69 Brilliant Quotes from The Power of Habit By Charles Duhigg
The Power of Habit By Charles Duhigg is a very interesting and informative book.Before reading it,I knew that habits were powerful but did not know how to change them.Mr.Duhigg teaches so well how to replace bad habits with good ones.
If you have been struggling to change some of your bad habits without any success,i recommend this book.It's simply brilliant.
Here are the quotes I love:
''Most
of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered
decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. And though each habit means
relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we order, what we say to our
kids each night, whether we save or spend, how often we exercise, and the way
we organize our thoughts and work routines have enormous impacts on our health,
productivity, financial security, and happiness.''
‘’ Habits can be changed, if we understand how they work.’’
‘’Transforming a habit isn’t necessarily easy or quick. It isn’t
always simple. But it is possible. And now we understand how.’’
‘’As each rat learned how to navigate the maze, its mental activity decreased.
As the route became more and more automatic, each rat started thinking less and
less….The rat had internalized how to sprint through the maze to such a degree
that it hardly needed to think at all.’’
‘’Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking
for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make
almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down
more often. This effort-saving instinct is a huge advantage. An efficient brain
requires less room, which makes for a smaller head, which makes childbirth
easier and therefore causes fewer infant and mother deaths. An efficient brain
also allows us to stop thinking constantly about basic behaviors, such as walking
and choosing what to eat, so we can devote mental energy to inventing spears,
irrigation systems, and, eventually, airplanes and video games.
First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go
into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the 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 remembering 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.
Eventually, whether in a chilly MIT laboratory or your driveway, a
habit is born.’’
''Habits never really
disappear. They’re encoded into the structures of our brain, and that’s a huge
advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive
after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference
between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking
there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.''
‘’Without habit loops, our brains would shut down, overwhelmed by the
minutiae of daily life. People whose basal ganglia are damaged by injury or
disease often become mentally paralyzed. They have trouble performing basic
activities, such as opening a door or deciding what to eat. They lose the
ability to ignore insignificant details—one study, for example, found that
patients with basal ganglia injuries couldn’t recognize facial expressions,
including fear and disgust, because they were perpetually uncertain about which
part of the face to focus on. Without our basal ganglia, we lose access to the
hundreds of habits we rely on every day.’’
‘’Habits are often as much a curse as a benefit.’’
''Habits emerge without our
permission. Studies indicate that families usually don’t intend to eat fast food on a regular
basis. What happens is that a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week,
and then twice a week—as the cues and
rewards create a habit—until the kids are consuming
an unhealthy amount of hamburgers and fries.''
''Habits are delicate. When a fast food restaurant closes down, the
families that previously ate there will often start having dinner at home,
rather than seek out an alternative location.Even small shifts can end the
pattern. But since we often don’t recognize these habit loops as they grow, we
are blind to our ability to control them. By learning to observe the cues and
rewards, though, we can change the routines.''
“ ‘I made for myself a million dollars on Pepsodent,’ Hopkins wrote a
few years after the product appeared on shelves. The key, he said, was that he
had ‘learned the right human psychology.’ That psychology was grounded in two
basic rules:
First, find a simple and obvious cue.
Second, clearly define the rewards.
If you get those elements right, Hopkins promised, it was like magic.
Look at Pepsodent: He had identified a cue—tooth film—and a reward—beautiful
teeth—that had persuaded millions to start a daily ritual. Even today,
Hopkins’s rules are a staple of marketing textbooks and the foundation of
millions of ad campaigns. And those same principles have been used to create
thousands of other habits—often without people realizing how closely they are
hewing to Hopkins’s formula.’’
''There is nothing
programmed into our brains that makes us see a box of doughnuts and
automatically want a sugary treat….But once our brain learns that a doughnut
box contains yummy sugar and other carbohydrates, it will start anticipating
the sugar high. Our brains will push us toward the box. Then, if we don’t eat the doughnut, we’ll feel disappointed.''
reactions so that ‘wanting evolves into obsessive craving’ that can
force our brains into autopilot, ‘even in the face of strong disincentives, including
loss of reputation, job, home, and family.’ However, these cravings don’t have complete authority over us…., there are mechanisms that can
help us ignore the temptations. But to overpower the habit, we must recognize
which craving is driving the behavior.''
