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Atomic Habits
Lessons from the book 'Atomic Habits' by James Clear.
Atomic Habits
Notes for the book by James Clear
Jump Ahead:
The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits
Dave Brailsford was a performance director for British Cycling and he developed a strategy he referred to as "the aggregation of marginal gains" which was all about looking for tiny ways to improve everything you do. For cycling, if you were able to get better, even just a little, on a bunch of the different things that go into riding a bike, your overall performance would increase significantly.
Small differences can compound over time. For example, a 1 percent improvement every day for a year would yield a 37 times overall increase in performance. It is the same for habits that you develop. Small habits can compound to become major self improvements over time when they are repeated.
A single decision is easy to ignore, but a series of the same decisions is not. It works the same for bad habits as well. Success is a culmination of several daily habits that you develop.
Your trajectory is much more important than your current status. Your current status is a lagging indicator, but your trajectory is a leading indicator. Someone who has money now but is quickly spending more than they earn is more of a concern than someone who may be broke now, but are making small changes to improve their financial situation.
Progress seems to happen suddenly sometimes, but in reality it is the result of several previous actions that suddenly cause a breakthrough. If you find a way to jump a half inch higher every time you train, you will eventually be able to dunk.
The delay in the breakthrough can be frustrating when you are trying to form a new habit. You are working at it every day and barely noticing a difference, but like all things that compound, the most powerful upswings happen later. This is referred to as the 'Plateau of Latent Potential'.
If you want better results, do not focus on goals, instead focus on systems. Goals are the end result you want to achieve and systems are the processes you need to achieve them. Goals are good for setting the direction you want to go in, but systems create the progress towards that vision. You will have issues if you think too much about goals and do not spend enough time focusing on systems. Some of the problems with being too focused on goals include:
Successful people and unsuccessful people have the same goals. Most people want to make money, and have that as a goal, but not everyone has a system that is helping them.
Achieving goals can be fleeting. You may have a goal to make a million dollars and achieve it, but if your systems aren't maintained then you can loose all your money again.
Focusing on goals delays your happiness. Your goals are in the future so if you are only considering yourself successful if and when they are achieved then you aren't going to be happy with yourself until then (if at all), but if you focus on the system then each day can be seen as a success.
Goals can stifle long-term progress. We may achieve a goal, but what then? A system runs all the time and never ends.
How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)
Often times when we try to make a change, we focus on changing the wrong things. There are 3 levels at which change can occur:
Outcomes. This is the outer layer and concerns itself with the results you want to achieve.
Process. This the middle layer and concerns itself with habits and systems that you want to change.
Identity. This is the middle layer, and concerns itself with your beliefs, your worldview, and your perspectives.
The key is the direction you take to make changes, for outcome-based habits, you are focusing on what you want to achieve, and you go from the outside in, but with identity-based habits, you are focusing on who you want to become instead, and you go from the inside out.
It is one thing to say I want to be healthy and to set goals and try to become healthy, but instead, if you rephrase into the present and start identifying as someone who values health, then that becomes a much stronger motivator for change. There is a direct correlation between how strongly you identify with the new you and how likely you will maintain the habits and systems that will allow you to realize that identity. Motivation can get you moving towards change, but it is identity that keeps you on that path. We are more likely to act according to our identity when we believe it strongly.
Conversely, the more a thought or behaviour is tied to your identity, the harder it will be to change. Good habits make sense for positive change, but if they conflict with your identity then you will fail to maintain them.
Your identity and beliefs have been conditioned through experience. They are a product of your habits. The word 'identity' comes from the Latin words 'essentitas,' which means 'being', and 'identidem,' which means 'repeatedly'. Your whole identity is not just your habits, other actions contribute to it as well, but since your habits are repeated so often, they do become a big part of who you are.
There is a two step process to changing your identity:
Decide who you want to be (define your values, your principals and the vision for yourself).
Prove it to yourself by setting up habits and systems that align with that vision.
