How We Can Improve Communication in Polarized Times with Charles Duhigg

In this episode, Charles Duhigg explains how we can improve communication in polarized times. He explores how to foster active listening, social reciprocity, and techniques like “looping for understanding.” The conversation covers different types of conversations, the importance of focusing on common ground, and strategies for building and changing habits. Charles also shares insights on handling online conflict, the psychology of identity threat, and how intentional communication and habit design can improve relationships and personal well-being.

Key Takeaways:

• Importance of active and ostentatious listening in conversations.
• Concept of social reciprocity and its role in effective communication.
• Techniques for improving dialogue, such as “looping for understanding.”
• Different types of conversations: practical, emotional, and social.
• The idea of meta conversation and setting clear goals for discussions.
• Strategies for focusing on common ground before addressing differences.
• The impact of politeness in online communication and reducing hostility.
• Understanding identity threat and its effects on open dialogue.
• The habit loop framework: cue, routine, and reward in habit formation.
• The significance of implementation intentions in managing habits and responses.

Charles Duhigg is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and was previously a reporterat the New York Times where he won a Pulitzer prize for explanatory reporting in 2013. He has appeared on This American Life, N.P.R., The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and Frontline. His latest book is Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.

Connect with Charles Duhigg: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter

If you enjoyed this conversation with Charles Duhigg, check out these other episodes:

Oren Jay Sofer on Mindful Communication

How to Unlock the Power of Deeper Connections with David Brooks

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Episode Transcript:

Charles Duhigg 00:00:00  When somebody proves to us that they’re listening to us. When someone is polite to us, we have an instinct to listen back to them, to be polite to them, back in return. So one of the things that we have to do is instead of just listening, we have to ostentatiously listen. We have to prove that we’re listening.

Chris Forbes 00:00:25  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:10  I have a confession. I’ve gotten pretty cynical about certain conversations because here’s what usually happens I try to listen, I ask questions, I’m genuinely curious, and the other person just keeps talking. There’s no reciprocity. No. What do you think? It feels less like a dialogue and more like I’m just absorbing someone’s monologue. My guest today is Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit and Super Communicators, and he said to me something I’d never really considered. Maybe they just don’t know how to ask questions back. Maybe they need permission. That really helped reframe some things for me. We also talk about why your exercise habit still requires effort, even though you’ve done it a thousand times how 12 step programs are essentially habit rewiring, and why some online conversations could be fixed with basic politeness. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi Charles, welcome to the show.

Charles Duhigg 00:02:12  Thanks for having.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:13  Me. I’m happy to have you back on. We’re going to be discussing your latest book, Super Communicators, which we talked about in a previous episode, but I’d like to talk about it in the context of how we talk to each other in an increasingly polarized time.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:28  And I also want to talk about your classic book that I think is about 13 years old, but the audio book you just rerecorded in your voice, The Power of Habit, which is a topic that I’m always thinking about. But before we do that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Charles Duhigg 00:03:16  Well, you know, we’re going to be talking a little bit about polarization today.

Charles Duhigg 00:03:19  And I think that polarization is a great example of this. Look, there is this instinct when we meet someone who believes something differently than we do, voted for someone different than we voted for to try and and beat them, right. To win, to to kind of raise the flag for our cause and defend it valiantly. And that can feel really good in the moment, but it does very little to make this nation better. Right. If you think about it, our country has always been its best. Not when we agree with each other, but when we disagree with each other cordially, when we know how to get along with our neighbors, even though we hold different opinions. And so, for me, I think that there is this, this feeling of wanting to win, wanting to be right. That’s the bad wolf. And the good wolf is the one that says, look, I want to have a conversation with you. I want to understand where you’re coming from, and I want you to understand where I’m coming from.

Charles Duhigg 00:04:08  And when we walk away from each other, we might not agree with each other. And that’s okay. Yeah. Because the goal here is understanding not for one person to be right and the other person to be wrong.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:17  So one of the things that I have found challenging is I agree with everything you just said. And I recognize, like making my point doesn’t actually work, right. I’m probably not going to convince anybody who thinks something differently, but the conversations seem to be like, everybody comes at everybody else. So like, I’m, I’m I’m not saying I’m a saint. I’m trying to be in a receptive listening position and the other person is not in that position. And so they do their thing. I might ask a couple questions, but there’s never not, never there’s very often no reciprocity where we’re having dialogue back and forth. And so I think about like, what do we do when the other person doesn’t want dialogue? Is it just you just don’t bother? Like, what do you think about that?

Charles Duhigg 00:05:04  So I think there’s two things.

Charles Duhigg 00:05:05  The first is there are times when people don’t want dialogue, right? When I tell my kids that I want to talk to them about their rooms, I don’t actually want to have a conversation about their rooms. I want them to go clean their rooms. Right. And so if you’re in a situation where the other person genuinely does not want to have a dialogue with you, there’s very little you can do. But that actually happens very, very infrequently. What often happens much more frequently is that we miss assume if the other person wants to have a dialogue or not. And you’re exactly right. Some people who are more talented at communication, more comfortable communication, what they can do is they can get into this pattern where they’re asking questions and the other person isn’t asking questions. And so what do we do at that moment? Well, there’s two things that we can do. The first is we all have in our brain hardwired into our neurology, this instinct for social reciprocity, which is when somebody proves to us that they’re listening to us when someone is polite to us.

