Atomic Habits

By James Clear

Nonfiction, self-help

2018

I’ve often thought about the concept of willpower. What is it exactly? Is it the ability that some people have to do the thing they least want to do, when they don’t want to do it? Is it the same thing as discipline? And most importantly: where did all of mine go? Granted, I do display the occasional burst of inspired will. I’ve been known to roll out of bed at 5:20 am when the alarm goes off. I’ve also been known to hit snooze. I’ve been known to show up to the grueling BJJ class, sometimes twice in one day. I’ve been known to stay up late finishing papers, or to choose the healthy option at lunch, or to say no to one more drink at the bar. And I’ve also been known to do the exact opposite of all of those things.

What really gets upsetting is I do want to be the kind of person who makes the “right” choice, and by that I mean the one that future Alex will be thankful for, and yet I watch myself fall short time and time again. Why does it seem to work on some days and not so much on others? Is it that my “willpower reserves” are depleted on those days and I just don’t have enough “willpower juice” to punch the ticket of that difficult choice? On the days when I do make that choice, I can almost hear the faint sound of 80 year old Alex cheering, way down the line. On the days I fall short, I can hear his disappointed silence, and it’s deafening. The confusing thing is that often, it’s both in one day. I’ll go far here, fall short there. I’ll go train, but then watch TV instead of studying or reading. Or I’ll eat the healthy food I have at home instead of eating out, but then stay up late and sleep through my alarm the next morning. There is apparently an infinite number of choices I make throughout the day, and all of them have a good and a bad option. Maybe being a person of strong will means that you make the good choice 9 times out of 10 or 99 times out of 100. Most days for me it feels closer to 50/50. I appreciate myself for all the times I’m able to rise to the occasion, but I wonder what’s missing all the times I fall short. Not enough willpower in the tank, I guess.

Enter James Clear. The thing that I took away most from his book was that change is not a matter of willpower. Willpower waxes and wanes and is unreliable. Change is simply a matter of becoming very clear on the kind of person you want to be, and then arranging your environment so that becoming that person is as easy as possible. Falling back on willpower is like swimming upstream, especially when there’s no change to the environment. It’s a fuel reserve that you can use when you need it but, like a shot of adrenaline, or the NOS button in the Fast & Furious movies, it’s for emergencies only. The most important thing is that we minimize how often we need to fall back on our willpower. This shows up in very logical, common-sensical ways: you want to lose weight, so you spend all day resisting the urge to grab the bag of cheetos in your pantry and rip into it like a lion tackling a gazelle. The urge is strong but you are stronger. You get one day down and pat yourself on the back. You keep it up and manage to make it a week, or ten days. Then, on day eleven, when you didn’t sleep well the night before and your boss is making you work overtime, in a moment of weakness, you grab the bag.

I think most of us would immediately recognize the obvious thing to do in this case: get rid of the cheetos. If there’s nothing there to binge-eat, then there’s nothing to resist. And no need to rely on willpower. And this simple re-framing is, if I understood it correctly, much of the premise of this book. It’s summarized in his simple. 4-step approach: Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it rewarding. Of course, there are myriad studies, examples, and practical ways of doing so. Some of my favorites are habit-stacking, in which you use the buddy system to tie one difficult thing to one pleasant thing. Example: you want to exercise more. You also love watching anime. Habit stacking would look something like I can watch an episode, but only after I’ve done thirty push-ups. This is an example of step 4: make it rewarding.

Another one is that if you have trouble sticking to your daily habit, make it smaller. The idea is that any new habit should take only two minutes or less for the first few weeks. This is step 3, make it easy. The point at the beginning is not to make progress, but just to get used to the routine. You may not be able to run for an hour every day, but maybe you can do twenty minutes. And if you find out you can’t do twenty minutes, do five. And if that fails, then just stick to putting on your running shoes. Keep making the daily habit smaller until it becomes so small and manageable it would be absurd not to do it. And then you think well I’ve already got my shoes on, might as well run around the block. Before you realize it you’re doing more and more, and then something wonderful happens: you start to become proud of yourself. You start to hear 80-year-old you whoop and cheer and say “what a stud!” And once you're proud of yourself, you realize you don't have to tap the willpower reserves just to go on a run or eat an apple. The urge to eat junk food is nothing compared to the desire to keep being the person you’re proud of. The choice becomes easy.

Just like Einstein said “You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it”, you can’t will yourself into having more willpower. You can’t do anything consistently long-term if you don’t believe you are that kind of person. So trying to white-knuckle everything and go easy on yourself. That does not mean give up. It means take stock of where you are and where you want to be, and then take baby steps in that direction. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it rewarding. Then take larger steps. One day you’ll notice you really are that person. You somehow went from batting .200 to batting 1000. And it didn’t take an act of herculean willpower. It just took patience, persistence, and getting those f#@king cheetos out of the house.