Good Life Project - Charles Duhigg: The Power of Habit [Best of]

Episode Date: December 25, 2017

Ever wonder how to kill a bad habit or start a good one? How to stop eating ice cream at 11 pm or smoking or procrastinating? How to exercise every day, without fail?Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of The Power of Habit, (https://amzn.to/3jhgYHS) Charles Duhigg, did too. But he went beyond wondering and spent a few years researching the science behind habits. What he discovered was pretty mind-blowing.Not only is there a huge amount of mythology and misinformation around these hidden routines, but the people who understand the real psychology of habit formation are using it not just to change their own behavior, but to "influence" the buying decisions of hundreds of millions of consumers. Including you.In this episode of Good Life Project, Duhigg reveals how one of the biggest retailers in the world, Target, uses habit analysis to figure out which customers are pregnant and leverages that information to cultivate new buying habits. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.He shares how to tap the neuroscience of habit to create your own positive behaviors (hint: chocolate after exercise may not be such a bad thing). He reveals why old habits never really die and what to do about it.Duhigg takes us behind the scenes of major corporations and shows how to use the science of habit to transform a failing business into a success story in ways you'd never suspect. And he shares how these ideas can be tapped to create larger shifts in cultures and societies for good or, if misused, not-so-good.[We first aired this conversation in July 2012. I'm so excited to share this "Best Of" episode with you now as we head into the year to come to think about the habits we want to create].+------------------------+Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sparketypes/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. So this tends to be the time of year that we look at a little thing called habits.

During the holiday season, we tend to beat ourselves up for the habits that we don't love ourselves. And as we turn the page on the new year, very often we tend to look at the habits that we'd love to leave behind. We'd love to break and the habits we'd love to make and how those might actually work and come alive in our lives. And a while back, we sat down with Charles Duhigg, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and the author of a book, a massive book that was all over the place called The Power of Habit, about how the science of habit formation in our lives, companies, and societies really happens, the truth behind how to actually make and change habits. It was massively eye-opening to me. And I thought that as we move through this time of year and start to look ahead at the habits we'd love to create in the year to come,

it would be a good idea to revisit that conversation with Charles and to share it with you. You will hear the quality of the recording is a little bit different than our current recordings, which happen in our studio. This was actually taped back when Charles was on staff. He was a journalist at the New York Times. It was taped in their offices. So you'll hear a bit of background noise. Just to give you a heads up, that's what's happening there. Still a really powerful exercise that has left me really thinking about how I behave in the world and how I want to create new behaviors that are positive, constructive in my life. On to the conversation, I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Good Life Project is sponsored by Health IQ.

Health IQ is an insurance company that uses science and data to secure lower rates on life insurance for health conscious people like runners and cyclists, strength trainers, vegans, and more. It's like saving money on your car insurance for being a good driver. Health IQ saves you money on your life insurance for living a health conscious lifestyle. So to see if you qualify, get your free quote today at healthiq.com slash good life. And you can also mention the promo code good life when you talk to a health IQ agent. That's healthiq.com slash good life. Hi, I'm Jonathan Fields.

And my guest today is Charles Duhigg, investigative reporter for the New York Times and author of a really fabulous new book, The Power of Habit. We're going to get into this and explore a whole bunch of things around this idea of habit, what it is, what it isn't, maybe bust a little bit of mythology around it. So Charles, welcome. It's great to be here with you. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

So this book is exploding. I got an early copy. You were very kind to send it over to me and I devoured the whole thing really quickly. I'm glad to hear that. I'm fascinated by sort of the storytelling and the neuroscience. And what we do with this show is we, and we were talking about this a little bit, we have two different types of guests. People who have these interesting stories out in the world, and we may circle back to

you on that for a different piece. And then people that are sort of pieces of the mindset puzzle. So that's what I really want to explore with you today. Absolutely. So, and let's start out with, you had a recent article in the Sunday Times, it was a magazine I guess. Right, yeah. That exploded. Yeah.

Wasn't it like the most emailed story of the year or something like that? It got a little bit of attention, which is nice. The piece about Target and how they're using, they're studying shoppers habits to predict who's pregnant. So can you go in and tell a little bit of that story? So this is actually a chapter from the book. And about 18 months ago, as I was writing the book, I was looking for a company that is studying shopping habits to understand how they do it. And someone told me, you've got to look at Target.

