The Power of Habits

Livre qui parle des Habitudes. Aller plus loin : Atomic Habits - James Clear

Highlights Notes de lecture

Prologue: The Habit Cure

that one small shift in Lisa’s perception that day in Cairo—the conviction that she had to give up smoking to accomplish her goal—had touched off a series of changes that would ultimately radiate out to every part of her life. Over the next six months, she would replace smoking with jogging, and that, in turn, changed how she ate, worked, slept, saved money, scheduled her workdays, planned for the future, and so on. She would start running half-marathons, and then a marathon, go back to school, buy a house, and get engaged

Prologue: The Habit Cure

when researchers began examining images of Lisa’s brain, they saw something remarkable: One set of neurological patterns—her old habits—had been overridden by new patterns. They could still see the neural activity of her old behaviors, but those impulses were crowded out by new urges. As Lisa’s habits changed, so had her brain. It wasn’t the trip to Cairo that had caused the shift, scientists were convinced, or the divorce or desert trek. It was that Lisa had focused on changing just one habit—smoking—at first. Everyone in the study had gone through a similar process. By focusing on one pattern—what is known as a “keystone habit”—Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well.

Prologue: The Habit Cure

“I want to show you one of your most recent scans,” a researcher told Lisa near the end of her exam. He pulled up a picture on a computer screen that showed images from inside her head. “When you see food, these areas”—he pointed to a place near the center of her brain—“which are associated with craving and hunger, are still active. Your brain still produces the urges that made you overeat. “However, there’s new activity in this area”—he pointed to the region closest to her forehead—“where we believe behavioral inhibition and self-discipline starts. That activity has become more pronounced each time you’ve come in.”

Prologue: The Habit Cure

When you woke up this morning, what did you do first? Did you hop in the shower, check your email, or grab a doughnut from the kitchen counter? Did you brush your teeth before or after you toweled off? Tie the left or right shoe first? What did you say to your kids on your way out the door? Which route did you drive to work? When you got to your desk, did you deal with email, chat with a colleague, or jump into writing a memo? Salad or hamburger for lunch? When you got home, did you put on your sneakers and go for a run, or pour yourself a drink and eat dinner in front of the TV? “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,” William James wrote in 1892.prl.2 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

Prologue: The Habit Cure

One paper published by a Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits.

Prologue: The Habit Cure

he was seeing how crowds and cultures abided by many of the same rules. In some sense, he said, a community was a giant collection of habits occurring among thousands of people that, depending on how they’re influenced, could result in violence or peace

Prologue: The Habit Cure

Understanding habits is the most important thing I’ve learned in the army,” the major told me. “It’s changed everything about how I see the world. You want to fall asleep fast and wake up feeling good? Pay attention to your nighttime patterns and what you automatically do when you get up. You want to make running easy? Create triggers to make it a routine

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

MIT researchers started working on habits in the 1990s

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

The basal ganglia, in other words, stored habits even while the rest of the brain went to sleep.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

This process—in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine—is known as “chunking,” and it’s at the root of how habits form.1.18 There are dozens—if not hundreds—of behavioral chunks that we rely on every day. Some are simple: You automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. Some, such as getting dressed or making the kids’ lunch, are a little more complex.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

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.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

An efficient brain also allows us to stop thinking constantly about basic behaviors, such as walking and choosing what to eat

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

Those spikes are the brain’s way of determining when to cede control to a habit, and which habit to use. From behind a partition, for instance, it’s difficult for a rat to know if it’s inside a familiar maze or an unfamiliar cupboard with a cat lurking outside. To deal with this uncertainty, the brain spends a lot of effort at the beginning of a habit looking for something—a cue—that offers a hint as to which pattern to use. From behind a partition, if a rat hears a click, it knows to use the maze habit. If it hears a meow, it chooses a different pattern. And at the end of the activity, when the reward appears, the brain shakes itself awake and makes sure everything unfolded as expected.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

This process within our brains is a three-step loop. 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:

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

simply understanding how habits work—learning the structure of the habit loop—makes them easier to control. Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

“We’ve done experiments where we trained rats to run down a maze until it was a habit, and then we extinguished the habit by changing the placement of the reward,” Ann Graybiel, a scientist at MIT who oversaw many of the basal ganglia experiments, told me. “Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old place, and put in the rat, and, by golly, the old habit will reemerge right away. 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.”

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

Once we develop a routine of sitting on the couch, rather than running, or snacking whenever we pass a doughnut box, those patterns always remain inside our heads. By the same rule, though, if we learn to create new neurological routines that overpower those behaviors—if we take control of the habit loop—we can force those bad tendencies into the background

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

once someone creates a new pattern, studies have demonstrated, going for a jog or ignoring the doughnuts becomes as automatic as any other habit.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

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

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

Did you pause this morning to decide whether to tie your left or right shoe first? Did you have trouble figuring out if you should brush your teeth before or after you showered? Of course not. Those decisions are habitual, effortless

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

After twenty-eight days of training, Eugene was choosing the “correct” object 85 percent of the time. At thirty-six days, he was right 95 percent of the time

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

he task was to put the items in piles. Why was he trying to turn them over? “That’s just a habit, I think,” he said. He couldn’t do it. The objects, when presented outside of the context of the habit loop, made no sense to him.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

As long as the right cues were present—such as his radio or the morning light through his windows—he automatically followed the script dictated by his basal ganglia.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

Eugene, who had forgotten their earlier conversation by the time she left, would get angry—why was she leaving without chatting?—and then forget why he was upset. But the emotional habit had already started, and so his anger would persist, red hot and beyond his understanding, until it burned itself out.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

If Eugene’s cues changed the slightest bit, his habits fell apart. The few times he walked around the block, for instance, and something was different—the city was doing street repairs or a windstorm had blown branches all over the sidewalk—Eugene would get lost

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

it’s possible to learn and make unconscious choices without remembering anything about the lesson or decision making.1.22 Eugene showed that habits, as much as memory and reason, are at the root of how we behave. We might not remember the experiences that create our habits, but once they are lodged within our brains they influence how we act—often without our realization.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

Researchers have learned that cues can be almost anything, from a visual trigger such as a candy bar or a television commercial to a certain place, a time of day, an emotion, a sequence of thoughts, or the company of particular people.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

Routines can be incredibly complex or fantastically simple (some habits, such as those related to emotions, are measured in milliseconds).

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

Rewards can range from food or drugs that cause physical sensations, to emotional payoffs, such as the feelings of pride that accompany praise or self-congratulation.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

researchers affiliated with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism trained mice to press levers in response to certain cues until the behavior became a habit. The mice were always rewarded with food. Then, the scientists poisoned the food so that it made the animals violently ill, or electrified the floor, so that when the mice walked toward their reward they received a shock. The mice knew the food and cage were dangerous—when they were offered the poisoned pellets in a bowl or saw the electrified floor panels, they stayed away. When they saw their old cues, however, they unthinkingly pressed the lever and ate the food, or they walked across the floor, even as they vomited or jumped from the electricity. The habit was so ingrained the mice couldn’t stop themselves.1.23

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

a once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week, and then twice a week—as the cues and rewards create a habit

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop.     Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

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.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

Eugene’s habits started impacting his life in negative ways. He was sedentary, sometimes watching television for hours at a time because he never grew bored with the shows.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

I met E.P., and saw how rich life can be even if you can’t remember it. The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

his daughter told a nurse to try complimenting him on his willingness to sit still, and to repeat the compliment, over and over, each time she saw him. “We wanted to, you know, get his pride involved,” his daughter, Carol Rayes, told me. “We’d say, ‘Oh, Dad, you’re really doing something important for science by keeping these doodads in place.’ ” The nurses started to dote on him. He loved it. After a couple of days, he did whatever they asked. Eugene returned home a week later.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

Claude Hopkins was best known for a series of rules he coined explaining how to create new habits among consumers. These rules would transform industries and eventually became conventional wisdom among marketers, educational reformers, public health professionals, politicians, and CEOs. Even today, Hopkins’s rules influence everything from how we buy cleaning supplies to the tools governments use for eradicating disease. They are fundamental to creating any new routine.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

It was no secret that the health of Americans’ teeth was in steep decline. As the nation had become wealthier, people had started buying larger amounts of sugary, processed foods.2.2 When the government started drafting men for World War I, so many recruits had rotting teeth that officials said poor dental hygiene was a national security risk.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

A decade after the first Pepsodent campaign, pollsters found that toothbrushing had become a ritual for more than half the American population.2.6 Hopkins had helped establish toothbrushing as a daily activity.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