Your identity can shape your habits, and your habits become part of your identity. It works both ways. You need constant revision of your beliefs, identity and habits to ensure you continue to become the best version of yourself.
How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps
Habits are behaviours that have been repeated enough times that they are now automatic. They are formed through trial and error. The activity in the brain that is used decreases when habits are formed, because you perceive a cue and automatically react to it, saving yourself from having to analyze and decide what to do each time. Your brain doesn't need to do any more trial and error, it creates a mental rule: if then, then that. Habits are essentially mental shortcuts learned from experience.
The conscious mind can be a bottleneck to thinking, so habit formation is incredibly useful to free up the brain for more productive use. Our memories of the past enable us to better predict the future, so when we encounter a familiar situation, it is best to allow the subconscious mind (our habits) to take control, and free up your mind and attention for other tasks. Habits make you more free.
There are 4 steps in the process of forming a habit:
Cue. This is the stimulus that causes your brain to initiate a reaction.
Craving. This is the motivational force behind the reaction, which creates a desire in you to change your state.
Response. This is the reaction that you take to satisfy your craving.
Reward. This is the goal of the reaction or habit, and we chase them because they satisfy us and teach us, which actions are worth remembering in the future.
We do not all have habits and reactions to the same cues. Some of us may find passing by a plate of cookies without eating one very difficult, others can walk by barely even noticing them.
The cue triggers your brain into noticing the reward, the craving motivates you into action, and the response is about obtaining the reward. Feelings of pleasure and disappointment fuel the feedback system that shape our habits. If a behaviour isn't strong in all four of these stages, then it will not develop into a habit. Without the first 3 steps, the behaviour will not occur, and without the last one it will not be repeated.
The cue and the craving stages create a desire to change and can be seen as the problem phase of habit formation while the response and reward stages are the actions you take to achieve that change and can be seen as the solutions phase.
Our behaviours are all driven by a desire to solve a problem. Sometimes that problem is that you want something good that you do not currently have, sometimes that problem is that you are experiencing something bad and want to avoid it. Either way, we want to establish habits that allow us to solve problems efficiently.
There are four laws of habit formation:
Make it obvious. The cue needs to be easily noticeable in order to stimulate the craving.
Make it attractive. The craving needs to be something you really want in order to get you to respond.
Make it easy. The response cannot be difficult or else we may not do it.
Make it satisfying. The reward needs to satisfy the craving or else you haven't solved the problem.
Contrarily, there are four laws to breaking a habit as well:
Make it invisible. If the cue is hard to notice then we will not be stimulated.
Make it unattractive. If there is no craving, there will be no need to respond.
Make it difficult. If the response is difficult we will not want to do it.
Make it unsatisfying. If the reward is not really something we want then we will no longer be motivated to repeat the behaviour.
The 1st Law: Make it Obvious
Your brain is constantly at work, taking in information from your surroundings, analyzing it, and trying to predict what is useful and what is not. When you experience the same thing repeatedly your brain starts to form a clearer picture of what is important and can save that information for future use. Your brain is constantly learning from experience.
The cue that triggers a habit does not even have to be noticed consciously, which can be very useful. Cues that were once conscious can become invisible overtime as we subconsciously process them without much effort. This is why becoming aware of our cues is the first step to behaviour change.
Even before we start to try and build new habits, we need to understand the habits that already exist, because we may not even be aware of them. The more automatic our response is, the less likely we are to even noticing it. Many failures to make behaviour change is as a result of lack of self-awareness, as we become so used to reacting the same way each time that we do not even question why we do it, or if we even want to do it.
We use the terms 'good habit' and 'bad habit', but this is a bit misleading as all habits serve you in some way, which is why you keep repeating them. The real distinguisher is whether or not the habit is effective or ineffective at helping you become the person you want.
One way to start becoming aware of your habits and bringing them back to the conscious is by saying things out loud. For example, if you have a desire for another cookie you can say, "eating this cookie will impact my health negatively" and this will draw attention to your behaviour and whether or not it aligns with the vision you have for yourself.
