Charles Duhigg The Power Of Habit Summary

578 Words3 Pages
Summary The Power of Habit concentrates on how habits are formed in our day-to-day lives and what it takes to change those habits. The author, Charles Duhigg, talks about how the choices we make aren’t always choices, but habits that impact happiness, productivity, and financial security. In the prologue of the book, the author starts off by giving an example of what habits can do, and how changing a “keystone habit” can have a major impact. In the first example, Charles talks about a woman who was in debt, obese, and didn’t have a job, and how in four years she had flipped her whole life upside down just by trading her smoking habit with a jogging habit. The change of one single habit led to changing in the way this woman ate, worked, slept, and save…show more content…
Charles then explains how habits are formed; they start with a cue, follow a routine, and then find a reward. Habits aren’t typically intentionally formed, and once there is an understanding of how they are formed, the forming process can be interrupted and the habit can be changed. For the habit to be changed, the cue has to remain the same, as does the reward, but the routine, which is the bad or undesired trait, can be changed resulting in a new habit. One of the ways that habits are formed is through repetition. If a task is repeated enough times it becomes engraved into the mind and becomes a habit. Habits learned through repetition are difficult to break since it creates grooves in mind and to break the habit, it takes large levels of repetition to create new grooves. The hardest habits to break are compulsions and addictions since the behaviors are so rewarding. The easiest habits to change are those that obey social norms since they aren’t necessarily engraved into our minds. A change of accepted social norms in society is all it takes to change these habits, regardless of the reason the social norms
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