The science of rewiring bad habits, in 17 minutes | Charles Duhigg

0:00 I'm Charles Duhigg, a writer at the New Yorker magazine and the author of The Power of Habit, Supercommunicators and Smarter, Faster, Better. How to diagnose your habits. About 40 to 45% of what you do every day, according to studies, is a habit. Now you might think of it as a choice that you're making, but actually if we can observe your life, what we'll see is that you're just acting almost unconsciously. You're doing the same thing that you've done before. And these habits, they shape everything from what we eat to what we spend to how we treat other people to what we do at work. Almost half of what we do every day is a habit.

0:47 And the reason why is because our brains are designed to create habits wherever they can. There's a part of our brain known as the basil ganglia that exists just to create habits. Every animal on earth has a basil ganglia. And the reason why it's there is because if you had to make a decision every single time you were walking down the trail whether to pick up the apple or pick up the rock and put it into your mouth, you would be so overwhelmed that you would never you would never accomplish anything, right? You'd never make it past the apple and the rock. So what our brain has done is it's evolved in order to create habits. And every single habit that exists within our cranium, almost half of what we do every day operates the same way. It's what's known as the habit loop. A habit actually has three components. There's a cue, which is like a trigger

1:33 for an automatic behavior to unfold, and then a routine, the behavior itself, what we think of as the habit, and then finally a reward. And your brain, the basil ganglia, what it does is it looks for that pattern of the cue, the routine, and the reward. And when it sees it frequently enough, it says, "I'm going to make this automatic. Instead of you having to make a decision to get up and go running in the morning, instead of you having to make a decision to pick up that doughnut and put it into your mouth, I know what the cue and the reward are. And so, I'm going to make it happen effortlessly." What's important about this is that it means that we can take control of our habits. If we can recognize the cues and rewards that inform those behaviors, those routines,

2:23 if we can start fiddling with the gears inside our head, then we can build the habits that we want and we can change the habits that we dislike until we become the people that we want to be. So when people think about habits, sometimes they think that it's a matter of discipline, right? If I have enough willpower, then I'm going to have the right habits. Or they think it's a sign of character. Good people have good habits and bad people have bad habits. But that's actually not right. In fact, the science says that that's completely wrong. Your brain does not distinguish between good habits and bad habits. Your brain just creates habits. Anytime that there's a cue, routine, and reward, your brain will create that connection and they'll make that behavior easier and easier and easier until it becomes automatic. It's up to you to decide whether it's good or bad.

3:13 It's up to you to decide whether it's something you want to encourage or something you want to discourage. And it's not a matter of discipline. Right? We can use willpower to to push ourselves to do amazing things. But when we become really amazing, when we don't have to use that willpower anymore is when a behavior becomes a habit. When it happens almost without willpower. Anyone who's who was not an athlete at one point who took up running knows that the first couple of times you go for a run, it's miserable, right? You're like pushing yourself and then something happens that like two or three weeks later, you wake up and you put on your running shoes and you're out on the path and you realize, you know what? I didn't I didn't even have to push myself to do this. I just kind of did it almost unthinkingly. That's because the habit has taken hold. Habits

4:00 are not a reflection of our internal character or our capacity for discipline or willpower. Habits are a mechanical function that happens inside our brains. There's two basic mistakes that we make when we try and get rid of a bad habit. The first is that we try to extinguish it, right? We try to say like, "Okay, I used to smoke and now I'm not going to smoke anymore. I'm just going to throw all the cigarettes out. And that can work for a little while, right? You can use your willpower to resist the temptation to smoke. But the problem is that old Q routine and reward, it still lives inside your brain. And at some point, you're going to have a moment of weakness. Your mother-in-law is going to come into town. You're going to have a really tough day at work. And you're going to see that old cue. Oh, that's the corner that I always smoke on. and almost thoughtlessly you're going to

4:51 revert to the old habit. And so the number one most important thing is to recognize we can't extinguish a habit. What we need to do is we need to change that habit. We need to take advantage of the old cue and the old reward and insert a new behavior into the habit loop. And this is the second mistake that most people make is that they focus on the behavior instead of focusing on the cue and the reward. So, there's this question, how do we diagnose the cues and rewards that shape our habits? Let's talk about Q's first. Almost all Q's fall into one of five categories. It's usually a time of day, a particular place, the presence of certain other people, uh an emotion,

5:36 or a preceding behavior that's become ritualized. And so, if you're trying to change a habit, one of the things you can do to figure out the cue is just write down those five things whenever the craving hits you. When you have a craving for a cigarette, when you have a craving for a donut, when you normally go running in the morning, just write down what time of day is it? What am I feeling right now? Who else is around me? And what you're going to notice in a couple of days is a pattern. You're going to be able to identify the cue by noticing what remains consistent daytoday. We also have to figure out what the reward is. And rewards are really tricky. The rewards are like little packages that it's hard to unpack sometimes. So when you're smoking a cigarette, is the reward there that you get a burst of energy or is it that actually when you smoke you get to

