Before the start of any significant transition, such as New Year’s or a new semester, we may have a list of lofty goals: waking up before sunrise, exercising more, and being more productive. These goals are often plans for permanent change, not one-time targets, and they require forming better habits. As much as we would like to believe that we can be consistent and improve ourselves, a brief reflection of our New Year’s resolutions and a comparison to past resolutions quickly bring us back to reality.
Realizing that simply listening to an audiobook about forming new habits is not a substitute for actual effort—but curious nonetheless—I listened to Atomic Habits by James Clear. In this book, Clear provides a framework for starting and maintaining new habits while breaking undesirable ones. At the beginning, he explains that it is not that lack of motivation or ambitious goals that prevent us from doing so, but that we often have ineffective systems, or how we go about carrying out our habits. If we can improve what we do by a mere one percent every day and enjoy the process, rather than only look towards our goals, we can eventually achieve results. The rest of the book guides us through principles of habit formation and specific examples of techniques we can use to alter our habits.
According to Clear, there are four things that lead to habit formation: making a habit obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. These four principles can also be called: cue, craving, response, and reward, respectively. In trying to start a habit, making the cue that signals the start of the habit more obvious increases the likelihood of remembering and putting the habit into action. The craving portion of habit formation involves making the habit seem more enjoyable to increase anticipation for it, while making a habit easier to do leads to higher rates of response. Finally, making a habit satisfying by providing some sort of reward allows the habit to actually last, leading to desired changes. When each of these aspects is addressed, it becomes less and less difficult to start and maintain good habits. This can also be applied to breaking bad habits by reversing these four principles; the cues of to-be-broken habits should be hidden, the habit should be made more unattractive, carrying out the habit should be made difficult, and the rewards for stopping a bad habit should be more immediate and attractive.
Clear provides some helpful, specific examples of how each of these principles can be used. If you would like to stop playing video games right after getting home, you may want to hide the video game console and controllers to make these cues less obvious, making it less likely that you will see them and start playing. To change the mindset that exercise is a drain on energy, which hinders starting an exercising habit, you can start framing exercise as something you “get” to do to become fit rather than “have” to do. In order to make it harder to watch TV, you can make it difficult for yourself by unplugging it after each use; this extra hassle can make you less willing to turn on the TV. Lastly, to make the rewards of doing something more immediate, you can cross each day you stick to a habit off the calendar, as keeping the streak going can act as a reward in itself.
Although some of the techniques that are mentioned in the book may be very familiar to us—likely due to past efforts to start or break habits—such as involving friends and family to hold ourselves accountable and making implementation intentions that state exactly when and where we will exercise, there are some that I personally found to be new or particularly interesting. A strategy that Clear calls “habit stacking,” this technique involves using an already established habit as a cue to start another habit. For example, you can say that right after brushing your teeth (an established habit), you will do a few push-ups (a habit you want to form). In addition to this, you can use “temptation bundling,” where you add a personally enjoyable activity that can make you anticipate doing these push-ups, such as scrolling through social media. I was also fascinated by the 2-minute rule, where you start a habit by just committing 2 minutes to it. Because this is easy, it encourages you to just start, and this often leads to more than 2 minutes of action. Another way that this rule can be used is by using the 2 minutes as a limit, where you are required to stop. Eventually, this can prompt a longer session, just like an example in the book where someone who limited his gym time for only 5 minutes decided he might as well stay longer.
A key idea that Clear emphasizes repeatedly is that your sense of identity shapes the habits you will want to commit to, as habits provide the evidence to reinforce your identity. Considering yourself as the type of person who takes pride in doing something, such as exercising regularly, will make you more likely to exercise than thinking it is something you would just like to do. Then, as you stick to your habits, you come to think of yourself as a disciplined, athletic person. This interplay between habits and identity allows us to change and maintain these changes. Because each small difference we make in our actions slowly changes who we are and how we think of ourselves, we do not have to despair that we will ever improve. We cannot see the results immediately, but we can surely become the type of people we aspire to be, one percent at a time.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.