The Art of Manliness - Episode #61： The Power Of Habit With Charles Duhigg

00:00:00.000 Hello, Brett here. Before we get to today's show, got a quick favor to ask of you. If you've been

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00:00:26.200 your support and now on to the show. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of

00:00:46.760 Manliness podcast. Well, I am really excited about today's show. Our guest today has written a book

00:00:51.700 that's been one of the most influential books I've read in recent years. We've written a post about

00:00:55.800 it on the blog and also did a video on our YouTube channel inspired by this book. Our guest is Charles

00:01:01.760 Duhigg. He's the author of The Power of Habit, Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. And it's

00:01:07.220 basically a summation of all the research that's been going on in recent years about the science of

00:01:13.800 habit formation, what goes on in our brain whenever we form a habit. And Charles Duhigg has basically laid

00:01:19.580 out this process that we go through in order to form a habit. It's called the habit loop. And he talks

00:01:24.520 about how you can use the habit loop and hack it to transform bad habits into good habits and how

00:01:30.080 to make new habits. So in today's show, that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk

00:01:33.700 about how to use the habit loop to transform your life for the better, to get rid of bad habits and

00:01:39.560 make good habits. So I think you're going to get a lot of out of this episode. So stay tuned.

00:01:46.180 Charles Duhigg, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me.

00:01:49.080 Okay, so your book is The Power of Habit. You're a reporter for the New York Times. How did you

00:01:54.680 get started researching habits? I think you mentioned there was an incident in Iraq when

00:01:59.540 you're over there doing a story that kind of peaked it. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

00:02:03.340 Yeah, absolutely. That was kind of my first introduction to the science of habit formation.

00:02:08.000 I was a reporter in Iraq. And I went down to a city named Kufa, which is about an hour south of

00:02:13.480 Baghdad, talked to an army major down there. And this major had been given this assignment of

00:02:18.800 stopping riots from happening in the city. Now, this is in 2003, 2004. And if you'll remember,

00:02:24.740 this is when the U.S. had sort of fully moved into Iraq. And riots were a real problem. They

00:02:30.780 were killing dozens, sometimes hundreds of people a week. And so stopping, no one really understood

00:02:37.240 how to stop the riots. And so this army major met with the mayor of Kufa. And he had this whole

00:02:42.300 laundry list of things that he was asking for to stop the gun runners and stop the suicide bombers.

00:02:46.760 And the mayor basically said, I can't do any of that. Those are all great ideas, but I don't know

00:02:51.600 how. And then the major had this one other request, which was, can you take all the food

00:02:56.140 vendors out of the plazas? And the mayor said, sure, this one I can do. And so a couple of weeks

00:03:01.920 later, there's a crowd developing around the Grand Mosque of Kufa, which is a very important

00:03:08.680 site in Shia Islam. And one of the things that they never tell you on the news when you're watching

00:03:13.400 riot footage is that it actually takes hours and hours for a riot to develop. What usually

00:03:17.800 happens, and we know this from drone footage that's shot overhead, is that a group of sort

00:03:23.460 of troublemakers will show up someplace, like a plaza, and they'll attract some spectators.

00:03:28.200 And those spectators will get larger and larger over time. And eventually the crowd will reach

00:03:33.000 this kind of critical size where it's big enough for a riot to occur. And someone will pick up a

00:03:38.420 bottle and throw it against a wall or something like that. And a riot will start. And all these

00:03:42.100 people who previously were spectators will sort of get drawn into it. But the key is that it has

00:03:47.100 to have this critical size. So a couple of weeks after the major asked the Kufa to remove the food

00:03:53.680 vendors, a crowd is developing around the Grand Mosque of Kufa. And the local Iraqi cops start to get

00:03:59.660 worried. And they radio the base. And they say, please be on standby. We think a riot's going to

00:04:04.400 break out. And the major and his troops say, OK. And they start watching the drone footage.

