As a news reporter in Iraq, Charles Duhigg had a front row seat to what he dubbed “one of the biggest habit-formation experiments in history”: the U.S. military in action. He witnessed an army major deal with violent outbreaks in public plazas in Kufa by removing the crowd’s access to food. It turned out angry people turn into an angry mob, but hungry people go home and eat.
Almost a decade of research later, Duhigg published the go-to habit manual, The Power of Habit. At its core lies the habit loop, which consists of three steps:
- Cue. The signal that triggers your habit, like the clock striking 1 PM, which means it’s time to get lunch.
- Routine. The behavior that follows, such as walking over to the cafeteria and buying a cookie.
- Reward. The source of satisfaction that makes the habit so easy to repeat, like the sugar-induced dopamine high that comes after eating the cookie.
In the Iraq example above, the army major disrupted the crowd’s habits by removing the option to follow their routine. In the past, hunger had cued the crowd to follow a routine of buying food from vendors. Their reward was satiation. Without the food vendors, they couldn’t follow through on their old habit, and most people in the crowd opted to create a new habit of going home to eat. That was exactly the major’s goal.
For breaking habits, you can identify these three components and then swap in replacements. Usually, you start with replacing the routine, which leads to a different reward. For example, to avoid eating sweets in the afternoon, try talking to a friend instead of buying a cookie.
For habits you want to acquire, you can assemble the three parts yourself, although often the cue already exists. As you’ll see in BJ Fogg’s methodology below, identifying existing cues is a great way to form new habits (BJ Fogg uses the term trigger, but he means the same thing as a cue).
The Science
Duhigg cites dozens of academic papers in his book, but the core study observed the behavior of rats in a maze as they searched for a piece of chocolate. If the path remained the same for a week, their brains would show minimal activity while running towards the chocolate. Mental effort spiked only at the beginning and end of the loop, which indicated a learning experience and reinforced the behavior. That low mental activity in the middle is part of what you and I are looking for when we form habits. With a new habit, we’re looking to create new behaviors in ourselves that are effortless.
Case Study
In 2015, I worked with a client, Clint, for nine months to moderate his drinking habit. During our coaching, Clint read The Power of Habit, and practiced spotting cues that would spark his desire for alcohol. After learning to recognize these triggers, he replaced his routines and eventually ended up cutting his alcohol intake by almost 50%.
Here’s an edited transcript of one of our conversations about triggers:
“A trigger for me that led me to drinking usually happens sometime around eight o’clock at night. I’ve had a long and tiring day, I’ve accomplished a lot, my brain still wants to be in productivity mode, but my body is exhausted. I just reach a point of frustration and tiredness and I am looking for something to unwind and to relax and so I built this habit up over time that my brain says: ‘If you drink alcohol you’re going to feel that relaxed feeling.’”
And, on changing routine and reward:
“A few examples would be having a glass of soda water with lime. Even though there’s no alcohol in the soda, it’s a very refreshing drink. And because it’s bubbly and something that I don’t usually drink, it tricks my brain into thinking I’m having a treat.”
Lastly, on Clint’s results:
“At the beginning of our coaching session early last year I was drinking pretty much every day. I started out with the goal of wanting to not drink at all, which was which was maybe overly ambitious [… but] I found that I was able to slowly build up my willpower over the course of the year and slowly add more days on to not drinking so that by the end of the year I came close to ‘tipping the scales,’ as I call it, so that I was having more days of not drinking than I had of drinking.”
When to use this model
The strength of this model is that it’s so well known — many of you have read the Power of Habit. However, we’ve found the models below to be slightly easier to implement and slightly more focused on people who are actually trying to apply behavior design models to themselves.
-
This article was originally posted at https://medium.com/better-humans/how-to-create-any-habit-with-advice-from-the-four-greatest-habit-masters-9b96528db259
For more articles like this please subscribe to the Weekly Newsletter.