Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Narrated by James Clear. Penguin Audio, 2018. Audiobook.
Back in April 2021, I needed to spend Audible credits before they expired and selected this book. I probably ran across a review about it. Or maybe it turned up in a search for similar topic books. However I came to add it to my library, I now regret it’s taken me almost 3 years to finally listen to it! Really. It did not take me long to realize how effective James Clear’s system could be in helping me achieve the lifestyle I want, nor how simple the system was to tweak and refine.
Fair warning, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear is a very, very popular book. If you can’t borrow it from a friend or buy it, you’ll be waiting a long time for a library loan1. It’s a global phenomenon! Looking at the website, atomichabits.com2, the number of different languages the book is available in is 60, 10 of which are differing Spanish languages.
I loved that the book started off with definitions for the two words3,4 in the title. These perfectly explain everything about the “system.” Okay, the author did take literary license with the meaning of “atomic.” His words actually describe an atom. Still, almost anyone would immediately recognize “an extremely small amount of a thing” and “a source of immense energy and power” as being atomic in nature. “Habit” is spot on: “a routine or practice performed regularly.”
The foundational premise of the Atomic Habits system is profound in its logic: tiny improvements of just 1% a day compound annually into a tremendous overall improvement5. Such a logical and straight forward progression. Mathematically simple, right?
Realistically, a daily 1% improvement isn’t possible. However, imagine you could improve 1% every week or even every month. Keep building on each improvement gain, adding another 1% the next week and the next. No matter how slowly, each time you are improving, getting closer to “the best you you can be.” In his conclusion, the author reveals the “secret…is to never stop making improvements.”
No wonder it’s a bestseller on all the top lists. Who wouldn’t succeed if they were following this system, continuously improving their habits and performance?
Laying down the “Laws”
The book is broken out into six sections. The Fundamentals section introduces the 1% daily improvement concept. There is a compelling real world example for British Cycling. For 110 years British Cycling had only ever won one Olympic medal and had never won the Tour de France. After hiring a new performance director who used a strategy of “the aggregation of marginal gains,” the British Cycling team won sixty-six Olympic medals and won the Tour de France five times within a span of 10 years. They accomplished it by assessing and improving as many factors that went into riding a bike as they could: seat comfort, aerodynamics of clothes, muscle recovery, even the pillow and mattress that allowed the cyclists the most restorative rest. Everything.
The author stresses the importance of focusing on your progression rather than your current results6. A 1% improvement is hardly noticeable. However, when these compound into a potential 37% improvement in a year, that will definitely leave a mark.
This section is where the author first introduces the concept of identity’s effect on habits. This was something that really hit home for me as I always qualify my successes (e.g. “I placed first in my age group, but I was actually the only female participating in that age group.”). I remembered the confusion I felt when my trainers and healthcare providers began referring to me as an athlete. It wasn’t how I identified the part of myself that was busting ass everyday working out and running a trail race most weekends. When I finally accepted that identity, it was empowering.
I stopped trying to justify–or feeling guilty for–taking up space in those arenas. It was easier to engage with my support team because I now identified with the type of person they were administering to. It put a huge dent in the “impostor syndrome” I suffered from every time I went among those I considered “real” athletes, serious athletes. Biologically, our brains don’t know the difference between what we tell it we’ve done and what we actually do. If we believe, to our psyche, it is true. (A way to make “delusions of grandeur” a positive tool toward success. 😉 )
The next section introduces the first of the “Four Laws of Behavior Change.” These four laws are based on the science of what forms a habit of behavior.
First there is the cue. Example: chatting with friends over dinner. Which triggers the craving. Example: recalling the wine you usually have, it’s lightly sweet flavor and the lightening of mood that usually follows. A response will follow cue and craving. Example: Order the glass of wine with an anticipatory sense of pleasure, already lightening your mood. Finally the reward. Example: the pleasure at the first taste on your tongue, the sigh of contentment, the smile.
Law 1: Make it Obvious
This law is all about your environment and the unconscious cues that trigger us to perform a certain behavior.
How many times have you walked past a basket of muffins, a tin of cookies, or a bowl of candy, and took one—or three? You weren’t hungry, and you’re cutting down on sweets, but there they are, tempting you into undesired behavior. Every time I go to my sister’s house, I have to get a handful of M&Ms from the dispenser she keeps on the counter. A cue, leading to a craving, to a response, to satisfaction. Repeat each time I see the cue, and wallah, a habit is formed.
For myself, my cue for doing my morning training run might be laying out my clothes, shoes, and gear the night before so it’s readily available when the alarm wakes me. Or enabling a “water” reminder on my phone to cue me to drink water when I’ve been writing for an hour or more without a break. Setting up my environment to avoid cuing undesired habits, like putting the cookie jar in the cabinet out of sight.
