The Power of Habit Summary & key ideas explained

Lisa Allen's life was coming apart. She smoked, she drank too much, she ate to cope, she owed money and her husband had left her. Then, on a trip to Cairo, she made a small, almost absurd decision: she would come back in a year and trek across the desert. To survive that, she told herself, the cigarettes had to go.

That single change started a chain reaction. Within four years she had lost weight, run a marathon and turned much of the rest of her life around. When scientists scanned her brain, they could still see the old patterns. They hadn't vanished. New ones had simply overpowered them.

That's the puzzle at the heart of Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit. Duhigg, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, cites a Duke University paper finding that more than 40 percent of what people do each day isn't a decision at all. It's habit. If that's true, then learning how habits work is one of the most practical things you can do.

In this read, you'll find out:

• the three-part loop behind every habit;
• why one rule about safety remade an industrial giant;
• and how to take apart a habit of your own, step by step.

So what actually happens inside your head when a habit takes over?