Giving up alcohol, getting back into the gym and Atomic Habits
I feel like the phrase ‘I’m not one for self-help books’ gets overused. I often have a hard time getting over the pseudo-scientific methods that are often preached but I can see their value — they aim to help people move between a state of where they are and where they want to be. So often these are different: whether it is to do with exercise, work, social media, personal relationships or eating habits — we all have ways in which we want to improve. I have always been interested in the role that external forces play on our ability to make ‘free’ choices when trying to achieve our goals. Reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, I didn’t find anything particularly mindblowing or ground-breaking, but what I did encounter was a clear and simple framework to allow me to move from where I am to where I want to be and the role my habits would play in helping/hindering me from achieving/failing to achieve my goals.
The framework I use most from the book is the ‘4 Laws of Behaviour Change’. These are based on your behavioural responses like cue, craving, response and reward [which are detailed more in the book] but in short they are:
The idea is quite simple but I’ll use two examples from my life where I’ve managed to make it work. Firstly, since I have injured my back, I haven’t been able to run, which has thrown me out of my regular exercise patterns. I wanted to create a good habit of going to the gym on a regular basis [c.3 times a week]. Secondly, I wanted to give up alcohol, but given how associated alcohol is with so many social activities, it had become very hard to say no.
I am too myopic to take into account the long term benefits of going to the gym [Or in other words, I am too lazy] and the societal pressures to drink alcohol often mean I end up doing it and then regretting it later, with constant migraines, so I needed to design processes to allow myself to overcome these issues and form habits that take more ownership of my decisions. Here is how the framework helped:
There are a few other powerful things I have taken from the book:
The first is how environment is much more powerful than motivation. Motivation can come and go, but the key is being able to stick to the habit when the motivation isn’t there. This is why priming your enviroment is so powerful — it can help you to still achieve your goals when you can’t be bothered or you’re a bit tired or bored of it — when many others would give up.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
The second is “habit stacking”. This is great if you want to do something quite small like start moisturising every day. The idea is that there are already things you do every day — like brushing your teeth or eating lunch. If you want to start a new habit, then you should try to attach your new habit onto an existing habit. You’ll then start to associate them together. “After I brush my teeth, I will moisturise” until eventually it becomes second nature. Hint: habit stacking works well for getting into the habit of doing physio exercises.
The final take away is called the “2-minute rule”. The idea is when you think about the way you want to change, you’ll often be guilty of dreaming too big: ‘I want to write a book’ or ‘I want to run a marathon’. This can end up in failure because the task is just too overwhelming. Evidence suggests that what you actually need to do is just get into the habit of starting. Let’s say you want to do 30 minutes of yoga every day — the idea is that you really should just start by doing 2 minutes of yoga every day. It may sound silly but the fixed cost of getting ready and priming yourself to do yoga every day is the habit-forming element. You need to get into the habit of doing that first. Once you’ve done that, extending from 2 minutes of yoga to 30 minutes is actually very easy.
Not everyone is a habit person, but everyone wants to improve in some way or another. I feel like this book gave me some helpful tips on how to do that and it has helped improve my life in a meaningful way — I guess that’s all you can ask for!
Have a nice week,
Shiv
Ps: https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits is the source in case that wasn’t clear.