Episode #61： The Power Of Habit With Charles Duhigg
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Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, Brett McKay sits down with Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, to talk about the science of habit formation and how you can use it to turn bad habits into good ones.
Transcript
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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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enjoying the Art of Manliness podcast, I'd really appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a
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so much. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get
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something out of it. Word of mouth is the primary way the Art of Manliness grows and spreads. So
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please share. Text a friend, send an email, do whatever, however you communicate. Tell them to
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check out a particular episode if you think they'd get something out of it. Thank you for
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your support and now on to the show. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of
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Manliness podcast. Well, I am really excited about today's show. Our guest today has written a book
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that's been one of the most influential books I've read in recent years. We've written a post about
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it on the blog and also did a video on our YouTube channel inspired by this book. Our guest is Charles
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Duhigg. He's the author of The Power of Habit, Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. And it's
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basically a summation of all the research that's been going on in recent years about the science of
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habit formation, what goes on in our brain whenever we form a habit. And Charles Duhigg has basically laid
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out this process that we go through in order to form a habit. It's called the habit loop. And he talks
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about how you can use the habit loop and hack it to transform bad habits into good habits and how
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to make new habits. So in today's show, that's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk
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about how to use the habit loop to transform your life for the better, to get rid of bad habits and
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make good habits. So I think you're going to get a lot of out of this episode. So stay tuned.
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Charles Duhigg, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me.
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Okay, so your book is The Power of Habit. You're a reporter for the New York Times. How did you
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get started researching habits? I think you mentioned there was an incident in Iraq when
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you're over there doing a story that kind of peaked it. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
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Yeah, absolutely. That was kind of my first introduction to the science of habit formation.
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I was a reporter in Iraq. And I went down to a city named Kufa, which is about an hour south of
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Baghdad, talked to an army major down there. And this major had been given this assignment of
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stopping riots from happening in the city. Now, this is in 2003, 2004. And if you'll remember,
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this is when the U.S. had sort of fully moved into Iraq. And riots were a real problem. They
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were killing dozens, sometimes hundreds of people a week. And so stopping, no one really understood
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how to stop the riots. And so this army major met with the mayor of Kufa. And he had this whole
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laundry list of things that he was asking for to stop the gun runners and stop the suicide bombers.
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And the mayor basically said, I can't do any of that. Those are all great ideas, but I don't know
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how. And then the major had this one other request, which was, can you take all the food
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vendors out of the plazas? And the mayor said, sure, this one I can do. And so a couple of weeks
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later, there's a crowd developing around the Grand Mosque of Kufa, which is a very important
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site in Shia Islam. And one of the things that they never tell you on the news when you're watching
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riot footage is that it actually takes hours and hours for a riot to develop. What usually
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happens, and we know this from drone footage that's shot overhead, is that a group of sort
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of troublemakers will show up someplace, like a plaza, and they'll attract some spectators.
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And those spectators will get larger and larger over time. And eventually the crowd will reach
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this kind of critical size where it's big enough for a riot to occur. And someone will pick up a
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bottle and throw it against a wall or something like that. And a riot will start. And all these
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people who previously were spectators will sort of get drawn into it. But the key is that it has
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to have this critical size. So a couple of weeks after the major asked the Kufa to remove the food
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vendors, a crowd is developing around the Grand Mosque of Kufa. And the local Iraqi cops start to get
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worried. And they radio the base. And they say, please be on standby. We think a riot's going to
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break out. And the major and his troops say, OK. And they start watching the drone footage.
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And it's flying overhead. And at about 5 o'clock, 5.30, 5.45, which is actually like the only nice
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time of day in Iraq, the crowd has gotten large enough that it's kind of at that critical
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riot size. And it looks like things are about to get really bad. And all of a sudden, and you sort
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of notice this from the footage from the drones, the folks at the periphery of the crowd, because
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it's 5.30, it's like dinner time. They start looking around for these kebab sellers that normally
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filled up the plaza around the Grand Mosque of Kufa. But the kebab sellers, of course,
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had been removed by the mayor at the major's request. And so some of these folks, they sort
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of wander away. And you can actually follow them on the footage. And they go home, assumably
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to have dinner. And sort of the next ring of people, of spectators on the plaza, they're
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watching these people leave. And some of them apparently think, oh, there must be a better
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riot going on someplace else. And so they start following these people who've wandered away.
