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PDF Summary: The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg
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1-Page PDF Summary of The Power of Habit
Do you have any bad habits you want to break? Or do you want to start a new habit, like healthier eating, exercise, or reading more?
You're not alone. People try and fail to change their habits all the time. But they often fail because they believe it's simply about willpower - stopping the habit brute force - without understanding the nature of the habit and how to most effectively change it.
The Power of Habit gives you an incredibly useful framework for understanding your habits and for changing them. In short, you must set up a routine that gives you fast positive feedback, and keep doing it until it becomes a fully-formed habit. Learn the strategies for developing a lasting habit here.
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- Reward: get pleasure from the momentary distraction from a text, email, Tweet, etc.
Changing Your Habits
Over time, habits become deeply ingrained. Over many iterations of the habit loop, the transition between cue, craving, routine, and reward become automatic. Think about any personal habits that you want to break, and how hard they seem to change. Once you get a cue and craving, it can seem almost as though you lose control and act on auto-pilot.
Luckily, research into successful methods of behavior change have revealed the best practices of changing your habits.
Step 1: Identify the Cues and Rewards
First and foremost is understanding your own habits. First, identify the cues or triggers that kick off your habit. Every time you feel tempted with a craving, make a note to yourself on paper. Then think about what happened recently, or what you felt recently, that kicked off the craving.
Next, understand the reward you get after the routine. This could be a physical one, like food, or an emotional one, like relief of boredom or feeling socially connected. Think deep, and ask yourself “why?” five times. Often, the real root cues and rewards are not the superficial ones that first come to mind.
Step 2: Change the Routine
Once you identify your cues and rewards, you want to work on actually changing the habit.
It turns out that it’s incredibly hard to completely eliminate old habits. For some reason, even after a long time, experiencing a cue can trigger old habits despite your best intentions. This is why alcoholics and smokers can fall off the wagon after just smelling cigarette smoke or having one taste of alcohol.
Luckily, there is one Golden Rule: to change a habit, keep the same cue and the same reward, but change the routine.
Because your brain’s already wired in the habit, it’s hard to totally resist the temptation of the cue and the craving, for the rest of your life. Instead, a more successful strategy is to replace the routine with something more productive, so that you get the same reward at the end.
Step 3: Break through Pain Points
The key to developing willpower is to predict the most painful points, and build a specific plan beforehand for how you’ll work through them. For example, if you want to start running, the most painful point is probably when you get off the couch, put on your shoes, and take the first 20 steps. After that, you can get into the zone.
To build a habit, construct a routine ahead of time to push through the pain, and keep practicing it until it becomes a habit. You don’t necessarily need to have a greater bank of willpower – you just need to make self-control automatic so you don’t even think about it, and this conserves willpower for later.
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PDF Summary Part 1: Individual Habits | Chapter 1: The Habit Loop
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You can even train the rat to activate different routines based on different cues. You can put the chocolate in a different place and associate it with a bang sound. Then, depending on whether you play a click or a bang, the rat will take the corresponding route.
Interestingly, when the rat’s running its routine, its brain goes into autopilot. The rat's brain activity is a lot less active than it is when normally exploring the world. If you’ve ever zoned out while doing something pretty complex – like brushing your teeth or backing out of the driveway – you know the feeling.
This graph shows brain behavior in trained rats. Notice how the brain behavior ramps down quickly when the mouse hears the click - essentially, the mouse goes into autopilot as it executes its routine. Source
That’s because habits are evolutionarily advantageous. The brain is always looking for ways to save effort. In our caveman past, having a brain that can could go into auto-pilot to execute ordinary routines, like walking...
PDF Summary Chapter 2: Starting New Habits
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When measuring activity in the monkey’s dopamine neurons, a predictable pattern appeared – when the monkey got a reward (R), its brain activity spiked, indicating pleasure:
Source
After many iterations of this loop, the monkey got really good at pulling the lever and getting the grape juice. It was good at recognizing the cue, doing the routine of pulling the lever, and getting the reward of juice.
