedback cues that come from holding and using a smartphone. What makes Realism appealing is that it obeys the Golden Rule: the cue that leads you to pull out your phone prompts you to pull out the plastic frame instead, which gives you many of the same physical reward cues since it looks and feels a lot like a phone. The cue and reward are intact, but the routine of losing yourself in your smartphone is replaced by a better alternative.
Though the Golden Rule is a useful guide, different addictions demand different routine overrides. What works for people who can’t stop checking their emails over lunch may not work for WoW addicts. The key is to work out what made the original addiction rewarding. Sometimes the same addictive behavior can be driven by very different needs. When Isaac Vaisberg reflected on his WoW addiction, he saw that interacting with other players soothed his loneliness. So Vaisberg overcame his addiction, in the long run, by cultivating a vibrant social life and taking on a new job that brought him meaningful extended relationships. Vaisberg was an impressive athlete, so he wasn’t particularly attracted to the “crush your enemies” aspect of WoW.
Other WoW addicts, particularly gamers from poorer or working-class backgrounds, are attracted to the element of fantasy that allows them to “travel” to new places they might never otherwise see. Still others are bullied at school, so for them the addiction fills the need for revenge or for physical domination. (Many of these motives aren’t psychologically healthy; there’s also value in seeing a therapist to address their underlying causes.) Each underlying motive implies a different solution. Once you understand why each addict plays for hours on end, you can suggest a new routine that satisfies his underlying motive. The bullied gamer might benefit from martial arts classes; the frustrated traveler from reading exotic books and watching documentaries; and the lonely gamer from cultivating new social ties. Even if the solution doesn’t come easily, the first step is understanding why the addiction was rewarding in the first place, and which psychological needs it was frustrating in the process.
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Building a new habit is difficult. We know this because the same people seem to make the same resolutions every January. According to one study, roughly half of all Americans make New Year’s resolutions—most of them to lose weight, exercise more often, or stop smoking. Three quarters s
tick to their resolutions through January, but by June roughly half report failing. By the following December most are back making the same resolution they made a year earlier.
One major challenge is that a habit doesn’t become routine for weeks or even months. During that fragile early period, you have to be vigilant to protect whatever gains you’ve made. This is tricky because habit formation takes longer for some people than for others. There isn’t a magic number. Several years ago, four English psychologists tracked habit formation in the real world. They asked a group of university students to spend twelve weeks pursuing a new habit in exchange for £30. At the first meeting, each student chose a new healthy eating, drinking, or exercise behavior that might follow a daily cue. For example, some chose to eat an apple with lunch; others running fifteen minutes in the hour before dinner. The students carried out the same behavior every day for eighty-four days, and logged in daily to report whether and how automatically they completed the action.
On average, the students formed habits after sixty-six days. But that average hides how much that number varied. One student took just eighteen days to cement his habit, while the authors calculated that another would need 254 days. Few of the habits were very demanding, and they weren’t designed to override existing bad habits, so these numbers are lower than they might be among addicts who are trying to shed chronic addictions. Even if sixty-six days is a reasonable estimate, that’s still a long time to maintain a new habit in place of an entrenched, deeply rewarding behavior.
There is one subtle psychological lever that seems to hasten habit formation: the language you use to describe your behavior. Suppose you were trying to avoid using Facebook. Each time you’re tempted, you can either tell yourself “I can’t use Facebook,” or you can tell yourself “I don’t use Facebook.” They sound similar, and the difference may seem trivial, but it isn’t. “I can’t” wrests control from you and gives it to an unnamed outside agent. It’s disempowering. You’re the child in an invisible relationship, forced not to do something you’d like to do, and, like children, many people are drawn to whatever they’re not allowed to do. In contrast, “I don’t” is an empowering declaration that this isn’t something you do. It gives the power to you and signals that you’re a particular kind of person—the kind of person who, on principle, doesn’t use Facebook.
We know this works because two consumer behavior researchers, Vanessa Patrick and Henrik Hagtvedt, ran an experiment using the technique. They asked a group of women to think of a meaningful long-term health goal, like exercising three times a week or eating healthier food. The researchers explained that the women would face challenges on their quest to live healthier lives, and that they should deal with temptation with self-talk. Faced with the prospect of exercising after a long day of work, for example, one group was told to say, “I can’t miss my workouts,” while the other was told to say, “I don’t miss my workouts.” After ten days the women returned to the lab and reported on their progress. Just 10 percent of the women persisted with their goal when they were told to say “I can’t,” whereas a full 80 percent persisted when they said, “I don’t.” Their language empowered them rather than implying they were in the grip of an external force beyond their control. This study tracked behavior across just ten days, so it’s difficult to draw strong conclusions. The right words seem to help, but overturning addiction is certainly more complicated than saying “I don’t” whenever you’re tempted to regress.
Even when helpful new habits override harmful old ones, there’s a chance they’ll become just as addictive. That was the case for Civil War veteran Robert Pemberton, who tried and failed to treat his morphine addiction with cocaine. The goal, in the long run, is to be free of bad habits altogether—not to replace one bad habit with another. For all of distraction’s benefits, it’s a short-term solution that rarely eliminates addiction on its own. The missing piece in the treatment puzzle is to redesign your environment so temptations are as close to absent as possible. That’s the idea behind the technique of behavioral architecture.