Charles Duhigg 00:05:58  We have an instinct to listen back to them, to be polite to them, back in return. So one of the things that we have to do is instead of just listening, we have to ostentatiously listen. We have to prove that we’re listening. And there’s a technique for this known as looping for understanding. And I think we mentioned last time and it has these three steps, right. Step one is you ask a question. Step two is when the person answers that question. Afterwards you repeat back in your own words which you heard them say. And the goal here is not mimicry. The goal here is to prove to them that you’re paying attention, to prove to them that you’re actually thinking about what they’re saying. And most of us learn to do this somewhat intuitively. It’s step three that I always forget to do, which is when I’m done to say, hey, I’m just wondering, did I get that right? Did I understand you correctly? Because what I’m doing in that moment is I’m asking them for permission to acknowledge that I was listening.

Charles Duhigg 00:06:49  And what I know is, if you acknowledge that I’m listening. That’s social reciprocity instinct in your brain. It will make you want to listen to me in return. So the best thing that we can do to get the other person to listen is we can prove that we’re listening by demonstrating that we’re listening. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, and I do this myself all the time, sometimes you get these these conversations. You ask question after question. The person doesn’t ask you any questions back. Now you might think, oh, maybe they’re just self-obsessed or maybe. But it might also be that they’re just they just don’t know how to ask questions or uncomfortable at it. They need permission. So oftentimes what I do in those situations is I say, oh, you know, I’ve been asking you so many questions. I’m sure you have some questions for me. Let me stop and give you a second to ask me some questions. And whenever I do that, inevitably I find the other person.

Charles Duhigg 00:07:36  They have lots of questions that they want to ask me. They just didn’t know really how to do it. They’re not socially at ease quite as much as I am, but when you invite them to ask you questions, what you find is it becomes a dialogue or it becomes a back and forth.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:48  That’s really great. I never thought of that second point really at all as like a way to invite them to do it and that they may simply not know how to do it. I’ve also sometimes wondered whether the fact like you just if I’m the one asking questions, the interaction takes a certain shape, and things that take a certain shape sometimes stay in that shape unless you consciously alter the shape well.

Charles Duhigg 00:08:16  And I think what we’re getting at here is what’s known as meta conversation, right? When we’re talking about talking. And when I say, oh, I’ve been asking you so many questions, you probably have some questions for me. I’m engaging in meta conversation. What I’m saying is let’s deliberately shape this conversation together.

Charles Duhigg 00:08:31  When I say, oh, look, the reason I wanted to talk to you today is because I really wanted to figure out where we should go on vacation for next year. That’s meta conversation. I’m announcing my goal for the conversation, and then I’m really well served to ask you what your goal is. Does that work for you, or is there anything else you wanted to talk about? When we engage in this meta conversation and the best communicators engage in meta conversation all the time, it doesn’t feel awkward. It doesn’t feel clumsy. It feels like we’re saying, hey, here’s what I’d like to talk about, or here’s how I’d like us to share with each other. And that actually feels very clarifying and good to everyone in the dialogue.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:03  Right. And this takes us kind of back to the heart of super communicators, which was that there are different types of conversations, and knowing what type of conversation you’re in is really important. And to your point, being able to to sort of name that and set up the right context for that type of conversation.

Charles Duhigg 00:09:21  Absolutely. What researchers have found is that when we’re having a discussion, we think we know what that discussion is about. We think we’re talking about where to go on vacation next year, what the budget should be. But actually, if you look inside our brains, what you see is we’re having multiple different kinds of conversations all at the same time. And in general, these different kinds of conversations, they tend to fall into one of three buckets. There are practical conversations where we’re making plans together or we’re solving problems, but then there’s also emotional conversations where I tell you what I’m feeling And I don’t want you to solve my feelings. I want you to empathize. And then finally, there’s social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to society. And all three of these different kinds of conversations are equally legitimate. But what researchers have found is if you’re not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, it’s almost impossible for you to really listen to each other.

Charles Duhigg 00:10:13  It’s almost impossible for you to feel connected to each other. Right. If I come home from work and I’m having a bad day, and I start complaining about my day, and my wife says, oh, here’s a solution. Like, you know, if you’re not getting along with your boss, just take your boss out to lunch. Odds are I’m not going to be able to hear what she’s saying. I’m going to get even more upset because I’m having an emotional conversation and she’s responding with a practical conversation. Yeah. And they’re both equally legitimate conversations. But we need to be having the same kind of conversation at the same moment. And within psychology, this has become known as the matching principle that says successful communication requires having the same kind of conversation at the same time.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:50  And what is a learning conversation.

Charles Duhigg 00:10:52  So a learning conversation is when I go into a conversation with the goal of wanting to understand how you see the world and wanting you to understand how I see the world, right? Oftentimes, if you think about it, when we get into a conversation, our goal is, I want to convince you that I’m right and maybe you’re wrong.

Charles Duhigg 00:11:08  I want to convince you that I’m smart. I want to convince you that you should like me. Those usually are not great conversations, right? The best conversations or conversations when I go in to say, look, I’m talking to you because I really want to learn who you are. And I might disagree with some of the stuff you say, but what’s more important to me than is telling you is trying to understand how you see the world. And then once I understand how you see the world, I want to speak in a way that you can understand how I see the world. And if we both walk away with understanding, then the conversation is 100% of a success. That’s a learning conversation.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:41  Got it. Makes sense. You have a couple rules that you posted. You have a Substack. I can’t remember what it’s called. The science.