But interestingly, over time, the monkey began anticipating the reward. The brain activity spiked when the cue appeared, well in advance of actually getting the reward:
Source
Notice that the peak area of brain activity happens when the cue is sensed (CS). This is the craving that happens when you sense a cue. The activity no longer appears...
PDF Summary Chapter 3: Stopping Bad Habits
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Step 2: Change the Routine
Once you identify your cues and rewards, you want to work on actually changing the habit.
It turns out that it’s incredibly hard to completely eliminate old habits. For some reason, even after a long time, experiencing a cue can trigger old habits despite your best intentions. This is why alcoholics and smokers can fall off the wagon after just smelling cigarette smoke or having one taste of alcohol.
Luckily, there is one Golden Rule: to change a habit, keep the same cue and the same reward, but change the routine.
Because your brain’s already wired in the habit, it’s hard to totally resist the temptation of the cue and the craving, for the rest of your life. Instead, a more successful strategy is to replace the routine with something more productive, so that you get the same reward at the end.
And this works because often it’s the routine that you want to eliminate – whether that’s eating junk food, drinking, or binging Netflix.
Example: Alcoholics Anonymous
One of the most successful examples of habit change is Alcoholics Anonymous. Its famous 12-step program forces the recovering alcoholic to go through a few important...
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PDF Summary Part 2: Organizational Habits | Chapter 4: Keystone Habits
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Example: Transforming a Corporate Culture
In 1987, the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) was struggling to grow in the face of competition. Its product quality was poor, and its workers went on strike when ordered to improve their productivity.
The company’s shareholders hired a new CEO from government, Paul O’Neill. On his first investor meeting, he shocked the room by talking not about synergy or profits or competitive advantages, but about a simple focus: worker safety. He wanted to make Alcoa the safest company in the country. His stance was that if the company worked together to lower injury rate, they would have developed habits across the entire organization that prized excellence of work.
The investors were shocked – surely this was an insane, unprofitable area to focus on. But O’Neill was right – over his 13 year tenure, Alcoa grew its market value by 5 times and became more profitable than ever. Improving worker safety was a keystone habit that caused ripples of improvements through every major practice in the company.
The first step was making it known across the entire company that worker safety was the number one priority. People would be promoted...
PDF Summary Chapter 5: Building Willpower
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Building willpower in one aspect of life spills over into other areas of life.
In different studies, participants were trained to build willpower in physical exercise, or money management, or study habits. Not only did they achieve results in what they were training directly (like exercising or saving money), they also improved other aspects of their lives – they smoked less, drank less, watched TV less, and ate better, even though the experiment didn’t target these behaviors. It almost seemed as though willpower was a keystone habit that taught people how to better regulate their impulses and avoid temptations, across all their life.
How to Develop Willpower
The key to developing willpower is to predict the most painful points, and build a specific plan beforehand for how you’ll work through them. For example, if you want to start running, the most painful point is probably when you get off the couch, put on your shoes, and take the first 20 steps. After that, you can get into the zone.
To build a habit, construct a routine ahead of time to push through the pain, and keep practicing it until it becomes a habit. You don’t necessarily need to have a...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: Habits in Organizations
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Similarly, departments want to maintain control over their jurisdiction and prevent power grabs by other departments. So different departments agree on habits to avoid turf battles – don’t intrude on our space, and we won’t intrude on yours. This leads to the natural pushing away of responsibiltiies: “this isn’t a sales problem, it’s an engineering problem.”
Habits broker peace between warring factions. Break these habits, and you’ll be alienated as a disruptor.
Of course, the problem with these habits is that at times they can be destructive. Sometimes problems appear that perfuse the entire organization. If departments maintain clearly defined boundaries, no one claims responsibility for these problems. The anecdotes below will illustrate the example.
And over time, these habits become calcified – they become a part of the organization’s DNA, new employees quickly adopt the habits to fit in, and the cycle perpetuates.
To resolve this, companies need to deliberately cultivate habits that allow one priority to overshadow everything else, even though it might temporarily disrupt the balance of power. The Alcoa anecdote above illustrates this well – worker safety...
