Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - The Power of Habit | Charles Duhigg

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

This week’s conversation is with Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter and a former columnist and senior editor at the New York Times.Charles is the author of The Power of Habit, which has spent over three years on the New York Times bestseller lists, and Smarter Faster Better, also a New York Times bestseller.His books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide.Charles currently writes for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, and hosts How To! with Charles Duhigg, a Slate podcast.He is a graduate of Yale University and the Harvard Business School, and a frequent contributor to This American Life, NPR, The Colbert Report, PBS’s NewsHour, and Frontline.In this conversation, we discuss what led Charles to write The Power of Habit and drill down into some best practices to create a new habit or curb a poor habit._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And we know the routine. We know the behavior. I want to meditate for five minutes. But the next step is you must choose what the cue is and what the reward is to create this clump of behavior, this chunk. And a cue can be one of five things. It's a time of day, a particular place, a certain emotion, the presence of certain other people, or a preceding behavior that's become ritualized. Okay, welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I am a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create,

where Pete Carroll, the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, and I built an eight-week online mindset training course. We love what we built there. But the whole idea behind this podcast, behind these conversations, is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery, to better understand what it is that they are searching for. We want to understand their psychological framework, how they organize their inner life, how they use their minds to do better in life, whether that's living in the living room or that's performing on the world stage, whatever that might be. And we want to also understand the mental skills that they use to build and refine their craft. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true.

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Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and a former columnist and senior editor at the New York Times. So Charles is the author of The Power of Habit. And that's actually where I first became connected to his work. And that book has spent over three years on the New York Times bestseller list. And Smarter, Better, Faster is also a second book that he's got, also a New York Times bestseller. And And Smarter, Better, Faster is also a second book they've got, also a New York Times bestseller. And in total, his books have sold over 5 million copies worldwide. How about it? Charles currently writes for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine, and he also hosts How To with Charles Duhigg. And that's a podcast that you can go find and check out what he's doing there. It's awesome. And so in this conversation, we discuss what led Charles to write The Power of Habit and to drill down into some of the best

practices to create a new habit. And that is actually, you know, it's interesting science that he's made simple. And so it's behavioral psychology that he's kind of pulled out this one bit here and he's made it really simple so that you can apply it. That's what's great about what he's done here. With that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Charles Duhigg. Charles, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, for sure. So nice job on your research that you've done and the books that you've published. And certainly, yeah, I found your work on the power of habit to be awesome. And so that's what led us to this

conversation. But before we dive into the science and the practice of habit formation and what you came to understand, let's do a little framing. Where did you come from? What was, what was it like growing up for you? Sure. So I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, um, and, and then left to go to college at Yale, um, and then started. Oh, you're just going to slip that in there. Yeah. I went to Yale, one of the top universities in the planet. Yeah. Okay. So hold on. You're not going to get, you're not going to just slip that in here. Like, Oh, I'm above that, you know? All right. So how did you get to Yale? How did that work? Honestly, just by applying. I like it. It was, that's not how people get into Yale. I mean, in my case, it kind of was, I think that it was a huge advantage coming from New

Mexico. I don't think, I don't think they had a ton of applicants from New Mexico. Your people are loving you right now. And so I applied to Yale. And then what actually happened is that after I graduated, I went back to Albuquerque to start a company where we built medical education campuses, essentially for like universities. And then because I realized after a couple of years of doing that, I didn't actually know that much about business.

I went back to business school. So I went to Harvard for business school and, and again, Oh yeah, let's just slip that one in there too. Let's just, you know, Yale then Harvard. But I will say that for anyone who's listening, who wants to go to Yale or, or, or Harvard business school, like the, the key is actually just to kind of be different, right? Like the fact that I was from New Mexico, I think made me different. I was starting like medical education campuses at a time when everyone

else was doing dot coms, which made me kind of different. I had studied like a Marxist intellectual history at Yale. So if you're applying to business school and you've studied Marxist history, I think that makes you kind of different kind of different. And, and when I was at HBS, there's this thing that happens between the first year and the second year where you go and you get an internship and, and you're basically supposed to get an internship from the people you want to work, work with afterwards, or you're hoping you get a job. And so I was planning on moving back to New Mexico and going into business in New Mexico and going into politics. And so I got a job with these like great private equity guys in New Mexico. And I spent that summer between first and second year doing that. And, and what I would do is I would like come in and basically I'd build like models on my computer, like Excel models to figure out if we should buy golf courses. And the best part of my day was that I would allow myself to listen to an episode of This American Life while I was doing that.

