The Power of Habit | connecting-the-dots

! "First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice. " – Octavia Butler

$ People don't decide their future, But They decide their habits and Habits decide their future – F M ALEXANDER

PART ONE

The Habit Loop

Story: LISA quitting smoking

Lisa - Cairo - vacation - her husband left her because he was in love with another woman - she was so disoriented that she didnt realise until she smelled burning plastic but actually she was trying to light Marlboro (cigaratte) - she felt desperate like she had to change something at least one thing she could control
SHE NEEDED A GOAL IN HER LIFE, SOMETHING TO WORK TOWARD
decided to trek the desert - to give herself one year to prepare
NEED TO MAKE CERTAIN SACRIFICE - particularly SMOKING
next 6 months - replaced
- smoking >> jogging
- changed how she ate, slept, saved money, scheduled her work days, planned her future
- start running half marathons
- bought a house and engaged
her neurological patterns - her old habits overridden by new patterns
still neural activity of her old behaviors, impulses crowded out by her new urges
AS HER HABITS CHANGED SO HAD HER BRAIN
she focused on just one habit - smoking
focusing on one pattern - KEYSTONE HABIT - taught herself to reprogram other routines
& UNDERSTAND HOW A DECISION BECOMES AN AUTOMATIC BEHAVIOUR.
! "ALL OUR LIFE, SO FAR AS IT HAS DEFINITE FORM, IS BUT A MASS OF HABITS" - WILLIAM JAMES (1982)
$ "MORE THAN 40% OF THE ACTIONS PEOPLE PERFORMED EACH DAY WEREN'T ACTUAL DECISIONS, BUT HABITS" - DUKE UNIVERSITY RESEARCHER (2006)

Part 1:-

how habits emerge within individual lives
neurological habit formation
Ex: Procter & Gamble - Febreze spray
Ex: Alcoholics Anonymous - attacking habits at the core of addiction
Ex: Coach Tony Dungy - National football league

Part 2:

habits of successful companies and organisations
Paul O Neill - CEO of aluminium manaufacturing company
Starbucks - high school dropout to top manager

Part 3:

habits of soceities
Martin luther king jr - civil rights movement
Rick warren - nation's largest church
Murderer in Britain go free
- " HABITS CAN BE CHANGED, IF WE UNDERSTAND HOW THEY WORK "

Story: Riots controlled in Iraq

riots pattern - violence preceded by crowds of iraqis gathering in open space - course of several hours - someone throw a rock or a bottle - crowds break loose - The Major met the Mayor and made a request - COULD THEY KEEP FOOD VENDORS OUT OF PLAZA? -request accepted - soon after that people started to gather - but at dusk when enough people gathered they started getting restless and hungry - to their surprise there aren't any kebabs sellers - all left peacefully.
Community was a giant collection of habits occuring among thousands of people, depending how they are influenced.
The Major told, "Understanding habits is the most important thing I have learned in the army. You want to fall asleep and wake up early feeling good, then pay attention to your nightmare patterns. what you automatically do when you get up. You want to make running easy? Create triggers to make it a routine"
My wife and I wrote our habits plan for our marriage
~ "There's nothing you can't do if you get the habits right"

HOW HABITS WORK?

Larry Squire - 52 year old scientist - studying the neuroanatomy of memory.
- everyone relies on similar neurological processes everyday.
- subconscious mechanisms impact countless choices that seem as products of well reasoned thoughts but actually are influenced by urges unrecognised.
Henry Molaison - hit by a bicycle when he was 7 years old - turned 27 - was desperate - was smart but couldn't get a job - losing consciousness upto 10 times a day
- studies suggested that an area of brain called - HIPPOCAMPUS -might play a role in seizures.
- doctor suggested a surgery
- surgery took place in 1953
- he remembered all the old memories very well
- but a new problem popped out
- he forgot all the new info he got within 20 seconds
- his brain frozen in time

"Why does my brain decide that one memory is more important than another?" "How it is decided?"

