Atomic Habits - James Clear

Why I picked up this book

• I’ve always wanted to stay disciplined, but have failed to build consistent practices and habits.
• I wanted to learn common sense and well researched techniques that have ben applied by several people in the past to build long lasting habits.
• Google searching quickly made it clear that this book was as near to a bible on the topic, and was well reviewed and recommended.

Habit formation is good for the brain

• As is described in the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, our brain has two systems : System 1 which is always scanning your surroundings and making decisions quickly. When most of the tasks are being done by this part of your brain, it feels like we are operating in autopilot. This part of the brain does not, however, have the capability to deliberate and spend effort and energy in slow thinking. This is the job of system 2. This system uses a lot of resources of your brain, and therefore the brain would like to use this system as less as possible.
• (Page 46) System 2 can be referred to as the conscious part of your brain. This part of your brain is usually the bottleneck while performing tasks. Therefore, the brain would like to rely on this part of your brain less. Habits are mostly processed by system 1, the quick and fast part.
• Whenever the brain is able to associate cues, their responses and tag them with a set of prescribed actions which lead to fulfilling results, it tags it as a habit, and wants to fortify it. With enough practice, the detection of the cue, and the complete chain of response and reward becomes automatic and we don’t feel the need to effortfully carry out the tasks.
• This is why, evolutionarily, it is advantageous for the brain to build frequently occurring tasks and chores as habits. This way, it’s precious resource (system 2) is free to be used for other tasks that need deliberate and logical thinking.
• (Page 151) For these reasons, the real motivation of humans is to actually be lazy. This can be called the law of least efforts. On (Page 156), it is actually shown how this can be used to gain an advantage in habit formation.

Habit building is more about the system than the goal

If you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero.” - James Clear (Atomic Habits)

• The above quote can be used to understand the “plateau of latent potential”, according to which the graph between results and time looks like an exponential (or power curve) rather than a linear curve. This is why it is important to persevere and build a system that will ensure good habit formations. This is also why it is difficult to break bad habits. The negative effects of bad habits won’t show up until much later, and therefore in the present moment it might seem harmless !

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” - James Clear (Atomic Habits)

To build the right habits, associate with the right identity

• Most people try to form habits using an outside in approach. They try to set a goal, and then figure out what needs to be done to reach that goal. For example, you might think to yourself “I need to loose 10 kgs this year”. What happens after you reach your goal ? More over, what happens when you don’t reach your goal ?
• It is better to build habits using identity association. This is a simple two step process :
  • Step 1 : Decide the type of person you want to become
  • Step 2 : Prove it to yourself with small wins

• Your friends can help you reaffirm a positive identity and thereby possibly accelerate formation of good habits ? This might be the basic principle of positive reinforcement (Page 33)
• (Page 33) The book mentions that the more pride you take in your identity, the more motivated you are to maintain habits that re-affirm that identity. The following reasons summarize why habit formation through identity association works
  • Is it then possible that people who have a reduced ego through meditation might have a harder time to form new habits, whether good or bad ?
  • Identity association also works because of another principle mentioned in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow : we always want to be consistent to the story we have been saying. If we have firmly established our identity as, say, someone who “stays healthy”, then it would be very painful for us to repeatedly eat unhealthy food as it would contradict our stated identity.
  • (Page 208) Another way you can use identity association to strengthen your chances of sticking to good habits or breaking bad ones is to sign a “habit contract” with someone you trust. Signing a contract is a great way to establish your identity and force yourself into being consistent with your identity
• If you are not sure of the right identity to associate yourself with, you can work backwards from the outcome you desire. If you want to build more muscle, then ask yourself what type of person has a lot of muscles. The answers might include :
  • A person who goes to the gym regularly
  • A person who eats healthy
  • A person who sleeps on time
  • You can use this trick to filter decisions through the lens of your aspirational identity. Like I once heard on a podcast by the ramakrishna mission, “until you become an enlightened person, act like one”.

The Habit Loop

All habits proceed through these four stages called the habit loop :