''To understand the power of cravings in creating habits, consider how
exercise habits emerge. In 2002 researchers at New Mexico State University
wanted to understand why people habitually exercise. They studied 266
individuals, most of whom worked out at least three times a week. What they
found was that many of them had started running or lifting weights almost on a
whim, or because they suddenly had free time or wanted to deal with unexpected
stresses in their lives. However, the reason they continued—why it
became a habit—was
because of a specific reward they started to crave. In one group, 92 percent of
people said they habitually exercised because it made them ‘feel good’—they grew to expect and crave the endorphins and other neurochemicals
a workout provided. In another group, 67 percent of people said that working
out gave them a sense of ‘accomplishment’—they had come to crave a regular sense of triumph from tracking their
performances, and that self-reward was enough to make the physical activity
into a habit.''
''I work hard because I expect pride from a discovery. I exercise
because I expect feeling good afterward. I just wish I could pick and choose
better.''
''Only once they created a sense of craving—the desire to make everything smell as nice as it looked—did Febreze become a hit. That craving is an essential part of the
formula for creating new habits.''
''After Pepsodent started dominating the marketplace, researchers at competing
companies scrambled to figure out why. What they found was that customers said
that if they forgot to use Pepsodent, they realized their mistake because they
missed that cool, tingling sensation in their mouths. They expected—they craved—that
slight irritation. If it wasn’t there,
their mouths didn’t feel
clean. Claude Hopkins wasn’t selling
beautiful teeth. He was selling a sensation. Once people craved that cool
tingling—once they equated it with cleanliness—brushing became a habit.''
‘’ ‘Consumers need some kind of signal that a product is working,’ Tracy
Sinclair, who was a brand manager for Oral-B and Crest Kids Toothpaste, told
me. ‘We can make toothpaste taste like anything—blueberries, green tea—and as
long as it has a cool tingle, people feel like their mouth is clean. The
tingling doesn’t make the
toothpaste work any better. It just convinces people it’s doing the job.’ ‘’
''Want to craft a new eating habit? When researchers affiliated with the
National Weight Control Registry—a project involving more than six thousand people who have lost more
than thirty pounds—looked at
the habits of successful dieters, they found that 78 percent of them ate breakfast
every morning, a meal cued by a time of day. But most of the successful dieters
also envisioned a specific reward for sticking with their diet—a bikini they wanted to wear or the sense of pride they felt when they
stepped on the scale each day—something
they chose carefully and really wanted. They focused on the craving for that
reward when temptations arose, cultivated the craving into a mild obsession.
And their cravings for that reward, researchers found, crowded out the temptation
to drop the diet. The craving drove the habit loop.''
Cravings are what
drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new
habit easier. It’s as true now as it
was almost a century ago. Every night, millions of people scrub their teeth in order
to get a tingling feeling; every morning, millions put on their jogging shoes
to capture an endorphin rush they’ve learned to crave.
“Champions don’t do extraordinary things….They do ordinary things, but they do them
without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits
they’ve learned.”
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.’’
‘’AA’s methods
seem to sidestep scientific and medical findings altogether, as well as the
types of intervention many psychiatrists say alcoholics really need.What AA
provides instead is a method for attacking the habits that surround
alcohol use. AA, in essence, is a giant machine for changing habit loops. And
though the habits associated with alcoholism are extreme, the lessons AA
provides demonstrate how almost any habit—even the most obstinate—can be changed….AA succeeds because it helps alcoholics use the same
cues, and get the same reward, but it shifts the routine.’’
‘’AA asks alcoholics to search for the rewards they get from alcohol.
What cravings, the program asks, are driving your habit loop?Often,
intoxication itself doesn’t make the
list. Alcoholics crave a drink because it offers escape, relaxation,
companionship, the blunting of anxieties, and an opportunity for emotional
release. They might crave a cocktail to forget their worries. But they don’t necessarily crave feeling drunk. The physical effects of alcohol are
often one of the least rewarding parts of drinking for addicts.’’
‘’In order to offer alcoholics the same rewards they get at a bar, AA has
built a system of meetings and companionship—the ‘sponsor’ each member works with—that strives to offer as much escape, distraction, and catharsis as a
Friday night bender. If someone needs relief, they can get it from talking to
their sponsor or attending a group gathering, rather than toasting a drinking
buddy.
