The Power of Habit - So You Like Your Oreo Fix

This is another idea I got from The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg: a great way of quitting bad habits is to not get into them in the first place. Here's an example:

Recently, I've been stopping by a 7-11 on my way home from work and picking up a snack - such as oreos. This happens fairly regularly - at around 6:30 on weekdays, I'll pick up my oreos and then go on my way home.

After about two weeks of doing this, I noticed that at around 6:30 every weekday, I develop a terrible craving for oreos, and feel a tremendous urge to go into that 7-11 and pick them up. Skipping my 7-11 visit has started to require incredible amounts of willpower.

So what happened? Using Duhigg's Habit Loop model, I realized that I had classically conditioned myself to expect oreos at 6:30 on weekdays. This means that my body had been trained to expect them, and so the anticipation manifested as the craving that was so difficult to resist.

Using the Habit Loop model, my cue is the time of day and the sight of 7-11. The behaviour is buying and eating oreos, and the reward is the sugar rush I get from it. After an extended period reinforcing this loop for my brain, seeing the cue was enough for my brain to start anticipating the reward, resulting in a manufactured craving that wouldn't go away until I partook in the behaviour that resulted in the reward.

Now how to fix this - giving up my oreos completely is not something I'm willing to do. I love oreos and am unashamed of my indulgence. The problem is that I want to eat oreos when I actually feel like eating them, and not because my body is manufacturing a craving just because it happens to be expecting them.

The solution, as I've gleaned from Duhigg, is to keep my oreo supply unpredictable. By preventing the association between any single cue and my oreos, I can keep my brain from automating away the behaviour by forming a habit. This way, every time I buy oreos, it will be conscious decision that I will likely have thought through, and not automatic behaviour.

It's difficult to do this when you have a regular job with regular hours, but I could get around this, for example, by varying up the source of my oreos. I could get them from 7-11 one day, and then get them from Jewel or Target the next time. I could also vary up the time - maybe I could get them with lunch one time, and the on the way home the next time. Finally, I could also vary up the frequency - I could eat oreos for two successive days, and then skip three days, and then eat the following day.

So remember: our brains are automation machines. Don't let them automate bad habits. Bad habits are easy to build and hard to get rid of. You don't need to completely stop a behaviour in order to prevent the bad habit from forming - you can do it by varying up the cue and hence prevent the cue-reward association from forming. After all, life is short, and we all deserve the occasional oreo fix. :)

Here's the affiliate link to the The Power of Habit if you'd like to support my blog. And here's the non-affiliate link if you're not into that. :)

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

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The Power of Habit - the Habit Loop

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg is a book I picked up recently from my local library. At about 25% in, it's already had a decent impact on my worldview, and I think it promises to be a good read. For this blog post, I want to write about the model The Power of Habit presents of habits.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

 

First of all, habits are relatively simple things. It's when hundreds, even thousands of these coalesce around a single individual do they emerge as something as complex as the "lifestyle" of that individual.

Habits come from a three-step loop, says The Power of Habit. The first step of the loop is the "cue". This is what triggers the automatic behaviour, letting you relinquish your cognitive control. Since our brain is evolutionarily programmed to exert as little effort as possible, it is constantly on the outlook to set such "cues" that allow it to revert to default behaviour, and hence save you from expending too much brainpower.

The next step in the loop is the actual action that gets triggered.

The final step is the reward - this, says The Power of Habit, is what tells the brain whether the action it just took should be repeatable or not. The higher the reward, the more likely your brain is to want to engage in that behaviour again.

The Power of Habit uses the example of brushing teeth in his book. Back in World War One, he says, bad dental hygiene was on the verge of becoming a national crisis. In those days, hardly anyone brushed their teeth. Toothpastes and brushes for hygiene were regarded as the proverbial snake-oil. However, after an ingenious marketing campaign by a man called Claude Hopkins, by the time World War Two rolled around, it was discovered that nearly half the men in the Army were brushing their teeth regularly!

Hopkins worked his magic by associating a behaviour with a cue, and a reward the with behaviour. In this case, he used the filmy coating that we can feel on our teeth as a "cue". The behaviour he encouraged people to do was brush their teeth using the toothpaste he was marketing (a brand called Pepsodent), and the reward they got for it was a minty freshness from the toothpaste.

The Power of Habit notes that the minty freshness that we now associate with a clean mouth was a relatively new phenomenon back then, and that it has no effect on actual oral hygiene. In fact, many leading dentists of the day disclaimed Pepsodent as a farce, because it so heavily advertised the feeling of freshness. However, Pepsodent succeeded where so many other toothpaste brands failed because it gave its buyers a tangible reward (minty freshness) as opposed to a promise of good oral hygiene.

So there you have it - that's the Habit loop. Cue, behaviour, reward. This sequence evolved into a habit when it's repeated enough times so that through classical conditioning the brain starts anticipating the reward as soon as it sees the cue. This elicits an automatic craving that can't be satisfied until the behaviour is performed.

Here's the an affiliate link The Power of Habit if you'd like to support my blog. And here's the non-affiliate link if you're not into that. :)

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

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