What I Learned from Atomic Habits by James Clear

Understanding Habits

A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic. It’s not something you think through every time; it runs on autopilot. This is both the power and the danger of habits: they free up your mind for other tasks, but they can also quietly shape your life in ways you don’t always notice.

The habit is composed of four successive parts:

• The cue is the trigger that initiates the habit. It’s a signal from your environment or your internal state that tells your brain to start a behavior (e.g., your alarm ringing in the morning).
• The routine is the actual behavior you perform after the cue. This is the habit itself (e.g., checking your phone).
• The reward is the benefit you get from completing the routine. Rewards satisfy cravings, teach your brain that the routine is worth remembering, and reinforce the habit loop (e.g., feeling in the loop after scrolling social media).
• The belief is the layer that makes the habit stick in the long run. Belief is about identity and mindset; the conviction that repeating the habit is part of who you are (e.g., “I am someone who stays connected”).

The first step to having a clearer view of your habits is to use a habit scorecard. It’s a simple list of your daily habits that you mark as positive (e.g., eating a healthy breakfast after waking up), negative (e.g., checking my phone after waking up), or neutral (e.g., going to the toilet after waking up). The goal is awareness: you can’t change and improve yourself if you don’t already notice your actions.

Building Good Habits

Make it easy and reduce the friction of performing a habit. The easier a habit, the more likely it is to stick. If you’re having a hard time, follow the 2-minute rule: scale any habit down so it can be started in under 2 minutes. Instead of “Read before bed,” start with “Read one page”. Once it becomes automatic enough in the long term, you can slowly increase the dosage. Automating simple tasks can also help reduce the friction. Use tools and technologies at your disposal to achieve this.

Habit stacking is another method to build new habits by attaching them to existing ones. The formula is simple: after [current habit], I will [new habit], like: After eating breakfast, I will clean my dishes.

Adapt your environment for different types of tasks. Avoid working from your bed or watching videos on your laptop. Likewise, keep social media out of your office and emails off your phone. By doing this, your brain can easily switch modes based on the environment, making you much more capable of following a habit.

Optimize your environment so that good habits are easy to follow and bad habits are harder. If you want to stop snacking on unhealthy food, hide the food and place a big bowl of fruits front and center in the kitchen, so that it’s easier to take one instead.

Also, try out temptation bundling. This technique consists of pairing an action you need to do with an action you want to do. Listen to your favorite podcast while exercising or watch videos while cooking homemade meals. This can go hand-in-hand with making habits attractive or unattractive by reframing them so that good ones feel appealing and bad ones feel unappealing.

Staying Motivated

Because habits often have delayed rewards, add instant gratification: small rewards that make sticking with them more satisfying. If you go running at noon, reward yourself with lunch just after arriving back home.

Habit tracking is another tool for motivation. In the form of a list, a checkmark, or a calendar, it provides visual motivation and reinforces progress. To me, this looked like keeping track of the calories I consumed every day. In this case, I even harnessed the power of AI for complex meals by sharing with it each ingredient and quantity or by asking it to look up the information online. By keeping track of my daily intake, I realized that some days, I was eating less than recommended, and others, I had a sudden urge to eat an entire pack of cookies. A couple of weeks later, I stopped keeping track, but that’s because I had grasped how to maintain a healthy and consistent diet.

If one day doesn’t work out, rebounding is key. The days I ate too much, I either went out on a running adventure to compensate or, the next day, followed the same habit as if nothing had happened. I think the worst case would have been to either entirely forgo the habit or try to compensate on the second day, which could easily backfire.

Having an accountability partner who watches your progress makes you more likely to stick to your habits. Make it official. The author suggests signing a real contract between you, but to be honest, I think this is too formal and scary. Don’t get me wrong, you still have to make it clear that you’re not alone in your journey to change. What I would do is send a message to my partner, sibling, or parent I speak with frequently about my new habit, and pin that message. Every day I speak with them, I’ll be reminded and have that positive pressure to achieve my goal. The key is to stay positive, as any negative pressure can have a far more severe impact on mental health and self-confidence.

Progress and Growth

Fail = Explore, Win = Exploit & Specify. It’s a learning loop: when you fail, look back at what went wrong and try again with your new knowledge; when you succeed, double down and refine what’s already working well.

If your habit feels too easy, too automatic, you probably should crank the difficulty notch a bit higher. As stated before, with the 2-minute rule, it’s fine to start with a short time, but as soon as it doesn’t feel challenging or engaging enough, add more time. Don’t overdo it, though, because then you will lose the habit, so try to stay in the “Goldilocks zone”. For instance, if you want to lose weight and be in a calorie deficit, don’t go straight to 500 calories; instead, try 100. When that feels easy and natural, try 200. As you reach 500 by taking your time, you should be comfortable staying at that range. The same goes for increasing intake. Do it in small doses, at a reasonable speed that fits you.

Identity is the deepest level of habit change. Instead of focusing on outcomes (what you want) or processes (how you get there), focus on identity (who you want to be). Habits are votes for the type of person you are becoming. Don’t say that you can’t do something because you’re too energetic or too introverted. Instead, reflect on who you want to be and manage your habits accordingly.

Review habits regularly and reflect to see whether they still align with your goals and identity.

My Final Thoughts

When I first started reading this book, I felt it would talk about information I already knew from watching countless productivity videos online. This wasn’t too far from the truth, and yet, I learned a lot, from simple human psychology to new tools to test out. All in logical and organized chapters that carve a system I can use for life. This one book, in physical, digital, or audio format, serves the self-conscious mind far more than watching any amount of videos on this subject online. Or any article for that matter ;).