Each time you see the cafe, you go in a buy a coffee and a delicious but unhealthy muffin the routine. Repeat over the days, weeks ahead and hey presto you have a habit. A habit that is potentially hard to break. A muffin and coffee craving that starts the minute you anticipate your journey to work.
And it is your basal ganglia which are involved with linking your actions with these rewards over time. It takes over from other parts of your brain which were involved in the initial decision-making process to go and buy that first coffee and muffin. Ingrained into your neural wiring. And occurring without proper consultation with other regions of your brain, such as your prefrontal cortex, as to whether this really is the best course of action. But one trick with trying to break a bad habit is in fact not to try and stop doing it.
It is to redesign it. If you just stop it, then you are preventing the brain getting the reward it wants. And that creates cravings which are hard to ignore. Causing you to relapse. Take the above example of grabbing and coffee and unhealthy muffin on the way to work.
You could redesign the cue by taking a different route to work. Change the reward, so you include something tasty but healthier for your desk-breakfast to compensate for the lack of early morning muffin. Your body and brain are still getting what they want, but in a way that is better for you. Of course, some habits are easier to break than others. And when they involve physiological responses which edge closer to addiction alcohol, nicotine, sugar, caffeine you are likely to be in for a tough ride.
Having to deal with the associated withdrawal symptoms. Definitely not a change which can happen overnight. And there is no formula for how long it takes people to change a habit.
Some researchers say it take 66 days to form a new habit. But it is personal. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically. We know that a habit cannot be eradicated—it must, instead, be replaced. And we know that habits are most malleable when the Golden Rule of habit change is applied: If we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new routine can be inserted.
For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group. Habits never really disappear. Still curious? Individuals and habits are all different, and so the specifics of diagnosing and changing the patterns in our lives differ from person to person and behavior to behavior.
Giving up cigarettes is different than curbing overeating, which is different from changing how you communicate with your spouse, which is different from how you prioritize tasks at work.
Rather, I hoped to deliver something else: a framework for understanding how habits work and a guide to experimenting with how they might change. Some habits yield easily to analysis and influence. Others are more complex and obstinate, and require prolonged study. And for others, change is a process that never fully concludes. Each chapter in this book explains a different aspect of why habits exist and how they function. The framework described in this appendix is an attempt to distill, in a very basic way, the tactics that researchers have found for diagnosing and shaping habits within our own lives.
This is merely a practical guide, a place to start. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped. The MIT researchers in Chapter One discovered a simple neurological loop at the core of every habit, a loop that consists of three parts: A cue, a routine and a reward.
To understand your own habits, you need to identify the components of your loops. Once you have diagnosed the habit loop of a particular behavior, you can look for ways to supplant old vices with new routines. But every afternoon you manage to ignore that note, get up, wander towards the cafeteria, buy a cookie and, while chatting with colleagues around the cash register, eat it.
It feels good, and then it feels bad. Tomorrow will be different. How do you start diagnosing and then changing this behavior? By figuring out the habit loop. And the first step is to identify the routine. Your routine is that you get up from your desk in the afternoon, walk to the cafeteria, buy a chocolate chip cookie and eat it while chatting with friends.
Is it hunger? Low blood sugar? That you need a break before plunging into another task? 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? Rewards are powerful because they satisfying cravings. When the Febreze marketing team discovered that consumers desired a fresh scent at the end of a cleaning ritual, for example, they had found a craving that no one even knew existed. It was hiding in plain sight.
Most cravings are like this: obvious in retrospect, but incredibly hard to see when we are under their sway. This might take a few days, or a week, or longer. On the first day of your experiment, when you feel the urge to go to the cafeteria and buy a cookie, adjust your routine so it delivers a different reward.
For instance, instead of walking to the cafeteria, go outside, walk around the block, and then go back to your desk without eating anything. The next day, go to the cafeteria and buy a donut, or a candy bar, and eat it at your desk.
The next day, go to the cafeteria, buy an apple, and eat it while chatting with your friends. Then, try a cup of coffee. You get the idea. The point is to test different hypotheses to determine which craving is driving your routine. Are you craving the cookie itself, or a break from work?
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