By James Clear (2018)
What habit(s) do you want to change? Can you do it by shear force and make yourself do it? Likely not, at least not permanently. We can use our will to get rid of a bad habit or acquiring a new one, but the effort needed is more subtle and requires small steps or changes to be long-lasting. Wanting to improve oneself is commendable and more easily said than done. No need to be superman or reinvent yourself, just work on small consistent efforts to make change. Over time it will work. Think compound interest. Small changes daily (or almost daily) make for improvements we’d like to see. If you were sailing across an ocean and were only 1 degree off your charted course, you might end up in another country rather than what you intended.
It’s easier to make small, atomic, changes little by little and wind up seeing big results. Just keep repeating the change you want to see in small steps. Your old habits will not jump in your way. What we want will happen over time. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see the results, you want right away. The final goal is what is important. Remind yourself that you must keep at it to see the change over time.
Good habits or bad ones are formed by repetition. We do things over and over so that they become nearly automatic. Building habits require several steps. First is a cue… hunger which is a craving, and we respond with an action, eating and then a reward… satisfaction.
We need to make it easier on ourselves by making what we want to do (a new or replacement habit) obvious so we can practice it with less effort otherwise we find ourselves putting off the new behavior. Put the “cue” out in the open so you will “trip over it” more or less. Clear calls these implementation intentions. Don’t be vague on your intentions such as eating healthy foods. Stop and think, what does that really mean and how will I do that? Maybe you need to read two or three articles on the subject or a book. Then make a list of new foods to try and put them on your grocery list. Do that two or three times a week. Bottom line, make a clear plan and have the clues be obvious.
Clear discusses a plan by a Boston doctor to help patients improve their diets. The doctor asked the cafeteria to swap the sodas from the refrigerators near check out with bottled water. The cafeteria also placed bottles of water in different locations near the food selections. Sales of soda fell, and water sold increased so that better choices were made. This is evidence that if you make the environment more friendly to easier choices, then you can make progress on your goal with small steps.
We all know that pleasure can drive what we do. Rewards can be a strong motivator and the drive for pleasure can help lead us in the right direction to build new habits. The anticipation of a reward can be enough to drive us towards new behavior as the release of dopamine in the brain is something humans seek. It’s that feel good feeling. When we look forward to something desirable, we are likely to strive to get it completed. Anticipation of something desirable is almost as good as achieving or received the desired thing.
Here’s a new term that you might not be familiar with, temptation bundling. By taking a task that is not too appealing but maybe important; put it together with another behavior you like. For instance, Clear told the story of an engineer who wanted to exercise more but did not really like to do that. The engineer decided to hook his stationary bike up with a device that measured his effort and if the effort was sufficient, then another connection allowed the TV by the bike to play a Netflix movie while he was cycling. Kill two birds with one stone so to speak. Think of your own way to do an arduous but important task coupled with a reward.
Watching puppy videos or social media is like munching a bag of potato chips. Easy, fun, mindless, but what does it accomplish? By making tasks that are important but easy to avoid, we can improve our chances of getting them done by “lubricating” the effort to merely get started on them. Sometimes just getting started is the hard part. Have your workspace set up so that everything is at hand when you start something so there is less friction or interruption once you get going. Then you are more likely to continue your important work. Make it harder to quit by using a timer (think Pomodoro technique) and not get up until the timer goes off. Another way is to use a small step or short sprint. Just devote a few minutes, say less than 5 minutes, and just work on the task at hand. You can make yourself be focused for that short time and make some progress. Sometimes teaming up with someone helps. Want to run or exercise more? Have a partner to do it with you as you would be less likely to let them down if you have a commitment to jog a few miles together.
Clear illustrated the next point by relating a story of a teacher in a south Asian country where stomach diseases, pneumonia and skin infections were prevalent. The teacher convinced an American company to provide good smelling hand soap. Basic sanitation can be aided by hand washing. Since the soap smelled good and lathered easily, more people washed their hands to smell the soap, and this reduced several of the medical issues. Clear was trying to show that by making a task satisfying can go a long way to changing what we do.
Some tasks such as strength building or losing weight are satisfying, but it takes time to see the results. We all like immediate results, but it helps to stay focused on the goal. Bad habits like smoking may give us stress relief now but cancer in 20 years. The important thing here is to attach some gratification along the way. His example was a couple who wanted to eat healthier and for less cost than eating out. The couple that did this by putting $50 in a savings account each time they skipped a dinner out. That way they could see their savings grow for that trip they wanted to take.
All these suggestions work if we stick to them. Just small changes daily can go a long way to get us where we want to go. There is a Japanese word, Kaizen, which means continuous improvement. It has five elements: teamwork; personal discipline; good morale; quality circles; and suggestions for more improvement. This is, as you can see, tends to promote progress by working together as a group with suggestions and feedback. I think that we can adopt this for our own individual efforts by talking with others who have similar interests and share with them our progress and learn about their progress to have more productive habits
We need to preserve what we have accomplished and one way to do this is by habit tracking. Benjamin Franklin used a journal and calendar to record what he did so that he could see if he was slipping and spending too much time on frivolous things and not making progress he desired. You can use a calendar, journal, or task manager. That way you can see what you have “checked off” which provides its own reward.
To wrap up this discuss, you can consider penalizing yourself for not keep up your progress. The book gave an example of an executive who wanted to lose weight. If he did not reach a loss goal by a certain time, he had to give $100 to his trainer and $500 to his wife. Needless to say, he was motivated to save money and that helped him struggle towards his goal. We may not go to that extreme, but you can see that punishment might help sometimes. Set up some negative consequences for not staying on track. When others know of your plan, humans like to have successes and not let other people down.
Slow steady progress can be made over time. It is easier to do that than some huge overnight change which is not likely to stick. Build small changes daily to make new habits over time. A final example given was learning to meditate. Clear suggested that since most of us like a cup of coffee in the morning, stack the desire to mediate, immediately behind the coffee break and continue the momentum to take time to meditate. You are stacking a new habit onto one you already have.
Key points:
- Just a 1% change daily can, over time, yield huge results
- Forget about goals, focus on systems
- It’s all about identities rather than outcomes
- Four laws of behavior change.
Thought – habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. It takes time to build them as rate of transition is slow. It’s hard to stay focused on long term work. Bad habits can creep in such as skipping exercise, eating junk food too often, too much time checking social media, etc. Bad habits make time your enemy.
Forget goals – systems are better because winners and losers have the same goal, win. Achieving a goal is only a momentary change. Why not invest in the system that got you there? Goals restrict happiness. The purpose of goals is to win the game while the purpose of systems is to continue to play the game.
Identify changes is the Northstar of habit change. Define what it is you are trying to change and why.
The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit become part of our identity.
How to build a habit – four laws
- Cue – make it obvious. Modify your environment to make change easy. Put fewer steps between you good behavior.
- Make it attractive – we are motivated by the anticipation of reward.
- Make it easy – friction is a powerful force. Put things nearby so you can easily jump to them.
- Make it satisfying – think dopamine, and it’s upbeat effect on your mood after a good workout.
Systems should be our focus rather than goals, identity rather than outcome, small incremental changes, it’s a lifestyle change.
For more on this subject, go to:
https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits