研究所、轉學考(插大)、學士後-英文題庫下載題庫

        Under stress, we all tend to seek comfort – sometimes in not-so-healthy ways – but a new study suggests that challenging experiences are as likely to promote good habits as they are to support bad ones. 

        In several different experiments, researchers including Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, found that under various types of stress, all types of habits got stronger – not just the ones that cause trouble. 

        “When your willpower is low and you have little motivational energy, you are likely to fall back into old, bad habits of eating too much and not exercising – but only if those are, in fact, your habits,” says Wood. “Our novel finding is that people fall back into good habits in just the same way.” The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

        Stress depletes willpower; indeed, the brain is wired so that extreme stress actually shuts down the higher regions involved in long-term planning and thoughtful consideration. That’s because those functions are superfluous when survival is at stake. When under threat, the brain relies on faster, more primitive regions whose behavior is largely automatic under such circumstances. Automatic doesn’t mean built-in; however, many of our automatic behaviors, like riding a bike or eating French fries when feeling anxious, become automatic through repetition.