One of my go to books when I try to change my lifestyle. Atomic Habits is a book written by James Clear, a behavioural psychologist, and is a practical guide on how to develop better habits and break bad ones.
The book is aimed at anyone looking to improve their life, regardless of their age or background. In this blog post, we will summarize the main points of the book and provide actionable steps that readers can take to implement these ideas in their lives.
Part 1: How habits are formed
The book is divided into four parts, each covering different aspects of habit formation.
Part one explains the importance of making small, incremental changes to your habits, rather than trying to change everything all at once. Clear refers to this as the "atomic" approach to habits. He emphasizes that the key to long-term success is to focus on the small changes that you can make today and build upon them over time.
If you have trained with me in the gym, you probably remember hearing about making each week 1% better than the last. Same idea.
Part 2: The four laws of behaviour change
This is the most important part of the book. Clear identifies four steps of going through a habit.
The cue: It triggers your brain into wanting something. Your stomach makes sounds and reminds you you're hungry. Your brain wants to eat.
Craving: What your brain instinctively thinks about. You immediately remember the good pizza you had last week. It was so good! Let's have another one.
Response: This is our action in response to our craving. Do you go for another pizza, or do make another choice?
Reward: The result of our response. You were hungry, you had a craving and you acted. Whether you ate a pizza or something else, one of the rewards is a full stomach.
Clear argues that we can use these laws to our advantage and create new habits. The only law we can't really take advantage of is our craving as it is a natural instincts. I would even argue that inhibiting what's natural to us is unhealthy, but I'll save that for another post.
Let's take a look at what we can change.
Changing the cue
By identifying the cues that trigger our bad habits, we can replace them with new, healthier cues. For example, instead of waiting for your stomach to growl your hunger to your brain, you could set another cue to eat at more regular intervals. You could set an alarm at precise times throughout the day to remind you to have a healthy snack.
This would prevent you from going super hungry and succumbing to cravings.
We can also create a habit stack, which is a series of small, interrelated habits that we can perform together to make larger, more meaningful changes.
Say you have a rock solid habit of making yourself breakfast before work. This is called your anchor habit. You could stack the habit of packing a couple of fruits (a banana and apple for example), into your work bag. This would help you eat healthier snacks throughout your day.
The habit stack would be along the lines of: After I put my breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, I immediately put an apple and banana in my work bag.
You can stack tons of habits together. "When I finish my workout I immediately stretch for 5 minutes" or "When I get out of the shower at night I read for 15 minutes."
To make habit stacking successful, make sure your anchor habit is already something you do seamlessly. Do not try to stack two new habits together.
Part 3: Making the response easy
The third part of Atomic Habit is about optimizing your environment for success. Clear believes that the people, places, and objects around us have a significant impact on our habits.
Your environment, at home and at work are two places you can control in your favour.
Let's say you want to workout more often. You have a busy schedule and decide to start exercising at home. Somehow the weeks go by and you're still not training as often as you'd like.
This is where you can start tweaking your home to your advantage. Could you leave your exercise mat in one dedicated workout area? But now ok let's say you live like me in a small apartment and don't want to leave the mat out all the time. Could you perhaps leave your dumbbells somewhere so it's easy to see them? And maybe put your exercise shoes right beside them?
This would give you a visual cue to exercise every time you see the dumbbells.
You can set up your environment however you want depending on your needs. It helps to identify the friction points between you and your desired habits. This will give you a clearer idea of how to set up your environment to reduce the friction.
Part 4: How to change to reward
The reward of any action is what makes or breaks a habit. Notice that all "bad" habits give you some reward. A pizza gives you immediate satiety, scrolling Instagram gives you a short boost of dopamine, not going to the gym makes you feel more cozy.
The problem with "good" habits is that their rewards usually come much later. Going to the gym to grind out a gruelling workout is painful and noticing changes in strength or appearance takes weeks if not months. Not scrolling on social media can make us feel more lonely in the moment, but learning to be happy with ourselves also takes time.
Thankfully, there are a few ways to get around this.
Habit trackers
One of the rewards we often overlook is the fact that we take a small step towards our goals. Knowing that we are progressing towards them is an intrinsic reward that only we can feel.
Being aware of this will add an immediate reward to your healthy habits. Few people acknowledge that eating something healthy instead of a pizza is a win.
The common trap here is to be inconsistent. I fall in that trap very often. I often set out to do a new habit, do it for a few days and pat myself on the back, only to forget about it sooner than later.
Clear suggests creating a visual habit tracker to get around this. Having a habit tracker, on which you get to visualize how long you've been doing something will help you be consistent.
And trust me, filling out those trackers gets addictive!
Progress over perfection
Another great thing Atomic Habits emphasizes is to focus on progress, not perfection.
The habit trackers will help tremendously with that. It's so easy to get bogged down into thinking that we're not doing anything right. We get stuck into inaction, which is just as unhelpful.
Learning to trust, and more importantly, to enjoy the process we create for ourselves is invaluable. It's a hard skill to acquire that takes time, but once you get it, you'll find that creating new habits isn't so bad.
Support systems
Finally, Clear suggests creating support systems to help us stay accountable. If you don't enjoy working out, but know you have to, there are a few systems you can use.
You could buddy up, and go exercise with a friend. This creates mutual accountability. You could hire a personal trainer, you could also join a regular group class.
This resonates with another cheesy, but very accurate quote:
If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together.
Achieving something new, that originally seems daunting will be much easier with other people around you.
I will use this occasion to shamelessly plug my Youtube channel here, if you are looking for a community to workout at home with, we are all about it.
Conclusion
So, how can you implement these ideas in your life? Here are some actionable steps you can take today:
Start small: Identify one small habit that you can change today, such as drinking a glass of water when you wake up in the morning.
Use the four laws of behaviour change: When trying to establish a new habit, identify the cue that triggers your bad habit, replace it with a healthier response, and reward yourself for your success.
Create a habit stack: Combine several small, interrelated habits to make larger, more meaningful changes. For example, you could create a habit stack that includes stretching, drinking water, and meditating in the morning.
Optimize your environment: Assess your environment and make changes that will make it easier to form good habits and harder to fall back into bad ones. For example, if you tend to snack on unhealthy foods, remove them from your pantry and replace them with healthier options.
Focus on progress, not perfection: Don't get discouraged if you slip up or miss a day. Instead, focus on the progress you've made and use positive feedback to reinforce your good habits.
Find an accountability system: Whether it's a coach, a mentor, or a support group, having someone to hold you accountable can be a powerful motivator for sticking to your habits.
In conclusion, Atomic Habits is an excellent book for anyone looking to improve their life by developing better habits and breaking bad ones. I personally re-read this one every other year to remind myself of this framework. By focusing on small, incremental changes, using the four laws of behaviour change, optimizing your environment, and staying accountable, you can achieve long-term success and build the life you want.
Happy training,
Clem
Comments