He created a craving. And that craving, it turns out, is what makes cues and rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

Throughout his career, one of Claude Hopkins’s signature tactics was to find simple triggers to convince consumers to use his products every day. He sold Quaker Oats, for instance, as a breakfast cereal that could provide energy for twenty-four hours—but only if you ate a bowl every morning. He hawked tonics that cured stomachaches, joint pain, bad skin, and “womanly problems”—but only if you drank the medicine at symptoms’ first appearance

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

To sell Pepsodent, then, Hopkins needed a trigger that would justify the toothpaste’s daily use. He sat down with a pile of dental textbooks. “It was dry reading,” he later wrote. “But in the middle of one book I found a reference to the mucin plaques on teeth, which I afterward called ‘the film.’ That gave me an appealing idea. I resolved to advertise this toothpaste as a creator of beauty. To deal with that cloudy film.” In focusing on tooth film, Hopkins was ignoring the fact that this same film has always covered people’s teeth and hadn’t seemed to bother anyone. The film is a naturally occurring membrane that builds up on teeth regardless of what you eat or how often you brush.2.7 People had never paid much attention to it, and there was little reason why they should: You can get rid of the film by eating an apple, running your finger over your teeth, brushing, or vigorously swirling liquid around your mouth. Toothpaste didn’t do anything to help remove the film. In fact, one of the leading dental researchers of the time said that all toothpastes—particularly Pepsodent—were worthless.2.8 That didn’t stop Hopkins from exploiting his discovery. Here, he decided, was a cue that could trigger a habit. Soon, cities were plastered with Pepsodent ads. “Just run your tongue across your teeth,” read one. “You’ll feel a film—that’s what makes your teeth look ‘off color’ and invites decay.”     “Note how many pretty teeth are seen everywhere,” read another ad, featuring smiling beauties. “Millions are using a new method of teeth cleansing. Why would any woman have dingy film on her teeth? Pepsodent removes the film!”2.9 The brilliance of these appeals was that they relied upon a cue—tooth film—that was universal and impossible to ignore. Telling someone to run their tongue across their teeth, it turned out, was likely to cause them to run their tongue across their teeth. And when they did, they were likely to feel a film. Hopkins had found a cue that was simple, had existed for ages, and was so easy to trigger that an advertisement could cause people to comply automatically.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

the reward, as Hopkins envisioned it, was even more enticing. Who, after all, doesn’t want to be more beautiful?

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

Within a decade, Pepsodent was one of the top-selling goods in the world, and remained America’s best-selling toothpaste for more than thirty years.2.10, 2.11 Before Pepsodent appeared, only 7 percent of Americans had a tube of toothpaste in their medicine chests. A decade after Hopkins’s ad campaign went nationwide, that number had jumped to 65 percent.2.12 By the end of World War II, the military downgraded concerns about recruits’ teeth because so many soldiers were brushing every day.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

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

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

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.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

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. Studies of people who have successfully started new exercise routines, for instance, show they are more likely to stick with a workout plan if they choose a specific cue, such as running as soon as they get home from work, and a clear reward, such as a beer or an evening of guilt-free television.2.13 Research on dieting says creating new food habits requires a predetermined cue—such as planning menus in advance—and simple rewards for dieters when they stick to their intentions.2.14

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

However, it turns out that Hopkins’s two rules aren’t enough. There’s also a third rule that must be satisfied to create a habit—a rule so subtle that Hopkins himself relied on it without knowing it existed

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

People couldn’t detect most of the bad smells in their lives. If you live with nine cats, you become desensitized to their scent. If you smoke cigarettes, it damages your olfactory capacities so much that you can’t smell smoke anymore. Scents are strange; even the strongest fade with constant exposure.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

As the monkey became more and more practiced at the behavior—as the habit became stronger and stronger—Julio’s brain began anticipating the blackberry juice. Schultz’s probes started recording the “I got a reward!” pattern the instant Julio saw the shapes on the screen, before the juice arrived

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

In other words, the shapes on the monitor had become a cue not just for pulling a lever, but also for a pleasure response inside the monkey’s brain. Julio started expecting his reward as soon as he saw the yellow spirals and red squiggles.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

Schultz adjusted the experiment. Previously, Julio had received juice as soon as he touched the lever. Now, sometimes, the juice didn’t arrive at all, even if Julio performed correctly. Or it would arrive after a slight delay. Or it would be watered down until it was only half as sweet. When the juice didn’t arrive or was late or diluted, Julio would get angry and make unhappy noises, or become mopey. And within Julio’s brain, Schultz watched a new pattern emerge: craving

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

When Julio saw the cue, he started anticipating a juice-fueled joy. But if the juice didn’t arrive, that joy became a craving that, if unsatisfied, drove Julio to anger or depression.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

Other monkeys were trained to anticipate juice whenever they saw a shape on a screen. Then, researchers tried to distract them. They opened the lab’s door, so the monkeys could go outside and play with their friends. They put food in a corner, so the monkeys could eat if they abandoned the experiment. For those monkeys who hadn’t developed a strong habit, the distractions worked.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

However, once a monkey had developed a habit—once its brain anticipated the reward—the distractions held no allure. The animal would sit there, watching the monitor and pressing the lever, over and over again, regardless of the offer of food or the opportunity to go outside.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

This explains why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings. Most of the time, these cravings emerge so gradually that we’re not really aware they exist, so we’re often blind to their influence. But as we associate cues with certain rewards, a subconscious craving emerges in our brains that starts the habit loop spinning.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

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.”

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

This is how new habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.2.26 Take, for instance, smoking. When a smoker sees a cue—say, a pack of Marlboros—her brain starts anticipating a hit of nicotine. Just the sight of cigarettes is enough for the brain to crave a nicotine rush. If it doesn’t arrive, the craving grows until the smoker reaches, unthinkingly, for a Marlboro.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

Particularly strong habits, wrote two researchers at the University of Michigan, produce addiction-like 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.”2.27

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

to overpower the habit, we must recognize which craving is driving the behavior. If we’re not conscious of the anticipation, then we’re like the shoppers who wander, as if drawn by an unseen force, into Cinnabon.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

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.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

If you want to start running each morning, it’s essential that you choose a simple cue (like always lacing up your sneakers before breakfast or leaving your running clothes next to your bed) and a clear reward (such as a midday treat, a sense of accomplishment from recording your miles, or the endorphin rush you get from a jog). But countless studies have shown that a cue and a reward, on their own, aren’t enough for a new habit to last. Only when your brain starts expecting the reward—craving the endorphins or sense of accomplishment—will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each morning. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come.2.29

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

“we’re like the monkeys. When we see the chicken or fries on the table, our brains begin anticipating that food, even if we’re not hungry. Our brains are craving them. Frankly, I don’t even like this kind of food, but suddenly, it’s hard to fight this urge. And as soon as I eat it, I feel this rush of pleasure as the craving is satisfied. It’s humiliating, but that’s how habits work.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

Television commercials were filmed of women spraying freshly made beds and spritzing just-laundered clothing. The tagline had been “Gets bad smells out of fabrics.” It was rewritten as “Cleans life’s smells.” Each change was designed to appeal to a specific, daily cue: Cleaning a room. Making a bed. Vacuuming a rug. In each one, Febreze was positioned as the reward: the nice smell that occurs at the end of a cleaning routine.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

When the researchers went back into consumers’ homes after the new ads aired and the redesigned bottles were given away, they found that some housewives in the test market had started expecting—craving—the Febreze scent. One woman said that when her bottle ran dry, she squirted diluted perfume on her laundry. “If I don’t smell something nice at the end, it doesn’t really seem clean now,” she told them.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

who wants to admit their house stinks? “We were looking at it all wrong. No one craves scentlessness. On the other hand, lots of people crave a nice smell after they’ve spent thirty minutes cleaning.”

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

Unlike other pastes of the period, Pepsodent contained citric acid, as well as doses of mint oil and other chemicals.2.31 Pepsodent’s inventor used those ingredients to make the toothpaste taste fresh, but they had another, unanticipated effect as well. They’re irritants that create a cool, tingling sensation on the tongue and gums. 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.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

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. When other companies discovered what Hopkins was really selling, they started imitating him. Within a few decades, almost every toothpaste contained oils and chemicals that caused gums to tingle

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

“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.”

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

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.2.33

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

For companies, understanding the science of cravings is revolutionary.

