How to Exponentially Improve Your Life, Two Minutes at a Time — Atomic Habits

Up until 2002, the British Cycling team was a joke. I mean, seriously, over the course of their 76 year long career, they had only brought home one Olympic gold medal — one! Needless to say, they obviously needed some desperate improvement. Thankfully, their luck took a turn for the better in 2003. A brighter future awaited them as the team went under the wing of Sir Dave Brailsford. What made Brailsford so different from every coach before him was his commitment to improving every single aspect of the team by 1%. He quoted:

“ The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together” — Sir Dave Brailsford

Improving the basics seems like a pretty simple concept right? It’s not the revolutionary change you’d think of, huh? But nonetheless, that’s exactly what Brailsford did. He went on and made small improvements everywhere he could. From adjusting the bike seats to make them more comfortable, to testing various fabrics to see which ones were the most aerodynamic, to even hiring a surgeon to teach the team how to properly wash their hands to prevent them from catching diseases. Although some of these “improvements” may seem meaningless in the long run, Brailsford’s efforts did not go unrewarded.

By 2008, the British Cycling team’s performance had seen some astounding improvement. They went on to win 60% of the gold medals available in the Olympics that year in the road and cycling events (while simultaneously smashing world records!) Pretty impressive, right? Using the same techniques, they also went to on to win 5 consecutive Tour de France courses. By 2017, the team had won 178 world championships and 66 Olympic/Paralympic gold medals.

You might be asking yourself, how the hell did they do it? It must have taken a few dozen training montages to see such massive improvement. Oddly enough though, the answer was actually quite simple: They formed good habits.

Why (Good) Habits are Important

How much of your day do you really remember? Are you able to tell me every single thing you’ve done today, start to finish? Chances are, probably not. Don’t worry though! This is normal and you’re not alone, in fact, it’s a good thing. Believe it or not, a large portion of our daily actions are purely automotive. I’s estimated that around 40–45% of our decisions are made out of habit. But before you feel robbed of your ability to make decisions, habits are actually a really good, evolutionary skill we’ve acquired over the years as a species.

Habits were an incredibly useful tool for our ancestors. By automating the actions that fulfill basic needs, like hunger, thirst, etc., it left us with more cognitive processing room for more meaningful and complex tasks that actually require the brainpower. We all have evolved habit sequences integrated into our brains!

Habits spawn out of a cue — craving — response — reward system we’ve developed. To break it down, let’s take the common habit of smoking as an example. Seeing a cigarette or a lighter is a common cue to the average smoker. After seeing one of these items, the craving follows. The urge to smoke a cigarette becomes prevalent at this moment. After this stage, comes the response. The smoker then chooses to pick up the cigarette and go for a smoke to ease the cravings. Finally, we have the reward, which is the nicotine that the addict’s body craved.

Visual from Atomic Habits

Habits are very useful to us, because they come naturally. However, as the example above shows, not all habits are good habits. Most people take for granted this built in system we have, and lots don’t even recognize that most things we do are out of habit! This is why building good habits is so crucial. Habits are seen so frequently in our daily routines, sometimes we even do them and forget it (how many times have you left the house worrying whether or not you’ve turned off the oven or locked the door, just to all the way back and check that you already have?). Bad habits, though, while they may not seem like it at times, do hurt us, and our future selves.

Let’s go back to grade 10 mathematics (bear with me). If you improved your daily habits and routines by only 1% everyday, you’d see exponential improvement in the span of one year! Similarly, by worsening your daily habits by 1% everyday, you’d see an exponential decline in your life.

Graph from Atomic Habits

Alright, even though I love it, enough with the math. Let’s get to the more important part.

How to Build Good Habits

The key component to any habit, good or bad, is your environment. The way your environment is set up leads to all of your best and worst habits. TV in your bedroom? Probably the reason you’re binging Stranger Things every night. Phone charging by your nightstand? It’s the reason why the first thing you do in the morning is look at it. Keep a lighter on you at all times? That’s why you get to smoke whenever you have the opportunity. Your environment is everything, and you probably haven’t realized it yet.

