Atomic Habits

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By James Clear

I was familiar with the title, but for some reason never compelled to grab the book until Clear was on a podcast. He was a solid guest with useful information, so I immediately added Atomic Habits to my reading list.

More than anything else, I appreciated the emphasis of habits over goals. My head often wanders off too far into the future and doesn’t properly address the present. This becomes a challenge of mindfulness and meditation to improve my mental/emotional state. I received Atomic Habits as another extension of that. By emphasizing regular habits, it pulls me into a more limited and current window of time. My therapist told me “Stay in the present. Just do the next right thing.” It’s probably the best piece of advice that I’ve ever received. I make myself unhappy by allowing my anxiety to spiral out into futures that aren’t here yet and may never actually arrive. I can only focus on my breath so much. The approach to building positive habits described by Clear is a valuable tool. The anxiety attaches to longterm outcomes, which cannot be determined or controlled by one day of my life. However, if I focus on repeated positive actions in the here and now, I can improve my chances for positive outcomes later, while also keeping my mind on things that are actually within my control.

We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. I believe that.

I found that I was only halfway through the book and was inspired to start tweaking my habits. I already have some solid routines in place. My exercise is consistent. I always get my DuoLingo practice done. My bedtime routine is getting better and includes some journaling. When I encountered the section about habit stacking, I was excited to start putting more stuff into my day. I’ve tried and failed to maintain a regular meditation practice. Partly because I didn’t have a specific time for it. I tried to track whether I did it every day, but I didn’t really make time for it. Since the DuoLingo habit has been so consistent, I decided that I would just tie meditation to that. Rather than immediately practicing Spanish once I log off from my work laptop, I will meditate for 10 minutes (I hadn’t read about the 2 Minute Rule yet) and then do the Spanish as before. Similarly, Heather and I have been doing a question-a-day journal for a few years. We consistently answer those questions as we get into bed every night. Like the meditation, I’ve made some failed attempts at a regular gratitude journal. I am now doing that as part of the nightly routine along with the other journal prompt. I’m only about a week into both practices but they felt easy to include so far.

Creating a good habit:

  1. Make it Obvious
    • Use implementation intentions that specify specific time and place
    • Use habit stacking. Use existing habits to trigger new habits.
    • Design your environment. Make cues of good habits obvious and visible.
  2. Make it Attractive
    • Use temptation bundling. Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
    • Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.
    • Create a motivation ritual. Do something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit. This seems to be the reverse order of the first attractive point. That has a reward at the end, this has a positive inspiration at the beginning.
  3. Make it Easy
    • Reduce friction. Decrease the number of steps between you and your good habits.
    • Prime the environment. Prepare your environment to make future actions easier.
    • Master the decisive moment. Optimize the small choices that deliver outsized impact. One good decision can cascade into better options and better decisions down the road.
    • Use the Two-Minute Rule. Downscale your habits until they can be done in two minutes or less. This addresses a problem that I definitely suffer. I want to go all or nothing. I want to solve the whole thing in one shot. If I can’t do all of it, why do any of it? Small wins are still wins. Incremental improvement compounds. Static friction is greater than moving friction. Just get the ball rolling and make it faster when you’re ready, not all at once.
    • Automate your habits. Invest in technology and onetime purchases that lock in future behavior. I dabble in this. I could stand to do it more. I think of this more on the negative side. How to block bad habits more than how to automate good ones.
  4. Make it Satisfying
    • Use reinforcement. Give yourself an immediate reward when you complete your habit. It needs to be the right kind. Hopefully the reward is constructive also. Clear points out that giving yourself donuts for working out can be self defeating.
    • Make “doing nothing” enjoyable. When avoiding a bad habit, design a way to see the benefits. It’s tricky because there’s no natural reward for not doing a thing. Eating junk food and scrolling reddit provide some immediate boost of pleasure. Not eating junk and not scrolling don’t get the same bump although avoiding those things would be healthier in the long run. How to make the avoidance of bad feel good in the immediate term?
    • Use a habit tracker. Keep track of your habit streak and “don’t break the chain.” This one I already use a lot. I’ve been tracking behaviors in calendars for a few years. I’ve changed which behaviors those are and I have been more successful with certain habits than others.
    • Never miss twice. When you forget to do a habit, make sure you get back on track immediately. There are no consequences to habit formation for a single miss. Consecutive misses can be the start of a new habit.

Breaking a bad habit:

  1. Make it invisible
    • Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.
  2. Make it Unattractive
    • Reframe your mind-set. Highlight the benefits of avoiding the bad habits. Clear referenced a book about quitting smoking which thoroughly broke down and contradicted all of the reasons why one should smoke. It was described as negative in all ways and helped people to see that any other approach to addressing their trigger to smoke would be better.
  3. Make it Difficult
    • Increase friction. Increase the number of steps between you and your bad habits. We try not to buy junk food for the house. If it’s there, I’ll eat it. I have some app limitations on my phone to reduce phone abuse.
    • Use a commitment device. Restrict your future choices to the ones that benefit you. I’ve thought about taking it farther and people referenced in the book do so. Perhaps the TV or the router could be on a timer that turns them off at an appropriate time to start the bedtime routine. There are enough nights where I feel like I genuinely don’t want that, but maybe that’s my dumb addicted brain talking over my better self.
  4. Make it Unsatisfying
    • Get an accountability partner. Ask someone to watch your behavior. Heather and Amy provide some amount of this, but I could do more.
    • Create a habit contract. Make the costs of your bad habits public and painful. This seems extreme. I don’t think I need to go that far with any of mine. Sharing my screen time stats wouldn’t be a bad idea though. I’m a sucker for gamification. Maybe I need to compete with some people over screen time golf?

Clear warned about getting too attached to metrics, such that the metrics supplant the original meaning of the exercise. He called this Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” I’ve believed that for some time, but didn’t have such a snappy way to phrase it. Not everything that can be measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured.

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