And if it was like a really tough day, I'd like let myself listen to two of them because I didn't want to run out of them. And so I realized about halfway through the summer, I actually like listening to This American Life much more than I like doing private equity. So when I went back to HBS in the second semester, I decided I wanted to become a journalist, which is what I had. I had done like my college newspaper and stuff like that. And so after I graduated from business school, I became a journalist. I was first at the LA Times and then I went to the New York Times. And now I write for the New Yorker. And so that's kind of how I ended up becoming a writer and

writing The Power of Habit and another book called Smarter, Faster, Better. Okay. So you're pretty measured, actually. So you think quite a bit about next steps. And it sounds like you might even be be you might come from a place of scarcity i can't quite tell but like what threw me off was a little bit you're like i don't want to run out of these amazing conversations as opposed to like you know like there's lots of good conversations i'll just find the next one but then you're really open you know like you really go to places like oh i'll do this and then i'll about that? And then I'll pivot here. So there's an openness to experiences that's pretty high.

I think that's right. And that's a really interesting way of thinking about it. Like to like sort of to look at it from like a scarcity versus like openness. I'm not sure that they're orthogonal. I just was trying to figure out. I've never really heard that mix before. Well, I think that like the common denominator is that throughout my life, what I found is that the people who are both happiest and most successful are the people who kind of love what they're doing. And I've noticed

this a lot with my business school classmates, that there's a group of people who choose jobs because of secondary reasons. Either they're high status or they bring a lot of compensation or X or Y or Z. And the thing is that like when they're done with the job, they don't actually like the job that much. So when they're done with the job, they basically stop thinking about the job. And then there's another group of people that I've been exposed to who like whatever they're doing, they just love doing it. And it, and it fascinates them so much that they think about it all the time. And because they think about it all the time, they're essentially working twice as much, like joyfully as everyone else. And that extra,

you know, working twice as much, you end up being twice as good. And so I think the decision that I made was that I, I was, I was really interested in politics. I was very serious about politics and business was going to kind of be a path to politics. But the thing that I realized pretty early on working on campaigns was like, I don't actually like talking to voters that much. Like, like the retail politics was boring for me. And it was, it was unpleasant. It wasn't something I would want to do in my spare time. But thinking about storytelling and like trying to learn new things. And the thing about being a journalist is it's your job. If you're in business, it's your job to get to do one thing and get better and better and faster and faster at it.

If you're a journalist, it's like exactly the opposite. Your job is to learn something new and do something different every single day. And I realized that those are things that I would do in my spare time regardless. And so that meant that I would be more successful on that path than I would on some other path where I was looking at a secondary reward as opposed to the activity itself. Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. How would you articulate your quote unquote path? You're on the path of? I'm on the path of trying to figure out how to tell stories on about important topics that people are desperate to finish the story. So is the desperate to finish the story, is that part of the art or is that the need to find

or figure out the aha slash solution? That's a really good question. I think it's a little bit of both. So like, like the work, so when I write books, the books are kind of like, I like to think of them as like intellectual self-help books, but the journalism I do for the New Yorker and for the, for the, the New York Times is really investigative work. So I did a series, for instance, about Apple and about conditions in Chinese factories where they build iPhones and iPads and computers. And it was really important. I felt from a social justice perspective, it's really important that people know that the products that they're buying, that there are these human costs to them. But with all investigative topics, you reach this problem, which is that most people don't actually want to read depressing stories, right? The fact that you, I'm sure you, do you have an iPhone? Yes, I do. Okay. So do I, by the way, I have an iPhone too. So everyone who has an iPhone,

they have a little bit of blood on their hands because they are made in factories where people get injured and get killed. And they actually, it's not unrelated to each other. It's the pace of innovation that Apple demands requires factories that are more dangerous than they could otherwise be. So here's your, here's some of your Marx influence, you know. Exactly, exactly. Societies develop through class conflict. Yeah, exactly. And that they're, and I love capitalism.

