I first heard about How to Change when The Indicator podcast re-published their episode on “How to keep your New Year’s resolutions“. It sounded helpful and since I wanted to take advantage of the ‘fresh start’ effect that January provides, I decided to read it ASAP (it may or may not be important to note that I haven’t actually formed any resolutions this year. But I tend to have the best intentions of improving myself year-round so this book is appropriate at any time).

How to Change is a summary of various studies on behaviour change, written to be actionable and easy to implement. Thus, Milkman organises her chapters by the various impediments to change, and provides a chapter summary at the end of each chapter. Things that struck me while I was reading include:

• We tend to choose activities that give us immediate benefits over those that give us long-term benefits. We can harness this preference by “temptation bundling” – combining an activity that gives us immediate benefits with one we want to do that will give us long-term benefits
• Reminders work better when we can act of them immediately
• To form the “stickiest” habit possible, it’s actually good to build in flexibility, especially when it comes to timings (e.g. exercising 3 times a week when you can > exercising on Mon, Wed, Fri)
• We benefit more from giving advice than receiving advice

If you know roughly why you fail to carry out your new year’s resolutions or why you can’t seem to add exercise/healthy diet/reading more/etc to your life, this book will be really helpful. Even if you don’t know, it might be worth reading because Milkman gives quite a lot of examples of why we fail to change our behaviour and it’s possible you can find out why you fail and from there, what you can do.

At the end of the book, Milkman talks about a study she did with Angela Duckworth (author of Grit) about the long-term effects of all these behavioural change strategies. Long story short: if we fail to intentionally continue working on our behaviour, we’re apt to lapse into our old ways. And that’s why I think that it would be useful to keep a copy of notes from this book on hand, so that we can continually reference and try new strategies to keep the habit alive if one starts to fail. I can definitely see myself referring back to How to Change in the future.