Creating and Breaking Habits
It is about the science behind how habits are formed.
This is the third of the summary of the book: Atomic Habits.
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There are four steps to creating a habit: cue, craving, response, and reward.
This is how this works.
- Cue is a signal or an information that you get first.
- Craving is the motivation to do this thing or what’s going to make you do it.
- Response is the action you take after you decide to do a thing.
- Reward is what you get thereafter.
To break down these four steps, let’s use the example of a gambler.
The first step is cue. Cue could mean different things to different people.
Imagine that a gambler gets to a place (it could be a mall) and hears the sound of the gambling machine.
Someone who is not a gambler could hear that same sound and it would mean nothing to them.
But for someone who is a gambler, that machine sound sends an information that there’s something there.
This gambler is interested and the next thing is that they start to crave playing a game.
If they take action, they respond and finally, there could be a reward for playing.
Following these four steps solidifies the habit. It’s also the same if one wants to break free from a habit.
Cue is what you first see; it’s like a trigger and if you want to form an habit the thing you need to do about a cue is to make it more visible.
The next one is the craving. After you make the cue or trigger obvious, the next thing is to make it attractive. It them becomes a craving.
Then the next is response. To form a habit you have to make it easy for you to respond and for the reward, you have to make it satisfying.
If the reward is not satisfying enough, there is no way you would take an action that will lead to the final result that can help you form a habit.
It’s the same when you want to break a habit.
If you want to break a habit, make the trigger invisible so that you don’t see it.
The craving is attractive, you make it unattractive.
For the response, instead of making it easy, you make it difficult. You try your best to make it difficult for you to respond.
To the next…
Share this with everyone who haven’t gotten a chance to read Atomic Habits but would be interested in a book summary.
Catch you in the next one.
I plan to do this as a 13-day series. So, in 13 days, you can learn all about the book like you read it yourself. This is Day 3.
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