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

by James Clear

Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.

It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.

when you have your habits dialed in and the basics of life are handled and done, your mind is free to focus on new challenges and master the next set of problems. Building habits in the present allows you to do more of what you want in the future.

The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.

Every craving is linked to a desire to change your internal state.

The first purpose of rewards is to satisfy your craving.

rewards teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future.

This four-step process is not something that happens occasionally, but rather it is an endless feedback loop that is running and active during every moment you are alive—even now. The brain is continually scanning the environment, predicting what will happen next, trying out different responses, and learning from the results. The entire process is completed in a split second, and we use it again and again without realizing everything that has been packed into the previous moment.

Whenever you want to change your behavior, you can simply ask yourself: How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying?

The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.

In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.

When it comes to building new habits, you can use the connectedness of behavior to your advantage. 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.

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

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.

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.

In one suburb near Amsterdam, they found that some homeowners used 30 percent less energy than their neighbors—despite the homes being of similar size and getting electricity for the same price.

It turned out the houses in this neighborhood were nearly identical except for one feature: the location of the electrical meter.

When their energy use was obvious and easy to track, people changed their behavior.9

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

If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment.

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.

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.

Our behavior is not defined by the objects in the environment but by our relationship to them.

Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces around you. 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.

The power of context also reveals an important strategy: habits can be easier to change in a new environment.12 It helps to escape the subtle triggers and cues that nudge you toward your current habits.

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

Whenever possible, avoid mixing the context of one habit with another. When you start mixing contexts, you’ll start mixing habits—and the easier ones will usually win out.

Every habit should have a home.

If you can manage to stick with this strategy, each context will become associated with a particular habit and mode of thought. Habits thrive under predictable circumstances like these.

“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.

Here’s the punch line: 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.

To put it bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.

A more reliable approach is to cut bad habits off at the source. One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.

This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.

The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.

If you want to increase the odds that a behavior will occur, then you need to make it attractive.

While it is not possible to transform every habit into a supernormal stimulus, we can make any habit more enticing.

Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop.

When it comes to habits, the key takeaway is this: dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it.

Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation. And whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act.

It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.

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. This is where a strategy known as temptation bundling comes into play.

Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do. In Byrne’s case, he bundled watching Netflix (the thing he wanted to do) with riding his stationary bike (the thing he needed to do).

You’re more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time. Perhaps you want to hear about the latest celebrity gossip, but you need to get in shape. Using temptation bundling, you could only read the tabloids and watch reality shows at the gym. Maybe you want to get a pedicure, but you need to clean out your email inbox. Solution: only get a pedicure while processing overdue work emails.

Premack’s Principle.

“more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.”23 In other words, even if you don’t really want to process overdue work emails, you’ll become conditioned to do it if it means you get to do something you really want to do along the way.

You can even combine temptation bundling with the habit stacking strategy we discussed in Chapter 5 to create a set...

Temptation bundling is one way to create a heightened version of any habit by connecting it with something you already want.