Vanessa Hill

And for a lot of people, they want to act more in line with their intentions, but they feel like they just can't, right?

And what the research suggests is that

Forming these habits, so kind of closing that intention behavior gap, is particularly hard in the evening.

It is harder to form habits in the evening than it is in the morning.

In the morning, we are kind of creatures of habit.

It's easier to kind of get up and do things and have a set routine.

By the time it gets to the end of the day, we have used our self-control all throughout the day.

We have different hormonal changes than what we have in the morning.

There's this kind of messy chaos that exists in our day that at the end of the day, we don't want to make decisions anymore.

We don't really want to do what we know is probably good for us and what we intended to do in the morning.

And in a really interesting way, this has come through in different studies.

And some of my studies on bedtime procrastination, we sent people a text message as soon as they wake up and we've asked them like, hey, what time are you planning on going to bed tonight?

They'll tell us a time.

And then there's always a discrepancy there.

They're going to bed later than their intended time.

In other studies on habit, researchers have asked people to form a new habit, in this case, a stretching habit in this one study.

And they've split people into two groups, morning people and evening people.

And the morning people in this one study were able to form the habit much sooner than the evening people.

It is just hard to form habits in the evening and to act differently.

in line with our intentions.