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

“Foaming is a huge reward,” said Sinclair, the brand manager. “Shampoo doesn’t have to foam, but we add foaming chemicals because people expect it each time they wash their hair. Same thing with laundry detergent. And toothpaste—now every company adds sodium laureth sulfate to make toothpaste foam more. There’s no cleaning benefit, but people feel better when there’s a bunch of suds around their mouth. Once the customer starts expecting that foam, the habit starts growing.”

2. The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits

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.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” Dungy would explain. “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.” How, the owners would ask, are you going to create those new habits? Oh, no, he wasn’t going to create new habits, Dungy would answer. Players spent their lives building the habits that got them to the NFL. No athlete is going to abandon those patterns simply because some new coach says to. So rather than creating new habits, Dungy was going to change players’ old ones. And the secret to changing old habits was using what was already inside players’ heads. Habits are a three-step loop—the cue, the routine, and the reward—but Dungy only wanted to attack the middle step, the routine.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

He knew from experience that it was easier to convince someone to adopt a new behavior if there was something familiar at the beginning and end.3.5

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Dungy recognized that you can never truly extinguish bad habits. Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Alcoholism, of course, is more than a habit. It’s a physical addiction with psychological and perhaps genetic roots.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

A physician started hourly infusions of a hallucinogenic drug called belladonna, then in vogue for the treatment of alcoholism. Wilson floated in and out of consciousness on a bed in a small room. Then, in an episode that has been described at millions of meetings in cafeterias, union halls, and church basements, Wilson began writhing in agony. For days, he hallucinated. The withdrawal pains made it feel as if insects were crawling across his skin. He was so nauseous he could hardly move, but the pain was too intense to stay still. “If there is a God, let Him show Himself!” Wilson yelled to his empty room. “I am ready to do anything. Anything!” At that moment, he later wrote, a white light filled his room, the pain ceased, and he felt as if he were on a mountaintop, “and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing.3.11 And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness.” Bill Wilson would never have another drink

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

AA’s methods seem to sidestep scientific and medical findings altogether, as well as the types of intervention many psychiatrists say alcoholics really need.1 What AA provides instead is a method for attacking the habits that surround alcohol use.3.15 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.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

the program’s intense focus on spirituality, as articulated in step three, which says that alcoholics can achieve sobriety by making “a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand him.”3.18 Seven of the twelve steps mention God or spirituality

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

AA succeeds because it helps alcoholics use the same cues, and get the same reward, but it shifts the routine.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before, and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Take steps four (to make “a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves”) and five (to admit “to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”).     “It’s not obvious from the way they’re written, but to complete those steps, someone has to create a list of all the triggers for their alcoholic urges

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

When you make a self-inventory, you’re figuring out all the things that make you drink. And admitting to someone else all the bad things you’ve done is a pretty good way of figuring out the moments where everything spiraled out of control.”

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

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.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Eradicating the alcoholics’ neurological cravings, however, wasn’t enough to stop their drinking habits. Four of them relapsed soon after the surgery, usually after a stressful event. They picked up a bottle because that’s how they automatically dealt with anxiety. However, once they learned alternate routines for dealing with stress, the drinking stopped for good

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

The alcoholics only permanently changed once they learned new routines that drew on the old triggers and provided a familiar relief.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Mandy would often bite until her nails pulled away from the skin underneath. Her fingertips were covered with tiny scabs. The end of her fingers had become blunted without nails to protect them and sometimes they tingled or itched, a sign of nerve injury. The biting habit had damaged her social life. She was so embarrassed around her friends that she kept her hands in her pockets and, on dates, would become preoccupied with balling her fingers into fists. She had tried to stop by painting her nails with foul-tasting polishes or promising herself, starting right now, that she would muster the willpower to quit. But as soon as she began doing homework or watching television, her fingers ended up in her mouth.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

“What do you feel right before you bring your hand up to your mouth to bite your nails?” he asked her. “There’s a little bit of tension in my fingers,” Mandy said. “It hurts a little bit here, at the edge of the nail. Sometimes I’ll run my thumb along, looking for hangnails, and when I feel something catch, I’ll bring it up to my mouth. Then I’ll go finger by finger, biting all the rough edges. Once I start, it feels like I have to do all of them.” Asking patients to describe what triggers their habitual behavior is called awareness training

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

it’s the first step in habit reversal training. The tension that Mandy felt in her nails cued her nail biting habit.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Next, the therapist asked Mandy to describe why she bit her nails. At first, she had trouble coming up with reasons. As they talked, though, it became clear that she bit when she was bored. The therapist put her in some typical situations, such as watching television and doing homework, and she started nibbling. When she had worked through all of the nails, she felt a brief sense of completeness, she said. That was the habit’s reward: a physical stimulation she had come to crave.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

At the end of their first session, the therapist sent Mandy home with an assignment: Carry around an index card, and each time you feel the cue—a tension in your fingertips—make a check mark on the card. She came back a week later with twenty-eight checks. She was, by that point, acutely aware of the sensations that preceded her habit. She knew how many times it occurred during class or while watching television.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Then the therapist taught Mandy what is known as a “competing response.” Whenever she felt that tension in her fingertips, he told her, she should immediately put her hands in her pockets or under her legs, or grip a pencil or something else that made it impossible to put her fingers in her mouth. Then Mandy was to search for something that would provide a quick physical stimulation—such as rubbing her arm or rapping her knuckles on a desk—anything that would produce a physical response. The cues and rewards stayed the same. Only the routine changed.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Mandy was sent home with a new assignment: Continue with the index card, but make a check when you feel the tension in your fingertips and a hash mark when you successfully override the habit. A week later, Mandy had bitten her nails only three times and had used the competing response seven times. She rewarded herself with a manicure, but kept using the note cards. After a month, the nail-biting habit was gone. The competing routines had become automatic. One habit had replaced another.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

once you’re aware of how your habit works, once you recognize the cues and rewards, you’re halfway to changing it

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.”2

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

habit reversal therapy is used to treat verbal and physical tics, depression, smoking, gambling problems, anxiety, bedwetting, procrastination, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and other behavioral problems.3.26, 3.27 And its techniques lay bare one of the fundamental principles of habits: Often, we don’t really understand the cravings driving our behaviors until we look for them

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

If you want to stop smoking, ask yourself, do you do it because you love nicotine, or because it provides a burst of stimulation, a structure to your day, a way to socialize?

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine. At least, most of the time. For some habits, however, there’s one other ingredient that’s necessary: belief.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

my sponsor told me that it didn’t matter if I felt in control. Without a higher power in my life, without admitting my powerlessness, none of it was going to work. I thought that was bull—I’m an atheist. But I knew that if something didn’t change, I was going to kill my kids. So I started working at that, working at believing in something bigger than me. And it’s working. I don’t know if it’s God or something else, but there is a power that has helped me stay sober for seven years now and I’m in awe of it. I don’t wake up sober every morning—I mean, I haven’t had a drink in seven years, but some mornings I wake up feeling like I’m gonna fall down that day. Those days, I look for the higher power, and I call my sponsor, and most of the time we don’t talk about drinking. We talk about life and marriage and my job, and by the time I’m ready for a shower, my head is on straight.”

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Researchers began finding that habit replacement worked pretty well for many people until the stresses of life—such as finding out your mom has cancer, or your marriage is coming apart—got too high, at which point alcoholics often fell off the wagon. Academics asked why, if habit replacement is so effective, it seemed to fail at such critical moments. And as they dug into alcoholics’ stories to answer that question, they learned that replacement habits only become durable new behaviors when they are accompanied by something else.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Researchers hated that explanation. God and spirituality are not testable hypotheses. Churches are filled with drunks who continue drinking despite a pious faith. In conversations with addicts, though, spirituality kept coming up again and again. So in 2005, a group of scientists—this time affiliated with UC Berkeley, Brown University, and the National Institutes of Health—began asking alcoholics about all kinds of religious and spiritual topics.3.32 Then they looked at the data to see if there was any correlation between religious belief and how long people stayed sober.3.33 A pattern emerged. 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, like John in Brooklyn, 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.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

You don’t have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better. “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.”

