Book Highlights: Atomic Habits

Forming new habits and breaking old ones are hard.

Delayed Outcomes is one of the main reasons why we start a new habit and give up early. The new year weight loss goals, your financial goals and learning something new don’t happen quickly enough. When we rely solely on motivation, a limited resource, we run out of steam of quickly – the valley of disappointment.

Building a good habit is like cultivating a flower, it takes time. Breaking a bad habit is hard like uprooting a tree.

Goals oriented thinking is quite pervasive. SMART goals or not, setting goals, being excited in the beginning, losing momentum and giving up halfway is something a lot of us are familiar with.

Goals give direction. Systems (habits) enable progress.

When the focus is on outcomes, success or failure impacts your identity. When you instead start with setting out to change who you to become, you focus on the identity that will lead to good outcomes.

Atomic Habits approaches this desire for change through incremental and tiny improvements. A 1% improvement every day compounds to a 37% increase improvement in a year’s time. Acquiring new habits or breaking bad ones is no longer a mountain to climb, but a series of small steps taken every day.

Habits are how the brain automates our actions and responses to cues. A cue triggers a response and when there is a reward at the end of it, the brain starts to crave for it, and this leads to what is called the Habit Loop.

Recognizing how a habit is formed is critical to forming new ones or breaking old ones. If creating a good habit, make the cues obvious, the craving attractive, the action easy and a satisfying reward. You can break a bad habit by making the triggers invisible, the craving unattractive, the action difficult and the rewards unsatisfying.

Atomic Habits’ 1st Law of Behaviour Change: Make it obvious

When you understand how habits work, focusing on the starting point, the cue can help you stick to new habits or break the old ones. Self-awareness is the goal here. Make a list of all your current habits, mark them as good, bad and neutral. Now for each of the habits you’ve listed, identify your cues. You don’t always have to be aware of the cue for the habit to be triggered. So the first step is to spot and highlight all your current habits.

When you want to start a new habit, a fresh start and a clean slate feel good. Time and location are powerful cues that you can take advantage to design a new habit for your self. Research shows that when you write down a plan that involves time and location for when and where you will act on your intention, the success rate is higher. This plan is also referred to as the Implementation Intention.

Every night I write down my implementation intention for the following morning’s routine, I’ve noticed that I stick to it, compared to those days when I forget to write it down in my journal.

Habit Stacking allows you to piggyback habits. You can use a habit that is already established to trigger a new one you’re trying to establish.

Behaviour is the function of the person in their environment

Your environment is a cue for a lot of your behaviours, so why not make a conscious decision to design it a certain way. Supermarkets and large retail stores are masters at this, to trick you into buying products you don’t want by placing them strategically in the aisles.

Why waste your energy on motivation if you can design the environment around you to subconsciously trigger you to perform an action.

One space, one use. One device, one use.

Since a lot of us are working from home these days, creating separate zones in the house can help separate work from other activities like reading and relaxing.

Willpower is a limited resource. Relying on that to break bad habits is ineffective. Remember the “uprooting a tree” analogy for breaking a bad habit. Now imagine trying to uproot it with a small knife.

Willpower is at its weakest at the end of a long workday since you’ve used it up. Any surprise why so much of the binge eating happens at night? You see a jar of cookies on the kitchen counter as you’re walking by and before you realize, your hands already are in it.

When you realize that habits are automatic and do not run solely on motivation, you start to realize the importance of the cues and the environment in which your current habits operate. “Discipline” is the application of morals to solve problems of habit that results in judgements of your personality and character. It’s a downward spiral from thereon.

The solution: make the cue invisible. Leave your phone in the next room. Move the cookie jar from the kitchen counter to a place where you can’t see it.

If cues can be made obvious or invisible, the craving element can also be designed to work in our favour. The craving is the thoughts, emotions and feelings we experience that creates the “want” for the reward. It is the craving and desire that gets us to act.

Often, the feeling of anticipation feels better than the actual completion of a task.

The brain is geared towards “wanting” more than “liking”. That’s why desire is such a powerful emotion. Fast food has perfected the science of packaging and selling a craving.

