ATOMIC HABITS: How To Get 40.1 TIMES BETTER At Anything! | James Clear

your current life today is largely the sum of your habits it's the habits that you've been following for say the last six months or the last year the last two years that have carried you to whatever results you have right now but i think the real reason that habits matter is they reinforce a new identity they reshape the way you think about yourself every action you take is like a vote for the type of person that you wish to [Music] become well just this morning i started to revisit your book um in anticipation of this interview which frankly i've probably wanted to do since i read it about two years ago when it came out so hey it's an absolutely fabulous book and it doesn't surprise me uh that it sold so many copies over a million copies i believe uh around the world so far um i mean how does that feel to you uh yeah it's surprising and great obviously it's uh been really fun to watch it take off um i just wanted to write something useful and you know that's what i've tried to do not only with the book but with my newsletter and the writing the articles that i wrote before i became an author and so it's fun to see that actually happen you know i mean that's that's the best part is hearing from people who use atomic habits to lose weight or to be more productive or start a side business or whatever um so making an actual difference and being useful is kind of my number one thing and i feel like if you do that well then you know the business side kind of takes care of itself yeah no absolutely i think it is very useful very practical super well researched um you know if you were writing the book now based upon all the interviews you've done over the last couple of years based upon all the podcasts you've been on i mean is there anything that's coming up that you wish you'd put in the book yeah there are a couple probably two things i would pick that if i could uh add them or redo it i would i would adjust that the the first one's kind of a small thing is just talking more about timing like when the right time is to insert a habit into your daily routine or something you know you can imagine like the morning is often a good time for many people because they have control over that hour you know like we all have the same 24 hours in a day but each hour is not equally under your control like the hour from a.m to seven a.m it might be just up to you how to use that but the hour from 11am to noon maybe you're at work or you're you're under under the demands of your boss or you know running errands or whatever so uh talking a little bit more about timing you know for some people building a meditation habit at 7 a.m makes a lot of sense but if you have young kids your four-year-old doesn't care that you're trying to meditate then um so so there's there's something to be said there i think could be expanded upon and then the big one though is you know i wrote i think it's chapter 10 in the book talks about the influence of social environment on your habits the influence of family and friends yeah and so i knew that it was important in the sense that i wrote a chapter about it but that's the one topic that since the book has come out i think is even more important than i realized if you really want to get a habit to stick for the long run the social environment plays a huge role and in fact if you look at many habits that we do stick to for 20 or 30 or 40 years there's often a very strong social component things like you know say you move into a new neighborhood and you walk outside and you see your you see your neighbor mowing their lawn or trimming the hedges and you think oh i need to i need to mow the lawn you may stick to that habit for as long as you live in the house and partially it's because you want to have a clean lawn but mostly it's because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood and so it's actually the social expectation that gets that habit to stick and that's true for all kinds of tribes that we're a part of uh whether it's the people we work with or the people that we live around or the volunteering that we do whatever it is all those tribes large and small have a set of social expectations for how to act and what's normal and those social norms often influence which habits we stick to in the long run yeah i mean absolutely we have something in the uk that's called social prescribing at the moment which is really taking off and it's this idea that as doctors instead of asking a patient an individual patient to try and make changes by themselves we try and tap them in to a local group where they're already doing that behavior a classic example is something called park run which is you know transforming the health of the uk do you know are you familiar with park run no i haven't heard about it yeah park run is is basically every saturday in local parks people get together to run a 5k or walk a 5k but you do it together um they've got a motto that i think it's something like no one comes last um so there's always a tail walker to be the very last person in it's very supportive and it really it's transformed my relationship with running because i rock up until the pandemic every saturday with my son and i know all i have to do is is arrive at the venue once i'm there whether i'm tired whether i'm not feeling it i will end up completing 5k and you know as doctors we're really starting to learn actually that the way we've been advising people to do things is potentially a little bit short-sighted and not helpful in the long term yeah that's a great example i think the punch line for me usually comes down to you want to join a group to join a tribe where your desired behavior is the normal behavior because if it's normal in that group it's going to become very attractive and natural for you to stick to it because our behaviors are not just something we do from a practical standpoint for ourselves they also are signals to the people around us and by finding tribes where your desired behavior is the normal behavior the good habit that you want to build becomes the signal to those other people hey i get it i fit in i'm part of this i belong and belonging is one of the deepest needs that we all have and if you have to choose between i get the habits that i want to have but i don't really belong i don't fit in i'm kind of cast out or i'm going against the grain of the social norm or i have habits that i don't really love but i get to fit in and i belong most people will choose belonging over loneliness the desire to belong often overpowers the desire to improve and so you want to make sure you get those two things aligned and even further to your point about being a doctor this i mean this influences things it's almost like a fish being in water where it's like what is water you know like when you go to the hospital or go to see patients you could wear a bathing suit but that would be weird right so instead you wear a white lab coat or a suit and tie or whatever like we don't dress that way we have a habit of which clothes we put on largely because that would be it would violate all the social expectations and norms for what it means to visit someone in a hospital or what it means to go to the doctor and that type of thing happens all over the place it's again it's like a fish and water it surrounds us constantly like why do you ring doorbells or knock on doors before you walk in because it would be weird to barge into someone's house without doing that right like we have a habit of doing things that way and there's a social expectation that you ask for permission before you step inside someone's home yeah and so the social environment in that way just it has such a strong influence on the habits and behaviors that we repeat again and again and you can go against the grain of the social nor the social norm for a little bit but if you want to stick to a habit for years i think you got to have some kind of community or some kind of social norm that's working with you rather than against you yeah i mean really really uh helpful advice to people if someone's listening to this and they think okay james i get that but i've tried and you know my friends the ones who i like hanging out with don't have those behaviors they still like boozing every night they still like you know having big tubs of ice cream when i'm actually trying to stop doing that you know what can i do then have you sort of picked up any helpful tips along the way that will help people who struggle getting those social getting getting that social environment aligned with what they want as well yep yeah i don't um you know certainly there is a time and a place for having to cut things out of your life entirely but i don't know that that's necessary uh most of the time i do think for many habits you need at least some kind of we can call it like a sacred space where it can happen uh where you're not actually going against the grain of things like let's say that you want to start doing yoga consistently or start running consistently um if you grow up or live in you know flat of all people who are fairly athletic and interested in that well it's a lot more natural to do that whereas if your family nobody's interested in working out with you or they kind of criticize you when you put the yoga video on um then then you're kind of fighting this up here he'll battle you don't really have a sacred space for that so you know um finding somewhere whether it's a little harder here during the pandemic but you know usually we could say going to a yoga studio for a class where at least for that hour you're surrounded by people who your desired behavior is the normal behavior so that's one thing the other thing though is the more precise you get about what you actually want the less likely you are to find that generally just kind of hanging out in the world because your your goals are specific to you and uh so what you may find and i have had to do this is that you may need to create the tribe rather than stumble into one or find one naturally so as an example um you know my uh my business my career is to be an author but i really view myself more as like an online business person as an entrepreneur and so i have looked and sought out other entrepreneurs who have similar businesses as me they started with a newsletter they write books now and um i've reached out to all of them cold slowly developed relationships with some of them and then once i had talked to say 25 or 30 people like that i had five or six or eight that i really got along well with and so i invite those people out to a retreat each year where we all kind of get together in person for you know three or four days and i take care of organizing it all everybody pitches in money and splits the cost and it's really valuable for all of us because it's not the kind of group that we would just stumble into right we wouldn't we wouldn't just be able to naturally find that social environment so you may find that you need to create it uh in order for for you to be surrounded by people who really do share your objectives and your goals and your values um but i think that's very much worth it it's 100 worth the effort for me yeah i mean it's a great example to share and you didn't mention the pandemic and i guess in some ways that has presented new opportunities so what i mean by that