Charles Duhigg 00:11:48  The science.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:49  Of better signs of.

Charles Duhigg 00:11:50  Better science.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:51  Is close. To put an extra word in there.

Charles Duhigg 00:11:53  That’s okay, you say.

Eric Zimmer 00:11:54  If you and a friend have very different opinions, you can talk about them and feel even closer afterwards.

Eric Zimmer 00:12:00  But you had something really interesting there, which is if you focus on your similarities first, then move to differences.

Charles Duhigg 00:12:07  Yeah, I think that’s really important. And, you know, and this comes from a study where they would pair these, these people who had very different political ideas. And for some of them they would say, okay, you guys have something in common and figure out what it is. And it was that they had the same they came from the same hometown, or they were both, you know, in the model trains or something like that. As soon as the two people figured out, like, oh, we have something in common. Then they moved on to their differences. Their differences were much easier to discuss. And this kind of makes sense, right? Because if I get into a conversation with you and we’re talking about politics and you voted for your person and I voted for my person, and that’s literally all I know about you, is that we voted for different people.

Charles Duhigg 00:12:45  That’s going to kind of overshadow the conversation. It’s going to overshadow my mental image of you and what I think I need to do in this conversation to stand up for my perspective. But if we start by saying, oh, hey, Eric, you know, I know you grew up in in Michigan and I grew up in Michigan. Like, I think we actually went to high schools in the same town. Now we have something in common then. And then when we start talking about our differences, that difference is not the overwhelming characteristic that typifies who I am and who you are. It’s just one of many elements. Right. And inevitably, we have something in common with everyone we bump into. We just have to figure out what it is. And once we’ve established that thing in common, we’re much more likely to have a productive and a useful conversation about what we disagree about and both walk away feeling better about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:31  It strikes me that even in established relationships, that might be a good idea.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:39  So, you know, I have friends who who feel differently than I do on key issues. And we have a long history together. And yet sometimes the conversation is about that thing. And it occurs to me as you’re talking that if I were to be warming the conversation up with like reflecting on the songs we used to listen to together when we were 16, I’ve brought the similarities to mind in a way.

Charles Duhigg 00:14:05  And you.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:05  Could even sort of latent otherwise.

Charles Duhigg 00:14:07  And you can even be more specific than that. You can say things like, and I say this with my wife all the time. We’re talking about where to go on vacation, okay? We both want to have a relaxing vacation, right? That’s our goal. Our goal is to have a relaxing vacation. And I know that, you know, for you, relaxing means by the beach. And for me, relaxing means being in the city where I can walk or walk around. But since we both have this goal in common, let’s see if we can figure out a place that satisfies both of our need for relaxation.

Charles Duhigg 00:14:31  So I don’t even have to talk about, like, you know, the songs we listen to when we’re 16, although that’s kind of fun and that’s a great thing we have in common. What I can do is just say, actually, we have the same goal in common, and we have hunches of different ways to achieve that goal. Once we know what we have in common, it’s a lot easier to. A lot easier to find the path that satisfies both of us.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:51  San Sebastian, Spain. That’s the. That’s the answer to your beach and see.

Charles Duhigg 00:14:55  Oh, yeah, I know I love San Sebastian. It’s. It is beautiful. The Basque Country is amazing. The surfing is great there. And then the ponchos.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:02  We talked about surfing on our last conversation. I learned the surf at San Sebastian about.

Charles Duhigg 00:15:09  Oh.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:10  About three years ago. And I think it’s kind of ruined me for all the other beaches because it is like the perfect beginner wave.

Charles Duhigg 00:15:18  Yeah, no, it’s a pretty nice place to learn.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:20  I mean, it’s just. Yeah. Anyway, let’s not go too far down the surfing rabbit hole here. The other thing that you talked about a little bit was when the, when we’re online, that even somebody inserting something positive into like a comment thread often changes the flavor of the whole thread.

Charles Duhigg 00:15:41  Yeah. And it’s, it’s not just positivity, it’s actually politeness. So there was this really interesting study that was done where they looked at editors on Wikipedia. Right. And the and people on Wikipedia, they get into arguments all the time, right, about what’s, what should be let in and what shouldn’t be let in. And so they were looking at the most heated arguments. And what they found was if just one person started saying please and thank you. It kind of changed the entire conversation, because as soon as one person is saying please or thank you again, this gets back to the social reciprocity. I kind of feel a little bit of an instinct to either say please and thank you myself, or at least not to be like, you’re a jerk.

Charles Duhigg 00:16:20  Thank you very much. Right? Like adding just a little bit of politeness really goes a long way. Now, there’s some other things that we know about online conversations and communication, which is number one. Sarcasm does not work online, right? Because if I say something sarcastic, you can hear the sarcasm in my voice. If I type something sarcastic and you’re reading it quickly, you think I’m being serious. And so that’s that’s a big thing, is dial down the sarcasm, dial up the politeness. And then also this meta conversation really works online, right? To say like, hey, look, I think we’re getting distracted here. The reason why I wanted to have this chat with you was because we need to figure out, like, what our lunch order. Right? That’s a meta conversation. And what you’re doing at that moment is you’re saying, oh, let’s reorient this so that we can communicate with each other.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:39  As we’re talking about this, I think it’s worth noting. And I sort of said it early on Like, these techniques aren’t magic.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:46  They’re not going to make somebody who’s just a true troll. Not a troll. Right? Yeah, but it’s going to shift the way that most people respond. There’s the outliers. But if we’re talking about how most people respond, they’re going to respond to, you know, as you mentioned, reciprocity and and politeness and.