Target's doing this really, really well. And I found this guy, Andrew Pohl, who runs what's known as their predictive analytics team. And Target is among the smartest companies at examining shopping habits and then learning how to market to them or manipulate them, depending on where you sit. And one of the things they've done is they have built predictive models to figure out which shoppers are pregnant. Sometimes even before that shopper's father instance might know they're pregnant so what was the story around that so so this one in one instance they had they just started

doing this like sending out these advertisements and at first they would send out these coupon books that were just filled with baby stuff right it was clear the target knew you were pregnant so I was talking to one of the managers and he said that this father came in to the store really angry, and he's clutching one of these coupon books. And he says, why are you sending this to my teenage daughter? Are you trying to encourage her to become pregnant? And the guy says, I don't know what you're talking about.

He looks at it. It's filled with baby stuff. He's like, I'm so sorry. Calls the guy at home a couple days later, and he's like, look, I just want to apologize again. And the guy says, well, I actually have to to apologize to you I had a talk with my daughter and it turns out there's been some activity I'm not aware of and she's due in August so it was a target that actually figured out before this guy that his daughter

was pregnant and which is you know on the one hand really cool but on the other hand really freaking people out right It has to be insane to spook people out. Right. But what's behind this? I mean, what's target, like how's target getting to this point? Well, so in the last decade, we've learned a huge amount about how habits work, particularly from a neurological perspective. And what we found or what scientists have found in laboratories is that every habit

has three components. There's a cue, which is like the trigger for the behavior. Okay. Your brain goes into automatic mode. And then the routine, which is like the trigger for the behavior. Your brain goes into automatic mode. And then the routine, which is the behavior itself. And then a reward, which is why your brain encodes this chunk of behavior as an automatic routine. Right. So everyone has to have those three pieces to become encoded, I guess.

Every habit has to have those three parts. And most of the time when we think about habits, we only think about the behavior right we think about like eating the doughnut or going for an exercise you know exercising going for a run right but this cue and this reward are kind of the keys to unlocking habits and to shaping them and remaking them and so if you know this as an individual it's enormously powerful if you know this is a company like in targets case you know how to encourage people to behave almost automatically. And that's what they did.

So they've got such a vast amount of data that they're collecting from how many data points that they can literally put together this predictive model that understands the cue and the reward, and they build the routine that they want. Exactly. That's exactly right. So what they do, their goal is to, they assign every person who walks through their doors regularly a guest identification number.

What they want to do is they want to link all the demographic information they can to it. What you purchased previously, which coupons you use, if you open emails, they'll buy where do you live, are you married, do you own your house or rent, how much money do you earn, what magazines do you get, what websites do you live are you married had to own your house or rent how much money do you earn what magazines do you get what websites do you visit etc and they want to figure out what for Jonathan is the particular cue that's gonna get you to buy a lawnmower from them what reward can I give you that's gonna get you to come into target when you need a new lawn so the behavior is always a purchase in their world.

And then so the voodoo and slash science is the cue and the reward that's going to lead to the behavior. That's exactly right. For them, what they want to drive is purchasing behavior. But obviously, that's not in designing your own habits. Right. So let's make this, I mean, let's kind of bring this down to the individual. Because we all have habits. What fascinated me too, and I've read this in different places, but you laid it out in an interesting way that kind of made me say, of bring this down to the individual um yeah because we all have habits and what what fascinated

me too and i've read this in different places but you laid it out an interesting way that kind of made me say well is how much of what we do from the moment we open our eyes to the moment we go to bed at night is literally largely on autopilot right and talk to me a little bit about this well and it has to be that way right because so there was a study that was done by duke university a couple years ago where they followed college students around. And their basic question was how much of what they do is actual decision making and how much feels like decision making and it's just habit. And they found that 45% of daily activities are habit. Right?

And a habit is something where you once made a decision and then essentially you stopped thinking about it and continued doing it. Right. And if you think about it, this is actually really important because if you had to concentrate every single time you tied your shoes or backed the car out of the driveway or got dressed in the morning, you'd never have any time to think about the meeting that's coming up or what you need for class today or making your kids lunch. So it's important to be able to form habits. But we know from neurological studies that when a habit emerges, your brain actually powers down. That's why they feel so powerful, and that's why these mistakes can happen, right?