The author’s re-frame of house cleaning really flipped my perception of this dull, labor and time intensive work. Rather than looking at it as a chore that has to be done, it is actually readying the environment for its next use. (I’m not sure that’ll work for making my bed each day7. ;-P ) A clean, orderly, organized space makes anything you do in that space more efficient. Easy tweak (once it’s orderly and maintained) for that 1% improvement.
For a good habit, this is the satisfying experience-repetition that keeps you doing it over and over again. Inverted, the same “laws” can break bad habits. Make it invisible, unattractive, hard, unsatisfying. Having to get a designated driver to drive you home and leaving your own vehicle in a parking lot overnight is going to make it less likely you’ll get buzzed the next time you join friends for dinner.
Law 2: Make it Attractive
This one is about the craving to repeat a habit. Of course, it’s hard to match the surge of dopamine we get when we ingest, inhale, or otherwise take in physical substances that interact biologically with our bodies. Some physical stimuli works better than others, a hug and a kiss or a relaxation massage are going to release the pleasure hormone much more readily than doing a 30-min leg workout. I expect a little more difficulty making a strictly behavioral habit attractive. “Make my bed? Why, unless I’m changing sheets. I’ll just be messing it up again tonight.”
The author calls on “temptation bundling” to make the unattractive habits attractive. He provides several great examples but a lot is going to depend on your lifestyle and daily routine to make this process effective. It takes more work and ingenuity, but it’s easy to see how you can succeed. Bonus, with some, you can accomplish two things at once. Imagine you’re an avid reader/listener like me, however, you can only listen to audiobooks while walking. The reward of your daily walks will be getting to listen your book(s) for as long as your walk.
Law 3: Make it Easy
For me, this one seems the process that can show the greatest improvement in helping create a desired habit. It will take as much brainstorming, effort, and ingenuity as the previous two. However, the potential to see immediate improvements is enticing.
Take my example of the “cue” for the desired behavior of morning runs: layout clothes, shoes, and gear so everything I need is only a few steps from my bed. Huh. I just realized this little effort to prep my gear has the potential of saving me loads of time on any given day, improving my efficiency. I spend a lot of time walking in and out of rooms trying to recall what I went there for. Keeping my gear all in one place is an easy tweak to contribute to that 1% improvement.
Another. Spending one day a week preparing nutritious foods and snacks will facilitate daily improvements in creating and maintaining a habit of eating nutrient-dense meals each day. Setting aside specific blocks of time for various tasks can make it easier to maintain a regular study habit. (Personally, I have seven different courses I need to be working on. Then another three (or five) which I haven’t prioritized.)
Law 4: Make it Satisfying
It’s all about the “reward.” It’s human nature. We’re not likely to do something that doesn’t provide us with some tangible benefit. What we really want is instant gratification!
The author describes two environments the scientists call “immediate-return” and “delayed-return” environments. An example of an immediate-return environment is of an animal in the wild, living in the moment, every action results in an almost instantaneous outcome. Grazing, drinking, fleeing, selecting a secure place to sleep and nest, creeping through the grasses to avoid detection by prey, etc.
The example for a delayed-return environment is the current environment most of us live in8. I’ve never really considered this before, but as I think on it, most physical actions have an immediate return—positive or negative. Eat and drink tastes good or bad. Walking or running, moves you from this location to that. It’s when we anticipate or crave a future result that we have to cope with delayed return.
Walking or running for weight loss. Biologically, our bodies evolved to hold onto fuel, a powerful biologic mechanism that helped us to survive and thrive over the millennia when there was only an immediate-return environment. No longer expending much stored fuel to acquire our nourishment, the reward of weight loss through regular walking is delayed while your body adapts and changes. And while you’re tweaking habits to get your body to utilize stored fuel and reduce its opportunities to store excess
I use this example of delayed weight loss because it’s one that most of us can relate to, if not experienced directly. The author uses several other modern day delayed-return examples. Like working now for payment you’ll get in the future. Learning and practicing a skill that you won’t become proficient at until you’ve repeated this practice many times.
To give your delayed-return habit an immediate-return reward, tack on an “extra” reward to the behavior—taking care to ensure it doesn’t conflict with the new identity you’ve created for yourself. In other words, don’t reward yourself for an intense workout with a trip through your favorite drive-through. The process is basically the same as “making it attractive,” but is about the satisfaction you feel–and anticipate–receiving the reward.
For me, it might be a weekly monetary reward for completing my weekly mileage. This reward goes into savings toward funding a trip to participate in an international ultra-marathon event. My immediate-return gratification is seeing my savings increase every time I successfully complete a week’s training. For you, it might be a daily reward to fund a weekly massage. Or art lesson. Or an accumulation of rewarded minutes you can self-redeem for the free time to watch that movie that just hit streaming platforms.
