Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

Habits are the routine, often subconscious behaviors that you repeat regularly. Rather than focus on goals, Clear argues that you need to focus on building better systems. In 2003, British Cycling, the governing body for professional cycling in Great Britain, hired Dave Brailsford as its performance director. Before Brailsford was hired, the performance of the British team was underwhelming: no British rider had won the Tour de France in over one hundred years and only one British athlete had won a gold medal at the Olympic Games since 1908. Brailsford’s coaching method was called “the aggregation of marginal gains” (Chapter 1, 2) where athletes looked for tiny margins of improvement in everything they did. This involved diverse methods, including designing new seats for the bikes, testing fabrics to be more aerodynamic, comparing massage gels for muscle recovery, training in hand washing to reduce the chances of getting sick, and optimizing mattresses for ideal sleep cycles. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the British Cycling team won 60% of the gold medals in road and track cycling events, a remarkable improvement. Later that year, Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France, the first of five Tour de France victories in six years.

Clear opens with this analogy to pose the question that drives his book, “how did this happen? […] Why do small improvements accumulate into such remarkable results, and how can you replicate this approach in your own life?” (Chapter 1, 3-4). Clear’s answer to this question is what he calls “atomic habits,” small changes that accumulate over time. Clear uses compound interest as an analogy: the payoff is delayed but getting 1% percent better every day will eventually lead to a huge increase. If you get 1% better every day for a year, you will become 37 times better than when you started. Understanding your habits is essential because, while good habits can help you reach your goals, bad habits get in your way. Habits are a “double-edged sword” (Chapter 1, 8). It is important to be aware of how your habits contribute to, or hinder, self-improvement.

Improving your daily habits is one of the most impactful ways of enhancing your life. However, bad habits are easy to repeat and good ones are hard to form. Once habits are established, they are hard to break. As an example, Clear introduces Brian Clark, an entrepreneur who chewed his fingernails. Regular manicures helped break his habit. Manicures made his hands look nicer, and he didn’t want to ruin his manicure by chewing his fingernails. By changing his habit, he stopped chewing his nails.

Clear identifies three different types of change: outcome change, process change, and identity change. Outcomes are results like publishing a book, getting a promotion, or winning a competition. Process describes habits and systems that form routines. Identity is the deepest level of change: your worldview, your values, self-image, beliefs. To build sustainable habits that improve who you are, you need to focus on identity-based changes, not outcome-based habits. The focus should be on who you wish to become, not what you want to achieve. Identity is formed by your habits, it is your “repeated beingness” (Chapter 2, 11). Habits are how you embody your identity.

To become the best version of yourself, you have to continually refine your beliefs and your values to expand your identities. Habits are particularly powerful because they can shift your beliefs about yourself. For example, when offered a cigarette, one person might decline by saying, “I’m trying to quit,” while another person says, “I’m not a smoker.” Both individuals do not take the cigarette, but the declarative claim of “I’m not a smoker” makes an identity-based argument that smoking is no longer a part of who they are. In contrast, the person who is trying to quit still identifies as a smoker. Negative identity beliefs can impact your ability to change. If you identify as someone who is a smoker, is bad with names, or is always late, you reinforce these behaviors. Your old identities can sabotage your new plans.

In Chapter 3, Clear turns to the question of what habits are and why you form them. A habit is a behavior that you repeat often enough that it becomes automatic. Habit formation is a process of trial and error as the brain figures out how respond to new situations. He opens with a study from the late nineteenth century that tracked the behavior of cats. In 1898, the psychologist Edward Thorndike conducted an experiment using a device called the puzzle box. Cats could escape through a door to get food by simple actions like pressing a lever. Thorndike observed that cats would explore for a few minutes until they found the lever.

Over time, the cats began to associate pushing the lever with escaping the box, and the cats became faster at escaping. At first, it took an average of one and a half minutes. By the end, it was 6.3 seconds. Thorndike concluded that “behaviors followed by satisfying consequences tend to be repeated and those that produce unpleasant consequence are less likely to be repeated” (Chapter 3, 2). When you stumble across a reward—running reduces stress or video games relax us—we process the chain of events that lead us to the reward. Like the cats escaping from the box, you streamline the process, so the useful action is reinforced, this is how habits are formed. Initially when you start a new habit, your brain is very active, but as you develop habits, it becomes more unconscious. Behaviors become “mental shortcuts” (Chapter 3, 4) that are repeated.

Building a habit is a process of four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. They are divided into two phases. The first is the problem phase, where you find cue and craving. The second part is the solution phase, which involves response and reward. First, a cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior. In this stage, you are looking for rewards. Cravings are the motivation or desire behind habits that inspire us to act. The response is the act of performing the habit, either as a thought or a concrete action. Responses are dependent on the amount of effort required to get the reward. It is also contingent on your ability. Finally, you get the reward, which is the outcome of every habit. Rewards satisfy your craving, but they also teach us patterns of behavior. All four stages are required for a habit to form.