My insights on 'The Power of Habits' by C.Duhigg - Part 1

THE POWER OF HABIT

For humans, change is difficult. To bring about a change in habit becomes incredibly difficult at the starting point itself. Why? One wonders… Most of us are under the delusion that we’re making decisions all day long. However, most of the actions we take on a daily basis are habitual. The start may be a conscious decision, a choice but becomes a loop with reinforcement and ends up as habits. We do such actions without thinking. At some point, we started with a decision, which later became automatic. Overtime, these habits become deeply ingrained.

This book focuses on how habits emerge within individual lives. Duhigg, in this section, explains the neurology behind habit formation.

THE NEUROLOGICAL COMPONENTS OF HABITS

Habits begin with a CUE, a trigger telling you which habit to use and puts it into automatic mode.

A ROUTINE, acts out as a habit, which could be physical, emotional, and mental.

A REWARD, is the result of routine and reinforces habits.

A CRAVING, is the ANTICIPATION of reward when you get the cue, even before actually getting a reward.

 Habits can be powerful and sometimes destructive.  There are habits of doing things we wish we did less of; like, habitually opening the Facebook or snacking when not hungry. However, if one could understand how habits got triggered, one could overcome them. Overtime one can end up losing full control over your behaviour- with a cue the brain goes onto an autopilot and executes the routine. A craving pushes through routine for a reward at the end of the habit. Without pushing through routine, one doesn’t get reward and craving goes unsatisfied leading to unhappiness. For example:

Cue: the mobile rings.

Craving: who’s contacting me? What’s going on in the world?

Routine: stop everything; check the phone.

Reward: get pleasure from momentary distraction from a text, mail, tweet, whattsApp….

However, the good news is that, by consciously recognizing cues and rewards habits can be combated.

Over repetitions of the habit loop, the transition between cue, craving, routine and reward become automatic. Think about personal habits one can break and how they seem to change. What scientists observe that while executing intricate, unfamiliar action, the brain expends more energy, as the author explained using the rat and the maze experiment?

Therefore, either to change or create a habit, it’s important that we first understand how habits work by analysing and reflecting the reasons behind it. William James may be the prominent one, but others, from Aristotle to Oprah, have been looking at and trying to understand how habits exist and become integral part of our lives. However, it is only in the last two decades that this subject has come into focus and scientists and businesses have developed understanding into the workings of the habits and the most importantly, how they can be changed.

Duhigg explores another realm here- how to build new habits and change old ones. He has illustrated them with examples.

 For instance, an ad man, Claude Hopkins could push tooth brushing from an obscure practice into a national obsession by changing the cue. ”Just run your tongue across your teeth,” read one ad. “You’ll feel a film… Note how many pretty teeth are seen everywhere. Why would any woman have dingy film on her teeth? Pepsodent removes the film!” Pepsodent became a household name.

Cinnabon chooses to locate their stores away from other food stalls in the Malls as ‘they want the smell of cinnamon rolls to waft down hallways and around corners uninterrupted for the shoppers to start subconsciously craving for it.’ A sense of craving then emerges and a habit loop is formed.

 He goes on to give the example of how Procter & Gamble turned a room spray they called, Febreze into a billion-dollar business by developing an understanding into consumers’ habitual urges, or how Alcoholics Anonymous reforms lives by attacking habits at the core of addiction, and also how coach Tony Dungy reversed the fortunes of the worst team in the National Football League by simply focusing on his players’ automatic reactions to subtle on-field cues.

2. The second section examines the habits of successful companies and organizations.

 If we find it difficult to change our personal habits, then wouldn’t it be difficult for entire organisations, comprising of so many people, sometimes of hundreds and thousands people, to change themselves from the core and bring in change the way those hundreds and thousands behave? According to Charles Duhigg, organisations too have habits that play out in a similar fashion as in our personal lives.

 ‘According to Donald Bibeault, only 33% of listed companies have actually been able to recover from a position of sustained net income losses.’  The rate at which the world is changing today, companies at large need to change and evolve faster than ever before.

The book details how an executive, Paul O’Neill, before becoming a treasury Secretary, remodelled a struggling Aluminium manufacturer into one of the top performers by just focussing on one keystone habit, or how Starbucks managed to turn a dropout into a great manager simply by instilling in him the habits that could strengthen his resolve to win. The book has also discussed as to how even a talented surgeon could make mistakes if the hospital’s organisational habits go awry.

3. The third part of the book is about how habits play out in societies.

 The author recalls and recounts Martin Luther King Jr. had initiated and achieved partial success in the Civil Rights Movement by changing social habit and mind set of people of Montgomery, Alabama; why the same focus helped a Pastor Rick Warren build the largest church in the Nation at that time in California; and finally, Duhigg goes on to explore an ethical question: should a murderer in Britain go free if he argues that it was his habit that compelled him to kill.

 The book draws from several academic studies, interviews of several scientists and executives as also researches conducted at different organisations. The book is totally focussed on habits. Habits can be technically defined as choices deliberately made at some point by us; later we stop thinking about it and continue doing it often every day and then it becomes an automatic behaviour. It ends up as a natural consequence of our neurology.  However, these patterns can be rebuilt in any ways we chose to if we are aware which ones to choose and what to discard.