I’ve been thinking a lot about habits lately—a whole lot. Changes in just one or two simple habits can radically transform our personal lives, society, and how we relate to the natural world, hopefully for the better but sometimes for the worse. How many of us have made a resolution or started a new habit already this year involving nature, gardening, or land stewardship? Are you sticking with it or just getting around to thinking about starting it? I am here to say: “If it matters, don’t give up!” It can take time and practice through repetition to establish or change a habit, according to an accumulating body of fascinating research around the human psychology of habits. A little bit of knowledge about how habits work can go a long way toward establishing and maintaining new habits.
The habit loop
Habits are a big part of what powers us through the day without having to think through the details of each and every step in a routine action. From wake up routines to commuting patterns, we carry out a series of regular actions based on established and regularly repeated cues, routines, and rewards. This is known as the “habit loop,” as vividly described by Charles Duhigg in his best-selling book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.
Duhigg describes how habits, deeply encoded in one of the most evolutionarily ancient parts of our brains, the basal ganglia, relieve us of some of our daily cognitive load so that the more advanced parts of our brain can be devoted to higher order activities like reasoning, innovation, and decision-making. Habits can become ingrained fairly quickly if the chemical neurotransmitter reward in our brains is great enough, if the cues and rewards are strongly linked, or when routines are simplified and reinforced through regular repetition and behavior reinforcement.
Caption: An example of the habit loop illustrating part of my winter bluebird care routine. I spot a messy bird bath after a day of heavy use (visual cue), spring into action to scrub the basin and refill with clean water (routine), then enjoy the thrill of spotting a bluebird taking a drink of fresh, clean water the next morning (reward). My craving to see bluebirds in winter helps to power me through this frequent winter routine on freezing cold days. I suspect some endorphins are released in my brain every time I witness the scene of a bluebird drinking fresh water outside my window on a freezing cold winter day. Graphic: S. Small-Lorenz
Cue-routine-reward. Cue-routine-reward. A habit cycle powered by an incessant craving for a drop of neurotransmitter joy. Habits can become so routinely mechanized that they are difficult, yet not impossible, to change. It is entirely possible, though, to modify habits just through tweaking routines. It is also possible to create new habits through repetition, with clearly identified cues and rewards. To instill a new habit, it can help to establish the cue, the reward, and a simple sequence of action steps in between.
 Caption: We lose the valuable benefits of leaf litter when we bag it and send it off site. Photo: S. Small-Lorenz | It occurs to me that the way we typically manage residential landscapes in Maryland is driven largely by culturally reinforced habits that may not always represent the best possible stewardship of our surrounding ecosystems. Feed the lawn with bags of manufactured fertilizer. Water that lawn with a hose tapped into municipal or well water. Mow the lawn with a roaring gas-powered machine. Rake or blow the leaves to the curb, prune and trim, then bag it all up and send it off in trucks to be dealt with off-site. There are exceptions, but as I travel through suburban Maryland, this is what I often see, all in support of a preferred aesthetic of an emerald green carpet lawn dotted with a few ornamental trees or shrubs offering low habitat value, with a high cost to our watershed, ecosystems, and climate. A whole series of lifelong, deeply ingrained lawn care habits multiplied across acres and miles depleted of beneficial insects, butterflies, and birds. |
These habits also reflect missed opportunities to create better soil with higher soil organic matter that absorbs more stormwater where it falls, which would result in a more flood and drought-resilient watershed because soil with higher organic matter absorbs and retains more moisture. This, in turn, creates a foundation for a flourishing landscape that supports a wide array of biodiversity.
Keystone habits: Small actions that lead to big results
Then there are habits known as “keystone habits.” Like the architectural feature that supports an arch or keystone species that sustain an ecosystem, keystone habits are those habits that have the power to make big change throughout a system, by means of small actions. Small action = big change. It sounds so simple and gratifying, right? But is it realistic?
