CHARLES DUHIGG’S : THE POWER OF HABIT

Charles Duhigg is a famous reporter at The New York Times and the non-fiction author of two books. In The Feast 2013 he talks about his book “The Power Of Habit”, which is about the neurology of habit formation. In order to change a habit you have to break it down and make it different. He explained this with the help of an experiment performed by Dr. Ann Graybiel,  foremost neurologist and a researcher at MIT, did a surgery on a rat to observe the neurological activity. She operated 75 sensors into a rats cranium and put it in a simple maze designed by her.  After surgery that rat found the chocolate in a maze in about 30 minutes, at first it took time to find the chocolate, but after many turns it become the habit. She repeated the procedure again and again 150 times per rat. He said that forty to forty five percent of what we do on daily basis is a habit. Every habit has three parts, firstly cues which act as trigger, other is routine when person can’t help but thrive for something addictive on daily basis, lastly reward  which one can gain in the end. A habit can be change, if you identify the cues and rewards. Willpower plays important role in changing one’s habit. He explained the Willpower by a Marshmallow experiment performed by a researcher in which she gave marshmallows to students and asked them to resist it for about 10 minutes in reward she will give them another one. Only one kid could resist and rewarded later. Many years later she found out that the kids were doing much better than other in high schools, universities which were able to resist the marshmallow for longer time.  They have more willpower than their peers. This explained us that we can use willpower to override a habit with new behaviour. The author said cravings are what drive habits and to stop it willpower plays a major role. According to Charles Duhigg :

“Willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success”