Charles Duhigg - Habit Quotes

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Once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom — and the responsibility — to remake them. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp, and the only option left is to get to work.

Charles Duhigg
There's something about it that makes other good habits easier.

Charles Duhigg
Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.

Charles Duhigg
This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be.

Charles Duhigg
Change might not be fast and it isn't always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.

Charles Duhigg
Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.

Charles Duhigg
When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new routines — the pattern will unfold automatically.

Charles Duhigg
Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

Charles Duhigg
A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances. It grows because of the habits of a community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together. And it endures because a movement's leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.

Charles Duhigg
Companies aren't families. They're battlefields in a civil war. Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines—habits—that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get a day's work done.

Charles Duhigg
However, to modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consiously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits' routines, and find alternatives. You must know you have control and be self-conscious enough to use it — and every chapter in this book is devoted to illustrating a different aspect of why that control is real.

Charles Duhigg
The problem is that your brain can't tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it's always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

Charles Duhigg
Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they're not. They're habits.

Charles Duhigg
Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.

Charles Duhigg
Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.

Charles Duhigg
But countless studies have shown that a cue and a reward, on their own, aren't enough for a new habit to last. Only when your brain starts expecting the reward—craving the endorphins or sense of accomplishment—will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each morning. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come.

Charles Duhigg
Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.

Charles Duhigg
For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible.

Charles Duhigg
If you dress a new something in old habits, it's easier for the public to accept it.

Charles Duhigg
Shampoo doesn't have to foam, but we add foaming chemicals because people expect it each time they wash their hair. Same thing with laundry detergent. And toothpaste—now every company adds sodium laureth sulfate to make toothpaste foam more. There's no cleaning benefit, but people feel better when there's a bunch of suds around their mouth. Once the customer starts expecting that foam, the habit starts growing.

Charles Duhigg
The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.

Charles Duhigg