However, knowing this information, you can prime environment, and have it work for you, rather than against you. Right now, 90% of your habits have formed because they are obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. In fact, this is the secret formula for all habit forming. The trick to forming good habits is using this formula, and manipulating your environment to be able to follow through with it.

Making it Obvious

Making the habits you want to build obvious is crucial for them to succeed. Changing your environment to adhere to this first step will make forming good habits so much easier.

This first step is as easy as it sounds. You need to make your cues for your good habits obvious. Want to eat more greens? Make them the first thing you see when you open the fridge door, instead of tucking them away in the drawers you never open. Want to call your relatives more often? Set reminders (or better yet, alarms) to remind you to call them, rather than forgetting once it’s too late in the day. Wish you’d write more? Have your desk at home set up and your computer fired up and ready to go once you get back from work/school, rather than keeping your laptop hidden away (personally, I keep my laptop on my bed at all times, to make doing work more obvious in my environment).

Making things obvious don’t need to only be physical, however. Making things obvious could be things like writing down the habits you’d like to build, setting goals for yourself, and marking things down in your calendar. You could even use Implementation Intentions. Set specific dates and times for habits you want to preform. For example, tell yourself “I will [behaviour] at [time] in [location]”. By setting these times and saying them out loud, you are more likely to follow through, rather than just telling yourself “I’ll get to it”. You need to optimize your environment to work for you. Try a bunch of different things, until you get it right!

Just by making things more obvious, you can actually become more motivated in whatever good habit you’re trying to build. This first step triggers the cue in the habit sequence, letting the rest of the habit follow.

Making it Attractive

The next step in forming good habits is to make it attractive. This step is extremely important, because otherwise, good habits are a pain in the ass to follow through with.

There are many ways too make your good habits attractive. You want to be able to get to a point where you crave to perform a certain habit, otherwise you’re left feeling unsatisfied (trust me, this will come with time).

One way you can do this is by using temptation bundling. Temptation bundling is a very good tactic to make the habits you want to start very attractive. Essentially, you have to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do. This way, you up the appeal of what you need to do, which is a great way to get you habits going.

You could also up the attractiveness of new habits by surrounding yourself with people that belong to a culture where that habit is valued. If you want to work out more, try to hang out with people who regularly do so. As humans, it comes naturally to us to want to “fit in” (it’s actually an evolutionary tactic we’ve developed). Use this to your advantage! Join fitness clubs, put yourself out there!

Making your habits attractive makes them addicting. This way, you crave this habit while you build it, which helps you keep them going in the long run.

Making it Easy

At the start, creating good habits seem like such a chore. Especially when you set your standards ridiculously high, and discourage yourself once you realize that your goals haven’t been achieved. This is why making habits easy (at least in the beginning) is so so important.

To make things easy, try setting small, simple goals. For example, if you want to work out more, just tell yourself to go to the gym and do one work out. Just one. Although this seems really easy, it actually helps you start performing the routine of putting your gym clothes on, preparing your gym bag, driving/biking/walking to the gym, working out etc.

A great tip that I learned from Atomic Habits by James Clear in making habits easy was the Two-Minute Rule. Whenever you start a new habit, tell yourself to commit to it only for two minutes a day. Whether it be wanting write more, read more, work out more, just do it for two-minutes. After performing this habit for two minutes, you’ll either stop (which, still allows the habit to keep forming) or, you’ll enter a state of flow, where you’ve even forgotten the clock ever existed, and end up working for hours.

Starting your habits is always the hardest part. However, once you cross that dark bridge, things become much, much easier.

Always remember to make your habits start out easy. This way, once you develop the basic outline of your routine, completing harder versions of the habit (e.g. writing a paragraph a day turns into writing a page day) becomes way easier, and you’ll thank yourself for it later. Making your habits easy, makes the response part of the habit sequence come naturally.

