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This book has a lot of nice stories inside it of how people changed themselves or their businesses by creating powerful habits.
It explains how habits are formed and how they work.
The Habit Loop : Cue, Routine, Reward!
There is not a lot to take away from this book in terms of helpful tools that you can use, but here are some useful pieces of information :
The author is a graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale University.
There is a problem with your brain in that it can't tell the difference between good and bad habits, and so if you have a bad one, it's always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.
Anyone can use the basic formula of the habit loop to create habits of her or his own. Want to exercise more? Choose a cue, such as going to the gym as soon as you wake up, and a reward, such as a smoothie after each workout. Then think about that smoothie and the endorphin rush you will feel. Allow yourself to anticipate the reward. Eventually that craving will make it easier to push through the gym doors every day.
Did you know that Sodium Laureth Sulfate makes soaps, shampoos and detergents foam? It's because we want our cleaning products to foam to convince us they are working.
You should look to see if your toothpaste, soaps and shampoos have it!
Attempts to give up snacking will usually fail unless there's a new routine to satisfy old cues and reward urges.
A smoker can't quit unless she finds some activity to replace cigarettes when her nicotine craving is triggered. The physical addiction to nicotine lasts only as long as the chemical is in a smoker's bloodstream - about 100 hours after the last cigarette.
Many of the lingering urges that we think of as a nicotine's addictive twinges are really behavioral habits asserting themselves - for example, we crave a cigarette after a big meal not because we physically need it, but because we remember so fondly the rush it provided each time.
Alcoholics crave a drink because it offers escape, relaxation, companionship, the blunting of anxieties, and an opportunity for emotional release. They might crave a drink to forget their worries. But they don't necessarily crave feeling drunk. The physical effects of alcohol are often one of the least rewarding parts of drinking.
Today, Habit Reversal Therapy is used to treat verbal and physical tics, smoking, gambling problems, anxiety, bedwetting, procrastination, OCD and others.
Start to believe you are not shy until , eventually, you are not anymore.
How Do Habits Change?
A habit cannot be eradicated, it can only be replaced. If we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new routine can be inserted. A support group is really helpful and quite necessary.
You need to find a new routine that is clear and your odds go up if you are part of a group.
You can stop biting your nails! What is the cue and the reward? The cue is watching TV when anxious. The reward is the loss of anxiety. What to do?
Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence. Making your bed every morning is correlated to better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget. It's not that a family meal or a tidy bed causes better grades or less frivolous spending. But somehow those initial shifts start chain reactions that help other good habits take hold.
"Signing your kids up for piano lessons or sports is so important. It has nothing to do with creating a good musician or a sports star. When you learn to force yourself to practice for an hour or run fifteen laps, you start building self-regulatory strength. A five-year-old who can follow a ball for 10 minutes becomes a sixth grader who can start his homework on time."
THE SOLUTION:
So you have a bad habit? Remember Cue, Routine, Reward.
The Framework to Change :
STEP ONE : IDENTIFY THE ROUTINE
The routine is basically the behaviour you want to change.
Let's say you have a habit of eating a cookie during afternoon at work in the cafeteria.
What's the cue for this routine? Is it hunger? Is it boredom? Low Blood Sugar? That you need a break before plunging into another tas?
And what's the reward? The cookie itself? The change of scenery? The temporary distraction? Socializing with colleagues? Or the burst of energy that comes from that blast of sugar? To figure these things out you need to do some experimentation.
STEP TWO : EXPERIMENT WITH REWARDS
Try different rewards. In the cookie example, try eating an apple instead. The a coffee. Then go to a different location. What you choose to do instead of eating a cookie isn't important. The point is to test different hypotheses to determine which craving is driving your routine.
By experimenting with different rewards , you can isolate what you are actually craving, which is essential in redesigning the habit.
Once you've figured out the routine and the reward, what remains is identifying the cue.
STEP THREE : ISOLATE THE CUE
Experiments have shown that almost all habitual CUES fit into one of 5 categories:
(1) Location (where are you?)
(2) Time (what time is it?)
(3) Emotional State (what's your emotional state?)
(4) Other people (who else is around?)
(5) Immediately preceding action (did you answer an email or a phone call or some such?)
Keep making notes day by day to those 5 questions.
STEP FOUR : HAVE A PLAN
You can change to a better routine by planning for the cue and choosing a behavior that delivers the reward you are craving. What you need is a Plan.
A habit is a formula our brain automatically follows: When I see CUE, I will do ROUTINE in order to get REWARD.
Using the cookie example, I learned that it wasn't really the cookie I craved - rather, it was a moment of distraction and the opportunity to socialize.
So I wrote a plan :
Every afternoon, at 'cookie time', I will walk to a friend's desk and talk for 10 minutes.
Obviously changing some habits can be more difficult. But this framework is a place to start. Sometimes change takes a long time. Sometimes it requires repeated experiments and failures. But once you understand how a habit operates - once you diagnose the cue, the routine and the reward - you gain power of it.
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