Saying things out loud can also help you remember and action things you want to do as well. For example, saying "I am going to exercise when I wake up tomorrow morning" will increase your chances of actually doing it.
The best way to start a new habit is to plan ahead on when and where you intent to act. Although cues can come from anywhere, time and location are the two most common ones. One way to effectively plan ahead is by creating an 'implementation intention.'
An implementation intention can be written as: When situation X happens, I will respond with Y. People who make specific plans for when and where they want to form a new habit are more likely to succeed. When the situation arises there is no need to think about it, you can just leverage your plan to know what to do.
This same strategy can be applied to your habits by intentionally saying what you will do, when you will do it, and where you will get it done. The modified sentence for habits becomes, "I will [behaviour] at [time] and in [location]". For example, "I will exercise at 7:30am in the basement". Not only will this increase your chances on following though with the desired behaviour, but it will also help you avoid situations or say no to situations that do not promote the desired behaviour.
One of the best ways to form a new habit is by habit stacking. This is when, instead of planning the behaviour based on a time and location, you pair the desired habit with an existing one. Then your implementation intention can look like: "After [current habit], I will [new habit]". For example, "After I have my morning coffee I will exercise for 30 minutes." There is no limit to how many habits you can stack.
When considering when to do a habit, you need to be realistic about when you are most likely to be successful. Do not commit to exercising at lunch if you value that time to be social with co-workers.
Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More
Every habit is context dependent. Even with unique personalities, certain behaviours and patterns tend to arise amongst the masses in certain environments. In this case behaviour change is coming from external factors, not internal ones.
We mainly perceive the world through our sensory nervous system and the 5 senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste, but we also have others ways of sensing things, some we "notice" without being conscious about them, like when the elevation changes in an airplane, or when you sense the amount of salt in the blood and the need to drink.
Above all, the sense of sight is by far the most powerful. We are dependent on it for our day to day more than any other sense. As a result of how much we depend on it, it is also the biggest influencer of behaviour change. A small change in what you see can make a big difference in what you do, so it is important to design your environment to be filled with productive cues, not ones that are unproductive.
Creating easy-to-notice visual cues can draw your attention towards a desired habit. If you want to read more before bed, perhaps you can leave your cellphone out of the bedroom and keep a book by your bed.
So many people live in a world that has been designed by other people, but you become the architect of your environment by altering the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues. When you have a designed environment, you can then link a habit to a particular context. A new environment makes habits easier to change, because it makes it easier to let go of the old habits that are associated with the old environment as well.
Creating a new environment doesn't necessarily have to be a completely new space, it can also just mean rearranging your existing one, perhaps taking some things away or adding ones when necessary.
Whenever possible you should not mix the context of one habit with another, or else the one that is easier to do will win. The cues should trigger a single behaviour as opposed to competing ones. As an example, if you keep your phone by your bed you are more likely to pick it up instead of that book you meant to read. The context of the bed had two possible reactions, but it is easier to pick up the phone and that is what we tend to do.
The Secret to Self-Control
Discipline was something we have been taught since we were young. If we were disciplined and did what we were supposed to we would be successful, but the truth is, those people we often see as disciplined, aren't all that different in terms of personality than those who are not. The big difference is that they design their environment in such a way where they do not get tempted. It is not a matter of being stronger, it is a matter of not putting yourself in the situation where you'd have to exercise restraint in the first place.
Sometimes behaviour change techniques can have the opposite results, when we are put back in the same environment that created the bad habit in the first place. Bad habits are self-fulfilling and fuel other bad habits. You can break a bad habit, but it's pretty engrained in your brain, so you won't be able to forget it easily. This is why restraint alone is very difficult to break bad habits.
You will be more successful if you are able to cut the bad habit at the source, and eliminate any cues that trigger it. This is the direct opposite of the 1st Law of Behaviour Change, instead of making it obvious, you want to make it invisible.