6:24 go outside and talk to your friends and take a take a little break from work when you have a donut in the morning? Is the the reward the taste that you get from it or is the reward the sense of indulgence that you give yourself? I got something done this morning. I get to reward myself. I deserve this donut. The way that we actually figure out what the reward is is we experiment. And to give you an example of this, I want to tell you about a bad habit that I once had when I was working in the New York Times. I fell into this bad habit where every afternoon I would get up and I would go up to the cafeteria and I would get a cookie and I would eat that cookie. And I started gaining a little bit of weight as a result. And it got to a point where like I would actually write on these post-it notes, "Do not eat any cookies." And I'd put them at the bottom

7:13 of my computer screen. And somehow every day I managed to ignore that note and go up to the cafeteria and get a cookie. So when I was talking to habit experts, I asked them, "What's going on here? How do I change this?" And they said, "Well, look, what you need to do is you need to figure out what the cue and the reward for this cookie habit is." Each day when I felt a cookie urge, I would write down these five things. the time of day, who's standing around me, where am I, am I feeling any particular emotions, is there a preceding behavior that's become ritualized? And within like 3 days, it was very clear that the habit always struck, the craving always struck at about 3:30 in the afternoon, right? So, it was clearly a time of day was the cue. And then I had to figure out what the reward was. And when I talked to these researchers, I was like, "Well,

7:59 I don't know what the reward is. The reward are cookies. They're delicious." And they were like, "No, no, no. My friend, you have to understand a cookie is like a bundle of rewards all tied together. Is it that you're craving that cookie because it tastes good? Or is it that it gives you a burst of energy because there's sugar in it? Or is it that this is just a nice way to take a break from work because you ride the the elevator up and you get the cookie and you ride the elevator back down? You need to experiment with different rewards to figure out which one is driving this habit. 3:30 in the afternoon, one of the things I would do is I would test the hypothesis. Is this about getting energy from the sugar in the cookie? And instead of getting a cookie, I'd get a cup of coffee and I'd shoot that coffee down and I'd notice, is the cookie urge gone? No,

8:47 it is not gone. Then I thought maybe maybe it's because of the sugar. Maybe it's because I really enjoy the reward of eating the sugar. So the next day, what I did is I went up to the cafeteria and instead of getting a cookie, I took some Splenda and I spread the Splenda on my tongue because that's going to give me the reward sensation of sugar. Did that make the cookie craving go away? It did not. I still craved the cookie. And after a while when I did these little experiments, what I noticed is that when I'd go up to the cafeteria, oftentimes there were friends there and I would buy my cookie or I'd get my coffee or I'd spread the splend on my tongue and sometimes I'd go over and I'd chitchat with my friends and we'd spend 10 or 15 minutes gossiping about other people inside at work. And when I'd go down to my desk after doing that gossip, suddenly I wasn't

9:35 craving a cookie anymore. I felt satisfied and that's what helped me figure out the reward that I was seeking was social interaction. So now I know the Q and the reward. The Q is a certain time of day, 3:30 in the afternoon. The reward is social interaction. And so what I did is I came up with a new habit loop for myself. What are known as implementation intentions. At 3:30 in the afternoon, I would stand up from my desk. I would look around the newsroom. I'd go find someone to gossip with. I'd gossip with them for 10 or 15 minutes and then I'd go back to my desk and the craving was completely gone. I didn't crave the cookies. I didn't have any problem ignoring the cookies, not going up to the cafeteria and just avoiding a cookie. What I've done is instead of trying to extinguish a bad habit, I've changed that habit. And in doing so, the reason it's been

10:27 successful is because I paid attention to the cues and the rewards instead of focusing exclusively on the behavior itself. This is actually known as the golden rule of habit change. That it is difficult if not impossible to extinguish a habit because the neural connections of that Q routine reward will continue existing in my brain for years. So the golden rule is if I change that habit rather than trying to extinguish it by paying attention to the cues and rewards and finding a new behavior that corresponds to the old Q and delivers something similar to the old reward, then that change is going to be much easier and it's going to be much longerlasting. So one of the things that we've discovered that's really interesting is that some habits are more powerful than others. Some habits when they start to change, they seem to set off this chain reaction that change other