I am a capitalist, but I, there are costs to capitalism. You know, I, we're living in an age of, um, political participation where even people who don't want to be political, that is inherently an act that is political, but, but people don't like the, people don't like to hear that. Like nobody likes to hear depressing stuff about like, you have a responsibility to think about the person in China who's making your iPhone. So if you can figure out how to tell that story in a way that someone is desperate to finish the story because it's a well-told story, then you can smuggle those ideas into people's heads. And that's kind of my mission statement

is to figure out how to find the most important ideas that people should be aware of and smuggle them into people's heads by figuring out how to tell stories that like people are just desperate to finish. Very cool. Okay. So I want to get into, I want to get into the power habit because I want to see how that fits into your model. And I also don't want to skim over the core kind of messages that your parents installed or watered, depending on if you're more of an engineer or a naturist. How did your parents – what was it that your parents helped you understand at a young age to lead you to this deep intellectual curious life. Well, can I ask you a question on that? Since you're a clinical therapist and do you, because when I've talked to therapists, I feel like

there's these two schools of thought. Some talk about the importance of family and parents. And then I talked to a lot of the like cognitive behavioral folks and they say like, actually, I think that's a distraction. Like I want to figure out who a person is on their own terms. And if they tell me that their parents are important, then I'll we'll go down that path. But if they say, actually, like my parents are like a footnote in who I feel like I am, then I think then, then the parents actually aren't important. Like as, as someone who's worked

with a lot of people in clinical settings, what do you find? Like how important is upbringing and parents, even for people who say like, I, I see myself as someone apart from my parents. It's cool. First note is, is this a deflection? This is a problem to talk to a therapist. I promise you it isn't. I'll answer the question. I'm joking. And again, for clarity for folks that are listening is that I see one client a month.

They happen to be one of the most extraordinary humans on the planet, you know. And so I'm going to answer it in two ways, right? And the first answer is in high performing environments, it depends. And so sometimes in high performing environments, we do need to go understand some of the history that has led to some biases, some non-conscious programming that is below surface that is actually getting in the way, but we can't quite understand and make sense of. That's interesting. Yeah. So because we, in the world of high performance, we got to, unfortunately, we got to get results

now, you know, and in the, let's say the NFL, that the first three, four weeks of a season, if coaches can't co-create with the athletes a culture that is trending towards outwardly success, then coaches are fired. It's called Black Monday. There's a week. I don't know if it's four or five or whatever, but there's a week when that happens. So at the Olympics, like, you know, you've got four years, but really you're trying to make a national team every year. So it depends. Okay. And I'll answer it that, yeah, like where you came from provides a lot of color and context. Do we have to unearth things?

No, I think that that's, I'm trained in a cognitive behavioral training methodology inspired by Carl Rogers, humanist psychology. And then with a particular unique training in mindfulness as well, with a subcontext of sport and a secondary subcontext of consequential environments. So not to get too in the weeds here, but I think that, yeah, that stuff matters. And also it's really important, equally, if not more important to say, who is the person you want to become? Oh, that's interesting. And then we get clarity on that and say, right, okay, let's understand your skills. Let's

understand the values, your guiding principles. Let's understand what they are, clarify them, articulate who you're working on becoming. So those are two separate activities. And then in the middle, well, to be that person, what are the mental skills you need? Because if you say, I want to be, let's just say, a loving, strong human, whatever that means to you. And great. Okay, how are you doing on that?

They go, well, I'm really good until I get on stage. Then I become anxious and frustrated. Well, shit, you don't have enough mental skill to kind of be the person you want to be aspirationally in said environment. So let's deconstruct that and develop a plan for that. So long, long answer. And I'm about to round home base here is that there's two basic frameworks in psychology, self-discovery and mental skills. And it's not either or it's knowing the right artistry to blend those two for the desired outcome.