00:04:10.100 And it's flying overhead. And at about 5 o'clock, 5.30, 5.45, which is actually like the only nice

00:04:17.180 time of day in Iraq, the crowd has gotten large enough that it's kind of at that critical

00:04:22.520 riot size. And it looks like things are about to get really bad. And all of a sudden, and you sort

00:04:27.820 of notice this from the footage from the drones, the folks at the periphery of the crowd, because

00:04:31.520 it's 5.30, it's like dinner time. They start looking around for these kebab sellers that normally

00:04:36.900 filled up the plaza around the Grand Mosque of Kufa. But the kebab sellers, of course, 0.97

00:04:42.420 had been removed by the mayor at the major's request. And so some of these folks, they sort

00:04:47.580 of wander away. And you can actually follow them on the footage. And they go home, assumably

00:04:51.800 to have dinner. And sort of the next ring of people, of spectators on the plaza, they're

00:04:56.540 watching these people leave. And some of them apparently think, oh, there must be a better

00:05:00.700 riot going on someplace else. And so they start following these people who've wandered away.

00:05:04.280 And the next ring of people do the same thing. And over about 45 minutes, the entire plaza

00:05:09.680 clears out, except for these troublemakers. And the troublemakers don't have an audience

00:05:13.760 anymore. And so they go home too. In the nine months that the major had been there, there

00:05:19.200 hadn't been one riot. And this is like an all-time record for this area. And so I went

00:05:24.920 and I talked to the major and I asked him, how did you know that removing the food vendors

00:05:28.760 would have this impact on stopping the riots? And he said, well, he wasn't really certain

00:05:34.300 that it was going to work, but he sort of had this theory. And the reason why is because

00:05:37.620 he was this guy from Georgia. When he was in high school, he was trying to decide whether

00:05:41.260 to go into the military or whether to join his brother who had become this very successful

00:05:45.660 methamphetamine entrepreneur in rural Georgia. And he decided to enter the military only because

00:05:51.900 his brother actually got arrested and sent to jail like two weeks before his graduation.

00:05:55.480 And he said that when he got into the military, he quickly realized that it's like this giant

00:05:59.440 habit-changing machine, right? The military has spent millions and millions of dollars

00:06:04.980 understanding habits so that they can train you, for instance, you know, your natural instinct

00:06:09.340 when someone's shooting at you is to run away, but they want to give you this habit to shoot

00:06:13.020 back. Or when you're in a war zone now, you can email with your spouse. And so if they

00:06:17.400 don't teach you good communication habits, you get into these fights over email and you're

00:06:20.680 distracted when you're on patrol. And so the military has spent a lot of time thinking

00:06:24.940 about habits. And they transmitted this to the major himself. And he said that when

00:06:28.420 he took command in CUFA, that he had been trained in such a way that he sort of saw these crowds

00:06:34.300 not as thousands of individuals who could become violent, but as a group of habits. And that

00:06:40.640 he knew that changing some of the cues in their environment could disrupt the patterns that

00:06:46.180 would otherwise exert themselves. And that's exactly what happened. And so when I got back to

00:06:50.820 the U.S., I thought this was really interesting. And I started looking into it more and more.

00:06:54.300 And from that, collecting research on the science of habit formation.

00:06:58.520 It's interesting. So yeah, your whole book delves into this research about, you know,

00:07:01.920 it goes into neuroscience and other, you know, cognitive science about habit formation.

00:07:07.140 But I mean, what is it seems like we've been studying habits since William James, right? That was

00:07:11.300 like over 100 years ago. But what's changed in the past 20, 10 years that allows us to understand

00:07:17.740 habits more fully? Like what, you know, the science that you've displayed in your book?

00:07:22.260 Well, in particular, in the last decade, there's just been these huge insights into and huge new

00:07:28.080 tools for understanding the neurology of habit formation. The basic insight is that every habit

00:07:34.140 has these three components. There's a cue, which is like a trigger for an automatic behavior to start.

00:07:38.520 And then a routine, which is the behavior itself. And then finally, a reward. And we've known that

00:07:42.860 since Pavlov, right? That like the cues and rewards shape how we automatically behave.

