by Charles Duhigg
- By focusing on just one habit, or a "keystone habit," we can teach ourselves to reprogram other parts of our lives as well.
- Most of the choices we make each day are not the product of well-considered decision making, but are instead habits.
- Habits can be changed if we understand how they work.
- If you picture the brain as an onion, then the outside layers are the most recent additions from an evolutionary perspective.
- The outside layers are where the most complex thinking occurs; the inside layers control our automatic behaviors.
- The basal ganglia, near the center, recalls and acts on patterns, storing habits while the rest of the brain goes to sleep.
- Chunking is when the brain converts a sequence of habits into an automatic routine, and is at the root of how habits form.
- Habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.
- An efficient brain makes for a smaller head and therefore easier childbirth, and also allows us to devote mental energy to other tasks.
- Our brain looks for a cue to signal which pattern to use. Upon receiving a reward, it assesses whether this routine is worth remembering.
- Over time, the cue-routine-reward loop becomes more automatic, and the cue and reward cause anticipation and craving. Eventually a habit is born.
- Our brain cannot tell the difference between good and bad habits, and so bad habits are always lurking, waiting for the right cues and rewards.
- Without habit loops, our brains would shut down, overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily life.
- It is possible to learn and make unconscious choices without remembering anything about the lesson or decision making.
- By learning to observe the cues and rewards of habit loops, we can change the routines.
- To cultivate a new habit, create a craving. A craving is what makes cues and rewards work, and what powers the habit loop.
- As a habit becomes stronger, the cue begins eliciting a pleasure response from our brain, thereby creating anticipation and cravings.
- New habits form by putting together a cue, routine, and reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop.
- To overpower a habit, we must recognize which craving is driving the behavior. Otherwise we will subconsciously submit to it.
- A cue and reward, on their own, are not enough for a new habit to last; a craving prompted by the cue is always required.
- Think about a reward to create a craving; this will make it easier to endure the routine.
- What we crave doesn't have to have any material benefit, such as tingling from toothpaste or foaming from shampoo.
- Cravings are what drive habits, and figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.
- It is easier to convince someone to adopt a new behavior if there is something familiar at the beginning and end.
- To change a habit, you must keep the old cue and deliver the old reward, but must insert a new routine.
- To create a new habit you must trigger a new craving; but to change an old habit, you must address an old craving with a new routine.
- Often, we don't really understand the cravings driving our behaviors until we look for them.
- Habit replacement can work well until a stressor appears. But a strong belief can help preserve the reworked habit loop.
- People might be skeptical about their ability to change if they're by themselves, but a community creates belief.
- When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real.
- Attacking the behaviors we think of as addictions by modifying the behaviors surrounding them is one of the most effective modes of treatment.
- Keystone habits are the habits that matter most when remaking businesses and lives. They start a process that, over time, transforms everything.
- Success doesn't depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.
- Exercise, eating with your family, and making your bed, when done habitually, start chain reactions that help other good habits take hold.
- Small wins have an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves, and are how keystone habits create widespread change.
- They fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.
- The second way keystone habits encourage change by creating structures that help other habits flourish.
- The final way keystone habits encourage widespread change is by creating cultures where new values become ingrained. They make hard choices easier.
- Grit is the tendency to work strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.
- Keystone habits transform us by creating cultures that make clear the values that, in a difficult or uncertain moment, we might otherwise forget.
- Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.
- Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does individual talent.
- Willpower is not a skill, but instead like a muscle; it gets tired as it works harder, and you can completely exhaust it.
- If you strengthen your willpower muscles in one part of your life, that strength will spill over and touch everything.
- We can teach ourselves how to handle moments of adversity by creating willpower habit loops.
- Starbucks teaches the LATTE method: Listen to the customer, Acknowledge the problem, Take action, Thank them, then Explain why the problem occurred.
- Willpower becomes habit by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time, and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives.
- Increasing someone's agency, or their feeling of control or decision-making authority, taxes them less in situations that require self-control.
- Destructive organizational habits are usually the product of thoughtlessness, or of leaders who avoid curating a culture.
- Organizations do not make rational choices based on deliberate decision making, even though it may seem that way.
- Instead, organizations are guided by long-held organizational habits, patterns that often emerge from thousands of employees' independent decisions.
- These habits, or "routines," provide hundreds of unwritten rules that companies need to operate.
- Among the most important benefits of routines is that they create truces between potentially warring groups or individuals within an organization.
- If you follow the established patterns and abide by the truce, then rivalries won't destroy the company or your livelihood.
- Leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced peace and, paradoxically, make clear who is in charge.
- During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equatable balance of power.
- Good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits. Wise leaders prolong a sense of emergency on purpose.
- Customers act like creatures of habit, automatically repeating past behavior with little regard to current goals.
- People's buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event; and they often don't notice or care.
- Our brains crave familiarity in music because familiarity is how we manage to hear without becoming distracted by all the sound.
- By playing a new song between songs that are already popular, you make that new song seem familiar, thereby mitigating its risk.
- If you dress something new in old habits, it's easier for the public to accept it. You make the novel seem familiar.
- Movements begin as the habits of friendship, grow through habits of communities, and are sustained by new habits that change participants' sense of self.
- On the whole, our deepest relationships tend to be with people who look like us, earn the same amount of money, and come from similar backgrounds.
- There is a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly.
- Weak ties are people who share membership in social circles, but aren't directly connected by the strong ties of friendship.
- Weak ties give us access to social networks where we don't otherwise belong. They move a political or social movement beyond an initial clique.
- The habits of peer pressure spread through weak ties, and gain their authority through communal expectations.
- The strong ties of friendship and the weak ties of peer pressure merge to create incredible momentum and permit widespread social change.
- For an idea to grow beyond a community, it must be self-propelling. This requires giving people new habits that help them figure out where to go on their own.
- Everyone's identity must change in a movement. You start to see yourself as part of a vast social enterprise, and then you really believe you are.
- Courts and juries have decided that some powerful habits overwhelm our capacity to make choices, and so we're not responsible for what we do.
- People with sleep terrors are in the grip of terrible anxieties, but their brains have shut down except for primitive regions, or "central pattern generators."
- These generators create habits, or automatic behaviors so ingrained that they happen with almost no input from higher regions of the brain.
- For problematic gamblers, a near miss is a prompt to put down another bet; for others, it creates apprehension and is a prompt for quitting.
- For Aristotle, habits reigned supreme. He thought that the behaviors that occur unthinkingly are the evidence of our truest selves.
- Every habit is malleable, but we must decide to change it. You have not just the freedom, but the responsibility, to remake them.
- The will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating belief in change, and an important method for creating that belief is habits.
- If you believe you can change, that change becomes real. Your habits are what you choose them to be.