#1 Habit Expert: Here's how you become dramatically better

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, Charles, I want to show you something. So in 2014, I wrote about how I lost weight. But previously, I used your book a year before because I had a little bit of a drinking issue, and it frankly was kind of ruining my life. And I read your book, and the idea of the habit loop changed my life. And that's why I'm so excited to talk to you.
Your book changed my life probably more than any book I've ever read. And I have read probably thousands of books. So I'll tell you the story. So basically, yeah, I had like an issue with alcohol. And I read your book. And you can correct me if I'm wrong. But the way that I distinctly remember it is that a habit doesn't go away. You just have to change part of the routine and replace it.

**Charles Duhigg** (0:50)
That's exactly right.

**Sam Parr** (0:52)
One of the ways that people continue being stuck on this treadmill, and this sounds very oversimplified, but it's true in my case.
Like you start like craving carbohydrates the day after you drink. Like you still crave, because I was drinking like 20 beers a day, and I still craved like the sugar. And so I actually just made a small habit. Every time I wanted to drink alcohol, a beer, I ate a pack of M&Ms. And that like sugar replacement actually helped me like kick booze. Then I replaced that with non-alcoholic beer. And I got fat along the way, but I was like, I'll get fat, and then I'll kick that habit later.

**Charles Duhigg** (1:26)
I love this, because you're exactly right. So for folks who aren't familiar with it, the habit loop is what research tells us is that every habit in our life, and about 40 to 45 percent of what we do every day is a habit. Every habit has these three components. There's a cue, which is like a trigger for the automatic behavior. And then the routine, right? Picking up the beer and drinking it, or going for a run if you have an exercise habit.
And when we do that, it delivers a reward to us. Every habit in your life delivers a reward, whether you're aware of it or not. And over time, our brain begins to associate this cue, this routine, and this reward into a little package that happens almost automatically inside our brain.
And at the core of it, you're exactly right. Is this craving?
And there's a woman named Dr. Anne Grabeel at MIT who's done research on habits. And what she's found is that if you create a habit in say a rat's brain for running a maze, and then you remove it from the maze for literally years, and then bring it back and drop it in the maze again, that habit re-emerges instantaneously. And it's because this cue, routine, and reward, the neural pathways associated with those three things have gotten thicker and thicker and thicker. And so when you start trying to extinguish a habit, and you just say, I'm going to stop drinking, just I'm going to white-knuckle it and give up cigarettes, because that neural pathway still exists, you still have that craving, you still have that urge. So you're exactly right. The key is, don't try and extinguish the habit, rather try and change it, find a new behavior, like eating M&Ms, that corresponds to the old cue, and that delivers something similar to the old reward. And in doing so, you're kind of overriding that neural pathway inside your brain.

**Sam Parr** (3:11)
And I did this with the help of a doctor. And I was like, look, the doctor was like, just get fat for a little while, we'll figure that out later. So I got fat. And then that's when I wrote this blog post of how I lost weight. And the way that I lost weight, it was very simple. You had this idea called a Keystone Habit, which I don't know if you invented that term, but that's crazy because it's like a term that everyone uses now. But basically my Keystone Habit was that I would put my running shoes next to my bed and then I would sleep in my workout gear that morning. So when I woke up, I was in my running gear or in my workout gear, and then when my feet touched the floor, they went into the shoes.

**Charles Duhigg** (3:51)
Yeah, that's a really smart cue. And yeah, I actually did come up with a phrase Keystone Habit.

**Sam Parr** (3:57)
Did you really? That's awesome.

**Charles Duhigg** (3:58)
Well, my wife is a biologist and there's this concept of Keystone Species. And so I was talking through this idea, which exists in the scientific literature, but had never been kind of called this. And we were like, it's kind of like a Keystone Habit. But what I love about what you just said is that, so there's a writer named David Epstein, who he's written a bunch of books. He will also sleep in his workout clothes. And it's because that cue, when you wake up and you throw your feet out of bed and you're already in your clothes, that cue, it just makes it so easy to like take the next step and like go out the door, right? Like you probably at this point, when you are running, you're not even thinking about running as you start. You're just kind of on autopilot. You're doing what feels natural. And this is the power of habits, is that we can choose these behaviors that we want to encourage.