For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading a book called Atomic Habits, written by James Clear. This book is based around the four laws of behaviour change: cue, craving, response, reward. Each section of the book focuses on these four laws, in the result of replacing your bad habits with good ones.

The main message in the book is that, the little steps matter much more than you’d think. Every time you put your toothpaste cap back on instead of leaving it on the counter, you are making progress. I’m really glad I was assigned to read this book, it teaches lessons, and techniques that can be used at any point in your life, and can be applied to anything within it.

The First Law: Make it Obvious

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life” – Carl Jung 

At the very beginning of this section of Atomic Habits, a technique called “pointing-and-calling”  caught my eye. Clear writes about the train operators in Tokyo who call out each action of their day, such as : “signal is green”, and “all clear”. Which from a pedestrians perspective may look like a safety precaution for the users of the train but truly served the operators in a much deeper way. The technique of “pointing-and-calling” is used to lower the amount of accidents in the workplace. Make the important parts of the day obvious to yourself. Clear explains a way to apply this technique to your own life. I started with an activity called the “Habit Score Card” were I jotted down a list of actions that I do each morning.

From there, as you can see, I added positive symbols (+), neutral symbols (=), and negative symbols (-) to mark the habit with its addition to my personal gain. This activity was important in the process of dropping negative habits because I had just begun to recognize but habits as a whole, the good and the bad. 

As Clear explains in this section of the book, in order for your body to begin to make new habits you must be able to see your current ones, and the consequences that come along with them. For example in my life, a negative habit I do daily is leaving my towel on my bedroom floor after I’ve taken a shower. And it is important for me to recognize that when I leave my towel on my floor, it soaks into my carpet, and could possibly be making my room, and other clothes on my floor wet. Or another would be, by my daily habit of coming home from school and directly going into my dads office, this couple of minutes gives me time to talk through my day, and unload before I continue upstairs to greet my mom, and do homework. 

Moving on with this idea of recognizing your habits, the next activity I did was the “Implementation Intention”, how it works is you fill out the sentence: I will [behaviour] at [time] in [location]. Some examples I completed are below. 

Clear explains, many studies have shown that we are most commonly able to stick to our goals when they are specific, and written down, and spoken. By doing these things, we are making the goal real, not just a thought passing by. Instead of, “I should probably go grab groceries soon”, it should be “I will pick up bread, eggs, and lettuce at 4:45pm today in Safeway”. A quote from Atomic Habits that I really liked was “many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity”. This opened up my eyes to my own life and how often I refrain from taking action because of the stigma I have created around it. “Habit Stacking” is a different form of “Implementation Intention”, the stacking is based around this sentence: after [current habit], I will [new habit].

 

Clear explains that another common reason that habits don’t stick around, is because they are placed or to be completed at unreasonable times. For example, an unreasonable goal for myself would be: “after I get home from school, I will finish my homework”, this is too vague of a goal, “what do I mean by after school?”, “do I finish my work at 3pm, or 5pm?”, “what homework am I doing?”. To make this goal more reasonable I would change it to: “after get home from school at 3:20pm, I will make myself a snack, sit down at the kitchen table, and complete any late assignments”.

In order to begin to make your habits stick, you must make them as obvious to yourself as you possibly can. 

The Second Law: Make it Attractive

“The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is too become habit forming” 

A great example of attractive habit making was made by Clear in Atomic Habits, the food industry. As consumers today we have cravings for salts, sugars, and fats, just like our earliest ancestors did. But compared to now and then, the process of finding food is completely different. Back then food was scarce, and a lot of the time you weren’t sure when your next meal would be, so when you found food, you ate as much of it as you could to stock up until the next meal. The food industry plays with this part of our DNA, by using advertisements to make the food we buy as attractive as possible. 

Although it’s nice to think about food, we need to apply this idea to our habits. And we can do this by mixing the “Habit Stacking”, which was shown earlier and “Temptation Bundling”. Because we as humans are suckers for the most exciting, or enjoyable thing possible, we can get stuck doing only the easiest thing possible, which most of them time is not good for us. With “Temptation Bundling” we can motivate ourselves to do the things we need, with the help of the things we want. The formula for this is” 1) after (current habit), I will (habit needed) 2) After (habit needed), i will (habit I want).

