Hey there, guys! Today I wanted to give you five lessons that I learned from reading the book, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Now, I read this book a little while ago. I took a lot of notes on it and learned a ton from it and it actually helped me start to change a lot of my habits which led to some pretty drastic changes in my life. So, I wanted to share some of the most important things that I've learned from this book. And the first lesson, is simply that all habits can be broken down into a three-step process.
Habits are triggered by cues which then lead into a routine and the routine ultimately culminates in a reward. One of the key things to note in this lesson is that habits are delicate things. They don't trigger unless the cue triggers them. So if you don't expose yourself to a cue you're not going to do a habit.
Now, this is important for both good habits and bad habits. You need to build cues that trigger good habits and you want to try to avoid cues that trigger bad ones.
Now, speaking of cues that trigger habits the second lesson I learned from this book that I want to share with you is that almost all cues fall into one of five different categories. They either fall into the category of location time, emotional state, actions of other people, or the immediately preceding action. Knowing these five categories of cues is useful when you wanna start changing bad habits because they'll allow you to pick out the cues of each individual, a specific habit that you're targeting.
Now, the third lesson that I learned from this book is that there's actually a fourth component to the habit loop. When I read the first chapter it presented the first three parts of that loop but then later on in the book you learn about the fourth one which is craving.
Through an experiment done on a monkey scientists have been able to figure out that in the initial stages of building a habit the brain receives a spike of activity. Basically, a dopamine surge is when the actual reward of the habit is achieved. However, as time goes on and the habit is done over and over and over again and becomes more ingrained the spike of activity starts to come before the routine has even gone through. It comes when the cue happens. Now what this means for you is that when you're exposed to a cue for a habit that you've already had for a while and have gone through many different times your brain gets that spike of activity before even going through the routine. At that point, you get this craving this need to get the reward and it's a self-perpetuating cycle that keeps the habit going.
Now the book talks a lot about how to change your habits how to actually break bad habits and start building new ones but one of the most interesting parts of this that I read about, which I wanna make the subject of this fourth lesson, is that people who want to break bad habits or who are trying to make a change in their life are often more successful if they plan in advance what they're going to do when there's a pain point when something difficult comes up. The example Duhigg gave in the book was of people who had knee-replacement surgeries. People who have this surgery have to go through lots of painful rehabilitation and walking and exercising to actually regain full functionality of their knees but this rehabilitation is actually really painful and a lot of patients just can't muster the willpower to go through it. Now what researchers found are patients who actually wrote down a plan of what they were going to do at specific times during the day to rehabilitate their knee were much more likely to go through that painful rehabilitation process and were, in turn, much more likely to recover.
And finally, the last lesson that I wanna share from this book is that some habits have a tendency to spawn other habits and these habits are called keystone habits. The book mentions that for people trying to lose weight one of the most successful methods that have been used is simply having them keep a daily food journal. By establishing this one little, easy-to-maintain habit dieters were actually able to recognize patterns in their life they hadn't noticed before and that spurred them on to start making more positive changes to tackle those patterns. Essentially, keystone habits help to create small wins which, in turn, boost your overall motivation and give you some momentum to build even more habits in your life.
To give you a personal example, I started getting serious about building new habits back in 2014 and my keystone habit was simply waking up early every day. By establishing that habit, I was waking up early and feeling really productive in the morning and that gave me the motivation to start creating a morning routine full of other good habits.
So, those are the five lessons, I wanted to share with you from The Power of Habit. Overall, I learned a lot from this book and I highly recommend reading it.