Atomic Habits, James Clear [Book Review]
How to improve your life, one tiny change at a time? The author offers a synthesis of the best ideas smart people figured out a long time ago, as well as the most compelling discoveries that scientists have made recently.
Improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable — sometimes it isn’t even noticeable — but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here is how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.
What is a habit?
A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.
On the contrary: whenever you encounter a new situation in life, your brain has to work out a new solution by exploring different strategies. The more task you can handle without thinking, the more brain capacity is free for other complex tasks. This is also the main reason why we have developed memory: it’s easier to remember a solution than try to find it again every time.
Your conscious brain can only pay attention to one problem at a time, whenever possible, the conscious mind likes to pawn off tasks to the nonconscious mind to do automatically. This is precisely what happens when a habit is formed.
Habits are not only useful for themselves: Knowledge compounds. Every new idea you learn isn’t valuable only by itself, it offers also a new point of view on old ideas. This is true also for social relationships: being a little nicer with people will lead to a network with broad and strong connections in the long run. Sadly, every progress we make will not be reflected with results immediately; this is the main reason why constant progress is hard. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event and not all the struggle that you’ve been through.
Goal vs System
Goals are the result you would like to achieve, systems are the processes that lead you to your goals.
Goals are good for setting up the direction and creating the mindset, but you cannot measure actual progress with them, you should spend more time designing the process rather than thinking about your goals. We often think about the result that we want, so we start working on something new, and then after a few days or weeks we give up, that’s because we are not focused on the process. After little effort we will gain small/zero results, this will kill our motivation because it seems that we will never reach the goal.
When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy.
You are trying to change the wrong thing
We are setting objectives, always referring to outcomes: “you should lose 1Kg by the end of the month”, but there are actually three layers of change to be addressed:
- outcomes: most of your goals are at this level;
- processes: changes at this level are interested in the actual implementations of our habits: “you should follow this schedule today at the gym”. These changes are more specific and better to track progress;
- identity: the deepest level of change is inside your identity, your definition of you. This is the first layer that you should change before any other: “I’m an athletic person, I show up at the gym quite regularly”.
Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last. You may want more money, but if your identity is someone who consumes rather than creates, then you’ll continue to be pulled toward spending rather than earning. […] Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.
But how is your identity formed?
Your identity emerges out of your habits, it’s shaped by your experience, your identity changes every day by a tiny amount: we are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self.
How to build a habit
The process by which habits are created is a repetition of four steps:
- cue: notice a possibility for action;
- craving: desire a certain outcome;
- response: act with an objective in mind;
- reward: collect feedback.
I’ll go through them one by one as it is done in the book.
Cue
Your actions are influenced by the surrounding environment: if you see a dish of biscuits, it’s really likely that you will take one, also if you were not hungry.
Visual cues are really powerful because they trigger a craving in our brain.
If you want to increase the probability of you performing a habit, you have to change the environment around you and make it suited for the action to be taken.
The 1st law of Behavior change is to make it obvious.
You need to have clear cues that trigger your habits, one practical way of achieving this is through habit stacking: it consists of performing a habit right after a precise action. In this way, you force yourself to act, using the previous situation as a cue for the new one. This rule is already applied in your life: for example, you may wash your teeth after dinner, or take a shower after a run. Placing one action right after another creates an automatism that tricks your brain and helps you to take action.
The brain has many ways to perceive the environment, but half of it is used to process visual information, for these reasons visual cues are the most powerful to trigger actions. It’s important to change your environment in order to have a lot of constructive cues around you.
The same idea can be exploited oppositely: if there is a bad habit that I want to remove, I can try to hide the visual cues (like hiding cigarettes).
Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment.
Craving
Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in. The business industry knows well how to make you desire something.
After you perceive a cue you start craving for something or someone, at this phase in our brain we reach a so-called dopamine spike, these spikes are the reasons we act, they are the mental fuel that gives us the strength to go on in every context. In 1954 the neuroscientists James Olds and Peter Milner ran an experiment on rats: they blocked their releases of dopamine through electrodes, the results? The rats wouldn’t eat or have sex, they just starved to death. The cool fact about dopamine spikes is that they happen before taking the action, they anticipate it, there is also a dopamine release after getting results for a given action, but they are less intense than the ones in the craving phase. This brings us to the next rule:
2nd Law of Behavior Change: make it attractive.
A way to improve craving for action that you really don’t like to take is Temptation Bundling: it consists in pairing an action that you want to do with an action you need to do. In this way, you force yourself to take the boring action, craving the pleasing one.
In general, people tend to follow cravings that seem auto-destructive, but they are just the manifestation of a deeper underlying motive.
Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future. Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do at the moment. When you binge-eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different.
Response
A study taken at the University of Florida divided photography students into two groups: one group will be graded on the number of photos taken, the other one will be graded on the quality of just one photo. At the end of the experiments, they surprisingly found that the best photos came from the “quantity” group. This teaches us that by tacking actions you are producing results, these results are either good or lessons for the next actions, instead, planning and learning are useful only up to a certain point. A lot of times we postpone action until we feel confident enough to take them; this approach is a way to protect ourselves, delaying failures. Habits are built through repetition and not by planning, the better way to learn is to take the risk and make mistakes.
Our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient. And despite what the latest productivity bestseller will tell you, this is a smart strategy, not a dumb one. Energy is precious, and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible. It is human nature to follow the Law of Least effort.
By making your habits as simple as possible, you are overcoming this friction, and you make it easy for yourself to complete tasks. You cannot always rely on motivation. One way to apply this in everyday life is to remove distractions when you are working on a demanding task. You should ask yourself how to make it easy to do what’s right.
3rd Law of Behavior Change: make it easy.
Every day there are moments where we need to make a decision, and this decision will take us to one path in the future, in every decision we select a path and discard others, the action I’ll take later are influenced by the decision I’m making now.
The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things. Standardize before optimizing.
The same concepts are valid when we are trying to break a bad habit: make it impractical, increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.
Reward
In modern times we don’t collect immediate results from our actions, we live in a delayed-return environment: you can work for years without an actual result. The earliest remains of modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) show a brain similar to ours, apart from the neocortex, which is used for language. Basically, the brain is the same as it was hundreds of years ago, and it is only recently that society has shifted to a delayed-return environment.
The brain developed in an immediate-reward environment, our ancestors acted responding to immediate threats, the distant future was not an interest. That’s the deep reason behind our bad habits: they are bad habits only in the long term, in the short one they provide instant reward and for the brain they are attractive. When you are playing video games, binge-eating, smoking, … Your brain is giving more importance to the immediate benefit than the future effect.
We all want better lives for ourselves. However, when the moment of decision arrives, instant gratification usually wins. You are no longer making choice for Future You, you are choosing for Present You.
To stick to a habit is vital to feel successful, to have a sense of reward after taking action, sometimes a cross over the calendar’s day is enough, others prefer to journal their progress. In any case, the best form of motivation is progress, you need a signal that shows you that you are moving forward.
4th Law of Behavior Change: make it satisfying.
Another technique used to stick with habits is through an accountability partner: basically, a person that you will update with your progress and failures; knowing that someone is watching could be a powerful motivator.
How do we design habits that pull us in rather than ones that fade away? One interesting founding about this subject is that the way to maintain motivation is to work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty”. This is called the Goldilocks rule: the peak of motivation happens when working on a task right at the edge of your current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy.
Thank you for reading.