More to do with our DNA, we have been herd animals ever since the beginning, making the people around us extremely important in the process of us reaching our full potential. This can be applied to our habits in a simple way. Surround yourself with cues that get you to believe your goal is common behaviour. For me, I’d like to exercise more, if I watch tv shows where people sit around all the time, and my social media is full of people who don’t do anything, it wont seem like a common activity to me. But if I get my friends to exercise with me, then it will be talked about, and if I put reminders throughout my environment, I will be much more likely to normalize this habit, and stick with it. 

The Third Law: Make it Easy 

“We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to to taking action”

The second and third law go hand in hand, just like their titles: attractive, and easy. In order for your body to label an action  as “easy”, is when it happens almost subconsciously. For example turning the tap off after washing my hands, I’ve repeated it so many times now that I do it without any thought. This happens because each time that we complete an action, the neuro-pathway is strengthened. 

Clear writes in the book that people ask him “‘how long does it take to build a new habit?’ But what people really should be asking is, ‘how many does it take to form a new habit?”. To apply this to my goal setting, I need to create habits that are as easy to me as washing my face, and turning off the light. 

This quote from Atomic Habits helped to sum this up really well: “Imagine you are holding a garden hose that is bent in the middle. Some water can flow through, but not very much. If you want to increase the rate at which water passes through the hose, you have two options. The first option is to crank up the valve and force more water out. The second option is to simply remove the bend in the hose and let water flow through naturally.” Forcing things to happen causes tension, and takes a lot of effort, but if you create habits that are in your mind “simple”, then you will have less tension, and a much easier time sticking to them. 

Back to talking about environment. You can create cues throughout your environment to make reaching your goals much easier for yourself, for example, some of my goals are to run more often, play guitar everyday, and make time to create art each day. So this this the layout of my room to make these goals easier to achieve with different types of motivations. 

Another decisive attribute in our brain when deciding wether something is “easy” or not, is the amount of time it takes to complete it. The “Two-Minute Rule” is a great way to get a solid start on your goals without piling too much on a once. 

Humans are creatures of habit, and when unattainable goals are presented, we most likely won’t stick with them. By making steps to your goals, that gradually become more challenging, you will be able to normalize the task or goal, and it will become a long lasting habit. 

The Fourth Law: Make it Satisfying 

“Pleasure teaches your brain that a behaviour is worth remembering and repeating”

As humans, we take note of the actions that result in a reward, and the actions that result in punishment. And out of all of the rewards we receive, whether its a feeling of satisfaction, or praise from someone, our brain automatically prioritizes the rewards that come the soonest. 

A lot of the immediate rewards we revive in this day and age make us feel as though we’ve worked hard, when we haven’t, like picking up our phone after only doing a couple minutes of work, or eating something with a high amount of sugar more than once a day. We are rewarding our bodies, and making these action stronger and stronger of habits whether we want to or not. 

This science of reward and punishment can easily be applied to goal setting, and long term habits. As an example, I have a lot of trouble with hanging up my clothes or if needed, putting them in the laundry basket after wearing them, instead, I toss them on the floor. Next thing I know I can no longer see my floor. So in order to begin the process of making it satisfying to put away my clothes, when I renovate my room, I will focus on making my shelving unit in my closet as easy as possible to maintain, as well as looking nice when its clean. 

All this reading about making sure you can achieve what you aspire, made me think about how to stay motivated when your goals don’t go as planned and Clear answers just that. If a mistake is made don’t make it twice. I’ve heard this for most of my life, if you fall, get right back up. The longer you lay down after you’ve fallen, the further you fall into a bad habit. 

I’ve ditched many of the goals I’ve made in the past because I was the only person who was holding me accountable of them. There was no consequence when I opted out of the goal, but with the “Habit Contract” there is. Like I said before, I have trouble keeping my clothes off of the floor. So I used the Atomic Habits, Habit Tracker template to get my habit started. 

Above you can see the objective, and the consequence of my goal. And earlier today before I made this goal effective, I picked up all my clothes off my floor for the last time. 

 

 

 

 

I’ve taken away more from this book than I can justify. Each of the four laws of behaviour change had something to offer. Atomic Habits was extremely engaging, as it had a mixture of stories, and facts. I plan on sharing the knowledge I’ve gained from this book with the people around me, and continue to remind myself of it all as well.