If there’s something you already like doing, a natural want, bundle it with something you need to do. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, calls this Temptation Bundling. This is similar to the idea of habit stacking, but in this case, you’re piggybacking on something you really want to do, but before you that you need to complete a task that you need to do. It uses your existing craving, but in your favour towards making a new behaviour into a habit.

We start learning by imitation right from the time we were toddlers. It does stop even as we grow older. So surround yourself with people you can learn from. This shared identity will reinforce the personal identity you wish to create for yourself. But this can also be a slippery slope as the desire for recognition can lead to feelings of inferiority and Imposter Syndrome.

Stop judging yourself for the bad habits you may have acquired. A moral view of it only exacerbates your situation. Our reptilian brain is active and takes over in more ways than we like to admit.

Our desires are ancient, habits are new.

So to find the root cause of our bad habits, we need to the primal needs driving them, which is not always obvious. Once we understand the root cause of our craving, we can find ways to fix our habits by reprograming our brain. One way to do this is by associating a hard habit with a positive experience through what is knows as a Motivation Ritual. Sportspeople are good at this when they have to get through training on “bad days”.

Mistaking planning for actual work is a form of procrastination. And procrastination is linked to failure and possible feelings of inferiority.

I’ve written about how perfection is a favourite ruse of procrastinators.

Habits form based on frequency, not time

Focus on the daily repetitions and not how long it takes to create a habit. Focus on who you want to become and not just the goals you want to achieve. Automaticity is the effortful practice that leads to automatic behaviour.

Once you have decided to take action, make it easy. Reduce the friction through changes in your environment so that it is ready for “immediate use”. You can increase or decrease the friction depending on the habit.

Make good habits easy and bad habits hard

There are decisive moments each day that influence your behaviours leading to a productive day or an unproductive one. Changing our behaviour at key moments can alter how the day pans out. Finding these gateway habits can be crucial in implementing behaviour changes.

One way to make a good habit easy is to use the two-minute rule. Scale down the habit to actions that can be completed in two minutes or less. And then stop. Once you reach the point of automaticity, you can scale up. Often driven by the initial novelty of starting a new task, we aim for doing too much. And this often leads to failure because we’ve made it difficult for ourselves to sustain once the motivation and willpower run dry.

What if good habits were inevitable? Wouldn’t that be great! We could take one-time decisions that locks our future behaviour in. Technology can come to our help in this case, whether it is automatic subscriptions, smart devices etc. Simple things like using smaller plates, betters mattresses and SIP mutual funds can also automate good habits or make them inevitable.

Environment of inevitability = One-time actions + Commitment devices + Automation

Rewards give us the feedback for the actions performed. But short term and immediate rewards tend to be harmful. Practicing delayed gratification is known to have positive impacts on how we lead our lives.

Gamification and game design uses a combination of extrinsic rewards to tap into your intrinsic motivation to deliver engagement. Jane McGonigal in her book called Reality Is Broken describes how games can be deployed in a social context for positive impact.

Here’s a video about the famous Marshmallow test where kids that exhibited behaviours of delayed gratification led happier and successful lives.

This is another idea that games have perfected – the levels and the progress bar to give you feedback. Creating a habit tracker does the same thing. I’ve tried software habit trackers, but a physical tracker performs better. If it’s software based, it’s better to choose one that is automatic.

A habit tracker makes your habit obvious, attractive and satisfying.

Another idea to keep you honest about your habits and the progress is to have an accountability partner. If you are part of a team, group or community, you can find someone there to review your progress on a weekly basis.

I find the idea of a Habit Contract a bit strange, but it apparently works according to the examples shared in this book. A habit contract is a verbal or written commitment to yourself that states your commitment and a penalty for not following through.

Habits can automate behaviour, but when we get to the point of automaticity, and it becomes easier and easier, we stop progressing in terms of skill level. To level up and learn something new, we need to increase the difficulty of the tasks each time. This is how we achieve mastery. Again, games have implemented this for decades.

To achieve a “flow state“, we need to work with tasks of manageable difficulty – tasks that are not too easy or too difficult.

The fundamental idea in this book is that tiny changes and small improvements in your daily life by breaking down habits into smaller chunks can compound over a period of time to produce desired results. It’s not just about achieving our goals but changing mindsets and lifestyles for the better.

Here’s my rating of the book on Goodreads.