Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

Author: James Clear

Blog Post By: Adam Fan

Atomic Habits is one of the most influential books to me throughout the year. The book helped me figure out why things feel out of place when I was trying to solve everything with my willpower. 

Endless Loop 

Towards the end of the year or the start of the year. People tend to set up various kinds of goals to accomplish in the following year. Generally speaking, the action makes perfect sense since we long to be the better version of ourselves. Ironically, how many of us find ourselves cultivating identical goals each and every year. 

The Truth of Habits

As we often hear, cultivating a new habit takes 21 days. While this is scientifically and statistically correct, it overly simplified the process and difficulty of cultivating a habit. 

The prerequisite step of cultivating a habit should be to change your self-identity. A repetitive action or thought will be strongly bound together with your self-identity. The more it repeats the more difficult it is to get rid of it. Aside from the addiction that smoke or drugs bring. Your brain will force youto connect with your identity, which is another kind of addiction as long as the connection is still there. Though it might sound irrelevant to the topic, here is an example for better understanding. 

Let’s say Adam wants to quit smoking. Using the original thought everyone will have, Adam keeps telling himself “I was addicted to smoking and now I will stop smoking, then eventually quit smoking. '' In this case, not only is fighting against the addiction difficult, people are so afraid of the feeling of losing something, losing the action to smoke in this case. Technically, mental health could be a lot more difficult and painful to maintain than physical discomfort because physical discomfort also puts pressure on your mental health. How would changing self-identity help? Since physical discomfort is inevitable, maintaining your mental health can be essential. What Adam should do is tell himself “I don’t even smoke, I’m not a smoker.” in order to cut off the connection between “Adam” and “Smoking” By doing the small action of changing your mindset of self-identity is the key to cultivating habits. 

Setting Up Clear Expectation

People tend to underestimate the power of compound effects[1] in both negative and positive ways. Small tasks are seemingly unimportant to be done. While big steps or attempts are most likely to fail. People then abandon the goal they set up. As the graphic shown above, achieving goals works differently compared with our imagination. Resetting your expectations will decrease the frustration you have to come over in the process of achieving goals.  

[1] Compound effect: According to The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, the compound effect is the strategy of reaping huge rewards from small, seemingly insignificant actions.

Then the Four Steps

After the prerequisite above, we can start with cultivating a habit. There are four steps to do this:

1.  Make it Obvious

2.  Make it Attractive

3.  Make it Easy 

4.  Make it Satisfying 

For better understanding, let’s assume Adam wants to lose weight through exercising. 

Make it Obvious

Spread hints around you and make them obvious so you will notice that there’s something, a habit you want to cultivate. For instance, Adam can buy multiple sports shoes and put them in places where he frequently passes by which will also frequently give him a hint that you should go to exercise. 

Furthermore you can combine the action with the habits you already have, which let your mind get used to the sequence so the habit can be cultivated easily. It’s called the stacking of habits. For instance, Adam tells himself he has to exercise after dinner, or he has to exercise before taking a shower. By combining the habits you have with the habits you desire to cultivate will form very memorable hinds to you. 

Make it Attractive

When doing something you are not comfortable with or things you are not used to, having an award will be a good lure to keep on doing it. It’s called temptation bundling. For instance, Adam is also addicted to TV shows on Netflix. In order to implement the temptation bundling, Adam decides that he can watch an episode of TV shows that he is interested in if he does exercise on that day. By doing this will also make it easier to cultivate the habit. 

Make it Easy

Now we have the hinds that remind us about the habit and a reward comes after really prosecuting the action. The next step is Make it Easy, this step can be separated into two parts. First part is to make the start of “prosecuting the action” easier, if it's too hard to even start the action then eventually nothing will be accomplished. In Adam’s case, he has to change into an exercise suit and rearrange the furniture position in order to get started. Normally, it is just a small thing to do. The day that Adam is too tired to do this preparation happens oftenly. What Adam can do here is to change into an exercise suit as soon as he gets home and position the furniture in a way that will never bother him doing exercise. 

Second part is to make the habit, which is the goal itself easier. As we mentioned earlier, cultivating a habit takes 21 days. In Adam's case, giving himself the goal of exercising an hour each day might not be the best option. In 21 days, there’s gonna be some days when an hour is not possible for Adam. Breaking the goal you set up is not a wise decision. Starting with a goal that is easier to accomplish will also make the habit easier to be cultivated. To Adam, that will be setting his goal into 30 minutes each day and if needed he can increase to an hour based on the 30 minutes habit. Keep in mind that within the 21 days have nothing to do with the amount you do each time but how frequently you do it. Frequency is what we aim for. 

Make it Satisfying

With the power of step two we can get attracted to take the action. However, you will get tired of these cheap pleasures some days. It’s not a great call for both maintaining long-term habits and while cultivating the habit. The optimal and long-lasting reward to us is the sense of accomplishment and feeling and seeing yourself really become better and better. To achieve that, we need a measure of value where you can clearly see you are changing into the way you want and getting closer to the ideal “you” . In Adam's case, measuring his weight is probably the best choice. Seeing himself not only losing weight and becoming a well-shaped person but also to notice that he is able to accomplish something he set up. The level of satisfaction accomplishment brings is not in the same dimension with those cheap pleasures. 

After reading the book, it really helped  me a lot in understanding and cultivating good habits for myself. The author also talks about how to quit bad habits and there is an interesting example with smoking, which you can explore more by yourself. Atomic Habits is a book that is really worth a read. Thanks for reading this blog and I hope you can find a new world and new knowledge, point of view while you read. 

Works Cited

Clear, James. “Book Summary: The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy.” James Clear, https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/the-compound-effect. Accessed 22 November 2022.

Hornsby, Aidan. “Notes on Atomic Habits. By James Clear | by Aidan Hornsby.” Medium, 30 May 2020, https://medium.com/@aidanhornsby/notes-on-atomic-habits-c021e38eeae7. Accessed 22 November 2022.

“How To Turn Off “Are You Still Watching” On Netflix.” Tech News Today, 2 February 2022, https://www.technewstoday.com/netflix-are-you-still-watching/. Accessed 22 November 2022.

McGinn, Dave, et al. “Set a new year's resolution. When every day feels the same, having a goal to work towards will make a difference.” The Globe and Mail, 1 January 2021, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article-set-a-new-years-resolution-when-every-day-feels-the-same-having-a-goal/. Accessed 22 November 2022.

Pathak, Khamosh. “How to Set a Custom Timer on Apple Watch.” How-To Geek, 3 May 2021, https://www.howtogeek.com/722324/how-to-set-a-custom-timer-on-apple-watch/. Accessed 22 November 2022.

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