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and use the code finding mastery 20 at Felix gray.com for 20% off. The thing that I hear you saying that sort of like speaks to my world. Cause I'm always thinking about like what kind of narrative when I, when I have a character, what kind of narrative do I want to present to the reader to, to explain why that character is in my story, right? And they're always real people, right? It's all nonfiction. But I get to choose what details to share with the reader. And what I hear you saying is that the past can be a narrative that helps explain where they are. And I think that sometimes that's true. Sometimes for my purposes, that's actually a distraction. So oftentimes I find that going into someone's biography

detracts from explaining who they are because it sets up a set of biases that colors how you see this person. So to give you an example, I'll use my own. So usually when people ask me about my past, I say New Mexico because it's just kind of interesting and different. But I'm always hesitant to talk too much about my past because I think who I am, and most importantly, the second narrative is the narrative of who I want to be. Oftentimes, that's the narrative I'm thinking about for my characters is how do I share with the reader who this person aspires to be in the future. I find that oftentimes like telling people about my biography can distract them from the true narrative of who I am, my true biography. Cause the fact that I grew up in New Mexico actually has very little impact

on, on, I think who I've turned out to be. Like I have a, I have nine siblings and one of my siblings is in prison in Hawaii. But the thing is that like, because I have nine siblings and because some of them are half siblings, the one who's in prison, I've met him like five times in my entire life. He hasn't had much impact on me. But there's definitely a narrative I could tell people to say like, oh, you know, I have a brother who's in prison. And that's going to give someone an entire, like, that's a whole, a whole suitcase of

assumptions about who, who I am and which, which in my case tend not to be particularly true. And so there's this interesting thing that I play with that I imagine you think about all the time too, but tell me if I'm wrong, which is what aspects of our biography inform who we are today and who we want to become versus which, which aspects of our biography inform who we are today and who we want to become versus which aspects of our biography actually distract the listener or the reader from who this person wants to become? Does that make sense? Absolutely. And so the context that you just offered is incredibly important. So I can tell you've thought about it a lot. And then we'll go back to the question, which was like,

what did they do your parents? What was that like? But it was for a very specific aim, which was that, that led you to a deep intellectual life, but we're starting with first Yale and Harvard, you know, like, so it's not like the, it needs some context, right. Because you could have had, this is the reason I'm interested in the question is because one, I'm a parent. And two, I think that there, for some people, there's some scar tissue

around high achievement at a young age. And for some people, the ecosystem at home, they figured it out. Like they did a really nice job. You know, like they love learning. They love the intellectual curiosity and the freedom to explore and formal training as opposed to some, like there was this talented young athlete that was one of the best in the world in her sport. She got into Brown and she flat out crumbled her freshman year. This is not a novel story, but she crumbled her freshman year because she thought she'd be different once she got into the Ivy League, fill in the blanks. And so it doesn't sound like you had that by any means. And so that's why I was trying to get just a little color, like how'd your parents do it? And you might say, I don't want to say it because

I had some scar tissue and that's fine too. Yeah. No, in my case, that's really interesting. And I actually had never thought about that. Like why I didn't crumble when I made it. You know, the truth of the matter is that like, I mean, so my father was an attorney and my mother actually went to law school while I was in high school. And I grew up in an intellectual home. I mean, the other thing is that I debated in high school and I was like a very serious debater. Like it was my entire life. And so when I... Were you masterful at that? I was a master very serious debater. Like it was my entire life. And, and so when I, were you, were you masterful at that?

