Who doesn’t have some bad habits they’d like to conquer? Wouldn’t it be nice if those things that blemish an otherwise flawless person could just disappear without any effort on our part? Imagine waking up one morning to find that your character defects were wiped away while you slept!

Lawrence LeShan thought he could do exactly that. LeShan (1920-2020) was an American psychologist who pioneered research into subliminal conditioning for behavior modification.

He believed that repeated audio messages played while an individual is sleeping could help change bad habits. He tested the theory during the summer of 1942 on a group of summer campers.

When the audio device malfunctioned, LeShan sat in the room while the boys slept and repeatedly spoke the words, “My fingernails taste terribly bitter.”

The test subjects were 20 boys, ages 8 to 14, who suffered from habitual nail biting. They were divided into two groups: a test group and a control group. For 54 consecutive nights, as the boys of the test group slept, LeShan played a recording that repeated the phrase, “My fingernails taste terribly bitter.” The phrase was repeated 300 times each night.

There was one hiccup in the way things played out. Five weeks into the experiment, the machine that played the messages broke. Rather than let everything fall apart, LeShan sat in the room with the boys throughout the night and repeatedly spoke the words, “My fingernails taste terribly bitter.”

Curious about the results? LeShan determined that 40% of the boys in the test group stopped biting their nails. That’s a pretty good outcome.

It also appears that the thing that was most effective in changing the boys’ behavior wasn’t necessarily the content of the message, but the presence of the messenger after the machine malfunctioned. Some of the boys reported that they were inspired by the thought, “If I stop biting my nails, maybe the voice will go away.”

So what is that bad habit you are trying to break? You might consider taking a page from the LeShan method. Find the creepiest, most unnerving person you can find, and pay him or her to sit in your bedroom throughout the night, droning on about how you need to overcome your bad habit. There’s a pretty good chance that within a few days, you will be well-motivated to change your ways.

---