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by
James Clear
Read between
February 11 - April 2, 2019
When the cues that spark a habit are subtle or hidden, they are easy to ignore.
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.
Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
The cues that trigger a habit can start out very specific, but over time your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behavior.
Our behavior is not defined by the objects in the environment but by our relationship to them.
The power of context also reveals an important strategy: habits can be easier to change in a new environment.
If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable.
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.
This practice is an inversion of the 1st Law of Behavior Change. Rather than make it obvious, you can make it invisible. I’m often surprised by how effective simple changes like these can be.
Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.
We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place.
Our friends and family provide a sort of invisible peer pressure that pulls us in their direction.
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.
The shared identity begins to reinforce your personal identity. This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.
Humans are similar. 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.
Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out.
Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done.
When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing. If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.
This is the first takeaway of the 3rd Law: you just need t...
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With each repetition, cell-to-cell signaling improves and the neural connections tighten.
Repeating a habit leads to clear physical changes in the brain.
Like the muscles of the body responding to regular weight training, particular regions of the brain adapt as they are used and atrophy as they are abandoned.
Both common sense and scientific evidence agree: repetition is a form of change.
Each time you repeat an action, you are activating a particular neural circuit associated with that habit.
All habits follow a similar trajectory from effortful practice to automatic behavior, a process known as automaticity. Automaticity is the ability to perform a behavior without thinking about each step, which occurs when the nonconscious mind takes over.
habits form based on frequency, not time.
It’s the frequency that makes the difference. Your current habits have been internalized over the course of hundreds, if not thousands, of repetitions. New habits require the same level of frequency.
The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones.
“How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right?” Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.
