Module 9 · Consistency & maintenance · Research-supported

When life changes

New job, new baby, illness, a move — adapting habits to a new season.

6 min read · Level: Intermediate · Free — no account needed to read

The problem it solves

What happens to your habits when your life changes shape?

The concept

A new job, a new baby, a move, an illness, caring for someone — big changes reshape your days, and habits built for the old shape often stop fitting. That’s a setback in the plan, not in you.

Adaptation means redesigning habits for the new context: new cues, new sizes, sometimes new habits entirely. Some habits will need to pause for a season; some may be let go.

Life changes are also windows. Old cues are gone, so it can be a good time to build habits you’ve wanted for a while.

Why it matters

Research on changing circumstances shows old habits are disrupted when context changes, and a field study found people who had just moved responded more to a behaviour-change intervention.

Research-supported: Good studies support it, but there are fewer of them, the effects are modest, or they come from a narrow set of situations.

See it happen

Since becoming a parent, Sam has abandoned all his old habits and feels he has “lost himself”.

The ordinary first approach

His habits are gone until the baby is older.

With the idea

He picks one habit that matters most and redesigns it — a 10-minute walk with the pram after the morning feed.

What changed

He adapted one habit to the new life instead of waiting for the old one to return.

Easy to get wrong

• Holding new-life days to old-life habit sizes.
• Trying to keep every old habit through a big change.
• Waiting for things to “go back to normal” before adapting.

Try it now: Redesign for this season

1. Name the change in your life.
2. Pick the one habit that matters most through it.
3. Redesign its cue and size for how your days look now.

Apply it to one of your habits

For one of your habits, how would it need to change to fit your life as it is now?

Reflect

• Which habits from an old season of your life would you like back?

Go deeper — evidence & sources

• Wood, Tam & Witt (2005). Changing circumstances, disrupting habits. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.88.6.918
• Verplanken & Roy (2016). Empowering interventions to promote sustainable lifestyles: Testing the habit discontinuity hypothesis in a field experiment. Journal of Environmental Psychology. doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.11.008