The Power of Atomic Habits

Understanding how we can utilize the Principles of Attraction and Accumulation to overcome initial inertia and get the ball rolling, habits are how we keep things moving, affecting greater and greater change.

Readers familiar with the topic may have noticed that the headline of this text is an amalgamation of ‘The Power of Habit’ by Charles Duhigg and ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. These books are excellent resources on the subject matter and you should definitely check them out if you want to dive deeper after reading this article. You can find quick video summaries on ‘The Power of Habit’ here and ‘Atomic Habits’ here. The books themselves can be found here and here.

Habits are what take us from isolated acts to recurring and accumulative change. They help with things we do over and over again, automating them, so we (almost) do not have to think about them any more. This can both be a blessing and a curse, depending if the habit that is being reinforced is serving our needs and long-term wellbeing or not.

If we use habits to our advantage we can affect great and meaningful change in our lives. It’s how we build mastery and become an expert in our field. It is how we become an accomplished author and reach our long-term goals. Those things do not happen over night, but we build towards them with each day.

Duhigg describes a habit loop, consisting of a cue that starts the automated behavior, a routine (the automated action we take triggered by that cue) and the corresponding reward (something we long for and is satisfied by the routine). A habit is successfully formed once the cue itself triggers the craving for the reward.

Being a little bit of a couch potato myself, I built the habit to always snack when watching a show. As soon as I turn on the TV and get onto my comfy couch, my hand automatically reaches out for a snack. The cue (TV) triggered longing for the reward I programmed into my habit loop (satisfaction of eating a snack) and I would automatically execute the routine of eating something.

Awareness of habit loops is very powerful as it allows us to reflect on the routines we have, identifying the corresponding cues that trigger specific behavior and the rewards we are craving.

Equipped with that awareness the most efficient way to change a habit is usually to target the routine. For example if I wanted to live healthier, I can put out carrots and hummus instead of chips and chocolate, still running through the same habit loop but with my routine slightly modified.

But changing existing habits is not the only thing we can do, we can also deliberately add new ones to our daily lives.

When we do, it is important to start small. The process of becoming an author starts with writing a single word. Setting 5 to 10 minutes aside each day for writing is a great way to get into the habit without overwhelming ourselves. From there we can increase the time spend on writing each week bit by bit, until sitting down to write on our novel for several hours in the afternoon is just part of our routine.

Tracking our success streak is a great way to keep ourselves motivated. Even if it was only 5 minutes, we can mark it on our calendar with a check mark. As time passes, looking back on how long we have been at it and how much we got done with time can be a great motivational tool to keep us going. The important part is that we keep doing it, no matter how small the daily contribution.

Making sure we can concentrate on what we set out to do during the time we want to do it is of similar importance, controlling the demands others have on us. Putting the phone on air plane mode, closing emails and putting the messenger to DND are some examples of how we can achieve that.

We can also prep our environment, putting our sport clothes out the evening before and in plain sight when we wake up. This way we immediately get the cue to work out, before we can get distracted.

We can also stack habits on top of each other to get from doing our morning exercises, to starting the boiler before jumping into the shower, so we may have tea and breakfast immediately afterwards.

All these systems allow us to accumulate compounding changes with time and achieve the long-term effects we desire: writing that novel, being in better mental and physical shape, getting that dream job...

Goals of what we want to achieve are great for setting the direction we want to develop towards to. All the small systems that we put into place to build and support habits in service of that goal, are how we get there. Goals are the What, systems breeding habits are the How.

During that ongoing process it is important that we remain kind with ourselves, not judging ourselves too harshly when we fall short of our own expectations. Didn't work out with the date we were really excited for? There will be a better fit in the future! If we keep putting our true, awesome selves out there, it is only a numbers game of when we find a great fit, not if. Only by kindness with ourselves can we sustain that process. This is our Why, the motivation we get from accepting that we have value and potential.

Once we embrace that kindness for ourselves we can train our awareness to identify what is going on in our lives, instead of simply doing what we have always been doing on auto-pilot. We take a step back from doing mode, becoming aware of how we act. We can use this awareness to identify how each current habit serves us and deliberately make good habits more appealing and bad habits less so.

If we want to eat healthier, we can consciously get more greens in the super market and less sweets, instead of doing our shopping on auto-pilot. We can put the mobile to silent and stash it in another room or delete certain apps, if we want to be less tempted and distracted by all the social media. We can define our own cues like specific days of the week, time of day, things we look at (like vision boards or phrases we put up on our walls), certain rooms at home or at work, etc. All these can become cues triggering routines and habit loops of our own design, putting ourselves in a self-directed automated doing mode instead of one that was created by happenstance.

This mindful awareness and the modes our brains can be in, switching between doing and being mode, is something we will be taking a closer look at in the future.

Thank you so much for reading, if you would like to know more please do not hesitate to give me a poke or check out the Art of Meaningful Change!