Rating Qualities

9
Applicable
Engaging
Well Structured

The Power of Habit

Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Charles Duhigg | Random House, 2012

Have you ever wondered why some people can adopt a healthier lifestyle or realize professional
achievement, while others flail and fail? Journalist Charles Duhigg attributes this to habit and
explains that successful people learn to control and change their habits. First, they understand
that the three steps of the “habit loop” – “cue, routine and reward” – determine what individuals
do without thinking. By analyzing how undesirable habits such as overeating, excess drinking or
smoking operate in that loop by satiating cravings, people who want to change can control habits
that may seem to control them. Duhigg’s fun, educational book will help anyone who wants to
embark on self-improvement. May the force of habit be with you.

Review

A Matter of Habit

Journalist Charles Duhigg describes a habit as an activity that a person deliberately decides to
perform once and continues doing without focus, often frequently. He offers the example of the
complicated procedures you automatically go through to drive your car. Habits develop because
the human brain is wired to seek ways to conserve energy.

Patients who lose their memory due to illness or injury still retain the ability to carry out their
habits. Duhigg cites a patient named Eugene who suffered from a damaging attack of viral
encephalitis. He could no longer draw a rough floor plan of his home, but he could find the kitchen
when he wanted a snack. Eugene demonstrated that “someone who can’t remember his own age
or almost anything else can develop habits that seem inconceivably complex – until you realize
everyone relies on similar neurological processes every day.”

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 Such “automatic behaviors” reside in the deep brain’s basal ganglia, which translate deeds into
customary actions by using a process called “chunking.” For example, picking up your car keys is a
chunk of behavior that immediately triggers the other chunks involved in driving.

Duhigg describes how a three-stage “habit loop” develops in the basal ganglia. In the first stage,
the brain seeks a “cue” that will let it operate on automatic pilot and indicate what it should tell
the body to do. The second stage is the “routine,” or the ensuing habit. Then comes the “reward,”
which teaches the brain whether the loop in question is “worth remembering for the future.” When
the cue and the reward connect, the brain develops a strong feeling of expectation, leading to a
craving and the birth of a habit.

Unfortunately, Duhigg relates, the brain does not judge whether the new habit is beneficial or
detrimental, so hard-to-break bad habits take root. You can change destructive habits and adopt
new, positive ones by understanding and managing the cue-routine-reward loop. Duhigg advises
that you can focus on your cues and rewards, and alter your routine to thwart cravings and bad
habits.

Pining for Pepsodent and Begging for Febreze

Claude Hopkins made a fortune marketing Pepsodent toothpaste by inventing advertising tactics
designed to trigger “new habits among consumers.” Brushing your teeth was not a nationwide
habit in the US in the early 20th century, but, Duhigg reports, Hopkins understood that if he
marketed a desire – that is, a craving – he could make Pepsodent indispensable in Americans’
daily lives. He built the craving to get rid of “tooth film” in order to achieve the reward of
“beautiful teeth.” Hopkins marketed the “minty-fresh” Pepsodent feeling and created a national
toothpaste habit.

Similarly, according to Duhigg, Procter & Gamble mastered the habit loop to sell Febreze, an odor-
destroying air freshener. After much trial and error, P&G marketers learned that shoppers did
not want to admit that their homes smelled bad. Instead, they wanted to reward themselves for
housecleaning by making the air smell nice as “a little mini-celebration.” After P&G’s original
Febreze ad campaign failed, its next sets of ads portrayed the product as providing a way to add a
satisfying finishing touch to a newly cleaned room – and sales skyrocketed.

The brain begins to look forward to the reward that a habitual routine provides. Encountering the
right cue sends the brain, Duhigg writes, into a “subconscious craving” that sets off the habit loop,
leading to the routine and the reward. This process is not inevitable. Individuals can analyze their
cravings to learn which one impels the habit. Similarly, people can manipulate their cravings to
better ends; for example, if you value the endorphin rush of exercise, your routine of taking a run
every morning can become an automatic habit loop.