So explain what you mean by power down. So there's a part of the brain named the basal ganglia. Right. It's a very old structure inside the brain. And within the basal ganglia, patterns form form and they execute automatically. And so when a behavior becomes a habit, when it becomes ritualized, your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain where you're making decisions, hands over control to the basal ganglia. And the basal ganglia doesn't really make decisions. It just follows patterns.

It just executes. Exactly. Okay. But there is these two special times that the prefrontal cortex is active. The first is during the start of a habit, the cue, because it basically looks for something to tell it, which habit should I apply right now? And then at the end, the reward, because your brain sort of shakes itself awake again and says, okay, so I just went through this routine.

What did I get out of it? Right. It's looking for, like, why should I do it again? Exactly. Should I remember this for the future? And that's why if you influence the cue and the reward, if you kind of play with these, you have such power is because that's the opportunity to change how you're literally thinking about a pattern.

Right. So we've got essentially, it's like a loop, feedback loop. But, I mean, can a pattern be created with one pass through that loop or is this a matter of repetition over time? So most of the time it's a matter of repetition. But if you think about it, it sort of depends on the power of the reward. If you want to create a chocolate habit, you could probably do that. It's like half the time.

Right, exactly. You're halfway through it and you're like, I love this work. Remember this one. Now if you want to create a habit to go on a long run every morning when you're exhausted, that one's going to take a little bit longer. But at the same time, it's actually the same neurological process, right? You're basically, you have to come up with some cue for your brain to recognize this chunk of behavior and there has to be a reward at the end. And so actually this chocolate example is a good one because we know from studies that the best way to start exercising, for instance, is at first give yourself a piece of chocolate as soon as you're done with your workout.

Which is totally counterintuitive, right? Because most people are working out. It's not counterintuitive. Pretty close to what I do actually. But what you do counterproductive. That's probably the better way to put it. But what you're doing is counterproductive. Right. That's probably the better way to put it. Counterproductive.

What you're trying to do is you're trying to trick your brain into associating this cue and this routine with a reward. And then we know from studies that after a week and a half, and I'm sure you know this from your own experience sort of working out, once you start exercising, you don't want that chocolate anymore afterwards right the intrinsic reward becomes enough to sustain the pattern but you have to trick your brain at first by giving it an extrinsic reward so so what I want to make it crystal clear so so let's talk about like running it okay I want to start you know like a daily running habit right the behavior we know what it is it's defined it's it's running and then what would it QB for that the Q would be so all cues fall into one of five categories

according to studies it's either a time a certain place the presence of other people and certain other people in emotion or a certain preceding action so one of the ways that you could create a cue is, for instance, you would want to go running at about the same time every day. And you'd want to go running at about the same time in your morning process. And you might want to put your running shoes as some type of visual cue to help remind you right by your bed or by your door. You want to ritualize that, right?

The specific cue, if I looked at your life, I could tell you what the specific cue is. You might not even know yourself. Interesting. But the more you ritualize the beginning of that process, the more a cue will emerge in your neurology. Interesting. So you've laid out these five things.

So with these cues, is it the type of thing where one is enough, or would it be better if I could associate all five cues at the same time? Does that make a more powerful sort of neural pathway or does it not matter? Absolutely. So there's going to be one cue for your running habits. But in a sense, your neurology is going to choose that cue. And the best thing you can do is to ritualize all five things.

And you can actually see this in beer commercials, for instance. If you want to learn a lot about habits, watch beer commercials, because in a beer commercial, you'll notice that when the guy walks into the bar and he has a beer, he's surrounded by this group of friends, right? Because that's a cue, the presence of certain other people. It's like game time on a Sunday.

Game time on a Sunday, right? A certain time of day. You'll notice that when the bottle is handed to him, it always has droplets on the outside. That's because most people, when they, a certain time of day, you'll notice that when the bottle is handed to them, it always has like droplets on the outside. That's because most people, when they take a beer out of the fridge, it condenses, and you see these droplets on the outside. They're trying to take all these cues that naturally occur in your life and to shoehorn this new behavior, having a beer in the middle of the day with your friends, into something

you already do. So, I mean, which, I mean, it makes perfect sense that sort of like you do this and then the cues kind of set up and you're almost saying we probably have a lot of these cues already. It's not like we actually have to create the cues, but it's a good idea to probably start to tune in on what the cues in our life already are and focus more on, okay, we don't necessarily need to create new cues, but let's identify the existing cues and link this new behavior to that. And then I think what you're saying also is maybe make a more deliberate reward after this new behavior.

