The Power of Habits - Change your life by changing your habit

Author: Charles Duhigg

A habit cannot be eradicated – it must, instead, be replaced.” - Author

Yeah! it's a good or bad habit no one can eliminate but it is no delay to change or transform yourself.

Today I wanted to give you five lessons that I learned from reading the book, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

I read this book a few months before and I’m sharing how it makes some significant changes in my daily routine. We can split this book into five lessons.

For the first lesson from the book is, all habits broken into 3 step process

· Habits are triggered by cues

· which then lead into a routine

· and the routine ultimately

One of the key things to note in this lesson is that habits are delicate things. They don't trigger unless the cue triggers them. So if you don't expose yourself to a cue you're not going to do a habit. Whether a good or bad habit.

The second lesson from this book that I want to share with you is that almost all cues fall into one of five different categories. They either fall into the category of location time, emotional state, actions of other people or the immediately preceding action. Knowing these five categories of cues is useful when you want to start changing bad habits because they'll allow you to pick out the cues of each individual, specific habit that you're targeting.

The third lesson that I learned from this book is that there's actually a fourth component to the habit loop. When I read the first chapter it presented the first three parts of that loop but then later on in the book you learn about the fourth one which is craving. Through an experiment done on a monkey, scientists have been able to figure out that in the initial stages of building a habit the brain receives a spike of activity. Basically, a dopamine surge, when the actual reward of the habit is achieved.

The fourth lesson is that people who want to break bad habits or who are trying to make a change in their life are often more successful if they plan in advance what they're going to do when there's a pain point when something difficult comes up. The example Duhigg gave in the book was of people who had knee-replacement surgeries. People who have this surgery have to go through lots of painful rehabilitation and walking, exercising to actually regain full functionality of their knees but this rehabilitation is actually really painful and a lot of patients just can't muster the willpower to go through it. Now what researchers found in patients who actually wrote down a plan of what they were going to do at specific times during the day to rehabilitate their knee were much more likely to go through that painful rehabilitation process and were, in turn, much more likely to recover.

Finally, the last lesson that I want to share from this book is that some habits have a tendency to spawn other habits and these habits are called keystone habits. Read more..