00:07:48.360 But what's different is that we didn't really understand how powerfully cues and rewards

00:07:53.880 functioned on a neurological level. That simply introducing cues and rewards or fiddling with

00:07:59.400 cues and rewards in the environment can actually change how people behave without them realizing

00:08:04.520 anything is going on. We've also learned just how many of our behaviors actually are habits.

00:08:10.020 There was a woman named Wendy Wood at Duke University who did a study where she followed

00:08:14.360 hundreds of people around. And she calculated that about 40 to 45% of what we do every day

00:08:20.100 isn't really a decision. It's a habit. And once you begin to understand how these habits function

00:08:26.240 on an neurological level and how many of them surround us, you get this new appreciation for

00:08:32.400 how powerfully you can change behaviors with these subtle shifts in the cues and rewards within a

00:08:38.780 person's environment. And what exactly happens to our brain when we form a habit? Because

00:08:43.220 I guess the research has shown or I guess they've done MRIs. Is that what they use?

00:08:49.060 They use a lot of different things. They use MRIs, fMRIs. They even just use like a sort of

00:08:55.160 measurement of electrical activity. So yeah, what happens? I mean, when you're starting that

00:08:59.200 habit formation, like what's going on with the brain? I mean, what do they see going on in the brain

00:09:03.800 when we're trying to form a habit? Well, so two things happen. The first of which is that you tend

00:09:08.640 to develop a neural pathway that associates a behavior with a specific cue and a reward, right?

00:09:14.840 And so this is kind of how our brain works. Our brain creates pathways that electrical charges

00:09:21.480 travel down so as to motivate certain behaviors. And once those pathways get established,

00:09:27.300 it's pretty uncommon for them to ever disappear. The other thing that we know is that when you're

00:09:34.160 in the grip of a habit, once a habit is established, your brain essentially thinks less when it's in

00:09:39.480 the grip of the habit, right? A habit is essentially an energy-saving mechanism for your brain to be

00:09:44.600 able to say, okay, look, when I see X, I'm going to do Y and I'm going to get reward Z. So I don't have

00:09:50.000 to think about it anymore. I can make it automatic. And that's really, really powerful because it means

00:09:55.620 that it conserves our mental energy for other tasks, like being able to think about the memo

00:10:02.320 we have due when we're driving to work because the drive has become a habit, or being able to talk

00:10:08.580 to our friends when we walk into the cafeteria because choosing something to eat has become a

00:10:12.400 habit. So this ability to conserve mental energy is really, really useful from an evolutionary

00:10:17.820 perspective. But because these neural pathways tend to be very long-lasting, that essentially once

00:10:24.720 they're in place, they never really disappear. It also means that once you develop a habit,

00:10:29.700 it really never goes away. You can change it and you can try and ignore it. But once that pathway

00:10:36.780 is there, you have to actively do something to discourage the behavior from emerging.

00:10:41.880 Okay. So let's get into what you call the habit loop, right? So you kind of mentioned it earlier.

00:10:45.820 So it's the cue, routine, reward. And that's what you tinker with in order to change habits or to

00:10:53.160 form a new habit, correct?

00:10:54.660 That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, basically you need to recognize those three

00:10:59.200 parts of the habit loop in order to be able to diagnose and then manipulate that behavior.

00:11:03.740 Okay. And so what's the thing that you, should you tinker with? Is it the cue that you tinker with?

00:11:08.020 Is it the reward? What is it you tinker with in order to find out what's causing you to do something?

00:11:13.200 Sure. You can tinker with anything, but what studies seem to indicate is that because those

00:11:19.040 habits are so long lasting, it's very, very, very hard to change the cue and the reward.