PDF Summary Chapter 7: How Companies Exploit Your Habits
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So retailers have figured out that these new customized deals need to be sandwiched in between familiar items, like dish soap and detergent. Then it doesn’t look like you’re being explicitly targeted, but you notice the customized deals anyway.
This relates to the lesson from Chapter 3 – to adopt new habits, keep the same cue and the same reward, but change the routine. By sandwiching a new routine (baby formula) in between familiar cues (normal coupons), companies can inspire new habits.
(Shortform note: there are clear connections these ideas and how today’s top companies like Facebook and Netflix build unshakeable habits of using their services.)
Example: Listening Habits in Pop Music
In popular music, there’s a running joke that the top songs all sound the same. For example, many songs follow a familiar 4 chord progression.
People crave familiarity, even if they consciously deny liking these songs. We subconsciously enjoy patterns so they ease the load on our cognition. For audio, patterns help us distinguish signal from the noise. In a busy intersection with hundreds of different noises happening at once, we can still pay attention to a conversation. Patterns in...
PDF Summary Part 3: Societal Habits | Chapter 8: How Movements are Started
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The book argues that Rosa Parks was the catalyst for the movement because of her exceptionally well-connected placement in the local community. She actively participated in the NAACP, church, youth organizations, botanical club, and volunteer groups. So her arrest set off a series of powerful events:
- the head of the local NAACP (where she was secretary) was bailed her out and saw her example as the perfect opportunity to challenge segregation laws
- her friend, the president of a schoolteacher group, called for a boycott on Parks’s court appearance date. She spread flyers to all teachers in the organization, who then passed them on to parents
- people who knew Parks intimately from her many community involvements rallied to her cause
The social habits of close friendship kicked in to rally around Parks and the larger issue. When someone you care about is in trouble, you just act.
2) Movements Spread through the Community by Social Habits
For the movement to grow, it now must expand beyond the immediate clique and involve a whole community, many of whom have only weak ties to the victim. Now, the habits of social pressure kick in.
A 1960s study found...
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PDF Summary Chapter 9: Are We Liable for Our Habits?
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Before she could recognize what was happening, she was uncontrollably addicted. She used gambling as stress relief, and being a capable card player was now part of her identity. Within a few years, she was $20,000 in debt to the casino, and they went bankrupt. She realized her life had to change, and she kicked the habit for a few years.
Then her parents died, and she inherited nearly $1 million. She was getting along fine, but one day while driving she started panicking about her parents’ deaths. She wanted to take her mind off the pain – and she craved gambling again (recall cravings and habits above). She visited a casino and instantly felt her stress melt away.
As she made repeated trips back to the casino, her old habits returned, and she was now gambling with even bigger stakes. She played $400 on each hand, two hands at a time, and on a single trip, she lost $250,000. She couldn’t control her cravings. Within 2 years, Bachmann had lost all the money she inherited, and in further debt with the casino, who had lent her money to gamble with.
Bachmann sued. She argued that she had no control over her habits, just like Brian Thomas when he killed his wife. Once the...
PDF Summary Quick Guide: Changing Your Habits
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- Three notes: saccharine, tired, guilty Craving still exist? not hungry, but still feel something's missing
Hypothesis: I actually want some fresh air and walk outside.
- New routine: I walk for 10 minutes outside instead of going to the supermarket.
- Three notes: relaxed, cold, hungry Craving still exist? no
Hypothesis: I actually like the feeling of the elevator.
- New routine: I ride down and up the elevator three times.
- Three notes: bored, nauseous, silly Craving still exist? yes
Hypothesis: I actually want some human contact (the dessert is just an excuse to talk to the checkout clerk).
- New routine: I talk to a co-worker.
- Three notes: interested, cool, productivity Craving still exist? yes
This is an artificially simplistic example, but we can see that the only time the craving actually went away was when I walked outside. This is already a strong hint that the dessert is not what I actually want.
Figuring this out can take many tries over weeks. Be patient and keep collecting data until you see patterns.
Step 3: Isolate the Cue
The last diagnostic step is to figure out what cue sets you off. Because you’re...
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