Anyhow, let's jump right into the review itself. After struggling with Behave for almost three weeks, this book was a breath of fresh air of some sort. Its body was divided into three main topics - habits of individuals, habits of companies and habits of societies. Each topic consisted of 2 or 3 shorter stories. Each of these stories had a certain amount of finesse to them. At times it felt like I was reading a fiction book instead of a non-fiction one.
In comparison to other non-fiction books, this book can be characterised as a not particularly "content-heavy" one, because the concepts presented in this book are really easy to grasp, so you sometimes kind of know what is the key getaway even though you are only in the first third of a chapter, but I would not consider it a downside, quite the contrary. Each of the lessons the author wanted to get across was enveloped in some kind of "real-life" engaging story which created the contents of the book that are easy to learn and, most importantly, stick with you like glue, which means that you are very familiar with them by the time you turn the last page. Upon finishing this book, I found myself being able to reproduce the contents rather accurately, which I am really glad about because it bears some valuable lessons about habits - their formation, change etc. which I'll talk about in the next paragraph.
The golden nuggets (if you want a toilet break, now it's the time)
What does a habit formation look like in the brain and what is the purpose of habits?
- About three decades ago, psychologists and neurologists weren't sure what part of the brain is responsible for habit formation and what is the purpose of habits (they hypothesised that there is a purpose to it otherwise, in regards to Darwinian perspective, there would be no real merit to an organism creating habitual behaviour).
- To simplify it, they put mice into a maze with a reward hidden in it. As soon as mice registered that the reward is present in the maze due to olfactory input they received, they spurred forward to find the reward as fast as they possibly could to satisfy their craving.
- Looking at the output representing the brain activity of the mice, the researchers found out that there was the highest brain activity when mice registered the reward or obtained the reward and in contrast to that there was slightly lower activity when mice were performing the reward itself, however, the disparity wasn't that large but here comes the real kicker - after re-running the experiment several times, the mice started to manifest much less intense brain activity in the process of searching for the reward, and intense brain activity occurred only at the beginning and at the end of the task.
- In other words, they found out that the brain is automating the processes we do on a regular basis to save us some energy. This phenomenon obtained its own name - chunking.
- One chunk consists of a cue (situation or sensory input that triggers the habit/chunk), routine (behaviour we are engaged in while performing a habit) and reward (the reason why we do that routine - accompanied by craving)
How to establish a new habit?
- The short answer is: create a craving and clearly define the reward you want to obtain for doing a certain habit. It's rather simple, the more enjoyable and specific the reward is, the easier time you have adopting the habit.
- Another important point Duhigg raises is that you need to consider the bigger picture when thinking about establishing a new habit. Why do I desire to adopt this habit? What are the consequences of me failing to adopt the habit? Is it realistic to adopt this particular habit at this particular time? What are the drawbacks that might stem from me adopting this habit? (Some) humans are highly sophisticated creatures with advanced reasoning and planning skills - anyone can successfully adopt a well-chosen habit if he puts his mind to it. Of course, a substantial amount of willpower is needed to accomplish such a feat because you essentially need to learn something you have never done before or did it in a wrong way hence it takes time and patience.
How to change/manipulate a habit?
- In regards to this issue, Duhigg introduced a concept he named The Golden Rule of Habit Change. It basically states that to change a habit, one must keep a cue and reward but change the routine. To give a rather unpleasant example, consider the habit loop consisting of stress (cue) - drinking alcohol (routine) - alleviation of stress that one previously felt [this one comes with a taxing price of waking up with an awful hangover the next day] (reward). With a huge amount of effort, an alcoholic can transform it into something like this: stress (cue) - visiting Anonymous Alcoholics counselling meeting (routine) - alleviation of a stress that one previously felt (reward) but there is a catch.
- The catch goes as follows: the issue with habits is that once they are ingrained in our brain, the never fully go away and we can reactivate them when we get a corresponding cue (hopping on the bike after a winter break or visiting a local pub with a friend for a glass of water after 4 months of abstinence).
- Since habits never fully go away avoiding a cue or omitting the reward is not a particularly smart strategy because the craving brain can a) generate new kinds of cues you weren't previously aware of which exacerbates the gravity of a whole situation or b) find a new possibly destructing rewards to compensate for the reward you omitted (in case of alcoholics suddenly starting to drink at home in spite the fact that one previously only drank alcohol in a pub with acquaintances or changing a bottle of wine for a bottle of vodka).
Habits in a larger context
- To understand the larger context of how habits affect us and the entire society, we need to understand that, on a fundamental level, each complicated system (human being, a company, NewYork in the time of The Great Depression) works on the system of habits. Why? As aforementioned, it saves a lot of time and resources plus it's more comfortable, easier and more familiar.
