The first book on my list of "Goodreads' Summaries" is Charles Duhigg's legendary book on habits. Throughout this list, I will be reviewing and summarizing books that have either changed my life completely (altered my daily routine, widened my vision, gave me a brand new mission to work towards, etc.) or touched my soul.

There is a straightforward neurological loop at the core of every habit. This loop consists of three parts: a cue, a routine, and a reward. To change a habit, you should identify what triggers it. This is the cue. Something which signals the brain that there will be a reward at the end. (essentially something that creates a craving) It is the first domino.

This loop is quite crucial because it reveals a fundamental truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It diverts its energy and focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit - unless you find new routines - the pattern will unfold automatically.

The cue and the reward are connected directly. So much so, that the brain forgets there even is a routine in between. In most scenarios, the routine is the easiest one to identify: It's the behavior you want to change.

In his book, Duhigg's framework for changing a habit is as follows:

Identify the routine
Experiment with rewards
Isolate the cue

"If you anticipate nothing, you will never be dissappointed."
A small note that I took for myself from The Power of Habit

And he divides habits into three subcategories in terms of their implications:

Habits of Individuals
Habits of Organizations
Habits of Societies

The main goal of this summary is to teach you the necessary methods to alter a habit you currently have or develop another one.

Before we get started, I'm telling you that you have to believe you could change a habit. This is not some affirmation or positive thinking. There has been countless studies on nicotine-dependent people, alcoholics, and even on drug addicts that show how plausible it is to change an addiction let alone a habit if and only if you have faith.

1. Identify the Routine

Routine is always the easiest to identify. It is the behavior you want to change or get rid of. For example, eating doughnuts, watching too much TV, Youtube addiction, sluggishness, being indecisive, so on and so forth.

It's best to explain the framework by an anecdote. "Let's say you have a bad habit like Charles did when he started researching for this book, of going to the cafeteria and buying a chocolate chip cookie every afternoon. Let's say this habit has caused you to gain a few pounds. You've tried to stop yourself - you even went so far as to put a Post-it on your computer that reads no more cookies.

But every afternoon you manage to ignore that note, get up, and, while chatting with your colleagues around the cash register, eat it. It feels good, and then it feels bad. Tomorrow, you promise yourself, you'll muster the willpower to resist. Tomorrow will be different."

To start diagnosing this habit, you should first identify the behaviour you want to change, which is quite obvious: get up from the desk, walk to the cafeteria, buy a chocolate chip cookie, and eat it while chatting with friends.

Less obvious to ask is what is the cue in here? Boredom? A drop in blood sugar? That you need a break before plunging into another task? What about the reward? The cookie itself? Change of scenery? A temporary distraction? Socializing with colleagues? Or a burst of energy that comes from the sugar? To figure this out we have to experiment a little bit.

2. Experiment with Rewards

Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings. Most cravings are also obvious in retrospect, but incredibly hard to see when we are under their sway. It's important to experiment with rewards in order to understand which cravings drive which habits.

Next time, go buy an apple instead of a cookie and eat it with your friends. Or instead of walking to the cafeteria, walk around the block and then go back without eating anything. Try a cup of coffee. Just walk over to your friend's desk, chit chat for a few minutes and go back to your desk.

It doesn't matter what you choose to do instead of buying a cookie. The point is to figure it the craving. Are you craving the cookie itself, or a break from work? If it's the cookie, is it because you're hungry or you just want the burst of energy that the cookie provides. (If so, the coffee should suffice.) Or are you wandering up to the cafeteria to socialize, and the cookie is just an excuse. (rationalization as a defence mechanism, if you're interested in neuroscience and psychology.)

After you try out different rewards you can use the oldest trick in the book to look for patterns. Jot down the first three things that come to mind after the activity, whether they be emotions, random thoughts, reflections on how you're feeling, or just the first three words that pop into your head. Then set an alarm for fifteen minutes and reconsider if you still have the urge to have that cookie.

Writing down is crucial because of two things: First, it forces a moment of awareness of what you are feeling or thinking. Second, it increases the likelihood of recalling what you were thinking at that moment.

The fifteen-minute wait is there to determine the reward you're craving. If fifteen minutes after eating ice cream or a doughnut, you still feel the urge to go to the cafeteria, then your habit isn't fuelled by a sugar craving. On the other hand, if fifteen minutes after chatting with a friend, you find it easier to go back to work, you've identified the reward - temporary distraction and socialization - that your habit is fuelled by.

3. Isolate the Cue

To find what triggers your habit, you have to eliminate the noise. Meaning that in order to establish or see a pattern you have to get rid of some factors. Luckily, science offers some help in this regard. Experiments have shown that almost all habitual cues fit into one of five categories:

Location
Time
Emotional State
Other people
Immediately preceding action

Try asking yourself these questions to find the pattern:

Where are you?
What time is it?
What's your emotional state?
Who else is around?
What action preceded the urge?

After writing answers to all of these questions for a few days you'll start to notice some things. The approximate time of the day when the urge kicks in, how you were feeling and what you were doing right before it, where you were when it happened, etc. As Charles points out, his habit was kicking in between 3:00 - 4:00 P.M. He had also found out, by trial and error in step 2, that the routine wasn't fuelled by hunger. All he urged was a temporary distraction and socialization. Therefore, he devised a plan. He set an alarm to 3:30 P.M., went to a friend's desk, chatted with them, and then came back. After some time, this became his new altered routine and his habit has changed.

Therefore, The Golden Rule of habit change is this: "Use the same cue, provide the same reward, change the routine."