The 2nd Law: Make It Attractive
A supernormal stimulus is a heightened version of reality and it elicits a stronger reaction. For example, it may seem normal to see a pigeon on the street, but if we saw a pigeon the size of a chicken then we would likely react to it. Processed foods often have dynamic contrast, and combine flavours or textures that elicit a combination of our senses, like the gooey melted cheese on a crispy thin crust pizza.
There are examples of heightened reality all around us. In TV commercials when they advertise food, in stores where they use mannequins with exaggerated features as models. Models in ads do not even look like their original selves by the time make up and photos shop has been added. They do this on purpose, they want to exaggerate features that we find attractive, so they form a strong cue for a craving.
Compared to nature, these heightened versions of reality become hard to ignore, and we are faced with stimuli that our brains haven't ever had to deal with. If we want to increase the chances that a desired behaviour will occur, then we need to make it attractive.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter and habits are driven by the dopamine feedback loop. Highly habit forming behaviour is directly associated with higher levels of dopamine. Dopamine is not only released when you experience pleasure, but it is also released when you anticipate it. The same reward system that is activated when you get something is also activated when you expect it. Sometimes the anticipation feels better than the reward.
Your brain has far more surface area dedicated to wanting things than it does to liking things, which shows the crucial role cravings and desires play in how we behave throughout our lives. Desire drives behaviour. Every action is taken because of the craving that come before it. We need to make our habits attractive, because it is the anticipation of the reward that motivates us to behave a certain way in the first place.
One strategy, known as 'temptation bundling', is when you connect an action you want to do with an action you have to do anyways. You are more likely to find a behaviour attractive if you get to do something you enjoy at the same time. For example, maybe you can listen to some good podcasts or even a TV show while on the treadmill.
You can combine temptation bundling with habit stacking to guide your behaviour. This could look like: "After [current habit] I will [new habit I need] and after [new habit i need] I will [new habit i want]". For example, "After I drink my coffee, I will exercise for 30 minutes, and after I exercise for 30 minutes I will check the group chat with my friends."
The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits
We are social creatures with a strong desire to feel belonging. We tend to imitate the habits of 3 groups in particular:
The close. Physical cues in our environment tend to have a strong impact on our behaviour, but so does the social environment we are in as well. As a general rule, the closer we are to someone the more likely we are to develop similar habits. Associating yourself with people who act the same way you want to act will increase the chances of you forming the same positive habits. The odds improve if you are able to find more things in common with them as the shared identity helps create the individual identity as well. It also explains why sticking with the group even after the habit is formed is crucial for long-term success.
The many. Even if we desire to do the opposite, we tend to act in a similar way to how everyone else is acting in a situation. This can come from the pressure to conform socially in groups, the desire to be accepted and to get along with others. You can ignore this, but it takes extra effort. Change becomes unattractive when it goes against the crowd, but it becomes attractive when it goes along with them instead.
The powerful. We have a strong desire to fit in, but that can also lead to a desire to stand out. This is why we are attracted to and want to copy the habits of people we perceive as successful, because we desire to be successful ourselves. Many of our habits are imitated from people we admire. High status people tend to enjoy the approval and praise of others and we are motivated to perform behaviours that elevate our status.
How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits
Underneath every craving lies a deeper motive. For example, we may crave pizza, but the underlying motive is that we have a need for food to survive. Here are some examples of underlying motives:
Conserve energy
Get food and water
Find love and reproduce
Forming social connections and bonds
Getting social acceptance and approval
Reduce uncertainty
Achieve a high status
This is not a full list, but it captures some of the main deeper motives that manifest in the form of cravings.
There are many different ways to handle any given motive. Habits depend on associations, and it is these associations that determine whether we can predict a habit to be worth repeating again in the future. Our behaviour depends a lot on these predictions, and what this means is that how we interpret the events that happen to us dictates our behaviour more than the event itself. Put another way, the same cue can incite a good habit or a bad habit depending on your predicted behaviour.
