The Power of Habit explores the science behind habit creation and change, including tips and advice on how to change our habits and make them stick.
Takeaways
- Habits are around 40% of your life. They have 3 parts: cue, routine, and reward
- You can change your habits more easily by just changing the action part: the routine
Full Summary
About the Author:
Although Charles Duhigg is a reporter rather than a scientist, he makes a good job here at condensing lots of science in a way that is accessible and practical.
You Change When You Must Change
Charles Duhigg opens the book with the example of Lisa. Lisa changed her smoking habit when she felt she had to change to accomplish her goals.
Lisa still has powerful cravings to overeat when she sees images of food, but there’s new brain activity in what’s supposedly the region of inhibition and self-control.
Charles Duhigg says habits can be changed -if we understand how they work.
And that’s what The Power of Habit sets out to do.
The Habit Loop – How Habits Work
Charles Duhigg explains that habits emerge because the brain looks for ways to save effort.
The Basal Ganglia stores habits for us, and once stored, we don’t need to use the rational part of the brain to execute.
We just access our habits in “automated mode”, and it all goes very quickly.
The process of making a routine into a habit is called “chunking”.
The brain activity spikes at the beginning of a habit, when it’s looking for a cue. And spikes again at the end, when a reward is usually present.
In between spikes, the brain relinquishes control of the habit. Habits are automated, but they are not destiny. They can be changed, ignored, or replaced.
The habit then consists of three steps:
- Cue: a trigger telling the brain to go into automatic mode. Depending on the trigger the brain selects a specific routine
- Routine: physical, mental, or emotional behavior that follows automatically
- Reward: positive result telling our brain if this loop is worth memorizing
Companies (Ab)Using Habits
The author explains how McDonald’s uses the power of habit by standardizing everything.
The shop architecture, the food, and what the employees say.
All are designed to deliver the exact same feeling anytime, anywhere.
Habits are delicate, though, and even small shifts can change them. If the place closes, for example, the family can start having dinner at home.
Also, read:
How to Change Habits
To change it you must:
- Identify your routine: What is it that you want to change
- Experiment With Rewards: the reward is often far from obvious. Change the “routine” part as a test and see which works. For example, if you’re eating junk food, try eating an apple. If you still crave junk food, hunger wasn’t the issue. Try coffee. If you’re still hungry, maybe you needed a break. Try chatting with friends or exercising. Write down your results and keep trying until you identify the right cue driving your habits
- Find the Cue: Once you isolate which reward works, find out what was the cue. They’re often related to a location, a time, a person, an emotional state, or a preceding action. Keeping a log of the habit you want to change will allow you to isolate your cue
- Have a Plan: Prepare a plan on what you will do once the cue comes up and stick to it
The Golden Rule of Habit Change
It’s much easier to change behavior if the cue and reward stay the same. If there’s something familiar at the beginning and at the end, changing what really matters, the routine, becomes much easier.
Example: Stopping Nail Biting
Any time the patient felt the need to bite her fingers, she was advised to grab a pen or put her hands in her pockets.
Then she should search for something to provide quick physical stimulation, such as rubbing her arms.
The cues and reward should stay the same, just the routine changed.
And little by little she replaced the old habit with the new one.
Belief: The Key Ingredient for Changing
Research shows that alcoholics with faith and belief in God stayed sober the most. It wasn’t a specific faith in God that helped though, but more a general belief they could change.
You need to believe things will get better.
Small wins are particularly useful in that realm. Small wins galvanize us and show us that bigger wins are possible, as long as we stay constant.
Plan For Inflection Points
The author says that patients in rehab who had written plans and a plan to cope with pain to get healthy quicker did so twice as fast as those without plans.
It’s because they had plans and solutions in advance to deal with what Duhigg calls “inflection points”. Inflection points are those points when pain, emotions, or fatigue hit us.
And the patients who healed quickest had cues and rewards to deal with inflection points (for example: walking to the bus stop and saying hi to their wives).
The author says that’s what Starbucks does with its employees: it provides them with routines to use when they hit an inflection point and a customer screams or is rude.
Use The Familiar to Adopt the Unfamiliar
We often like familiar songs even when we say we don’t. People say they don’t like a specific popular song or artist, but they don’t change the station the way they do with a new song.
“Hey Ya!” by Outkast was slated to be a success by the producer. And yet it was failing on the radio because it didn’t resemble previous songs. The trick is to get people hooked on Hey Ya and then want to sandwich it between two other popular and familiar songs. Blending the unoriginal with the original.
Similarly, there’s a strong tendency to stick to what we’ve always eaten. To change the eating habits of soldiers, the army changed the way it delivered a certain type of meat to make it look as if it were the same type of meat they had always eaten. And the troops just went along with it.
Review
The Power of Habit is a good, popular, and beginner-friendly book on understanding habits and routines.
It is not as actionable as the later “Atomic Habits“. And I would have preferred less storytelling and more scientific sources. The chapter on willpower relies heavily on Baumeister’s “ego depletion” model (the idea that willpower is a physical battery that runs out). But subsequent large-scale replication attempts (e.g., Hagger et al., 2016) failed to replicate ego depletion.
That said, it remains a strong book for understanding and changing habits.
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