The final section in the book is Advanced Tactics. It delves more deeply into the physiological and psychological aspects of why, what, and how you can be successful in creating good (or breaking bad) habits.
Genes vs talent. Recognizing and being open to the the different opportunities each will provide. Personality influence over behavior. Identifying and maximizing your strengths and motivators. Dealing with boredom, as a professional or an amateur—a professional just does it. (I guess no matter how you tailor it to be obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying, sometimes it just comes down to strength of will to get it done.)
Surprisingly, the author cautions against the “downside” of good habits. This is mostly about becoming complacent with the habits you’ve developed to achieve your improvement.
An example for me might be not altering my training “habits” and believing completing any training run makes me “successful” in my training. However, if I haven’t continually tweaked my training and challenged myself (faster, longer, heat , vertical–aka mountains), I couldn’t hope to complete a future Canadian Death Race–a race whose name so triggers my SCB (Stupid-Crazy-Badass) tendencies that it calls to me like a siren’s song. 😀
Assess and revamp habits regularly for continuing improvement.
My take away
The Atomic Habits system can and will give you success in creating and breaking habits. It includes so much granularity and flexibility in the design of each behavioral change, the very first effort will provide positive results.
I’ve mostly kept to a scheduled wake/sleep routine this week for the first time in as long as I can remember. I say “mostly” because midweek 7:30 got pushed out to 8:00 and 8:30 on two occasions when I turned my alarm off and didn’t get up. I worked on breaking this bad habit of turning by using a tried and true “unsatisfying” result: I put an annoying alarm (my medication dispenser) out of reach of my bed.
By using the same assessment and granular breakdown of each cue, craving, response, and reward, you can tweak a habit until it works successfully for you. As the author noted in his conclusion, “This is a continuous process. There is no finish line. … Always looking for the next way to get 1% better.”
Related resources:
* www.atomichabits.com: Here you can download print copies of some of the diagrams, lists, and additional resources referenced in the audiobook.
* www.jamesclear.com: Here you can sign up for James Clear’s newsletter, see videos of speeches and interviews, see his speaking events schedule, etc.
* MasterClass Course
* Atoms: A new iOS mobile app (Android version coming soon) for “building good habits and breaking bad ones.”
* Additionally, there are many workbooks and summaries produced by various authors and publishers. An “atomic habits” keyword search on any book marketplace will find them.
Footnotes:
- Here’s a summary of Austin Public Library availability, illustrating the incredible demand for this book:
Book 121 holds on 30 copies
eBook 219 holds on 37 copies
Audiobook 446 holds on 78 copies (1 Greek language copy available via Hoopla)
CD 1 hold on 5 copies
It has a 4.8 stars rating on Amazon with 124,421 reviews. 4.4 stars on Goodreads with 839,149 reviews. Astounding to me, although it has had 6 years since its publication to accumulate ratings and reviews. ↩︎ - This site actually reroutes to jamesclear.com/atomic-habits.com, so know you’re still in the right place when you see that. ↩︎
- Full disclosure, it wasn’t until seeing these in digital print that it finally resonated with me. Appropriately enough, it was at the very beginning, even before the Contents pages. ↩︎
- Note, I wasn’t even through the first couple of chapters of the audiobook edition before I bought an eBook edition. For “self-help” books (e.g. systems, to use the author’s term) I’m going to utilize, I find I need the visual aid of a printed copy for better comprehension and recall. Although I would prefer to acquire physical copies, I refrain and stick to digital copies where I can. I learned my lesson in 2021, when I found myself donating (selling when I could) hundreds of books as I began downsizing and eliminating remote storage. ↩︎
- Do the math:
1% better daily for 1 year: 101%365 = 1.01365 = 37.78% (Up to 138% by year end)
1% worse daily for 1 year: 99%365 = .99365 = .026% (Down to near 0 from 100%) ↩︎ - There’s a great graphic in this section of the print editions depicting the “valley of disappointment.” It illustrates our expectation of a straight, linear progression and how it compares to the reality of the curved “compounding” of tiny improvements over time. For me, this is easily identifiable as the time in a given endeavor—weight loss, strengthening, nutrition, learning Spanish—when I get discouraged and quit. ↩︎
- Speaking of making my bed. Another audiobook I’ve had but haven’t listened to yet is Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…and Maybe the World by Admiral H. McRaven (who also narrates). I’ll put that on the short list to listen to and review. ↩︎
- It’s not accurate to assume this is the case for all “modern humans.” Even in “first world” countries like my own, there are thousands and thousands of men, women, and children living in an immediate-return environment. Homeless and jobless, wouldn’t you be facing the same decisions, actions, and consequences of living in the wild? How do you get food and water? Where can you sleep that is safe and sheltered from the elements? How do you get your ailments treated before they become life-threatening? ↩︎