Duhigg gives examples of successful organizations and individuals who have identified and implemented keystone habits to achieve positive change and desired outcomes. These include daily habits drilled by Michael Phelps that helped him to break a world swimming record in an Olympic race, even while his goggles failed him, and former Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neill’s singular, unprecedented obsession with workplace safety that dramatically transformed its corporate culture and overall productivity, despite initial deep doubts and laments of indignant shareholders. Think about a life-altering habit that you have adopted, changed, or left behind. How hard was it but how much did it transform your life to eventually change that habit? Research has shown that cues and rewards of the habit loop can be difficult to rewire, but that it is also entirely possible to alter the routine between the cue and reward to achieve a more desired outcome.
My primary driving question these days is: “How do we change habits to improve habitat?”
As I review the many sustainable practices promoted through our Bay-Wise Living Landscapes Program, I am searching for those potential keystone habits that we should emphasize in 2025 that represent small actions for big changes. Small behavior changes across the landscape that, when added up, could have an outsized, beneficial impact on our watersheds and their ecosystems.
My 2025 keystone habit for Maryland
If I could foster one keystone habit change across Maryland in 2025 it would be this: “Recycle yard debris on-site.” This one habit actually captures a number of low-cost but beneficial practices, such as leaving leaf litter where it falls, leaf mulching, grass-cycling, and creating wildlife brush-piles from yard prunings. So, technically, we’re talking about habits within a habit.
Caption: Leaf litter (L) and a log under a layer of snow (R). Firefly larvae take shelter in leaf litter and logs throughout the winter. Yard “debris” has high habitat value, providing overwintering habitat for many beneficial insects and wildlife species. Photos: S. Small-Lorenz.
Managing our yard “debris” like leaves, grass, clippings, branches, stumps, snags, and prunings in ways that acknowledge their ecological value can improve soil and water, laying the groundwork for more climate-resilient landscapes and communities. Leaving leaves where they fall nourishes soil and vegetation, retains soil moisture, creates a substrate for native plants to establish, and provides an insulating ground layer of habitat for a wide array of species.
Leaf mulching and composting on-site are other sustainable options for managing leaf litter. Grass-cycling by leaving grass clippings on the lawn instead of bagging it up and sending it off-site provides a free, natural fertilizer with a much lower carbon footprint than trucking it off or applying manufactured fertilizer. Arranging downed limbs and pruned branches into brush piles provides shelter for songbirds and small mammals on extended snowy days like we’ve had this month and throughout the year and returns carbon and nutrients to the soil. (The main exception to this habit is to remove and properly dispose of invasive non-native plant materials, especially those that reproduce vegetatively or have gone to seed, to avoid spreading them.)
Photo: S. Small-Lorenz
How does habit change take root in the community?
However, pleading with people or even providing scientific evidence is not likely to make these habit changes take hold on a large enough scale to make a measurable impact across an entire watershed. Study upon study has shown that people are more likely to respond to a combination of seeing their neighbors do it and financial incentives over any amount of urging, pleading, pledging, or piles of scientific evidence (Bergquist et al. 2023). Could this be because neighbor cues and financial rewards better tap into this primal habit loop of cue-routine-reward? There is evidence that the answer to this question is “yes.”
Friction, cues, and incentives
In a fascinating review, Mazar et al. (2021) identified three successful strategies for motivating environmental behavior change through policy, and I believe these strategies are applicable to individuals and organizations as well. First is the strategic use of friction. Identify where friction can be reduced or increased to motivate habit change. Make it easy to implement the desired behavior (reduce friction) or a little more challenging to do it the old way (add friction). They cite a number of environmental behavior change studies, including one that made it easier to recycle by reducing steps to the recycling bin or a little more expensive to use disposable bags through token bag fees. This is a matter of simplifying the routine in the cue-routine-reward habit loop to lead to the desired behavior or complicating it to deter less desired behavior.
