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Chapter 8
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Power of Habit, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Habits, Human Behavior, and Success
Habit Change and Personal Growth
Social Habits and Cultural Influence
The Moral Consequences of Habits
Summary
Analysis
Angie Bachmann had been a stay-at-home mother for two decades. When her youngest daughter finally started school, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She decided to spend the afternoon at a casino. Over time, she started going every Friday, as a reward for making it through the week. But she carefully limited her gambling. Over time, she improved and started winning money. Gambling was long illegal in Bachmann’s home state of Iowa. Governments have tried to regulate it and other practices they consider to be bad habits. But when Iowa legalized gambling, the state government started making lots of money.
Angie Bachmann’s trips to the casino show how habit loops form over time. At first, when the casino became the reward for her weekly routine, she controlled herself and acted responsibly. But that gradually started to change as her habit loop became stronger and stronger. Bachmann’s behavior and Duhigg’s comments on the government regulation of gambling hint at this chapter’s central question: who is to blame for bad habits, and who is responsible for stopping them?
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When Angie Bachmann began caring for her parents, who were dying of lung disease, she started to feel even more distant from her family and friends. So, she started going to the casino more and more. Sometimes, she won—or lost—thousands of dollars in a matter of hours. She had to start borrowing money from her parents. But the casino excited her and soothed all of her anxieties about her family life, so she kept going. Eventually, she went bankrupt. But this was just the beginning of her story.
Bachmann’s worsening gambling problem shows how habits can totally control people’s lives—to the point of overriding their common sense and changing their very identities. Still, Duhigg presents her as a responsible and sympathetic character who understood her problem and just occasionally lost control of herself. This adds to the moral complexity surrounding bad habits. If good people can develop bad habits through no serious fault of their own, Duhigg seems to be asking, then are people really responsible for their habits?
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In July 2008, Brian Thomas called the police and admitted to accidentally killing his wife in the middle of the night. He was a lifelong sleepwalker, and the court struggled to decide whether he was truly guilty of murder. Usually, the brain stem paralyzes the human body during sleep. But sleepwalkers’ brains don’t do this—which is why they can do complex tasks like walking, cooking, or even driving while totally unconscious.
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Other people have sleep terrors: they experience intense anxiety, and the only active parts of their brain are the “primitive neurological regions” responsible for habits like the fight-or-flight response. During sleep terrors, people can’t consciously turn off these habits, even when they’re violent. In fact, hundreds of people have been acquitted of crimes they committed during sleep terrors. During Brian Thomas’s trial, even the prosecution agreed that he was innocent because he killed his wife while asleep. But Duhigg asks why Angie Bachmann wasn’t also considered innocent—as she was also just following her habits.
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When Angie Bachmann’s parents died within two months of each other, she was devastated. She also inherited about $1 million, which she used to move her family back to her hometown in Tennessee—where gambling wasn’t legal. But one night, she had a panic attack and went to the casino with her husband. She lost several thousand dollars at the blackjack table, but she still felt much better. The casino company, Harrah’s, had a sophisticated system for tracking and manipulating customers. It started sending Bachmann free plane tickets, hotel suites, concert tickets, and even cash to gamble. One night, she lost $250,000 and didn’t even tell her husband. But the casino kept calling, and she kept thinking that she could win the money back.
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The neuroscientist Reza Habib scanned the brains of problem gamblers and casual gamblers while they looked at a slot machine. Habib found that problem gamblers get more excited when they win and, unlike casual gamblers, also respond to near misses as if they’re almost real wins. This helps explain why they keep gambling for longer, and why casino companies program their slot machines to deliver lots of near misses. For compulsive gamblers, the habit loop simply takes over. In fact, patients have successfully sued pharmaceutical companies when drugs that affect the basal ganglia and brain stem have made them into compulsive gamblers, eaters, and more.
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In 2006, Angie Bachmann was nearly broke when Harrah’s invited her to a casino. She gambled away the rest of her money—and then her house. If Brian Thomas wasn’t guilty of murdering his wife, Duhigg asks, why was Angie Bachmann considered guilty of gambling away her money? Reza Habib argues that problem gamblers lose control of their free will, just like Thomas did. When Harrah and Bachmann sued each other, however, the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of Harrah’s and argued that compulsive gamblers must “take personal responsibility” for their actions. But Duhigg asks why people believe that certain habits are easier to control than others.
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The philosopher Aristotle thought that habits are an indication of people’s true inner selves. In this book, Duhigg has tried to show that habits are powerful and deeply rooted, but also that they’re not destiny. If people understand the cue-routine-reward loop behind their habits, they can decide to change them. This is why Angie Bachmann is responsible for her actions and Brian Thomas isn’t: Bachmann knew about her bad habits, so was responsible for changing them. But Thomas had no idea that his habits could lead him to murder his wife in his sleep, so he can’t be held responsible for them.
In the prologue, Duhigg quoted William James: “all our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.” In his twenties, James considered himself a failure and contemplated suicide. But first, he decided to try believing in free will and changing his life. It was a remarkable success. In order to grow, James realized, people have to first make a habit out of believing they can change.
Duhigg concludes that habits are like water to a fish: they’re everywhere, but they’re easy to forget unless we make a point of looking at them. James also compared habits to water: just like water carves out channels for itself, then repeatedly follows those same paths, people develop habits and then repeat them. But they also have the power to create new paths for themselves.
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