Charles Duhigg 00:18:06  Yeah. No, I think that’s exactly right. I mean, one of the things that we know about studies of internet trolls is you don’t feed the trolls. If someone if someone is there just to, like, make you upset, your best policy is not to interact with them because that’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for a reaction. And if you deny that to them, hopefully they’ll move on to something else in their life. But that’s a very small percentage of people who actually fall into that category. Most people, they get online and they actually they want to be heard. They have something that they want to say, and at the same time, they want to see how people react to it and they want to see other people’s comments.

Charles Duhigg 00:18:41  And it’s very easy for that to spiral. If I say like, oh, just like every other liberal that just like all you want to do is like, make this country weaker or you’re just like every other conservative, you don’t, you don’t care about poor people. You don’t care about anyone besides yourself. What’s happening? There is something that’s known as identity threats. So identity threat is a feeling that we feel. And it feels like a threat. It feels like a it feels like it triggers our fight or flight response. When you force me into a group that I do not want to belong to, or you deny me membership in a group that I esteem against my will, it feels like a threat. So if I say, oh, you’re just like those conservatives who don’t care about poor people, I’m forcing you into this group that you might that you probably don’t want to belong to, of people who don’t care about poor people. Right? Or if I’m saying, oh, you know, you never went to law school.

Charles Duhigg 00:19:30  You don’t understand how the law works. Then what I’m doing is I’m denying you membership in a group that you do want to be a part of. People who understand how the law works, because you actually know a lot about the law. And when we engage in this identity threat, It’s really, really dangerous because what it does is rather than allowing me to listen to what you’re saying, it triggers that fight or flight response. And once that’s triggered, it’s very hard for me to calm that down.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:54  Yeah, I have found over the years. I mean, anybody who’s, you know, in a public position on the internet, I’m sure you have this happen to you all the time. I will get very upset emails from time to time from people. And I have found that 95% of the time, if I reply with a kind and thoughtful email like I just, I just let the I let the venom sort of run off and I look at what their key point was, and I respond with some degree of compassion or like, I’m sorry that it landed.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:27  You know, that 95% of the time I get an email back that is lovely, where the person’s like, I’m sorry I overreacted. You know, I just it really hit me wrong. But I, you know, like literally 95% of the time. Now, occasionally it doesn’t work, but most of the time, even what seems to be somebody that you’re like, well, how could they be that angry about what I said? A little bit of understanding and of willingness to say, hey, I care that it upset you. Goes a long way.

Charles Duhigg 00:20:57  I agree, I completely agree, and I think that there’s something important. What you just said that you let the venom run off. Now, the question is from the other person’s perspective, do they see that as venom? Right. Or from their perspective is they’re like they’re like, look, I you know, I heard you say this thing on the radio and I just feel like maybe, maybe you don’t know what my experience is like.

Charles Duhigg 00:21:16  Or maybe, maybe you weren’t exposed to the same facts I was exposed to. Or maybe you’re just mistaken. So from their perspective, it might not be venom. It might not be them saying, I think you’re the worst person on earth. It might be them saying, hey, look, you left out my perspective, and my perspective is important. And so I think that one of the things that happens, particularly when we engage in this looping understanding, when we try and show someone that we’re really paying attention to them, it’s much, much easier for us to see their best intentions. Because if my job is to listen to you closely enough that I can repeat back. Okay, here’s the argument that I think you’re making. This is why. This is why it seems like it matters to you so much. Am I getting that right? If I make that much effort, usually I’m seeing the world a little bit from your perspective. And that doesn’t mean I have to agree with your perspective, right? It doesn’t mean that I have to walk away and say, oh, I’ve changed my mind.

Charles Duhigg 00:22:05  But it does mean that you see you see that I’m trying to hear you, and you become much more likely to want to hear me in response.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:12  Yeah. The thing that makes me think venom is the ones when it really is that way. And most always, I get an apology. I most always will get an apology. Like, boy, I really, you know, right? I came at you pretty hard, you know, or.

Charles Duhigg 00:22:26  I reread, I reread what I wrote and it really came off a lot, a lot more angry than I intended.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:31  It. Exactly.

Charles Duhigg 00:22:32  Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s interesting because what they’re really saying there, I think is true, is I wrote this and I didn’t understand how you would read it until like a couple of hours later with a clear head. I reread it myself and I was like, oh man, that’s that’s way overboard, right? And it’s not so much that they that they, they think that you are bad or wrong as much as they’re in a hot moment.

Charles Duhigg 00:22:54  And we all get into those moments when we type something and then later on we’re like, I wish I’d phrase it differently.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:59  Yep. I used to have a rule. I’ve said this before on the show. It was back when I had a job in the software business, and I had a hard and fast rule. I could not hit send on any email after 5 p.m. that the subject was at all contentious. Yeah, because I just couldn’t trust myself at that point in the day to be able to even read myself clear enough.