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

AA trains people in how to believe in something until they believe in the program and themselves. It lets people practice believing that things will eventually get better, until things actually do.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they’re by themselves, but a group will convince them to suspend disbelief. A community creates belief.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

researchers found that some people had remade their habits after a personal tragedy, such as a divorce or a life-threatening illness.3.35 Others changed after they saw a friend go through something awful

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Just as frequently, however, there was no tragedy that preceded people’s transformations. Rather, they changed because they were embedded in social groups that made change easier

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

The precise mechanisms of belief are still little understood

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

we do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

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.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

belief made everything they had learned—all the routines they had practiced until they became automatic—stick, even at the most stressful moments.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

There is, unfortunately, no specific set of steps guaranteed to work for every person.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

We know that a habit cannot be eradicated—it must, instead, be replaced. And we know that habits are most malleable when the Golden Rule of habit change is applied: If we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new routine can be inserted. But that’s not enough. For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

If you want to lose weight, study your habits to determine why you really leave your desk for a snack each day

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

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

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

physical cravings often fade quickly after use is discontinued. A physical addiction to nicotine, for instance, lasts only as long as the chemical is in a smoker’s bloodstream—about one hundred hours after the last cigarette. Many of the lingering urges that we think of as nicotine’s addictive twinges are really behavioral habits asserting themselves—we crave a cigarette at breakfast a month later not because we physically need it, but because we remember so fondly the rush it once provided each morning.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Attacking the behaviors we think of as addictions by modifying the habits surrounding them has been shown, in clinical studies, to be one of the most effective modes of treatment.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Changing any habit requires determination. No one will quit smoking cigarettes simply because they sketch a habit loop.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Anyone struggling with addiction or destructive behaviors can benefit from help from many quarters, including trained therapists, physicians, social workers, and clergy. Even professionals in those fields, though, agree that most alcoholics, smokers, and other people struggling with problematic behaviors quit on their own, away from formal treatment settings.

3. The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs

Much of the time, those changes are accomplished because people examine the cues, cravings, and rewards that drive their behaviors and then find ways to replace their self-destructive routines with healthier alternatives, even if they aren’t fully aware of what they are doing at the time. 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.

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

some habits have the power to start a chain reaction

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

“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

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

“Every time I looked at a different part of the government, I found these habits that seemed to explain why things were either succeeding or failing,” O’Neill told me. “The best agencies understood the importance of routines. The worst agencies were headed by people who never thought about it, and then wondered why no one followed their orders.”

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

O’Neill’s safety plan, in effect, was modeled on the habit loop. He identified a simple cue: an employee injury. He instituted an automatic routine: Any time someone was injured, the unit president had to report it to O’Neill within twenty-four hours and present a plan for making sure the injury never happened again.4.8, 4.9 And there was a reward: The only people who got promoted were those who embraced the system.

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

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

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence.

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

not that a family meal or a tidy bed causes better grades or less frivolous spending. But somehow those initial shifts start chain reactions that help other good habits take hold. If you focus on changing or cultivating keystone habits, you can cause widespread shifts.

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

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.

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

Bowman purchased a book of relaxation exercises and asked Phelps’s mom to read them aloud every night. The book contained a script—“Tighten your right hand into a fist and release it. Imagine the tension melting away”—that tensed and relaxed each part of Phelps’s body before he fell asleep

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

all elite performers are obsessives.

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

When Phelps was a teenager, for instance, at the end of each practice, Bowman would tell him to go home and “watch the videotape. Watch it before you go to sleep and when you wake up.” The videotape wasn’t real. Rather, it was a mental visualization of the perfect race. Each night before falling asleep and each morning after waking up, Phelps would imagine himself jumping off the blocks and, in slow motion, swimming flawlessly. He would visualize his strokes, the walls of the pool, his turns, and the finish. He would imagine the wake behind his body, the water dripping off his lips as his mouth cleared the surface, what it would feel like to rip off his cap at the end. He would lie in bed with his eyes shut and watch the entire competition, the smallest details, again and again, until he knew each second by heart. During practices, when Bowman ordered Phelps to swim at race speed, he would shout, “Put in the videotape!” and Phelps would push himself, as hard as he could. It almost felt anticlimactic as he cut through the water. He had done this so many times in his head that, by now, it felt rote. But it worked. He got faster and faster.

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves. “Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage,” one Cornell professor wrote in 1984. “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”4.14 Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.4.15

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

convincing the American Psychiatric Association to stop defining homosexuality as a mental disease—were out of reach.4.16 Then, in the early 1970s, the 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 movement from HQ 71–471 (“Abnormal Sexual Relations, Including Sexual Crimes”) to another, less pejorative category.4.17 In 1972, after receiving a letter requesting the reclassification, the Library of Congress agreed to make the shift, reclassifying books into a newly created category, HQ 76.5 (“Homosexuality, Lesbianism—Gay Liberation Movement, Homophile Movement”). It was a minor tweak of an old institutional habit regarding how books were shelved, but the effect was electrifying. News of the new policy spread across the nation. Gay rights organizations, citing the victory, started fund-raising drives. Within a few years, openly gay politicians were running for political office in California, New York, Massachusetts, and Oregon, many of them citing the Library of Congress’s decision as inspiration. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association, after years of internal debate, rewrote the definition of homosexuality so it was no longer a mental illness—paving the way for the passage of state laws that made it illegal to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation.

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

the second way that keystone habits encourage change: by creating structures that help other habits to flourish

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

this keystone habit—food journaling—created a structure that helped other habits to flourish. Six months into the study, people who kept daily food records had lost twice as much weight as everyone else. “After a while, the journal got inside my head,” one person told me.4.25 “I started thinking about meals differently. It gave me a system for thinking about food without becoming depressed.”

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

This is the final way that keystone habits encourage widespread change: by creating cultures where new values become ingrained. Keystone habits make tough choices—such as firing a top executive—easier, because when that person violates the culture, it’s clear they have to go

4. Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

Cultures grow out of the keystone habits in every organization, whether leaders are aware of them or not.

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

“Sometimes it looks like people with great self-control aren’t working hard—but that’s because they’ve made it automatic,” Angela Duckworth, one of the University of Pennsylvania researchers told me. “Their willpower occurs without them having to think about it.”

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

early on, Starbucks started researching how they could teach employees to regulate their emotions and marshal their self-discipline to deliver a burst of pep with every serving. Unless baristas are trained to put aside their personal problems, the emotions of some employees will inevitably spill into how they treat customers. However, if a worker knows how to remain focused and disciplined, even at the end of an eight-hour shift, they’ll deliver the higher class of fast food service that Starbucks customers expect. 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.5.3

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

To Muraven, this model of willpower-as-skill wasn’t a satisfying explanation. A skill, after all, is something that remains constant from day to day. If you have the skill to make an omelet on Wednesday, you’ll still know how to make it on Friday. In Muraven’s experience, though, it felt like he forgot how to exert willpower all the time. Some evenings he would come home from work and have no problem going for a jog. Other days, he couldn’t do anything besides lie on the couch and watch television. It was as if his brain—or, at least, that part of his brain responsible for making him exercise—had forgotten how to summon the willpower to push him out the door. Some days, he ate healthily. Other days, when he was tired, he raided the vending machines and stuffed himself with candy and chips.

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

“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,” said Todd Heatherton, a researcher at Dartmouth who has worked on willpower studies.5.11 “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.”

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

No matter how much their employees want to do a great job, many will fail because they lack self-discipline. They show up late. They snap at rude customers. They get distracted or drawn into workplace dramas. They quit for no reason.

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

If your parents or teachers have been telling you what to do your entire life, and suddenly customers are yelling and your boss is too busy to give you guidance, it can be really overwhelming. A lot of people can’t make the transition. So we try to figure out how to give our employees the self-discipline they didn’t learn in high school.”

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

employees complained. “If someone has trouble with self-discipline at work, they’re probably also going to have trouble attending a program designed to strengthen their self-discipline after work

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

The solution, Starbucks discovered, was turning self-discipline into an organizational habit.

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

the patients who didn’t write out any plans were at a significant disadvantage, because they never thought ahead about how to deal with painful inflection points. They never deliberately designed willpower habits. Even if they intended to walk around the block, their resolve abandoned them when they confronted the agony of the first few steps.

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

sometimes, particularly when faced with unexpected stresses or uncertainties, those employees would snap and their self-control would evaporate. A customer might begin yelling, for instance, and a normally calm employee would lose her composure. An impatient crowd might overwhelm a barista, and suddenly he was on the edge of tears.5.17     What employees really needed were clear instructions about how to deal with inflection points—something similar to the Scottish patients’ booklets: a routine for employees to follow when their willpower muscles went limp.5.18 So the company developed new training materials that spelled out routines for employees to use when they hit rough patches. The manuals taught workers how to respond to specific cues, such as a screaming customer or a long line at a cash register. Managers drilled employees, role-playing with them until the responses became automatic. The company identified specific rewards—a grateful customer, praise from a manager—that employees could look to as evidence of a job well done. Starbucks taught their employees how to handle moments of adversity by giving them willpower habit loops. When Travis started at Starbucks, for instance, his manager introduced him to the habits right away. “One of the hardest things about this job is dealing with an angry customer,” Travis’s manager told him. “When someone comes up and starts yelling at you because they got the wrong drink, what’s your first reaction?” “I don’t know,” Travis said. “I guess I feel kind of scared. Or angry.” “That’s natural,” his manager said. “But our job is to provide the best customer service, even when the pressure’s on.” The manager flipped open the Starbucks manual, and showed Travis a page that was largely blank. At the top, it read, “When a customer is unhappy, my plan is to … ”     “This workbook is for you to imagine unpleasant situations, and write out a plan for responding,” the manager said.