I was a master debater. Yeah. Yeah. Oh God. So you've thought about this too. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Nerds laughing is, is really bad, isn't it? You know? But so, so being like like so i'm a big believer in competition which i'd be curious your take on this since you work with competitors um i do think that competition is great at training us what we're good at and where we need and and helping

us learn how to deal with adversity and so and so I think when I got to Yale, which was a very different environment than I'd grown up in, I think the reason I didn't crumble is because like, I was used to competing and I was used to failing. And, and I think that was invaluable. And so like, so I have a 12 year old and a nine year old, both boys. How old are your kids? 12. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, so you you're probably and are they boys or girls oh no one and he's a boy 12 and just trying to sort it out like we're just trying to figure it out so so i think i i i imagine you probably think about this too like how much how much

competition how much just pure like fatherly love and support do I want to give them and how much do I want to put them into competitive environments where they can fail and they can learn that failure is not devastating. Oh, the answer is both. Yeah. Non-orthogonal, you know, I love you for, because you breathe and because I'm, I'm choosing that, you know, to be that way with you and i i'm gonna love you when uh you scrape your knee and when you come up short and when you try your best and it doesn't work and when you try your least and it does work you know like i'm gonna i'm gonna help teach along the way in all those places and so what i'm one of my main i've got two main aims for values and then one kind of dictum, which is kindness and strength are kind of the values that I'm helping to shape.

So those are always kind of bumpers up against how I choose my thoughts and my words and my actions as parenting. And then I'm working on decoupling what he does from who he is, helping him decouple from that. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, there's a sense of freedom. Like I can go do whatever I want and there's no kind of assault on my identity. So how do you do – like give an example of that, the decoupling. Like how do you facilitate that? Well, first I think is just kind of getting the model is that there is oftentimes one of the core seeds of suffering is that I don't know if I matter because I don't know if I can perform well enough to the standards of others.

And it's such a crippling experience that it is one of the high constrictors of life, which is fear of others. And so it's because the same part of the brain that is trying to sort out survival is also sorting out, you know, well, what is that external threat around me? Oh, it's them. It's him. It's, you know, it's that person over there. That's the source of my anxiousness. And so it's fear of other people's opinions that is one of the great constrictors. And so just pulling apart what you do is actually an experiment because you've never done it before in the context that you're in now. So each time you're doing something, it is a mini experiment.

So from that, we become researchers and we figure out like without judgment and critique, like how to go, what do I want to adjust? You know, there's parts of me that are a puzzle and I'm trying to sort out like how to detangle who I am from what I do. And so if I can create mini experiments and then create core values on the other side, then I feel like I think that's really smart. Yeah, I think it's a really, really smart way of approaching it. OK, listen. OK, I've totally derailed you. I love it. No, it's good.

I see why you're good. So that's actually important. the science of habits here but um highly open to ideas and experiences um moderate on agreeableness like you've got that interest to want to debate and compete in that way and i'm not sure if your tone of competition is to be better than others or to be your best together with others i'm not sure about that yet a bit neurotic what do you think yeah that's fair yeah definitely definitely when it comes to uh particularly like like writing a bit neurotic yeah a bit neurotic uh and then i'd say uh high conscientiousness like you're really you care you're you're working on like you know like global thought and caring about you know the good of the world it sounds like yeah i i. I, I, I, I at least aspire to.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's the trap. Okay, good. Now get us into the power of habit. Cause I, like, it's such an important conversation that, you know, got stuck in behaviorism and Skinner and, and, you know, you, you and a handful of folks have put a little bit of a revitalization on a really important part of growth. Thanks. Yeah, no, it's so it started for me when I was at the LA Times. I went to Iraq as a reporter. And, you know, I really I actually really wanted that's one of the reasons I became a journalist is I wanted to go to a war zone just because I was intensely curious what it was like. And so when I got there, I had this experience, which is that I was, I was sort of blown away by how the military actually works.

Because the whole idea behind the military is that basically like you can fit any cog into that machine, any person into it, and they will learn to do the right things and make them into a habit. And for me, I finally got clarity on this when I was talking to this one major in this town named Kufa, which is about an hour south of Baghdad.