11:16 patterns in our lives. We've all experienced this before, right? Sometimes when you go running in the morning, it's easier to eat a healthy lunch that day. And that doesn't really make any sense. Like, why would running in the morning make it change your eating habits at lunch? But what researchers have found is that some habits are known as keystone habits. And when they change, they set off this chain reaction. Now, what's interesting is that keystone habits are different for different people, right? If you were a an athlete in high school and then you stopped running for a few years, but you start running again, then it's unlikely that running is going to be a keystone habit for you because you already think of yourself as a runner. It's already part of your identity. But if you're someone like me who was not an athlete in high school at all, who

12:03 didn't start exercising until he was in his late 20s and early 30s, then what happens is when I get up and I go for a run in the morning, there's a part of my brain that says, you know what, I'm a runner. Like, I'm the kind of person who can wake up in the morning and go for a jog. And that person when they walk into the cafeteria for lunch, they don't pick up the unhealthy hamburger, they pick up a salad. You're that kind of person. Keystone habits are powerful because they change our self-image. They change how we see ourselves. Particularly in part in that part of our brain that doesn't listen to our logic and doesn't listen to our arguments, but just looks at our behavior and determines who we are based on what we actually do rather than what we say. There's

12:49 two researchers named Otton and Chang in Australia who have looked at exercise habits. And what they found is that for people who previously didn't exercise, when they start exercising, it sets off all kinds of chain reactions. Not only do they eat healthier on the day that they exercise, they use their credit cards less. They procrastinate less at work. They end up doing chores at home, like washing the dishes earlier in the day. They get to bed on time more frequently, and they sleep better. Now, there's nothing about going for a run in the morning that makes me think like, "Oh, I should keep my AMX in my pocket today." But one of the things that happens is that there's part of my brain paying attention to how I behave. And when that part of my brain sees me go and exercise in the morning, it says to itself, you know what? You're a disciplined guy. You're the kind of guy

13:37 who doesn't have to spend needlessly for something you don't really need. Just keeps the credit card in your pocket. If we identify these habits that change how we see ourselves, then all we have to do is change that one habit and it'll cause changes throughout the rest of our life. So, when you're feeling stuck and you're trying to figure out what's the keystone habit that's going to help get me unstuck, the most important question you can ask yourself is what kind of change seems irrationally scary to you? Anyone who hasn't exercised before, they know that if they say that they want to start exercising, it's kind of terrifying. And it shouldn't be terrifying, right? There's lots of guidance online how to go out and get running shoes. There's gyms you can join. And yet, for someone who hasn't exercised, if you say like, "Tomorrow morning, we're going to go

14:25 work out." All of a sudden, they're going to get a little bit anxious. They're going to say, "I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this." That irrational anxiety, that unexplained overreaction emotionally, that is a sign that for you exercise will be a keystone habit. Because what that's really saying to you is you're saying you don't see yourself as someone who exercises. you're having trouble reconciling your image of yourself with this new behavior. Which means that if you go out and you do that new behavior, suddenly your image of yourself is going to update. Suddenly your image of yourself is going to start saying, "You know what? I never thought of myself as an exerciser, but I've run three times this week." And that's kind of exerciser behavior. So look

15:14 for the habits that seem irrationally scary to you. And those are the keystone habits. And they could be things like exercise. It could also be I always avoid having this conversation with my mom, right? It it it doesn't make any sense. Like it's an easy conversation to have and yet I keep on shying away from it. That means that that kind of conversation is a keystone habit for you. Look for the kind of change that seems irrationally scary to you and lean into that. And what you'll find is that it's hard at first. It takes some willpower. It takes some effort. But pretty quickly, your brain starts telling you, "Oh, you know what? You're the kind of person who can do this. You're the kind of person who exercises. You're the kind of person who can have tough conversations with your mom. You're the kind of person who doesn't procrastinate." And suddenly,

16:02 you'll find all these different parts of your life have become easier and better as a result. So, the biggest idea I'd leave you with when it comes to keystone habits is you don't have to change everything at once, right? In fact, you only have to change one thing as long as it's the right thing if you want to get along better with your with your relatives. You don't have to call every single one of them. You don't have to have all the tough conversations. You just have to call up your mom and talk about that one thing that you've been avoiding forever. You don't have to change everything. In fact, if you try and change everything, you're going to fail. Instead, look for one change that seems meaningful to you, one change that scares you a little bit,

16:48 one change where you think to yourself, "If I do that, that's kind of a big deal. Even though it doesn't seem like it should be a big deal, even though going running for two blocks in the morning doesn't seem like it should be that big a deal, if I do that, it actually kind of feels like a big deal to me." And just focus on changing that one habit. And when you do, all of a sudden, all the other patterns in your life will start to become more flexible, more malleable, and you'll find ways to change them without even thinking about it. Want to support the channel? Join the Big Think Members community where you get access to videos early, ad free.