The Power of Habit
by Ravenspen
Do you find yourself automatically doing things you don’t want to? Do you wish you could do some activities effortlessly and automatically without struggling to force yourself into them because they are “good for you”? Welcome to the world of Human Habits.
Habits are not an ingrained automatic pattern of behavior, according to New York Times business writer Charles Duhigg. They are just as learned as parallel parking or any other new skill we eventually master with time and practice. Activities ranging from teeth brushing and in what order we put on our shoes in the morning all the way to gambling and exercising are all just habits, and they are learned behaviors, based on neurological patterns. In Duhigg’s new book The Power of Habit he “explores the science behind why we do what we do — and how companies are now working to use our habit formations to sell and market products to us.”
According to Duhigg, each behavior which becomes habitual arises from a three part psychological pattern which he terms a habit loop. The process begins with a Cue or Trigger, which, because it is familiar, sends the brain a message to go into ‘automatic’ mode and not interfere with the behavior pattern.
The behavior itself, called a Routine, is what we think about when we are describing our habits as Duhigg told Terry Gross in an interview on the NPR radio program Fresh Air.
“The third step”, he says, “is the Reward: something that your brain likes that helps it remember the ‘habit loop’ in the future”.
Habitual behavior, while it may start out initially as a conscious decision, soon ends up being controlled in the brain by the basal ganglia, which, it turns out, plays an important part “in the development of emotions, memories and pattern recognition”. Decisions, by contrast, form in the prefronal cortex. After a behavior becomes automatic, i.e. a habit, the prefronal cortex stops concerning itself with the behavior, going into a ‘sleep mode’ about it.
“In fact, the brain starts working less and less,” says Duhigg. “The brain can almost completely shut down. … And this is a real advantage, because it means you have all of this mental activity you can devote to something else.”
While this is of great evolutionary advantage to humans in some ways, permitting us to ‘multitask’ by carrying on conversations while tying our shoes, or listening to the radio while we drive a car, it also creates a perfect mental environment for habits to flourish, including those we wish we could avoid.
“You can do these complex behaviors without being mentally aware of it at all,” he says. “And that’s because of the capacity of our basal ganglia: to take a behavior and turn it into an automatic routine.”
The good news is that patterned automatic behaviors tend to flourish in the same environment; which means a change of environment can trigger a change of behavior. Thus even taking a vacation can be an opportunity, the best opportunity perhaps, of breaking certain habits.
For example Duhigg notes that “If you want to quit smoking, you should stop smoking while you’re on a vacation — because all your old cues and all your old rewards aren’t there anymore. So you have this ability to form a new pattern and hopefully be able to carry it over into your life.” This has been proven to be one of the most successful ways of changing such ‘ingrained’ patterns of behavior.
Organizational habits generally start showing up in the workplace environment. Think about how often you go for the same parking spot when you first get to your job. Savvy businesses know all about this, and exploit habit cues to sway customers, particularly if customers themselves can’t articulate what pleasurable experience they derive from a habit.
Duhigg points out that companies are often better then their own customers at knowing what those consumers want. A major producer of a room deodorizer discovered that customers did not want to purchase it to remove odors from the house, but they did want to purchase it to use after housecleaning, to make a room “smell as clean as it looked” Consumers themselves would not have been able to tell that to the manufacturer.
“The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child”.
– Charles Duhigg
This, he says, is because all of our former routines change abruptly, creating a new environment for marketers to interest us in new products we wouldn’t have thought about before. The megastore Target, for example, tries to target pregnant women, says Duhigg, in order to capture their buying habits for the next few years. Analysts at Target collect ‘terabytes of information’ on its shoppers. They have figured out that women who buy certain products — vitamins, unscented lotions, washcloths — might be pregnant and then can use that information to jump-start their marketing campaign to those customers.
Duhigg also makes several excellent points about the nature of habits.
On breaking habits
Duhigg notes: “What we know from lab studies is that it’s never too late to break a habit. Habits are malleable throughout your entire life. But we also know that the best way to change a habit is to understand its structure — that once you tell people about the cue and the reward and you force them to recognize what those factors are in a behavior, it becomes much, much easier to change.”
On his own bad habits
“I felt like I had a lot of habits that I was powerless over. … I have a 3-year-old and a 10-month-old. And I remember when my 3-year-old was 1 1/2 or 2. I was writing the book. We would feed him chicken nuggets or other stuff for dinner, which was the only stuff he would eat. And it was impossible for me to stop from reaching over and grabbing his chicken nuggets. It was a struggle every night not to eat his dinner because a 2-year-old dinner is designed to taste delicious and to disintegrate into your mouth into carbs and sugar. And so, I was really interested in this, and I wanted to exercise more and I wanted to be more productive at work.”
On rewards
“The weird thing about rewards is that we don’t actually know what we’re actually craving.”
On spirituality and habits
“When [Alcoholics Anonymous] started, there was no scientific basis to it whatsoever. In fact, there’s no scientific basis to AA. The famous “Twelve Steps”? The reason why there are 12 of them is because the guy who came up with them — who wrote them one night while he was sitting on his bed — he chose them because there’s 12 apostles. There’s no real logic to how AA was designed. But the reason why AA works is because it is essentially this big machine for changing the habits around alcohol consumption and giving people a new routine, rather than going to a bar or drink. … It doesn’t seem to work if people do it on their own. … At some point, if you’re changing a really deep-seated behavior, you’re going to have a moment of weakness. And at that moment, if you can look across a room and think, ‘Jim’s kind of a moron. I think I’m smarter than Jim. But Jim has been sober for three years. And if Jim can do it, I can definitely do it,’ that’s enormously powerful.”
You can read the original article and listen to the interview at NPR Books
The Power of Habit
Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business
by Charles Duhigg
Hardcover, 371 pages
Chris Callahan holds a BA in religion and a Masters degree in Library Sciences. A New Warrior in the ManKind Project; Chris is a teacher, librarian and writer. He has spent 30 years reading and thinking on politics, sociology, ethics and history. His Journal sobriquet is Ravenspen. Chris completed the New Warrior Training Adventure in 2010.
– is a deeply personal issue that everyone decides for himself. Sometimes the price is high, sometimes low. But this is not very important for life. Life is an interesting thing. And the price on Viagra – too.