Charles Duhigg 00:23:23  And if you said it, for if you save it for tomorrow morning, you wake up and you think, oh, that’s sentence. That’s exactly that’s a little over the top. I need to scale that back a little bit.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:31  Yes, yes. So yeah, from a cooler perspective we can read very differently. All right. So I would love to turn our attention to the book that you’re very well known for, which is The Power of Habit, which is 13 years old now.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:46  And I’d like to start by seeing if we could talk about what a habit is. Sure. At its most basic level, like what do you think of as a habit?

Charles Duhigg 00:23:58  So we use this word habit. And what we oftentimes don’t, don’t fully understand is that every habit has three components, right. We think of a habit as a behavior, but it’s actually three different things. There’s a cue which is like a trigger for a behavior to happen automatically. That’s the first part. Then there’s the routine, the behavior itself, what we think of as the habit. And then finally, every habit in our life delivers a reward to us. That’s the third part. And this is known as the habit loop. It’s the cue, the routine and the reward. And that means that when I walk past that one ice cream shop, I start anticipating. What a chocolate ice cream cone tastes like. So the queue is walking past the ice cream shop. The anticipated reward is that chocolate flavor. And so I kind of almost unthinkingly walk into the into the ice cream shop, and I buy an ice cream like I do every week when I walk past the shop.

Charles Duhigg 00:24:52  Right. Yeah. And that’s the routine. And it’s important because for a long time we focused on the behavior, the routine as something we should change. But what we’ve learned is that we get much more power in trying to influence the queue and the reward that if we can identify or diagnose the queue and the reward, if we can sort of fiddle with the gears, then that behavior, that routine becomes much easier to shift. And so that’s what a habit is. And.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:43  I like that point about CU being really important because it speaks to there being a consistent context. Yeah. Like something like brushing my teeth becomes a habit because the context of getting ready to go to bed happens every day. Buckling my seatbelt, getting in my car becomes habitual because I’m always sitting in a car, in a chair with a belt to my right. Right. Or you know. Right. And so I think that context thing is really important. And one of the things that I’ve worked with people with over the years, and I’d love to just hear you talk about, is that for a lot of people, particularly people like you, you’ve got a busy career, you’ve got kids who are, what, 13 and 9 or 9 and 12, 14, nine, 19.

Charles Duhigg 00:26:26  12, 14 and 17.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:27  Yeah. So your life is very busy. Our context shift a lot.

Charles Duhigg 00:26:32  Yeah.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:32  And and so how do we work to build a positive habit if our contexts don’t stand still very well.

Charles Duhigg 00:26:40  Well, okay. So what’s interesting is that so so let’s talk about where where how habits work in our brain. Yeah. There’s a part of the brain known as the basal ganglia. Every animal on Earth has a basal ganglia. And it evolved essentially just to create habits. Right. Because because if you can’t build habits, you basically can’t live. If you have to decide, like how to walk every single time you open the door, or if you have to decide every time you see a rock or an apple. Do I eat the rock or do I eat the apple? You’re so overwhelmed that you you just you can’t do anything.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:09  You have no teeth.

Charles Duhigg 00:27:10  Yeah. And you have no teeth. Exactly. So? So every creature that has succeeded has succeeded because they have a basal ganglia and the basal ganglia whose job is to make habits.

Charles Duhigg 00:27:18  So. Okay. So the basal ganglia is where this cued this routine and this reward get all linked together. Now the important thing is that when we’re talking about these cues, it doesn’t have to be the entire context, right? A cue usually falls into one of five categories. There’s a cue cuz oftentimes at the time of day, it’s a certain place, it’s a certain emotion you’re feeling. It’s the presence of certain people, or it’s a preceding behavior that’s become ritualized. Right. So let’s let’s talk about teeth brushing. I brush my teeth. If I take a shower and I don’t brush my teeth, I do not feel clean. Like right now, if I feel my teeth, I feel fine. But if I took a shower and I came out of the shower and I felt my teeth and I hadn’t, I didn’t have that minty feeling in my mouth, I would feel like, oh, the shower isn’t complete. I’m not totally clean yet. So for me, the cue for brushing my teeth has become associated with showering, right? And there’s probably other other cues as well in different settings.

Charles Duhigg 00:28:15  But but showering is a big one. Now, the thing is, I shower sometimes in the middle of the day. Sometimes I shower in the morning, sometimes I shower in a hotel room, sometimes I shower at home. So it doesn’t have to be exactly the same context for that cue to be powerful. And if someone’s trying to, for instance, change the habit in their own life or create a new habit, let’s say you want to go start exercising in the morning? The thing to think about is what cues am I going to create for myself? So am I going to? I’m going to put my running clothes right next to my bed, already laid out, so it’s super easy to get into them as soon as I wake up. Right? Or I’m going to I’m going to set the alarm for six instead of 615, so that I have an extra 15 minutes to to go into the garage and lift some weights. So I’m choosing a cue deliberately, and I might have a couple of different, cuz I might be a time of day and and a certain place and a certain behavior.

Charles Duhigg 00:29:05  I’m going to see which one will stick. And then equally importantly, is to decide what reward I’m going to give myself as soon as the exercise is done right. Okay. As soon as I’m done exercising, I’m going to let myself have one of those chocolate protein shakes that I really, really like, or a nice smoothie or something like that. And the reason why that’s important is because oftentimes when we’re trying to build a habit, we don’t give ourselves a reward afterwards, we sort of assume that the behavior itself should be reward enough, but our brain pays attention to rewards, and if we’re not giving ourselves a reward, our brain says, I’m not going to make this behavior easier. I’m not going to link these things together. So choosing a cue and choosing a reward is really, really important in building a new habit.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:49  I’ve asked this question of many different people on the show, and it’s this if reward theory is correct, which I believe it certainly is to some degree. Every single time I’ve exercised in my life, within minutes of being done, I have thought, I’m glad I did, that I feel better.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:09  Yeah. And yet, I mean, and I’ve got thousands of reps at this point, decades of reps of like 100%. I still have to very often. It just takes more friction to get me over the line than it seems like it should have to be for something that’s got such a high reward. What’s going on?

