A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research tested the words people use when confronting temptation. Recent research reveals why looking at our behaviors this way can have a profound impact.
Our choices become what we do because of who we are. Identity helps us make otherwise difficult choices by offloading willpower. It was something I just did not do, much in the same way I’d imagine a Hasidic Jew does not eat pork or an observant Muslim does not drink alcohol–they just don’t. Saying no to eating animals was no longer difficult. I was a vegetarian, and vegetarians don’t eat meat. The things I once loved to eat were now inedible because I had changed how I defined myself. However, when I began calling myself a vegetarian, somehow what was once appetizing suddenly became something else. As anyone who has made a dramatic shift in diet knows, friends always ask, “Don’t you miss meat? I mean, it tastes so good!” Of course I missed meat! Before diving into the method I use to transform my habits, follow me back about 20 years. I call it “progressive extremism,” and it works particularly well in situations in which substituting one habit for another just won’t do. When it comes to gaining control over bad habits, like eating food we know isn’t good for us, I shared with her the only thing that has worked for me. Having struggled with my own weight for years, there was no way I was going to look her in the face and tell her she should chat it up with her co-workers the next time she has a sugar craving. “Where does that leave me?” the woman in the audience wanted to know. Maybe replacing cookies with co-workers did it for Duhigg, but what if you’re the kind of person (like me) that loves the hell out of cookies? I was obese precisely because, among many other delicious things, I love cookies and for no other reason than the fact that they taste amazing! For me, ooey gooey chocolate chewy beats chatting it up with Mel from accounting every time. Voilà!ĭuhigg echos the popular belief that the key to breaking a bad habit is replacing it with another habit.
Once Duhigg figured out that the reward was connecting with friends, he could get rid of the cookie-eating habit by substituting one routine for another. When he began to analyze this habit, Duhigg discovered that the real reward for his behavior was not the cookie itself but the socializing he enjoyed while nom nom nom-ing with co-workers. For example, Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, describes a bad cookie-eating habit that added eight pounds to his waistline.Įvery day, Duhigg says, he found himself going to the 14th floor of his office building to buy a cookie. However, breaking an existing habit is an entirely different story, and the distinction is something many people mischaracterize. Doing so daily acts as a reminder until, over time, the behavior becomes something done with little or no conscious thought. If you’d like to get in the habit of taking a vitamin every day, for example, the key is to place the pills somewhere in the path of your normal routine–say, next to your toothbrush, so you remember to take it each morning before you brush. The brain learns causal relationships between triggers that prompt an action and the associated outcome. As I describe in this video, there are different techniques to use depending on the behavior you intend to modify.įor example, creating a habit requires encoding a new set of automatic behaviors, while breaking a habit requires a different set of processes. The first step is to realize that starting a new routine is very different from breaking an existing habit.