How to change your habits: why they form and how to build or break them | Charles Duhigg, M.B.A

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterattiamd.com/subscribe. My guest this week is Charles Duhigg. Charles is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and the author of several best-selling books, including The Power of Habit and Smarter, Faster, Better, and most recently Super Communicators. He is one of the most trusted voices on the science of behavior change, performance, and decision-making. He's known for translating complex psychological and neuroscience research into actionable insights that improve everyday life. I wanted to have Charles on the show because habits are the foundation for integrating nearly everything we talk about on this podcast when it comes to improving lifespan and health span, whether it's exercise, nutrition, sleep, or emotional regulation. If the behavior doesn't stick, the benefits won't accrue. In this episode, we discuss the neuroscience of habit formation, how cue, routine, reward loops govern nearly half our daily behaviors, and why understanding this loop is integral to behavior change. Why positive reinforcement is 20 times more effective than punishment, and how to harness rewards to build lasting habits. How the military, Alcoholics Anonymous, and behavior change research structure environments to transform behaviors at scale. Willpower as a finite mental muscle, how it gets fatigued, and how environment shapes its effectiveness, and how to preserve it for when it matters most. The myth of 21 days to form a habit, and the truth about timeline, relapse, and learning through failure. Building better habits with your kids, teaching them how to identify cues and rewards, and modeling failures as data for learning. The power of social accountability and coaching in habit change, and why self-judgment is counterproductive to lasting success. Creating cognitive routines that foster deeper thinking, productivity, and innovation. Featuring lessons from elite pilots, parents, and writers. How to gamify long-term goals like saving money or taking blood pressure meds, using short-term rewards and narrative cues. The relationship between identity, purpose, and behavior, and why meaning is often the most powerful habit reinforcer of all. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Charles Duhigg.
Charles, thank you so much for making the trip out to Austin.

**Charles Duhigg** (3:24)
Thank you for having me. This is such a treat.

**Peter Attia** (3:26)
In many ways, you're kind of the OG guy when it comes to talking about habit formation. It's hard to believe we were just talking a moment ago that it's been 13 years since your amazing book on the subject matter. I probably read it eight years ago, but it's a topic that is relevant regardless of what you do. That said, for what I do, what my job is and how I try to sort of help people, it really comes down to knowing what to do and then putting it into practice. Give folks a bit of a sense of your background and maybe even how that factored into you taking an interest in this topic.

**Charles Duhigg** (4:03)
Yeah, absolutely. So before I wrote The Power of Habit, I had been a reporter for quite a while, and a business reporter and a science reporter in particular.
I decided to become a journalist after I went to Harvard Business School and I got my MBA. About halfway through business school, I realized it's a lot more fun to write about business than to do it. So I decided to become a journalist. One of the things that I noticed as I was writing, I was working at the New York Times at that point. One of the things I noticed because I had spent time overseas in Iraq during the war, I had reported on a bunch of different things. I had two experiences that really got me interested in habits. The first is that when I was in Iraq, I got embedded with a unit that was right outside of Baghdad. And I was talking to a captain there, actually he was a major. I was asking him, how do you train soldiers to become soldiers? Because one of the things that you see in a war zone in particular, anyone who's spending time around the military, is that the behaviors are so deeply ingrained. The goal is to ingrain a set of behaviors that if a bomb goes off, which happened underneath my car, everyone around you, the 50, 18 year olds around you, who probably don't know how to do anything with their lives, they know exactly what to do in that moment, and they react automatically. And so I was talking to this major, and he's this little short guy, and he's really muscular, he jaws all the time. And I said, how do you do this? And he said, well, the thing you have to understand, son, because he called me son, the thing you have to understand is, the military is a giant habit change machine. This is what we do. We teach young recruits who maybe don't have any self-discipline, maybe prone to emotional upheavals, we teach them the right habits, and we've made a science of it. And when I came back to the US, I kind of had this experience where I was thinking about that, and I was thinking to myself, if I'm so smart and so talented, right? If I have this great job and I win these awards, why can't I get myself to lose weight? Why can't I get myself to go running in the morning every day? Why is this such a struggle for me when I'm so good at other things? And I realized it was because I had not learned and studied how habits function in my own habits, and that once I learned that, I had the tools to change how I behave automatically, which is of course the most important component of our behavior because it's what we do every day.