9. Power of Habit Chapter 3

 - Tony Dungy was a football coach whose dream was to coach an NFL team, and he had many prospective interviews but was unable to get many jobs because his technique was to focus on players' habits. He finally got a job coaching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who were one of the worst NFL teams. 

- Golden rule: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it 

- Dungy doesn't bother with obscure plays or complicated moves like other coaches. He just makes his players drill the same basic plays over and over again until they can do it better and faster than the other team. 

- Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was an alcoholic who went to a hospital for drug and alcohol addictions, and he was given belladonna (a hallucinogenic drug) which caused him to have intense pains and hallucinations and he had a vision that he saw "god" and that he was in a new world when he regained consciousness. 

- AA has a very high success rate, and it's twelve steps are cultural lodestones which are incorporated in treatment programs for many different problems, but AA has no actual medical or scientific backing. 

- Researchers say AA works because it forces people to identify the cues and rewards that encourage their alcoholism and then helps them find new routines and behaviors. It's not obvious in the steps themselves, but by completing them, a person will have ended up making a complete list of all of their alcoholic triggers. 

- Experiment where electrical triggers were placed in alcoholics' heads to rewire their neurological habitual response to alcohol. The craving disappeared as soon as they electricity was turned on, but reappeared immediately after it was off. They relapsed soon after the surgery, and were not able to completely detox until changing their habits and attending AA meetings. 

- Mandy, a twenty four year old grad student, had a chronic nail biting problem which wouldn't go away no matter how she tried. She was referred to a doctoral psychology student who was studying a habit reversal training treatment. Mandy was able to explain that she bit her nails after finding rough edges and then doing all of her fingers after doing one. Together, Brad Dufrene (the man who treated her) and Mandy were able to figure out that she bit her nails when she was bored. 

- When you're looking to change a habit it's important to understand the craving driving the behavior so that you're able to change it. 

- Dungy told his player Brooks exactly what to do whenever he saw a certain cue, removing the time Brooks needed for decision making when making a play and making him much faster 

- During crucial, high stress moments for the team, everything would fall apart. They trusted the system most of the time, but it broke down when there was more on the line. 

- There are cracks in the theory that all AA does is replace people's habits. Habit replacement worked pretty well until the stresses of life (finding out your mom has cancer, getting divorced, etc.), got too high and alcoholics went back to drinking. 

- Alcoholics that believed in a higher power were more likely to make it through stressful periods of their lives without falling off the wagon. Researchers found that it wasn't God that mattered, but the belief itself. Once people learned to believe in something, they began believing in other things until they also believed that they could change. Belief made the habit loop into a permanent behavior. 

- Dungy was fired from the Bucs and was hired as head coach for the Indianapolis Colts. The same pattern happened again, when Dungy's son died. The players wanted to do anything to make their coach feel better, so they began to give in to Dungy's vision of football, with a new kind of conviction. 

- In order for habits to permanently change, people must believe that the change is feasible.