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

One of the systems we use is called the LATTE method. We Listen to the customer, Acknowledge their complaint, Take action by solving the problem, Thank them, and then Explain why the problem occurred.5.19

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

Starbucks has dozens of routines that employees are taught to use during stressful inflection points. There’s the What What Why system of giving criticism and the Connect, Discover, and Respond system for taking orders when things become hectic.

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

Throughout the training manuals are dozens of blank pages where employees can write out plans that anticipate how they will surmount inflection points. Then they practice those plans, again and again, until they become automatic.5.20

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives. When the Scottish patients filled out their booklets, or Travis studied the LATTE method, they decided ahead of time how to react to a cue—a painful muscle or an angry customer. When the cue arrived, the routine occurred.

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

if you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they’ll prove you right.” Schultz’s focus on employee training and customer service made Starbucks into one of the most successful companies in the world

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

When Muraven started exploring why students who had been treated kindly had more willpower he found that the key difference was the sense of control they had over their experience. “We’ve found this again and again,” Muraven told me. “When people are asked to do something that takes self-control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons—if they feel like it’s a choice or something they enjoy because it helps someone else—it’s much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they’re just following orders, their willpower muscles get tired much faster.

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

For companies and organizations, this insight has enormous implications. Simply giving employees a sense of agency—a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority—can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

One 2010 study at a manufacturing plant in Ohio, for instance, scrutinized assembly-line workers who were empowered to make small decisions about their schedules and work environment.5.24 They designed their own uniforms and had authority over shifts. Nothing else changed. All the manufacturing processes and pay scales stayed the same. Within two months, productivity at the plant increased by 20 percent. Workers were taking shorter breaks. They were making fewer mistakes. Giving employees a sense of control improved how much self-discipline they brought to their jobs.

5. Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

He would have known to acknowledge her authority, and then ask politely for one small exception. He could have gotten inside the hospital

6. The Power of a Crisis: How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident : and Design

Destructive organizational habits can be found within hundreds of industries and at thousands of firms. And almost always, they are the products of thoughtlessness, of leaders who avoid thinking about the culture and so let it develop without guidance. There are no organizations without institutional habits. There are only places where they are deliberately designed, and places where they are created without forethought, so they often grow from rivalries or fear.

6. The Power of a Crisis: How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident : and Design

Nelson and Winter had spent more than a decade examining how companies work, trudging through swamps of data before arriving at their central conclusion: “Much of firm behavior,” they wrote, is best “understood as a reflection of general habits and strategic orientations coming from the firm’s past,”

6. The Power of a Crisis: How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident : and Design

most organizations make rational choices based on deliberate decision making, but that’s not really how companies operate at all. Instead, firms are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions.6.16 And these habits have more profound impacts than anyone previously understood.

6. The Power of a Crisis: How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident : and Design

Companies aren’t big happy families where everyone plays together nicely. Rather, most workplaces are made up of fiefdoms where executives compete for power and credit, often in hidden skirmishes that make their own performances appear superior and their rivals’ seem worse. Divisions compete for resources and sabotage each other to steal glory. Bosses pit their subordinates against one another so that no one can mount a coup.

6. The Power of a Crisis: How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident : and Design

Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines—habits—that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get a day’s work done. Organizational habits offer a basic promise: If you follow the established patterns and abide by the truce, then rivalries won’t destroy the company, the profits will roll in, and, eventually, everyone will get rich

6. The Power of a Crisis: How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident : and Design

conflict within companies usually “follows largely predictable paths and stays within predictable bounds that are consistent with the ongoing routine.…

6. The Power of a Crisis: How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident : and Design

crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose.

6. The Power of a Crisis: How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident : and Design

Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits

6. The Power of a Crisis: How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident : and Design

NASA administrators, for instance, tried for years to improve the agency’s safety habits, but those efforts were unsuccessful until the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. In the wake of that tragedy, the organization was able to overhaul how it enforced quality standards.

6. The Power of a Crisis: How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident : and Design

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel told a conference of chief executives in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown, soon after he was appointed as President Obama’s chief of staff. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” Soon afterward, the Obama administration convinced a once-reluctant Congress to pass the president’s $787 billion stimulus plan. Congress also passed Obama’s health care reform law, reworked consumer protection laws, and approved dozens of other statutes, from expanding children’s health insurance to giving women new opportunities to sue over wage discrimination. It was one of the biggest policy overhauls since the Great Society and the New Deal, and it happened because, in the aftermath of a financial catastrophe, lawmakers saw opportunity.

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

Pregnant women and new parents, after all, are the holy grail of retail. There is almost no more profitable, product-hungry, price-insensitive group in existence.

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

It’s not just diapers and wipes. People with infants are so tired that they’ll buy everything they need—juice and toilet paper, socks and magazines—wherever they purchase their bottles and formula. What’s more, if a new parent starts shopping at Target, they’ll keep coming back for years.

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

habits influence almost every shopping decision. A series of experiments convinced marketers that if they managed to understand a particular shopper’s habits, they could get them to buy almost anything

Notes

O. Amir, R. Dhar, and A. Pocheptsova, “Deciding Without Resources: Resource Depletion and Choice in Context,” Journal of Marketing Research 46, no. 3 (2009): 344–55; H. Aarts, R. Custers, and P. Sheeran, “The Goal-Dependent Automaticity of Drinking Habits,” British Journal of Social Psychology 44, no. 1 (2005): 47–63; S. Orbell and P. Sheeran, “Implementation Intentions and Repeated Behavior: Augmenting the Predictive Validity of the Theory of Planned Behavior,” European Journal of Social Psychology 29, nos. 2–3 (1999): 349–69; P. Sheeran, P. Gollwitzer, and P. Webb, “The Interplay Between Goal Intentions and Implementation Intentions,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31, no. 1 (2005): 87–98; H. Shen and R. S. Wyer, “Procedural Priming and Consumer Judgments: Effects on the Impact of Positively and Negatively Valenced Information,” Journal of Consumer Research 34, no. 5 (2007): 727–37; Itamar Simonson, “The Effect of Purchase Quantity and Timing on Variety-Seeking Behavior,” Journal of Marketing Research 27, no. 2 (1990): 150–62; G. Taylor and S. Neslin, “The Current and Future Sales Impact of a Retail Frequency Reward Program,” Journal of Retailing 81, no. 4, 293–305; H. Aarts and B. Verplanken, “Habit, Attitude, and Planned Behavior: Is Habit an Empty Construct or an Interesting Case of Goal-Directed Automaticity?” European Review of Social Psychology 10 (1999): 101–34; B. Verplanken, Henk Aarts, and Ad Van Knippenberg, “Habit, Information Acquisition, and the Process of Making Travel Mode Choices,” European Journal of Social Psychology 27, no. 5 (1997): 539–60; B. Verplanken et al., “Attitude Versus General Habit: Antecedents of Travel Mode Choice,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 24, no. 4 (1994): 285–300; B. Verplanken et al., “Consumer Style and Health: The Role of Impulsive Buying in Unhealthy Eating,” Psychology and Health 20, no. 4 (2005): 429–41; B. Verplanken et al., “Context Change and Travel Mode Choice: Combining the Habit Discontinuity and Self-Activation Hypotheses,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 28 (2008): 121–27; Bas Verplanken and Wendy Wood, “Interventions to Break and Create Consumer Habits,” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 25, no. 1 (2006): 90–103; H. Evanschitzky, B. Ramaseshan, and V. Vogel, “Customer Equity Drivers and Future Sales,” Journal of Marketing 72 (2008): 98–108; P. Sheeran and T. L. Webb, “Does Changing Behavioral Intentions Engender Behavioral Change? A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence,” Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 2 (2006): 249–68; P. Sheeran, T. L. Webb, and A. Luszczynska, “Planning to Break Unwanted Habits: Habit Strength Moderates Implementation Intention Effects on Behavior Change,” British Journal of Social Psychology 48, no. 3 (2009): 507–23; D. Wegner and R. Wenzlaff, “Thought Suppression,” Annual Review of Psychology 51 (2000): 59–91; L. Lwin, A. Mattila, and J. Wirtz, “How Effective Are Loyalty Reward Programs in Driving Share of Wallet?” Journal of Service Research 9, no. 4 (2007): 327–34; D. Kashy, J. Quinn, and W. Wood, “Habits in Everyday Life: Thought, Emotion, and Action,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, no. 6 (2002): 1281–97; L. Tam, M. Witt, and W. Wood (2005), “Changing Circumstances, Disrupting Habits,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88, no. 6 (2005): 918–33; Alison Jing Xu and Robert S. Wyer, “The Effect of Mind-sets on Consumer Decision Strategies,” Journal of Consumer Research 34, no. 4 (2007): 556–66; C. Cole, M. Lee, and C. Yoon, “Consumer Decision Making and Aging: Current Knowledge and Future Directions,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 19 (2009): 2–16; S. Dhar, A. Krishna, and Z. Zhang, “The Optimal Choice of Promotional Vehicles: Front-Loaded or Rear-Loaded Incentives?” Management Science 46, no. 3 (2000): 348–62.

