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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
August 31 - October 3, 2024
The cues that can trigger a habit come in a wide range of forms—the feel of your phone buzzing in your pocket, the smell of chocolate chip cookies, the sound of ambulance sirens—but the two most common cues are time and location.
Time and location are also how reminders are set on our phone.
“When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.”
Once an implementation intention has been set, you don’t have to wait for inspiration to strike. Do I write a chapter today or not? Do I meditate this morning or at lunch? When the moment of action occurs, there is no need to make a decision. Simply follow your predetermined plan. The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill out this sentence: I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].
Being specific about what you want and how you will achieve it helps you say no to things that derail progress, distract your attention, and pull you off course.
Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world. The goal is to make the time and location so obvious that, with enough repetition, you get an urge to do the right thing at the right time, even if you can’t say why.
The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
BJ Fogg as part of his Tiny Habits program,
the secret to creating a successful habit stack is selecting the right cue to kick things off.
When and where you choose to insert a habit into your daily routine can make a big difference.
Your cue should also have the same frequency as your desired habit.
One way to find the right trigger for your habit stack is by brainstorming a list of your current habits.
In the second column, write down all of the things that happen to you each day without fail. For example:
Habit stacking works best when the cue is highly specific and immediately actionable. Many
The 1st Law of Behavior Change is to make it obvious. Strategies like implementation intentions and habit stacking are among the most practical ways to create obvious cues for your habits and design a clear plan for when and where to take action.
Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you.
Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.
The most powerful of all human sensory abilities, however, is vision. The human body has about eleven million sensory receptors. Approximately ten million of those are dedicated to sight. Some experts estimate that half of the brain’s resources are used on vision. Given that we are more dependent on vision than on any other sense, it should come as no surprise that visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behavior. For this reason, a small change in what you see can lead to a big shift in what you do. As a result, you can imagine how important it is to live and work in environments that
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creating obvious visual cues can draw your attention toward a desired habit.
Making a better decision is easy and natural when the cues for good habits are right in front of you.
Want to think more creatively? Move to a bigger room, a rooftop patio, or a building with expansive architecture. Take a break from the space where you do your daily work, which is also linked to your current thought patterns.
When you can’t manage to get to an entirely new environment, redefine or rearrange your current one. Create a separate space for work, study, exercise, entertainment, and cooking. The mantra I find useful is “One space, one use.”
You can do the same with your digital spaces. I know a writer who uses his computer only for writing, his tablet only for reading, and his phone only for social media and texting. Every habit should have a home.
The Secret to Self-Control
This chapter is freeing and eye-opening.
Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.
Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the environmental cues reappear.
Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food, you feel bad. Watching television makes you feel sluggish, so you watch more television because you don’t have the energy to do anything else. Worrying about your health makes you feel anxious, which causes you to smoke to ease your anxiety, which makes your health even worse and soon you’re feeling more anxious. It’s a downward spiral, a runaway train of bad habits.
You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely—even if they go unused for quite a while. And that means that simply resisting temptation is an ineffective strategy.
I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.
Rather than make it obvious, you can make it invisible. I’m often surprised by how effective simple changes like these can be. Remove a single cue and the entire habit often fades away.
Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term
Scientists refer to these exaggerated cues as supernormal stimuli. A supernormal stimulus is a heightened version of reality—like a beak with three red dots or an egg the size of a volleyball—and it elicits a stronger response than usual.
We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop.
For years, scientists assumed dopamine was all about pleasure, but now we know it plays a central role in many neurological processes, including motivation, learning and memory, punishment and aversion, and voluntary movement.
Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation.
It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.
Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them.
Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
2nd Law of Behavior Change
We pick up habits from the people around us. We copy the way our parents handle arguments, the way our peers flirt with one another, the way our coworkers get results.
And from tv
One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.
To make your habits even more attractive, you can take this strategy one step further. Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits.
There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group. The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart, or finding truth. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.
When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.
We are drawn to behaviors that earn us respect, approval, admiration, and status. We want to be the one in the gym who can do muscle-ups or the musician who can play the hardest chord progressions or the parent with the most accomplished children because these things separate us from the crowd. Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out.
Many of our daily habits are imitations of people we admire.
We imitate people we envy.
craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive. Your brain did not evolve with a desire to smoke cigarettes or to check Instagram or to play video games. At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty and relieve anxiety, to win social acceptance and approval, or to achieve status.
Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires. New versions of old vices. The underlying motives behind human behavior remain the same. The specific habits we perform differ based on the period of history.
