about drinking. We talk about life and marriage and my job, and by the time I’m ready for a shower, my head is on straight.”
The first cracks in the theory that Alcoholics Anonymous succeeded solely by reprogramming participants’ habits started appearing a little over a decade ago and were caused by stories from alcoholics like John. Researchers began finding that habit replacement worked pretty well for many people until the stresses of life-such as finding out your mom has cancer, or your marriage is coming apart-got too high, at which point alcoholics often fell off the wagon. Academics asked why, if habit replacement is so effective, it seemed to fail at such critical moments. And as they dug into alcoholics’ stories to answer that question, they learned that replacement habits only become durable new behaviors when they are accompanied by something else.
One group of researchers at the Alcohol Research Group in California, for instance, noticed a pattern in interviews. Over and over again, alcoholics said the same thing: Identifying cues and choosing new routines is important, but without another ingredient, the new habits never fully took hold.
The secret, the alcoholics said, was God.
Researchers hated that explanation. God and spirituality are not testable hypotheses. Churches are filled with drunks who continue drinking despite a pious faith. In conversations with addicts, though, spirituality kept coming up again and again. So in 2005, a group of scientists-this time affiliated with UC Berkeley, Brown University, and the National Institutes of Health-began asking alcoholics about all kinds of religious and spiritual topics. [95] Then they looked at the data to see if there was any correlation between religious belief and how long people stayed sober. [96]
A pattern emerged. 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, like John in Brooklyn, 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.
“I wouldn’t have said this a year ago-that’s how fast our understanding is changing,” said Tonigan, the University of New Mexico researcher, “but belief seems critical. You don’t have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better.
“Even if you give people better habits, it doesn’t repair why they started drinking in the first place. Eventually they’ll have a bad day, and no new routine is going to make everything seem okay. What can make a difference is
By putting alcoholics in meetings where belief is a given-where, in fact, belief is an integral part of the twelve steps-AA trains people in how to believe in something until they believe in the program and themselves. It lets people practice believing that things will eventually get better, until things actually do.
“At some point, people in AA look around the room and think,
As John was leaving the AA meeting, I asked him why the program worked now, after it had failed him before. “When I started coming to meetings after the truck accident, someone asked for volunteers to help put away the chairs,” he told me. “I raised my hand. It wasn’t a big thing, it took like five minutes, but it felt good to do something that wasn’t all about
“I wasn’t ready to give in to the group the first time, but when I came back, I was ready to start believing in something.”
V.
Within a week of Dungy’s firing by the Bucs, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts left an impassioned fifteen- minute message on his answering machine. The Colts, despite having one of the NFL’s best quarterbacks, Peyton Manning, had just finished a dreadful season. The owner needed help. He was tired of losing, he said. Dungy moved to Indianapolis and became head coach.
He immediately started implementing the same basic game plan: remaking the Colts’ routines and teaching players to use old cues to build reworked habits. In his first season, the Colts went 10-6 and qualified for the play- offs. The next season, they went 12-4 and came within one game of the Super Bowl. Dungy’s celebrity grew. Newspaper and television profiles appeared around the country. Fans flew in so they could visit the church Dungy attended. His sons became fixtures in the Colts’ locker room and on the sidelines. In 2005, Jamie, his eldest boy, graduated from high school and went to college in Florida.
Even as Dungy’s successes mounted, however, the same troubling patterns emerged. The Colts would play a season of disciplined, winning football, and then under play-off pressure, choke.
“Belief is the biggest part of success in professional football,” Dungy told me. “The team
The Colts finished the 2005 regular season with fourteen wins and two losses, the best record in its history.
Then tragedy struck.
Three days before Christmas, Tony Dungy’s phone rang in the middle of the night. His wife answered and handed him the receiver, thinking it was one of his players. There was a nurse on the line. Dungy’s son Jamie had been brought into the hospital earlier in the evening, she said, with compression injuries on his throat. His girlfriend had found him hanging in his apartment, a belt around his neck. Paramedics had rushed him to the hospital, but efforts at revival were unsuccessful. [97] He was gone.
A chaplain flew to spend Christmas with the family. “Life will never be the same again,” the chaplain told them, “but you won’t always feel like you do right now.”
A few days after the funeral, Dungy returned to the sidelines. He needed something to distract himself, and his wife and team encouraged him to go back to work. “I was overwhelmed by their love and support,” he later wrote. “As a group, we had always leaned on each other in difficult times; I needed them now more than ever.”
The team lost their first play-off game, concluding their season. But in the aftermath of watching Dungy during this tragedy, “something changed,” one of his players from that period told me. “We had seen Coach through this terrible thing and all of us wanted to help him somehow.”
It is simplistic, even cavalier, to suggest that a young man’s death can have an impact on football games. Dungy has always said that nothing is more important to him than his family. But in the wake of Jamie’s passing, as the Colts started preparing for the next season, something shifted, his players say. The team gave in to Dungy’s vision of how football should be played in a way they hadn’t before. They started to believe.
“I had spent a lot of previous seasons worrying about my contract and salary,” said one player who, like others, spoke about that period on the condition of anonymity. “When Coach came back, after the funeral, I wanted to give him everything I could, to take away his hurt. I kind of gave myself to the team.”
“Some men like hugging each other,” another player told me. “I don’t. I haven’t hugged my sons in a decade. But after Coach came back, I walked over and I hugged him as long as I could, because I wanted him to know that I was there for him.”
After the death of Dungy’s son, the team started playing differently. A conviction emerged among players about the strength of Dungy’s strategy. In practices and scrimmages leading up to the start of the 2006 season, the Colts played tight, precise football.
“Most football teams aren’t really teams. They’re just guys who work together,” a third player from that period told me. “But we became a