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

“Consumers sometimes act like creatures of habit, automatically repeating past behavior with little regard to current goals,” two psychologists at the University of Southern California wrote in 2009.7.4

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

“It used to be that companies only knew what their customers wanted them to know,” said Tom Davenport, one of the leading researchers on how businesses use data and analytics. “That world is far behind us. You’d be shocked how much information is out there—and every company buys it, because it’s the only way to survive.”

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

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.

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

“Changing residence, getting married or divorced, losing or changing a job, having someone enter or leave the household,” Andreasen wrote, are life changes that make consumers more “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” And what’s the biggest life event for most people? What causes the greatest disruption and “vulnerability to marketing interventions”? Having a baby

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

“People listen to Top 40 because they want to hear their favorite songs or songs that sound just like their favorite songs. When something different comes on, they’re offended. They don’t want anything unfamiliar.”

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

Listening to music activates numerous areas of the brain, including the auditory cortex, the thalamus, and the superior parietal cortex.7.19 These same areas are also associated with pattern recognition and helping the brain decide which inputs to pay attention to and which to ignore. The areas that process music, in other words, are designed to seek out patterns and look for familiarity

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

Our brains crave familiarity in music because familiarity is how we manage to hear without becoming distracted by all the sound. Just as the scientists at MIT discovered that behavioral habits prevent us from becoming overwhelmed by the endless decisions we would otherwise have to make each day, listening habits exist because, without them, it would be impossible to determine if we should concentrate on our child’s voice, the coach’s whistle, or the noise from a busy street during a Saturday soccer game

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

Listening habits allow us to unconsciously separate important noises from those that can be ignored.

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

we don’t actually choose if we like or dislike a song. It would take too much mental effort. Instead, we react to the cues (“This sounds like all the other songs I’ve ever liked”) and rewards (“It’s fun to hum along!”) and without thinking, we either start singing, or reach over and change the station.

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

To change people’s diets, the exotic must be made familiar. And to do that, you must camouflage it in everyday garb.

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

when the Subsistence Division of the Quartermaster Corps—the people in charge of feeding soldiers—started serving fresh cabbage to troops in 1943, it was rejected. So mess halls chopped and boiled the cabbage until it looked like every other vegetable on a soldier’s tray—and the troops ate it without complaint.

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

“Soldiers were more likely to eat food, whether familiar or unfamiliar, when it was prepared similar to their prior experiences and served in a familiar fashion,” a present-day researcher evaluating those studies wrote.7.23

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

DJs started making sure that whenever “Hey Ya!” was played, it was sandwiched between songs that were already popular. “It’s textbook playlist theory now,” said Tom Webster, a radio consultant. “Play a new song between two consensus popular hits.”

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

“Managing a playlist is all about risk mitigation,” said Webster. “Stations have to take risks on new songs, otherwise people stop listening. But what listeners really want are songs they already like. So you have to make new songs seem familiar as fast as possible.”

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same: If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

People want to visit places that satisfy their social needs. Getting people to exercise in groups makes it more likely they’ll stick with a workout.

7. How Target Knows what you want before you Do: When Companies Predict (and Manipulate) Habits

to sell a new habit—in this case exercise—wrap it in something that people already know and like

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances. It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together. And it endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership. Usually, only when all three parts of this process are fulfilled can a movement become self-propelling and reach a critical mass

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

Studies show that people have no problem ignoring strangers’ injuries, but when a friend is insulted, our sense of outrage is enough to overcome the inertia that usually makes protests hard to organize.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

he found that when job hunters approached strangers for assistance, they were rejected. When they appealed to friends, help was provided. More surprising, however, was how often job hunters also received help from casual acquaintances—friends of friends—people who were neither strangers nor close pals. Granovetter called those connections “weak ties,”

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

In fact, in landing a job, Granovetter discovered, weak-tie acquaintances were often more important than strong-tie friends because weak ties give us access to social networks where we don’t otherwise belong

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

When sociologists have examined how opinions move through communities, how gossip spreads or political movements start, they’ve discovered a common pattern: Our weak-tie acquaintances are often as influential—if not more—than our close-tie friends

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

Granovetter wrote, “Individuals with few weak ties will be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system and will be confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends. This deprivation will not only insulate them from the latest ideas and fashions but may put them in a disadvantaged position in the labor market, where advancement can depend … on knowing about appropriate job openings at just the right time.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

The power of weak ties helps explain how a protest can expand from a group of friends into a broad social movement. Convincing thousands of people to pursue the same goal—especially when that pursuit entails real hardship, such as walking to work rather than taking the bus, or going to jail, or even skipping a morning cup of coffee because the company that sells it doesn’t support organic farming—is hard. Most people don’t care enough about the latest outrage to give up their bus ride or caffeine unless it’s a close friend that has been insulted or jailed. So there is a tool that activists have long relied upon to compel protest, even when a group of people don’t necessarily want to participate. It’s a form of persuasion that has been remarkably effective over hundreds of years. It’s the sense of obligation that neighborhoods or communities place upon themselves. In other words, peer pressure.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

King, like thousands of other movement leaders, would shift the struggle’s guidance from his hands onto the shoulders of his followers, in large part by handing them new habits. He would activate the third part of the movement formula, and the boycott would become a self-perpetuating force.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

Only the evangelist who helps people “to become followers of Christ in their normal social relationship has any chance of liberating multitudes.”

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

At the center of McGavran’s philosophy was an admonition that missionaries should imitate the tactics of other successful movements—including the civil rights campaign—by appealing to people’s social habits.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

McGavran said, ministers needed to convert groups of people, rather than individuals, so that a community’s social habits would encourage religious participation, rather than pulling people away.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

“We’ve thought long and hard about habitualizing faith, breaking it down into pieces,” Warren told me. “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.”

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

When Warren first arrived in Saddleback Valley, he spent twelve weeks going door-to-door, introducing himself and asking strangers why they didn’t go to church. Many of the answers were practical—it was boring, people said, the music was bad, the sermons didn’t seem applicable to their lives, they needed child care, they hated dressing up, the pews were uncomfortable. Warren’s church would address each of those complaints.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

Warren’s sermons, from the start, focused on practical topics, with titles such as “How to Handle Discouragement,” “How to Feel Good About Yourself,” “How to Raise Healthy Families,” and “How to Survive Under Stress.”8.27 His lessons were easy to understand, focused on real, daily problems, and could be applied as soon as parishioners left church.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

it transformed church participation from a decision into a habit that drew on already-existing social urges and patterns.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

when people come to Saddleback and see the giant crowds on the weekends, they think that’s our success,” Warren told me. “But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Ninety-five percent of this church is what happens during the week inside those small groups. “The congregation and the small groups are like a one-two punch. You have this big crowd to remind you why you’re doing this in the first place, and a small group of close friends to help you focus on how to be faithful. Together, they’re like glue. We have over five thousand small groups now. It’s the only thing that makes a church this size manageable. Otherwise, I’d work myself to death, and 95 percent of the congregation would never receive the attention they came here looking for.”