Charles Duhigg 00:30:31  I’d say a couple things. First of all, my guess is that when you first started exercising, you did not feel great after you. After you did all those sit ups, right? So what happens oftentimes is that we need an external reward at first. If I do 1010 sit ups, I’m going to let myself have a smoothie. And over time, our brain kind of comes to realize, oh, actually, if I do ten sit ups, I feel pretty good. Like, it actually releases endorphins and endocannabinoids and all dopamine, these these neurotransmitters that make me feel good. So the the reward, the brain’s recognition of the reward often moves from an external reward to an internal reward.

Charles Duhigg 00:31:05  And that’s really important. Now, that being said, the fact that you have an internal reward that you feel good after exercising, that’s enough to get you exercising. But it’s not the greatest reward on the face of the planet, right? Like my guess is that, for instance, like not sex is a great example of this, right? Sex rewards are so overwhelming that you very often do not need a lot of encouragement if you are with someone whom you love and in a sexual relationship to have sex because the reward is very large now the reward of feeling good after you do 1010 sit ups, it’s not. It’s not insignificant, but it’s not as big a reward as having like a nice ice cream or going or, you know. So I think what’s important here is the fact that you still have to work a little bit hard to do your exercise. That doesn’t mean that doesn’t mean that it’s not a habit for you. It means that you’ve learned that you need to remind yourself of that reward.

Charles Duhigg 00:32:01  You need to remind yourself that part of your cues is remembering how good you feel after exercise to get yourself to exercise right.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:08  And I think that gets to my my question about like, how do we define a habit? Because I would say from one view of of exercise, I have an exercise habit. I do it five days a week, almost always year after year. Right. So in that way it happens, right? But it doesn’t feel automatic in the way that brushing my teeth feels automatic.

Charles Duhigg 00:32:32  Well, because it takes a little bit more effort. But they’re still both. They’re both habits. Right. I mean, let’s take for instance, it probably takes more effort to brush your teeth than it does to breathe. Right. And and actually, you can stop breathing until basically you have a buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood. You don’t have to breathe. You don’t have an instinct to breathe. But the reason why we keep breathing is because it’s a habit that we fallen into, and it’s a habit that’s so easy that we hardly even think about it.

Charles Duhigg 00:32:56  It takes a little bit more effort to brush your teeth, right? It takes a little bit more effort to work out. That doesn’t mean that any of them aren’t habits, and a habit doesn’t mean it’s something that happens thoughtlessly. It means it’s something that gets easier and easier and easier in the context of that cue and reward. So the first time you exercised, you really had to think about it a lot, right? You had to like, okay, here’s the route I’m going to take. Here’s what I’m going to wear. I know that I’m gonna look really dumb running. So I’m only going to run for a couple blocks. Like you spend a lot of time thinking about it. A couple of weeks in, you’re like, oh yeah, just throw in the clothes. Like, let’s just go for the run. What happens is that our basal ganglia makes that behavior, that chunk of behaviors, the cue routines and reward easier and easier and easier. That does not mean it becomes completely thoughtless, but it does mean that actually your brain spends less time thinking about that that habit loop as the as time goes on.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:50  That’s a great way to think of it. I often think of it as momentum, right? There’s a certain momentum. Certain behaviors in my life have a momentum to them. Yeah, that is really strong. There’s been times over the last couple of decades where I will get completely off track with something that’s a habit, you know, for a few weeks, a month. And the effort then that it takes to get going again is, you know, 20 times what it takes me today. Yeah. So let’s talk about this habit loop in a little bit more detail, because it’s kind of the heart of what you just laid out is what makes something a habit. So walk us through each of the components of it and give us an example of each.

Charles Duhigg 00:34:33  Okay, so as I mentioned a cue it falls into one of these five buckets. Right. Let’s say that, you know, like my, my teeth brushing habit, the cue for that is a preceding behavior. It’s taking a shower. And that that triggers this craving for that minty feeling in my mouth.

Charles Duhigg 00:34:50  It’s not a huge craving, right? It’s not a craving. I mean, if it’s not convenient, if I’m rushing out the door, I’m not going to be consumed by it all day long. But it’s enough to remind me to go pick up my toothbrush and make that really easy.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:01  You’re not robbing somebody for a tube of toothpaste.

Charles Duhigg 00:35:03  Exactly. Exactly, exactly. So that’s that’s how cues work. And rewards. Rewards are just something that we enjoy. Now, the problem is that sometimes we create a habit and we don’t. We give ourselves a reward that, in theory, is rewarding. Like sometimes people say like, okay, I’m going to go for a run this morning, and if I do, my reward is I’m going to let myself eat some kale chips. Kale chips is not a reward, right? Nobody’s like, oh man, Kale chips. I love these things so much. Right? Or they. And so so you need to give yourself a reward that you actually find rewarding.

