Hello, Habits

by Fumio Sasaki

  But if I haven’t been able to make it a habit to get up early, I know I won’t be able to stick to any of my other habits, either, and I know that I’ll feel down. And I also remind myself that as long as I get up and do some yoga, I’ll be wide awake in five minutes, even if I’m a little tired right when the alarm goes off. Because I’ve repeated this inner debate over and over, the result has basically become fixed. So, my inner parliamentary system doesn’t have to keep repeating the voting.

  We are not our kings

  As we’ve seen so far, many actions that people take are not driven by their awareness. But it’s our awareness that feels responsible when we don’t do what we’re supposed to do. It’s easy to conclude that it’s because of a person’s “weak will,” and an issue of their awareness, if they don’t succeed at dieting or quitting cigarettes or alcohol.

  But that’s a show of overconfidence in our awareness and willpower, based on the misunderstanding that a person’s awareness significantly controls their actions.

  What we must first keep in mind is that awareness and willpower are not the causes behind our actions. Unfortunately, we are not our kings. We must calmly acknowledge that fact.

  Making yourself a creature of habit

  In the autumn, squirrels try to secure plenty of food in preparation for winter. But it isn’t as if squirrels think consciously, “The winter’s about to come, so I’d better secure lots of food,” or make a detailed plan. The brains of squirrels have evolved so that when the sunlight that enters their vision decreases a certain amount, a program is activated that instructs them to start burying their food.

  Haruki Murakami has said that his life philosophy is to make himself a “creature of habit.” To form a habit is to change the part of yourself that’s an animal—the part that’s governed by your unconscious. The issue isn’t something in your conscious mind, it’s the amount of sunlight that enters your vision. To change your habits, you need to better address the real source that governs your actions.

  Let’s take a look at how our actions become habits. It’s the process by which the king that we call our awareness steps down from the position of king.

  Forming habits without thinking

  To learn to ride a bicycle without thinking, we need to learn how to use our bodies. At first, we need to control our movements using our awareness, but eventually we ride without thinking about it. What types of changes occur in our brain when that happens?

  An experiment conducted at MIT during the 1990s can serve as a reference. Devices were embedded in the heads of rats to study their brain activity. The rats were placed at the entrance of a T-shaped maze, with chocolate placed around the left bend. The partitions were removed when a clicking sound was made as a cue, at which time the rats would try to find the source of the sweet smell. It took time, at first, as they went back and forth and kept turning in the opposite direction.

  As the trial and error continued, activity took place in the part of the rat’s brain called the basal ganglia.

  After the experiment was repeated hundreds of times, the rats stopped losing their way, and it took less time for them to reach their goal. The rats became very good at finding the chocolate, but their brain activity actually decreased; they “thought” less and less.

  Two or three days after the experiment began, they would scratch the walls, sniff the scent, and could then stop gathering information; they knew enough already. And by the time a week had gone by, activity had also decreased in the part of their brain associated with memory. In the end, the rats were able to get to the chocolate without thinking at all. The action had become a habit.

  To find the chocolate, a rat first goes through trial and error. But after many repetitions, the rat’s brain activity decreases; it stops having to “think.”

  The three elements of habits

  According to Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, habits consist of the following three elements:

  Trigger. The rats’ brains were most active when they heard the sound of the partitions being removed and when they eventually found the chocolate. The trigger conveys what “autopilot mode” to use—in the rats’ case, the clicking sound.

  Routine. A trigger leads to a predetermined set of actions, a routine. In the case of the rats, the routine became to turn left at the bend, without hesitation, as soon as the maze was opened, thus finding the chocolate. This routine was put together as a result of trial and error and stored in the rats’ brains, and became a series of actions that could eventually be taken with barely a thought.

  Reward. The brain determines whether a series of actions should be stored as a routine based on the reward. As we saw in Chapter 1, a reward is something that brings us joy and happiness; it’s something that feels good. For the rats, it’s smart to take the same actions that result in finding tasty chocolate. That’s why their brains worked on storing the path to that chocolate.

  Making something a habit is to cause an actual change in your brain

  We go back to a restaurant where the food was good, and we don’t go again if it tasted bad. We repeatedly try to experience emotions like happiness and joy that we feel as a result of our actions. This “reward system,” which is activated through the mediation of dopamine, is an old circuit, and it works the same way in rats and humans. And when we take actions like eating, having sex, or interacting with friends, we experience pleasant feelings.

  And the more we conduct these actions, the stronger the link between the actions and the pleasant feelings becomes. A dendritic spine, which is a membranous protrusion that receives signals at the synapse and allows nerve cells to pass signals between them, will actually become bigger when it repeatedly receives signals.

