The Science of Habit Change, Why GLP-1s are Disrupting It, and How To Use It To Have Better Conversations | Charles Duhigg

**Dan Harris** (0:03)
Hello, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. We talk a lot on this show about habit formation. Why? Because this process bedevils so many of us. We know we should do things like meditate or exercise or get more sleep, and yet somehow, inexplicably, we don't do those things. And that is why habit formation is such a key topic and why we come back to it so often Today, my guest literally wrote the book on habit formation. He wrote a massive bestseller called The Power of Habit.
He also wrote a book, another bestseller called Supercommunicators. And we're going to talk today about how to connect habit formation to your communication style. And perhaps most fascinatingly, we're going to talk about what Glp-1s might be revealing about how and why we change our habits. We have a lot here to discuss with my guest, Charles Duhigg. Charles, welcome back to the show.

**Charles Duhigg** (1:05)
Thanks for having me. It's always such a treat to get a chance to spend some time with you.

**Dan Harris** (1:09)
All right, before we get to all the stuff about Glp-1s, which I am really curious about, let's just talk about the basics of habit formation and how to make good habits and break bad ones. Before we get super practical, which we will, just to put this in perspective, I saw a statistic while researching this, and you'll tell me if it's correct, that 40% of daily human actions are habits rather than conscious decisions. Is that true?

**Charles Duhigg** (1:36)
That's absolutely true.
Even worse, it's 40-45%. That's from research that a woman named Wendy Wood who's now at USC did. You're exactly right. When you think about it, much of what you do as you go through your day is not these calm, deliberate decisions, it's that you're doing things instinctually, automatically. In fact, if we didn't have the ability to do that, we would be in a terrible place. We would not have evolved to become humans. There's a part of our brain named the basal ganglia that exists in every single mammal.
This region of the brain basically exists just to make habits. Because without the ability to stop thinking about some behaviors, we simply don't have enough neurological cognitive horsepower to make it through the world. So this is how our body has dealt with that. Is it makes certain decisions into habits, and then that gives us the free time to think about inventing fire, or making music, or inventing video game consoles.

**Dan Harris** (2:41)
Right, so if we had to remember how to turn a doorknob 75 times a day, we'd be kind of fucked.

**Charles Duhigg** (2:47)
Oh, absolutely, or even worse, if you were walking down the path and you saw an apple and a rock and you had to decide which one of them to pick up and eat, right? There's real dangers to not being able to form habits.

**Dan Harris** (2:58)
I think you talk about this in your book that there's an interesting distinction between the part of the brain that retains memory and the part of the brain where we retain habits.

**Charles Duhigg** (3:11)
Absolutely, absolutely. So much of what we think of as actual thought occurs in the prefrontal cortex, right? That's where we, that's where our language, our ability to sort of speak with other people comes from, our ability to form and remember those memories. But much of the brain exists in older structures that predate speech, that predate what we think of as conscious thought. And there's a story in the book, Power of Habit, about a patient who, because of a surgery he had undergone, had complete amnesia. He basically couldn't remember anything longer than about five or 10 seconds. And yet, when researchers watched him, what they would find is that if they told him, here's a toy, I'm gonna hide it. Do you remember where we hid it? He'll say, no, I have no idea what you're talking about. And yet he was able to find the bathroom on his own. He was able to make himself breakfast in the morning. If he went on a walk, as long as he took the same route, he could walk by himself and find his way back home. And they couldn't understand how this was possible. How can a guy who can't remember what happened literally just minutes ago, how can he remember how to find the path home? And from this came one of our big discoveries, which is that much of the neural encoding of habits lies in a distinct region of our brain beyond where we think of as storing memories or conscious or deliberate thought.