And this guy had been brought in to stop riots from happening. And he had all these ideas of what to do and he met with the mayor of the town. And eventually, he asked the mayor of the town basically couldn't do anything. There were all these riots, people were dying in the riots. They had no idea how to stop them. And the major asked the mayor of this town, will you take all the food vendors out of the plazas? And the mayor said, yeah, I'll go ahead and take the food vendors out of the plazas. This is actually something I can do that you've asked me to do. I can't stop the gun runners or like the suicide bombers,

but this thing I can do. And so the major was telling me this story and he was explaining that the way that a riot works is actually different from what most people think it is. It's not, it's something that takes like hours and hours to build. So what happens is that a group of troublemakers will show up and then observers will come to watch the troublemakers and the crowd of observers will get larger and larger and larger until finally it's large enough that the troublemakers kind of inspire the crowd to begin rioting

but you need like seven or eight hours to make it happen and so so that the major was telling me about this he was showing me the drone footage from this one group that had built around the Grand Mosque of Kufa, which is this very, very important site in Shia Islam and had been a site of a lot of riots. And so he's showing me and the troublemakers show up about 10 o'clock in the morning. And then like people start coming and watching them and then going home and coming and watching. And the crowd gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And after about six or seven hours, it's like five o'clock in the afternoon the crowd is finally big enough that like it's at the right size for a riot to happen and the major says now watch the people on the periphery of the crowd

and as i watch you see these people like looking over their shoulders and they're kind of looking around and the major says to me it's dinner. And they're looking for the kebab sellers that normally fill up this plaza. But the mayor had removed the kebab sellers because I'd asked him to. And so watch what those people do. And those people at the periphery of the crowd, they all start wandering off and they're going home to eat dinner. And then there's this next ring of people who see the people behind them wandering home. And they decide to leave too, because they're like, well, if everyone's leaving, I guess I'll take off. Or maybe they think like, there's a better right someplace else. I'm going to follow them and see and they decide to leave too because they're like well if everyone's leaving I guess I'll take off or maybe they think like there's a better riot someplace else I'm going to follow them and see where they're going and so they leave and eventually over like 45

minutes the entire plaza clears out except for the troublemakers and the troublemakers don't have an audience anymore and so they go home too and so the this major told me that in the nine months after they had removed the food vendors there had not been one riot in this city. And I asked him, like, how did you know that this was going to work? Because if you had asked me how to stop riots, I never would have guessed take the kebab sellers out of the plazas. And he told me this great story, which is that he had, he's like this small guy. He's like five foot six. And he's like built like a fire plug.

He would chaw on tobacco and like spit every and he's like built like a fire plug he would he would he would chaw on tobacco and like spit every other word he was like he's like a cartoon character so he told me that when he was in high school he was about to graduate and he was going to join his brother because his brother had just become this very successful methamphetamine entrepreneur in their area in kentucky and and so he was going to basically become a meth dealer and his brother got arrested the night before this guy was going to graduate from high school. And so instead of going and becoming a meth dealer

with his brother, he decides to enlist in the Marines. And he joins the Army. He's actually an Army major. He joins the Army. And when he's in the Army, what they teach him right away is like, we are going to teach you how to change your habits because when someone shoots at you, your instinct is going to be to run away. But we want you to, we want to teach you the habit to shoot back. And then actually in the military nowadays, if you're overseas, you know, you can communicate all the time with your family back home. Like

every night you like send like a, you talk to them on Skype or by email. So they have to, so the army has to teach you things like communication habits, because otherwise you'll get distracted while you're on patrol or you'll get into a fight with your wife, you'll be distracted. So the military is basically this giant habit change machine. And this guy said it changed his life. Like once he understood how habits worked, that habits were this thing that you could like play with and fiddle with the gears, it changed everything about how he lives. And so like I had gone to Iraq expecting that I was going to learn about like manhood and war and stuff like that. But actually what I learned about was there's this awesome thing happening with the science of habit formation that I had never heard of.

And that's how I got interested in habits. And once I started researching it, I learned about this thing named, known as the habit loop, which is basically the insight you, you know, the BF Skinner insight, right? That, that every habit has these three components, a cue, a routine, and a reward. And that we think about the behavior, the routine all the time. But if you focus on the cue and the reward, that is how you can actually change how people behave. And so that was kind of how I got interested in habits.

