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Concept

Context Cues

Context cues are the features of a place, time or situation that trigger a habit automatically, which is why a behaviour that vanished on holiday returns the moment you are back in the old room.

Wendy Wood's research in Good Habits, Bad Habits shows that habits are bound to their context far more tightly than to intention: the same sofa, the same hour, the same colleague's voice fire the same routine without a decision. That is why moving house, changing jobs or a long trip often breaks habits, good and bad, and why the same person behaves differently in different rooms. The practical lesson runs both ways: keep the good cues stable, and change the context of the habits you want to lose. What people get wrong is trying to hold a habit steady while its cues keep changing, or expecting a bad habit to stay gone when they return to the place that fires it.

A real-life example

Zeynep reads every night for the month she is in her sister's flat, where the book lies on the bedside table and the television is in another room. Back home, the phone is on the table and the reading stops. She copies the context: book on the table, phone in the kitchen. The habit returns within days.

How to use it

  1. 1Fix the cue for a habit you want: same place, same time, same first step, every day.
  2. 2For a habit you want to lose, change the context rather than the intention: a different chair, route or hour.
  3. 3Use transitions on purpose: a new home, job or season is the easiest moment to install or drop a habit.