Have you ever wondered how some high-achieving people manage to stay committed to their work? To getting up early every morning? Or exercising every day? Meanwhile, you have a hard time slugging out of bed in the morning, exercise is a struggle and you end up on your phone for at least an hour every day at work? Mostly this can be whittled down to habits. I’ve talked in part about habits, and how it’s important to make small habits that can increase your productivity. Now I want to look at things from the opposite end. To do that, we need to look back in time to none other than the Vietnam War.
What does the Vietnam War have to do with bad habits? A lot actually, and it’s been a pivotal point of research into the human mind and how habits work. In 1971 it was discovered that over 35% of American soldiers in Vietnam had tried heroin and at least 20% had full-blown addiction. This set off alarm bells back at home and there was huge concern about the impending drug crisis that might ensue when the soldiers returned to the USA. There was tracking set up and the government was preparing for the worst. Then something strange happened.
When following up with the soldiers who returned from Vietnam, it was discovered that of those with known addiction, only 5% became re-addicted within the first year of being home and 12% became re-addicted within 3 years. Now that might sound like an awful lot of people who relapsed into drug use, but for comparison, the current relapse rate after going to rehab is somewhere around 90%. So now there was a new question, Why?
There was an assumption and to a large extent there still is, that to get clean and stay clean of drugs you just have to have the will and the grit. The reality as was plainly shown with the returning vets is that we are more a product of our environment than we might like to admit. It turns out that when the soldiers returned from the war a few things happened. The first is that their stress levels went down (we tend to be less stressed when not getting shot at), the soldiers also were returned to their friends and family who provided a feeling of belonging and comfort. However, the third thing that happened was that they changed their environment and thus their habits.
Now the soldiers didn’t do this intentionally, it just happened due to the fact they were no longer fighting in Vietnam. It turns out that triggers are far more important than we used to think. When the soldiers came back nearly everything in their lives changed. If the soldier used heroin after every frontline deployment, the ending of a frontline deployment would become a trigger and they would grave the drug after every deployment. If they used heroin after getting yelled at by a superior, getting yelled at by a superior would become yet another trigger. Upon returning home, nearly every trigger had been removed from the soldier’s lives, no more frontline duty, no more yelling commanding officer and thus no more trigger. Interestingly if you were to take a soldier and put them back on the frontlines in a similar environment, even decades later, you would find that the rate of re-addiction would skyrocket.
So what does this have to do with you? Well, this mechanism is not exclusive to drug use. In fact, it’s pretty much universal across all behaviours. If you have a habit of stopping for a breakfast sandwich from McDonald’s it’s likely to be linked to a trigger. Have you ever noticed that your mouth starts watering while you’re in the drive-thru? Pulling into that drive-thru could be the trigger, or it could be something as simple as turning onto the road you know the McDonalds is on. Triggers are not just related to ingesting things either. Ever notice how as soon as you are in an awkward silence you whip out your phone without even thinking about it? The silence is a trigger to grab your phone.