is yes i can no longer go to my yoga class for example but actually there's a litany now of uh zoom yoga classes and you can probably through social media through the internet find actually sort of trial out until you find your perfect tribe which may even be meeting on a daily basis um i don't know if you've been doing many interviews during the pandemic at all but i'm i'm interested as to whether you feel the way the world has changed over the past six months has that harmed the creation of new habits or has that helped the creation of new habits um well anytime behavior changes or sorry any time the environment changes in the big way behavior changes in a big way and many of us throughout the pandemic have felt or seen our environment change in really meaningful ways it used to be that you went into the office but now your office is the kitchen table or the pantry used to be miles away from you most of the day but now it's right around the corner and you can snack whenever you want and so those shifts and environment have definitely led to a shift in behaviors a creation of new habits now not necessarily all good habits but it's definitely been a shift i do think however we can ask ourselves you know what is one of the things that i like to come back to when we talk about designing habits is what is the path of least resistance so how can i make the good habits the obvious and easy thing to do in this environment and when we all have our environment shift and we're working from home and different things are happening um you're in an environment that you probably have not optimized before at least not for the certain set of habits that are being performed in it now so i'll give a couple personal examples um i knew i'd be spending more time at home during quarantine and the pandemic and so on and i figured well i'd like to use at least some of that time productively so i want to read a little bit more so i bought some books off my reading list i have like four or five of them next to me right now on the desk i put a couple down on the coffee table one or two next to my bed so i kind of sprinkling books throughout the house so that it's the path of least resistance to read them i also took all the apps that are on the home screen of my phone and i move those to a second screen and then i took audible and i put that on the home screen right in the home bar so it's the first thing that i would see when i would open up my phone just to remind me to listen to another audio book and so what i'm trying to do is to prime my environment for more productive action right to make the good habit the lack the path of least resistance and what you often see if you look around people's environments we have you know people can have good intentions we can have all kinds of things that we would like to do but the habits that we often actually spend time on are often the path of least resistance like if you take a lot of people feel like they watch too much tv or they watch more netflix than they would like or whatever but if you walk into any living room where do all the couches and chairs face right so it's like what is this room designed to get you to do and i'm not saying that you have to you know get rid of your television or something but you could place it inside a cabinet or a wall unit so that's behind doors you're less likely to see it you could take the chair that you usually sit in to watch television you could turn it and have it face a coffee table with a book on it you could take the remote control put it inside a drawer put a book in its place um and you know no single choice like that is going to radically transform your behavior but you can imagine the impact of making a dozen or two dozen or 50 little choices like that throughout your uh environment that all kind of prime the more productive action and suddenly it becomes a lot easier to stick to good habits when they're the path of least resistance yeah such a good point and as you were describing that i thought about my living room at the moment and you know i've got three three books in there that i'm i'm sort of dipping in and out of at the moment we've also started unplugging the television and the virgin sort of cable box and actually if you have to plug them in before you put it on before you load up netflix that is that is sometimes a five minute procedure for it to you know turn it on it to load up that is enough that is enough friction between me watching netflix again ah you know what i'm just going to read the book um and it's surprising how little friction you need for a bad habit to kind of fade away like another similar example to that i um i've been doing this for the last year or two where i i have this little habit where i try to start my day by leaving my phone in another room until lunch and it doesn't work for everybody but it works well for me and what i find is if i have my phone next to me if it's if i bring it in i'm like everybody else i check it every three minutes you know but if it's in a different room i have a home office and so it's only like 30 seconds away but i never go get it and i'm like well did i want it or not you know in the one sense i wanted it bad enough to check it every three minutes when it was next to me but in another sense i never wanted it so bad that i would work 30 seconds to go get it and i've seen the same thing with beer if i buy like a six pack of beer and i put it in the front of the fridge if i have it right there where i can see it when i open up the door i'll grab one every night just because it's there but if i tuck it down on the lowest shelf and i put it like kind of to the back of the fridge where i can barely even see it um sometimes i'll forget it's there for weeks and it's surprising that that little bit of friction can lead to a change in your behavior you know i don't think those things will solve like a true addiction but most people aren't dealing with that in many cases uh you'll be surprised how much you can curtail your bad habits just by making them less obvious and a little more difficult to do yeah i mean we'll maybe touch back on addiction later if there's time but that is such a great example james because you're bringing you're still bringing beer into the house you're just hiding it you're making it invisible which is changing your behavior so you know i've always said to my patients try and control the environments you can control right you can't control what's outside your front door so for people who are let's say trying to lose weight for example if they feel that that's going to benefit them for their health i will often say well which of the foods you're trying to eat more of which the ones you're trying to eat less of let's not bring the ones you're trying to eat less off into the house in the first place but you're saying even if you do bring stuff into the house there are tricks you can do just to make them that little bit harder to access which i think is a really helpful tip for people well the more friction there is between you and a bad habit or an undesirable behavior the less likely you are to do it so if the food that you want to avoid the junk food that you're trying to not eat if it's you know 15 minutes away at the store that's a lot of friction if it's in the house that's much less friction but it's better if it's um the highest shelf in the pantry or tucked away at the bottom of the fridge or you know um down in the basement in the cellar or something like these you know anywhere where you can add more friction make it less visible make it less obvious increase the number of steps between you and the behavior like you did when you unplug the television um you know that's just a little bit of extra friction and all of that stuff adds up and is is helpful in kind of guiding your behavior towards the path of least resistance yeah reminds me one of my patients who actually couldn't stop eating crisps uh so i think you guys call them potato chips and he the solution we ended up finding after trying to tweak it for a little while is he would put them in his garden shed so he had to you know in the uk in the winter you probably don't want to get out of the door go into your garden gets the shed and it worked it was you know it is amazing i think i think we often what i think is beautiful about your book actually there's there's many things about it that are that are just frankly fantastic but you've actually you've really helped to codify something that we all do on a daily basis often without thinking about it and i want to explore that a little bit with you i either in the book or in a previous interview i've heard you say that where we are at the moment in life is a result of the habits that we have or something to that effect i wonder if you could maybe expand upon that a little bit because i think it's a really interesting concept well you know there are a variety of things that influence your outcomes in life probably if we're gonna say there are like two or three big pillars we probably would say well there's luck and randomness so certainly you know good luck and bad luck influence your outcomes there's your choices uh individual decisions you make where to go to school who to marry what job to take what career to pursue those certainly influence your outcomes and then there are your habits and your actions and um you know by definition the first one luck and randomness is not under your control so you you i don't think it makes sense to focus there because you don't have control over it uh by definition now your choices we you know we could talk more about that possibly but the one that i've explored the most is your habits and the reason is because they are decisions they're they're also choices but they're ones that get repeated day in and day out and i think for that reason they exert an enormous force on your outcomes in life and we could potentially as you just mentioned sort of boil it down and simplify it and say that your current life today is largely the sum of your habits um in many ways it's the habits that you've been following for say the last six months or the last year or the last two years that have carried you to whatever results you have right now um i had a friend who told me a couple months ago i thought i liked the way he phrased it he said if you're enjoying good results right now you were killing it six months ago and i think that speaks to the quality of habits and how they build up and compound and it's really the process that you've been running and i like to kind of simplify this down and use i use the phrase system versus goal and so what i say is that like you do not rise to level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems and if we're a little bit more precise about those words your goal is like your desired outcome your target the thing that you want to achieve but what is your system your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow and so each little habit is kind of like a gear in that overall machine and if you optimize your habits you're optimizing your system and you naturally uh fall to whatever that level of result is to whatever the system is running toward if there is ever a gap between your goal and your system if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits your daily habits will always win it doesn't matter how good your intentions were