The anticipation itself produces the feelings that we call a craving. The cues are transformed by our feelings and emotions into a signal that we can use to help explain what we are currently sensing. In other words, the craving gives us a feeling of something missing, and motivates us to change our internal state. For example, when your stomach is empty, there is a gap between what your body feels and what it wants to feel, and this provides motivation to get food. You do not necessarily want pizza, but you have a craving for pizza as a way to make you feel differently from hunger.
Our feelings and emotions tell us whether we want to change or stay the same. They help us decide the best way to get from our current state to our desired state. Whenever a habit satisfies an underlying motive, you develop a craving to repeat it.
In order to make hard habits more attractive, you need to associate them with a positive experience. We tend to use the phrase "have to" when it comes to harder habits, but a slight mindset shift, and if we change our vocabulary to "get to" it will change the way we perceive it. For example, instead of "I have to exercise before work" say, "I get to exercise before work." One word has changed a chore into an opportunity.
Reframing your habits to focus on the benefits rather than the burdens is a quick way to shift your perspective and make harder habits more attractive. Conversely, you can focus on the benefits of avoiding a bad habit in order to make it seem unattractive.
You can take it a step further by creating a motivation ritual where you associate your habits with something you enjoy, so then you can use it as a cue for motivation. For example, perhaps you listen to a great playlist whenever you go for a jog, so in the future when you need extra motivation to get out, you can simply play the playlist.
You are using your brain for what it is designed to do: use cues to predict the future and know what behaviours will get you from your current state to your desired state, and you can trick it with associations for just about anything. For example, if you want to feel happier in general, and petting your cat makes you happy, then you need to come up with a small ritual to do before petting your cat, like maybe a mantra or a breathing exercise, and then repeat this ritual before each time you pet your cat. You will associate the mantra with petting the cat, which makes you happy and eventually you won't even need to have your cat near you, you just need to repeat the mantra and you will feel happier.
Once a habit has been established, the cue can trigger a craving even if there is no direct link between it and the association.
The 3rd Law: Make It Easy
Planning has its place, but we need to be careful that we are not trying to come up with the perfect plan and as such avoiding taking action. Actions are what deliver outcomes.
Planning doesn't lead to any results. Coming up with ideas and putting them on paper is not going to make them come to life. There is security in planning and not taking action, because you cannot fail at something you are not doing. It does not feel good to fail or be judged by our peers, and that is why some people get stuck in perpetual planning.
Planning also makes us feel like we are doing something, but in reality, we are just planning on doing something. The action needs to happen. Put another way, planning is a form of procrastination, and instead we should be focusing on putting things into practise.
Mastering a habit starts with repetition, not perfection. Do not worry about the perfect workout plan, just concentrate on working out repeatedly, and the habit will form.
Repeat something enough times and your brain starts to automate the response to it to save energy. This is called 'long-term potentiation.' Combined with a process known as 'automaticity,' which is the automatic behaviour that is triggered by the brain's automatic processing, allows us to perform behaviours without thinking of each step of the process.
Habits are formed with frequency, not time. So, instead of thinking about how long will it take to form a habit, think of how many repetitions you need to do in order for it to become automatic. It doesn't matter if you dedicate a few weeks or months to forming a habit, what matters is the frequency you are doing it within the timeframe.
Once you have completed enough successful attempts, the behaviour becomes solidified in your brain and it becomes a habit. Do not focus on making it automatic, just focus on actually doing it and making progress and then it will become more automatic.
The Law of Least Effort
In physics, the path that is followed between any two points is the path that requires the least amount of energy. This is known as the Principle of Least Action and it underpins the laws of the universe. For people this is known as the Law of Least Effort.
People think motivation is the key to forming good habits, but in reality we are motivated to take the easy route and do whatever is convenient. This helps us conserve energy, which our brain is wired to do whenever possible. When presented with two similar options, the brain will naturally gravitate towards whatever requires less effort.