Making it Satisfying

Last but not least, we have making your habits satisfying. This is probably the most important part of the habit-forming formula to keep in mind. If your brain likes something that just occurred, it will release dopamine (the reward chemical) and think “Ou! We like that! Remember that for next time!” Making habits satisfying creates the reward part of the habit sequence. You’re way more likely to keep repeating your good habits if you like the feelings they give you.

Sometimes, it seems that good habits are absolutely impossible to make satisfying (seriously, how come all the good habits are so dreadful?) Thankfully, there are ways to make even the most tedious habits satisfying.

One way is associating the end of the habit with one of your core values. Per example, when we brush our teeth, we get the satisfaction of a clean mouth. Having a clean mouth is one our values.

Another way is by rewarding yourself. Reward yourself with something small after having completed a habit. This could be some alone time, a 5 minute break, or even a snack. Or better yet, deprive yourself of something that you love until you preform the habit. This way, once you’re doing the habit, you have something to look forward to once it’s over. Be cautious though! You don’t want to find yourself creating a bad habit after performing a good one (for example, don’t let yourself eat junk food just because you went to the gym!)

A third, and final way that can make your good habits more satisfying it to track your progress. There are so many ways to do this, and it actually encourages you to keep the habit up! You can track your progress by either marking an X on your calendar for each day you’ve done the habit. Or by keeping two mason jars, one full of paper clips, one empty, and transferring the paperclips to the empty jar for every time you’ve successfully completed your habit!

Tracking your progress actually helps a lot. By keeping a visual example of your habits obvious, you motivate yourself to keep on going, and to get that calendar/mason jar filled!

By using these four tricks, you can make habit forming so much easier for yourself. Those tedious chores seem less and less evil when you use these tactics.

…And Then Breaking the Bad Ones

Breaking bad habits is a tough act to follow. James Clear often says that habits never fully fade away, (like I said before, they’re literally integrated into our brains) but by changing your lifestyle and environment, you can make them seemingly disappear.

Just like with building good habits, there is a secret formula to breaking your bad ones. We just simply invert everything. So, rather that making these bad habits obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying, we want to make them invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying.

By doing this and setting limitations for yourself, your bad habits might even become out of reach, forcing you to forget them.

Making it Invisible

It’s very easy to fall into bad habits when your environment doesn’t work with you. Willpower is sooo overrated, and lots of people try to rely solely on it to overcome their bad habits. It’s easy to say “I’ll just stop eating unhealthy foods” when your fridge is filled with sugary and fatty foods. Lots of people even tend to get discouraged when their “willpower” isn’t as strong as they estimated it to be, and they fall back into their bad habits.

Instead of letting your willpower be the only (very weak) force overcoming your bad habits, take extra steps in making sure you won’t go back to your bad habits. Make them freaking invisible!

Ways to do this include having a close friend take your cigarettes away from you, throwing away your lighter etc.. Or taking the TV out of your room so that you won’t spend your morning/night in bed binging your favourite show. Even giving away your social media passwords to a trusted friend and telling them to change them until the weekend, so that you can focus on writing that essay that’s due soon!

Making the cues of your bad habits invisible is an effortless step in breaking them. By setting limitations for yourself, you remove the very thing that causes your bad habits in the first place.

Making it Unattractive

After making your habits invisible, you have to go the extra step and making them unattractive. By doing this, not only are you removing the cues, but also making the cravings for that habit non appealing — and essentially non existent.

To make things unattractive, however, does require some work. You must reframe your mindset and highlight the benefits of breaking your bad habits.

To do this, you can do research on your bad habits. I know for me it helps to Google my current bad habits to make sure I understand why I want to give them up. Why they’re unhealthy, demotivating, counterproductive etc. By educating yourself, you give yourself liberation from your bad habits.

You can also reframe your mindset around the emotions your feeling. This one takes more effort but I promise it’s worth it. James Clear uses the example of pregame jitters when addressing this. Instead of thinking “Holy fuck I’m so nervous”, you can reframe it into “I am excited and this adrenaline rush is going to help me concentrate”.