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 “The Golden Rule of Habit Change”

National Football League coach Tony Dungy understood the power of habit. Managing the low-
achieving Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he realized that if his players could alter their habits and not
overthink their plays, they would win more often. Instead of modifying his players’ cues, Duhigg
explains, Dungy changed their routines. That is the basis of changing a habit. Dungy taught his
athletes a smaller number of plays but drilled them in applying those plays whenever they got
the appropriate cues. This helped the Bucs succeed, though they still couldn’t win big games in a
pinch. When the Bucs fired Dungy in 2001, he went to the Indianapolis Colts and built a cohesive,
winning team using the same strategy.

Duhigg recounts the way Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) follows a similar approach when it helps
members set out to change the habits that surround their drinking. While addiction can have
physiological aspects, AA focuses on the habit loop and seeks to “shift the routine” when someone
encounters cues that lead to drinking. If a person drinks to forget, unwind or feel less nervous,
the next step is to determine the causes of that feeling of anxiety or apprehension. AA’s solution
is to replace the routine of drinking with a routine of companionship – talking to other alcoholics
about the craving and the feelings it sparks instead of finding refuge in a bottle. AA’s approach to
alcoholism has spread to treating other addictions, Duhigg relates, such as food, cigarettes, drugs
and gambling. AA teaches that individuals must examine their cravings closely and determine
what drives them.

Additionally, the author asserts, people who wish to change their habits must embrace a belief
that says they can change. For some, this has a spiritual element; for example, AA incorporates
God in its famous 12 steps. Anyone who wants to change a behavior needs the “capacity to believe
that things will get better.” For alcoholics, that means being confident that they can meet life’s
challenges without a drink; for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, it meant being firmly convinced that
they could win under challenging conditions. This sense of belief is always more effective if it
occurs in a group – such as the community of an AA meeting or a team in the National Football
League.

Habits That Change Other Habits

When Paul O’Neill became CEO of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), he startled
employees by focusing on workplace safety. He did so, Duhigg says, because he recognized that
organizational habits have the power to drive change. He focused on a “keystone habit” – one
that, if altered, can cascade through a firm and force other changes in seemingly unrelated areas.
He knew the “habits that matter most are the ones that – when they start to shift – dislodge and
remake other patterns.”

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 Organizations develop habits that help them do business or accomplish their goals. O’Neill’s focus
on worker safety forced Alcoa to restructure the way it worked, and that made it not just safer but
also leaner and meaner. Changes in safety procedures affected all areas of its business. Keystone
habits also can have this impact in individuals’ lives. For example, someone who exercises more
tends to smoke and drink less, eat more healthful food and become more productive. Keystone
habits force “small wins”: transitional accomplishments that help people realize that great
successes are possible.

Starbucks’s rules for employees, Duhigg reports, inculcate the concept of willpower, which
research identifies as the pre-eminent habit determining personal success. Just as scholars achieve
positive results in other areas of their lives when they practice academic self-discipline, Starbucks
workers improve their lives and careers after they learn the willpower of being cheerful no matter
what crops up in their workdays.

The willpower they learn evokes the famous “marshmallow experiment” in which researchers
told little kids that they could have one marshmallow right away or two if they waited 15 minutes
alone with the treat in front of them. The ones who could wait proved to be more successful
throughout their schooling based on their “self-regulatory” skills at age four. According to Duhigg,
self-regulation is a learnable skill. People can learn willpower as effectively as they can learn to
play a musical instrument or speak a foreign language, though once you master willpower, you
must keep it exercised and in shape, just as you would work to keep your muscles toned.

Starbucks teaches employees willpower by focusing on “inflection points” – situations that are
likely to weaken their self-discipline, like dealing with dissatisfied patrons. Employees practice
routines for handling discontented customers so they can perform them habitually. The company
calls this approach “the LATTE method.” Its steps are: “Listen, acknowledge, take action, thank
and explain.” CEO Howard Schultz also instituted a policy of giving staffers “a sense of agency” –
knowledge that the company values their opinions and independent decisions.

Good organizational habits can grow from crises. At Rhode Island Hospital, a mistake in the
operating room (OR) showed that employees were using a keystone habit incorrectly. To avoid
conflicts, nurses had flagged demanding doctors’ names with color codes; nurses knew that if
a physician’s name was listed in black, they had to capitulate to that doctor’s demands without
question. This led to a crisis that ultimately spurred OR teams to develop better habits. Now teams
complete a checklist together before any procedure.