‘’Most people’s habits
have occurred for so long they don’t pay attention to what causes it anymore.’’
‘’Often, we don’t really
understand the cravings driving our behaviors until we look for them.’’
Alcoholics who practiced the techniques of habit replacement, the data
indicated, could often stay sober until there was a stressful event in their
lives—at which point, a certain number started drinking
again, no matter how many new routines they had embraced. However, those
alcoholics who believed,…that some higher power had entered their lives were
more likely to make it through the stressful periods with their sobriety
intact.It wasn’t God that
mattered, the researchers figured out. It was belief itself that made a
difference. Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started
spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they
could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a
permanent behavior.
''Even if you give people better habits, it doesn’t repair why they started drinking in the first place. Eventually they’ll have a bad day, and no new routine is going to make everything seem
okay. What can make a difference is believing that they can cope with
that stress without alcohol.”
''We do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe
that change is feasible. The same process that makes AA so effective—the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe—happens whenever people come together to help one another
change.Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.''
''If you want to change
a habit, you must find an alternative routine, and your odds of success go up
dramatically when you commit to changing as part of a group. Belief is
essential, and it grows out of a communal experience, even if that community is
only as large as two people.''
‘’The line separating habits and addictions is often difficult to measure.
For instance, the American Society of Addiction Medicine defines addiction as ‘a
primary, chronic disease of brain reward,motivation, memory and related
circuitry.… Addiction is characterized by impairment in
behavioral control, craving, inability to consistently abstain, and diminished
relationships.’ ‘’
''while addiction is
complicated and still poorly understood, many of the behaviors that we
associate with it are often driven by habit.''
''It is important to note that though the process of habit change is easily
described, it does not necessarily follow that it is easily accomplished. It is
facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained
patterns can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding
of the cravings driving behaviors. Changing any habit requires determination.
No one will quit smoking cigarettes simply because they sketch a habit loop. However,
by understanding habits’
mechanisms, we gain insights that make new behaviors easier to grasp.''
''Understanding the cues
and cravings driving your habits won’t make them suddenly disappear—but it will give you a way to plan how to change the pattern.''
''Some habits, in other
words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are “keystone habits,” and they can influence how people work, eat,
play, live, spend, and communicate.Keystone habits start a process that, over
time, transforms everything.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.''
‘’When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as
once a week, they start changing
other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly.
Typically,people who exercise start eating better and becoming 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 stressed. It’s not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone
habit that triggers widespread change. ‘Exercise spills over,’said James
Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. ‘There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.’ ‘’
‘’If you focus on changing or cultivating keystone habits, you can cause
widespread shifts. However, identifying keystone habits is tricky.To find them,
you have to know where to look. Detecting keystone habits means searching out
certain characteristics. Keystone habits offer what is known within academic
literature as ‘small wins.’ They help other habits to flourish by creating new
structures, and they establish cultures where change becomes contagious…... A
huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an
influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves.’’
‘’Willpower is a learnable skill, something that can be taught the
same way kids learn to do math and say ‘thank you.’ ‘’
Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or
legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.
''As people strengthened
their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money
management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard
they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.''
“When you learn to force yourself to go to the gym or start your homework
or eat a salad instead of a hamburger, part of what’s happening is that you’re changing how you think,….People get better at regulating their
impulses. They learn how to distract themselves from temptations. And once you’ve gotten into that willpower groove, your brain is practiced at
helping you focus on a goal.”
''Imagine unpleasant
situations, and write out a plan for responding….Throughout the training manuals
[of starbucks] are dozens of blank pages where employees can write out plans that
anticipate how they will surmount inflection points[ such as an angry coworker or an overwhelmed customer] . Then they practice those plans, again and
again, until they become automatic. This is how willpower becomes a habit: by
choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when
an inflection point arrives.''
''Crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often
prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose. That’s exactly what occurred after the King’s Cross station fire. Five days after the blaze, the British secretary
of state appointed a special investigator, Desmond Fennell, to study the
incident. Fennell began by interviewing the Underground’s leadership, and quickly discovered that everyone had known—for years—that fire
safety was a serious problem, and yet nothing had changed. Some administrators
had proposed new hierarchies that would have clarified responsibility for fire
prevention.Others had proposed giving station managers more power so that they could
bridge departmental divides. None of those reforms had been implemented.''
