HACKING OUR HABITS

Here’s the crux: our habits are formed by four simple steps – cue, craving, response and reward. These repeat themselves in a cycle, creating a ‘habit loop’. By understanding this process, we can build our own systems to lose the bad habits, and stick to the good ones.

Step 1:  All habits are initiated by a cue, something that triggers our brain to take an action without too much thought

When my phone buzzes, I’ll usually pick it up to check my alerts without it even feeling like a conscious decision.

If we become more aware of these cues, we can start to reconfigure them. To break the habit of picking up my phone too often, I can remove the cue by putting it in a different room.

Clear’s book is packed full of interesting research studies, including a few which seem to show conclusively that one of the best ways to stick to an intention to do something is to make an explicit plan setting out exactly when, where and how you will do it. As he argues, somewhat reassuringly: “Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action.”

Step 2: For a habit to stick, you must want to do it after your brain has registered the cue

It’s often the case that things that are bad for us (like junk food and social media doom-scrolling) feel more attractive in the moment than things that are good for us in the long term (like going to gym or reviewing our pension plan).

So, we need to find a way to make good habits attractive and bad habits unattractive. Clear tells the story of how electrical engineering student Ronan Byrne set about making exercise a more attractive habit. He developed a hack to link up his bike, laptop and TV and built a programme which allowed him to watch Netflix only when he cycled above a certain speed. We may not all have Byrne’s engineering ingenuity, but there are simpler methods available to make good habits more attractive by bundling them together with things we enjoy.

Step 3: Response – having acknowledged the cue and made our desired habit attractive, how do we make sure we go ahead and do it?

Building on the insights of behavioural economics and nudge theory, we now know that there is one guaranteed way to improve the likelihood of anyone doing a specific thing: make it easy.

Something called the ‘two-minute rule’ might help with this. The theory goes that any habit can be started in two minutes. If you want to be a reader, build a daily habit of reading for two minutes every day. If you want to be a musician, build a daily habit of playing a musical instrument for two minutes every day. The hardest part of any habit is always getting started – by making this difficult hurdle easier to clear, habits are more likely to stick. And if you feel no inclination to continue beyond the initial two minutes, this habit may not have been the right one for you anyway!

We can also root out bad habits by making them difficult. This might be as simple as removing social media apps from your phone’s home screen to increase the number of clicks needed to open then. Clear went to even more extreme lengths – to keep on track with his deadline for completing Atomic Habits he had his assistant change all his social media passwords.

Step 4: Make it satisfying so we’ll want to do it again next time

Our brains are wired so that we only tend to repeat an action if we got an immediate sense of reward and enjoyment the first time. (See my recent video on dopamine for more about how our brain’s reward system drives our behaviour).

Thousands of year ago we got our dopamine hits from hunting and foraging, forming tribes and telling stories around the campfire – things that were essential for our survival.

These days, it’s a lot more complicated. The world we live in has evolved at a much faster pace than our brains. As a result, we get instant gratification from unhealthy habits like eating donuts, but no immediate reward for doing things that are good for us.

To compensate for this, we can engineer our own reward systems and hack our brains into wanting to repeat a habit. Progress is often slow and difficult to recognise on a day-by-day basis. So, a common tactic to make progress more immediately rewarding is to track it. This concept will be familiar if you use a step counting app and derive a seemingly disproportionate amount of pleasure from seeing how long you can keep your daily streak running (yes, that’s me).

CONCLUSION

(and how I completed 52 books in a year)

Atomic Habits includes a lot of practical examples and tactics for changing habits. But the real value of this book was the fresh perspective it inspired in taking stock of my habits, how they are formed, and how I can manage them. We can all fall into the trap of continuing to do things without really thinking, just because we’ve always done them.

My secret to completing 52 books last year? I replaced podcasts with audiobooks.

Don’t get me wrong, I think podcasts are brilliant and I do find myself occasionally missing the BBC Newscast crew and Darknet Diaries. But I feel I’ve replaced a habit with a better one which helps me to learn more and feel more inspired. To use Clear’s terminology, I also did some ‘habit stacking’, pairing up an hour or two of audiobook listening every morning with walking the dog. Setting an ambitious goal was important to me, but only because I had a system in place and the goal helped to reinforce it. It even drove some other good habits – in my efforts to stay on track, I found extra time by getting up a little earlier, not scrolling social media first thing, and extending my daily dog walks.

There’s no secret hack that we can all use to magically change our habits overnight – different tactics are likely to work better for different people in different scenarios. But at least a couple of the ideas in this book have really stuck with me – our habits define us, and if we want to change them, we need to look at systems first, rather than goals.

As Clear puts it: “Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.”