How do habits come about? What purpose do they serve? Why is it so hard to break bad habits, such as smoking, drinking, unhealthy eating, and lack of exercise?
Charles Duhigg, business editor and Pulitzer Prize winner, shows us in his best-selling book, “The Power of Habit”, that the fight against bad habits is not hopeless.
First, we learn how habits work: A cue leads to a routine action that is completed with a reward. Typically, this helps us perform many of our daily tasks almost automatically, such as brushing our teeth after getting out of bed, which rewards us with a feeling of freshness.
But unfortunately, the brain doesn't distinguish between good and bad habits – if a smoker feels good after smoking, his brain will continue to let him automatically reach for a cigarette.
If we understand how habits work, we have taken the first step toward change. Then we need to determine experimentally what triggers a habitual behavior and what reward our brain hopes to gain from that behavior. A trigger is usually a place, a time, a state of mind, contact with other people, or a directly preceding action. Once we have identified the trigger and reward, we can plan a new routine in between. For a while, we have to force ourselves to replace the old routine with the new one. But after a few weeks, the brain will have overwritten the old habit with a new one.
The author presents a wealth of interesting and entertaining examples from everyday life – from clever toothpaste advertisements that got Americans to brush their teeth regularly a hundred years ago, athletes who use routines to win Olympic medals, Alcoholics Anonymous who manage to replace their drinking habits with other routines, and market researchers who design supermarkets and advertising brochures so that our habits lead us to buy more than we need.
The book is enjoyable to read and encourages the reader to recognize, rethink and, if necessary, consciously reshape their habits.
🎧 Suitable as an audiobook? Yes.
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