How to use bad habits to your advantage

With the start of a New Year, improving our lives is much on our minds. How can I stop smoking, lose weight, get out more?

Alas, so many noble aspirations end up dying as the days go by. Charles Duhigg, a New York Times reporter turned author, has some news for all of us. The enemy that stands between us and our resolutions is also our best friend.

It’s the 800-pound behavioral gorilla called habit.

“Forty to forty-five percent of what we do every day is habit,” says Duhigg. “Our brain is designed to create habits because it’s a great energy-saving tactic. If we had to concentrate on things like backing our car out of the driveway, deciding what to eat, or how to walk down the street every time we did it, we’d be exhausted. There wouldn’t be any time to invent fire, or spears, or video games. Habit is neurologically built into our brain and has helped us immeasurably.”

In essence, habits are the software program most used by the hardware that is the human brain.

One of the reasons habits are so human is that they’re very powerful and very simple.

“All habits run the same program, made up of three parts. There’s the cue, which is like the trigger that causes an automatic behavior, or habit, to start,” said Duhigg. “Then there’s the routine, which is the behavior itself. And finally, there is the reward, which is the perceived benefit of the behavior which makes our brain remember the cycle and return to it over and over.”

And according to Duhigg, once that rut has worn itself through the soft gray matter that is your brain, it’s there forever. Habits are a habit you can’t break.

“The mistake that people make is that they try to extinguish a bad habit. It’s almost impossible to do that.”

In his book, “The Power of Habit,” (now out in paperback) Duhigg says you have to manipulate the habit. You can’t erase the software program, but you can rewrite key parts of its code so that the habit works for you.

To do that, you’ve got to understand what’s really behind the first and last parts of the habit’s life cycle: the cue and the reward. What is the trigger for the behavior? Knowing that is the first step towards really understanding the key part: the reward.

“Unlike a dog, humans create their own concept of reward…of positive outcome,” says Duhigg. “Each of us chooses what feels good for us so rewards are as different as people and sometimes they are not what you think.”

Do you have that cookie every day at 3 p.m. because you want the sugar rush or do you really want a gossip break? Figure that out and you can replace the activity phase with a new action. An orange for a cookie. A walk for a smoke, whatever you please. The cue is the same, the reward is the same, but now the habit is your tool, not your master.

The tactic also works if you want to change someone else’s habits. For example, a wife whose husband didn’t do the dishes. She figured out that on the rare times her husband did the washing up, she would make a point of saying ‘Honey, I really appreciate you taking care of the dishes tonight. I think we should set aside some special…intimate time…tonight.’ In a short while, the husband was doing the dishes every night!

Go figure.