The Power of Habit: Creating Healthy Habits with Feat
At Feat, we often talk about creating healthy habits. Our entire infrastructure is built on a framework that goes hand in hand with creating a habit: being rewarded for an action. At Feat, we hope to encourage people to be more active and incentivize them by providing rewards in the form of good food experiences. When it comes to creating habits, there is a lot of information out there — the number of days, the easiest triggers, simple plans to get started. Small nuggets of so-called wisdom can be found with an easy Google search, but Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business brings habit understanding to a whole new level.
Duhigg doesn’t claim to know it all when it comes to habits, but he lays down some very convincing arguments and examples about the real power of habit across many aspects of our lives. A habit, Duhigg explains, “is a choice that we deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about, but continue doing.” This choice follows the same rhythm: we receive a cue, we implement a routine, and we gain a reward. From nail biting to overeating, and from compulsive gambling to workplace safety routines, Duhigg argues that habits work the same on the small and large scale.
Duhigg also hones in on what are called keystone habits: habits that have a profound effect elsewhere in life. “When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once per week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work,” writes Duhigg. They also tend to smoke less, show more patience, use their credit cards less and feel less stress, even if we still can’t figure out exactly why this is. The good news is, creating a habit around habitual exercise (even just getting in the habit of taking the stairs) can positively affect the rest of your life.
In addition, Duhigg dives into understanding how to get people to stick with physical activity habits like going to the gym. He presents a case study from the YMCA where they were seeing plenty of people sign up, but not many people stick with it. Duhigg spoke with Bill Lazarus, a social scientist who helped with the YMCA project. “People want to visit places that satisfy their social needs. Getting people to exercise in groups makes it more likely they’ll stick with a workout,” concedes Lazarus. In conclusion, the way to get people to stick with their gym routine wasn’t about fancy equipment, but a friendly environment. “People, it turns out,” writes Duhigg, “go to the gym looking for a human connection, not a treadmill.”
When it comes to food and eating habits, Duhigg has more than one case study to present, but one of the most interesting is looking at the way in which American housewives of the 1940s grew to accept eating and serving offal in the house. With the prime cuts of meat being shipped overseas for the war effort, the so-called “waste” was all that was available. But serving liver and innards was a tough sell to the American housewife, so campaigns were undertaken to educate them how to use these types of meat in typical dishes (like meat pies and meatloaf). “To change people’s diets, the exotic must be made familiar. And to do that, you must camouflage it in everyday garb,” writes Duhigg. Interesting insights about food alternatives that boost our bodies and brains has also been written by Positive Health Wellness (check this article out!).
Duhigg touches on all aspects of habits that are crucial to the Feat program: the power of habitual exercise, the need for a social community to stick with the routine, and changing eating habits through normalization of foods.
Feat encourages everyday exercise in a social community. Working on teams to gain rewards allows participants to stay motivated alongside their teammates and provides an opportunity to socialize with those in a similar pattern, just like at a gym. At the same time, Feat food rewards aren’t just about offering up something yummy to eat. They’re about introducing new ideas in eating so that eating healthy doesn’t feel so difficult, foreign, or strange: the same way eating offal went from weird to normal.
Duhigg provides a comprehensive look at habits and practical advice for making, or replacing, habits by identifying a routine, experimenting with rewards, isolating your cues and having a plan. But there’s one ingredient that has proven crucial in habit change: belief. Duhigg writes, “To modify a habit, you must decide to change it. You must consciously accept the hard work of identifying the cues and rewards that drive the habits’ routines, and find alternatives. You must know you have control and be self-conscious enough to use it.”
Once you’ve made the decision to change, join Feat and we’ll give you a space and place to make healthy habits stick!
