Stress Can Boost Good Habits Too

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 led by 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.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/05/27/stress-can-lead-to-good-habits-too/#ixzz2Ub1Jm25U