The Power of Habit

This post is dedicated to my lovely hobby of reading. I'm always reading something. These days though, it has been mostly academic material, however, I try to get some non-academic literary nourishment as often as I can. Most times that means short stories and / or short romance novels. Today, however, was not one of those days. Today I completed an extremely powerful book called 'THE POWER OF HABIT: Why we do what we do and how to change' by Charles Duhigg.

On October 16, 2014 I had a conversation with a high school friend on Facebook. We hadn't seen each other in years and just did a bit of catching up. We were both students pursuing post graduate degrees at the time, albeit in different parts of the globe. We both had struggles relating to school and I remember telling her that I was having problems with time management and productivity. As a solution to this problem I was finding things to fill up my schedule so that I would be forced to be more productive with the little time I had for each task. My plan was to create habits of going to the gym every night, working two part time jobs, studying Japanese more seriously and attending language classes, in addition to working on my thesis.

In essence, I wanted to change my habits. I told my friend about how I had lost motivation and how hard it was to work on my thesis. I went to school everyday, but most days were not productive. My friend then told me that she also went through something similar and suggested that I waste time productively by reading a non-wishy washy book called 'The Power of Habit'. She even sent me the link to the book on Amazon. I thanked her for it and decided not to buy it. A few months later, as I idly browsed the isle of English books at a bookstore in town, I saw 'The Power of Habit' on the shelf staring at me. It was fate, I had to buy it. So I started reading in 2015.


The book started well and it definitely wasn't some wishy washy psychological mumbo jumbo. The message of the book was not 'be strong and just break that silly habit that harms you'. 'The Power of Habit' explains the inner workings of the brain via various stories and studies. In fact, the first story is about a man who has lost his memory due to a brain infection from viral encephalitis. The book revealed how our BASAL GANGLIA works and how this part of our brains retain our habits and even if we lose our memory, this part of the brain will more than likely remember certain habits, like going for a walk at a specific time every day or eat breakfast several times a day simply because the right cue was present.

The Power of Habit is so well written that it reminds me of a perfect piece of patchwork sheet. The finished product is a beautiful compilation of different stories with the same thread of thoughts running through it. The book explores how habits affected toothpaste promotion and usage, Febreeze acceptance into households, people's shopping behaviour, gambling behaviour, sleep terrors and over eating, among others. It links many studies to the concept of habit and explains the simple yet difficult way in which habits are formed and broken.

It is a very good book to read and it keeps you hooked on reading because of the ever changing stories. It's also very timely, in that it talks about Target (the store), Obama, casino gambling, febreeze, among others. It opened my eyes to little things that are obvious yet obscure and ended on a very interesting and fitting note:

"There are two young fish swimming along 

and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, 

who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' 

The two young fish swim on for a bit, 

and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes

 'What the hell is water?'" 

(Duhigg, 2013, pp. 273)

Charles Duhigg pointed out that in this scenario, the water represents habits -"the unthinking choices and invisible decisions that surround us everyday - and which, just by looking at them, become visible again. "Water hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper; and after having ceased to flow, it resumes, when it flows again, the path traced by itself before" (Duhigg, 2013, pp. 274) This flow of water (habit), however, may be redirected, if we are aware of it and consciously decide to carve out a new pathway for it to flow.