Atomic habits

How Small Changes Lead to Remarkable Results: A Summary of James Clear's Atomic Habits

TLDR: Atomic Habits is a practical guide to creating lasting personal change, by harnessing the power of tiny, repeated actions. The book explains why habits are crucial for success, how to break bad habits, and how to design lasting good ones. Atomic Habits is based on a simple framework called the 'Four Laws of Behaviour Change', which can help you master the art of habit formation.

↓↓ Expand below to explore the key underlying themes, or scroll down to dive into the ‘Four Laws of Behaviour Change’ ↓↓

• Without healthy habits, you will always seem to be short on energy. It’s only by using them to make the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for creativity, and thinking freely. A habit is a behaviour that has been repeated enough times to become automatic. They reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.
  

• Habits generate the ‘compound interest of self-improvement’. An atomic habit is a small sequence that, when combined with other complementary ones, has a multiplactory - not just additive - impact. Because of this compounding effect, time accentuates the results: good habits make time your ally, and bad habits make it your enemy.
  

• Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold. This is like water being heated, where there is limited external evidence of change until 'sudden' transformation happens when 'boiling point' is reached. The most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. As such, you should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results. You get what you repeat. If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line. 
  

• You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Goals have four flaws:
  

  • Winners and losers have the same goals. Goal setting suffers from survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.
    

  • Achieving a goal is only a momentary change. Without changing the system of bad habits that gives you undesirable results, you will need to re-achieve that momentary goal over and over.
    

  • Goals restrict happiness. The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone. 
    

  • Goals are at odds with long-term progress. When all of your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it?  

• The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become. There are three levels of change: outcome change, process change, and identity change. The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. The literal translation of the latin words for ‘identity’ is literally“repeated beingness.” Decide the type of person you want to be. Then prove it to yourself with small, repeated ‘wins’. The more a habit becomes part of your life, the less you need outside encouragement to follow through: incentives can start habits, but identity sustains them.
  

• Habits form based on frequency, not time. “How long does it take to build a new habit?” is the wrong question. ‘How many repetitions are required to make a habit automatic’, is key. The rate, rather than the time period, matters most.
  

• 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.
  

• 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. Every behaviour has a surface level craving and a deeper underlying motive - tackling the root of the issue is key.
  

• Some habits come easier than others to us due to our genetic make-up. Choosing the combination of habits that plays to our strengths can be a powerful competitive advantage.  

• Habits alone are insufficient for mastery - deliberate practice is also required. Habits allow us to do things without thinking; the downside is that they can stop us paying attention to little errors. Reflection and review processes support mastery, narrowing our focus to a tiny element of performance, making us conscious of where new atomic habits are needed. Once the effortful work of building this new habit is complete, it can form the foundation to advance to the next one. One example of a ‘review and reflection process’ would be keeping a ‘decision journal’. You can use these to record the major decisions you made each week, why, and what the expected outcome was. These outcomes can then be reviewed at the end of each month or year to analyse decisions' quality and improve similar ones in future.

Photo by Ashwin Vaswani on Unsplash

Most of the book examines how to engineer each of the four parts of the 'habit loop' to our advantage. The focus goes on configuring our systems and environment, instead of summoning up willpower.

The 'Four Laws of Behaviour Change' are:

1 - The cue: making good habits obvious, and bad ones invisible.

• Identify your current habits, filling out a Habits Scorecard, which lists each one with a rating of whether they help or hinder your desired identity. You can also use ‘Pointing-and-Calling’, which is a technique of observing out loud what you are doing and what the outcome will be, to increase your awareness of your habitual actions and their consequences.This will allow you later to optimise the small choices that deliver outsized impact, the ones that — like a fork in the road— either send you in the direction of a productive day or an unproductive one.
  

• Use implementation intentions, which are statements that specify for each new habit “I will [BEHAVIOUR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]. This helps you create clarity on what to do, and avoid apparently inconsequential, but ultimately destructive, distractions.
  

• Use habit stacking, a method of grafting a new habit onto the end of the routine of an established one. For example, “After I brush my teeth, I will floss.” This helps you create a strong cue for your new habit and makes it easier to remember. Habit stacking works best when the cue is highly specific and immediately actionable. Your cue should also have the same frequency as your desired habit.  

• Design your environment, making the cues of good habits visible and the cues of bad habits invisible. The most persistent behaviours usually have multiple cues. Given visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behaviour, small changes in what you see can lead to a big shift in what you do. people who appear to have tremendous self-control, aren’t all that different from those who are struggling, so much as they structure their lives to spend less time in tempting situations.

2 - The craving: making good habits attractive, and bad ones repulsive.

