Adjusting to the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States: The impact of disruptions on habits and changes in health behaviors.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic provides a naturalistic test of whether pandemic-related disruptions weaken habits and undermine behavior stability. We hypothesized that better capacity to effortfully guide behavior (self-regulation) would buffer this effect and be associated with behavior stability and development of new habits to accomplish daily behaviors. A cross-sectional study of 416 MTurk workers recruited in April 2020 (M_age = 34.60, SD = 11.51) indicated that pandemic-related disruptions generally exceeded people's capacity to effortfully modify their behavior. Self-regulation related to the development of new habits and to lower likelihood that work productivity decreased. Self-regulation also protected against the effect of disruption on the likelihood that substa

SUBMITTER: Andrade FC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9813642 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature