Here’s How to Make Resolutions Stick, According to a Behavior Change Scientist

The Harry Potter audiobooks helped Katy Milkman make a foundational discovery about exercise behavior.

A Harvard graduate student at the time, she was struggling to work out. Once a varsity tennis player, she no longer had teammates and apractice routine to motivate her, and she faced seemingly endless claims on her time.

But she had Harry and Voldemort. “I came up with this hack,” she said, “which was that I only got to listen to audio novels when I was exercising. This was life-changing for me. I’d rush home to change clothes and go exercise, so I could listen to Harry Potter and get a little break from reality.”

That hack became the focus of her early research, which centered on “temptation bundling,” the process by which we develop and reinforce desirable habits by coupling something we enjoy — an exciting audiobook, for instance — with something we might otherwise skip, such as 30 minutes on the treadmill.

Since then, Milkman has become one of academia’s top experts in behavior change and how people can build or shed habits. A professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, she’s the author of the 2021 book “How to Change,” host of the podcast “Choiceology” and co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at Penn.

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