How To Create Life-Changing Habits
Atomic Habits is a short book that can change your life by giving you the secrets you need to create/break habits to see positive changes. After reading it, here is the most important habit-creation tip and my favourite mindset tip from the book.
HABIT CREATING/BREAKING TIPS
Habits are created through the habit loop, which is a sequence of events that lead to an action being taken. The four stages are:
1. Cue – an environmental stimulus (Bad cue: the smell of a pizza baking | Good cue: seeing a language learning app on your phone)
2. Craving – the feeling of want created by the stimulus (Bad: Desire to eat a full pizza | Good: continuing that Duolingo streak you worked so hard to build!)
3. Response – the action is taken (Bad: going in and eating a whole pizza (we’ve all been there) | Good: opening the Duolingo and completing a lesson)
4. Reward - the satisfying feeling (Bad: the processed food on your taste buds | Good: strengthening the language neurons in your brain and seeing your streak go up)
So now, being aware of the habit loop, if you want to stop a behaviour at least one of these four steps must be weakened. To create a habit, at least one of these must be strengthened. So, looking at my own life, one of my goals is to learn German to a B2 level, and one of the habits that will help me along the way is a daily Duolingo lesson (yes, I know Duolingo alone won’t make you fluent). So, my key actions in the habit loop would be as follows:
1. Cue – make an environment that makes the cue occur more often. Depending on self-discipline alone, as James Clear notes, is a short-term strategy. So, a current daily habit is eating dinner, and if I do a Duolingo lesson every day after eating, having dinner (which will occur daily) will become the cue for me to practice. This is also called habit stacking.
2. Craving – make the act attractive. This could be by reminding yourself of your why when thinking about the habit. For example, one of my goals would be to be able to live in Germany for at least a period of a year without language holding me back.
3. Response – make it easy to create the desired response. This could be by having the Duolingo app on my home screen reducing even the slightest friction in finding the app.
4. Reward – make the act satisfying. When forming habits, what is immediately rewarded is repeated, and what immediately causes pain/inconvenience is avoided. To strengthen this habit, I must make the ‘inconvenience’ of a short Duolingo lesson more pleasurable. This could be by rewarding myself with an episode of my favourite German Netflix show “Biohackers”, only if I complete the lesson.
Being conscious of the habit loop should allow me to introduce any new habits I desire, including posting more regularly on LinkedIn and now this website.
MINDSET TIP
“You don’t rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems.”
Goals are a good thing; they can give us a general sense of direction (e.g., achieving a B2 level of German). However, they can also be vague and lack a concrete action plan. In addition, having a goal is a binary measure that is in a state of being achieved or not meaning hundreds of days of the goal being unachieved (which may be discouraging) and one day of having achieved the goal. And even once the goal has been achieved, it is often not as rewarding as you thought, and this can lead to an empty feeling.
Much more effective are systems. Systems are regular actions that can be taken, even without a goal in mind. For example, if I instead aim to study German for 30 minutes a day, over the years I would achieve a B2 level in German. The beauty of focusing on the system is that every day by completing 30 minutes I could have a mini victory. Systems also do not have an “end-point”, so even after achieving the B2 level, the system would still be in place allowing continuous improvement far beyond any goal that could have been set. Falling in love with your systems is the key.
Atomic Habits is chocked full of gems, and these are just two of them. If you want to hear, anymore feel free to comment/message or pick the book up yourself.
Danke.