it doesn't matter what you hope to achieve it's what your habits are carrying you toward and so the kind of the great irony of all of this is we also badly want better results in life you know we also badly want to make more money or to reduce stress or to find love or to be more productive but the results are actually not the thing that needs to change it's the system that precedes the results it's the habits that precede the outcome so it's kind of like fix the inputs and the alps the outputs will fix themselves why is it that we don't sort of intuitively get that why is it you know classic case january the first every year where it's okay complete lifestyle overhaul um get to the gym three times a week eat completely perfect whole foods you know don't bring any sugar in the house and it lasts for about two weeks or three weeks at the most for many people and then if they're not seeing results you know there's something isn't there in the human psyche that actually we we judge the success of our habits maybe a little bit too early i guess i really like what your friends said about how you are now is what you were doing six months ago that's it's such a beautiful way to think about it but but what's going on there with human psychology that we sort of we don't quite see it yeah i i don't know that i have a perfect example or uh answer but a couple things that come to mind like one is that i think at a very deep fundamental level at like a biological level humans are goal seeking organisms um you know like in to some sense in some degree maybe it's subconscious but you have a goal of finding food and water you have a goal of seeking shelter and it's the objective of satisfying your thirst that motivates you to take action so we kind of i feel like it's probably wired into us at some deep level to uh have goals and results and so because of that we have a tendency to kind of over focus on on that um when it is applied to say the modern world and not to like just our physical existence um the other challenge and i think modernity just kind of magnifies this or accelerates it is that whether it's the daily news cycle or social media it tends to be very results-focused it tends to be very results-oriented so you know you're never going to see a news story that says something like man eats chicken and salad for lunch today right it's only going to be a story when it's like man loses you know all this weight or it's only we only hear about the broadway play once it's a hit not when it's being written right we only hear about the um successful team after they've won the championship not while they're training in the off season and so the results of success are often highly visible and discussed and the process of success is often hidden from view and uh for that reason i think we tend to overvalue results and undervalue the process that you know precedes it the all the the work that comes before so i think you know society tends to be very outcome oriented and results oriented and um certainly results matter and this is this again is like one of the little ironies or kind of competing tensions of this i'm not saying the results don't matter they do but people who focus only on results when one time people who focus on systems win again and again and so the place that you want to focus is on building better habits and developing better systems not necessarily achieving a particular outcome yeah yeah so much for people to reflect on there i think you know if we think about habits and often we call habits good or bad and it's really interesting because i think i think sitting underneath habits in the book and i really it's funny i read the book when it first came out uh i actually quoted uh some of your book in my third book which just came out in america which you may not have seen yet but i quote oh thank you i know it's all like quotes one of your lines in the conclusion there congrats by the way finishing any book is a huge project so congratulations to you you've done three yeah and i've i submitted my fourth manuscript last week so i'm barely still alive and functioning actually but um i like the uh i like the phrase that i think sam harris used it where he said um writing a book is often like having a baby except bloodier i was like yeah you know it's quite a battle my my pa said to me last week she's she said wrong i thought you'd finished in june i was like yes so did i i thought i was done she goes i'm just on the final bit now but you know june blood into july to august into september um but you know as i revisited it this morning and i haven't looked at it for maybe over 12 months actually right so it was it was really nice uh to revisit it and i've actually been prompted to maybe put it into my living room and make it one book that i reread now from start to finish but it's really interesting to me that although on the surface it's about habits what strikes me is actually it's really about awareness and what you're really doing is helping shine a light on people as to how they're spending their time what are they doing and actually i don't know how spiritually inclined you are but actually there's a real spiritual component to the book i found because you're helping people you're actually helping us understand ourselves better and i think that's one of the most powerful things that any of us can give another human being is the ability to understand themselves yeah thanks for saying that i think um you know behavior is this is i think one of the common myths about behavior change people say um oh you know behavior change is so hard it's so difficult to change habits whatever the truth is we're changing all the time one of the primary functions of your brain is to change your behavior whenever the environment shifts or whenever the context shifts so you're very capable of change and you're kind of doing it constantly however in order to change in an intentional way in order to be in control of that change and not just having it happen to you i think you have to start with some kind of awareness so the point that you just made about the book is actually about self-awareness it's actually about understanding yourself better it's actually about seeing some of the behaviors that you're usually blind to that i feel like is an essential first step if you want to be in control of that process in any way a lot of people feel like they're the victim of their habits but i think if you want to become the architect of them you need to have some kind of self-awareness you need to be able to identify what am i actually doing right now what is the truth of the situation and where do i want to go what is the truth of what i want to become or what to achieve and then you can start to bridge that gap once you have a better uh clearer understanding of where you currently stand and where you want to go is there an argument that we shouldn't use the term good and bad when it comes to habits now i i look i get it you know most of us would consider you know i don't know moving our bodies more uh you know a an inverted commas good habits but it it you know you describe so beautifully how all behaviors really are playing a role in our lives in some way and in some ways assigning good and bad to them might be you know layering on a level of judgment which can often actually get people even more stuck so i wonder if you can unpack that a little bit for us yeah you can sort of twist this either way like on the one hand you know i do think there's an argument for just saying listen there aren't really good or bad habits there are effective habits in the sense that they are effective at solving the problem that you're facing in that moment and having some additional layer of judgment or feeling guilty about that probably isn't serving you it's not really helping you move forward so maybe we could dismiss that on the other hand i think we all sort of implicitly understand what we're saying when we say it's a good habit or a bad habit but i have wrestled with this a little bit more because there are some academics or some researchers who kind of adamantly say uh that there is no such thing as a good or a bad habit and here's where i've come down on it pretty much all behaviors in life produce multiple outcomes across time so broadly speaking let's say there's an immediate outcome and there's an ultimate outcome and with your bad habits or things that we commonly call a bad habit usually the immediate outcome is favorable like the immediate outcome of eating a donut is great it's sweet it's sugary it's tasty it's enjoyable it's only the ultimate outcome a year two years from now or if you keep eating donuts that's unfavorable with a good habit or something we commonly call a good habit like say going to the gym the immediate outcome is often kind of unfavorable like the immediate outcome going to the gym for the first week is your body looks the same in the mirror the scale hasn't changed if anything you're a little bit sore it's only the ultimate outcome you know a year or two or five later that is favorable and i think first of all this is i feel like this is an important point for a couple reasons first it helps to explain a little bit why we continue to repeat habits that we consider to be bad for us the reason is because they serve you in the moment you know even something like smoking a cigarette the immediate outcome might be that you get to socialize with friends outside the office or you curb your nicotine craving it's only the ultimate outcome that is unfavorable and um we tend to have brains that are wired for immediate returns and that you know that makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint like you would rather have a brain that takes shelter from a storm now uh than one that doesn't you would rather have a brain that prioritizes getting the next meal than giving equal weight to a meal that you might have in two weeks um and so it serves us usually to be immediately focused but in modern society it comes back to hurt us a little bit when it comes to a lot of these bad habits with good habits however it's a lot about finding ways to delay gratification um or to pull the long-term rewards of those good habits into the present moment so you feel good right now in you know in ancient history or in prehistory our ancestors largely grew up in environments that were immediately focused like i said taking shelter from the storm or getting the next meal or something like that avoiding predators but modern society has become increasingly focused on delayed rewards you go to school now so that you can graduate in a few years you show up at work this week so you can get a paycheck in a month you save for retirement now so that you can have financial security a decade or two or three from now and so modern society asks us to make more delayed return decisions than our ancestors did and so i think we have a little bit of friction with a lot of the good habits that we want to build are more delayed than what maybe our biological underpinnings are wired for so there's a little bit of a challenge there but i think the summary of this is that if i were to define what is a good habit what is a bad habit i would say the cost of your good habits are in the present the cost of your bad habits are in the future and it's really that gap between immediate outcome and ultimate outcome that