To stop eating chips, change your couch

"Dr. Wood studied exercise habits among students who transferred from one college to another. When locations remained stable - the new school had an outdoor track just like the old school, for example - students continued running regularly. But if the tracks were too different, the exercise tapered off, on average. In another experiment, conducted by researchers studying smokers, those wanting to quit were more than twice as successful if they started kicking the habit while on vacation, when surrounded by unfamiliar people and places.

""Habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods," said Dr. Wood, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. "If you regularly eat chips while sitting on the couch, after a while, seeing the couch will automatically prompt you to reach for the Doritos. These associations are sometimes so strong that you have to replace the couch with a wooden chair for a diet to succeed."

"The researchers at P.& G. realized that these types of findings had enormous implications for selling Febreze. Because bad smells occurred too infrequently for a Febreze habit to form, marketers started looking for more regular cues on which they could capitalize."

Read on at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/business/13habit.html?pagewanted=4&ei=5087&em&en=8521c49a071adef5&ex=1216094400