Habits like scrolling through social media and watching TV require very little effort so we gravitate towards them when given the opportunity. Habits are an obstacle towards getting you to your desired state. Your desired state is a healthy body and feeling, and in order to get there you must overcome regular exercise. The greater the obstacle, the more friction there is between your current state and your end state, and that is why the key to increasing your likelihood of following through with a habit, it needs to be more convenient.
Making it easy does not mean only do things if they are easy to do, but focus on ways to make your desired action easier for you to choose in any given moment. Environment design is a great way to reduce the friction associated with your habits.
We already discussed how we can design our environment to make cues more obvious, but we can also design our environment to make our actions easier to do as well. For example, if our gym is across town, it can provide a convenient excuse not to go, but if we changed to a gym that is on our way to work, or even started to do home workouts, then it becomes easier for us to stick to regular exercise. When we remove friction, we can produce more with less effort.
The main concept is to design your environment to make it as easy as possible for you to choose your desired action in the future. Focus on eliminating friction for your good habits, and adding friction for your bad habits. For example, if you want to eat healthier, you can stop buying chips and chocolate and instead stock up on fruit and nuts.
How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule
Each day is made up with multiple moments that force us to make decisions, but it is really a few of your habits that really dictate the choices you make. These choices provide a chain effect, impacting your immediate future.
When it comes to forming habits, we may want to start big, but this often leads to failure, so one rule to keep in mind is the Two-Minute Rule, which states that when you start a new habit it should take no longer than two minutes to do. For example, instead of trying to read a chapter each night, you can start with reading one or two pages.
Once you have mastered the habit for two minutes it can act as a gateway habit that leads to better choices throughout the day. Focusing on something easy that just takes two minutes can help you slip into a state of focus, which leads to great things. You might even find yourself pushing the habit for longer than two minutes eventually.
The Two-Minute Rule also helps to reinforce the identity you want to build. If you want to be a reader, all it takes is two-minutes a day to be a reader, and eventually you will finish a book. It's a small action, but it helps to confirm the identity you envision for yourself.
Habit shaping is when, once you have mastered the basic first step of your new habit, you can then increase the difficulty and challenge yourself a little more. Perhaps reading for two minutes before bed becomes reading for five minutes. And once that is mastered, you level up again, such as reading for ten minutes. Eventually you can be reading an entire chapter before bed each night and a book or two a month.
How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible
Sometimes success is more about making the bad habits hard rather than the good habits easy. This is the inversion of the 3rd Law of Behaviour Change: make it difficult.
A commitment device is a choice that you make now that will impact the actions you take later. They are very useful because they allow you to plan ahead and reduce temptations in the future. For example, if your goal is to eat healthier, you can buy apples to snack on instead of cookies. Later, when you are hungry, you will be reminded of how delicious apples can be since there is no cookies to eat.
The goal is to make it such that it takes more work to get out of the good habit than it does to get started on it. With the example above, it is less work to just eat the apple versus having to get ready, go outside to a store, and return back for some cookies.
Some other commitment devices that can lock in better choices in the future includes:
Buying a good mattress or investing in blackout curtains leads to better sleep habits
Turning off notifications on your cellphone prevents you from getting your attention and time stolen from you
Setting up automated savings can ensure you are building a nest egg for the future
Some devices, like smartphones, can help us be productive and they can be helpful in leading to better habits, but they can also be full of distractions and lead to bad habits if we are not careful. It is especially important to set up our technology to make good habits easy and bad habits more difficult. Utilizing commitment devices like these can help you create an environment where good habits are virtually guaranteed.
The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying
The Cardinal Rule of Behaviour Change is 'What is rewarded is repeated and what is punished is avoided.' Your future behaviour is based on behaviours you were rewarded or punished for in the past. Positive emotions foster habits and negative emotions destroy them.