Organizational habits keep firms functioning; without them, companies would descend into
squabbling factions. In Duhigg’s analysis, these habits allow truces; Rhode Island Hospital’s
OR checklist now enables doctors and nurses to set aside any disagreements and practice
safely. Similarly, a serious fire in London’s King’s Cross subway station in 1987 spurred the
Underground’s authorities to teach better employee habits and create a disaster plan to ensure
future passenger safety.

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 Companies also can foretell and, in some ways, direct the habits of their patrons. For example, the
retailer Target carried out an analysis of consumer data to try to enable its marketers to predict
when customers were expecting babies. Their “Guest ID” data program indicated that patrons’
shopping habits changed most dramatically when they underwent a milestone in their lives, such
as getting married, moving to a new residence or starting a family. Expectant mothers’ shopping
habits underwent a predictable change. When that happened, Target sent them coupons for baby
items. To avoid concerns that such policies were intrusive, Duhigg says, Target mixed the coupons,
“sandwiching” the baby discounts among other items. Similarly, the promoters of OutKast’s song
“Hey Ya” helped propel it onto the Top 40 list by sandwiching its radio play between established
hits to make “Hey Ya” seem just as familiar to the public as those songs.

Habits in Societies

The 1950s Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott arose in part from “social habits,” which, Duhigg
reports, “can change the world” when people engage in them forcefully. Dressmaker Rosa
Parks had “strong ties” to family and friends, and “weak ties” to her seamstress work and church
acquaintances. When police arrested her for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person,
the black community rebelled. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders created “a
feeling of ownership” of her cause to mobilize black residents to boycott and join other civil rights
struggles. Parks’s weaker ties – like her work for local white families – spread the movement to
areas of the community that otherwise might not have become engaged.

Similarly, a young pastor named Rick Warren built his Saddleback megachurch in California
partly on the basis of social habits. Duhigg relates that he wanted to make churchgoing more social
and less of a chore by teaching people “habits of faith.” He created small, self-run groups that met
outside of Sunday services. The members read and studied the Bible, but they also were highly
social. They discussed the issues they faced daily and supported each other. The weak ties of the
main congregation branched out to minigroups with strong ties that built “self-directing leaders,”
a phenomenon of social habits.

Are People Responsible, or Are Their Habits to Blame?

Society struggles with the notion of habits. The question, Duhigg says, is how much responsibility
do people bear for their habitual actions. Is a gambler who feels sad at home (her cue) and who
then gambles away her money (her routine) to blame if she puts her craving for stress relief
(her reward) ahead of her family’s stability? Is a man suffering the lifelong habit of sleepwalking
culpable if, in an unconscious “sleep terror” – an affliction called “automatism” – he strangles
his wife? Research suggests that if the brain has no chance to intercede deliberately, the answer
is no; he's not responsible. A jury did acquit a man who killed his wife in his sleep, but just as
creditors don’t let gamblers escape their debts, society assumes that people bear some personal
responsibility for habits such as gambling.

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 Given determination and belief, Duhigg teaches, people can change their habits if they can
examine and analyze them to unravel understandable cues, routines and rewards.

A Comforting Message

As a journalist, Duhigg demonstrates excellent habits. He writes clearly with an emphasis

on readability. He offers a variety of entertaining, illustrative examples without bogging the reader
down in too much detail. He provides research and credible sources to back up his assertions.
And he draws helpful conclusions that take the reader through his analysis of habits and how to
change them. Duhigg offers the inspiring hope that no one needs to be a prisoner of bad habits.
He also spends time describing cognitive and non-cognitive processes that suggest no one is
entirely to blame for their habits, good or bad. That is a comforting message. Whether you come to
Duhigg’s reportage seeking a guide to changing your habits, a compelling read about the processes
of the brain, or a collection of insider stories of how businesses changed their habits and, thus,
shaped their consumers’ choices, you will not be disappointed.

About the Author

Charles Duhigg is an investigative journalist for The New York Times. His previous works
include Golden Opportunities, The Reckoning and Toxic Waters.

This document is restricted to the personal use of Ekaterina Baulina ([email protected])

getAbstract maintains complete editorial responsibility for all parts of this review. All rights reserved. No part of this review may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, photocopying or otherwise – without prior written permission of getAbstract AG (Switzerland).

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