  Making something a habit is completely different from learning something using your awareness, like if you listen to a lecture or take part in a seminar. It means practicing something over and over to actually rewrite the nerve cells in the brain.

  My triggers: yoga and my diary

  Let’s take a more detailed look at each element of a habit.

  First, we have the trigger. The general concept should be familiar to everyone—for example, it’s common to use an alarm clock as a trigger to get up in the morning. What I do next is yoga. I lay out my yoga mat on the floor before going to bed, so it’s the first thing that I see in the morning. That becomes a trigger, and I’m spurred to do yoga right after I get up.

  I also make coffee in the morning, after eating breakfast. Drinking that coffee is my trigger to start writing in my diary. When I drank coffee one evening, I wanted to write in my diary, because coffee is connected with my morning routine of writing in my diary.

  A story in The Principles of Psychology by William James goes like this: A war veteran carries his meal in both arms. Another man jokingly says, “Attention!” and the veteran reacts to the trigger and lowers both his arms to stand “at attention,” dropping the meat and potatoes he had been carrying. Habit functioned more powerfully than his awareness of the important things he was holding.

  Small triggers that create gifted people

  There are times when a small trigger serves as the beginning for creating a genius. Mayu Yamaguchi graduated from the Faculty of Law at University of Tokyo at the top of her class, served as an official at the Ministry of Finance, and then became a lawyer, completing law school at Harvard University with straight As. She obtained qualification as a lawyer from the State of New York, and says she is now aiming to become a university professor of law.

  No matter how I look at it, I can only imagine from this tremendous personal history, which almost gives me heartburn, that she has to be a genius. But Yamaguchi says what other geniuses say: “I’m not a genius, so I had to make an effort.” Her studies began by looking at her desk.

  This is the habit Yamaguchi has maintained since childhood. She gets up in the morning, opens the drapes, and lets in the sunlight. Next, she turns her eyes to her desk. She would sit at her desk and
read a book—any book would do—for around ten minutes, until her mother would call out to her to say that breakfast was ready. Yamaguchi says this routine has always helped remove any sense of resistance she may have had to sitting at her desk during the day. She would later come home from school, have a snack, and begin studying again, starting over with the familiar step of taking a seat at her desk.

  During high school and law school, each morning she would bathe in the morning light and then look at her desk before getting to work. This habit, which began from such a small trigger, created a genius.

  Triggers for habits that you want to quit

  Unfortunately, habits that you want to quit function the exact same way. I wanted to cut down on my drinking, but it was difficult.

  One reason was that there were many “buddies” for alcohol that served as triggers. For example, I liked to start drinking beer in the afternoon, and I would reflexively order bottled beer if I ordered soba noodles with tempura. The same applied to greasy foods like gyoza and fried chicken. Many other items also brought along the beer.

  Charles Duhigg summarizes five types of triggers as follows. I’ll give examples of triggers that make us want to drink.

  •Location (a convenience store on your way home; the venue for a friend’s wedding)

  •Time (when you finish work in the evening; Sunday afternoons)

  •Emotional state (stress from continuously working overtime; feeling down after making a mistake)

  •Other people (a date with a lovely lady; a class reunion with people you haven’t seen in a while)

  •Preceding event (working up a sweat while exercising; taking a dip in a hot spring spa)

  We’ll look at these in detail in Chapter 3, but first, it’s important to identify the triggers for a habit you want to quit, and to establish new triggers for a habit that you want to acquire.

  Routines that connect like a chain

  I don’t do special things for the purpose of doing something special. I do ordinary, everyday things in order to do something special.

  —Ichiro

  “Routines” are easy to understand. They refer to a set of actions that begin with a trigger. Brushing your teeth when you start getting ready for bed, using a hair dryer after taking a shower; these are actions that abound in our everyday life.

  When I go to the gym, my initial trigger is the itch to move my body. And as usual, I prepare my gym clothes and my water bottle. The path to the gym and the method for unlocking my locker are ingrained. My program is set for my muscle training and running, and the same goes for taking a shower after exercising and the method for washing my gym clothes.

  One routine serves as a trigger for starting the next routine. Although going to the gym to exercise is a complicated action, it’s possible to consider it as a series of actions where the triggers and the routine are connected like a chain. The same goes for everyone’s morning rituals.

  Routines give the mind a tune-up

  The good thing about routines is that you can change your mood simply by doing what you always do. Routines function like a tuner.

  For example, Haruki Murakami says that although he runs for an hour each day, he runs for a little bit longer when he receives unwarranted criticism or a rejection from someone. I, too, run every day, even more so when something negative happens. It’s because I have a real sense that my mood changes when I do that. The essence of the problem isn’t in the problem itself; it’s an issue of my mood, meaning, how to view the problem. We’ve seen that emotions affect willpower. By practicing your regular routine, the negative emotions will be eliminated, and your willpower will recover.