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

McGavran’s philosophy said that if you teach people to live with Christian habits, they’ll act as Christians without requiring constant guidance and monitoring.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

Warren created a series of curriculums, used in church classes and small group discussions, which were explicitly designed to teach parishioners new habits. “If you want to have Christ-like character, then you just develop the habits that Christ had,” one of Saddleback’s course manuals reads. “All of us are simply a bundle of habits.… Our goal is to help you replace some bad habits with some good habits that will help you grow in Christ’s likeness.”8.29 Every Saddleback member is asked to sign a “maturity covenant card” promising to adhere to three habits: daily quiet time for reflection and prayer, tithing 10 percent of their income, and membership in a small group. Giving everyone new habits has become a focus of the church.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

Once we do that, the responsibility for spiritual growth is no longer with me, it’s with you. We’ve given you a recipe,” Warren told me. “We don’t have to guide you, because you’re guiding yourself. These habits become a new self-identity, and, at that point, we just need to support you and get out of your way.”8.30

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

Warren needed to teach people habits that caused them to live faithfully not because of their ties, but because it’s who they are.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

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.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

A movement is a saga. For it to work, everyone’s identity has to change. People in Montgomery had to learn a new way to act.” Much like Alcoholics Anonymous—which draws power from group meetings where addicts learn new habits and start to believe by watching others demonstrate their faith—so Montgomery’s citizens learned in mass meetings new behaviors that expanded the movement. “People went to see how other people were handling it,” said Branch. “You start to see yourself as part of a vast social enterprise, and after a while, you really believe you are

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

Embedded within King’s philosophy was a set of new behaviors that converted participants from followers into self-directing leaders.

8. Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements Happen

Movements don’t emerge because everyone suddenly decides to face the same direction at once. They rely on social patterns that begin as the habits of friendship, grow through the habits of communities, and are sustained by new habits that change participants’ sense of self.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

Sleepwalking is a reminder that wake and sleep are not mutually exclusive,

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

The part of your brain that monitors your behavior is asleep, but the parts capable of very complex activities are awake.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

Society, as embodied by our courts and juries, has agreed that some habits are so powerful that they overwhelm our capacity to make choices, and thus we’re not responsible for what we do.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

our most primitive neurological structure—the brain stem—paralyzes our limbs and nervous system, allowing our brains to experience dreams without our bodies moving. Usually, people can make the transition in and out of paralysis multiple times each night without any problems. Within neurology, it’s known as the “switch.”

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

The behaviors of people in the grip of sleep terrors are habits, though of the most primal kind. The “central pattern generators” at work during a sleep terror are where such behavioral patterns as walking, breathing, flinching from a loud noise, or fighting an attacker come from. We don’t usually think about these behaviors as habits, but that’s what they are: automatic behaviors so ingrained in our neurology that, studies show, they can occur with almost no input from the higher regions of the brain.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

Responding to a threat by running away or defending ourselves is something everyone has practiced since they were babies.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

when those emotions occur, and there’s no chance for the higher brain to put things in context, we react the way our deepest habits tell us to.9.9 We run or fight or follow whatever behavioral pattern is easiest for our brains to latch on to.”

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

More than 150 murderers and rapists have escaped punishment in the past century using the automatism defense. Judges and juries, acting on behalf of society, have said that since the criminals didn’t choose to commit their crimes—since they didn’t consciously participate in the violence—they shouldn’t bear the blame.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

Thomas’s lawyer argued that his client hadn’t meant to kill his wife—in fact, he wasn’t even in control of his own actions that night. Instead, he was reacting automatically to a perceived threat. He was following a habit almost as old as our species: the instinct to fight an attacker and protect a loved one. Once the most primitive parts of his brain were exposed to a cue—someone strangling his wife—his habit took over and he fought back, with no chance of his higher cognition interceding.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

Harrah’s Entertainment—the company that owned the casino—was known within the gaming industry for the sophistication of its customer-tracking systems. At the core of that system were computer programs much like those Andrew Pole created at Target, predictive algorithms that studied gamblers’ habits and tried to figure out how to persuade them to spend more. The company assigned players a “predicted lifetime value,” and software built calendars that anticipated how often they would visit and how much they would spend. The company tracked customers through loyalty cards and mailed out coupons for free meals and cash vouchers; telemarketers called people at home to ask where they had been. Casino employees were trained to encourage visitors to discuss their lives, in the hopes they might reveal information that could be used to predict how much they had to gamble with. One Harrah’s executive called this approach “Pavlovian marketing.”

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

To pathological gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brains reacted almost the same way. But to a nonpathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss. People without a gambling problem were better at recognizing that a near miss means you still lose.”

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

People with gambling problems got a mental high from the near misses—which, Habib hypothesizes, is probably why they gamble for so much longer than everyone else: because the near miss triggers those habits that prompt them to put down another bet

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

Gaming companies are well aware of this tendency, of course, which is why in the past decades, slot machines have been reprogrammed to deliver a more constant supply of near wins.3 Gamblers who keep betting after near wins are what make casinos, racetracks, and state lotteries so profitable. “Adding a near miss to a lottery is like pouring jet fuel on a fire,” said a state lottery consultant

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

The areas of the brain that Habib scrutinized in his experiment—the basal ganglia and the brain stem—are the same regions where habits reside

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

Historically, in neuroscience, we’ve said that people with brain damage lose some of their free will,” said Habib. “But when a pathological gambler sees a casino, it seems very similar. It seems like they’re acting without choice.”9.28

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

Why does it seem the bereaved husband is a victim, while the bankrupt gambler got her just deserts? Why do some habits seem like they should be so easy to control, while others seem out of reach? More important, is it right to make a distinction in the first place? “Some thinkers,” Aristotle wrote in Nicomachean Ethics, “hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it is by instruction.” For Aristotle, habits reigned supreme. The behaviors that occur unthinkingly are the evidence of our truest selves, he said

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

We can choose our habits, once we know how. Everything we know about habits, from neurologists studying amnesiacs and organizational experts remaking companies, is that any of them can be changed, if you understand how they function.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

Hundreds of habits influence our days—they guide how we get dressed in the morning, talk to our kids, and fall asleep at night; they impact what we eat for lunch, how we do business, and whether we exercise or have a beer after work. Each of them has a different cue and offers a unique reward. Some are simple and others are complex, drawing upon emotional triggers and offering subtle neurochemical prizes. But every habit, no matter its complexity, is malleable.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

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

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

Brian Thomas should go free because Thomas never knew the patterns that drove him to kill existed in the first place—much less that he could master them. Bachmann, on the other hand, was aware of her habits. And once you know a habit exists, you have the responsibility to change it. If she had tried a bit harder, perhaps she could have reined them in. Others have done so, even in the face of greater temptations.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

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.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

“Today I about touched bottom, and perceive plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes,” James wrote in his diary in 1870, when he was twenty-eight years old. “Shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate aptitudes?” Is suicide, in other words, a better choice? Two months later, James made a decision. Before doing anything rash, he would conduct a yearlong experiment. He would spend twelve months believing that he had control over himself and his destiny, that he could become better, that he had the free will to change. There was no proof that it was true. But he would free himself to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that change was possible. “I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life,” he wrote in his diary. Regarding his ability to change, “I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”     Over the next year, he practiced every day. In his diary, he wrote as if his control over himself and his choices was never in question. He got married. He started teaching at Harvard

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

Later, he would famously write that the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change. And that one of the most important methods for creating that belief was habits. Habits, he noted, are what allow us to “do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all.” Once we choose who we want to be, people grow “to the way in which they have been exercised

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

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, as James wrote, that bears “us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.”

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

The way we habitually think of our surroundings and ourselves create the worlds that each of us inhabit.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

“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?’ ” the writer David Foster Wallace told a class of graduating college students in 2005. “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.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

William James wrote about habits and their central role in creating happiness and success. He eventually devoted an entire chapter in his masterpiece The Principles of Psychology to the topic.

