About 40% of everything you do today is a habit your brain automated, and the neural loop driving it doesn’t distinguish between good and bad habits.
Charles Duhigg explains why trying to eliminate a bad habit is neurologically futile and why the habit that scares you most irrationally is probably the one change that rewires everything else.
About the speaker: Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of The Power of Habit, which spent over three years on bestseller lists and has been translated into 40 languages, and Smarter Faster Better, also a bestseller. Mr. Duhigg writes for The New Yorker magazine and is a graduate of Yale University and the Harvard Business School. He has been a frequent contributor to CNBC, This American Life, NPR, The Colbert Report, NewsHour, and Frontline.
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Timestamps
00:00:50 Part 1: How your brain is running on habits
00:00:54 Chapter 1: The habit loop
00:13:05 Chapter 2: Identifying cravings
00:18:44 Chapter 3: Keystone habits
00:25:01 Chapter 4: How your beliefs and communities affect habits
00:33:00 Part 2: What makes conversations work
00:33:05 Chapter 5: How to become a supercommunicator
00:42:23 Chapter 6: The “Whats this really about?” conversation
00:51:51 Chapter 7: The “How do we feel?” conversation
01:07:35 Chapter 8: The “Who are we?” conversation
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
I’m Charles Duhigg, a writer at The New Yorker Magazine and the author of The Power of Habit, Supercommunicators, and Smarter, Faster, Better. Today on Big Think, we’re going to be talking about how to change your habits and create new habits. How to create the behaviors that you most want. And we’re going to be talking about how to become a supercommunicator, how to use language and conversation so that you can connect with anyone and help create the world that you most want to see.
Before we start talking about communication, let’s talk about habits, about how to build the right habits in our life, because much of how we connect with other people, much of how we communicate, is built on the habits that we live by. And so when we understand how those habits work, we gain power over changing them and making them better.
Part one: How your brain is running on habits
Chapter one: The habit loop
I’ve been a reporter for about 25 years now and had these experiences where I got really interested in trying to understand the psychology of why we make the decisions that we make. In particular, when I was in Iraq as a reporter, this is during the war, I met an army major who taught me that the way that the army functions is by changing people’s habits. That your instinct when someone’s shooting at you is to run away, but they want to teach you to shoot back and so what they do is they try and figure out how to teach you the right habits. Or, when you’re overseas in the military you can call home and talk to your spouse every night and if you don’t have good communication habits, then you end up getting into fights and as a result you’re distracted when you’re on patrol, and so one of the things that I’ve learned is that there’s a huge amount of knowledge that’s been generated in really the last couple of decades about why we do the things we do and more importantly, how to do them better. Whether it’s creating habits for myself around exercise or whether it’s communicating with the people that I care about the most, we now know due to advances in neural imaging and data collection why some people do this better than others and how we can learn from them.
About 40-45% of what you do every day, according to studies, is a habit. Now, you might think of it as a choice that you’re making. But actually, if we can observe your life, what we’ll see is that you’re just acting almost unconsciously. You’re doing the same thing that you’ve done before. And these habits, they shape everything from what we eat to what we spend to how we treat other people to what we do at work.
Almost half of what we do every day is a habit. And the reason why is because our brains are designed to create habits wherever they can. There’s a part of our brain known as the basal ganglia that exists just to create habits. Every animal on Earth has a basal ganglia. And the reason why it’s there is because if you had to make a decision every single time you were walking down the trail, whether to pick up the apple or pick up the rock and put it into your mouth, you would be so overwhelmed that you would never accomplish anything, right? You’d never make it past the apple and the rock.
So what our brain has done is it’s evolved in order to create habits. And every single habit that exists within our cranium, almost half of what we do every day, operates the same way. It’s what’s known as the habit loop. A habit actually has three components. There’s a cue, which is like a trigger for an automatic behavior to unfold. And then a routine, the behavior itself, what we think of as the habit. And then finally, a reward. And your brain, the basal ganglia, what it does is it looks for that pattern of the cue, the routine, and the reward. And when it sees it frequently enough, it says, I’m going to make this automatic. Instead of you having to make a decision to get up and go running in the morning, instead of you having to make a decision to pick up that donut and put it into your mouth, I know what the cue and the reward are, and so I’m going to make it happen effortlessly.
What’s important about this is that it means that we can take control of our habits. If we can recognize the cues and rewards that inform those behaviors, those routines, if we can start fiddling with the gears inside our head, then we can build the habits that we want and we can change the habits that we dislike until we become the people that we want to be.
So when people think about habits, sometimes they think that it’s a matter of discipline, right? If I have enough willpower, then I’m going to have the right habits. Or they think it’s a sign of character. Good people have good habits and bad people have bad habits. But that’s actually not right. In fact, the science says that that’s completely wrong. Your brain does not distinguish between good habits and bad habits. Your brain just creates habits. Anytime that there’s a cue, routine, and reward, your brain will create that connection and they’ll make that behavior easier and easier and easier until it becomes automatic. It’s up to you to decide whether it’s good or bad. It’s up to you to decide whether it’s something you want to encourage or something you want to discourage.
And it’s not a matter of discipline. We can use willpower to push ourselves to do amazing things. But when we become really amazing, when we don’t have to use that willpower anymore, is when a behavior becomes a habit. When it happens almost without willpower. Anyone who was not an athlete at one point who took up running knows that the first couple of times you go for a run, it’s miserable, right? You’re like pushing yourself. And then something happens that like two or three weeks later, you wake up and you put on your running shoes and you’re out on the path and you realize, you know what? I didn’t even have to push myself to do this. I just kind of did it almost unthinkingly. That’s because the habit has taken hold.
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