The Power of Habit : Summary

Most of the decisions that we take or activities that we do, on a daily basis are not a result of deliberate thought. These are the result of habits that we have built over time. We realize some of these decisions/activities as habits but often carry out many activities in auto-pilot mode. This is good as it frees our mind to do other things. The flip side is that we do not seem to be in control of the actions and hence feel powerless.

This book by Charles Duhigg goes in to various details about habit, i.e. how do habits arise ? what are the triggers to our habits ? why is it difficult to change some of our habits ? what should be done to change our habits. In this post, I will try to briefly summarize the contents of the book.

The Habit Loop

The author explains the basic framework of any habit formation via what he calls,“The Habit Loop”. In order to explain this framework, the reader is taken through a few specific cases that triggered an active research in this area. There have been many recent pop-science books that have mentioned H.M, a unique patient in the medical case history. What’s unique about H.M is that his hippocampus was removed surgically to avoid frequent convulsions. This created a testbed for several experiments relating to memory as H.M forgot anything he learnt in a few seconds.

The author mentions one such patient,Eugene Pauly, whose medical condition has led to an explosion of habit formation research. Eugene Pauly like H.M could not remember any new learnings beyond a few seconds. His ability to store anything new was severely damaged. However there was one thing peculiar about him. He was able to do certain activities effortlessly. The activities that were outcomes of past habits were all intact. In fact the most surprising aspect of this patient that eventually lead to a ton of research is that, Eugene Pauly was able to learn new habits, despite not being able to commit anything to memory. Dr. Larry Squire was the first person to study Eugene Pauly and report his findings in a medical journal. Larry Squire found that there are similar neurological processes for habit formulation across all individuals and the part of the brain that plays a major role in it is Basal Ganglia.

A series of experiments that were done on rats showed that habit formation has a specific pattern. When one is learning a new activity, there is a spike in neurological activity in the brain. However once the brain learns something, the basal ganglia takes over and there is a decrease in the brain activity. Also, it is not the case that the entire activity is in auto-pilot. The author explains the three-step habit loop as follows

• First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. The cues fall in to one of the five categories; time, location, emotional state, other people, immediately preceding action.

• Second, there is a routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional pattern

• Third, there is a reward which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future.

Over time, this loop - cue, routine reward - becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges. Eventually a habit is born.Another finding that emerged from experiments on Eugene Pauly is that a minor tweak in the components of the habit loop can completely wreck the habit. This means a few aspects can wreck our good habits that have been painfully cultivated. It also means that bad habits can be changed by tweaking the habit loop.

The takeaway from this chapter is that one needs to be aware of the habit loop in many of the activities that we perform in our daily life. It is estimated that 40% of the decisions that we take and activities that we do are based on habits. It is very likely that some of the decisions on a daily basis might be sub-optimal. It is also likely that some of the activities/habits that we carry need to change. By realizing the cue, routine and reward components of our activities, we can develop self-awareness that will go a long way in empowering us to create a change.

The Craving Brain

The author speaks about “craving”, an important ancillary component in the habit loop, that makes the loop in to a habit. If one reflects about cue-routine-reward loop for a few minutes, it becomes clear that there must be someother element that makes us go over the cue-routine-reward path. Something that powers the habit loop should be present in order to inculcate a new habit/ change an existing habit. That something is a craving for the reward.

Wolfram Schultz, a Cambridge scientist, in a series of experiments with monkeys, observed that there was a spike in monkey’s brain activity much before the reward was given. This led to an hypothesis that there is some sort of craving feeling that gets activated as soon as one sees a cue. This craving is the one that powers the habit loop. The author uses a few examples from the marketing world such as Febreze and Pepsodent to strengthen the “craving” hypothesis. In the hindsight, if you think about it for sometime, you can easily get convinced by looking a few situations in your own life where a cue created a craving that made you go through a specific routine to obtain the reward.