 Caption: A blue male Eastern Bluebird points his bill upwards as he drinks water from a bird bath during a snowfall. An adjacent inkberry provides winter cover for birds. Photo: S. Small-Lorenz. | Eastern Bluebirds are fussy and require water to drink alongside their breakfast of shelled sunflower seeds and mealworms, which requires maintaining a clean, heated bird bath throughout the winter. In my own practice of wintering bluebird care, I had to find a way to reduce “friction” to make it easier to regularly scrub our heated bird bath during a busy winter work week, especially when it gets dark before I come home from work, and we have shut off outdoor taps to avoid freezing and burst pipes. We finally installed a simple adhesive hook under the sink so that I could easily find my special scrubber, and I now keep the watering can near the front door for easy refills. I found that I could vastly reduce the hassle of refilling and scrubbing the birdbath simply by making it easy to reach for my tools, speeding up the process and frequency of scrubbing the bird bath and heater. I simplified the routine so that the visual cue – a messy birdbath – more easily resulted in the reward – waking up to my bluebirds and their flock mates drinking clear fresh water right outside my front window. |
“Re-setting the default” is a related strategy. A variety of studies have shown that setting the desired behavior as the default results in more rapid and widespread adoption of the more environmentally friendly option. For example, placing vegetarian meals at the top of a menu or adjusting office thermostat default settings resulted in significantly higher uptake of the desired pro-environment behaviors. In a different but related example, if I see salad at the start of a buffet meal, I will undoubtedly fill my plate with a bed of greens. If I encounter the dessert table first, you’d better believe I’m starting with the cheesecake!
Second is implementing clear cues to action – for example, studies showed that improving signage on cafeteria recycling bins using clear visual symbols right at the disposal site resulted in positive environmental behavior changes. I see this as directly tapping into the cue part of the cue-routine-reward habit loop.
Third is psychologically informed incentives that steer people toward desired environmental habits or away from detrimental habits. It turns out that people really like and value free things. Small fees, like the bag fee, have resulted in major societal behavior shifts by imposing a very small cost on the behavior of accepting a disposable bag. My local natural foods store takes it a step further by offering a wooden nickel token for each reusable bag a customer deploys, to donate to their choice of three local charities. There’s a double reward to accelerate that cue-routine-reward habit loop. Save the bag fee and donate it on the spot to a charity making a positive impact in the community.
Savor the intangible rewards
Rewards don’t always have to be financial, although small financial rewards or rebates have been shown to motivate environmental behavior change on a societal level. Rewards may come in the form of cost and time-savings or they may be as intangible as the smell of rich organic soil that you and your tree co-created, the endorphins released during the exercise of planting a common witch hazel shrub, the pleasure of seeing an Eastern Bluebird take a drink of fresh water from your clean, heated bird bath on a freezing winter day, or the joy of sighting that first firefly flicker of June.
Captions: Top: leaf litter, prunings, and standing woodland sunflower stems in the winter during a January snowfall event. Bottom: litter and songbird tracks in a light layer of snow. Photos: S. Small-Lorenz
If we can get comfortable with a slightly rougher and wilder aesthetic in our residential landscapes, the biodiversity and climate-resilience benefits could be immense. These new habits lend themselves to creativity – you can be as messy, manicured, or artistic as you would like with them yet still enjoy the benefits of rich soil, sustained soil moisture, pollinators, songbirds, hawks, and owls in your yard or park.
If you have resolved to become a better steward of nature this year, or even if you are just now thinking about trying your hand at some aspect of ecological landscaping, try putting your new knowledge of the habit loop to the test. If you’re looking for a place to start, join me in recycling your yard waste on-site in 2025. It may take a while to adjust and get the hang of this way of doing things, but once you get in the habit loop by identifying your cues, routines, and rewards, I predict that the workload becomes lighter, the cost savings will add up, and the many intangible rewards of being a better watershed steward right where you live will be noticeable and energizing.
References
Berguist, M. M. Thiel, M.H. Goldberg, S. van der Linden. 2023. Field interventions for climate change mitigation behaviors: A second-order meta-analysis. PNAS 120(13).
Duhigg, C. 2023. The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do in life and business. Penguin Random House. New York.
Mazar, A., G. Tomaino, Z. Carmon, W. Wood. 2021. Habits to save our habitat: Using the psychology of habits to promote sustainability. Behavioral Science & Policy, 7(2). Pp. 75-89.
By Stacy Small-Lorenz, Ph.D., Residential Landscape Ecology Specialist, University of Maryland Extension. Read more posts by Stacy.