i think helps define what is good or bad your good habits are the ones that serve you in the long run your bad habits are the ones that don't serve you well in the long run and um that i think is a you know maybe a simplistic way of viewing it but it kind of gives us a clean division for how most of us actually use the word in conversation yeah i really like that and i think it just i think the way you've come down there is it's really helpful because i think sometimes we can in science and academia sort of get a bit lost sometimes in terms of what technically is something you know how can we define it and of course i understand the value in that but it also has to be translated for the layman in terms of well what does that mean for me you know there's value in being precise but there's more value in being useful and so i would rather be i would rather have a useful definition than a precise one um and uh this is maybe one example of that you're preaching to the converter i'm all for things like that it's about you know you know you wrote a book you you come up with these concepts you write i've got to say i want to talk about your newsletter at some point it's it is just a brilliant newsletter and it guys thank you i would encourage anyone to sign up for it uh the 3c1 newsletter it's it's one that i read on most weeks i won't say i read it every week because i don't but i i see it everywhere and i read them more than i'm just happy that you're showing up at all man i think it's great thank you no i actually don't know how you produce that level of content on a weekly basis uh you must have some in fact let's go there now how you must have some pretty good habits or systems in place to produce such high quality output on a weekly basis so i want if you're able to share some of them thank you for for saying that um you know pretty much every thought we have is downstream from what we consume and so i think the first step for me is trying to choose good pieces of information to consume um almost all of my like reading is kind of like fuel for me the way that i think about it is um i have this this little challenge this little uh challenging point in my career where after about a year or two my my audience had started growing and i thought oh people are paying attention now now i need to be really good you know and so i thought well if i just spend more time writing then that's how i can make it even better i need to put more effort in but actually i think it ended up making it worse because what i didn't realize is that if i don't have good ideas to write about i don't need to write more i need to read more and so it's kind of like driving a car and reading is like filling up the tank with gas and writing is like going on an adventure and going on a journey and getting somewhere and the point of having a car is not to just stay at the gas station and fill it up with gas all day like you're supposed to actually go somewhere so if you only consume that's not beneficial but if all you do is try to drive and put stuff out then at some point you run out of gas and so i need a balance between the two i get that in a couple different ways trying to select good books to read of course is you know a big part of that but i have found twitter to be really useful i've spent what probably would be considered an unreasonable amount of time uh curating my twitter feed and like i would say it might be over 100 hours at this point that i've spent looking at different profiles should i follow this person or not what about people i really like who do they follow and like just kind of doing this endlessly you know over and over again i sort of do this kind of it's like bulking and then cutting basically but for twitter so i kind of like bulk up and add 100 accounts that i'm gonna follow and then i sit with that for a couple weeks and i cut again and you know only keep the ones that are really useful really high signal low noise but the end result of that is that essentially i'm crafting my information flow because i log in there you know for an hour or two every day and that's determining what i'm seeing in my timeline what's popping up in my feed and i would say at this point every day i probably get at least three ideas from my twitter feed probably more that i take notes on and maybe spark me to go read something more go down a rabbit hole or something like that so i really feel like that's probably the most important part in my process is crafting information flows and figuring out what to read and then the ideas sort of come bubble up naturally when you're getting that much inspiration um i have more practical or tactical stuff like we have a big spreadsheet that i keep where i dump all my ideas into it and i dump any interesting quotes i have into it and eventually those you know we go back through those and i select my favorites and those kind of make it into the newsletter so there's sort of like an additional round of curation that goes on but uh but i do think reading is probably the most important part of the process yeah what's interesting about that for me james is we started off this conversation talking about our social environments and we're quite lit we sort of we've kind of evolved into your social media environments which which certainly is part of our social environment the way humans now live and consume information and interact with people is done online it it'll you know a lot of it's done online a lot of it's done through social media and i really like that idea i i've been sort of talking on my instagram as it happens about this for a while to people say look you've really got to take control over who you're following you know the way you're going to think the work your ideas of the world but also how you feel like if you're struggling with stress and anxiety i sort of think well if you are you following people who make you feel more stressed make you feel more anxious whose whole persona is on calling other people out and then therefore it's going to be a whole divisive um type of feed you're following or are you or do you want to spend time following you know people who make you feel good positive um you know compassionate you know whatever it is you want it's not for me to say what people should or shouldn't follow i guess you've found what you need from twitter and you've not just left it up to chance which kind of goes to your central theme in the book as well which is about you know we're results of the habits we're following but half the time we don't even know that these are habits that we've been actually following until we shine a light on it and it's the same principle that you're using with twitter right you're you're being really intentional about who you're following but would you recommend giving given how important our environment what we surround ourselves with is would you almost say that that is something that all of us should be considering when we go online oh i i think so you when you choose the people that you follow online you are sort of like it's like you get to pick the citizens for your own little city you know you're getting to create that and you want to be very careful about who you led into your city about who you're you're allowing to be part of that information flow because essentially what you're choosing is you're choosing the people who are shaping your thoughts and that's one of the most important choices that you can make so i agree with you i think a lot of the time behavior on social media is somewhat mindless we just well we follow someone because we've been following them for a long time and we you know look at their post because we always look at the post when we log into instagram or twitter or wherever and we don't really think carefully does this actually benefit me like does this is this giving me good things to think about do i feel better about myself after i look at this i had one friend who she told me she was like i just deleted instagram because i felt worse about myself after i logged in every time and it took her a while to realize that and i don't think that's necessary i mean i have an instagram account but i do think that you need to be careful about who you follow um so curating that is a big part of yeah you're not only choosing who to follow you're choosing what your future self will think and um you want to make sure that you're giving yourself the opportunity to have good future thoughts yeah i don't if you see the social dilemma that's come out recently on netflix uh i haven't seen it but i know tristan and have been familiar with his work for a little while yeah i mean it's i i certainly think it's one of the most important documentaries i've seen in a long time it definitely warranted me plugging in uh waiting for the box to load for five minutes before i could press play on that but it really has made me think and you know we've not spoken about identity yet i really want to i really want to get into that but what was interesting about the social media algorithms and the way they were explaining in the documentary is that actually they're actually changing the way that we think and therefore changing the way that we behave and if if we really take that put that at the forefront of our minds if the people you follow and the algorithms which are then tracking that and then feeding you more content have the potential to change how you think and then how you behave well what could be more important than curating your online world intentionally one thing i was doing before i think it makes a difference on instagram when you follow someone you can actually go in and actually um add them to a close friends list and that's what i started doing maybe there's 10 or 20 people they're not all close friends but i've added them to close friends because i'm like i really like these people's content i actually want to see their content when they post it and that's that's again it's just another practical thing that i think it helps people take control a little bit yeah i would agree it's uh choosing information flows social media being probably one of the primary ones for all of us is a huge crucial thing for kind of shaping your future thoughts jameson but you've got these four laws these these four laws of change of behavior change i guess and i wonder if we could go through them i guess we've touched on a couple of them in sort of passing so far but before we start that i wonder if you could define what a habit is what an atomic habit is and then we can maybe sort of expand upon these four laws so a couple different definitions of a habit you know the one that's most common or is something to the effect of a habit is a behavior that you've repeated enough times to be more or less automatic or you know something fairly mindless automatic routine behavior so brushing your teeth tying your shoes unplugging the toaster after each use like you just kind of do these things automatically they take 30 seconds or a minute or you know they're pretty quick um there are some other ways to define a habit though and i like to use some of these alternate definitions because i think it helps reveal a little bit more nuance about what habits are and where they live in our lives so for example another way to define a habit is it's a behavior that is repeated in a particular context so you start to realize that the environment