Simply by putting in this bit of work, you can make your bad habits very unattractive. Although it takes effort, it’s soo worth it (refer back to the exponential graph if need be!)

Making it Difficult

The next step in breaking your bad habits is to make them difficult. The harder to preform the habit, the less you will want to do it. It contradicts the response part of the habits sequence.

One way of making your habits difficult is by using a commitment device. A commitment device essentially locks in your future behaviours, and literally restricts you from your bad habits. A commitment device can range from all sorts of things. For example, leaving your wallet at home so you’re not tempted to buy fast food when you go out. Or asking to automatically be added to the banned list in casinos. By setting these limitations for yourself when you’re in a good mindset prevents you from giving into your desires later on.

To make things even more difficult, you must create friction between you and your bad habits. Increase the number of steps necessary for you to preform them. Make your bad habits very hard to follow through on. Take advantage of your laziness! After each use of your TV, for example, unplug it and take the remote out of the room. And don’t plug it back and/or retrieve the remote unless you know exactly what you want to watch. This way, turning on the TV and scrolling through channels aimlessly will be harder, and prevent you from falling into its bad habit.

Making your habits difficult helps them become less and less inevitable. At the beginning of habit breaking, this step is crucial. When your habits are readily available to you, you will always fall victim to the bad ones. By doing this, you’re helping yourself avoid them. (Remember, willpower is overrated.)

And Finally, Making it Unsatisfying

The final step in breaking your bad habits is to make them unsatisfying. By making the reward part of your habit sequences not worth it, you will virtually not be left with that habit at all. Remember, the reward part is what makes your brain remember the habit. This way, by making it unsatisfying, the habit has no purpose.

For this to work, you must be tough on yourself. You can create a habit contract for yourself. Hold yourself accountable whenever you fall into your bad habits. A great example given by Clear in Atomic Habits is giving away $5, $10, $20 to a friend or family member when you perform one of your bad habits. This way you punish yourself for e.g. smoking a cigarette, eating junk food, watching too much Netflix etc. And by punishing yourself immediately after a bad habit, you’re actually rewarding your future self with better health and productivity! Pain now, greatness later.

Not only do you have to hold yourself accountable though, but you can have others do so as well. Having a close friend or sibling as your accountability partner can encourage you to keep your bad habits out of your life. This way, you also have a support system while trying to break your bad habits, which is something everyone should have. When you have someone watching your behaviour, it puts more pressure on you to stop the bad habits, and to replace them with good ones.

Making something unsatisfying is so key when changing your routines. This way you don’t want to keep repeating something, and the habit will no longer be weighing you down.

Key Takeaways

• Good habits are crucial, by improving yourself 1% a day, you’ll see exponential results by the end of just one year.
• Similarly, by declining by 1% everyday, you’ll see exponential decline in your life.
• Habits form out of a cue — craving — response — reward sequence.
• Optimize your environment to work with you, not against you.
• To build good habits, make your habits:
• OBVIOUS: make them visible, use implementation intention.
• ATTRACTIVE: use temptation bundling, join a culture where your habits are encouraged.
• EASY: set small, easy goals, that gradually get harder, use the Two-Minute Rule.
• SATISFYING: reward yourself for good habits, use a habit tracker.
• To break bad habits, make them:
• INVISIBLE: Make cues invisible, take bad habits out of your environment.
• UNATTRACTIVE: Reframing your mindset, reminding yourself of why the habit is bad, doing your research.
• DIFFICULT: Use a commitment device, increase fricition between you and your bad habits,
• UNSATISFYING: Creating habit contracts, and finding and accountability partner.

By following these simple and easy tips, you change change your life for the better. Habits make up so much of our lives, and we have to utilize the built in system we have for them. By improving aspects of your life, two minutes at a time, you can accelerate your growth, and live liberally.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear