The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg [Book Summary #16]

Rating: 10/10

Duhigg is a master of his craft. He uses compelling narratives to illustrate his scientific-backed researched. I highly recommend this book.

My Notes

*Each chapter revolves around a central agreement: Habits can be changed, if we understand how they work.

Part 1: The Habits of Individuals

First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is a routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remember for the future. 

• Over time, this loop--cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward--becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges. 

The reason the discovery of this habit loop is so important is that it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit--unless you find new routines--the pattern will unfold automatically. 

• Simply understanding how habits work--learning the structure of the habit loop--makes them easier to control.

Habits, as much as memory and reason, are at the root of how we behave.

Craving is what makes cues and rewards work. Craving powers the habit loop.

1. Find a simple and obvious cue.
2. Clearly define the rewards.
3. Cultivate craving for reward base on cue.

To overpower a habit, we must recognize which craving is driving the behavior.

Countless studies have shown that a cue and a reward, on their own, aren't enough for a new habit to last. Only when your brain starts expecting the reward will it become automatic. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come. 

The Gold Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.

• How it works: Use the same cue. Provide the same reward. Change the routine.

To change an old habit, you must address an old craving. You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine. 

Asking people to describe what triggers their habitual behavior is called awareness training...it's the first step in habit reversal training.

"Once you're aware of how your habit works, once you recognize the cues and rewards, you're halfway to changing it."

Often, we don't really understand the cravings driving our behaviors until we look for them.

For some habits there's one other ingredient that's necessary: Belief. 

• Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior. 
• You don't have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better.
• "A community creates belief."
• For habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible.
• Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.

Unfortunately, there are no specific set of steps guaranteed to work for every person. 

Step 2: The Habits of Successful Organization

Keystone habits: The habits that matter most, ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.

Typically, people who exercise start eating better and become more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stress.

Families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence.

Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.

Small wins are part of how keystone habits create widespread changes. Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.

Grit is highly correlated with success.

Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.

• The best way to strengthen willpower is to make it into a habit.
• Self-discipline is a learnable skill. Moreover, it's a muscle, one that can be trained and gets taxed the harder it works.

Write out SMART goals to triple your chance of success.

• The more specific, the better.
• Special attention should be given to the inflection points, the points where you know it will be the most difficult and most tempting to quit.

When people are asked to do something that takes self-control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons--if they feel like it's a choice or something they enjoy because it helps someone else--it's much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they're just following orders, their willpower muscles get tired much faster.

Among the most important benefits of routines is that they create truces between potentially warring groups or individuals within an organization.

Truces are only durable when they create real justice. If a truce is unbalanced--if the peace isn't real--then routines often fail when they are needed most.

For an organization to work, leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced peace, and, paradoxically, make it absolutely clear who's in charge.

During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power. Crises are so valuable that sometimes it's worth stirring up a sense of looming catastrophe rather than letting it die down.

Wise executives seek out moments of crisis--or create the perception of crisis--and cultivate the sense that something must change, until everyone is finally ready to overhaul the patterns they live with every day.

There is evidence that a preference for things that sound "familiar" is a product of our neurology.

Listening habits exist because, without them, it would be impossible to determine what to listen to. Listening habits allow us to unconsciously separate important noises from those that can be ignored.

To sell a new habit wrap it in something people already know and like.

Part 3: The Habits of Societies

Many movements are rooted in a three-part process, which is why social habits have such influence in movements.

1. A movements starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances.
2. It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together.
3. It endures because a movement's leader gives participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership. 

When the strong ties of friendship and the weak ties of peer pressure merge, they create incredible momentum. That's when widespread social change can begin.

For an idea to grow beyond a community, it must become self-propelling. And the surest way to achieve that is to give people new habits that help them figure out where to go on their own.

Any habit can be changed, if you understand how they function.

• However, to modify a habit, you must decide to change it.
• You must consciously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits' routines, and find alternatives.
• You must know you have control and be self-conscious enough to use it.

Once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom--and the responsibility--to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp, and the only option left is to get to work.

The way we habitually think of our surroundings and ourselves create the worlds that each of us inhabit.

Afterward

Two particular characteristics of successful dieters:

1. Eat breakfast everyday [Tim Ferriss, in the 4-Hour Body, suggests doing so within the first 30 minutes of waking up, thus further automating this habit.]
2. Weigh one's self every day. 

No matter how strong our willpower, we're guaranteed to fall back into our old ways once in awhile. But if we plan for those relapses--if we take steps to make sure those slips don't become a habit--it's easier to get back on track.

Habits emerge when patterns are predictable--when our brains learn to crave a specific reward at a specific moment. When rewards defy prediction, when we fall off the wagon in ways that confound expectations, we take some of the power out of the pattern. It's a little bit harder for the habit loop to start.

Every habit abides by a set of rules, and when you understand those codes you gain influence over them. Any habit can be changed.

Appendix        

Framework for changing a habit:

• Identify the routine.
• Experiment with rewards.
• Isolate the cue.
• Have a plan.