''People’s buying
habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event. When
someone gets married, for example, they’re more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When they move
into a new house, they’re more
apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they get divorced, there’s a higher chance they’ll start
buying different brands of beer.Consumers going through majorn life events
often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping patterns
have shifted. However, retailers notice, and they care quite a bit.''
''Changing residence, getting married or divorced, losing or changing a
job, having someone enter or leave the household,…. are life changes that make
consumers more vulnerable to intervention by marketers.''
''Peer pressure, on its own, isn’t enough to sustain a movement. But 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.''
‘’If you try to scare people into following Christ’s example, it’s not
going to work for too long. The only way you get people to take responsibility
for their spiritual maturity is to teach them habits of faith.’Once that happens, they become
self-feeders. People follow Christ not because you’ve led
them there, but because it’s who they
are.’ ‘’
''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.''
''Protecting people from their bad habits—in fact, defining which habits should be considered ‘bad’ in the first
place—is a prerogative lawmakers have eagerly
seized. Prostitution, gambling,liquor sales on the Sabbath, pornography,
usurious loans, sexual relations outside of marriage (or, if your tastes are
unusual, within marriage), are all habits that various legislatures have
regulated,outlawed, or tried to discourage with strict (and often ineffective)
laws.''
‘’[When you are asleep] The part of your brain that monitors your
behavior is asleep, but the parts capable of very complex activities are awake. The problem is that
there’s nothing guiding the brain except for basic
patterns, your most basic habits. You follow what exists in your head, because
you’re not capable of making a choice.”
''Sleepwalkers can behave in complex ways—for instance, they can open their eyes, see, move around, and drive a
car or cook a meal—all while
essentially unconscious, because the parts of their brain associated with
seeing, walking, driving, and cooking can function while they are asleep
without input from the brain’s more
advanced regions, such as the prefrontal cortex. Sleepwalkers have been known
to boil water and make tea. One operated a motorboat.Another turned on an
electric saw and started feeding in pieces of wood before going back to bed.
But in general, sleepwalkers will not do things that are dangerous to
themselves or others. Even asleep, there’s an instinct to avoid peril.''
''The behaviors that
occur unthinkingly are the evidence of our truest selves.''
''Every habit, no matter
its complexity, is malleable. The most addicted alcoholics can become sober.
The most dysfunctional companies can transform themselves. A high school
dropout can become a successful manager. 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.''
''Perhaps a sleepwalking murderer can plausibly argue he wasn’t aware of his habit,and so he doesn’t bear responsibility for his crime. But almost all the other patterns
that exist in most people’s lives—how we eat and sleep and talk to our kids, how we unthinkingly spend
our time, attention, and money—those are
habits that we know exist. And 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.''
If you believe you can change—if you make it a habit—the change
becomes real. This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are
what you choose them to be. Once that choice occurs—and becomes automatic—it’s not only real, it starts to seem inevitable, the thing, … that bears
us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet
an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’…And
the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks
over at the other and goes ‘What the hell
is water?’.The water is habits, the unthinking choices
and invisible decisions that surround us every day—and which, just by looking at them, become visible again.
''THE FRAMEWORK:
• Identify the routine
• Experiment with rewards
• Isolate the cue
• Have a plan ''
Location
Time
Emotional state
Other people
Immediately preceding action.''
''A habit is a formula
our brain automatically follows:
When I see CUE, I will
do ROUTINE in order to get a REWARD.''
''Once you’ve figured
out your habit loop—you’ve identified the reward driving your behavior, the cue triggering it,
and the routine itself—you can
begin to shift the behavior. You can change to a better routine by planning for
the cue and choosing a behavior that delivers the reward you are craving. What
you need is a plan….
Take, for instance, my cookie-in-the-afternoon habit….I learned that my
cue was roughly 3:30 in the afternoon. I knew that my routine was to go to the
cafeteria, buy a cookie, and chat with friends. And, through experimentation, I
had learned that it wasn’t really
the cookie I craved—rather, it
was a moment of distraction and the opportunity to socialize.
So I wrote a plan:
At 3:30, every day, I will walk to a friend’s desk and talk for 10 minutes.''
''Sometimes change takes
a long time.Sometimes it requires repeated experiments and failures. But once
you understand how a habit operates—once you diagnose the cue, the routine and the reward—you gain power over it.''
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