Charles Duhigg 00:35:35  Here’s another thing that people do, right. They say, okay, I’m going to go running tomorrow morning. So what they do is they wake up and they’re sort of in a in a hurry to try and figure out what their running clothes are. They go out, they, they, they go for a run, they come back, the kids are late for school. And so they rush through a shower, and then they’re rushing to get their kids to school. And finally they make it to their desk and they’re like, oh, finally I get to calm down. What they basically did is they punished themselves for exercising. Right now, your brain pays attention to those punishments and rewards, and it says, I don’t want to make running easier. Like whenever you go running, it’s kind of a nightmare afterwards that that seems like a sign that this is a bad behavior. So we really have to be deliberate about giving ourselves rewards that are genuinely rewarding and not letting ourselves think that like, just because we want it to be rewarding, it will be.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:23  Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast and a mother who needed care. But I had a persistent feeling of I can’t keep doing this, but I valued everything I was doing and I wasn’t willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That’s when I stumbled into something I now call this still point method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I’d had eight years ago. So you don’t have to stumble towards an answer that something is now here and it’s called overwhelm is optional tools for when you can’t do less. It’s an email course that fits into moments you already have. Taking less than ten minutes total a day. It isn’t about doing less, it’s about relating differently to what you do. I think it’s the most useful tool we’ve ever built.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:27  The launch price is $29. If life is too full but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional. Go to one you feed. Them. That’s one you feed them. So let’s flip it on its side. We’re talking about if I want to do a behavior, I want to set up a, I want to engineer a queue to happen that will start off a behavior which will then have a reward, and then that’s going to make it easier to to start the loop again the next time. So if on the other hand, I want to stop a behavior, the the term we might use instead of queue, at least coming out of the recovery movement is trigger, right? That’s the that’s almost the negative connotation. Right. It’s the same thing. Yeah. Something happens. I start to get stressed out as I’m hanging out with my children. And then there’s a behavior. Then there’s a reward for what we’ve got in our mind is we have a reward out there that we think is coming, and we want that reward.

Charles Duhigg 00:38:31  Yeah, you’re right, it’s a little bit different when we’re talking about changing habits as opposed to creating habits. And there’s this, this expression which is a terrible expression break a bad habit. Right. What we know is that if you try and break a bad habit, if you try and extinguish a habit, you can usually through willpower, do it for a little while. But oftentimes your willpower is going to give out at the worst possible time. When you’re stressed, when you’re overwhelmed, and at that moment you’re going to say like, screw it, I’m just going to go get a drink. So, so how do we handle that? The first thing is that we have to train ourselves to recognize, to figure out what the cue and the reward of this old habit is. Right? Okay, I know that. I feel like I need a drink every single time that I’m stressed. So for me, stress is the trigger. Stress is the cue to have a drink. And what’s the reward that it gives me? Well, like my body relaxes.

Charles Duhigg 00:39:21  Like I sort of say to myself, okay, I can’t I can’t worry about that anymore right now because I’m having a drink, I need to. I’ll just put it off for tomorrow. Right? I get to relieve some of that stress. Okay, now I know what the queue and the reward is. That pathway exists in my brain. The Q reward routine reward. If I try and extinguish it, I can for a little while. But it’s going to be really hard. What’s much better is instead of breaking a habit simply to change a habit, to find a new routine that corresponds to that old cue and that delivers something similar to that old reward, right? Okay. Yeah. So when I get really, really stressed, here’s what I’m going to do. Instead of going to a bar, I’m going to go to a meeting. Right. And I’m going to talk about what’s stressing me and out. And I know that if I do that, I’m actually going to feel better. It’s going to make the stress go away.

Charles Duhigg 00:40:04  So now I have a new routine that corresponds to that old cue and that old reward. That’s a much better way to change your behavior 100%.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:13  So to sort of try and summarize this, when we’re trying to create a habit, we are deliberately engineering a cue and a reward. We’re very much focusing on the cue and reward. If we’re trying to get rid of a bad habit, we may be able to do some work on cues. It’s a good idea not to put yourself in triggering situations if you don’t have to, but sometimes they’re unavoidable, right? Getting stressed is an unavoidable cue. It’s an emotional state. I can’t turn it off. So I’m going to have a cue. And when I and when I have an uncomfortable state, I’m going to want a reward, even if that reward is losing that uncomfortable state. So I can’t necessarily change the cue, and I can’t change the fact that I want a reward. What I can change in that case is the behavior that sits in the middle.

Charles Duhigg 00:41:03  That’s exactly right. And if you think about like what AA does, that’s exactly what AA does, right? It tells you like I mean, if you think about the 12 steps, like one of them is that you go and you you acknowledge all the mistakes you’ve made. And and that’s basically forcing you to recognize all of your triggers, all of your cues. Right. And then you’re told to focus on how to get what you’re looking for in other ways. Right. Like, if I’m feeling stressed out, I can come to a meeting, I stand up and I have to say my name, and I have to say who I am, and I have to tell you about my day, which gives me a sense of relief, the same way that going to a bar and having a drink sometimes gives me a sense of relief. When people talk about addiction from a clinical perspective. They talk about it as a habit. Dysfunction. Right. Smoking is a great example of this. So you’re only physically addicted to cigarettes for about 100 hours after your last cigarette.