matters a lot in habits like your couch at 7 pm might be where you watch netflix and so it's actually the behavior watching netflix is tied to that context if you're somewhere else at 7 pm then you probably won't perform that same habit and so you start to realize how much your behavior is linked to the environment or the circumstance around you a third definition of a habit which i really like jason raya who's a behavioral scientist he has something where he says something to the effect of habits are solutions to recurring problems in your environment and what i like about that is it speaks to habits serve a purpose they are effective at solving some kind of problem and if you start to unpack that a little bit more you see that there can be quite a variety in the habits that people build for example you finish the workday and it's like 6 p.m and you're exhausted and tired from a long day of work well in a sense that's a problem that your brain needs to solve and one person might solve that problem by playing video games for an hour and another person might solve it by smoking a cigarette and a third person might solve it by going for a run and you can see pretty quickly that there are some solutions that are more effective or optimal or healthy than others and i think the question to ask yourself you know early on when you're a child you inherit these solutions you kind of inherit you soak up the habits that you see role model by your parents or your friends or whatever experiences that you happen to have in your narrow sliver of the universe but what are the odds that the habits that you inherited from your childhood the experiences you had and the things that you saw done are also the optimal solution to the the problems that you face yeah it's very unlikely that whatever you happen to stumble across is actually the optimal way to do it and if you realize that then you come to discover that as you become an adult and you're more in control of your habits and your environment it becomes your responsibility to assess what are the problems and challenges i face repeatedly the things i'm trying to solve and what would be a better way to do that what are the optimal solutions so it's not your fault if you inherited unhelpful habits or unproductive habits but it is your responsibility to try to figure out how to adjust those and how to improve those in some meaningful way right so that's kind of my long definition of what is a habit now what is an atomic habit i use the phrase atomic because i i think it has three meanings and all three kind of apply to building better habits so the first meaning of the word atomic is tiny or small like an atom and that is part of my philosophy habits should be small and easy to do and not very difficult and convenient the second meaning of the word atomic is the fundamental unit in a larger system so atoms built into molecules molecules built into compounds and so on and we mentioned this earlier but your habits are kind of like the fundamental unit of the overall system that you run each one's like a little gear in the overall machine and collectively you put all those little units together and you end up with your daily routine or your lifestyle and then the third and final meaning of the word atomic is the source of immense energy or power and i think that if you combine all three of those meanings you make changes that are small and easy to do and you layer them together like units in a larger system you can end up with some really powerful results and those three kind of different meanings of atomic i think if you apply those to building better habits you can end up with a really powerful system of better habits and behaviors and so that's kind of where the phrase atomic havoc came from and how i feel uh or think about using it in that context yeah well no thanks for that really yeah really useful way to think about habits so trying to think about habits through the lens of health let's say meditation is a habit so i should say meditation is a practice that many people struggle to do consistently many people have the the desired outcome of i want to meditate i want to be a meditator i read about all these benefits but i just can't do it and i wonder if it might be useful to try and unpick why it's difficult but through the lens of those four laws i wonder if you'd be game for that to see if we can maybe to make it super practical for people yeah sure of course let me just give a summary of the four laws first and then we can uh kind of dive into using that example so if you want to have a stick you kind of roughly have four different things that if you can get them working for you they're sort of like levers and if they're in the right positions building good habits is easier and if they're in the wrong positions you're kind of fighting an uphill battle so the first thing is you want to make your habits obvious most habits are preceded by some kind of cue and so you want the cues of your habits to be obvious available visible easy to see the easier it is to see or get your attention the more likely you are to stick with the habit or perform it the second one is to make your habits attractive if you want your habits to be motivating if you want them to be compelling then you need to be attractive in some form the third law is to make it easy so the easier more convenient frictionless your habits are the more likely likely you are to perform them we've talked a little bit about that with environment design already and the fourth and final thing is you want to make it satisfying so the more satisfying or enjoyable a habit is the more likely you are to stick with it now not every behavior in life is satisfying or rewarding right sometimes things have a cost or a consequence sometimes they're fairly neutral but if a behavior is not rewarding if it's not enjoyable at least to some degree then it's unlikely to become a habit it needs to have some kind of positive emotional signal associated with it that kind of tells your brain hey that felt good you should repeat this again next time so just so real quick summary the four laws behavior change make it obvious make it attractive make it easy make it satisfying and i think that sort of gives you a high level framework for getting a good habit to stick i'll just kind of make a note of this right here we don't have to get into it in detail but you just want to mention it which is those four help you build a good habit if you want to break a bad habit then you just invert those four so rather than making it obvious you want to make it invisible unsubscribe from emails or reduce exposure to the queue rather than making it attractive you want to make it unattractive making it easy make it difficult increase friction add steps rather than making it satisfying make it unsatisfying add some kind of immediate cost or consequence to the behavior so that's like the high level view for breaking a bad habit uh and obviously the book goes into many more examples of like how to do each of those but um we can talk about the how to apply it to meditation now yeah so someone's listening to this or watching it on youtube and they go right okay i'm bought in gonna get james's book i'm gonna start a meditation practice where should i begin um how would you advise them using your sort of framework of these laws so usually if i if i say okay we gotta start in some place what's the first thing i should do i actually typically recommend what i call the two minute rule and the two-minute rule is part of that third law which is making it easy and the two-mineral says take whatever habit you're trying to build and scale it down to something takes two minutes or less to do so do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat or meditate for you know 15 minutes a day becomes meditated for two minutes um and sometimes i say that and people resist it a little bit because they're like okay you know i know the real goal isn't just to take my yoga mat out right now i know i'm actually trying to do the workout so this is some kind of mental trick and like why would i fall for it basically and i get where people are coming from but so i have this reader his name is mitch and uh he lost a bunch of weight kept it off for over a decade but for the first um six weeks that he went to the gym he had a rule for himself where he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes so he'd get in the car drive to the gym get out do half an exercise get back into the car drive home and it sounds ridiculous right it sounds silly you're like obviously this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants but if you take a step back what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up right he was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week even if it was only for five minutes and i think this is a much deeper truth about habits that often gets overlooked which is a habit must be established before it can be improved it has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize and scale it up and for whatever reason we get very all or nothing with our habits you know it's like i have to find the perfect workout program or the ideal business plan or the best diet to follow before i can take a first step and i can imagine in this um meditation example there are probably many people who are like well what is the best form of meditation like that would be one of the first first things they would ask themselves then they'd spend hours researching on youtube and whatever and you know a lot of the time we put off action because we think i need to learn more but usually the best way to learn is by taking action and so the two-minute rule kind of helps you overcome that tendency to have this like perfectionist spiral in research too much and encourage you encourages you to just get started so i think that's step number one is let's take meditation and let's just scale it down to something you can always do we're just going to meditate for say 60 seconds um and then we can start to apply some of the other laws so let's say we've got the first law make it obvious well uh there are a couple different things that you could make meditation obvious you could if you're going to do it on your phone if you're going to download one of the meditation apps like calm or waking up or headspace or something like that you could take that app and put it on the home screen the way that i mentioned earlier in this interview about moving audible there so you can make it the most obvious app on your phone if you don't care about that or you're just going to do it like in your house or in a room or something you need to figure out where is that going to occur so this is one of this is something i mentioned in the book i think it's in chapter five i talk about implementation intentions and implementation intentions are when you state your intention to implement a particular behavior at a certain time in a certain place on a certain day so it's like when do i meditate i meditate on mondays at 7 00 am in my guest room or whatever you know like you just you have to have a space where that actually happens and um maybe you have a meditation pillow so you set that up and that's all you know the environment the space is primed you know it could be just in the corner of your living room or something but there needs to be some space