That's exactly right. And this actually gets to another concept in the book, which is the golden rule of habit change. Because you had asked about creating habits, but most people say what they want to do is change their habits. So this is what we know from neurological laboratories and psychology laboratories.

It's very hard to eradicate a habit. Basically, once it's encoded in your neurology, it's there. Why is that just because the neural pathways are there and they don't disconnect, they only weaken our strength? Exactly, exactly. It's because of how, how essentially we learn on a neurological level certain neurons get either larger or smaller as they're exposed to neurotransmitters and so so to simply say I'm gonna cut out a

certain kind of neurological pathway and a certain habit that's not really feasible but what you can do is you can change that habit. If you diagnose the cue and if you diagnose the reward, you can shoehorn a new behavior in. OK. As long as it is triggered by the same cue and it delivers the old reward. Mayday, mayday.

We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24. Tell me how to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight

hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary so then it's almost like we're the old habit the old neural pathway is still there but we're creating a new pathway which is stronger stronger or sort of lays over exactly that's exactly right and and the best example of this is actually alcoholics anonymous right which we all know if you've never been to an AA meeting, we all know how it works, right? You basically, and the thing about AA is it was invented by these guys who weren't scientists.

Like they were literally like sitting in their rooms. They were alcoholics saying like, let's make this up. The reason why there's 12 steps, the famous 12 steps, is because there's 12 apostles in the Bible. And one guy came up with all 12 of them sitting in bed one night, writing down, waiting to go meet someone. No kidding. But the reason why AA works is that it's basically

this giant machine for changing habits. So the old habit was, the cue was, I had a tough day at work, I come home, the routine is I'm gonna go to a bar, see my friends, have a drink, just relax with a beer. And the reward is I feel so much better. Like I was able to forget my worries for a second. I talked to my friends.

I had this emotional catharsis. So what AA says is keep the same cue, keep the same reward. If you have a crappy day at work, instead of going to a bar, go to a meeting. And at that meeting, we're going to provide the exact same experience. You're going to have an emotionally cathartic experience you're gonna talk to your friends you're gonna talk about all of your problems and at the end you're gonna feel this sense of relief right they just change the routine so I guess that's why you know like it's common knowledge is there's like a sponsored

element to it so maybe if you don't have the meeting available to you but you want that routine and your you call and it's sort of like that's another routine that swaps into the middle that's exactly right that's exactly right I think I think most people in a have these sponsors and that's why is they want to replicate this right but it also gets to something else which is the other thing that we know about change and about creating new habits it's easier in groups right and I think this is true for entrepreneurs right it's it's easier to start a company when you have a community that's supporting you. Yeah, like-minded community, absolutely.

Right, or it's easier to parent when you have other parents you can talk to. And there's this kind of interesting reason why groups matter so much, which is that intellectually, people might know that they're capable of change. They might know that they're capable of starting a company or doing something great. But emotionally, there's going to be that moment when all of a sudden you think to yourself, who am I kidding? I can't do it. Right?

Like, why did I ever think I could do this? And this thing happens if you're in a group when that moment happens. You can look across the room and say to yourself, you know, Jim is over there. Jim is kind of a moron and he's able to do it. If Jim can do it, I sure as hell can do it because I'm way smarter than that guy. That's actually really important. It turns out that like having a group that's filled with A people who are like, way to go, Jonathan. Great job.