The Golden Rule of Habit Change

The author shares a motley collection of stories to illustrate two other aspects of habit loop. Stories about the success of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bucs(NFL) team performance, Mandy(a normal looking girl who has an obsessive tendency to bite her nails till they bled) illustrate a method to break bad habits. In all these stories, a common theme that runs is: the awareness of the cue and reward made it possible for the routine to be tweaked to obtain the same cue and reward with a healthy routine. All the above stories seem to end in a happy state by identifying the cue, identifying the actual reward and then tweaking the routine. However the habits break down under stress. Alumni of AA seemed to fall in to bad habits once tested at their limits and so is the case with other stories. The author then talks about a critical component of sustaining the habit loop - Belief, i.e one’s belief in the possibility of change.

One might read the first three chapters and cast aside the whole content as common sense. Possible. However if you reflect about the various activities that you do in your daily life and analyze whether every activity is a carefully well thought out deliberate action or not?. My guess is most of us will realize that the so called actions that we perform, be it at work or at home, are habits that we have acquired over time. Some bad, Some good. We might feel powerless to change bad habits. However the framework suggested in the first three chapters of the book offers a way to experiment with our lives and see if we could make a meaningful change in our habits.

Key stone Habits

Is there a pecking order among the various habit loops in our life? Is there any specific type of habit that has a disproportionate effect on our lives? The author calls such habits as key stone habits that can transform our lives. Keystone habits say that success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.In order to support his thesis, the author gives the following examples:

1. Paul O’Neill focused on one key stone habit “safety” and changed the entire culture of Alcoa.

2. Bob Bowman targeted a few specific habits that had nothing to do with swimming and everything to do with creating right mindset. He coached Phelps and we all know the rest of the story. We need to get a few small wins and they can create massive transformation

3. American Library Association’s Task Force on Gay Liberation decided to focus on one modest goal: convincing the Library of Congress to reclassify books about the gay liberation. It succeeded. It was a small win and eventually created a cascade of big wins

Key stone habits encourage change and subsequently can create a unique culture in an organization. The author gives various examples that show that a conscious effort in sustaining the culture can result in massive positive outcomes.

One of the takeaways of this chapter is the importance of journaling. If you want to pay attention to what you eat and control diet, food journaling has been found very useful. In a similar, journaling about anything that you want to change/improve can help you identify the components of habit loops. Self awareness is half the battle won.

Starbucks and the Habit of Success

Starbucks is an unique place for many reasons. One of the reasons is that it employs many youngsters just out of college. These young recruits, in all likelihood, would not have faced angry customers before and hence they find it difficult to fit in to the professional setting. Credit goes to Starbucks for teaching life skills to thousands of recruits. The way Starbucks accomplishes this is worth knowing and this chapter goes in to some of the details. At the core of all the education that Starbucks imparts is all-important habit: Will power

The company spent millions of dollars developing curriculums to train employees on self-discipline. Executives wrote workbooks that, in effect, serve as guides to how to make willpower a habit in workers' lives. Those curriculums are, in part, why Starbucks has grown from a sleepy Seattle company into a behemoth with more than seventeen thousand stores and revenues of more than $10 billion a year.

It is not an easy task to bring about self-discipline in a massive organization. What Starbucks did is a great lesson for anyone who wants to master self-discipline. Starbucks realized that their employees tendency to self-discipline themselves depended on the way they handled themselves at few inflection points. Hence it was a organization wide practice where employees would write/talk/share about their intended behavior, much before the inflection points.

In a way this is like an entrepreneur writing in his journal about potential inflection points in his/her startup’s future journey and then gearing up for an appropriate response. Institutionalizing this kind of response among its vast workforce is what has made Starbucks sustain its profitability year after year.

The takeaway from this chapter is that one should always consider that willpower is a finite resource and spend it appropriately over a day so that we get to maintain a healthy dose of self-discipline in our lives.

What Target knows much before you do

The author uses examples from the marketing world to drive home the point that if you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it. The takeaway from this chapter is a well known message is that it pays to monitor your customers habits closely.

The last few chapters of the book talks about habit formation in societies.

Here’s a visual from the web that captures the essence of the book

Takeaway

Habit is a choice that we deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about it, but continue doing, often every day. The book delves in to the basic components of habit formation loop. The book might take a few hours to read but is well worth the time as it makes the reader conscious of his/her habit loops. Once you recognize a habit loop, you seem to be much more control of your habits and hence your choices.