00:11:26.900 Now, this isn't impossible, right? For instance, when people are trying to quit smoking,

00:11:31.020 they tend to be much more successful if they quit smoking when they're on vacation, right? And that

00:11:35.600 makes sense because you're around different types of cues. You're not in the same patterns that you

00:11:41.680 have on a day-to-day basis. The problem is that eventually you go home, right? And you can't

00:11:46.960 really change the cues that surround you very easily without creating sort of some massive

00:11:53.020 upheaval throughout your life. And so what most psychologists and psychiatrists and neurologists

00:11:58.420 who study this say is that you should adhere to what's known as the golden rule of habit change,

00:12:02.600 which says don't try and change the cue and the reward. Instead, recognize what they are and try and

00:12:08.920 find a new behavior. Since the behavior is what you're actually worried about or the thing you

00:12:13.000 actually want to change, try and find a new behavior that seems to correspond to an old cue

00:12:17.100 and deliver a reward that's similar to that old reward. So smoking is a great example of this because

00:12:24.260 for most people, smoking is actually a habit dysfunction. We think of it as an addiction,

00:12:28.380 right? And nicotine is addicting, but it's not hugely addicting. Medical studies show that about

00:12:34.140 100 hours after your last cigarette, once the nicotine is out of your blood system, you're no

00:12:39.120 longer physically addicted to cigarettes. And yet we all know people who, you know, two weeks or two

00:12:44.340 months or two decades after giving up cigarettes, they still crave smoke with their morning coffee.

00:12:50.160 If you're still feeling that like two decades after you give up cigarettes, that's not because of a

00:12:53.800 physical addiction. That's a habit dysfunction. But because habits sort of exist in the same parts

00:12:58.160 of our brain as addictions, they feel somewhat indistinguishable to us. And so now when they

00:13:04.000 talk to people about curbing smoking, what they don't say is they don't say extinguish the behavior.

00:13:09.900 They don't say just go cold turkey and like try and willpower your way through it because that will

00:13:15.040 work for a little while. But once your willpower is kind of tapped out, once you've had a rough day,

00:13:20.140 if you're around those same cues, you're going to start craving that reward. And the reward of nicotine

00:13:24.880 is that it gives you this boost of energy and mental clarity. It actually makes you

00:13:28.900 think faster and easier. And so what they say is don't try and avoid or extinguish those cues and

00:13:35.240 rewards. Instead of find a new behavior that's very similar. When you are craving a cigarette,

00:13:42.040 instead have a double espresso, right? Because the same cue is going to, you're going to take

00:13:46.680 advantage of the same cue and shotgunning all of that caffeine is going to give you a physical reward

00:13:52.360 very akin to what nicotine feels like. So instead of trying to extinguish the habit,

00:14:00.140 instead recognize the cues and the rewards and try and find a new behavior, a new routine

00:14:05.360 that seems to mimic those old cues and those old rewards.

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00:15:03.760 So I guess what you're trying to do is you're trying to override that formation in your brain,

00:15:08.620 the neuropathways. I mean, so will the desire to smoke a cigarette still kind of be there and you

00:15:13.600 just sort of have to train your brain to be like, no, espresso is what you're going to do now.

00:15:19.340 Yeah. What will happen over time is that your brain will begin to crave the espresso instead of

00:15:25.420 the cigarette. And the reason why is because our brain expects a reward. Once our brain expects a

00:15:30.420 reward, it becomes almost neurochemically very similar to depression when it doesn't get it.

00:15:36.720 If you can displace the expectation of that reward to a different substance, caffeine instead of

00:15:41.240 nicotine, then your brain will sort of just purr happily along.

00:15:46.740 Okay. So, so changing a bad habit is just a matter of changing the routine. Don't mess with the cue

00:15:50.900 or the reward, just change the routine. Is that correct?

00:15:53.960 But recognize the cue and the routine, right? Like, like all of this is incumbent upon being able to

00:15:58.980 diagnose exactly what's going on. And it can be really hard to diagnose cues. Cues are somewhat

00:16:04.920 usually pretty easy to diagnose. Rewards can be much, much harder to diagnose. And unless you know

00:16:10.460 exactly what that reward really is, it's very hard to find a new behavior that provides it.

00:16:15.960 Yeah. I can see that being like with cigarettes, it could be just putting something in your mouth

00:16:19.540 or having something in your hand or talking with people. I know a lot of people talk.

00:16:23.460 Exactly. The social experience of smoking and the fact that it breaks up your day and gives you kind

00:16:27.500 of a structure to being able to sort of take a break from work, you know, and it's probably different

00:16:33.560 for different people. Nail biting is a good example. Mostly there's always been a question about why the

00:16:38.700 nail biting habit exists because it doesn't seem to serve any particular function. What researchers

00:16:42.740 eventually figured out is that people tend to bite their nails because they're anxious or they're bored.

00:16:47.420 And when you bite your nails, you feel this small burst of pain from the actual biting activity.

00:16:52.940 And that pain, it can sort of neurologically for microseconds, overwhelm the tension of boredom

00:16:58.820 or the tension of anxiety. And so as a result, the pain is essentially kind of a reward.

00:17:04.520 But we're not programmed to think of pain as a reward. And so it took a long time to realize

00:17:11.220 that. And until people did, it was very hard to treat nail biting.

00:17:15.980 Interesting. Okay. So we figured out how to change bad behavior, bad habits. I guess creating

00:17:21.520 new habits is just a matter of taking the habit loop, right? And just setting up like the routine

00:17:26.960 you want, you know, creating a cue for yourself and then giving yourself reward. Would that be it?

00:17:31.880 That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And the reward is the really important part there,

00:17:36.200 right? So think about how most people try and start a running habit in the morning, right? They

00:17:40.620 want to go exercising. So they wake up one morning and they put on their shoes and they go for a run.

00:17:47.080 And then they get home from their run and they're a little bit late, you know, for work because they

00:17:51.380 took time to go running. And so they like rush through their shower and they're kind of anxious about

00:17:55.380 getting to work. So they rush to work. Essentially what they're doing is they're kind of punishing

00:17:59.260 themselves or at least they're punishing their brain for exercising. Their brain learns

00:18:05.500 to say, whenever I go running in the morning, I feel anxious afterwards. And that's a negative

00:18:12.480 reinforcement for habits. On the other hand, studies have shown that when people try and

00:18:16.600 start exercising in the morning, if they do something like choose an obvious cue, like put

00:18:20.620 their running shoes next to their bed or tell their friend that they'll meet them at, you know,

00:18:23.960 seven to a.m., you know, down by the running path. And then when they're done, if they give

00:18:28.480 themselves a small piece of chocolate or let themselves take an extra long shower, drink a

00:18:33.300 smoothie, if they deliberately reward themselves, they're much more likely to develop a running

00:18:39.000 habit. But the key is you have to, you have to come, you have to find a reward that you genuinely

00:18:43.860 enjoy and then you have to allow yourself to enjoy it in order for your brain to start making

00:18:48.980 those associations. I'm curious, have they done studies with habit formation, like by

00:18:54.280 randomizing whether you get a reward or not? Because I read studies where when you don't

00:18:58.740 get the reward all the time, you're more prone to like do that thing. So you get the, like

00:19:02.940 email is a perfect example of that, right? Like you don't ever know if you're going to get

00:19:06.060 an email, right? An awesome email. So you keep checking on that off chance you're going

00:19:10.080 to get that email. It's going to change your life. Do you understand what I'm saying?

00:19:13.740 Yeah. Well, so what we do know a lot is about expected and intermittent rewards, right? In

00:19:20.800 order to develop a habit, a habit is based around stability, right? Your brain has to

00:19:25.160 begin to anticipate certain things in order to form associations. And so the reward has

00:19:31.680 to be consistent initially for that habit to stick. Now the question then becomes, so

00:19:37.480 what transcends sort of habit to addiction? What transcends kind of a pattern to

00:19:43.580 behavior to something you begin craving? And one of the things that can enhance craving

00:19:49.380 is when there's intermittent rewards. And that's exactly what you're talking about is

00:19:52.920 when there's an expected reward, our brain tends to discount it a little bit. When there's

00:19:58.480 an unexpected big reward, it feels much, much more rewarding to us. So if you want to make

00:20:04.640 something into a habit, what you should do is you should dribble among the expected rewards,

00:20:09.940 unexpected rewards, right? This is how, how slot machines work. You know, if you play a

00:20:15.960 slot machine that you're on average going to win probably one out of every three to five

00:20:21.200 pulls, right? It's closer to five. But like if you went 12 pulls without winning, you'd walk

00:20:26.780 away from the machine. So they set it up so that you're going to win on average every five

00:20:31.020 pulls. But then ever so often you win like three in a row, right? Unexpectedly. That's what makes

00:20:38.320 that activity more than a habit. It makes it into sort of a craving to continue playing.

