Habit

Sure, people always fall prey to everyday habits and routines. Most of us (and I must confess I count myself among them) keep doing the same thing - like looking too much at the mobile phone. It's the first object I reach for in the morning and the last thing I look at before bed.

It all seems so natural. Thing is, if you've read Charles DuHigg's The Power of Habit, there's a good chance you'll understand how a habit - like a parasite, only much worse - enters our brain and lives there.

The basic rule of habit is straightforward. It's a habit loop with three stages: the cue, which is a trigger in the first place; the routine, which is the behaviour itself; the reward, at the end, to satisfy the brain and guarantee that the loop is worth replicating. Straightforward idea, really.

To show you how a habit kicks in, let's think about the urinal in public toilets. For more than a century, the urinal has been one of the dirtiest areas. What would you do if you happened to be given the task of latrine cleaning? I learned the trick from a story at Schiphol, Amsterdam's international airport. Imagine, for a moment, holding your breath in front of the urinals and getting mad about the spillage (which is a tactful term to describe the amount of urine that hits the walls and floors). Can we shape the behaviour and habit of those visitors of the toilet? Remember the habit loop? Not many do, except a smart guy Jos Van Bedoff. Van Bedoff managed to change the habit of thousands of men at Schiphol, because he exploited the habit loop. Guess what is the cue that he invented?

A fake but life-sized fly etched into the white porcelain wall of each urinal.

The rest is easy to understand. Et voilà! Spillage was cut by a whopping 80 percent.