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So I think that's a great question. And there's an important distinction here, which is creating a new habit versus changing an old habit. But let's talk about creating a new habit. So it's very easy to say what behavior or what routine I want. I want to, and we need to be specific, right? Like let's say I want to spend five minutes in meditation every single day so as to develop sort of mindfulness skills. So we know what behavior, what routine we're talking about. Now the habit loop is a cue, a routine, a reward, and these become self-reinforcing. Basically, our brain learns to clump together that cue, the routine, the reward until it becomes more and more automatic behavior. And we know the routine,

we know the behavior. I want to meditate for five minutes. But the next step is you must choose what the cue is and what the reward is to create to create, creating this clump of behavior, this chunk. So, so let's say, let's say it's you, let's say you want to start, do you meditate right now? I do. Okay. Okay. But let's say, let's say before you started meditating, or let's just say what, what are your, so what is your existing cue? If you were choosing a cue, or since you meditate, what is the cue for, and a cue can be, it can be one of five things. It's a time of day, a particular place, a certain emotion, the presence of certain other people, or a preceding behavior that's become ritualized.

For you, what's your cue when you meditate? It's a first thing in the morning. And so there's a place that I go to when I'm in my home surroundings. So it's, it's a early riser. And if I miss it in the early riser, cause I got to jump out and kind of, you know, uh, whatever kind of events of life get in the way of that, then it's a evening routine. And so I'm, I'm, it's before I go to bed. So the cue to be concrete is time and place for me. Okay. Which is perfect. And it's great when you have more than one cue, right? When you can kind of, and my guess is, you can tell me if I'm wrong. My guess is that you also have a preceding ritualized behavior. Like you either, you're sitting down on like a pillow. There's like

some sense of ceremony that you've developed that accompanies. Yeah, and so you're hooking it around an existing habit. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So now here's the next question. So if you were starting this habit, so those would be great candidates of cues, but you need to decide what reward

you're going to give yourself after you meditate to decide what reward you're going to give yourself after you meditate to develop this habit. Now, eventually that reward is going to become the meditation itself. You probably feel calm and relaxed after you meditate, but initially your brain is not going to either A, experience that reward or B, be able to recognize that reward as a reward. And so you need to give yourself initially some type of external reward. So let me ask, when you started meditating, what reward did you give yourself after a session of meditation?

Relief. Yeah? How so? Tell me a little bit about that. I'm joking. Cause like when I first started, I was like, Oh my goodness, that was a scratchy seven minutes or whatever it was like, what was I doing? Oh, okay. Well, you know, there was no reward. And that, so it was an, I fell into the, to the classic trap early days. This was 25 years ago where my good practicing psychologist friend who, or mentor who introduced it to me, didn't talk to me about the reward. He just said, it was kind of like, go do it. I was like, okay. And did you, did you keep track in a journal of like, you know, I meditated three times this week or? I didn't have a goal around it. And so, but once I leveled up on it, the two things, and there was an accountability metric is what I had in place. So there was a secondary reward, which is I got to say something to my mentor when he said, did you do it?

Okay, there you go. So that's, I think the reward that you were giving yourself is that, is that there was a tension because your mentor had told you to do this. And there's a tension that if you haven't done it, he might ask you about it. But secondarily, you're creating a reward because you're telling your mentor, I actually did this thing. And so as a result, there's like some implicit praise that you'll get from him. There's a sense of accomplishment. So I think what we know about from habit studies is that most people, when they start an activity like meditation, they need to give themselves some kind of reward, whether that be keeping track of it on a journal, giving themselves even like a small piece of chocolate afterwards, saying like, because I meditated for five minutes, I'm allowed to go watch YouTube for 15 minutes guilt-free. Most of us create these rewards almost unconsciously without recognizing that we're doing it, right? When you talk to your mentor, you're rewarding yourself. And you might not even know initially that that's what you're doing. But the more explicit you make that, the easier it is to create that habit.

