Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Power of Habit

Our lifes goes day by day. When there is a consistent routine in our life, everything goes by the system. We can have some addictions to some things that we didn’t even focus on. An addiction is a physical and psychological state of being that if not treated correctly could result into harmful wrongdoing.

In The “Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg, he recounts a story in which a fatigued housewife named Angie Bachmann lost all of her family’s assets, amounting to a million dollars due to a gambling addiction. They tried to fix it with the changing of habits. Every habit has three components: A cue or a trigger of an automatic behavior to start, a routine the behavior itself, and a reward which is how our brain learns to remember this pattern for the future. According to Duhigg, “you cannot extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it”. Duhigg suggests that in order to change ones bad habit the “Golden Rule” must be implied. The Golden Rule is a theory of shifting a habit by retaining the old cue and reward, and tries to change only the routine. In the book Duhigg shows us how habits occur. Take the maze experiment for example. Where rats had to walk a maze and find the way to the chocolate(reward). After they heard a click (cue) that opened up the maze were the chocolate is placed (same place every time) the rats walked in different directions so it took them awhile before getting to the chocolate, but after multiple times the rats found out the exact directions to the chocolate(without thinking). At that moment they formed a habit (14). But it’s all goes by the effort. You need to be struggle and consistent with your new routine .

It’s easy to form a bad habit sometimes it’s even that easy you don’t even realize you formed a bad habit in the first place. But how do we break bad habits?

Before we're able to break a bad habit we have to find the cue of this habit. The experiment with Julio the monkey show us the better view about the cue.The experiment with Julio the monkey gives us a better perspective about the cue. The cue for Julio are the shapes on the screen. “The shapes on the monitor had become a cue not just for pulling a lever, but also for a pleasure response inside the monkey’s brain.” (46-47). In this case the cue triggered the brain with pleasure because the cue led to a reward(berries juice). Every bad habit has a reward otherwise we wouldn’t repeat that habit in the first place. My bad habit is while I doing homework or studying for exam or even during my workouts in the