Habits

Notes

30 Days to Better Habits - James Clear

How to Choose a Habit that Sticks

  • It is much more important to work on the right habit than it is to work really hard.

  • Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.

  • Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

  • Your habits reshape your identity in a gradual way.

The Two-Minute Rule for Building Lasting Habits

  • When you're trying to build a new habit, it's easy to start too big.

  • The Two-Minute Rule states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”

  • A habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details.

How to Fit New Habits in Your Life

  • Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action.

  • One effective way to insert a new habit into your life is with an "implementation intention." An implementation intention is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act. That is, how you intend to implement your habit. Scientists have found that if you make an implementation intention, you are more likely to follow through with your plans and stick to your habits.

  • The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill out this sentence:

    I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

How to Design Your Environment for Success

  • Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice the cues that stand out. Creating obvious visual cues can draw your attention toward your desired habit. Unfortunately, the environments where we live and work often make it easy to not do certain actions because there is no obvious cue to trigger the behavior.

  • We can summarize this strategy as follows: If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, you need to make the cue a big part of your environment. Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one. In the long-run (and often in the short-run), your willpower will not beat your environment. You can alter the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues. Making a better decision is easy, natural even, when the cues for good habits are right in front of you.

How to Make Good Habits Automatic

  • You can also optimize your environment to make the actions themselves easier to perform. This process can be called "reducing friction". The less friction associated with a habit, the more likely it is to occur.

  • When deciding where to practice a new habit, it is best to choose a place that is already along the path of your daily routine. Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life.

  • The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. You want to make your good habits the path of least resistance.

  • The ultimate way to reduce friction is to use technology and automation. This is exactly what many popular businesses are designed to do. Just as businesses use technology to automate the behavior of the masses, you can use technology to automate your own behavior.

Prime Your Environment to Make Future Habits Easy

  • It's nearly always better to focus on one habit at a time rather than building multiple habits. It is simpler, but it also addresses an often overlooked aspect: when you're building one habit, you're often building multiple habits.

  • One way to increase the odds that your habits will be performed is to walk into an environment that is ready for the habit. This is called "priming the environment".

  • Environment design makes the cues of good habits more obvious. Reducing fiction makes performing habits in the moment easier. Priming the environment makes the future habits easier.

Two Strategies to Combat Fading Motivation

  • Rather than having some linear relationship with achievement, habits tend to have more of a compound growth curve. The greatest returns are delayed. This gap between what we expect and what we experience is what I refer to as the "plateau of latent potential." This plateau plays a role in any journey of improvement. You’re putting in work each day, but you feel stuck in this valley of death. You’re accumulating potential, but it hasn’t been released yet. It’s all effort, and no reward.

  • "Temptation bundling" works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do. You’re more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time.

  • The second strategy you can use to boost your motivation is referred to as a "commitment device." A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that locks in your actions in the future.

How to Create a Reward that Makes Habits Satisfying

  • The vital thing in getting a habit to stick is to feel successful - even if it’s in a small way. The feeling of success is a signal that tells your brain that the habit paid off and that it was worth the effort.

  • We learn which behaviors to repeat based on how they make us feel. When we take an action that feels good, we want to do more of that action in the future. This is called “The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change”: What is rewarded gets repeated. What is punished is avoided.

  • If you’re not careful, the external reward can become the thing you end up chasing. The key is to not lose sight of your desired identity, and whenever possible, to choose an external reward that reinforces the type of person you wish to be.

Visualise Your Progress and Stay the Course with a Habit Tracker

  • The most effective form of motivation is progress.

  • When it comes to building better habits, a crucial step is to visualize the progress you’re making, and to be able to see yourself move forward. Perhaps the most straightforward way to visualize your progress is with a “habit tracker.”

  • Once you have created your habit tracker, the mantra to keep in mind is "never break the chain." That is, once you start tracking your habits, you don’t want to break the chain of crossing off each day or filling in each cell.

  • Visual signals of progress can be particularly powerful on a bad day. When you’re feeling down, it’s easy to forget about all the progress you have already made.

The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Habits

  • Your culture sets your expectation for what is "normal". Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.

  • New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every day. If you’re surrounded by readers, you’re more likely to consider reading to be a common habit. If you’re surrounded by people who recycle, you’re more likely to start recycling too.

  • Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe. It transforms a personal quest into a shared one. This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits.

Habit Graduation: Moving from Two Minutes to Mastery

  • When your old habit becomes boring, you know it’s time to move on. However, this can be a potential pitfall because, once people get bored, they start looking for something new to do: a new solution, a better approach, a different program. Pretty soon, you jump to one habit to the next, or one program to the next and you never spend enough time focusing on one thing long enough to get results.

  • The key is once you get bored, you stick with the same habit, but find a new detail to master or get interested in.

  • The second thing you can do is to stick with the same habit, but scale up the intensity or volume.

  • Start by mastering the first two minutes of the smallest version of the behavior, then advance to an intermediate step and repeat the process. Mastering each stage before moving on to the next level. Eventually, you’ll end up with the habit you had originally hoped to build despite starting so small.

  • The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak levels of motivation when working on tasks of just manageable difficulty. Not too hard, not too easy, just right. This is precisely the region where habits remain motivating and exciting.

Atomic Habits - James Clear

  • Each time you successfully do a habit, you will find it less effortful to do the next time.

  • The most important thing is to make it as easy as possible to start a new habit; after that you will start benefitting from the powerful compounding effect.

  • Make sure the habit only takes 2 minutes to start with; you can increase the time later.

  • Habit stacking happens when you attach a new habit to a pre-existing one - e.g., if you want to read 2 minutes a day and you already have breakfast each morning, try reading 2 minutes right after the breakfast

  • Reward yourself after completing the habit. This will give you a small dopamine hit, which will make it more likely for you to repeat the habit in the future.

  • Reduce friction for good habits - e.g., leave your gym shorts out overnight if you want to go to the gym in the morning.

  • Reduce exposure to the cue for bad habits - e.g., if you want to stop smoking and you noticed you always do it when drinking coffee in the garden, then stop drinking coffee in the garden. Time and location are the 2 most common cues.

  • It is much easier to avoid temptation than to resist it, so just avoid situations in which you know you will be tempted if you can.

How to Get Back on Track After Slipping Up (Habits, Diet, etc.) - Tim Ferriss

  • Expect to fall off the track at some point - but have a plan for when that happens

  • Doing anything with a friend for accountability - and put some money on the line (even $1 bets work well)

  • Have a "start again" meditation

  • Do less than you think you can handle - you can always add more later

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