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And the next ring of people do the same thing. And over about 45 minutes, the entire plaza
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clears out, except for these troublemakers. And the troublemakers don't have an audience
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anymore. And so they go home too. In the nine months that the major had been there, there
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hadn't been one riot. And this is like an all-time record for this area. And so I went
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and I talked to the major and I asked him, how did you know that removing the food vendors
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would have this impact on stopping the riots? And he said, well, he wasn't really certain
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that it was going to work, but he sort of had this theory. And the reason why is because
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he was this guy from Georgia. When he was in high school, he was trying to decide whether
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to go into the military or whether to join his brother who had become this very successful
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methamphetamine entrepreneur in rural Georgia. And he decided to enter the military only because
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his brother actually got arrested and sent to jail like two weeks before his graduation.
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And he said that when he got into the military, he quickly realized that it's like this giant
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habit-changing machine, right? The military has spent millions and millions of dollars
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understanding habits so that they can train you, for instance, you know, your natural instinct
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when someone's shooting at you is to run away, but they want to give you this habit to shoot
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back. Or when you're in a war zone now, you can email with your spouse. And so if they
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don't teach you good communication habits, you get into these fights over email and you're
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distracted when you're on patrol. And so the military has spent a lot of time thinking
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about habits. And they transmitted this to the major himself. And he said that when
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he took command in CUFA, that he had been trained in such a way that he sort of saw these crowds
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not as thousands of individuals who could become violent, but as a group of habits. And that
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he knew that changing some of the cues in their environment could disrupt the patterns that
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would otherwise exert themselves. And that's exactly what happened. And so when I got back to
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the U.S., I thought this was really interesting. And I started looking into it more and more.
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And from that, collecting research on the science of habit formation.
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It's interesting. So yeah, your whole book delves into this research about, you know,
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it goes into neuroscience and other, you know, cognitive science about habit formation.
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But I mean, what is it seems like we've been studying habits since William James, right? That was
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like over 100 years ago. But what's changed in the past 20, 10 years that allows us to understand
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habits more fully? Like what, you know, the science that you've displayed in your book?
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Well, in particular, in the last decade, there's just been these huge insights into and huge new
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tools for understanding the neurology of habit formation. The basic insight is that every habit
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has these three components. There's a cue, which is like a trigger for an automatic behavior to start.
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And then a routine, which is the behavior itself. And then finally, a reward. And we've known that
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since Pavlov, right? That like the cues and rewards shape how we automatically behave.
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But what's different is that we didn't really understand how powerfully cues and rewards
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functioned on a neurological level. That simply introducing cues and rewards or fiddling with
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cues and rewards in the environment can actually change how people behave without them realizing
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anything is going on. We've also learned just how many of our behaviors actually are habits.
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There was a woman named Wendy Wood at Duke University who did a study where she followed
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hundreds of people around. And she calculated that about 40 to 45% of what we do every day
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isn't really a decision. It's a habit. And once you begin to understand how these habits function
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on an neurological level and how many of them surround us, you get this new appreciation for
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how powerfully you can change behaviors with these subtle shifts in the cues and rewards within a
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person's environment. And what exactly happens to our brain when we form a habit? Because
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I guess the research has shown or I guess they've done MRIs. Is that what they use?
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They use a lot of different things. They use MRIs, fMRIs. They even just use like a sort of
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measurement of electrical activity. So yeah, what happens? I mean, when you're starting that
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habit formation, like what's going on with the brain? I mean, what do they see going on in the brain
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when we're trying to form a habit? Well, so two things happen. The first of which is that you tend
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to develop a neural pathway that associates a behavior with a specific cue and a reward, right?
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And so this is kind of how our brain works. Our brain creates pathways that electrical charges
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travel down so as to motivate certain behaviors. And once those pathways get established,
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it's pretty uncommon for them to ever disappear. The other thing that we know is that when you're
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in the grip of a habit, once a habit is established, your brain essentially thinks less when it's in
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the grip of the habit, right? A habit is essentially an energy-saving mechanism for your brain to be
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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
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to think about it anymore. I can make it automatic. And that's really, really powerful because it means
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that it conserves our mental energy for other tasks, like being able to think about the memo
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we have due when we're driving to work because the drive has become a habit, or being able to talk
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to our friends when we walk into the cafeteria because choosing something to eat has become a
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habit. So this ability to conserve mental energy is really, really useful from an evolutionary
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perspective. But because these neural pathways tend to be very long-lasting, that essentially once
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they're in place, they never really disappear. It also means that once you develop a habit,
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it really never goes away. You can change it and you can try and ignore it. But once that pathway
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is there, you have to actively do something to discourage the behavior from emerging.