• Use temptation bundling, combining an action you want to do, with an action you need to do. For example, you can listen to your favourite podcast while exercising, so that anticipation of the former results in motivation for the latter. This works because it is the anticipation of a reward—not receiving it— that gives us a dopamine hit, and so drives us to take action.
  

• Create a motivation ritual. This involves embedding cravings from other contexts around desired habits. To build a relaxation ritual, first find something that makes you truly relaxed—like petting your dog. Then create a short routine that you perform every time before you do the thing you love e.g. take three deep breaths and smile before petting the dog. Eventually, you’ll begin to associate this breathe-and-smile routine with being in a relaxed mood. It becomes a cue that means feeling relaxed, whether you’re petting your dog or not. Once established, you can use the cue - in this case the deep breaths and smile - to establish the desired relaxed state. 
  

• Join a culture where your desired behaviour is the norm. We tend to imitate the habits of three social groups: the close (family and friends), the many (the tribe), and the powerful (those with status and prestige). By joining a ‘tribe’ where our desired behaviour is the normal behaviour, especially when we already have something in common with the group, we will be influenced by the social pressure of the group around us, who share the same goals and values.  

• Reframe your mindset. This comes in two forms - the first requires highlighting the benefits of avoiding your bad habits and the costs of indulging in them. The second involves reprogramming your brain to enjoy hard habits, by referring to them as opportunities, not obligations, e.g. saying “I get to work out today” instead of “I have to work out today.”

3 - The response: make good habits easy, and bad ones difficult.

• Prime the environment. Create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. Leverage the law of least effort to your advantage: reduce the friction between you and your good habits, and increase the steps between you and your bad habits. This can look like setting out gym clothes, pre-preparing healthy ingredients, or keeping your phone out of reach.  

• Use a commitment device. Invest in technology and one-time purchases that lock in future behaviour, restricting your future choices to beneficital ones. This allows you to take advantage of good intentions before you can fall victim to temptation. As an example, the cash register automated ethical behaviour by making stealing practically impossible; rather than trying to change the employees, it made the preferred behaviour automatic.  

• Focus on repetition. The most effective form of learning is practice; mastery starts with repetition, not perfection, progressively making behaviour more automatic. The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it.
  

• Use the Two-Minute Rule. It states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.” You’ll find that nearly any habit can be scaled down into a two-minute version; The actions that follow will be more challenging, but the first two minutes should be easy. What you want is a “gateway habit” that naturally leads you down a more productive path. Once you’ve mastered the first two minutes of the smallest version of the behaviour, you can advance to an intermediate step and repeat the process—focusing on just the first two minutes and mastering that stage before moving on to the next.

4 - The reward: make good habits satisfying, and bad ones painful

The first three laws of behaviour change increase the odds that a desired habit will be performed this time. The fourth law —make it satisfying—increases the odds that a behaviour will be repeated next time.

• Make it instant. With bad habits, the immediate outcome usually feels good, although the ultimate outcome is anything but. With good habits, it is the reverse. Instead of fighting to delay gratification, add even a little bit of immediate pleasure - satisfaction - to the habits that pay off in the long-run and a little immediate pain to ones that don’t. What is immediately rewarded is repeated, what is immediately punished is avoided. Better still, to amplify cravings, introduce an element of ‘variable reward’, which reduces boredom as well as providing satisfaction. A ~50/50 split of reward vs none, will amplify cravings, giving enough “winning” to experience satisfaction and just enough “wanting” to experience desire for more.  

• Track your progress. The clear visual evidence that you are sticking to a habit, provided by habit trackers (or the ‘personal loyalty programme’ of saving for a specific purchase), is satisfying. They also help keep you focused on the process rather than the result. The immediate reward of seeing yourself maintain your ‘habit streak’, or saving money toward the purchase feels a lot better than being exhausted or deprived. But don’t break the chain in a habit tracker - missing once is an accident, missing twice is the start of a new (bad) habit.
  

• Get an accountability partner. Ask someone to watch your behaviour, and create a ‘habit contract’ with them - an agreed punishment for non-compliance. These make the costs of your bad habits public and painful. We care deeply about what others think of us, and we do not want others to have a lesser opinion of us. However, if you’re going to rely on punishment to change behaviour, then the strength of the punishment must match the relative strength of the behaviour it is trying to correct.
  

• Keep challenging. As habits become routine, they become less interesting and less satisfying. Humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities, so keep pressing into new habits.

Your can sign up to the author's newsletter, and access various companion materials here. While Atomic Habits is a really useful work, it's probably best read after Charles Duhigg’s similar book ‘The Power of Habit’.