The first 3 laws increase the odds that a behaviour will be done this time, but the 4th law increases the odds that the behaviour will be repeated again, and completes the habit loop. It isn't enough to just make it satisfying, the satisfaction has to be immediate.
The Mismatch Between Immediate And Delayed Rewards
Scientists say we live in a 'delayed-return environment' because sometimes we do not receive the benefits of our actions until much later. As en example, saving money for retirement means sacrificing a little bit now, so that you can enjoy it in the future.
There are several examples of delayed-return environments, like when we plan vacations, or take a course to improve our career, but the first example of this came from agriculture, when we started planting crops in the spring to reap the benefits at harvest season.
For our ancestors, instant gratification meant survival. When they came across a bush with berries, it made sense for them to eat as much as they could since it might be a while before they come across another one. Similarly, they needed to respond to threats immediately, or risk being caught in a storm or by a predator. The future was not as important as surviving in the present, and so our brains evolved to respond to immediate satisfaction.
Immediate satisfactions continues to serve us well most of the time. It makes sense to a guaranteed reward now versus a possible reward in the future, but occasionally the temptation for immediate rewards can steer us in the wrong direction.
For good habits, usually the immediate outcome does not feel good, but the long-term outcome does. It is the opposite for bad habits, where the immediate outcomes feels good and the long-term outcomes does not. Put another way, you pay up front for good habits, and you pay more down the road for your bad ones.
A good rule to follow is, the more immediate satisfaction doing something feels, the more you should question if it will help you with your long-term goals. The brain tends to overestimate immediate threats and underestimate distant threats. For example, we get nervous with turbulence on an airplane, but do not pay attention to the slow creep of clutter from failing to tidy up.
We can update the Cardinal Rule of Behaviour Change to, 'what is immediately rewarded is repeated and what is immediately punished is avoided.'
It is possible to train yourself to delay gratification by adding a little bit of immediate satisfaction to habits that will benefit us in the long-run, and some immediate pain to habits that don't.
How To Turn Instant Gratification Into Your Advantage
The ending of a behaviour is critical because it is the stage we remember the most, so you want the ending of your habit to be satisfying, and the best way to do this is by using reinforcement.
Habit stacking ties your behaviour to an immediate cue, and reinforcement ties your habit to immediate reward, which makes it satisfying in the end. Immediate reinforcement is especially helpful with behaviours you want to avoid because otherwise all you are doing is trying to resist temptation and that is not satisfying enough.
One strategy is to literally reward yourself each time you resist temptation. For example, if you are trying to quit smoking, each week that goes by when you do not smoke, you can take a portion of the money you would have spent on cigarettes and put it into a savings account to go on a trip later. It is important that your reward for avoiding the bad behaviour is also aligned with your long-term goals. As an example, it would not make sense to reward yourself for not smoking with a doughnut if your long-term goal is to be healthy.
Eventually, the reward won't be needed anymore as the power of the temptation from the cue is weakened over time, and the intrinsic value in the action itself, like feeling good about making the right choice, is rewarding enough. You become so closely tied to the identity you are trying to create that the identity itself becomes the reinforcement mechanism. Incentives can help kickstart a habit, but identity is what makes it stick around.
How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day
Having something visual to help you measure and track your progress is satisfying as it provides clear evidence of your advancement towards your new identity. This can come in many forms, like seeing a savings account grow, food journals, workout logs, but one of the best ways to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.
The mantra "don't break the chain" can be very powerful. It reinforces the value of just showing up every day, and how focusing on the process can lead to impressive results down the road. Habit tracking makes a behaviour obvious, attractive and satisfying all at once, as it:
Creates a visual cue that reminds you
Is inherently motivating as you see the progress you are making (and do not want to lose it)
Feels immediately satisfying to record your success each time
Habit tracking gives you visual proof that you are becoming the person you want to be.
To make habit tracking easier, it should be automated whenever possible, (you'd be surprised how much is being tracked already through banking statements and your cellphone data), manual tracking should be limited to only your most important habits, and you need to record the result right after the habit occurs.
