How Habits Work: The Key to Change

How Habits Work: The Habit Loop

The habit loop is the key to forming habits, the good ones and the bad. Here are the steps in the cycle:

1. Cue: Something in the environment triggers you to act in some way.
2. Routine: Carrying out the action reinforces it in your brain.
3. Reward: The satisfaction acquired by performing the action.

These simple steps are what make all of your habits possible. In order to demonstrate how habits work using this loop, let’s walk through an example :

Example

Imagine you are driving home from work. You see a fast food restaurant right on an intersection. Feeling hungry after work, you decide to enter the joint and order some juicy, salty, fatty food. After eating this food, you feel satisfied and continue your drive home. At this moment, you may have thought that the fast food stop will be a one time thing. However, biology is not on your side. Here is why:

The moment you felt hungry on your trip home, a potential cue was identified. Entering a fast food food joint is a simple, streamlined process that takes little effort. In other words, there was a painless routine in place. Finally, the pleasure hormones you get from the greasy food provides one of the strongest rewards possible, bested only be drugs and sex. Now that the habit loop has been set up, it becomes very easy to fall into the trap of stopping at the fast food joint regularly. At first, it will be once a month but as you succumb to the convenience factor, it will soon become a daily routine. 

Most fast food businesses are designed to trigger the habit loop. This is because they spend a lot of time studying how habits work and the best ways to exploit them. If you ever wondered why every Dunkin Donuts or McDonalds looks the same inside, it is because the company wants your habit loop to be triggered. When you see the welcoming architecture of these buildings, you will begin to feel a need to enter. This brings us to the next powerful biological pathway exploited by most major companies: the craving response. 

Craving

The craving response is responsible for making people repeat tasks subconsciously. Forming a habit can be compared to water eroding a riverbed. The more often it is triggered, the deeper the habit grows. Even when the loop is not present, the wiring of myelin still remains. When the cue is introduced again, the habit will re-emerge. This explains why many people relapse after fighting against an addiction. 

To initiate a craving response, someone has to be so deep in a habit loop that they miss the reward if they don’t get it. In Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, he explains how the act of brushing one’s teeth every morning is the result of a craving response. What people crave is the tingling sensation toothpaste gives in the morning. Fun fact: this tingling is not needed for toothpaste to do its job, it is literally there to provide a reward, completing the habit loop. This idea of craving explains why we do things from fluffing out pillows at night to using foamy shampoo when we shower. 

So how do we fight against the urge to do things? The first way is to try and change the routine you perform between the cue and the reward. This means that you must first identify what three things are triggering your habits. However, it is not very easy to make good habits or break bad ones. The difficulty is due to another factor involved in explaining how habits work: willpower.