Habit Power

Originally posted 27 September 2017.

The first book I wanted to read in retirement was Charles Duhigg’s 2012 The Power of Habit.  My reasons were simple enough.  First, I had wanted to read it for a long time:  I had had the book on my bookshelf since it was published five years ago. Second, the reason I wanted to read it is that I sometimes think I have some bad habits I don’t need, and that I don’t have some good habits that I do need.  Third, as I have said elsewhere in these posts, as I have lived my later adult years, I have felt that I have lived my life in response to various outside demands, and that there was much in life that I was not of my choosing.  I accepted it, I agreed to it, but it was not always what I wanted.  And I developed bad habits (or neglected nurturing good habits) in my efforts to adapt.  Fourth, the first months of retirement, a time when I had no habits, good or bad, seemed a perfect time to remake my life (if remaking, indeed, was called for).

In this book, Duhigg does what bestselling business/self-help authors do—select a few powerful stories to illustrate some pretty basic concepts.  As a reader of fiction, I find this method a bit tedious.  But since most books like this are written for people who don’t read books, I can tolerate the method, mostly.  I want to pause here to explain a point—what does my reading of fiction have to do with this?  As Duhigg knows, humans learn through story, as the continued power of The Bible. The Koran, The Bhagavad-Gita, and other holy books illustrates.   What English majors know is that serious fiction teaches us about life and human behavior.  A great novel is simply philosophy (or sociology, history, political science, economics, psychology) explored in story.  So self-help publishers figured out that to get a mass audience, the author has to tell stories.  Duhigg is a good storyteller.  Still, he is no Walker Percy, or James Baldwin or Marianne Robinson.  But, as they say, I digress.

Duhigg tells stories of a lazy loser who transformed her life into a model of personal achievement, of a brain injured guy who lost memory but still develops habits of which he is unaware, of a gambling addicted mom, of a football coach, of a marketing team at Proctor and Gamble, Rosa Parks, and Rick Warren.  You can read the book, if you want to know these stories. 

But here’s the gist.  A habit, good or bad, is a self-sustaining behavioral loop.  There is a cue, a routine, and a reward.  Each time the cue comes up, we repeat the loop, more or less without thinking.  Who knows how this loop begins. It seems to me that we begin a habit sometimes by accident.   We have a stressor and we find something that eliminates it.  We do something we enjoy and we repeat it.  With bad habits, the trick is to understand each of these three components, and then to replace or redirect it.  With establishing good habits, it is setting up a good environment for these components to begin working.

But there is a fourth component:  belief, faith.  It can be a faith in a higher power, as various AA-type groups promote.  Or a faith in oneself and one’s community, faith in the future.  And so community and teamwork also influence the behavioral loop of cue-routine-reward. 

My worst bad habit is eating salty snacks and simple carbohydrates.  The habit I most need to establish and keep is regular exercise.  With these, I am not unlike many people in the United States.  At various times in my life, I have broken the carbohydrate cycle.  At times I have established a regular exercise routine. My goal is to make break the cues for eating badly, and create the sense of reward for exercising. 

As I enter my fourth week of retirement, I can report that I have made progress in both of these areas.  Progress, but certainly not mastery.  I have eaten sesame sticks and corn chips three or four times.  Bread, more often.  For the past two weeks, I have swum three times each week, and hiked once, and biked once.  Progress, but the good habits are not engrained yet.  I have others that I will report on at another time.

And, having watched this video by fellow UT grad Admiral McRaven, I have started one new habit that I am enjoying:  making my bed.  As wives and girlfriends can tell you, making the bed has never been part of my daily routine.  Since retiring and moving to Harrisonburg, I think I have hit every day.