Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,58

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Clear identifies the habit loop as having four components: a cue, a craving, a response, and a reward. Using the example of turning on a light when you enter a room, the cue is walking into the room and finding it dark. The craving is feeling that there would be some value in the room not being dark. The response is flipping on the light switch, and the reward is that the room is no longer dark.8 You can apply this loop to any of your habits, such as getting your mail when you come home from work. The cue is reaching your driveway or front door at the end of the day. The craving is hoping there’s something in the mailbox. The response is going to the mailbox to find out. And the reward is getting the mail out of your mailbox. You probably didn’t think about any of this until you actually had the mail in your hands.

The Habit Loop

Creating habits to automate essential parts of our lives is a fundamental streamlining technique that we do largely unconsciously, often to our benefit. Of course, we also automate all kinds of things that we’d probably be much better off not turning into habits. I’m sure you know some version of this. Perhaps a cue is walking past your kitchen pantry. The craving comes from the knowledge that your favorite chips are in the pantry, and your innate desire to eat them. The response is that you go into the pantry, open the bag of chips, and take out a big handful. And the reward is crunchy, salty, fatty deliciousness . . . that doesn’t benefit your health in any way. Our negative habits operate with the same level of automaticity as our healthy ones. Those chips are in your stomach before you’ve even had the opportunity to register that you were stuffing them in your mouth.

Now, because you’re in the process of becoming limitless, you know that perpetuating negative behaviors is a drain on your superpowers. So, how do you break bad habits and, just as importantly, how do you create new habits that will help you?

GETTING IN THE HABIT

Before we get to this, let’s talk for a moment about how long it takes to form a habit. In a study for University College London, Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts, and Jane Wardle took participants through the process of developing a new healthy eating, drinking, or exercise habit, such as drinking water with lunch or jogging before dinner. They were asked to perform this new behavior based on specific situational cues every day for 84 days. “For the majority of participants,” they wrote, “automaticity increased steadily over the days of the study, supporting the assumption that repeating a behavior in a consistent setting increases automaticity.” By the end of the study, they’d found that it took an average of 66 days for the new behavior to become a habit, though it took individual participants as little as 18 days and as many as 254.9

It is also widely assumed that breaking a bad habit isn’t about ending that habit, but rather about replacing it with a different, more constructive, habit. Dr. Elliot Berkman, director of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Oregon, notes, “It’s much easier to start doing something new than to stop doing something habitual without a replacement behavior. That’s one reason why smoking cessation aids such as nicotine gum or inhalers tend to be more effective than the nicotine patch.”10

So, if the process of starting a new habit, such as setting aside time to read every day, is fundamentally the same as the process of ending a negative habit, such as grabbing those chips every time you pass the pantry, how does it work?

As with so many of the things we’ve discussed in this book, motivation plays a key role. Speaking specifically about the effort to break habits, Dr. Thomas G. Plante, adjunct clinical professor of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, said, “It depends on how much you really want to break the habit. Many people are ambivalent. They want to lose weight, but they like the foods they eat. They want to reduce their alcohol consumption but love their happy hour. They want to stop picking their nails, but it reduces stress for them. So, one important issue is how strongly you really want to break the