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Alcoholics who practiced the techniques of habit replacement, the data indicated, could often stay sober until there was a stressful event in their lives— at which point, a certain number started drinking again, no matter how many new routines they had embraced. However, those alcoholics who believed that some higher power had entered their lives were more likely to make it through the stressful periods with their sobriety intact. It wasn’t God that mattered, the researchers figured out. It was belief itself that made a difference. 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.
You don’t have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better.
What can make a difference is believing that they can cope with that stress without alcohol. It lets people practice believing that things will eventually get better, until things actually do.
There is, unfortunately, no specific set of steps guaranteed to work for every person. We know that a habit cannot be eradicated— it must, instead, be replaced.
And we know that habits are most malleable when the Golden Rule of habit change is applied: If we keep
the same cue and the same reward, a new routine can be inserted.
For a habit to stay changed, people must believe change is possible. And most often, that belief only emerges with the help of a group.
If you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine, and your odds of success go up dramatically when you commit to changing as part of a group.
We know that change can happen. Alcoholics can stop drinking. Smokers can quit puffing. Perennial losers can become champions. You can stop biting your nails or snacking at work, yelling at your
kids, staying up all night, or worrying over small concerns. And as scientists have discovered, it’s not just individual lives that can shift when habits are tended to. It’s also companies, organizations, and communities, as the next chapters explain.
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