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Okay. So let's get into what you call the habit loop, right? So you kind of mentioned it earlier.
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So it's the cue, routine, reward. And that's what you tinker with in order to change habits or to
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That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, basically you need to recognize those three
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parts of the habit loop in order to be able to diagnose and then manipulate that behavior.
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Okay. And so what's the thing that you, should you tinker with? Is it the cue that you tinker with?
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Is it the reward? What is it you tinker with in order to find out what's causing you to do something?
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Sure. You can tinker with anything, but what studies seem to indicate is that because those
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habits are so long lasting, it's very, very, very hard to change the cue and the reward.
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Now, this isn't impossible, right? For instance, when people are trying to quit smoking,
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they tend to be much more successful if they quit smoking when they're on vacation, right? And that
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makes sense because you're around different types of cues. You're not in the same patterns that you
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have on a day-to-day basis. The problem is that eventually you go home, right? And you can't
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really change the cues that surround you very easily without creating sort of some massive
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upheaval throughout your life. And so what most psychologists and psychiatrists and neurologists
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who study this say is that you should adhere to what's known as the golden rule of habit change,
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which says don't try and change the cue and the reward. Instead, recognize what they are and try and
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find a new behavior. Since the behavior is what you're actually worried about or the thing you
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actually want to change, try and find a new behavior that seems to correspond to an old cue
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and deliver a reward that's similar to that old reward. So smoking is a great example of this because
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for most people, smoking is actually a habit dysfunction. We think of it as an addiction,
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right? And nicotine is addicting, but it's not hugely addicting. Medical studies show that about
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100 hours after your last cigarette, once the nicotine is out of your blood system, you're no
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longer physically addicted to cigarettes. And yet we all know people who, you know, two weeks or two
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months or two decades after giving up cigarettes, they still crave smoke with their morning coffee.
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If you're still feeling that like two decades after you give up cigarettes, that's not because of a
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physical addiction. That's a habit dysfunction. But because habits sort of exist in the same parts
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of our brain as addictions, they feel somewhat indistinguishable to us. And so now when they
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talk to people about curbing smoking, what they don't say is they don't say extinguish the behavior.
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They don't say just go cold turkey and like try and willpower your way through it because that will
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work for a little while. But once your willpower is kind of tapped out, once you've had a rough day,
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if you're around those same cues, you're going to start craving that reward. And the reward of nicotine
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is that it gives you this boost of energy and mental clarity. It actually makes you
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think faster and easier. And so what they say is don't try and avoid or extinguish those cues and
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rewards. Instead of find a new behavior that's very similar. When you are craving a cigarette,
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instead have a double espresso, right? Because the same cue is going to, you're going to take
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advantage of the same cue and shotgunning all of that caffeine is going to give you a physical reward
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very akin to what nicotine feels like. So instead of trying to extinguish the habit,
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instead recognize the cues and the rewards and try and find a new behavior, a new routine
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that seems to mimic those old cues and those old rewards.
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So I guess what you're trying to do is you're trying to override that formation in your brain,
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the neuropathways. I mean, so will the desire to smoke a cigarette still kind of be there and you
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just sort of have to train your brain to be like, no, espresso is what you're going to do now.
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Yeah. What will happen over time is that your brain will begin to crave the espresso instead of
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the cigarette. And the reason why is because our brain expects a reward. Once our brain expects a
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reward, it becomes almost neurochemically very similar to depression when it doesn't get it.
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If you can displace the expectation of that reward to a different substance, caffeine instead of
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nicotine, then your brain will sort of just purr happily along.
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Okay. So, so changing a bad habit is just a matter of changing the routine. Don't mess with the cue
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or the reward, just change the routine. Is that correct?