When your habits breakdown it is important to recover quickly. That is the difference between successful people and unsuccessful ones. Everyone has hard days, but successful people rebound quickly. It's not having a cheat day and eating pizza and wings that will make you unhealthy, it is letting that spiral and become more consistent. The breaking of a habit doesn't make a huge impact as long as we reclaim it fast. If you fail once, forgive yourself, but try not to fail twice.
In our data-heavy world, we tend to put a lot more emphasis on things that can be measured, but just because you cannot measure something doesn't mean it is not important. There may be some habits that cannot be tracked very easily or practically. There are other ways to measure progress and sometimes it is helpful to focus on something different. For example, when trying to loose weight, the number on the scale can seem like it doesn't move as quickly as you'd want it to sometimes, and that can be demotivating, but that number does not matter if you are feeling more energised and happy throughout the day.
How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything
Once our actions have an immediate consequence, then our behaviour can begin to change. We tend to put in extra effort to avoid immediate pain. For example, we tend to pay our bills on time so we do not incur a late fee. The power of the punishment must equal the relative power of the behaviour you are trying to correct, or put another way, the cost of action must be cheaper than the cost of inaction.
The more local, tangible, and immediate the consequence, the more powerful it is in influencing behaviour change. One way to do this is by creating a 'habit contract.'
A habit contract is like a personal law that you create to hold yourself accountable. It is a verbal or written contract that clearly states your commitment to the habit you are looking to break or develop, and the consequence if you do not follow through with it. Once this is done, you need to share it with one or more people.
Having things written down increase our chances of following through in itself, but once we have communicated our intentions to someone else, the likelihood of success increases even further, because we tend to work harder to prove ourselves to others and show them that our behaviours are aligned with the identity we created.
Perhaps you feel a habit contract is too much for you, but at least having an accountability partner and communicating your goals to them will provide you with a valuable resource for motivation.
Advanced Tactics: How to Go from Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great
Your genes influence your personality and your personality can influence your habits. The 'Big Five' are common personality traits that are divided into 5 spectrums of behaviour:
Openness. From curious and willing to change / try new things on one end, and cautious and resistant to change on the other end.
Conscientiousness. From organized and efficient on one end, and easygoing and spontaneous on the other end.
Extroversion. From outgoing and energetic on one end, and solitary and reserved on the other end.
Agreeableness. From friendly and compassionate on one end, and difficult and detached on the other end.
Neuroticism. From anxious and sensitive on one end, and confident and collected on the other end.
Everyone is a mix of these 5 traits and the spectrum can change given the environment, but everyone has a pretty strong personality baseline and understanding this can help you understand yourself better and therefore know what rewards and punishments might be more effective when building habits.
Another way to put the odds of success in your favour is the 'explore, exploit, trade-off' method, wherein when we are first trying to start a habit, we should explore different approaches to discover one that works best, then we should exploit that method as much as we can, but not being so rigid that we aren't open to exploring things again when we feel we are going off track, or just want to test different methods you come across. Every now and then there will be trade-offs you can make, and it puts you in a position to constantly test and find better ways.
As you explore different ways of being successful, you can ask yourself these questions to continue to hone in on the habits and behaviours that are most satisfying to you:
What feels fun to me, but seems like work for others? If you do not find it challenging to do, but most other people do, then there is a good chance you can be successful in that area.
What makes me lose track of time? When you reach the flow state, or are "in the zone" with something you are doing and it seems like time passes quickly, then this usually means you are enjoying it.
Where do I get greater returns than the average person? We tend to enjoy things we are good at, which also comes with praise and acceptance of others.
What comes naturally to me? Since we gear towards things that are easier to do, then there is a good chance you will enjoy and get better at something that you are already good at naturally.
Some plants need lots of light in order to survive, others will die if exposed to too much light. If you find a more favourable environment for yourself, then you are more likely to thrive.
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