Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results: Atomic Habits by James Clear

How making small improvements consistently can have life changing benefits

Introduction

Have you ever tried to lose weight, or get into shape, or save more money, and failed in the process? Why is change so hard? Why is it that we find ourselves breaking our new year's resolutions year after year despite our best intentions?

The answers to these questions lie in our habits. Habits are automatic, unconscious patterns of behavior that drive 90% of our day-to-day behavior. Once we become adults, we’re just a collection of hundreds of tiny, unconscious habits running on autopilot, day in and day out.

So why do we have habits? The answer is simple — our brain is evolutionarily built to conserve energy and be as efficient as possible. Habits help our brain run behavior patterns on an autopilot loop so that we have precious energy and attention left to devote to conscious decision-making. While this helps us in certain ways, it also makes any kind of positive long-term changes nearly impossible to make. Often within days or weeks of starting a new behavior pattern, we find ourselves slipping into old habits. This is why being able to create new good habits and break existing bad ones is essential to building the life we desire. I recently read ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. It was an extremely practical guide to creating desirable habits and breaking undesirable ones. I thought I’d write a short book summary of the key ideas for anyone interested. So let’s dive right in!

The Habit loop

Believe it or not, every habit you’ve formed and will ever form usually follows a certain loop:

Cue → Craving → Reward → Response

Let’s take a simple example to look at this. Let’s say you’re someone who’s addicted to smoking, here’s what the habit loop might look like for you:

1. Cue: You’re working on a stressful project at work, on a really tight timeline. You feel anxious about whether you can deliver this project on time, and what your boss will say about the quality of your work.
2. Craving: You start craving a feeling of relief and relaxation. You want to. feel free of your worry, anxiety, and stress.
3. Response: You smoke a cigarette.
4. Reward: The act of smoking a cigarette relieves the stress and anxiety that you feel. You feel relaxed and free for a few moments.

Now your brain has made an unconscious association — When you feel anxious or stressed out, smoke a cigarette and you’ll feel better.

This is an example of a habit loop. Now you can examine the various habits in your life, and see how the same habit loop could be used to explain your behavior patterns.

The four laws of behavior change:

Now that we’ve understood what a habit loop is, we can use this knowledge to our advantage. To create and strengthen good habits, you have to create an obvious cue, make yourself crave it, make it easy to satisfy that craving in a desirable way, and make the habit pleasurable/satisfying. James Clear calls these the four laws of behavior change. To create a new positive habit, you want to Make it Obvious, Make it Attractive, Make it Easy and Make it Satisfying. Conversely, to break or weaken a negative habit, you just have to reverse the laws: Make it invisible, Make it unattractive, Make it Difficult, and Make it Unsatisfying.

Let us take a practical example to go through this. Let’s say you want to start eating healthier. Here’s how you could implement these 4 laws to reinforce this habit:

1. Make it obvious: To make it obvious, you could clearly declare your intentions about what type of diet changes you wish to make. You could also design your environment to make cues for healthy eating obvious — for example, you could follow a bunch of accounts on social media that promote healthy eating.
2. Make it attractive: You make healthy eating attractive by creating a peer group that is very health-conscious so that you automatically start eating healthier. You could read books about the benefits of a healthy diet. You could constantly remind yourself of the effects of a healthy diet on your mood, energy, cognition, immune system, sleep, and longevity.
3. Make it easy: This could involve only buying organic foods such as vegetables/fruit and not having any processed or sugary foods in the house. Eating unhealthy is difficult/inconvenient. You could delete any food delivery apps off of your phone so that you’re forced to cook more.
4. Make it satisfying: You could use positive reinforcement to reward yourself for eating healthy — for example, if you eat clean for a week straight, you are allowed a cheat day where you get to eat anything you want. You could track your diet on a daily basis, and once you’ve maintained the desired habit for a certain duration of time, you could allow yourself a meal at your favorite restaurant. The idea is to set up a deal with yourself so that once you’ve practiced a desirable habit pattern for a duration of time, you’re allowed a reward that you've been craving for a long time.

That’s just a simple example of how you could set up a new positive habit. The book provides a lot of practical examples of how you could use these 4 laws to create or break any habit that you want to.

Conclusion

James Clear calls habits the compound interest of personal development. Small changes, maintained consistently can create huge positive effects on the quality of your life. This provides a fantastic practical guide on how to use the power habits to build the life you desire.

If you enjoyed reading this book summary, definitely check out the book — it has a ton of practical tips and a lot of entertaining stories and research studies to illustrate the principles involved. And if you liked this blog post, please give me a few claps, and subscribe to my profile for more!