9. The Neurology of free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?

Water “hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes, when it flows again, the path traced by itself before.”9.31

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

The difficult thing about studying the science of habits is that most people, when they hear about this field of research, want to know the secret formula for quickly changing any habit. If scientists have discovered how these patterns work, then it stands to reason that they must have also found a recipe for rapid change, right? If only it were that easy.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

The problem is that there isn’t one formula for changing habits. There are thousands. Individuals and habits are all different, and so the specifics of diagnosing and changing the patterns in our lives differ from person to person and behavior to behavior. Giving up cigarettes is different from curbing overeating, which is different from changing how you communicate with your spouse, which is different from how you prioritize tasks at work. What’s more, each person’s habits are driven by different cravings.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

THE FRAMEWORK: • Identify the routine • Experiment with rewards • Isolate the cue • Have a plan

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

The MIT researchers in chapter 1 discovered a simple neurological loop at the core of every habit, a loop that consists of three parts: a cue, a routine, and a reward.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

To understand your own habits, you need to identify the components of your loops. Once you have diagnosed the habit loop of a particular behavior, you can look for ways to supplant old vices with new routines.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

As an example, let’s say you have a bad habit, like I did when I started researching this book, of going to the cafeteria and buying a chocolate chip cookie every afternoon. Let’s say this habit has caused you to gain a few pounds. In fact, let’s say this habit has caused you to gain exactly eight pounds, and that your wife has made a few pointed comments. You’ve tried to force yourself to stop—you even went so far as to put a Post-it on your computer that reads no more cookies. But every afternoon you manage to ignore that note, get up, wander toward the cafeteria, buy a cookie, and, while chatting with colleagues around the cash register, eat it. It feels good, and then it feels bad. Tomorrow, you promise yourself, you’ll muster the willpower to resist. Tomorrow will be different. But tomorrow the habit takes hold again.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

How do you start diagnosing and then changing this behavior? By figuring out the habit loop. And the first step is to identify the routine. In this cookie scenario—as with most habits—the routine is the most obvious aspect: It’s the behavior you want to change. Your routine is that you get up from your desk in the afternoon, walk to the cafeteria, buy a chocolate chip cookie, and eat it while chatting with friends.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

Next, some less obvious questions: What’s the cue for this routine? Is it hunger? Boredom? Low blood sugar? That you need a break before plunging into another task? And what’s the reward? The cookie itself? The change of scenery? The temporary distraction? Socializing with colleagues? Or the burst of energy that comes from that blast of sugar? To figure this out, you’ll need to do a little experimentation.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings. But we’re often not conscious of the cravings that drive our behaviors

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

When the Febreze marketing team discovered that consumers desired a fresh scent at the end of a cleaning ritual, for example, they had found a craving that no one even knew existed. It was hiding in plain sight. Most cravings are like this: obvious in retrospect, but incredibly hard to see when we are under their sway.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

To figure out which cravings are driving particular habits, it’s useful to experiment with different rewards. This might take a few days, or a week, or longer. During that period, you shouldn’t feel any pressure to make a real change—think of yourself as a scientist in the data collection stage.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

On the first day of your experiment, when you feel the urge to go to the cafeteria and buy a cookie, adjust your routine so it delivers a different reward. For instance, instead of walking to the cafeteria, go outside, walk around the block, and then go back to your desk without eating anything. The next day, go to the cafeteria and buy a donut, or a candy bar, and eat it at your desk. The next day, go to the cafeteria, buy an apple, and eat it while chatting with your friends. Then, try a cup of coffee. Then, instead of going to the cafeteria, walk over to your friend’s office and gossip for a few minutes and go back to your desk. You get the idea. What you choose to do instead of buying a cookie isn’t important. The point is to test different hypotheses to determine which craving is driving your routine. Are you craving the cookie itself, or a break from work? If it’s the cookie, is it because you’re hungry? (In which case the apple should work just as well.) Or is it because you want the burst of energy the cookie provides? (And so the coffee should suffice.) Or are you wandering up to the cafeteria as an excuse to socialize, and the cookie is just a convenient excuse? (If so, walking to someone’s desk and gossiping for a few minutes should satisfy the urge.) As you test four or five different rewards, you can use an old trick to look for patterns: After each activity, jot down on a piece of paper the first three things that come to mind when you get back to your desk. They can be emotions, random thoughts, reflections on how you’re feeling, or just the first three words that pop into your head.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

The reason why it’s important to write down three things—even if they are meaningless words—is twofold. First, it forces a momentary awareness of what you are thinking or feeling

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

Then, set an alarm on your watch or computer for fifteen minutes. When it goes off, ask yourself: Do you still feel the urge for that cookie?

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

What’s more, studies show that writing down a few words helps in later recalling what you were thinking at that moment. At the end of the experiment, when you review your notes, it will be much easier to remember what you were thinking and feeling at that precise instant, because your scribbled words will trigger a wave of recollection.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

And why the fifteen-minute alarm? Because the point of these tests is to determine the reward you’re craving. If, fifteen minutes after eating a donut, you still feel an urge to get up and go to the cafeteria, then your habit isn’t motivated by a sugar craving. If, after gossiping at a colleague’s desk, you still want a cookie, then the need for human contact isn’t what’s driving your behavior. On the other hand, if fifteen minutes after chatting with a friend, you find it easy to get back to work, then you’ve identified the reward—temporary distraction and socialization—that your habit sought to satisfy.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

When witnesses smiled more, or sat closer to the person asking the questions, they were more likely to misremember. In other words, when environmental cues said “we are friends”—a gentle tone, a smiling face—the witnesses were more likely to misremember what had occurred. Perhaps it was because, subconsciously, those friendship cues triggered a habit to please the questioner.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

The reason why it is so hard to identify the cues that trigger our habits is because there is too much information bombarding us as our behaviors unfold.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

Ask yourself, do you eat breakfast at a certain time each day because you are hungry? Or because the clock says 7:30? Or because your kids have started eating? Or because you’re dressed, and that’s when the breakfast habit kicks in? When you automatically turn your car left while driving to work, what triggers that behavior? A street sign? A particular tree? The knowledge that this is, in fact, the correct route? All of them together? When you’re driving your kid to school and you find that you’ve absentmindedly started taking the route to work—rather than to the school—what caused the mistake? What was the cue that caused the “drive to work” habit to kick in, rather than the “drive to school” pattern?

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

To identify a cue amid the noise, we can use the same system as the psychologist: Identify categories of behaviors ahead of time to scrutinize in order to see patterns

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

Experiments have shown that almost all habitual cues fit into one of five categories: Location Time Emotional state Other people Immediately preceding action

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

So if you’re trying to figure out the cue for the “going to the cafeteria and buying a chocolate chip cookie” habit, you write down five things the moment the urge hits (these are my actual notes from when I was trying to diagnose my habit): Where are you? (sitting at my desk) What time is it? (3:36 P.M.) What’s your emotional state? (bored) Who else is around? (no one) What action preceded the urge? (answered an email) The next day: Where are you? (walking back from the copier) What time is it? (3:18 P.M.) What’s your emotional state? (happy) Who else is around? (Jim from Sports) What action preceded the urge? (made a photocopy)

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

Three days in, it was pretty clear which cue was triggering my cookie habit—I felt an urge to get a snack at a certain time of day. I had already figured out, in step two, that it wasn’t hunger driving my behavior. The reward I was seeking was a temporary distraction—the kind that comes from gossiping with a friend. And the habit, I now knew, was triggered between 3:00 and 4:00.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

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.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

a habit is a choice that we deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about, but continue doing, often every day.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

a habit is a formula our brain automatically follows: When I see CUE, I will do ROUTINE in order to get a REWARD.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

To re-engineer that formula, we need to begin making choices again. And the easiest way to do this, according to study after study, is to have a plan.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

I wrote a plan: At 3:30, every day, I will walk to a friend’s desk and talk for 10 minutes. To make sure I remembered to do this, I set the alarm on my watch for 3:30. It didn’t work immediately. There were some days I was too busy and ignored the alarm, and then fell off the wagon. Other times it seemed like too much work to find a friend willing to chat—it was easier to get a cookie, and so I gave in to the urge. But on those days that I abided by my plan—when my alarm went off, I forced myself to walk to a friend’s desk and chat for ten minutes—I found that I ended the workday feeling better. I hadn’t gone to the cafeteria, I hadn’t eat a cookie, and I felt fine. Eventually, it got be automatic: when the alarm rang, I found a friend and ended the day feeling a small, but real, sense of accomplishment. After a few weeks, I hardly thought about the routine anymore. And when I couldn’t find anyone to chat with, I went to the cafeteria and bought tea and drank it with friends. That all happened about six months ago. I don’t have my watch anymore—I lost it at some point. But at about 3:30 every day, I absentmindedly stand up, look around the newsroom for someone to talk to, spend ten minutes gossiping about the news, and then go back to my desk. It occurs almost without me thinking about it. It has become a habit.

Appendix: A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas

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.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

conserving mental effort is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, such as a predator hiding in the bushes or a speeding car as we pull onto the street. So our basal ganglia have devised a clever system to determine when to let habits take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends. To see how it works, look closely at the graph of the rat’s neurological habit again. Notice that brain activity spikes at the beginning of the maze, when the rat hears the click before the partition starts moving, and again at the end, when it finds the chocolate.

1. The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

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.1.19

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