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But recognize the cue and the routine, right? Like, like all of this is incumbent upon being able to
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diagnose exactly what's going on. And it can be really hard to diagnose cues. Cues are somewhat
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usually pretty easy to diagnose. Rewards can be much, much harder to diagnose. And unless you know
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exactly what that reward really is, it's very hard to find a new behavior that provides it.
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Yeah. I can see that being like with cigarettes, it could be just putting something in your mouth
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or having something in your hand or talking with people. I know a lot of people talk.
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Exactly. The social experience of smoking and the fact that it breaks up your day and gives you kind
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of a structure to being able to sort of take a break from work, you know, and it's probably different
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for different people. Nail biting is a good example. Mostly there's always been a question about why the
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nail biting habit exists because it doesn't seem to serve any particular function. What researchers
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eventually figured out is that people tend to bite their nails because they're anxious or they're bored.
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And when you bite your nails, you feel this small burst of pain from the actual biting activity.
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And that pain, it can sort of neurologically for microseconds, overwhelm the tension of boredom
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or the tension of anxiety. And so as a result, the pain is essentially kind of a reward.
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But we're not programmed to think of pain as a reward. And so it took a long time to realize
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that. And until people did, it was very hard to treat nail biting.
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Interesting. Okay. So we figured out how to change bad behavior, bad habits. I guess creating
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new habits is just a matter of taking the habit loop, right? And just setting up like the routine
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you want, you know, creating a cue for yourself and then giving yourself reward. Would that be it?
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That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And the reward is the really important part there,
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right? So think about how most people try and start a running habit in the morning, right? They
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want to go exercising. So they wake up one morning and they put on their shoes and they go for a run.
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And then they get home from their run and they're a little bit late, you know, for work because they
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took time to go running. And so they like rush through their shower and they're kind of anxious about
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getting to work. So they rush to work. Essentially what they're doing is they're kind of punishing
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themselves or at least they're punishing their brain for exercising. Their brain learns
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to say, whenever I go running in the morning, I feel anxious afterwards. And that's a negative
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reinforcement for habits. On the other hand, studies have shown that when people try and
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start exercising in the morning, if they do something like choose an obvious cue, like put
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their running shoes next to their bed or tell their friend that they'll meet them at, you know,
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seven to a.m., you know, down by the running path. And then when they're done, if they give
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themselves a small piece of chocolate or let themselves take an extra long shower, drink a
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smoothie, if they deliberately reward themselves, they're much more likely to develop a running
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habit. But the key is you have to, you have to come, you have to find a reward that you genuinely
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enjoy and then you have to allow yourself to enjoy it in order for your brain to start making
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those associations. I'm curious, have they done studies with habit formation, like by
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randomizing whether you get a reward or not? Because I read studies where when you don't
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get the reward all the time, you're more prone to like do that thing. So you get the, like
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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
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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
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order to develop a habit, a habit is based around stability, right? Your brain has to
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begin to anticipate certain things in order to form associations. And so the reward has
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to be consistent initially for that habit to stick. Now the question then becomes, so
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what transcends sort of habit to addiction? What transcends kind of a pattern to
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behavior to something you begin craving? And one of the things that can enhance craving
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is when there's intermittent rewards. And that's exactly what you're talking about is
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when there's an expected reward, our brain tends to discount it a little bit. When there's
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an unexpected big reward, it feels much, much more rewarding to us. So if you want to make
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something into a habit, what you should do is you should dribble among the expected rewards,
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unexpected rewards, right? This is how, how slot machines work. You know, if you play a
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slot machine that you're on average going to win probably one out of every three to five
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pulls, right? It's closer to five. But like if you went 12 pulls without winning, you'd walk
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away from the machine. So they set it up so that you're going to win on average every five
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pulls. But then ever so often you win like three in a row, right? Unexpectedly. That's what makes
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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that you're going to feel endorphins and endocannabinoids, these neurotransmitters that come from physical
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activity. And that becomes a reward in and of itself that motivates the running, the exercise habit.
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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
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,
00:23:06.480
this is a huge generalization, but in general, women tend to find cathartic emotions. Like for
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
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,
00:26:42.500
And I apologize. I actually have to jump to another call.
00:26:50.600
Oh, well, Charles Duhigg, thank you so much for your time. This is a fascinating discussion.
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.