You can definitely do this. And also having people in that group who you can think to yourself, that guy's a schlump. And if he can do it, I can do it. It actually matters a lot. We know this from studies. So I mean, and I think what this is circling around to, it seems like social context and social support is a huge part of supporting habit. Is that, because I'm thinking about the occasion of alcoholics or just people who are trying,

dealing with weight. Right. Right. We're really talking about, it's interesting to me because on the one hand you think, okay, alcoholics or just people who are trying dealing with weight right right we're really talking about it's interesting to me because on the one hand you think okay if I do a really effective job at replacing that you know the cue and and the reward and the behavior like in the right or taking the cue in the reward and keeping them and changing the behavior do that a couple times we should be pretty much rocking and rolling but these are things where I mean it's a lifelong thing

that you have to keep repeating and repeating and repeating. And lifelong, people want to keep going back to the old behavior, which brings up the notion of how does the common understanding of addiction fit into this, whether it's food addiction, smoking, alcohol, sex, whatever people lump under addiction these days. Or like procrastination, right? Even these addictions that people feel powerless over that we don't think of as like, oh, that guy's got a real problem.

But there's lots of people who wish they were more productive, and they find they spend an hour a day wasting time on Facebook. An hour? In the world I live in. Or more. In the world I live in, it's like people spend an hour a day not on various platforms. That's true. Or the worst is, I know you have kids, and I do too.

Like, email, right? Your Blackberry, that thing buzzes. Right. Or your iPhone or whatever you're using. And you're playing with your kids, and you want to focus on your kids, and it buzzes, and you're like, this craving to see who just sent me

my fantasy football results. I don't need to know this. Well, it's like classic intermittent reinforcement. I mean, it literally creates addictive behaviors. That's exactly right. And it is. It's intermittent rewards. That's exactly what it is.

And this has been perfected by video game designers, by slot machines. And so here's what I think professionals would answer that question, addiction specialists. At this point, there is a widespread belief that most addictions are not actually addictions as we have come to think of them okay but habit dysfunctions huh so there are some people who have chemical addictions to for instance you know alcohol or drugs right and heroin and opiates are we know are physically addicting but take cigarettes if you smoke and you stop,

you're only physically addicted to cigarettes for about 100 hours after your last cigarette. So the chemistry takes about 100 hours. Yeah, once that nicotine's out of your bloodstream, there's no physical addiction. And we know this from blood studies and labs. Okay. But so the question is,

why does a smoker two weeks or two years after they quit crave that cigarette in the morning, feel addicted when they have their morning paper? It's because of the habit. They've encoded a neural pathway that says, I want that pep that nicotine used to give me when I'm sitting down in the morning. What they need to do is they need to find something else to provide it, like a double shot of espresso.

The habit, beyond the natural chemical addiction, the behavioral pattern of a habit itself can create an insane craving. It is actually as strong, if not stronger, than a physical addiction. We know this because we know that people who gave up drugs, who gave up booze, years later, still crave whatever it provided. Right. And I guess biologicallyologically it couldn't be the chemical. It can't be, right? I mean, you've been off this stuff for years.

And we know actually with smartphones it's the same thing. From fMRI studies when they've watched people's brains, the reason you feel a sense of craving when it buzzes in your pocket is because it triggers this habit, this sense of anticipating a reward. And once you're anticipating that reward, even if you weren't thinking about email five minutes ago, or even if you weren't hungry for a donut five minutes ago, as soon as the cue is there, the craving starts.

And that craving is enormously powerful. Right. Yeah, and I read the research showing that once a process is initiated in your brain, essentially, there is just an insane desire to finish the process, to complete the loop. Right, right, exactly. That habit loop is, I mean, it's like this simple thing, right? And you feel so powerless. Right.

But it's like a vice. So let's talk about this one other concept that you write about. And this is interesting to me because I've had so many conversations with people about this one other concept that you that you write about and um and this is interesting to me because i've had so many conversations with people about this because you know if you go to a health specialist or something they're like okay you know like you're overweight you're stressed out you're okay here's here's the thing i'm going to send you home with your program i want you to meditate twice a day i want you to change your diet you're going to start eating healthily i want you to start to exercise five days a week. Right? We're going to get you so that you're working, you know, like on a bouncy ball in your office instead of just... And you've got like these five new life-altering behaviors.

And like, okay, go. Is that even possible for us to do? If you're on The Biggest Loser and you've got like a camera crew following you around all the time, then sure. Okay. If you've got a super weird word support network, everyone else, absolutely not. So why not? Well, so for a long time, that was exactly the advice that people would give, right? Change your life because we don't want you to get exposed to any of your old cues that used to cause you.

