I grew up worrying that my dad was going to die.
At some point, before I turned ten, my siblings and I discovered that Dad was a secret smoker – presumably he’d hidden it from us to stop us from replicating his habit. But once we’d found his miniature cigars, he began smoking in front of us. Surprisingly to me, he only ever smoked in the car. Never at parties, never at home, never at work, only in the car. I made a few subtle attempts to get him to quit, but nothing worked. Until one day, ten years later, when I inadvertently led him to finally quit his 40-year habit.
In order to explain what happened, I first need to briefly explain how habits are held in place.
The concept of habit loops was introduced by Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habit, in which he explores how and why habits develop, why they stick and how we can break them. Simplified, a habit loop consists of three key elements:
• CUE: The trigger for habitual behaviour (eg a stressful meeting or negative event).
• ROUTINE: The habitual behaviour (eg smoking a cigarette or eating chocolate).
• REWARD: The result/impact on you of the habitual behaviour (eg a feeling of relief or happiness).
When I was 18 years old, after dropping out of university to build my first tech start-up, I read a book called Hooked by Nir Eyal which explains how big social media companies and tech companies get their users addicted to their products by exploiting this habit loop. While I was reading the book, I happened to stop off at home, and accidently left it in my dad’s bathroom. My dad loves to read while he’s on the toilet, and picked the book up. It taught him about his habit loop, and he finally understood the cue (his car), routine (reaching into the car door, grabbing the cigarettes and lighting one), and reward (nicotine creating a dopamine release in his brain) that were causing him to smoke. The next day he went to his car, took the cigarettes out, put miniature lollipops into the cigarette case, and never smoked again. The habit loop had been interrupted. A new, less-addictive habit had taken its place, and with that my father’s health outcomes had drastically improved.
Whether my father realised it or not, the science shows that the most important thing he did was not trying to fight the habit, but replacing the final step of the habit loop with a much less addictive reward – the lollipops. Some incredible new scientific research has revealed just how foolish it is to try and fight your bad habits – and why people always seem to rebound when they do. Have you ever noticed that when you focus too much on stopping something, you ultimately end up rebounding and do it more? This is because we are action-oriented creatures, not inaction-oriented creatures. Tali Sharot said to me: To get something good in life – whether it’s a chocolate cake or a promotion – we usually need to take action and do something to earn it. Consequently, our brain has adapted to understand that action is related to reward. So when we expect something good, a “go” signal is activated, which makes us more likely to act – and act fast.
Sharot describes an experiment where volunteers were told they could either press a button to get a reward (one dollar) or press a button to avoid a negative action (losing one dollar). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the volunteers who pressed the button to get the reward did so much more speedily than the volunteers who pressed the button not to lose the dollar. The brain associates rewards with action, so you need to pair an action with a reward. Additionally, some studies have shown that the more you try to suppress an action or thought, the more likely you are to take the action, or think about that thought. This is great evidence for the power of manifestation – you get what you think about – but it’s also further evidence that trying to fight or not think about a habit is a foolish strategy.
A 2008 study in Appetite found that the group of volunteers who tried not to think about eating ate more than the group who didn’t. The first group exhibited what is called a “behavioural rebound effect”. Similarly, a 2010 study in Psychological Science found that the group of smokers who tried not to think about smoking actually thought about it even more than the group who didn’t.
This reminds me of a small piece of advice my driving instructor said to me when I was 18: “Steven, the car will go where your eyes are looking. If you want to avoid crashing into the cars on the side of the road, don’t focus on the cars on the side of the road, because you will veer towards the parked cars on the side of the road. Look forward, into the distance, where you want the car to go.” This seems like a fitting analogy for breaking and making habits: You will end up doing the thing you’re focusing on, so don’t focus on stopping smoking, don’t forget it; focus on the behaviour you want to replace it with.
Excerpted with permission from The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life, Steven Bartlett, Penguin Random House.