- OK, these systems are complicated so, how can we change them? To tackle this issue, the author introduced a concept called The Keystone Habits. He basically argues that when we get to the bottom of things, we find out that there are some extremely important habits we rely on on a regular basis (while lots of other habits are simply derived from them) therefore when we want to fundamentally change ourselves, a company or the society we need to draw conclusions from the first principles - from the things we know that are true - and the build up a well-functioning framework from there with a bottom-up strategy.
- Since the concept itself is fairly abstract Duhigg followed up with the following example: There was a certain company that wasn't doing too good, Its processes were inefficient and it generated ludicrous amounts of net loss each year. After a period of being in red numbers, the new CEO stepped in he said something like this: "We need to improve the safety of our workspaces therefore from now on, it will be our number one priority!"
- Naturally, everyone thought that he was out of his mind because enhancing safety takes time and resources, yet seemingly it does not help with generating profit much but upon implementing new safety policies the profits started to rack up. Why? Each time there was an injury or potentially dangerous work protocol, the workers and division chiefs had to report it to their higherups with a proposed solution. The solution would be reviewed, approved and implemented. Over the span of a couple months, these improvements lead to the processes within the company to not only being safer but also more efficient. As a result, the company started to generate humongous amounts of profits seemingly from nothing, but that simply wasn't the case. What really happened was the newly implemented policy reformed the habits of employees and division chiefs in a beneficial way. After a while, compound effect kicked in and work environment started to improve rapidly.
- There is one more addition to this nugget - the power of a crisis. The crisis always serves as a catalyst that speeds up change (9/11 resulting in better safety measures on the airports or Spanish flue epidemy resulting in more resources spent on vaccination distribution and research). Good leaders know how to take advantage of a crisis to transform habits of a masses in unfathomable rate.
Are we responsible for our habits?
- There are two answers to this question: No and Depends. The author argues for "Depends" - a stance which says that we are not responsible for actions that we do if they are predicated on habits what we can have no knowledge about. Ugh, that explanation wasn't my finest moment so I'll invoke an example Duhigg presented in his book:
- You have the habit of sleepwalking. Sleepwalking is very rarely associated with having sleep terrors (there is a tiny minority of the population that sleepwalks and another tiny minority that has sleep terrors - states in which you essentially dream of being threatened and you try to eliminate such a threat either by escaping it or subduing it by force. Fortunately, you are paralysed so you cannot go out of your way to fatally harm someone which is simply not the case for people that have both of these conditions at the same time). You are not aware that you have both conditions because of sleep terrors never manifesting themselves before. You get a sleep terror while sleepwalking. You grab a knife and kill your sleeping wife because you mistakingly recognise her as a threat. Are you responsible for it? According to Duhigg no - you had no way of knowing that you possess such a habit (this kind of explanation is also sufficient for you if you want to be freed of any charges in case you commit a crime in such circumstances).
- To offer an example that is a polar opposite consider this: You have a drinking problem. You are aware of it. You don't do anything to solve it. You get drunk and kill your wife. Clearly in this case you are responsible for your actions because you knew you had a bad habit and you did nothing about it.
- The No answer that will always be no, no matter the circumstances because fundamentally, it's derived from a deterministic point of view - it states that you cannot be responsible for your habits if you have no free will. (Disclaimer: there is some solid evidence to suggest that your conscious thought is predetermined well before you come up with it which would verify the hypothesis, however, for all practical purposes is not healthy to assume that we are not masters of our own fate because then - a lot of the times - we don't try as hard to make the world a better place because "it's already predetermined what I do so why should I bother").
Quick manual to habit engineering (changing or creating habits)
- Identify the routine - to change a habit you need to first find out what kind of behaviour it consists of (oh snap, I'm always snacking in the middle of the workday and, as a result, I gained some weight). You can't change what you can't see.
- Isolate the cue - find out what are the circumstances in which you receive a cue to perform the routine (location, time, emotional state, preceding activity, the presence of other people).
- Experiment with rewards - if the outcome of a habit is something undesirable try different rewards and see if they satisfy the craving (try snacking on the broccoli instead of cookies xd).
- Once you know these three properties of a habit you want to change/create, design a realistic plan with small incremental steps that facilitate your goal and you should be able to achieve it.
Today's post was a bit extensive. Was I trying to make up for the lack of posts in the last 15 days? That's only partially true (quality over quantity duh). The main reason is that this book is truly a brilliant read and since it's not that content heavy I wanted to summarise as much useful content as possible. I highly recommend this book, it's super easy to read, you don't need any higher education or psychology background to understand its concepts.
That would be it from me for now, I hope you are having a great day.
Cheers
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