And what would happen is that people could do that for like a week or two, and then it would just all fall apart. And it's essentially because you're using so much willpower. And we used to think of willpower as this thing that like you either had it or you didn't, and if you had it, you could use it to change your life. And that's not right at all. Willpower, we now know, is like a muscle.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot if we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The more you use it, the more tired it gets.

It's like a depletable resource. Exactly. Exactly. Which is why if you spend your whole day replying to emails and doing little boring tasks at work, when you get home, it's impossible to make yourself go run. Because you've used it all on that stuff that's not interesting. But so the interesting thing about willpower as a muscle and that gets to losing weight is, A, you can strengthen it through practice.

And B, you can sidestep willpower. If you make something into a habit, if it's an automatic reaction, it doesn't tax your willpower quite as much. It doesn't make that muscle. It doesn't need as much muscle behind it. For weight loss, this is a great example because one of the things that they did, and this was almost by accident they figured this out, they asked, the psychologist asked a whole bunch of people who were trying to lose weight to start writing down just once a week what they were eating. And they were doing this actually just because they wanted like snapshots of these people's lives. But the people who were doing it, some of them, they

started writing down everything that they were eating, food journaling. And then they started doing this kind of crazy thing where they would look at yesterday's page, and they would find these patterns and come up and write little plans for what to do the next day. Or they would write what they were going to eat that night so that when they got home and they were tired and they were

exhausted, rather than just ordering takeout, they would just look at their journal and make a decision that they had made earlier in the day. And what they found out, what the psychologists found out, was that food journaling is what's known as a keystone habit. So some habits have more power than others in lives and also within companies. They seem to unlock all these other changes and set off a chain reaction. Food journaling is one of them. For some reason, if people start writing down everything that they're eating, they seem to learn their own patterns much faster and be able to be able to

sidestep taxing their willpower muscle by making a decision in the morning and kind of programming that they need to do it that night. And then over time that turns into more of an automated habit. Exactly. And then willpower becomes largely, or not, I guess you can't entirely remove it, but you know, maybe minimalize to the extent. Or you use it for something else. Right. Right.

The more you habitualize in your life, the more you have willpower leftover for some other task. Because you can only basically like use willpowerpower for three to four things a day. After that, it just taps out. So people who seem really, really accomplished, and there's a woman named Angela Duckworth who's written about this a lot at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the one who did the grit work. Right, she did grit work, right.

And she wrote this about grit, is that the people who seem super accomplished, it's not because they have that much more willpower than everyone else. It's because they've habitualized a huge amount of their day. She did this big study on West Point. And what she found out is that the people who succeed at West Point are the people who seem to have this habit, a gritty habit, of finding a community and talking to them and basically have this social support. That doesn't seem obvious that at West Point the people who find some friends they meet

with every single morning would succeed. But grit has to become a habit because otherwise there's just not enough willpower in the day to get it done. Yeah, I mean it's amazing that we don't really think about it like that. I remember reading a study a couple years back. I think it was Tal Ben-Jahar who did the study with Stanford students. Maybe, oh no, it was Babashiv who did the study, I think. But he took two groups of Stanford students and he said,

okay, walk down the hall. And one group had to memorize, keep five digits in their head. The other had to keep seven digits in their head. While they were walking, he offered them either a bowl of fruit or a piece of chocolate cake the difference between holding two digits in your memory versus seven digits in your memory completely created willpower right it like doubled the number of people who would take cake because I guess that part of the brain that like works with willpower is that easily

depleted or taxed it It's amazing, right? And we feel like, I don't know about you, I feel this- Aren't we better than that? I know, I know. It's like we're like primates still. I'm a successful- Complex organism.

Right, right, right. I'm a successful person, I should be able to do this stuff. Come on. And yet, if I spend the entire morning doing emails, by afternoon, I'm like, I just want to go get a cookie. Yeah. I felt the exact same thing. You know, it's like, especially, like, when you're, so you just wrote a big book.

When I'm writing a book, it's like, I need to write in the morning. Right. You know, because if I know if I'm saving until late afternoon, I'm busted. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's true. It's true. And it also means that, like, just being aware of that helps you plan out your day. Learning that you have to write in the morning means that you can become a more productive

person because rather than dealing with all the emails, you just put them off until 3 o'clock because that's the time that you're going to have the mental capacity to do it. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Keystone habit. So you gave one really killer example, food journaling. Right. Right. But does a keystone habit, in this case the food journaling, just lead to a change in the way that people eat? Or does this start to ripple out? It ripples through a person's life.

