From Joe: It’s counterintuitive. Attack a bad habit such overeating when you are on vacation? That’s when most of us put on the pounds! Yet this is exactly the kind of advice that New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg provided when he was recently interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
In his new book, “The Power of Habit,” Duhigg reviews up-to-the-minute information from the cognitive sciences about how habits are formed and broken. A key element in this process is the brain’s predisposition to conserve energy by automating behaviors which you perform with regularity. By turning these behaviors into automaticities, the brain conserves your decision-making resources for when they are needed to face novel challenges in life.
From Gross’ interview on NPR:
That’s one of the reasons why taking a vacation is so relaxing: It helps break certain habits.
“It’s also a great reason why changing a habit on a vacation is one of the proven most-successful ways to do it,” he says. “If you want to quit smoking, you should stop smoking while you’re on a vacation — because all your old cues and all your old rewards aren’t there anymore. So you have this ability to form a new pattern and hopefully be able to carry it over into your life.”
Neuroscientists have traced our habit-making behaviors to a part of the brain called the basal ganglia… Decisions, meanwhile, are made in a different part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. But as soon as a behavior becomes automatic, the decision-making part of your brain goes into a sleep mode of sorts.
“In fact, the brain starts working less and less,” says Duhigg. “The brain can almost completely shut down. … And this is a real advantage, because it means you have all of this mental activity you can devote to something else.”
In effect, you lose decision-making power over your own behavior the moment that the behavior gets formed into a habit.
Worse yet, once a habit is formed, other people might be in a better position to control your life than you yourself are! Their brains are not your brain. They can apply more decision-making power to your habits than you can do yourself.
“Companies are very, very good — better than consumers themselves — at knowing what consumers are actually craving,” Duhigg told Gross. Companies can also figure out how to get consumers to change their own habits and form new ones… The megastore Target, for example, tries to target pregnant women, says Duhigg, in order to capture their buying habits for the next few years.
Analysts at Target figured out that women who buy certain products — vitamins, unscented lotions, washcloths — might be pregnant and then can use that information to jump-start their marketing campaign.
This can get tricky: One father was upset after receiving coupons for baby products in the mail from Target addressed to his teenage daughter.
“He went in and said, ‘My daughter is 16 years old. Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?’ and the manager apologizes,” Duhigg says. “The manager calls a couple of days later … and the father says, ‘I need to apologize. … I had a conversation with my daughter, and it turns out there’s some things going on in my house that I wasn’t aware of. She’s due in August.’ So Target figured it out before her dad did.”
So what it amounts to is that the less control you have over your own habits, the more easily you can be controlled by others!
The excellent story and a podcast are available at NPR’s Fresh Air