328 Quotes by Charles Duhigg

The secret, the alcoholics said, was God.

The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone.

The problem is that your brain can't tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it's always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.

All my life I was fascinated by memory,” Squire told me. “Then I met E.P., and saw how rich life can be even if you can’t remember it. The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone.

I think I'm smart, and I know I was a good mom. But there wasn't a lot I could point to and say, that's why I'm special.

This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: THE HABIT LOOP

Grit, which they defined as the tendency to work strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.

If you believe you can change--if you make it a habit--the change becomes real.

Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.