1. Cue
2. Craving
3. Response
4. Reward

• Every time the brain pairs a cue/craving pair with a certain response that came with a satisfying reward, the brain tries to bookmark or tag this quad combo as being beneficial. The more number of times we repeat these things in the same order and are frequently met with a satisfying reward, the brain starts to form a habit out of it. There after, the cue alone is enough to automatically draw out the same craving, response and reward.
• In fact, after repeating this cycle enough number of times and receiving a satisfying reward every time, our brain starts registering a dopamine spike just on noticing the cue alone, even before we take any action ! (Page 107)
• Due to a principle known as time inconsistency, our brains value immediate rewards (or instant gratification) much more than long term rewards. We can use this aspects to hack the fourth step of the habit loop (reward) to aid formation of good habits, or hinder the formation of bad ones by (Page 188) :
  1. Adding a little immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long term (“I will treat myself to a nice Netflix movie if I meditate 7 days in a row”). Caution : design the short term rewards to be consistent with the identity you have chosen to fortify. For instance, don’t reward a 7 day streak of going to the gym with a tub of ice cream ! Here are some more examples : if you want to turn into the person that would like to save more money, then create an instant reward system of transferring money to a small account every time you delay instant gratification of spending. If you skip a latter, transfer $5 to that account. If you skipped a movie, transfer $300 to that account etc.
  2. Adding a little immediate pain to the ones that don’t pay off in the long term (“I will confess to my spouse every time I skip a day at the gym”).

Every stage of the habit loop can be used to either strengthen good habits or weaken bad habits.

Deciding what habits to form for yourself

Identity Association

• Choose the identity that you want to be associated with. For example, “ I want to be someone who leads a healthy lifestyle and is in the best physical shape of his life. He has a calm mindset and is always pleasant to talk to.” Then, think through what habits might this person have. Some answers could be :
  • This person goes to the gym regularly
  • This person meditates regularly
  • This person writes a diary everyday
  • This person tries to improve his knowledge by 1% everyday
• This way, you will have a list of habits that you want to build.

The Habit Scorecard

• Through your day, note down all the habits that you have. Do not judge, just notice.
• Score your habits
  • ”+” for good habits
  • ”-“ for bad habits
  • ”=” for neutral habits
• The score depends on your situations, goals and the identity you are trying to associate with at the moment.
• At the end, choose what habits you want to build, and which ones you want to get rid of.

Tools to help form good habits and break bad ones

Once you have decided what habits you want to develop, and once you are convinced of the positive and compounding effects of good habits, here are some tools you can use to build and maintain those habits. All of these tools hack into one of the 4 habit loop components (cue, craving, response and reward).

Make it obvious / invisible - hacks into the “cue” stage

• Use time and location as cues : make the time and location as strong and specific cues for practicing some habits. This is referred to as “implementation intention”. Follow the following format for writing down implementation intentions for habits whose cues can be time and location : “I will [BEHAVIOUR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]”.
• Make other habits as cues : this is referred to as habit stacking. The format of creating a habit stack is “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]”. Be careful of the following things when creating a habit stack :
  • Ensure feasibility of the habit stack. This would mean be careful of when and where each habit is being inserted into the stack.
  • Make the cue for the 1st habit in the stack very specific.
  • Choose an already established habit as a cue for the first habit in the stack. For example, opening up your phone right after getting out of your bed has become, unfortunately, a bad yet established habit. Why not piggyback on that habit and say that whenever I open my phone first thing in the morning, I will write morning pages on Obsidian right from my phone ?
• Recognize environment and context as cues : Design your environment to aid building good habits by placing items obviously in sight.
  • Keep a book on your night stand if you want to build a reading habit, keep a guitar next to your couch if you want practice guitar more regularly, etc. Similarly, hide things away from your view if you want to deter yourself from a bad habit. For instance, hide the pack of cigarettes so that it’s a pain to reach for them, put fancy apps that will lock you out of social media apps after you have spent more time on them than you would allow yourself to, etc.
  • Sometimes, the larger context of the environment itself becomes the cue. The location (a room, the couch) can get attached to good or bad habits. A social setting, example every time you hang out with office friends, can also become a context of the environment that gets tagged to good or bad habits. Identify contexts and locations that you associate with bad habits and either avoid them or be aware when entering those locations or contexts. Similarly, you can identify areas of your life, home that do not yet have a habit associated with it and build that habit in that context / location. For example, choose a new corner of the house for meditation so that the location gets associated with this good habit.
  • Every habit should (ideally) have a home.
  • To kick bad habits to the curb, sheer willpower is not enough. You must understand what environment cues (location, context) trigger bad habits, and make them invisible. It takes around 33 ms for a cue to trigger reward pathways in drug addicts ? There was something along these lines discussed in #vedanta podcast as well, that we should try to achieve a state of awareness where we are able to watch a thought form in our brains and immediately choose to uproot it.

“The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often.” - James Clear, Atomic Habits Page 93

Make it attractive / unattractive - hacks into the “craving” stage

• This is how the dopamine release mechanism in our brain looks like :

• The first time you experience a habit feedback loop (A) and your brain likes the rewards, it bookmarks it by releasing a dose of dopamine. Interestingly, next time around (B), the cue to craving pair itself is enough to release that dopamine, even when you have not done the action and received it’s reward as yet. In fact, there is a negative dopamine spike, i.e, disappointment when you respond to the craving but there is no reward (C). There will be another dopamine spike if the reward does come after some disappointment.
• The “want” centers in our brains are much bigger than the “like” centers of our brain. Which is why dopamine can be released by the mere hint of some cue and it’s accompanying craving. This is because your brain is expecting a big reward to follow whatever response you are going to make to the craving. Like mentioned in the previous section, the time between a cue and craving to get registered in your brain and dopamine getting released can be as small as 33 ms.
• Use temptation bundling to hack into our brain’s bigger want centers and increase the chances of habits you want to build to get strengthened.
  • The idea is to go off of an already established habit, and stack the habit you need to build next. These two can form the cue + craving phase. Once you are done with the habit you need (response), you can reward your brain with the habit you want !
  • Cue is the already established habit. Using this as the trigger, your brain will automatically get a craving for the habit you want (example I want to write my morning pages, which apparently my brains considers a desirable habit). Then use the habit you want to build and are struggling with (say reading a book for 10 minutes) as a response and the top it off by the reward, which was the habit you wanted (in this case, writing the morning pages).
  • Use this format for temptation bundling : After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED]. After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].
  • Example : After I brush my teeth, I will read a book for 10 mins. After I am done reading a book for 10 mins, I will write my morning pages !
• Use social norms to make good habits attractive and bad habits unattractive.
  • Embed yourself in the social circles of people who possess the habit that you want to build. For example, if you want to build a habit of running regularly, form a friend circle which considers running cool and goes for a run every morning. Similarly, hang out with people who consider the habit that you are trying to get rid of as uncool / abnormal. So if you are trying to quit smoking, make friends with people who consider smoking uncool.
  • By surrounding yourself with these people, you will observe that going against the herd is unattractive and you will try to pick up the good habit that they have (which would happen to be the good habit you are trying to pick up), or you will try to stay away from the habit they consider bad (for example smoking).
  • Study powerful people you admire and allow yourself to get influenced by them. Then you might start imitating / picking up their good habits.
• Understand that we form habits because they satisfy primal needs that everyone has : conserving energy, obtaining food and water, finding love and reproducing, social acceptance, achieving status and prestige etc. We can reprogram our brains to feel good when doing habits that are hard, or that feel effortful to execute (such as going to the gym).

  “You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience” - James Clear, Atomic Habits, page 130

  • This reprogramming can be achieved by considering effortful habits or chores as something you get to do rather than something you have to do. Here are some examples :
  • I need to run in the morning because this way I get to build endurance and have a healthy lifestyle.

Make it easy - hacks into the “response” stage

• Motion : planning, strategizing, learning
• Action : doing and producing results, however imperfectly or messily
• Action > Motion when trying to get started with building habits. This is also related to avoiding perfectionism.

  “If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection” - James Clear, Atomic Habits, Page 143

• Habits become automatic with frequency, not with time. That’s why it’s important to “get your reps in”.
• Human being’s true motivation is to be lazy, but we can understand this fact and use it to our advantage to increase the chances of developing good habits and breaking bad ones. One idea is to prime your environment so that the habit that was housed there is as frictionless to practice as ever. Eg : set out utensils in the kitchen in a way that making a healthy breakfast is a breeze the next morning. This concept is also called “resetting the room”
• Your day is filled with decisive moments. These are the micro decisions and choices we make that will then either trigger a good or bad habit. Especially in the context of bad habits, it is important to catch yourself in these decisive moments and decide to walk away (so to speak) if that choice is going to lead to a bad habit. For example, if you are deciding what to have for lunch, you can choose to either go to an area where there are a lot of unhealthy food joints (burgers, steaks etc). You think you still have a choice to choose once you get there, but really the environment once you get there will make it difficult for you to choose anything but a burger for lunch. You can take control of that decisive moment and choose to directly go to a place that is vegan, or serves healthy food. Perhaps meditation can help build the mind’s ability to maintain control of senses in these decisive moments.

  “Habits are like the entrance ramp to a highway. They lead you down a path and, before you know it, you’re speeding towards the next behavior.” - James Clear, Atomic Habits, Page 160

• The 2 minute rule : Since the first few moments of the habit are the onramp to the highway, make it dead simple to start. If you are tending to procrastinate, then decide to just do something for 2 minutes. Call this your “gateway habit”, so that once you get the momentum going, it’s much easier to keep doing good things. For example, once you put on your shoes it’s usually rare to still not go to run. Show up to the gym, and working out becomes the obvious next thing to do. So rather than “workout 4 days a week” as a habit, how about set “ride by scooter to the gym 4 times a week” as a habit ?
• To curb bad habits, invert “make it easy” to “make it difficult”. Use a commitment device to hold yourself accountable when you would have been compelled to do a bad habit. An example is the screen time regulation feature on most smartphones these days.
• Invest in one-time decisions that will automate the compounding positive effects of the good habits that it will enable. For example, if you want to read more, then buying a Kindle is a one time decision that can help you build that habit. If you want to sleep better, then buying a good mattress is the right decision. Similarly to help curb bad habits quickly, one-time decisions such as deleting social media apps can help.

Make it rewarding / unsatisfying - hacks into the “reward” stage of the habit loop

“What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided” - James Clear, Atomic Habits, Page 186

• To build habits by hacking into the “reward” part of the habit loop, ensure that every good habit that you are trying to build is followed by an instant reward. Why instant ? Because of time inconsistency : a theory as per which our brains have evolved to value instant gratification over delayed gratification (it has something to do with evolution and how animals and primates wanted food, shelter and mate instantly.) Examples of how to create a short term reward that is healthy :
  • We have already spoken about temptation bundling, where you sandwich a habit you are trying to build in between a habit that is already strong, and an activity / habit that is pleasurable.
  • Using the “streaks” app can be also be counted. The ability to tick things off from the list of habits and building over your streak is an instant reward that feels good.
  • Be sure to keep the reward inline with the identity you have associated with for building good habits.
• One way of making bad habits unsatisfying is to write a “habit contract” (Page 208). This can be signed. The contract must spell out the habit that you are committing to, and the consequences of not following through. The contract must be signed by all members involved.

Habit tracking - how to make habits stick

(Page 196, 197)

• Habit tracking, at once, makes use of three principles of making habits work. In particular it draws the energy of the following principles to make our habits stick :
  1. Make it obvious : it makes it obvious if we are being able to follow through on our habits. We humans have an overly optimistic view of our behaviors, and habit tracking can show us a mirror to reveal the truth.
  2. Make it attractive : one of the best forms of motivation is visible progress. As we see checkboxes being ticked off, we get a sense of making progress in the right direction.
  3. Make it satisfying : it is satisfying to put an “x” in front of the task / habit item. We are proving to ourselves with these small wins that we are, indeed, the person who exhibits these habits. This allows us to reinforce that habit as being associated with the identity that we want to build.
• To make habit tracking a sustained effort, keep the following three things in mind.
  1. Whenever possible, habit tracking should be automated.
  2. Reserve manual habit tracking only for a few select habits. You don’t want to be keeping a track of 10 habits all at once manually.
  3. With manual habit tracking, ensure that the habit is recorded immediately after performing it. This allows us to reap the benefits of the third principle of habit formation (make it rewarding / satisfying) while avoiding time inconsistency to come into effect.
• Goodhart’s law : We optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement for a habit, we get the wrong behavior. For example, if weight loss is your goal, then the number shown on the weighing scale can be a dangerous number to track. Your weight (in numbers) can be very stubborn, and in the absence of steady and visible progress, it can be demotivating. Instead, the measurement can be your weekly / monthly streak of going to the gym. This way, you should be able to see steady and visible progress.

The role of genes

• People are born with varying levels of ability for certain areas of life. Someone is predisposed to playing guitar, someone is predisposed to excel in athletics, while some people have a predisposition towards mathematics and science.
• Genes do not determine our destiny, but they sure tell us our areas of opportunities.
• To maximize the probability of successfully building and sticking to habits, pick habits from the right areas of your life (Page 219)
• Try to build habits that work for your personality (Page 221). You would not want to build a habit of lifting weights in the gym if, based on your personality, what you would really love is running instead. You can take a personality test (the big five) to determine your personality. However, the book gives no guidance to what sort of habits will be best suited to different personality types.
• Having said that genes have a say in your areas of opportunities, they should not be used as an excuse for not putting in hard work.

The Goldilocks rule to stay motivated

• According to the Goldilock’s rule, humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too easy, just right.
• Steve Martin, a well known comedian, might have taken advantage of the Goldilocks rule in staying motivated for a good 15 odd years, experimenting and perfecting his skill and art before he saw any success.
• Design the difficult of the habit / task to be “just manageable in difficulty”.
• No matter how interesting an activity or habit is in the beginning, eventually boredom will kick in. You need to learn to be comfortable with boredom and keep going nevertheless.

  “Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way” - James Clear, Atomic Habits, Page 236

Evolving habits to form mastery

• After building a habit successfully, some aspects of it start becoming automatic. To achieve mastery in things, however, you need to keep going back to increase the bar and throw in a new habit, another layer on to your previous habit.
• The constant review, correction and adjustment of thresholds to reach will ensure that you keep working up towards mastery.

Questions for further exploration

These are questions, mostly to myself, that I want to explore based on reading this book.

1. Since identity association is one of the ways of fortifying identities, is it difficult for meditators to form habits ? Given that one of the outcomes of daily meditation is a dissociation with ego and identity of self ?