where that habit lives and it's very clear when and where to do it a lot of people feel like what they lack is motivation but what they really lack is clarity um they lack a very clear understanding of when and where the habit's going to live so honestly i think just those two things so that's the first law make it obvious deciding when and where it's going to occur and this and the third law make it easy scaling it down and just doing it for 60 seconds or two minutes or whatever those two things alone would go a long way in getting people to to stick with a new meditation habit yeah that's really really helpful james and i just want to share with you a patient's story from i'm gonna guess seven eight years ago and you know i i've often said this but as a medical doctor i mean i can definitely put my hands up and and say very clearly that my patients have taught me a lot more than i taught them because i often say this when i'm teaching doctors as well really listen to your patients listen to what they're telling you that will often tell you why something's working why it's not working and one thing i've observed i've been really curious as to why does the same advice work for one patient and not work for another patient why does one patient go with that and sort of implement it all and come back like a different person literally a different person not just different health a different person which we'll also talk about um and why why does someone else really really struggle i remember this case uh this lady who i think stress and and chronic unremitting stress was driving a lot of her symptoms her headaches her insomnia her mood issues and we tried all kinds of things and she actually wanted to meditate but she said she tried before but when i sort of probed her a little bit she said it's just not for me doc i've tried i've tried the apps you know i've tried youtube videos it's just not for me and when you when you probed when i sort of delved a bit deeper she'd actually made it really hard she wanted to do 20 minutes consistently and because she hadn't met that bar she and her head is not a meditation so i said to her i said hey look what do you think you could commit to every day could we could you do 10 minutes she doesn't know i could try but i don't think so i said okay how about five she thought about it she said i don't know i said okay okay how about one minute she said well yeah i could do one minute but will it make any difference i said well hold on a minute let's just make a commitment here right so i and actually you know there's a lot of a lot of young girls adults about that and i said i'll tell you what whatever you commit to doing i will also do it i'll write it in a diary and when you when you come back to see me next week we'll compare right so i added that sort of accountability piece with her but she started off doing one minute and we we also defined when she was going to do it was going to be first thing in the morning before she did anything else that one minute you know after a couple of weeks became five minutes not because i asked her to but because she as you would say she was mastering the art of showing up you know i didn't know how to articulate i didn't know the science of behavior change back then i was sort of just going on intuition as a clinician how can i help that lady do what she tells me she wants to do and now she's meditating for 20 minutes a day locked in right and it's so if anyone is skeptical about your two-minute rule i would sort of concur as a clinician that this stuff works you know you just got to commit to it right you know one of the most motivating feelings for the human mind is the feeling of progress yeah if you're making progress you have every reason in the world to continue you know it's like oh we're moving forward i'm you know i'm making progress on the goal that i'm hoping to achieve and so there's this weird trick that we can play on ourselves in our brain where we're like well i want to meditate for 20 minutes and if she would have done it for one minute she would have felt like a failure if that was her expectation right but somehow just by shifting it and saying no i'm only going to try to do this for one minute if she does it for two minutes she feels like she crushed it you know and so this it's this very strange thing and i i think um that's a good argument for especially in the beginning starting with keeping the bar low and you need to get in your reps and this is true i think for almost any kind of habit that you're building like you need the repetitions whether it's meditating for one minute or writing one sentence or reading one page it doesn't matter that it's it's almost always better to do less than you would hoped than to do nothing at all and um the two minute rule kind of helps nudge you toward that direction nudge you toward the direction of getting in your reps getting it done and mastering the art of showing up even if it's in a small way and then using that as a foothold to advance to the next level and kind of build some momentum and get that feeling of progress yeah now you sort of frame that with two of the four laws but i really like the fourth law uh make it satisfying what are some of the ways that people can make things satisfying as you were talking about before how can you often the problem is with good habits or you know in adverse economics good habits the problem often is is the the the design effects is somewhere in the future how can how can people bring that into the presence well i think the ultimate form of a reward is feeling like you're showing up as the type of person that you want to be that it's reinforcing your desired identity but as you mentioned the problem is it takes a long time for that to be true like the first time you meditate you don't identify as i'm a meditator and it feels good to do this because that's part of who i am and part of my identity it might take you a year or two or who knows how long before you actually start to adopt that feeling i mean i didn't identify as an author until i actually had a published book like even when i was writing it i didn't feel like i was an author so that that can take a long time um i think the key though is that in my opinion there are kind of two things one you want some kind of a reward that is immediate and i think the speed of it is actually quite important you need to feel that positive emotional signal right away so that you have a repeat a reason to tie that behavior to feeling good and you have a reason to repeat it again in the future when the same situation arises so there are a couple different ways you can do this um you know one very simple way that applies to almost any habit is to use a habit tracker so um i'd like to use my dad as an example here so both of my parents like to swim but one of the challenges with swimming is that your body looks exactly the same when you get out of the water as it does when you jumped in and so you have no evidence that that workout was worth it right you have no evidence that this is actually getting you what you want and so what my dad does is after each workout he pulls out a little calendar and he puts an x on that day and it's a small thing but that x in the moment is something that matches the frequency of the habit every time he swims he also gets to put an x down and it gives him a signal of visual progress we just mentioned that progress is one of the most motivating feelings for the human mind you need to have some way to visualize that some way to see that you're progressing because if you can't see the change in your body or there's no change on the scale yet you need something else that says hey that was the right thing to do this feels good to show up and do the thing i want to do so a habit tracker is one very simple one the other thing though and people talk about external rewards all the time and so you know like oh i went to the gym and so i'm going to reward myself by getting an ice cream cone or something but uh my little nuance or argument here is i think you want to choose external rewards that align with the internal identity that you're trying to build so if you reward yourself for going to the gym by getting an ice cream cone that's kind of like casting votes for two different identities like on the one hand you're casting vote for being a healthy person on the other hand you're casting a vote for eating ice cream or whatever so instead you could do something like reward yourself you know any week when you don't miss a workout you reward yourself with a bubble bath at the end of the week and that's sort of like a an external reward that also is a vote for taking care of your body and so that kind of aligns with that identity that you're trying to build through working out or say any month that you hit your target of saving for retirement you some people might say oh well you could reward yourself by buying a leather jacket but that doesn't really align with the financial saving mentality you're trying to build so instead i would say well any month that you hit that target you could reward yourself with say a free hour where you get to take a walk in the park or free time to do whatever you want because really what you're trying to get to with retirement is freedom and so you're kind of aligning with that same internal identity that you're trying to build but i do think that the faster so the immediacy part the faster you can get a positive reward that's a really powerful thing and the more that your external rewards can align with the internal identity you're trying to build that's an important thing to keep in mind as well yeah i mean we we at home use tick charts on the wall to try and get that sort of progress going so my wife me my two kids we we've all got a tick chart on the wall we've chosen you know this is this is basically what my last book was about where we've chosen a mind hearts a mind body and hearts health snack a day so something for your mental health something for your physical health something for your emotional health they all take under five minutes and my kids do them initially at least to get their tick right so that was actually the motivator for them to do it and i think what you said there about the speed at which you um get the reward i think that's really important because i found often the kids sometimes that they would forget to put their tick and i say oh you know you can do at the end of the day when you're back from school you can put your ticks on you start to lose the connection right between [Music] behavior and reward and i wonder for you james like i've heard i've heard you say in a previous interview that's you know when you when you send out your weekly newsletter you know within an hour you're starting to get replies and you're getting that feedback so you've you've got that loop going or i've done something i start to to to hear and experience how that's impacting people how did that go for you when you were writing a book which obviously takes a long time and you're not getting that immediate reward did that make it harder to stay focused and to stay motivated definitely i think you know sort of the the topic that we're kind of circling right now is basically like immediate feedback or having some kind of having feedback loops in your behavior and how those influence your actions and so you're right you know whether you post a tweet and you kind of start seeing likes trickle in you know within the first few minutes or whether you send out a newsletter in my case and you get replies within an hour those feedback loops are very fast and very motivating because it feels good to get that to get those signals of feedback those signals of progress and that's enough to get me to show up again the next day and like let's work on next week's article or let's work on the next tweet or whatever um but with writing a book the feedback cycle the feedback loop is so long you one of the great challenges of writing a book is you sit down and work on something it's this huge manuscript 200 pages 300 pages whatever and it's a total mess and you work hard for eight hours and it's just as much of a mess as when you started there's nothing and you have to continue to do that for like two years before it actually turns into something and like starts to congeal and clarify itself um and i didn't realize that that was going to be such a challenge for me because atomic habits was my first book but when i was in the middle of it it was very hard and i didn't i don't need a million people to read my work when i'm working on it but i do need somebody to give me some feedback and say hey you're on the right path and so eventually the way that i solved that was by hiring an editor to send drafts to and just get a little bit of feedback from them and you know iterate on on my ideas and that was really crucial because that first year was very hard for me i felt like i was kind of lost um i have another point that i want to add to this kind of feedback loop conversation and it came up when you were you were mentioning something a minute ago this is true it's it's feedback loops like that are powerful immediate feedback is powerful not only for solidifying good habits for kind of making us feel motivated and getting these signals of progress but it also will curtail bad behavior if you have a very immediate consequence or punishment to the behavior so two of my favorite examples um danella meadows who's a was a great systems thinker and engineer she had an idea where she said uh if we want to reduce pollution any manufacturing facility that produces waste and like lets the wastewater out into the river they should be required to take up water for their facility downstream so that the very first uh place that feels the effects of the pollution is the place that is producing it yeah um another one that i really liked apparently boeing when they were working on their planes when they first made the switch i think this is in the 1990s when they first made the switch from a fully manual wing to one that was fully software driven the engineers who designed the software were required to be on the first test flight and it's such a partially that's because they wanted to test some things but it's such a great alignment of incentives you know like you better get this right because you're gonna be the one who pays the cost and um the more those are two just beautiful examples of immediate feedback loops in this case an immediate consequence and the faster that consequence or reward is delivered the more immediately it's associated with the behavior the more likely it is the behavior is going to change and this is something in atomic habits i refer to this as the cardinal rule of behavior change which is behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated behaviors that are immediately punished get avoided and it's really the speed that is kind of the key factor there you can you can sort of it it it's such a such a brilliant point and i started thinking about climate change and i started thinking about you know we're trying to society is trying to encourage all of us to reduce our use of plastic recycle more but actually one of the problems i guess is that there's no immediate feedback loop whether you recycle or not if you toss a plastic bottle away you don't see it in the ocean you don't see it in the fish's stomach you probably live thousands of miles away from where that's actually happening and so i guess not having that it's actually a big problem when we want to make societal changes something yeah society is um the feedback loops are delayed in a lot of ways between our choices i mean whenever you you know order chicken um you chose to kill a chicken but you didn't have to do it yourself right there's no immediate feedback loop there if you had to kill every piece of food that you ate you might make different choices based on that um and so there are a lot of things in society that are like that and i think behavior in a way figuring out how to design systems uh so that the feedback is immediate is it's a huge way to get behavior to change um and if you can figure out how to do it just in your own life i mean you don't you know no individual has control over the whole world but if you can figure out how to do it for your own life and design a system where the behaviors you don't want to uh perform they give you an immediate cost and the behaviors that you do want to perform provide more of an immediate reward that's a very powerful skill to develop and uh it takes some careful thought it's not necessarily easy but i think that you'll find your own behavior often shifts when you when you have those systems set up yeah and there are there are loads of tips in the book actually to help people do just that i think um i want to talk about identity we've sort of skirted around it we touched on it a little bit but it's probably the thing in the entire book that resonates with me on a deep level the most because in many ways it reflects what i've experienced in my own life but also what i've seen time and time again with patients is that it's not just about habits of course it is but it's what doing those habits regularly does for you and how you think about yourself so i'd love to hear your thoughts on identity but also like i'd love to know was there a penny dropping moment for you when you figured that out what happened there yeah i mean certainly you know various people have probably had similar thoughts at some point but i when i publish the book most of what i do most of my writing is uh reading widely collecting the best ideas that i can find from various authors and researchers and academics and so on and trying to put it together in a way that's easy to understand and easy to apply um and maybe i've experienced it in my own life but you know i'm not necessarily pretty much everything i share is you know somebody else has thought of it um identity-based habits is probably the one thing that i was like this is actually my idea um and so so i did feel kind of excited about it i remember when i first wrote about it it's funny when you write articles you know you have these ones that you publish that you think oh this will go over well and then it doesn't really do anything and then other ones you think um oh you know this is just kind of average and then for some reason it blows up and people love it so you're kind of a terrible judge of your own work i think probably all creators have felt that at some point but when i first wrote about identity based habits it was in december of 2012 and uh we were driving through west virginia and i was in the passenger seat of a car and i i had to get um i had to get an article out that day because my schedule was i published every monday and thursday and um i didn't have my article finished so i needed to write something and i don't know why but i just started thinking about the connection between identity and behavior and that was kind of when i first started you know working on that concept and published the article on it and then eventually i sat with the idea more worked on it for atomic habits continued to build upon it and where i ultimately came down is that true behavior change is really identity change and what i mean by that is if you start to look at yourself in a new way if you assign a new story to yourself you're not even really pursuing behavior change anymore you're just acting in alignment with the type of person that you see yourself to be so if you identify as i'm a meditator you're not really convincing yourself to be to meditate each day you're just like no this is what i do because that's part of who i am and so the real goal is not to run a marathon the goal is to become a runner the goal is not to read 50 books a year it's to become a reader the goal is not to do a silent meditation retreat it's to become a meditator and once you start assigning those identities to yourself you start seeing the behavior in a new way it's not an obligation or you know something you're trying to achieve it's not a challenge it's just part of your natural action now ultimately and kind of to connect this idea to the rest of our conversation i think this is where habits come back into play and it's the real reason i think why habits matter like we often talk about habits as being the pathway to external results oh habits will help you lose weight or make more money or be more productive or reduce stress and you know it's true habits can help you do all those things and that's great but i think the real reason that habits matter is they reinforce a new identity they reshape the way you think about yourself every action you take is like a vote for the type of person that you wish to become and so no doing one push-up does not transform your body but it does cast a vote for i'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts and no writing one sentence does not finish the novel but it does cast a vote for i'm a writer and the more that you do these things the more you perform these little habits the more you cast votes and build up kind of a body of evidence for being that kind of person and eventually the weight of the evidence sort of shifts things and this the story shifts in that direction and it's kind of like just to continue the voting metaphor um it's kind of like any election you don't it doesn't need to be unanimous right but all you need is a majority and if you have enough votes then you start to think yeah that is who i am like if you if you study biology every tuesday night for 30 minutes you don't naturally think the first night i am studious but if you keep doing that week in and week out then you're like yeah you know maybe being studious is part of my personality that is part of my identity and i think the final point i'll make on this is just that it's a little bit different than what you usually hear which is something like fake it till you make it yeah you know i don't necessarily have anything wrong with fake it till you make it it's asking you to believe something positive about yourself but it's asking you to believe something positive without having evidence for it and we have a word for beliefs that don't have evidence we call that delusion right like at some point your brain doesn't like this mismatch between what you're saying you are and what you're actually doing so behavior influences beliefs and beliefs influence behavior it's a two-way street but my argument is to let the behavior lead the way just start by doing one push-up or meditating for one minute or writing one sentence or sending one email and letting that be undeniable evidence that in that moment you were that kind of person you were an athlete you