And so I think if someone wanted to start a new habit, what I would say to them is, first of all, choose at least, choose a cue. And number two, figure out how you're going to reward yourself every single time you do this. Now, eventually, over time, you don't need to tell your mentor that you're meditating, right? You learn to enjoy meditation for meditation's sake. And similarly, somebody who's creating that habit, they don't need, they're going to find

that they don't need to eat a piece of chocolate afterwards. But that transition from an extrinsic to an intrinsic reward, that is somewhat of a, it can be a slow transition and an unnoticed transition. And so the most powerful thing to do is to give yourself an explicit reward at first so that your brain learns to grab onto this clump of behaviors and make it easier and easier. Yeah, you're spot on. There is a little bit of a challenge there too, with the moving from extrinsic to intrinsic. That can be tricky. There's a leap of faith there,

but to get going, the mechanics are spot spot on and there's actually some interesting research um around the queue celebrating at the queue so when you when you yeah when you put your let's uh let's say that you're gonna go run in the morning and you put your shoes out the night before by the front door and when you put your shoes out and you're running shoes and you put them down, you go, that's right. Look, I'm one step closer. Look at that. And you kind of celebrate like a wild person, you know, like you're manufacturing a bit of a neurochemical sense of excitement and joy and reward around just the cue. Absolutely. Absolutely. And yeah, and there's, so in the power of habit, there's this stuff about this guy, Wilfrum Schwartz at Oxford, who studies kind of where our sense of craving comes from. And that's exactly what he

says, is he says that over time, the anticipation of the reward gets linked into the queue so strongly that it becomes a motivating factor in and of itself. We begin experiencing the salience of the reward before we even have the reward because of that anticipation. It's also really powerful because if you don't get the reward in that case, what you get is something that looks like depression, like a mild, mild depression. And so as a result, the aversion to that sense of depression makes it easier for us to do the behavior that otherwise we were avoiding. There you go. I love it. So awesome. It's super crisp. It's mechanical. There is a little bit of an art to it, but you need those three levers, you know, three dials to play with. And it's not like breaking bad habits. That's not, it's creating new ones. That's exactly right.

Yeah. If you can hook them around an already think when, you know, in the, so I mentioned that there's, I think there's this distinction between creating new habits and changing old habits. When it comes to changing an old habit, I think it's better to think about changing an old habit than breaking a habit because it's just a slight twist on the formula, which is instead of coming up with a new cue and reward, you ask yourself, what is the existing cue and reward I have in my life that leads to this behavior that I want to change? And can I find something new, some new behavior that seems to correspond with that old cue and that seems to deliver something similar to that old reward? And then I just sort of shoehorn that new behavior in. For one of my clients, he would come home when he was tired after work and turn down the blinds and then open up a fifth of vodka. So turning down the blinds was a problem. So we stopped it there. Oh my God. Yeah.

All right. Listen, I want to be mindful of your time. I'd like to like follow up on a secondary part two with you about- Sure. Absolutely. I'd love to. Yeah. In the weeds of habit nudges and the loop and really take it into kind of under like unearth some of

the challenges with it. Cause it's not totally all clean, but there's, and there's some real practical challenges, but the basic framework is wonderful. Oh, thanks. No, I'd love to. Absolutely. Anytime. Let's, let's, let's set up another time. And, and, and I do think, I mean, I think to your point and you know this better than I do, you're exactly right that like it is an oversimplification of how people behave to create a framework where we say if you identify the cues and rewards, you can change your behavior. Because we know that behavior is multivariate and it's complex. And yet at the same time, creating this simple framework gives people a place to start. And this ties into what you were saying when you were talking about your kid, which is that we know that the most powerful ingredient for behavior change is experimentation. and I can observe the consequences and therefore run iterative experiments, that something happens in my brain that makes change easier.

And I think this framework gives people a place to run experiments that allows them to learn about themselves. That's what's up. Self-discovery on full tilt. Charles, thank you. Smarter, faster, better, and the power of habit. And we can also find you online. Where would you like to- Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm online at Charles Duhigg, and I have a podcast with Slate where

we talk about a lot of these things. It's called How To with Charles Duhigg, where someone writes in with a problem, and we basically find an expert to try and help them solve that problem by diagnosing what's really going on. I love it. D-U-H-I-G-G. And where can we find you on social? I'm just cduhigg on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook. Appreciate you, Charles. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community.

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