By Mandy Wheen, December 4th, 2023
Book Review
AKA Book Club
Atomic Habits, An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. Audiobook. James Clear, Penguin Audio, 2018.
Reviewed by Mandy Wheen
This book blew me away (pun unintended). I found out about this book from the AKA book club. Thank you for introducing it to me.
In order to write this review, I needed to re-listen to certain parts to refresh my challenged memory. Whilst doing so, I found myself getting reabsorbed with all the great techniques again. It is jam packed full of good old practical information.
I thought this book was about something huge and explosive, however, the more I listened, the clearer it became… KEEP THINGS SIMPLE AND START SMALL, which can then lead to something long lasting and purposeful.
This book is like a practical little assistant, giving tips and tricks to make long lasting changes that actually work. It also details how to stay on track to keep achieving, and being successful.
Because of listening to this book, I am going to make boredom my best friend! Why? All will be revealed.
Throughout his writing, the Author, James Clear, effectively uses stories and examples to explain how to form a new habit we wish to.
This book helped me to understand why my strategy of setting an alarm each night to begin my wind down prior to bed, wasn’t enough to get an early night. Instead, I had just formed a new habit. I had learned to simply turn off the alarm and ignore it, stopping the development of a new habit in its tracks.
Enter his 4 stages of a habit; Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward.
I was getting a short-term reward of being in the zombie relaxed tv mode, so my behaviour was formed. It was keeping me stuck short term by feeding my craving of wanting to rest and relax, and I was responding by turning off my alarm. This wasn’t addressing my long-term craving though of the lasting reward of real rest and detox.
Environment
The environment plays an important part in our choices and habit formation. The author provides an example of changes that were made in a Boston hospital cafeteria. The 6-month study involved placing bottles of water in all obvious locations instead of soda. This alone, reduced soda sales by 11.4% over 3 months, and bottled water sales increased by 25.8%. They did the same with healthier food choices too, which had a similar effect. May I suggest carrying blinkers for the checkout at the supermarket!
This demonstrates the importance of what is on show in both ours and our client’s home. If we wish for a new habit to eat healthier, we can begin small and ensure healthier choices are obvious and easily available. If we wish to get to bed earlier, implement more of the strategies below 😉
Biochemical responses for habit formation
The Habit Loop describes how the 4 stages keep us going around in a loop. We tend to scan our environment and wonder what will happen next. We are always looking for that reward, what will give us that hit of dopamine. He shows a lovely graph of how our dopamine is affected depending on the timing of a reward, which can either help us develop a new habit, or give up and reinforce a detrimental one.
Steps to changing a habit
1 make it obvious
2 make it attractive
3 make it easy
4 make it satisfying
James states we need to be aware of our old habits first so we can do something about them and build new habits. He uses Carl Jung’s quote to stress the importance of unearthing ingrained habits to be able to make our chosen changes:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate”
Carl Jung
Goal setting
There is an emphasis on making the end result of a new habit powerful enough to help us make the change, like we do within our client’s goal setting. I am sure we all know the importance of making the goal about the person.
The goal needs to be on who we wish to be and feel, rather than just challenging ourselves to achieve a goal. For example, I enjoy how it feels when I play music myself. So, I will more likely take the time to learn a song on my ukelele because of how it makes me feel, as opposed to just knowing another song, and adding it to my repertoire.
Building on this is Habit Stacking.
Habit Stacking is when a new habit is stacked onto one we already do, hence keeping it easy. Therefore, I am already sitting on the sofa, so I have my ukelele next to me, which cues me to practise it for 2minutes, forming the new habit of being able to play the whole song.
One of his suggestions is setting out gym gear in a place we can’t miss the night before to begin a habit of doing more exercise.
The 2-minute rule
To make things really easy to begin a new habit, he suggests aiming to do it for just 2 minutes. One person made it as simple as just needing to put on their running shoes and walking around the house in them. Once the first small step is taken, it is like a triumph and puts us in a better position to continue with more.
Society influences
James demonstrates how society and social norms can influence our behaviour and choices. He identifies an experiment where a group of actors all agreed that a drawn line was a different length to what it actually was. The participant ended up conforming to the majority group and doubting themselves even though the line was clearly not what the group was saying. Hence, we tend to be guided by the majority rather than our own instincts to avoid standing out alone, which may affect our ability to form new habits.
Goldilocks Rule
This rule appears to be all about how to continue improving and maintaining motivation to stay on track with a goal or task. It is about having enough difficulty so it is challenging and achievable. However, it is also essential to be challenging enough to keep our attention. Not too much, not too little, just enough, Goldilocks in the middle most comfortable bed, lol. There is a great graph for those imagery people in the book, or as a download off his website.
He speaks of a flow state. This state is like what we are all aiming in life, to be in the flow, and in the zone. It is to be fully immersed in an activity and feel like we are flowing. Here is one of many statistics throughout this book which demonstrates how much research has gone into the book. A task needs to be roughly 4% beyond our current ability to achieve a state of flow.
Boredom
This is what I mentioned at the beginning, if you are still here with me, and have not got distracted or bored! I will attempt to sum this up. He speaks of those who are most successful in life to be able to handle boredom, and not need that dopamine hit all the time. Those who keep showing up and can stick to the schedule even when it gets mundane and boring, end up being the professionals and succeeding. So well done, you have potential!
When is best to start something new?
The first day of the week, month or year because he says hope is highest then.
The book provides handy ways of framing goals and making them simple and achievable. For example: I will (behaviour)… at (time)… in (location)
Point and Call
I wanted to add this one in for Health and Safety at work and our homes. To increase the likelihood of doing something well and precise with as little errors as possible, I liked the Japanese train station point and call method.
In order to maintain an impeccable safety record at this busy train station, the guards point at each important safety risk and say it out loud.
For example, “Doors Clear” as they point and look to see if all the doors are clear. This is an example of something potentially getting mundane and boring and getting slack. So, if we need to ensure something important gets done correctly and safely, point to it and say out loud what needs to be checked or done. So, maybe next time when leaving the house, say “doors locked” and point to them. “Ukelele played” only kidding. Have a go at something that is important.
There are many other great suggestions and examples in the book to help us make the changes we wish to make.
Just keep showing up
When we make just 1% more effort every day, our results increase by 37 times after one year. 😊
It’s good to know that when we keep going, we are able to miss doing something once. That is OK because it is a mistake and we are able to make mistakes. However, if we miss doing the behaviour more than once, it can lead to a downward spiral, a bad habit and unwanted behaviour.
The Plateau of Latent Potential
When we keep showing up, things may not appear to be sky rocketing like we hoped it would. However, it is usual to see delayed results. Be reassured that over time, our efforts are being stored, like being incubated and needing time to mature. It is then we can buckle up our seat belt and enjoy being in that rocket of our progress and success.
Overall, to form a new habit, the research shows, when we put in the initial required conscious effort to start, it does get easier using less conscious effort. When a new habit is practised enough times, it becomes unconscious, and requires little effort.
Here’s to success with forming good habits and being comfortable in our boredom 😉
Mandy Wheen is a Level 6 KSP who has her home-based and online clinic in Tascott, Central Coast, NSW. She loves empowering children and families to feel comfortable in their own skin and enjoy a play-full life. Her background was in Occupational Therapy (BSc Hons) before fully immersing herself into natural therapy (Adv Dip Integrated Complementary Medicine, Dip Kinesiology, Dip Mind Body Medicine, Dip The Clinical Science of Biochemic Therapy (Dr.med.W.H.Schuessler)).