High-Level Thoughts
A comprehensive guide to changing your habits, with an in-depth examination of how to create good habits and break bad ones. Highly recommend it to anyone struggling to establish good routines in their life.
Several of the concepts covered in the book could be beneficial for more than just habit change; they could be used for general lifestyle and behavioural change too. You need only apply them in the right way.
Key Ideas
- Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
- The most effective way to create or change a habit is to focus on who you want to become rather than the result you’re trying to achieve.
- To get better results, you should focus on the systems behind your habits instead of their end goal.
- The four laws of behaviour change are: (1) Make it obvious. (2) Make it attractive. (3) Make it easy. (4) Make it satisfying.
- Our immediate environment plays a key role in shaping our behaviour.
Book Summary
Systems
When we incorporate new habits into our lives, it’s often because we’re fixated on some goal. We see habits as the means to achieving the goal. Only, getting a habit to stick tends to be rather difficult. At first, we’re motivated by our goals. But gradually this motivation wanes to the point where we give up on the habit and goal entirely.
This is exactly where we go wrong in establishing new habits. We’re overly fixated on our goals. And why wouldn’t we be? It’s common knowledge that if we want to achieve something then setting SMART goals is a great way to succeed. The problem is, we fixate so much on the goal itself that we don’t spend enough time focusing on how we’re going to get there. The results we achieve have little to do with the goals we’ve set and far more to do with the systems that we follow.
The distinction between the two is simple. Goals are the results we’re trying to achieve. Systems are the processes that lead to the results.
A key insight from the book is that when we’re having trouble changing a habit, the problem lies with our systems rather than with us. When we repeat bad habits, or struggle to build new ones, it’s not because we don’t want to change, we just lack the right systems for change.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
To succeed our aim should be to improve our systems. Building into this is the titular term; atomic habits are smaller parts of a larger system. They should be seen as the building blocks of our results. Perfecting a small element of a system may not seem like much, but the marginal gain it generates quickly compounds over time. As James Clear puts it,
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.” We tend to de-emphasise the importance of gradual progress, but taken over a long enough period the compound interest generated is immense.
But enough about systems. Focusing on them is great, but much like goals, we shouldn’t fixate on them. Our systems are only one part of the problem. The other part is how habits interconnect with our identity and sense of self.
Identity
Our identity emerges from our habits. Our actions are the manifestation of who we are, and the more we repeat an action the more it reinforces our sense of identity. Our repeated actions act as evidence for who we are. For example, if you go to the gym multiple times a week no matter the weather, then you have evidence that you’re dedicated to fitness.
By understanding this, we can see that habit change isn’t just about changing a habit. It’s also about changing our identity. This process can be seen as a three-layer system.
- Outcomes: Concerned with the results we want to achieve.
- Processes: Concerned with our systems.
- Identity: Concerned with changing our beliefs about ourselves.
When our primary focus is on our goals, we’re working outside in. The flaw to this approach is that it hardly ever forces us to assess our identity or the role it plays in our actions.
Instead, we should work inside out – figuring out what kind of person we need to be in order to achieve the results we want. When we do this, our habits are more likely to align with our sense of identity, meaning that they’re harder to break and more likely to last.
Habit Formation
All habits form following the same pattern.
- Cue: A trigger that instigates a behaviour.
- Craving: The motivational force behind every habit. Without a craving for change, there is no reason to act.
- Response: The habit you perform.
- Reward: Delivered by the response, this is the end goal of every habit. The more satisfying the reward, the more likely it is to be repeated.
By understanding the role each step plays in habit formation, it’s possible to derive four laws for behavioural change. Each law is applied slightly differently depending on whether the intention is to create a habit or break one.
| Habit Formation | Laws To Create A Habit | Laws To Break A Habit | |
| 1. | Cue. | Make it obvious. | Make it invisible. |
| 2. | Craving. | Make it attractive. | Make it unattractive. |
| 3. | Response. | Make it easy. | Make it difficult. |
| 4. | Reward. | Make it satisfying. | Make it unsatisfying. |
Laws 1-3 make it more likely that a habit will be performed. Law 4 makes it more likely for the habit to be repeated.
First Law: Make it Obvious
Whether we’re aware of it or not, our environment plays a big role in the decisions that we make. Behaviour is a function of a person in their environment. The more visible something is to us, the more likely we are to use it – it’s one of the reasons supermarkets place big brand items at eye level and cheaper alternatives in harder to reach locations.
Once we understand this it becomes apparent that environment design has a key role to play in our habits. When trying to build a new habit, design the environment in such a way that the habits cue is out in the open. The more visible and accessible the cue, the easier it becomes to initiate the habit.