So there's these fascinating studies that have looked at what happens when, for instance, people start exercising. Exercise is another big keystone habit. Keystone habits differ from person to person, organization to organization. But there's some that seem consistent, like exercise. So when people start exercising, they tend to start eating better. And that makes sense, right? You feel good about, you're feeling good about yourself, you want to eat something good. They also start using their credit card less.

Really? Which doesn't make any sense, right? Exercise has nothing to do with credit cards. But it's because exercise is this keystone habit that ripples through a person's life when they start exercising a couple of things happen they tend to first of all their self-image of themselves tends to change right and that's one of the the ways the keystone habit works is it changes our culture in an organization or our self-image and when you your self-image I'm the type of guy who runs every morning.

I'm also the type of guy who can resist buying that thing when I'm checking out. But it also helps us, it also strengthens that willpower muscle. That's why Keystone Habits seem to be so powerful is because it gives us a method for strengthening our sense of willpower and for strengthening our sense of self

right and it's even more powerful inside corporations so what we're meaning how would this give me an example within an organization so so one of the best ones and we go into this in the book is when Paul O'Neill took over Alcoa so he ended up becoming Treasury Secretary before then the reason he was Treasury Secretary because he was famous for turning around Alcoa which is the biggest aluminum manufacturer on earth when he took it over. So when he took over Alcoa, it was a troubled company. So he has this big meeting where he's going to announce his grand strategy.

And all the stock analysts from Wall Street come in, and they all expect him to say, we're going to increase profits and productivity, and we're going to really lean on workers. And he stands up on stage, and he says, my number one priority is worker safety. I want to change our habits around worker safety and get to zero injuries. Well, everyone in the audience freaks out because this is not what they expected to hear.

Right. It's like, what's that going to do? Why would I do that? But what Paul O'Neill knew, and he told me this, was that if he could change habits around worker safety, it would be this keystone habit for Alcoa that would change everything else. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. In a year, they were one of the most profitable companies within the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The next year, they were the most profitable company within the Dow Jones Index. And the reason why is because by changing worker safety, he unlocked all these other habits,

organizational habits throughout the organization. So he found that one thing, and there were probably like a hundred different things he could have chosen. Exactly. But he found one that happened to be this thing that had the ripple effect all the way after these other ones. Right. And people can find that in their own life or inside their own company.

The way we find Keystone habits, according to all these studies you look for things that seem to speak to your culture and values you look for things that seem to provide a platform for other changes right work or safety to improve worker safety you actually have to change production and if you're gonna change production you probably have to make it better but the third thing is keystone habits are things that offer opportunities for small wins. There's this really interesting body of work called the Science of Small Wins, which Tom Peters and Carl Wake. And what they talk about is, you need to find things that offer you these small little rewards during your day or in the week of an organization. Those become the stepping stones for these massive changes, which is also why I like

food journaling. Right. You can track it. Yeah. Yeah. You can say, like, I had three good days. I don't have to change my entire life because I'm going to change over the next six months and that's going to last forever.

Got it. So we take these things and we're looking for these things within these keystone habits to really start to set a lot of other habits in motion. What about the role of belief in this whole process? So let's say, do I have to believe that through changing my nutrition it will make a massive change in my health

or that I will be able to actually lose weight or do the workers in Alcoa have to believe that this will actually make a massive change in my health or I'll be up now that I will be able to actually lose weight or I'll be out do the workers in Alcoa have to believe that this will actually make a difference for the ripple to start to expand out absolutely belief is absolutely critical and it gets back to what we were talking about before that you can intellectually believe that change is possible but emotionally at some point you're gonna have doubts right and so the and so we know from studies that unless you make it through those periods of doubt, unless you genuinely believe you're going to change or that you can build that company,

it's just not going to come together. So then I guess to a certain extent, the little wins is one form of providing incremental little nuggets of belief. It's like proof. Exactly. Oh, wow, maybe this is possible. I mean, is that valid? And also, are there other sort of ways to instill belief? So you're exactly right.

