The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg - a Review en pointe.

There are books that shape a gullible human being's thoughts and beliefs by taking him face to face with that idea. This book is a face-off between the reader and the 'power of habit', a life-consuming action of ours that makes us 'US'.

The book does not contain one prescription of changing habits. Rather, it contains the framework for understanding how habits work and a guide to experimenting with how they might change. Some habits yield easy and for others, change is a process that never fully concludes.

Charles Duhigg (CD hereon) suggests a BROADER 4-step framework for all habit-loops. He suggests that with this approach change might not be fast and easy, but with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.

? Identify the routine

? Experiment with rewards

? Isolate the cue

? Have a plan

To bring things into perspective, a cue is a trigger (e.g. a bar of chocolates, an emotion, or a sequence of thoughts) that tells our brain to go into automatic mode, using a particular habit. The automatic response (e.g. feeling irritated, getting a glass of wine) is the routine. And the physical sensations or positive feelings (e.g. pride, relaxation) are the rewards which determine whether we remember this feedback loop in the future or not.

CD provides powerful case studies to initiate an idea and support it with condensed knowledge through experiments conducted by universities, biographies of remarkably successful people, and case studies (even lawsuits). In one chapter 'THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL - Are we responsible for our Habits?' he compares two cases, Angie Bachmann and Brian Thomas. Bachmann a woman who lost her fortune in gambling and Brian a husband who killed his loving wife in 'Sleep-trauma'. He compares the two cases as:

So though both Angie Bachmann and Brian Thomas acted out of habit, that they had no control over their actions because those behaviors unfolded automatically. It is just that Bachmann was held accountable and Brian was set free because Brian never knew the patterns that drove him to kill existed in the first place—much less that he could master them. Bachmann, on the other hand, was aware of her habits. And once you know a habit exists, you have the responsibility to change it.

That is the point of the book. Almost all patterns that exist in most people’s lives—how we eat and sleep and talk to our kids, how we unthinkingly spend our time, attention, and money—are habits that we know exist. And once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom—and the responsibility—to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp, and the only option left is to get to work.

To identify a cue amid the noise, we can use the same system as the psychologist: Identify categories of behaviours ahead of time to scrutinize in order to see patterns. Luckily, science offers some help in this regard. Experiments have shown that almost all habitual cues fit into one of five categories:

Location, Time, Emotional state, Other people, Immediately preceding action.

So if we’re trying to figure out the cue for the “e.g. going to the cafeteria and buying a chocolate chip cookie” habit, we write down five things the moment the urge hits. These five things give us information about what time and actions are causing us to react to that habit.

Once we’ve figured out the habit loop—we’ve identified the reward driving our behaviour, the cue triggering it, and the routine itself—we can begin to shift the behaviour. We can change to a better routine by planning for the cue and choosing a behaviour that delivers the reward we are craving. What we need is a plan. This is the book in the nutshell. But you have to read it to get the vibe and believability of the 'Habit' and 'Plan'.

I'll post another article on this book's review to keep this article 'featherlite'. Below are a few quotes/excerpts from the book.

“All our life,” William James said, “so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits—practical, emotional, and intellectual—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.”

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ ” the writer David Foster Wallace told a class of graduating college students in 2005. “And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’ ”

In general, sociologists say, most of us have friends who are like us. We might have a few close acquaintances who are richer, a few who are poorer, and a few of different races—but, on the whole, our deepest relationships tend to be with people who look like us, earn about the same amount of money, and come from similar backgrounds.

A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances. It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together. And it endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.

Article content credits: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and my independent viewpoint. Photo credits: Google