Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything(44)
When you celebrate effectively, you tap into the reward circuitry of your brain. By feeling good at the right moment, you cause your brain to recognize and encode the sequence of behaviors you just performed. In other words, you can hack your brain to create a habit by celebrating and self-reinforcing. In my research I found that this technique had never before been named, described, or studied. I realized that by studying and teaching celebration I was breaking new ground to help people change for the better.
The time has come to say “hello” to feeling good.
Positive Experiences Reinforce Habits
Every parent remembers the pure, unfettered joy of watching her or his child’s first steps. While the setting varies, the plot is the same. Wobbly but determined, the baby pulls herself up on the coffee table and scoots alongside it for a few minutes before spying her mom kneeling a few feet away. Maybe her dad is on the couch recording the moment for posterity. They’ve been encouraging her for a while now, but today might just be the day. Eventually, the baby gathers her courage and takes one hand off the coffee table. Mom holds out her arms and says, “Come on, honey, you can do it!”
The about-to-be-toddler takes a step, then another, then one more before tumbling into her mother’s arms.
“Yay! Good job, baby girl! Look at you, you walked!”
Dad will probably put down his phone and scoop the baby up in a hug. Maybe he even twirls her around while she giggles and grins.
Walking is a behavior that is repeated until it becomes second nature. And parents clap and cheer for their babies. This is a natural reaction from parents around the world, and it serves a purpose: Celebrating at the right moment helps their babies learn more quickly.
By learning, I don’t mean memorizing multiplication tables. In psychology, learning is the process by which your brain facilitates a change in behavior in response to your environment. The evolutionary aim of these changes is to make us more likely to survive, thrive, and reproduce.
A range of positive experiences can reinforce a new behavior that leads to a habitual response. For example, anything that gives you instant pleasure can reinforce a behavior and make it more likely to happen in the future. Food can be a powerful tool for this reason. Whether you’re trying to train your dog to sit or getting students to arrive on time by offering snacks at the start of the first few class periods, treats can both motivate behavior and reinforce a habit.
In my lab at Stanford some years ago, we wanted to see if using humor was an effective way to promote recycling. We rigged a recycling bin so people would hear a funny audio clip from The Simpsons every time they put something in. When someone dropped in an empty soda can, the bin would play “Marge, the mail’s here!” in Homer’s distinctive voice. We secretly deployed the bin at a trade show in San Jose and watched the reactions. When people used this bin, they were surprised and amused. Some people looked for errant scraps of paper to put into the bin to hear more funny clips. Other people removed things from our bin and put them back in. Would a bin like this create a habit of recycling? Maybe. In any case, we were on the right track. A positive feeling from humor can reinforce behavior.
Getting relief from physical, emotional, or psychological discomfort is also a positive experience. It’s three a.m. and you are having another bout of insomnia. You’re restless and thinking about work. There’s a big deadline tomorrow, and everyone is rushing to get a project out the door. You’re the manager, so you’ve got to keep things moving. And as you lie there awake, you’re worried that there will be a productivity bottleneck in your inbox tomorrow morning. The thought of it makes you anxious. So you roll over, grab your phone off the nightstand, and check your e-mail. Whew, nothing urgent. No need to respond to anything. You feel relieved. This is a positive experience that you’ll seek the next time you wake up in the middle of the night. You check your inbox and once again you feel relief. And then checking your e-mail will start becoming a habit. During some of my corporate speaking events, I’ve asked audiences if this sounds familiar. At times, well over 30 percent have raised their hands and acknowledged this habit. Little did they know that relief was the cause.
Early levels of some video games make it easy to feel successful. That’s by design. It makes you eager to keep playing. Candy Crush has been downloaded more than two billion times. It’s a simple (and free) matching game that you can play on your mobile device. The first level is ridiculously easy. To help signal that you’ve been successful, the designers built in all kinds of fun sensory experiences. There are pleasant little dings and satisfying visual cues. The word “sweet” even pops up after you reach a certain score. The result? You feel successful really fast—and you keep firing up that Candy Crush app whenever you have a free minute or two. Why? Because you are sweet at this game—and that? That feels great.
While these experiences are different feel-good paths to the land of habit, they all have one thing in common. What happens in your brain when you experience positive reinforcement isn’t magic—it’s neurochemical. Good feelings spur the production of a neurotransmitter (a chemical messenger in the brain) called dopamine that controls the brain’s “reward system” and helps us remember what behavior led to feeling good so we will do it again. With the help of dopamine, the brain encodes the cause-and-effect relationship, and this creates expectations for the future.