00:20:42.900 Gotcha. Okay. So I mean, how could you do that? I mean, would that, is that something,

00:20:46.560 would that be something you'd want to do? I mean, it would be, it would be hard to engineer that in

00:20:51.220 your own life, right? Like if you, if you're talking about, you know, customers or something

00:20:55.680 like that, or your kids, it's easier to do that. But the thing is that if you're doing it within

00:20:59.440 your own life, intermittent rewards are very unusual within your own life because you're giving

00:21:04.320 yourself the reward, you know that it exists. Now that being said, basically our brains understand

00:21:10.320 the science and sometimes take advantage of it. So one of the kind of interesting things that

00:21:13.620 happens when people develop an exercise habit, for instance, is that they will stop relying upon

00:21:19.140 extrinsic rewards like chocolate or a smoothie or a nice lunch hour. Eventually your brain learns

00:21:23.420 that you're going to feel endorphins and endocannabinoids, these neurotransmitters that come from physical

00:21:27.900 activity. And that becomes a reward in and of itself that motivates the running, the exercise habit.

00:21:33.680 What's interesting is that our brain tends to vary sometimes how many of those neurotransmitters

00:21:41.400 are released. Because there's a, realization is the wrong word, but basically our body understands

00:21:50.540 that to reinforce positive behavior, that the reward should not be completely predictable.

00:21:56.340 So instead of sort of calculating for intermittent rewards, you can oftentimes simply just allow them

00:22:02.040 to happen naturally. And when you think about it, this happens all the time, right? Like people will

00:22:06.740 be running and they're accustomed to taking a nice long shower. And then one day they decide,

00:22:11.400 in addition to the shower, I'm going to have a smoothie, right? Like I'm going to take it easy

00:22:14.560 this morning and really let myself enjoy like the rewards of running. That's an intermittent reward,

00:22:20.960 but you don't really have to plan those out ahead of time. You just have to have a mindset where

00:22:25.680 you allow yourself to enjoy the rewards that you're, that surrounds you.

00:22:29.940 Okay. Well, so we're a podcast geared primarily, primarily towards guys. Um, I'm curious if in

00:22:36.200 your research, did you find any difference between the way men and women go about forming habits?

00:22:41.160 Not particularly. I mean, in general, it's hard to make broad generalizations, right? Because,

00:22:46.460 um, in general, women tend to find different types of things and inherently more or less 0.70

00:22:53.560 rewarding than men. So we know that emotion, that emotional rewards are the most rewarding

00:22:59.260 kinds of rewards. Women tend to find cathartic emotions, have much greater salience. Again, 0.99

00:23:06.480 this is a huge generalization, but in general, women tend to find cathartic emotions. Like for 0.99

00:23:11.220 instance, you know, like crying is a great example of this, right? One of the, one of the hypotheses

00:23:16.260 about why women tend to cry more than men is that women actually find it just much more 0.67

00:23:21.340 neurologically rewarding to cry than men do. And so there's some interesting differences there

00:23:26.640 that you can get into about like what types of rewards you should give to different people.

00:23:31.660 But the truth of the matter is people know themselves really well. Like if there are plenty

00:23:36.060 of men out there who find crying rewarding and plenty of women who don't find crying rewarding.

00:23:40.940 And so the truth of the matter is that if you want to create habits for yourself and you know

00:23:45.820 that you need to positively reinforce, you need to find some rewards, just ask yourself what you

00:23:51.140 genuinely find rewarding and, and you'll know, right? We all know. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The one

00:23:57.060 section I found really intriguing or just fascinating or interesting because I didn't think of this as an

00:24:01.420 important part of habit formation was this idea that belief plays an important role in habit change.

