Maintaining habitual physical activity by overcoming disruptive competing actions: mechanisms and interventions

Habits are mental representations of associations between actions and contextual contingencies. Habit formation can be efficacious in promoting health behavior maintenance, including for highly complex behaviors such as physical activity. Changes in circumstances (e.g., job transitions, moving home) or the advent of disruptive events (e.g., work-related or personal responsibilities) can lead to habit discontinuity by eliminating the contextual contingencies associated with the behavior. Recently, habit theorists have distinguished between preparation or instigation and execution habits, with preparation or instigation habits proposed as central to the development and maintenance of complex habitual behaviors. Discontinuity for complex habitual behaviors may entail disruption of preparation, instigation, or execution habits making such behaviors highly vulnerable to disruption and discontinuity. We propose that the advent of events such as increased work demands or personal responsibilities (e.g., job demands or personal circumstances such as caregiving) and competing highly rewarding activities (e.g., technology-mediated screen activities such as using smartphone apps and games) have high potential to disrupt preparation and instigation habits for complex behaviors. We outline the mechanisms involved and propose several strategies that may be employed to minimize disruption and discontinuity of complex habitual behaviors using physical activity as an illustration. We identify reaffirming original goals, self-monitoring, and planning strategies as potentially efficacious means to minimize the potential for events and competing activities to disrupt physical activity preparation and instigation habits. We call for future research to investigate the efficacy of these strategies in managing disruptive events and promote maintenance of habitual physical activity habit maintenance.