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I had a conversation with my daughter, and it turns out there's some things going on in my house that I wasn't aware of. and the father says, ' I need to apologize. "The manager calls a couple of days later. Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?' and the manager apologizes," Duhigg says. "He went in and said, 'My daughter is 16 years old. This can get tricky: One father was upset after receiving coupons for baby products in the mail from Target addressed to his teenage daughter. They have figured out that women who buy certain products - vitamins, unscented lotions, washcloths - might be pregnant and then can use that information to jump-start their marketing campaign. "The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child," he says, "because all of your old routines go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new things."Īnalysts at Target collect "terabytes of information" on its shoppers. The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child.

So you have this ability to form a new pattern and hopefully be able to carry it over into your life." "If you want to quit smoking, you should stop smoking while you're on a vacation - because all your old cues and all your old rewards aren't there anymore. "It's also a great reason why changing a habit on a vacation is one of the proven most-successful ways to do it," he says. That's one of the reasons why taking a vacation is so relaxing: It helps break certain habits. "You'll put your shoes on in a different order without paying any attention to it," he says, "because once the cues change, patterns are broken up." But if they take a vacation, it's likely that the behavior will change. Studies have shown that people will perform automated behaviors - like pulling out of a driveway or brushing teeth - the same way every single time, if they're in the same environment. "And that's because of the capacity of our basal ganglia: to take a behavior and turn it into an automatic routine." "You can do these complex behaviors without being mentally aware of it at all," he says. That's why it's easy - while driving or parallel parking, let's say - to completely focus on something else: like the radio, or a conversation you're having. And this is a real advantage, because it means you have all of this mental activity you can devote to something else."

"The brain can almost completely shut down. "In fact, the brain starts working less and less," says Duhigg. But as soon as a behavior becomes automatic, the decision-making part of your brain goes into a sleep mode of sorts.

Decisions, meanwhile, are made in a different part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. Neuroscientists have traced our habit-making behaviors to a part of the brain called the basal ganglia, which also plays a key role in the development of emotions, memories and pattern recognition. The third step, he says, is the reward: something that your brain likes that helps it remember the "habit loop" in the future. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Power of Habit Author Charles Duhigg