Every night before I sleep, I pick up a special pen and a journal I keep for one job only. I write about the things I’m grateful for that day. I don’t schedule it and I don’t need a reminder. Wherever I am in the world, the journal comes with me and it gets done.
That’s a habit. Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit is the book that explains how it got that way, and how you can build your own.
Duhigg shows how every habit runs on a loop. There’s a cue that sets it off, a routine you follow, and a reward at the end. Once you can see the loop, you can work with it.
For me, the cue is getting ready for bed. The routine is the journal. The reward is putting my head on the pillow at peace with myself. The link is with the behaviour, so it doesn’t matter whether I go to bed early or late.
I wrote about that in Done Beats Perfect. If you anchor a new habit to something you already do every day, you soon stop needing reminders. Do it as soon as you get up, or right before your shower. The thing you already do becomes the cue.
He fills the book with great stories. There’s the advert that got people brushing their teeth every day, and the routines Michael Phelps ran before every race.
He’s also big on keystone habits, the ones that knock other things over when they change. His best example is Paul O’Neill, who took over the aluminium giant Alcoa and talked about nothing but worker safety. Investors thought he’d lost it. Fixing safety meant fixing how the whole company worked, and the results followed.
“Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.”
Replace it, don’t fight it
The idea that stuck with me most is what Duhigg calls the golden rule of habit change. You don’t get rid of a bad habit. You replace it, keeping the cue and the reward and changing the routine. If the cue is stress and the reward is relief, find a different routine that brings the relief.
If I had to sum the book up in a word, though, it would be belief. Duhigg found that belief is what keeps a change going when things get hard. It often grows when you’re around other people who are changing too. What do you really believe you’re capable of? How do you turn that into a discipline, a ritual? Do it long enough and it becomes a habit.
In my own book, Done Beats Perfect, I quoted research from University College London, published in 2009. It found it takes an average of 66 days to form a new habit. The same study found that missing the odd day didn’t really hurt. Being wildly inconsistent did.
That’s good news for anyone who isn’t perfect, which is all of us. Keep turning up.
I’ve seen that in my own life. I went from thinking I couldn’t run to finishing 107 miles. Nobody does that in one go. And the gratitude journal has come with me for years, through good weeks and rubbish ones. It stopped being something I had to remember.
I made a short video on habits for my 2016 advent calendar. Halfway through I fluffed a line, and I left it in. “I just tripped over my words there. Am I going to start again? No.” Progress comes from repetition, doing the same thing again and again until it’s automatic.
Think about the first time you tied your shoes. It took you a while. Now you don’t even think about it. The habits that support the results you want need to get that simple, and repetition is how they get there.
You don’t wake up one day with a new habit. You build it. It’s the little things you do over and over again.
Habits get their own section in my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me. They share it with the books on what we eat, which is where plenty of habits live.
What’s the cue behind the habit you’d most like to change?
