Free The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg Page A

recording your miles, or the endorphin rush you get from a jog). But countless studies have shown that a cue and a reward, on their own, aren’t enough for a new habit to last. Only when your brain starts
expecting
the reward—craving the endorphins or sense of accomplishment—will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each morning.The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come. 2.29

    “Let me ask you about a problem I have,” I said to Wolfram Schultz,the neuroscientist, after he explained to me how craving emerges. “I have a two-year-old, and when I’m home feeding him dinner—chicken nuggets and stuff like that—I’ll reach over and eat one myself without thinking about it. It’s a habit. And now I’m gaining weight.”

    “Everybody does that,” Schultz said. He has three children of his own, all adults now. When they were young, he would pick at their dinners unthinkingly. “In some ways,” he told me, “we’re like the monkeys. When we see the chicken or fries on the table, our brains begin anticipating that food, even if we’re not hungry. Our brains are craving them. Frankly, I don’t even
like
this kind of food, but suddenly, it’s hard to fight this urge. And as soon as I eat it, I feel this rush of pleasure as the craving is satisfied. It’s humiliating, but that’s how habits work.

    “I guess I should be thankful,” he said, “because the same process has let me create good habits. I work hard because I expect pride from a discovery. I exercise because I expect feeling good afterward. I just wish I could pick and choose better.”

IV.

    After their disastrous interview with the cat woman, Drake Stimson’s team at P&G started looking outside the usual channels for help. They began reading up on experiments such as those conducted by Wolfram Schultz. They asked a Harvard Business School professor to conduct psychological tests of Febreze’s ad campaigns. They interviewed customer after customer, looking for something that would give them a clue how to make Febreze a regular part of consumers’ lives.

    One day, they went to speak with a woman in a suburb near Scottsdale. She was in her forties with four kids. Her house was clean, but not compulsively tidy. To the surprise of the researchers, she loved Febreze.

    “I use it every day,” she told them.

    “You do?” Stimson said. The house didn’t seem like the kind of place with smelly problems. There weren’t any pets. No one smoked. “How? What smells are you trying to get rid of?”

    “I don’t really use it for specific smells,” the woman said. “I mean, you know, I’ve got boys. They’re going through puberty, and if I don’t clean their rooms, it smells like a locker. But I don’t really use it that way. I use it for normal cleaning—a couple of sprays when I’m done in a room. It’s a nice way to make everything smell good as a final touch.”

    They asked if they could watch her clean the house. In the bedroom, she made her bed, plumped the pillows, tightened the sheet’s corners, and then took a Febreze bottle and sprayed the smoothed comforter. In the living room, she vacuumed, picked up the kids’ shoes, straightened the coffee table, and sprayed Febreze on the freshly cleaned carpet. “It’s nice, you know?” she said. “Spraying feels like a little mini-celebration when I’m done with a room.” At the rate she was using Febreze, Stimson estimated, she would empty a bottle every two weeks.

    P&G had collected thousands of hours of videotapes of people cleaning their homes over the years. When the researchers got back to Cincinnati, some of them spent an evening looking through the tapes. The next morning, one of the scientists asked the Febreze team to join him in the conference room. He cued up the tape of one woman—a twenty-six-year-old with three children—making a bed. She smoothed the sheets and adjusted a pillow. Then, she