Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

by James Clear

Many human behaviors follow this cycle. You often decide what to do next based on what you have just finished doing. Going to the bathroom leads to washing and drying your hands, which reminds you that you need to put the dirty towels in the laundry, so you add laundry detergent to the shopping list, and so on. No behavior happens in isolation. Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior.

One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.

The habit stacking formula is: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”

This allows you to take advantage of the natural momentum that comes from one behavior leading into the next—a positive version of the Diderot Effect.

After I finish eating dinner, I will put my plate directly into the dishwasher. After I put my dishes away, I will immediately wipe down the counter. After I wipe down the counter, I will set out my coffee mug for tomorrow morning.

Wake up > Make my bed > Place a book on my pillow > Take a shower.

It’s like you always have a game plan for which action should come next. Once you get comfortable with this approach, you can develop general habit stacks to guide you whenever the situation is appropriate:

Minimalism. When I buy a new item, I will give something away. (“One in, one out.”) Mood. When the phone rings, I will take one deep breath and smile before answering.

When and where you choose to insert a habit into your daily routine can make a big difference. If you’re trying to add meditation into your morning routine but mornings are chaotic and your kids keep running into the room, then that may be the wrong place and time. Consider when you are most likely to be successful. Don’t ask yourself to do a habit when you’re likely to be occupied with something else.

Alternatively, you can create a list with two columns. In the first column, write down the habits you do each day without fail.

write down all of the things that happen to you each day without fail.

Habit stacking works best when the cue is highly specific and immediately actionable.

“When I close my laptop for lunch, I will do ten push-ups next to my desk.” Ambiguity gone.

The two most common cues are time and location.

The implementation intention formula is: I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

If the communal table at the office is always filled with doughnuts and bagels, it’s going to be hard not to grab one every now and then. Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you.

Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or B = f (P,E).

In other words, customers will occasionally buy products not because they want them but because of how they are presented to them. For example, items at eye level tend to be purchased more than those down near the floor.

while cheaper alternatives are tucked away in harder-to-reach spots.

We like to think that we are in control. If we choose water over soda, we assume it is because we wanted to do so. The truth, however, is that many of the actions we take each day are shaped not by purposeful drive and choice but by the most obvious option.

In humans, perception is directed by the sensory nervous system. We perceive the world through sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. But we also have other ways of sensing stimuli. Some are conscious, but many are nonconscious.

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 are filled with productive cues and devoid of unproductive ones. Thankfully, there is good news in this respect. You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.

As you may guess, the homes with the meters located in the main hallway used less electricity. When their energy use was obvious and easy to track, people changed their behavior.

Unfortunately, the environments where we live and work often make it easy not to do certain actions because there is no obvious cue to trigger the behavior. It’s easy not to practice the guitar when it’s tucked away in the closet. It’s easy not to read a book when the bookshelf is in the corner of the guest room. It’s easy not to take your vitamins when they are out of sight in the pantry. When the cues that spark a habit are subtle or hidden, they are easy to ignore.

If you want to remember to send more thank-you notes, keep a stack of stationery on your desk.

The same strategy can be employed for good habits. By sprinkling triggers throughout your surroundings, you increase the odds that you’ll think about your habit throughout the day. Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one. Making a better decision is easy and natural when the cues for good habits are right in front of you.

Our behavior is not defined by the objects in the environment but by our relationship to them. In fact, this is a useful way to think about the influence of the environment on your behavior.

For one person, her couch is the place where she reads for an hour each night. For someone else, the couch is where he watches television and eats a bowl of ice cream after work. Different people can have different memories—and thus different habits—associated with the same place.

Over time, subjects began to associate the context of their bed with the action of sleeping, and it became easier to quickly fall asleep when they climbed in bed. Their brains learned that sleeping—not browsing on their phones, not watching television, not staring

It helps to escape the subtle triggers and cues that nudge you toward your current habits. Go to a new place—a different coffee shop, a bench in the park, a corner of your room you seldom use—and create a new routine there.

It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new habit in the face of competing cues.

But when you step outside your normal environment, you leave your behavioral biases behind. You aren’t battling old environmental cues, which allows new habits to form without interruption.

Take a break from the space where you do your daily work, which is also linked to your current thought patterns.

A few years later, I could finally afford to move to a home with a separate room for my office. Suddenly, work was something that happened “in here” and personal life was something that happened “out there.” It was easier for me to turn off the professional side of my brain when there was a clear dividing line between work life and home life. Each room had one primary use. The kitchen was for cooking. The office was for working.

You can use your phone for all sorts of tasks, which makes it a powerful device. But when you can use your phone to do nearly anything, it becomes hard to associate it with one task. You want to be productive, but you’re also conditioned to browse social media, check email, and play video games whenever you open your phone. It’s a mishmash of cues.

If your space is limited, divide your room into activity zones: a chair for reading, a desk for writing, a table for eating.

each context will become associated with a particular habit and mode of thought. Habits thrive under predictable circumstances like these.

A stable environment where everything has a place and a purpose is an environment where habits can easily form.

Every habit is initiated by a cue. We are more likely to notice cues that stand out.

Gradually, your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behavior. The context becomes the cue.

It is easier to build new habits in a new environment because you are not fig...

Instead, Robins revealed that addictions could spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the environment. In Vietnam, soldiers spent all day surrounded by cues triggering heroin use: it was easy to access, they were engulfed by the constant stress of war, they built friendships with fellow soldiers who were also heroin users, and they were thousands of miles from home. Once a soldier returned to the United States, though, he found himself in an environment devoid of those triggers. When the context changed, so did the habit.

Someone becomes addicted at home or with friends, goes to a clinic to get clean—which is devoid of all the environmental stimuli that prompt their habit—then returns to their old neighborhood with all of their previous cues that caused them to get addicted in the first place.

If you’re overweight, a smoker, or an addict, you’ve been told your entire life that it is because you lack self-control—maybe even that you’re a bad person. The idea that a little bit of discipline would solve all our problems is deeply embedded in our culture.

When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. 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.

It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often.

perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

Decades later, she hopped on a horse again and found herself craving a cigarette for the first time in forever. The cues were still internalized; she just hadn’t been exposed to them in a long time.

Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the environmental cues reappear.

If you’re not careful about cues, you can cause the very behavior you want to stop. Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself.