Habits and how they work:

Habit is a behaviour/pattern that we get used to doing over and over again sometimes involuntarily. Some of them are good and some of them are bad, often hard to change or let go.

In this book, Charles Duhigg writes that the habits are responsible for most of what we do. The habits cause the brain to go on autopilot, becoming so efficient that we don’t consciously think about every single action we make. The author explains how some companies and individuals have achieved enormous success by altering own and/or people’s habits. By luck or design, they’ve been tapping into a powerful psychological pattern: the “habit loop.”

The habit loop which was identified by MIT researchers is a loop that consists of three parts: a cue, a routine and a reward as below:

As a first step, we need to identify these components of any habit that we want to improve and change and then work on them.

One of the ideas is to restructure or replace some of the bad things with something better in the above loop.

As an example, if we have a habit of eating some junk food every day at 3 pm. We need to first identify the cue, the routine and the reward. Try to identify if the queue is hunger or just an urge to take a break or something else and if its an urge to take a break, instead of picking something to eat, try to change that behavior with some other action, like drinking water or just taking a stretch or a walk outside of office or talking to a colleague for few minutes, or switching to different types of food to see if your sense of reward is still apparent.

To me some of the case studies used by corporations to influence consumer behaviour by making something a habit was fascinating and sometimes eye-opening for example the success of Ad industry to change people behaviour to brush their teeth every day and what Target and some casinos did to track their employee habits etc was very interesting to read.

I would recommend this for anyone who is interested in changing their habits for good.

Have you read this? Please comment below: