Atomic Habits

by James Clear

The Impact of Small Habits

 

Small habits can have a surprisingly powerful impact on your life. Imagine a plane taking off from Los Angeles on route to New York. If during takeoff, the pilot decided to adjust course 3.5 degrees to the south, the planes nose would move just a few feet. Outside of the cockpit, no one on board would notice the small movement. But over the course of a journey across the country, the impact of the change would be considerable. And the confused passengers would alight from their plane in Washington, DC, not New York. We don't notice tiny changes because their immediate impact is negligible. If you are out of shape today and go for a 20-minute jog, you'll still be out of shape tomorrow. Conversely, if you eat a family-size pizza for dinner, it won't make you overweight overnight. But if we repeat small behaviors, day after day, our choices compound into major results. Eat pizza every day, and it's likely you will have gained considerable weight after a year. Go jogging for 20 minutes every day, and you'll eventually be leaner and fitter, even though you won't have noticed the change happening. If you want to make a positive change in your life, you should recognize that change requires patience as well as confidence that your habits are keeping you on the right trajectory, even if you aren't seeing immediate results. So if you find that your behaviors and habits don't seem to be paying off, try to focus on your current trajectory rather than your current results. If you have little money in the bank, but you are saving something each month, then you can be confident that your trajectory is right. Your current results might not be great, but keep going in this direction, and in a few months, or a few years, you will notice a major improvement. By contrast a millionaire who outspends his earnings each month may not be worried about his bank statements from one month to the next, but in the end, his trajectory will catch up with him. The key to making big changes in your life, doesn't have to involve major upheaval. You don't need to revolutionize your behavior or reinvent yourself. Rather you can make tiny changes to your behavior, which when repeated time and time again, will become habits that may lead to big results.

How Habits Are Formed

 

Habits are automated behaviors that we've learned from experience. When you walk into a dark room, you don't think about what to do next. You instinctively reach for a light switch. It's a habit, a behavior that you've repeated so many times that it now happens automatically. So how are habits formed? Well, our brain figures out how to respond to new situations through a process of trial and error. 19th-century psychologist Edward Thorndike famously demonstrated this with an experiment where cats were placed in a black box. Unsurprisingly, each cat immediately tried to escape from the box, sniffing at its corners and clawing at its walls. Eventually the cat would find a lever that, when pressed, would open a door enabling escape. Thorndike then took the cats that had successfully escaped and repeated the experiment. His findings? Well, after being put in the box a few times, each cat learned the trick. Rather than scrambling around for a minute or more, the cats went straight for the lever. After 20 or 30 attempts, the average cat could escape in just six seconds. In other words, the process of getting out of the box had become habitual. Thorndike had discovered that behaviors that give satisfying consequences, in this case gaining freedom, tend to be repeated until they become automatic. Like cats in the 19th century, we also stumble across satisfying solutions to life's difficulties and predicaments. And thankfully, we now understand a little more about how habits work. Habits begin with a cue or a trigger to act. Walking into a dark room cues you to perform an action that will enable sight. Next comes a craving for a change in state. In this case to be able to see. Then comes our response or action, flicking the light switch. The final step in the process, and the end goal of every habit, is the reward. Here, it's the feeling of mild relief and comfort that comes from being able to see your surroundings. Every habit is subject to the same process. Do you habitually drink coffee every morning? Waking up is your cue, triggering a craving to feel alert. Your response is to drag yourself out of bed and make a cup of Joe. Your reward is feeling alert and ready to face the world. But of course, not all habits are good for us. Now that we understand how habits work, let's look at building positive ones that improve our lives.

Hard-to-miss Ques and A Plan of Action

 

Building new habits requires hard to miss cues and a plan of action. All of us have cues that trigger certain habits. The buzz of your phone, for example, is a cue to check your messages. And once you understand that certain stimuli can prompt habitual behavior, you can use this knowledge to change your habits. How? Well, one way is to change your surroundings and general environment to encourage better habits. Just take the work of Boston-based doctor Anne Thorndike. She wanted to improve her patient's dietary habits without requiring them to make a conscious decision. How did she pull this off? She had the hospital cafeteria rearranged. Originally, the refrigerators next to the cash registers contained only soda. Thorndike introduced water not only there, but at every other drink station. Over three months, soda sales dropped by 11% while water sales shot up by 25%. People were making healthier choices just because the cue to drink water rather than soda was more prominent. So simple changes to our environment can make a big difference. Want to practice guitar? Leave the instrument out in the center of the room. Trying to eat healthier snacks? Leave them out on the counter instead of in the salad drawer. Make your cues as obvious as possible and you'll be more likely to respond to them. A second great way to strengthen cues is to use implementation intentions. Most of us tend to be too vague about our intentions. We say, "I'm going to eat better," and simply hope that we'll follow through. An implementation intention introduces a clear plan of action, setting out when and where you'll carry out the habit you'd like to cultivate, and research shows that it works. A study of voters in the United States found that the citizens who were asked the questions, at what time will you vote and how will you get to the voting station, were more likely to actually turn out than those who were just asked if they would vote. So don't just say I'll run more often, say on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, when the alarm goes off, the first thing I'll do is don my running gear and clock two miles, then leave your running shoes out where you'll see them. You'll be giving yourself both a clear plan and an obvious cue, and it may surprise you how much easier this will make it to actually build a positive running habit.