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How far are you from your phone right now? Can you reach it without moving your feet? And, when you sleep, can you reach your phone from your bed? If you’re like many people, this is the first time you’ve considered those questions, and your answer to one or both will be “yes.” Your phone’s location may seem trivial—the sort of thing you’d never bother to consider in the midst of your busy life—but it’s a vivid illustration of the power of behavioral architecture. Like an architect who designs a building, you consciously or unconsciously design the space that surrounds you. If your phone is nearby, you’re far more likely to reach for it throughout the day. Worse, you’re also more likely to disrupt your sleep if you keep your phone by your bed. Nobody knows this better than reSTART’s Cosette Rae, whose preference for the clunky 1990s game Myst I mentioned earlier in the book. “I ‘purposely’ lose my phone during the day,” Rae told me when I visited reSTART. “I have to have a smartphone for work, but I refuse to turn on the ringer.” I struggled to reach Rae for months before I finally caught her on her office phone at reSTART. She apologized and told me that was the only way she could manage her smartphone addiction.
Behavioral architecture acknowledges that you can’t escape temptation completely. You can’t stop using your phone altogether, but you can aim to use it less often. You can’t avoid checking email, but life should be compartmentalized so refreshing your email account isn’t always an option. There’s a time for work and tech, and another for unencumbered vacations and social interactions. Many of the tools that drive our addictions are deeply invasive, so we’re forced to be vigilant. Smartphones are ubiquitous; if you own wearable tech, it doesn’t leave your body while you’re awake (and sometimes while you’re asleep as well). Work comes home with you in the form of smartphones, tablets, and laptops, and shopping is always an option. It’s tempting to sleep with your smartphone nearby “just in case,” and recent studies have shown that merely looking at an illuminated screen shortly before bed severely hampers your ability to sleep deeply. These devices are engineered to remain with us at all times—that’s one of their key selling points—so it’s easy to allow them to pierce the boundaries between the tech-on and tech-off components of our lives.
The first principle of behavioral architecture, then, is very simple: whatever’s nearby will have a bigger impact on your mental life than whatever is farther away. Surround yourself with temptation and you’ll be tempted; remove temptation from arm’s reach and you’ll find hidden reserves of willpower. Proximity is so powerful that it even drives which strangers you’ll befriend.
When World War II ended, universities struggled to cope with record enrollments. Like many universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a series of new housing developments for returning servicemen and their young families. One of those developments was named Westgate West. The buildings doubled as the research lab for three of the greatest social scientists of the twentieth century and would come to reframe the way we think about behavioral architecture.
In the late 1940s, psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and sociologist Kurt Back began to wonder how friendships form. Why do some strangers build lasting friendships, while others struggle to get past basic platitudes? Some experts, including Sigmund Freud, explained that friendship formation could be traced to infancy, where children acquired the values, beliefs, and attitudes that would bind or separate them later in life. But Festinger, Schachter, and Back pursued a different theory.
The researchers believed that physical space was the key to friendship formation; that “friendships are likely to develop on the basis of brief and passive contacts made going to and from home or walking about the neighborhood.” In their view, it wasn’t so much that people with similar attitudes became friends, but rather that people who passed each other during the day tended to become friends and so came to adopt s
imilar attitudes over time.
Festinger and his colleagues approached the students some months after they had moved into Westgate West, and asked them to list their three closest friends. The results were fascinating—and they had very little to do with values, beliefs, and attitudes. Forty-two percent of the responses were direct neighbors, so the resident of apartment 7 was quite likely to list the residents of apartments 6 and 8 as friends—and less likely to list the residents of apartments 9 and 10. Even more striking, the lucky residents of apartments 1 and 5 turned out to be the most popular, not because they happened to be kinder or more interesting, but because they happened to live at the bottom of the staircase that their upstairs neighbors were forced to use to reach the building’s second floor. Some of these accidental interactions fizzled, of course, but in contrast to the isolated residents of apartments 2, 3, and 4, those in apartments 1 and 5 had a better chance of meeting one or two kindred spirits.
Just as we tend to befriend strangers who are nearby, we’re also drawn to whatever temptation happens to be within arm’s reach. Many remedies for behavioral addiction involve creating psychological or physical distance between the user and the behavioral trigger. A Dutch design studio called Heldergroen has rigged its office furniture to automatically rise to the ceiling at six o’clock every evening. The desks, tables, and computers are connected to strong steel cables that wind upward through a pulley system driven by a powerful motor. After six, the space becomes a yoga studio or a dance floor—or any other activity that thrives on a blank floor plan. German car manufacturer Daimler has a similar email management policy. The company’s one hundred thousand employees can set incoming emails to delete automatically when they’re on vacation. A so-called mail on holiday assistant automatically emails the sender to explain that the email wasn’t delivered, and suggests another Daimler employee who will step in if the email is urgent. Workers come back from their vacations to an inbox that looks exactly as it did when they left several weeks ago.
