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Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.
habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
True behavior change is identity change.
Every belief, including those about yourself, is learned and conditioned through experience.
Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”
The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.
The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior.
Cravings are the second step, and they are the motivational force behind every habit.
The response is the actual habit you perform,
Rewards are the end goal of every habit.
The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward. We chase rewards because they serve two purposes: (1) they satisfy us and (2) they teach us.
Rewards close the feedback loop and complete the habit cycle.
the cue triggers a craving, which motivates a response, which provides a reward, which satisfies the craving and, ultimately, becomes associated with the cue.
Pointing-and-Calling is so effective because it raises the level of awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious level.
neutral habit, write “=”. For example, the list above might look like
“Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?”
The first step to changing bad habits is to be on the lookout for them.
implementation intention,
which is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act.
“When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.”
implementation intentions are effective for sticking to our goals,
people who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through.
Being specific about what you want and how you will achieve it helps you say no to things that derail progress, distract your attention, and pull you off course.
Habit stacking is a special form of an implementation intention. Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit.
tie your desired behavior into something you already do each day.
the secret to creating a successful habit stack is selecting the right cue to kick things off.
People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are.
The human body has about eleven million sensory receptors.7 Approximately ten million of those are dedicated to sight. Some experts estimate that half of the brain’s resources are used on vision.8
visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behavior.
Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life.
If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable.
Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.
A primary goal of food science is to create products that are more attractive to consumers. Nearly every food in a bag, box, or jar has been enhanced in some way, if only with additional flavoring.
our goal is to learn how to make our habits irresistible.
Every behavior that is highly habit-forming—taking drugs, eating junk food, playing video games, browsing social media—is associated with higher levels of dopamine.
dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it.
Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation. And whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act.17
the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.
Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.
Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior.
We are drawn to behaviors that earn us respect, approval, admiration, and status.
This is one reason we care so much about the habits of highly effective people. We try to copy the behavior of successful people because we desire success ourselves.
Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking.
good book for stopping to smoke
make it unattractive.
Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires.
Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it.
Habits are all about associations. These associations determine whether we predict a habit to be worth repeating or not.
Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive.
our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves.