were a meditator you were a salesperson whatever it is that you're trying to achieve and so for all of those reasons i kind of think the first question to ask yourself is what kind of identity do i want to build what who do i wish to become and if you have a good idea of that then you can start to back into habits that reinforce that identity and i feel like that's often the more fruitful way to approach behavior change than than to try to achieve some external result yeah well i think you know you you put it in such a beautifully unique way i i think it's an incredible concept for people to get their heads rounds and in some ways james you know there's quite there's a lot of research out there it's quite conflicting certainly from what i've seen that you know does it take 66 days to build a habit does it take 21 days i'm not convinced by any of that what i've seen but i'd love to know your thoughts on that but really the point i wanted to make to follow on from what you've just said is maybe it's not about the number of days but maybe it's until your identity actually makes the switch right maybe it takes you as long as it takes until you start to identify as the kind of person who does the habit that you've started to do yeah you hear all types of different numbers 21 days 30 days 90 days as you said 66 days the popular one right now there was one study that showed that on average it took about 66 days to build a habit but even in that study the range was quite wide you know if you pick something really simple and easy like drinking a glass of water at lunch each day that might be a few weeks you pick something more difficult like going for a run after work every day that might be seven or eight or nine months um so i don't think 66 really tells you very much um i think the true answer the honest answer to how long does it take to build a habit is forever because if you stop doing it it's no longer a habit and the point that i'm getting to here is that habits are not a finish line to be crossed you know the problem with numbers like that is that people are like oh well if i just do this for 30 days then i'll be a healthy person or if i you know if i do this for 66 days then i'll be productive but the reality is habits are a lifestyle to live not a finish line to cross and so that just i think reinforces this idea that you're looking for a small change a non-threatening change a sustainable change something you can make part of your new normal and if you're willing to do that if you're willing to integrate it into your lifestyle then to your point it's much more likely to become part of your identity at some point um the things that you identify as are part of how you live they're part of your daily routine and so you're not just looking to like do them for a sprint um you're looking to to make them part of the long run so um i think for all those reasons i i focus less on the number of days uh and more on uh how can i build something into my lifestyle and make a part of my new normal yeah no brilliance uh james sort of coming towards the end of our conversation um one thing i think a lot about i i can't actually remember if you cover this in the book so i'd sort of be interested in your thoughts on this i know for myself there are there are a few keystone habits so it's it's a habit that if i do the knock-on benefit to everything else is quite profound it's it's it's i don't know like a mega habit in some ways it's if that if that one gets in everything else gets in and is this something you've seen have you written about it is it something you've seen in the research and and i'm sure you've had feedback from millions of readers since the book came out as well i'd love to understand some of your thoughts on that yeah so first place i ever saw the phrase keystone habit was in the power of habit by charles duhigg and i like the idea you know the idea that you've got kind of these i sometimes will call them like a meta habit it's kind of like above all the other habits that come after it and i i've seen a couple i have a couple in my own life i've seen them with readers as well there are a few common ones um you know so like sleep is an interesting one if you get a good night of sleep then you kind of set yourself up for for the next day and getting it's very hard to perform other habits at your highest and best level if you're constantly running low on sleep so that's that's an important one um i always think for me personally reading is a huge one um and part of that is because as you go through life life is dynamic it's not static right the world is changing circumstances change your goals and desires change and that means that you face different problems at different times but the value of reading is that that's a habit that if you stick with it you can always just be reading a book that's relevant to what you want to achieve and so no matter what problem you're facing you can read a book about it if you want to learn how to be a better cook you can read a bunch of books about it if you want to learn how to launch a podcast you can read a book about it if you want to learn how to get in shape there are tons of books about that so it doesn't matter where you're at in your life reading is a habit that really serves you well and then for me what i would consider my keystone habit is exercise you know i'm interested in strength training but i think any form of exercise could probably work and what i find and this is to the point that you just made if i get the workout in i get the benefits of the workout the benefits of like the physical fitness but a couple other things happen as well the first is i tend to eat better on days that i would work out you would think i could like just be sloppy about it but it's really if i'm not working out then like my whole life kind of devolves and i start eating sloppy but if i get in the gym then it's like well i don't want to waste it and so i eat i eat healthier the second thing is that i tend to have like this post-workout high you know where you're pretty focused and you can concentrate well for maybe an hour or so i sleep better that night because i'm tired from the workout which means i wake up the next day and i have better energy and at no point was i trying to build better nutrition habits or focus habits or sleep habits or energy habits but all those things kind of came as a natural side effect of just making sure i got the workout in so i think a question you can ask yourself is just what are the things that i do on the day when things go well and one of those is often your keystone habit like exercise is commonly listed going for a daily walk is a common one especially among creatives just getting outside moving a little bit if you talk to a lot of performers comedians or basketball players or whatever a lot of them will talk about visualization being one of their keystone habits if they can get that in then they tend to perform better when they step out onto the stage or onto the court managers and ceos or high performers probably physicians as well probably talk about meditation as a common keystone habit they get those few minutes in then that kind of sets their day up for success so you know you can decide what it is for you but those are some common examples of habits that tend to pull the rest of your life in line yeah james you literally have written such a phenomenal book that has gone into the homes and the the minds and hearts of certainly a million but i'm sure many millions more over the coming years thank you for writing it thank you for thinking deeply thank you for writing the the email newsletter which really is i think one of the best newsletters out there certainly that i've come across this podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of our lives and james i always like to leave the listeners and the viewers with some practical tips just a few little takeaway thoughts that they can think about applying into their own lives immediately to start improving the way that they feel so any closing thoughts for my audience yeah i think we can summarize some of the key points that have come up throughout the conversation so first one the two minute rule take your habits scale them down to suddenly it takes two minutes or less to do you can apply that to pretty much any habit so that's a great way to make it easy to start um environment design we talked about making good habits the path of least resistance so what is the environment around you you know what are the things that you see first when you walk into the room or when you open your phone let's try to make prime the environment for productive action make the good habit the path of least resistance we talked about social environment how important that is so you want to join a group to join a tribe where your desired behavior is the normal behavior and if you can't readily find those groups then maybe you can create one the way that i did with you know creating some of those retreats for different authors and entrepreneurs so actions like that i think can really help we talked a little bit about implementation intentions and the importance of choosing exactly when and where a habit's going to live in your life so if you put sort of all of that together what you end up with is all right we're going to have a really small habit we'll use the two minute rule for that we'll use implementation intentions to figure out when and where we're going to insert that into our daily routine we're going to optimize the environment to make those behaviors easy and make them the path of least resistance and then eventually we're going to look for other people who are like-minded and who also share those values and principles and i think if you can do those things then you ultimately one have designed a better system for for habits and behavior and hopefully we'll be casting votes for your desired identity and reinforcing the kind of person you want to become and so you know again i mentioned one of the meanings of the word atom or atomic is the fundamental unit in a larger system and so you're just trying to do this you know one at a time building up those little habits creating a larger system creating more power and momentum and energy to move toward that desired identity and reinforce the kind of person you want to become so hopefully you found some of those ideas useful i think that's a good place to start when trying to build better habits and change your behavior james brilliant advice brilliant closing thoughts thank you for everything you do thank you for giving up some of your time today to come onto my show to talk and i look forward to the next book thank you so much really hope you enjoyed that conversation please do think about one thing that you can take and apply into your life inspiration is not enough you need to take action if you did enjoy that please do press subscribe hit that notification bell and why not check out this conversation that i picked out that acts as the perfect follow-up

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 135,412

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, habits, good habits, atomic habits, james clear, behaviour change, psychology, health, environment, tribe, support, identity, identity change

Id: QPV4fpOdHHM

Length: 88min 10sec (5290 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021