Charles Duhigg 00:41:53  By then, the nicotine has left your bloodstream. Yeah. But we all know people who crave a cigarette a year, five years, ten years after they give up. Right. That’s not physical addiction. That’s a habit dysfunction. And a habit. Dysfunction exists in these same part of our brain as the physical addiction. And so it feels exactly the same. But the way that you handle it is you look at it as a habit, and you figure out that cue in that reward, and you find a new routine to put in the middle of them.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:20  Yeah. I mean, we used to have a phrase in in recovery, which is like, I mean, if all if all you need is to get sober, just go to jail for a little while, you will be physically sober. Right? Right.

Charles Duhigg 00:42:30  Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:31  You don’t come out of jail, and suddenly it’s fixed. And so many people I know focus on that first period. I was a heroin addict, and that was the thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:39  We were like, oh, my God, those first 72 hours. Well, yeah, that’s unpleasant. But it’s the next five years. The next five years that that tend to be harder. And I think the other thing that 12 step programs do is they address, in this case, they are addressing not just the behavior, they’re addressing the cue in that learning. So that, you know, my stress is at a four instead of an eight all the time, right? I’m learning exactly to exactly bring those things down.

Charles Duhigg 00:43:09  And and I know what to do when I hit that. Eight. Right. Within psychology this is known as an implementation intention that basically one of the things that works really well is if if we make a decision about what to do in a hot state. When we are in a cold state, we’re more likely to listen to our good advice. Right? So if I go, if I come up with a shopping list, not when I’m really, really hungry. But if I come up with a shopping list after having dinner, then that shopping list is probably going to be better than if I just go into the grocery store and I’m starving and I’m going to get Pop Tarts.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:41  Exactly.

Charles Duhigg 00:43:42  And so, so a lot of what recovery or or any other form of trying to change our behavior is about is about making decisions in a cold state, about what I will do in a hot state, and then coming up with ways to remind myself right when my stress hits an eight, I’m going to call my sponsor. And and like, it’s not like, should I call my sponsor? It’s the right time to call my sponsor. Nope. It doesn’t matter if it’s 2:00 in the morning, I’m going to call my sponsor and I tell my sponsor and my sponsor is like, yes, you do that. That’s okay. I want that phone call. Like, when we program that behavior ahead of time, that’s when it works.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:17  So we only have a few minutes left here. I would love to ask, 13 years later, from writing The Power of Habit. What have you learned that adds to what you know? What’s in the book that you would you think is important, that you would love to add now? Or anything that you feel like you would walk back a little bit?

Charles Duhigg 00:44:36  No, I think that, you know, super communicators helped me a lot with this.

Charles Duhigg 00:44:39  Super communicators is coming out in in paperback next week. And I think one of the things that I realized in writing it is that so much of how we relate to other people is built around habits, right? So in In The Power of Habit, I talked a lot about the habits that shape how we live. I talked less about mental habits, but we all have mental habits, right? We fall into mental habits, you know, whether we feel good about something or bad about something, whether we feel good about ourselves or bad about ourselves, whether we let ourselves get angry or we don’t get angry. And communication is how we verbalize those habits and oftentimes how we change them. The act of sitting down with someone and saying, look, this happened to me, this thing happened and I felt this way, and I want to feel differently. So let’s talk about how I do this next time better. That is the act of reprogramming our habits. And what I’ve been impressed by is literally any habit can be changed, like any mental habit can be changed and the physical habit can be changed.

Charles Duhigg 00:45:38  It’s just a matter of wanting to take the time to understand that habit and wanting to change it. And oftentimes the best way we do that is through conversation is by communicating with other people.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:50  Yeah, that’s really beautiful. And something I think about a lot because mental habits, they just run on repeat in such a way. Yeah. And so there’s this, there’s this almost case of how do I recognize the cue which is triggering the behavior, which is the thought pattern. And, and I’ve found, you know, and I’ve worked with people in an email course I have. We work on this of using prompts to get you to reflect on something multiple times during the day because just simple proximity. If I’ve just reflected it 3:00 on the fact that I want to offer myself more self-compassion, there’s a much better chance at 430 in the afternoon, I’m going to actually remember to do that. Then, if I write about it Sunday night as a vague intention, right?

Charles Duhigg 00:46:35  I think that’s exactly right. And I think you’re building a habit there.

Charles Duhigg 00:46:37  Right? You’re you’re deliberately saying, okay, look like like I’m going to I’m going to give myself self-compassion, like I’m going to do this every day three times a day. And the cue is that I’m going to get this, this text reminder from Eric that’s going to help me do it. Yeah, that’s really powerful. That’s how we change our behavior.

Eric Zimmer 00:46:52  And the last thing I’ll say is that when you talk about habits and communication, I’m glad you tied that together, because I think about how habitual my conversational patterns are with certain people, which is not bad necessarily. We have a rhythm, we have a way. But it does make it harder when I want that conversation to go somewhere different.

Charles Duhigg 00:47:15  Yeah. No, it’s it’s worth reflecting on so that you’re you’re empowered. You have an implementation intention. Yes. To change when when you want to.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:23  Well, Charles, thank you so much for coming on. It’s always a thank.

Charles Duhigg 00:47:26  You for having.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:26  Me. The Power of Habit was such an influential book on me and the way that I see the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:33  So thank you. Thank you for that. I’m glad it’s out in audiobook with your your voice on it now. And until next time.

Charles Duhigg 00:47:39  Until next time. Thanks, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:41  Yeah. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.