New on OUTLIERS PSYCHOLOGY and WRITING: Create Productive Habits

Psychology and Writing: Create Productive Habits

By Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D.

Your brain will support habits that facilitate your writing; you just have to start them.

When we repeat behaviors, we create and strengthen neural pathways related to these behaviors. I researched this for Snap!, a book about maximizing your aha! moments. Habits are important! Some assist our momentum, but some can thwart it.

Here’s evidence for the former. Researchers at London’s University College surmised that London-based cabbies must have an enhanced working memory of locations: their training ran for two years, and they had to prove they could locate thousands of sites. Compared to a control group, their Memory center, the hippocampus, was more developed. The longer they’d been on the job, the larger its size.

These are “body memories.” They support skills. We can apply this to creativity.  

Body memories are based in the brain’s information networks. This is also called embodied biological intelligence or grounded cognition. We now believe that many cognitive processes arise from interactions among the various brain systems. How we physically and emotionally process the world, within the framework of our cognitive maps, guides our decisions, perceptions, interpretations, and behavior.

Now for the part that you can control: The cab driver research shows that training and rehearsal will encode and reinforce body memories.

Most of us know what it’s like to change a long-time habit. It’s tough! We continue to feel as if we should do what we used to do. We’re drawn to it, and not just because it’s familiar. It’s actually anchored in our physiology.

For example, I moved to a first floor from a second-floor office I’d occupied for two years. Whenever I went up to the second floor, I automatically started toward my former office. My body had absorbed the environmental signals to direct me to where my memories expected me to go. It took a while for them to fade. Our bodies “know.” They hold to the inner routes we’ve developed.  

Researchers at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee recruited forty people who showed a typing proficiency of at least 40 words per minute with 90 percent accuracy, using all of their fingers (not hunt-and-peck). They were assigned to a machine that, unbeknownst to them, introduced errors into six percent of the typed words that ended up on the screen. At the same time, the program surreptitiously corrected half of the typists’ actual errors.

The subjects didn’t wonder why a word they’d typed incorrectly had appeared correctly, but their fingers had noticed: after hitting the wrong key, a typist’s speed slowed slightly, even if the error was fixed before the typist saw it. Why? Because the brain’s motor signal had registered it. The fingers “knew” the error.

So, our brains encode our habits. To use this effectively, you need to develop and reinforce specific activities. If you want to feel inspired to write at a certain time, for instance, you must sit down and write at this time each day about three weeks in a row. No breaks, no alterations. After that, it will feel natural. If you want to write at least one uninterrupted hour each day (or two or six), you must do it regularly for several weeks. If you want to develop the habit of listening to your work played back to you, then you need to do this each day. For longer works, do it in chunks.

I’ve found that walking assists me, so before I walk, I work on something, then go. Often, my brain is still attuned to the work, and it produces some images or ideas.

If you’ve found some habits to successfully facilitate your creativity, keep doing them. If you have some habits the thwart you, replace them with those that support you.

Once you develop productive habits and stay with them consistently, they will become integrated into your body and your life. Your brain picks up and reinforces your signals to make the habits a natural routine.

Dr. Katherine Ramsland teaches forensic psychology and behavioral criminology in the graduate program at DeSales University. She has appeared as an expert on more than 250 crime documentaries and was an executive producer on Murder House Flip and A&E’s Confession of a Serial killer: BTK. The author of more than 1,800 articles and 73 books, including Confession of a Serial Killer, The Serial Killer’s Apprentice and How to Catch a Killer, she pens a regular blog for Psychology Today. She has also written a fiction series based on a female forensic psychologist who consults on death investigations. Dead-Handed is her most recent book.