00:24:07.360 Can you talk a little bit about how belief affects habit formation? Yeah, sure. So, so this is one of the

00:24:13.240 things that's kind of interesting, particularly if you're looking at Alcoholics Anonymous. So AA,

00:24:17.420 for instance, is essentially a large habit change organization, right? They, they help you identify

00:24:23.000 cues and rewards that alcohol previously provided. And they try and replicate those cues and rewards in

00:24:28.620 a sober environment by giving you a sponsor and replicating the social experience by giving you

00:24:32.940 an opportunity for emotional catharsis, by kind of telling your story and achieving some

00:24:37.940 emotionality away from alcohol. But when researchers have looked at AA, and a lot of

00:24:42.880 researchers were skeptical of AA for a long time because it was created by people who didn't have

00:24:46.240 any scientific background. Yeah. When they looked at it, what they found was that people kept on

00:24:49.960 saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like it's a great habit, you know,

00:24:53.700 habit transfer organization. But the real reason that it works for me is because I, it tells me to

00:25:00.320 believe in a higher power. And this doesn't make any sense to scientists because belief in a higher

00:25:04.020 power isn't supposed to like really do anything, right? There's no way to like test hypotheses around

00:25:08.460 like whether God exists. Yeah. But what they, what they eventually figured out is that it seemed

00:25:13.380 like for a number of people that getting a chance to practice belief was very, very important. So

00:25:21.100 in AA, a number of the steps are about believing in a higher power. And it seems like what's happening

00:25:25.740 in those AA meetings is that when people go through the steps, they're practicing belief. And

00:25:31.600 eventually they can transfer that practice, that skill to believing in themselves. And once they

00:25:39.400 start believing in themselves and their ability to stay sober in stressful situations, it makes it much

00:25:44.380 more likely that they'll actually stay sober in stressful situations. So it seems like there is this

00:25:50.540 kind of interesting prerequisite to behavior change, which is that you have to believe that behavior

00:25:58.000 change is possible. You have to believe that you are capable of behavior change. You have to believe

00:26:02.940 that that change can be permanent. And the way that you kind of learn to believe that is you practice

00:26:09.080 believing in other things. You build up the belief muscle and eventually you can apply it to yourself.

00:26:15.100 And so it sounds like you need to have like that growth mindset, right?

00:26:17.780 Yeah, I, right. I mean, I think that that's the thing is that you're, you know, most of our interior

00:26:22.220 capacities kind of a muscle is a good analogy that we, we develop neurological capacities,

00:26:27.800 because we practice them. And, and it's hard to practice belief in a sort of low stakes setting.

00:26:35.160 But when it happens, when you're believing in a higher power or something like that,

00:26:39.080 you get better at it.

00:26:40.240 Yeah. Interesting.

00:26:41.960 Oh, go ahead.

00:26:42.500 And I apologize. I actually have to jump to another call.

00:26:46.400 Well, we're done.

00:26:48.220 Oh, great.

00:26:48.780 So that was my last question.

00:26:50.600 Oh, well, Charles Duhigg, thank you so much for your time. This is a fascinating discussion.

00:26:53.900 And, uh, I appreciate your time.

00:26:56.920 No, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

00:26:59.120 Our guest today is Charles Duhigg. Charles Duhigg is the author of The Power of Habit,

00:27:03.100 Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. And you can find that on amazon.com and at other book

00:27:07.440 retailers. And you can find more about Charles Duhigg and his book at charlesduhigg.com. I highly

00:27:13.260 recommend you go check it out. He's got links to other additional resources and teaching guides

00:27:17.680 about The Power of Habit. So make sure to check it out. Well, that wraps up another edition of

00:27:23.480 the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of

00:27:27.680 Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And if you enjoy the Art of Manliness podcast,

00:27:32.840 we'd really appreciate it if you go on to iTunes or Stitcher or whatever you use to listen to your

00:27:37.480 podcast and give us a rating. That'll help us reach more people. And we just really appreciate

00:27:42.020 it. So until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

00:27:47.680 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - April 04, 2014

Episode #61： The Power Of Habit With Charles Duhigg

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