That's why small wins are so powerful. It's because it provides us little pieces of evidence that we're on the right path. It's also like little experiments that sometimes leads to serendipity, right? I tried X, it only took a couple minutes and it worked and it turns out there's a great path that way. But there's other things you have to do for this belief. Number one, it's most easy to achieve this belief as we discussed if you're in a group, right? You need social support, someone to carry you through those moments when you don't really necessarily believe that you can do it.

But number two, you have to provide yourself genuine rewards along the way. So the food journals are really interesting because when they would look at these food journals, the people who had used them to create new eating habits, what they found was that people would have one or two or three days of great eating. They would write down what they're going to eat. The habit had changed. Okay. And then on the fourth day, like everything would fall apart. It would be like a tough day. And that person would eat like ice cream when they got home.

They would totally, and they would write it down in their food journal. And what they found was the people who allowed themselves to have some kind of reward, allowed themselves to lapse, those people stuck with their diets the longest. And in fact, the habit became more automatic. Because it gets back to the habit loop that you need this reward somewhere in this habit, the cue, the routine, the reward. Sometimes the reward is, I've had three great days, I'm going to let myself have a bad day now. And over time, it became four days and five days and six days.

Right, and it expands that, which is kind of fascinating because there's Tim Ferriss, who is famous for all these different books. And in his last book, he was talking about his approach to nutrition, which is basically six days on and one cheat day. Right. And then he got blasted by a lot of people for saying, well, if you're really hardcore,

the cheat day, it's not really cool. But I guess there's something bigger happening there. I think there is. And take Michael Phelps. Michael Phelps trains seven days a week. Everything that Michael Phelps does is habitual. In fact, if you talk to his coach, which I did for one of the chapters, all he talks about is if we get the right habits down, Michael Phelps will win.

So Michael Phelps, most people train six days a week, Michael Phelps will win. So Michael Phelps, most people train six days a week. Michael Phelps decided to train seven days a week because he wanted to be one seventh in better shape. So some people can get to that place where they are hardcore. Now, if you talk to Michael Phelps about this, he cheats in other ways, right? Like his rule is after a certain time of day, he's allowed to eat whatever he wants. And so I think for Tim Ferriss' diet, like having one cheat day. There's got to be some outlet. There's got to be some outlet. Some reward, some. Yeah, the cravings build up. You have to accommodate them. And the question is, are you going to

choose how to accommodate them? Or are you just going to let the pressure build until they overwhelm you? Right. So, I mean, it's fact. I love this because I learned so much from this conversation and from the book. But the big takeaway for me was that we are really, like, we're so much more like primates than you ever want to. I kind of knew that already. But, you know, more like dogs, like Pavlov's dogs. And we're not that evolved when it comes to creating these habitual things.

And rather than saying habits are good or bad, just say this is a part of our day. This is how we live. And 45% of our days are basically habit-based. And a lot of that is really good because it frees our cognitive processing to go and do other things. So it's a matter of understanding what are the elements that form it and also understanding, okay, if I have a habit that I want to reinforce, okay, now I understand how it's formed and how it's built and reinforced. So now I can do that. And also if I have a habit that I want to change, because like you shared, we can't really eliminate them. They're always there.

We can kind of write on top of them. Then the big thing is really understanding how the loop works allows you to work with the cue and the behavior and the reward and the belief and the social support wrapped around it. That's exactly right. And I think the big takeaway also is that you're right. We are in some case, we're powerless to not have habits in our lives. But the difference between us and Pavlov's dogs is when he started ringing that bell and the dog would start slobbering, it couldn't change that. Right. For us, particularly with what we've learned in the last decade, we can mediate the process through decision-making. We can intermediate whether we respond habitually

and what habit unfolds by choosing our cues and rewards. And the best part about this book is learning how malleable habits are. There's literally no habit that can't be changed at any time in a person's life. You just have to understand how it works. And that doesn't mean it's simple or easy, but it's definitely simpler and easier

once you know where to start. Yeah, I love it. This has been a fabulous conversation. I thank you so much for your time. My guest again, it's been Charles Duhigg, who is an investigative journalist in the New York Times and the author of this great new book. Go check it out, The Power of Habit.

Love it, love it, love it. Doing phenomenally, by the way. Congratulations. I've been lucky. Thank you. Knock on something good here, right? Yeah, it's been good so far. Knock on wood, it'll continue.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Hey, thanks so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we've included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode and then share the Good

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