  As to how he overcomes tough times, Ichiro says he “does what he does every day, the same way as always.” He explains, “It’s difficult to start with the mind, but it will eventually catch up when I move the way that I always do. It’s a technique for times when my mind isn’t proactive.”

  You can tune up your mind by using your body as you always do. Your breathing gets faster when you feel that you “want” something, like when you’re about to buy something on impulse. So, the desire gets settled down when you intentionally breathe slowly. You can do this to calm yourself more easily when you’ve made it a habit to meditate.

  Rugby player Goromaru makes a sign with his fingers before he kicks the ball, and Yuzuru Hanyu makes the sign of the cross before he skates. They probably have to regain balance when they become enthusiastic or jittery for their own reasons, like, “This will be the deciding kick.”

  Going through the same routine to get back to your usual, relaxed psychological state, and producing the results that you’ve been practicing for. This is why athletes rely on routines.

  Rewards that are tough for people to imagine

  “That’s … a narcotic.”

  “… A narcotic?”

  “Yes. Once you plaster yourself to a rock wall on a mountain and inhale it, your everyday life will seem lukewarm.”

  —The Summit of the Gods

  The third element of habits, reward, is surprisingly the most difficult to fully understand. People attempt an action over and over to seek a reward:

  •Eating something good

  •Interacting with friends

  •Having sex with someone you love

  •Earning money

  •Getting likes on social media

  These are rewards that are easy to understand, and actions to pursue them are also easy to understand. But there are some actions that make you wonder why a person would do something like that.

  The reward for writing on Wikipedia

  When we talk about rewards, we can’t help thinking about money, but that’s not all there is. For example, you won’t receive a single dollar for writing a Wikipedia article.

  I was told that a writer by the name of Norimaki spent six months writing an article about Kobayashi Issa. That’s a tremendous amount of work. Norimaki says Wikipedia is a place where you can greedily research something that intrigues you and explore and share that interest as much as you like.

  You can satisfy your curiosity and inquisitiveness, and present it at a venue that other people will see. That must be the type of reward that motivates the writers on Wikipedia. Similarly, other kinds of writers will share their work with one another, and “meetups” are held for people who have the same hobbies. Finding such a community of matching interests is also a kind of reward.

  Microsoft once hired an expensive manager, gathered professional writers, and attempted to create a dictionary. Money was the reward. But it was nowhere near as powerful as the energy that people are able to produce when they act on their own accord. Even if there’s no money involved, people can experience various types of “rewards.”

  What type of reward do you get for tough exercise?

  Many forms of reward are difficult for others to imagine. I used to see people running under the blazing summer sun and think, “What’s in it for them, doing something like that?”

  Even though I belonged to the basketball club in junior high, where I worked hard and never missed a single day of practice, I stopped exercising once I grew up. I would think to myself, “I don’t know what’s so fun about running.”

  I’m now running full marathons again, and people sometimes say to me, “I just can’t understand why you do something like that.” For those who are not in the habit of running, thinking about it just brings images of suffering. But if rewards are necessary for habits, then there must be some reward in the pain of running as well.

  Does running really release endorphins?

  The neurotransmitters called endorphins are often used to explain the rewards of running. Endorphins have an analgesic effect, like morphine, so they control the pain of running and bring on a euphoric experience—what’s called a “runner’s high.”

  The neuroscientist Gregory Berns questions that explanation, however. In one study, true beta-endorphins only increased in 50 percent of people engaged
in strenuous exercise. Even among runners, there are few who have actually experienced “runner’s high,” and even they don’t experience it every time they run. Berns believes that endorphins don’t cause euphoria, but are some type of by-product.

  The positive functions of stress hormones

  Then what is the reward of running? Berns believes the answer lies in the stress hormone cortisol. You would think that stress hormones are just the bad guys—but just as dopamine has a complicated function, cortisol is versatile.

  Here’s how Berns explains it: Cortisol is generated in particularly high amounts by physical stress, and it lifts your mood, boosts your concentration, and may, depending on the situation, enhance your memory. But these effects are only present with twenty to forty milligrams amount of secretion in a day; any more than that will cause uncertainty or symptoms of what we’d call stress.

  Just the right amount of cortisol will interact with dopamine and cause a strong sense of satisfaction, or even a transcendental level of euphoria. Berns actually had the appropriate amount of cortisol administered to his own body, and reported euphoria and happiness. He concluded that dopamine alone isn’t enough. Combining it with the cortisol that’s excreted with a moderate level of stress will allow you to obtain a powerful sense of satisfaction.