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She needed a goal in her life, she thought. Something to work toward.
It explores the neurology of habit formation, how to build new habits and change old ones, and the methods, for instance, that one ad man used to push toothbrushing from an obscure practice into a national obsession.
It focuses on habits as they are technically defined: the choices that all of us deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about
but continue doing, often every day.
This process—in which the brain
converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine—is known as “chunking,”
Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
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:
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.
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.
People whose basal ganglia are damaged by injury or disease often become mentally paralyzed.
They lose the ability to ignore insignificant details—
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.
First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards.
How do you build a new habit when there’s no cue to trigger usage, and when the consumers who most need it don’t appreciate the reward?
This explains why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings. Most
But
only once they created a sense of craving—the desire to make everything smell as nice as it looked—did Febreze become a hit.
That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit.
Researchers say that AA works because the program forces people to identify the cues and rewards that encourage their alcoholic habits, and then helps them find new behaviors.
“competing response.”
At least, most of the time. For some habits, however, there’s one other ingredient that’s necessary: belief.
God and spirituality are not testable hypotheses.
It wasn’t God that mattered, the researchers figured out. It was belief itself that made a difference.
okay. What can make a difference is believing that they can cope with that stress without alcohol.”
If you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine, and your odds of success go up dramatically when you commit to changing as part of a
group. Belief is essential, and it grows out of a communal experience, even if that community is only as large as two people.
In other words, to protect workers, Alcoa needed to become the best, most streamlined aluminum company on earth.
Almost everything about the company’s rigid hierarchy had to change to accommodate O’Neill’s safety program.
If you focus on changing or cultivating keystone habits, you can cause widespread shifts. However,
“Small wins do not combine in a neat, linear, serial form, with each step being a demonstrable step closer to some predetermined goal,
Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.5.1
not.… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does
intellectual talent.”5.2 And the best way to strengthen willpower and give students a leg up, studies indicate, is to make it into a habit.
Friday. In Muraven’s experience, though, it felt like he forgot how to exert willpower all the time.
Willpower
isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.”
study: As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they
ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.
“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.” There
“That’s why signing kids up for piano lessons or sports is so important. It has nothing to do with creating a good musician or a five-year-old soccer star,” said Heatherton. “When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self-regulatory strength. A five-year-old who can follow the ball for ten minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time.”5.13
This is how willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives.
Get Curious, Say What No One Else Will, Apply the 5/5/5 Rule—
he noticed that a little-known retailer in Seattle was ordering an inordinate number of coffee drip cones.
She would ask these little questions, ‘How are you going to study tonight? What are you going to do tomorrow? How do you know you’re ready for your test?’ It trained me to set goals.
way. Researchers had noticed that some people, like Travis, were able to create willpower habits relatively easily. Others, however, struggled, no matter how much training and support they received. What was causing the difference?
The participants were asked to hit the space bar every time they saw a “6” followed by a “4.”
“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.
Giving employees a sense of control improved how much
self-discipline they brought to their jobs.