no one wondered how a man who couldn't draw a map of his home was able to find bathroom without hesitation.
how could someone find a jar of nuts when he couldn't say where the kitchen was located? or find his way home when he had no idea which house was his? Ans: New patterns are forming MIT researchers started working on habits - in 1990s thought that the basal ganglia might be integral to habits

picture human brain as an onion - then layer upon layer of cells :

outside layers closest to the scalp are generally the recent additions ie. When you dream up a new invention or laugh at friend's joke, it is outside parts of your brain that works. it is here the most complex thinking occurs.
Deeper inside, closer to the brain stem - brain meeting the spinal column - are older and primitive structures this part controls the automatic behaviours
Towards the centre, a golf ball sized lump of tissue - called BASAL GANGLIA - suspicions that it played a role in diseases like Parkinson's

Experiment with rat and chocolate:

rat placed in a T shaped maze with chocolate at one end.
rat placed behind a partition separating it from the chocolate
partition opened after a loud sound
initially the rat sniffed the wall and try to figure out the chocolate
when it reached the T, it took right ie turning away from the chocolate for no reason.
but slowly when the experiment was conducted many times, the rat showed less mental activity by acting automatically moving in the right direction
all it did was just to recall the past activity and follow the routine

The BASAL GANGLIA - central to recalling patterns and acting on them. Stored habits work even while rest of the brain went to sleep

 This process of brain converting a sequence of actions into an automatic routine is known as CHUNKING -this is the root of habits formation

When you first learned to drive, the driveway required a major dose of concentration. later, it routine occured by habit
once the habit starts unfolding, our gray matter is free to quiet itself or chase other thoughts
Habits, emerge because the brain is constantly looking ways to save efforts.
Habits allow minds to ramp down more often
An efficient brain allows us to stop thinking constantly about basic behaviours
We can devote mental energy to inventing spears, etc
Conserving mental effort is tricky, if our brain power down at wrong moment, we might fail to notice something.
Basal ganglia have devised a clever system to determine when to let habits take over.
This process withing our brain is a 3 step loop
1. Cue - trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode, and use the habit
2. Routine - can be physical or mental or emotional
3. Reward - helps the brain to figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future

THE HABIT LOOP:

Habits aren't destiny - can be ignored, changed or replaced
When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making
Unless you deliberately fight a habit - unless you find a new routine - the pattern will unfold automatically
Once you break a habit into its components, you can fiddle with the gears
Extinguished the habit by changing the placement of the reward
Habits never really disappear, which is a huge advantage, because it would be not nice if we have to learn how to drive after every vacation
But the challenge is, the brain cant tell the difference between bad and good habits
Once we develop a routine of sitting on the couch, rather than running or snacking whenever we pass a doughnut box, those patterns always remain in our heads.
If we learn to create new neurological routines that overpower those behaviours - if we take controlof habit loop - we can force the bad tendencies into the background
People whose basal ganglia are damaged by injury or disease often become mentally paralysed.
Habits are often as much a curse as a benefit
Habits, as much as memory and reason are at the roof of how we behave
We might not remember the experiences that create our habits
some habits, that are related to emotions are measured in milliseconds
Habits are powerful but are also delicate, which means they can be easily designed
they often occur without our permission

National Institute on Alcohol abuse and Alcoholism - Experiment

trained a mice to press levers - were rewarded with food - later the scientists poisoned the food and electrified the floor - mice knew the food and cage were dangerous - they had old cues - so unthinkingly pressed the lever and ate the food - habit was so ingrained that they couldn't stop themselves

families dont usually intend to eat fast food on regular basis - once a month pattern slowly becomes once a week and then twice a week
when a fast food outlet closes, the family starts having dinner at home rather than seeking an alternative location
even small shifts can end the pattern
by learning to observe the cues and rewards though we can change the routines

McDonalds strategy

every outlet looks the same, what employees say to the customer
everything is consistent cue to trigger eating routines
foods are specially engineered to deliver immediate rewards

The Craving Brain

How to create new habits

Pepsodent

early 1990s, Claude Hopkins - American executive - man who convinced Americans to buy Schiltz beer by boasting that the company cleaned the bottles with live steam but other companies too did the same - seduced women in purchasing Palmolive soap, claiming that Cleopatra washed with it, which outraged historians

he introduced the pepsodent smile and because of which it was sold in china, south africa, brazil, germany. he helped establish tooth brushing a daily activity

that is he created a craving

his signature tactics was to find simple triggers to convince consumers to use his products every day

pepsodent remained the best selling tooth paste for more than 30 years

Rule: find a simple and obvious cue, clearly define the rewards cue - tooth film; reward - beautiful teeth