Atomic Habits

INTRO: Writer builds ethos. Going from eating a baseball bat to the face to earning all American baseball honors, all because he kept his dorm clean and slept early. What’s really impressive is taking a new blog to Random House book contract in three years.

Operant conditioning (stimulus, response, reward) leaves out how mood and emotions factor in to decision making. Proposed habit model is cue, craving, response, reward.

CH1: Guy takes last-place British cycling to world domination by “aggregation of marginal gains.” Finding the perfect massage gel, pillow, mattress. Hand-washing lessons from a surgeon to prevent colds. Painting bike transports white to detect dust.

1% improvement compounded daily over a year is x37 better.

“Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.” Velocity more important than position. “Good habits make time your ally.”

Early habits run into the Valley of Disappointment. Then the Plateau of Latent Potential. Lots of activation energy needed for visible breakthroughs.

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”

Focus on systems, not goals. Winners and losers have the same goals, “dreaming big” is an artifact of survivorship bias. Have the right processes in place and “the score takes care of itself.”

Other problems with goals:
* Continually putting off happiness until the next milestone. Systems are more flexible to life’s variances.
* Achieving goals can result in relapse, the “yo-yo” affect. Goals optimize winning the game, systems optimize continuing to play the game.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

CH2: Three levels of decision-making: outcomes, processes, identity. Instead of using outcomes to change actions, change identity instead. Habits are always consistent with identity. “I’m trying to quit” -> “I’m not a smoker”

Self-image gets in the way of better habits. “I’m terrible with directions.” “I’m always late.” Progress requires unlearning.

Inversely, identity is built from habits. Actions are votes toward who we identify as, habits build evidence for self-image. (Logic in this chapter is pretty confusing)

If you want to lose weight, think “what would a healthy person do” when making decisions. Identity change is the North Star of habit change. At the same time, you literally become your habits. (Confusing messaging continues)

CH3 (less confusing): Habits emerge because conscious thinking is the bottleneck of the mind (System 1), and because we’re constantly searching for pleasurable changes in internal state. “Habits are reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”

Four steps comprise the Habit Loop:
1. Cue = hint of a possible reward (may be internal or external)
2. Craving = interpretation of a cue into motivation to act (dependent on thoughts, feelings, emotions of observer)

3. Response = thought or action to realize craving (dependent on how motivated/capable one is at the time)
4. Reward = resulting satisfaction, which then trains mind to repeat the cycle.

To break habits, make one step of the loop harder. To gain habits, make all steps of the loop easier. Hence, the FOUR LAWS OF BEHAVIOR CHANGE:
1. Make the cue obvious
2. Make the craving attractive
3. Make the response easy
4. Make the reward satisfying.

Conversely, to break bad habits:
1. Make the cue invisible
2. Make the craving unattractive
3. Make the response difficult
4. Make the reward unsatisfying.

Next four sections of book deal with each of the four laws.

CH4: You don’t need to be aware of a cue for a habit to begin. Aka we fall into old patterns without realizing it. Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Pointing-and-calling is a way to raise awareness of nonconscious habits to a more conscious level. Used by Japanese train workers to reduce errors. “Many of our failures in performance are largely attributable to a lack of self-awareness.”

A point-and-call system for general living is implementation intention. Be as specific as possible. “Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.” Give habits a time and space to live in the world.

CH5: Diderot Effect can lead to needless spending but can also help stack habits. Often we decide what to do next based on what we just finished doing. Identify existing habits and use them as cues for new ones. “When I see stairs, I will take them instead of the elevator.”

CH 6: Motivation is overrated; environment matters more. Doctor in Boston got hospital staff to drink less soda by placing water bottles everywhere. Lewin: Behavior = f(Person, Environment). Most of our actions aren’t driven by purposeful choice but by the most obvious option.

10/11 million sensory receptors and 1/2 of brain resources dedicated to vision.

45% of Coke sales come from end caps.

Architect your environment. Having energy meter in main hallway reduces energy usage. Bee stickers in urinals reduces spillage. Hiding apples in the crispr drawer leads to moldy apples. Make cues physically obvious, and have multiple cues for each good habit.

Contexts and our relationships to spaces are cues. Couch with friends and music -> drinking and video games. Designate new spaces to start new habits. “One space, one use.” Mixing contexts (e.g. phone) leads to conflicting habits, and the easy ones usually win out.

Extra minutiae:

To drink more water, fill water bottles and place them around the house.

To read more, go to the park and find a reading bench. “If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, create stable and predictable environments.”

CH 7: 30% of US soldiers in Vietnam were heroin addicts, but 90% of them quit overnight once they got back home.
Bad habits aren’t a result of poor discipline or moral weakness, but rather environments with the wrong cues. Live in a way that doesn’t require heroic self-control.

“Bad habits are autocatalytic, they foster the feelings they try to numb.”

Cues can unconsciously trigger ingrained reward pathways even after long dormant periods. Girl who smokes on horses stops riding for decades; starts again the moment she’s back on a horse. Ergo, just resisting temptation is ineffectual strategy. Make bad cues invisible instead.