Habits

Forming good habits is one of the most difficult things to do. We start the new year with a whole lot of resolutions and most of them fizzle out after the first month or two. To keep doing the things we want to do, the things we believe are good for us, we need to make them habits. James Clear’s book Atomic Habits explains exactly how to turn anything into a habit. His method is broken up into four laws and if you abide by these laws, you’ll be flossing nightly or hitting the gym daily, if that’s what you want!

Make It Obvious

The first law is “make it obvious”, which seems easy, but we often overlook this.  The first step is to write down all your current habits, to make yourself aware of them. Once you’re aware of what you’re doing and the habits you want to form, you need to implement specific intentions. This means, in your to-do list, you write down a specific task or habit and exactly what time you intend to do it. Then you habit stack, which is doing a new habit right after a current habit. This changed the game for me. I would always forget to take my vitamins, but now that I’ve “habit stacked” taking vitamins on top of my existing habit of eating breakfast, I never forget. The last step of the “make it obvious” law, is designing your environment to make habits obvious and visible. For example, put your book on your bedside table, leave your vitamins on the table where you eat breakfast or my personal favourite, take the laundry hamper out as soon as you remember to do it and leave it by the washing machine.

Make It Attractive

The second law is “make it attractive”, and the first step in this law is to use temptation bundling. We do this by pairing an action we want to do with an action we need to do. The dopamine hit we get from doing the thing we enjoy becomes associated with the new habit. This creates a positive feedback loop; we associate the new habit with the dopamine and so our minds perceive it as more enjoyable than it is. Ronan Byrne loved watching Netflix and knew that he wasn’t getting enough exercise. So, he hooked up his stationary bike to his laptop and TV and created a programme that would only play Netflix if he cycled at a certain speed. This is an extreme example, but it explains the point and got me thinking of possible ways I could do this.

Secondly, we should surround ourselves with people who have similar interests or place ourselves in an environment where the habits you want to form are normal. Friends and family are very influential in shaping our habits, and I know it’s kind of tricky during the pandemic, but I’ve found that YouTube and podcasts work just as well to create a motivational environment. Frequently hearing or watching people discuss things that you want to make a part of your life normalises it and makes it seem easier to do. That’s how I started writing this blog.  

Make It Easy

The third law, “make it easy”, is another one that seems so obvious and yet we fail to implement. The first step is to reduce friction, by reducing the number of steps it takes to perform the good habit. The opposite could be said for a bad habit you want to stop. If you’re playing too much PlayStation, pack it up and put it away after each time you play it. This will add friction and make you second guess whether it’s worth unpacking it to play. By doing this for habits you want to do and ones you want to stop, you prime your environment, making it easier to do future actions.

Clear says, we should master the decisive moments by optimising the small choices that deliver outsized impact, which is similar to the 80/20 Principle. This principle is applied in the next step, one I found really helpful, and that is the two-minute rule. The two-minute rule is to downscale your habit until it can be done in two minutes. This helps us act in the decisive moments instead of putting off the habit because the task seems too daunting. The examples he gives are: changing “read before bed each night” to “read one page”, and “run three kilometres” becomes “tie my running shoes.” I use this approach to write this blog- I tell myself to write for 2 minutes and it gets easier the more I write. It may seem strange to plan to read just one page of a book, but the point is to form the habit of showing up. Once you’re used to showing up, you can work on doing it for longer, but that shouldn’t be part of the thought process. Just showing up is all that’s necessary.

The last step to making it easy is to automate your habits- invest in technology and one-time purchases that lock in future behaviour. These could be things like a gym membership or cancelling subscriptions. “Present you” is taking the temptation away from future you.

Make It Satisfying

The fourth law is “make it satisfying” and this is key to behavioural change. We can do this through positive reinforcement. We react positively to instant gratification and we can see this by our use of social media. A lot of the time habits don’t stick because although we know it’s good for us, it may not be the most enjoyable at first. The same can be said for avoiding a bad habit- we need to make not doing the bad habit enjoyable by seeing the benefits of not doing it.

Use a habit tracker and don’t break the chain. Every day you complete the habit, mark it off and make sure you never miss the habit twice in a row and that you get back on track immediately if you do. Having a visual representation of your progress can help motivate you. You don’t want to see a gap in a long line of consecutive progress, so the longer you do it for, the more motivated you are to keep going.

His final step of making it satisfying is to have an accountability partner or create an accountability contract. With an accountability partner, you hold each other accountable and tell each other what you want to achieve. If you start coming up with excuses, your accountability partner can call you out. The same goes for an accountability contract, which normally works best when payment of sorts is involved. For example, “If I don’t go to gym three times a week, I will pay X $100” (X could be a friend or a charity), and then you get a witness to hold you accountable.

For these methods to work you must be serious about forming these habits. If you don’t really want to form them and change then these methods won’t work. When applying these steps to my life I found the two-minute rule and making habits easy really helped me form new habits. There are so many great anecdotes and explanations in this book that can help you form useful habits. I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in forming some new habits. For further reading, James Clear has some great resources on his website as well.