Taking this a step further, you can design your environment in a way that removes alternatives to the habit you’re trying to create. If we’re trying to build a habit of snacking on healthy food, then we could place fruit out in the open whilst putting the less healthy alternatives in less accessible locations.
Second Law: Make it Attractive
If a habit involves something you want to do, then the attraction is already there. The difficult comes when you’re trying to build habits that you need to do but may not necessarily want to do.
One way to get around this difficulty is by combining Premack’s principle and habit stacking. Habit stacking is where a habit is performed immediately after finishing a different habit. And Premack’s principle states that more probable behaviours will reinforce less probable behaviours. Together, they give a nice sequence to help perform the habits that we need to do.
After (current habit) I will (habit I need). After that, I will (habit I want).
As with the first law, environment design can be utilised to make a habit more attractive. Only, this time the focus is on our social environment rather than our physical one. The approval of our peers is a powerful motivating force, and when a habit is viewed as normal by our social environment then it tends to be amongst the most attractive. By joining a culture where a desired habit is viewed as the norm, it makes it far easier to pick up.
Third Law: Make it Easy
People like to take the path of least resistance. The path that requires less work and less energy. With this in mind, the easier we make a habit the more likely we’ll be to do it – especially if the alternatives offer greater resistance.
One way to do this is to incrementally improve the systems behind our habits by removing points of friction. It’s addition through subtraction. By subtracting points of friction we’re adding to the ease of use. By inverting this principle, to help break bad habits we can increase the friction in the systems.
Another technique, which is useful if a new habit is daunting or overwhelming, is the ‘2-minute rule’. That is, a new habit should take 2-minutes or less. It sounds counterintuitive, especially if the habit that’s being built takes much longer. But the aim isn’t to start with the perfect habit. The aim is to make the habit easy enough that you can master showing up. Once you’ve mastered the first 2-minutes, you can move on to focusing on the next 2-minutes, and so on. As it’s put in the book
“If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.”
Law Four: Make it Satisfying
The cardinal rule of behaviour change is ‘what is rewarded gets repeated, what is punished gets avoided’. When forming a new habit, we’re seeking immediate satisfaction. The trouble is, the reward for most habits materialises sometime in the future – and our brain tends to value our present state more than our future state. Therefore, the key is to find a way to generate a sense of immediate satisfaction when working on a new habit (or breaking a bad one).
An easy way to generate a sense of satisfaction is to make progress visible – this is particularly important for habits we’re trying to avoid. If the desired habit is to spend less frivolously, then it can be hard to feel satisfied as no action takes place if we don’t spend anything. By making the habit visible, say, by putting the money you wanted to spend into a savings account, then you get immediate satisfaction by seeing the progress you’re making. Whilst this applies to many habits, we need to be wary of Goodhart’s law – which states “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Having a measure is one thing, turning the measure into the goal is another.
Another approach to make it satisfying – or rather, make the consequences of not following through dissatisfying – is to have an accountability partner. Create an agreement with a friend or family member where you state your commitment to a habit and the consequences if you don’t follow through. For example, if you want to build a habit of regularly attending the gym then to incentivise yourself you could agree to pay a friend £100 if you fail to attend the gym three times during the week. Whilst this may seem extreme to some, it’s reasonable to others. The key is to find the appropriate level of consequence for your unique situation. The goal is to find a point where the cost of not following through on the habit is greater than the cost of following through.
Sustaining Long-Term Habits
Not all habits we pursue are fully suited to our individual interests and personalities. Some will be easier to create and sustain than others. The secret to maximising the odds of success is to choose the correct field to compete in. Habits are easier to perform, and to stick with long term, if they align with our natural disposition. Whilst the influence our genetics will have vary from situation to situation, what remains consistent throughout is our personality. By having a better insight into our own personality (through, for example, a big five personality trait test) we can better choose habits that suit us, rather than just picking what’s popular.
Having a habit align with our natural disposition isn’t enough on its own. It also has to challenge us the right amount. If something’s too easy for us then we become bored, if it’s too difficult then we quickly lose motivation and give up. The key is to find just the right amount of difficulty – a prime example of the Goldilocks rule, which states “humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities.”
By ensuring we remain within this ‘optimal zone’ of difficulty, our habits will constantly challenge us just enough for us to remain engaged. This isn’t a flawless plan however. At some point, given enough repetition, anything can become boring. Ultimately, if we want to succeed at anything then a decision needs to be made about whether or not it’s important enough to endure the monotony of repeating it. If a habit is truly important to us, then we’ll stick with it regardless of mood
