“Habits scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort”

This line is straight out of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, a book on how habits are formed in people, organisations and societies and how they can be changed. It’s a good book; Duhigg uses extensive research and a variety of really interesting stories to show why habits are so important and what we can do to change them.

I think the first stage in dealing with bad habits is overcoming denial; we try not to think of some of our habits as bad when they can have a long term detrimental effect.

In the appendix Duhigg gives a framework on how you can try and change your habits. It’s good to have this, I always say the best book is a book you can apply.

Here are the lessons I learnt from this book along with some criticisms.

Lessons:

• Habits are structured through a: Cue – Routine – Reward system. For example you want sugar (cue) you eat a doughnut (routine) and then you feel stimulated from the sugar (reward).

• Strong habits occur when your brain has already imagined the reward before receiving the actual reward. Therefore the feeling of the actual reward diminishes, this is how you develop cravings, and those cravings then make you go back to the initial cue which creates a loop.

• To build the craving for a good habit you need to focus on the reward. Find a reward that’s so good your brain already imagines it so you start to develop cravings for this good habit.

• It’s hard to extinguish bad habits, to change them you have to focus on the routine but keep the old cues and rewards. A prime example of this is how smokers use nicotine gum to receive the same reward they would from a cigarette. They still crave nicotine (cue) and have nicotine (reward), but the routine of smoking has changed to chewing gum.

• Not all habits are created equal, some habits (keystone habits) have the power to start a chain reaction and other habits are pathologically ingrained in us in that a lot of the times we act unconsciously and automatically.

• You should have a system to deal with handling habits when your willpower is at its lowest, it’s harder to be disciplined if your willpower has already been tested, it should be conserved for when you need it the most. Your willpower is a muscle you can work on.

• Most firms are held by long held organisational habits, to change an organisation you have to change their habits. A crisis can be used to turn around these habits; it doesn’t have to be a real crisis a perceived one will do.

• If you dress something new in old habits, it is easier for consumers to accept it. Consumers like familiarity.

• Belief is the most important thing in changing habits, if you believe you can then you will. This is where speaking things into existence and writing down targets can be important. But there is no specific formula to changing habits; you have to try different things in the cue – routine – reward formula.

Criticisms:

It could have been shorter; a few stories were long winded and did not have any relevance. It’s still worth the read, but I advise you to skim through it to the best bits.

Some stories in the book have to be taken with a pinch of salt; it’s easy in hindsight to put together evidence and mistake correlation for causation and this is done a few times in the section on organisational habits. For example the author claims an American football team won the Super Bowl because of a change in habits even though there are so many other factors in play when looking at the Super Bowl.

The author also seems to look at some of the worrying ways in which companies target customers, in a positive light. There is bit on how companies were targeting pregnant women with baby related products before they’d announced they were pregnant!

That example is not the only thing in the book that’s worrying. And it raises the question once again of whether companies can have your interest and their interest at heart?

If the goal of a company is to make as much money as they possibly can, will they not do whatever it legally takes to do this? I now understand why some are skeptical about companies like 23andme; our data is already at their fingerprints, imagine if they also had our DNA. Companies already know more about us than we do, what if they could use our genetic history to find out what makes us tick?

But can we really win the battle on data ? Sometimes the ease of not having to think about what to do because companies know what we want can outweigh our privacy needs, but do we really want this trade off?

This book in some way really highlights the negatives of capitalism; companies rarely look out for their customers, only themselves. But is this wrong and has this not always been the case? If you started your own company would you not try to find ways to succeed in a competitive market by any means, especially if you’re a small company?