Lesson 11
When Life Changes Your Routine
Use a house move, a new job or another big change to leave old habits behind and set up new ones on purpose.
A move breaks the cues
Priya ran along the canal three evenings a week for two years. Two weeks after moving from a flat in Leeds to a house in Bristol for a new job, she hasn’t run once, and she wants to as much as ever.
Nothing has happened to her motivation. What went was the cue: her run started when she walked home along the towpath, saw the water and went up to change. In Bristol she drives home a different way, to a street with no towpath. Wendy Wood and colleagues saw the same thing when students moved to a new university: habits such as exercising and reading the paper carried on mainly where some part of the old setting came with them (2005). A move takes the good habits along with the bad.