Everyone has large goals that seem unattainable. What most people don’t realize is that large goals require small changes that build up over time. These small changes we need to adjust and reconfigure are called our habits. To live the life we truly want to live, we need to eliminate bad habits and replace them with good ones as efficiently as possible. In the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, it breaks habit formation into four stages, cue, craving, response, and reward. His prescription for these four stages are The Four Laws of Behavior Change. These are:
- Make it obvious.
- Make it attractive.
- Make it easy.
- Make it satisfying.
Before any of this can be accomplished, we need to understand what we are trying to create and instill in our lives by adopting good habits. That is establishing an identity so that we can embody the values and principles of someone who can accomplish the goals we are striving for.
Shaping our identity
The key to establishing the habits we want to continue in our lives is to first establish our identity. Doing this means we already identify ourselves as someone who does the things we are trying to do so that we can convince our brain to take the actions it needs to fit that role. For example, if you want to be a runner and one of your goals is to run a marathon, identifying yourself as a runner rather than someone who is trying to be a runner will put you in the frame of mind and establish the identity needed to succeed. Personally speaking, I used to identify myself as a non runner and someone who hated running. During my marathon training, identifying myself as a runner allowed me to establish the necessary habits I needed to be successful as someone who is a runner.
This works in reverse as well. If you need to cut a habit in order to better your life, you’ll need to apply this premise as well. For example, someone who is trying to quit smoking would have an easier time breaking the habit of smoking if they no longer identified themselves as a smoker. Instead of saying “I’m trying to quit”, remove the power the bad habit of smoking has over you by saying “I’m not a smoker” This simple shift can make a world of difference when trying to establish good habits and break away from bad ones.
Habit formation
1. Make it obvious:
The first rule in habit formation as illustrated in the book Atomic Habits is to make it obvious. This is building off the idea that a habit is first initiated by a cue. When we want to form a habit, the best first step is to leave an obvious cue for you to begin that habit. For example, if you want to start going to the gym every morning before work, you could leave your gym bag and shoes near the front door and lay your gym clothes out the night before. This cue will signal to your brain that it’s time to begin that habit and it will make the routine easier to cement and become a ritual. The same principle can be applied in the opposite fashion when you’re trying to break a habit. Instead of creating an obvious cue, you’ll want to make the cue for that bad habit invisible. For example, if you have a junk food habit you’re trying to break away from, throw away those late night snacks you usually have out on your countertop. Humans are very visual so when we eliminate visual cues or add them to our routine, habits are more easily created or destroyed.
2. Make it attractive:
Beyond cues, people want their habits to be attractive enough to have the willpower to sustain them even when on surface level they are unenjoyable. We can do this in a few different ways. Let’s say you love to browse social media, but that habit gets in the way of the productive habits you’d like to create in order to fit into the identity you are trying to build for yourself. If you’re someone who is trying to build a fit identity and to do this you want to start the habit of going to the gym and spending an hour on the elliptical, you can make this more attractive by implementing what author James Clear calls “temptation bundling”. What this would look like under this scenario is you would give yourself permission to scroll on social media ONLY while you’re on the elliptical. This will correlate the two in your brain and make the elliptical a habit that you’re more likely to stick with due to the pleasure you get from scrolling on social media during this time. People are social creatures. If you’re trying to build a fit identity for yourself, another great way to develop a gym habit is to join a group with common interests. Joining a cycling class, a yoga studio, a fitness club, or anything else regarding fitness will match you with people who have similar goals and habits that you’re trying to create. This will automatically make a habit more attractive through the social cues we get from our peers. When you do things as a group, things always get more attractive and pleasurable.
3. Make it easy:
Let’s face it, when something is extremely difficult, human nature is to rebel against it even if it is in our best interest in the long run. For example, the goal of running a marathon seems daunting. Most people will give up and fail due to the daunting pressure of the goal. The best way to establish the right habits to achieve this goal and continue this lifestyle as a part of your identity is to make your habits easy. Now, being a runner will never be easy, however, we can break these habits down to establish our identity so we can step into these habits little by little. Let’s say you want to establish the identity of a runner and you want to run marathons, but running 5 miles a day or more feels like a daunting task you won’t stick to due to its difficulty. In the beginning, it’s better to cast votes for this identity of a runner rather than trying to establish an extremely difficult habit right off the bat. Begin by running for 2 minutes a day and work your way up from there. When you stack these wins of running even just a little bit every day, you’re putting votes in for your identity as a runner to be established. Running will begin to get easier and these habits will seem less daunting over time. On the contrary, eliminating a habit requires you to make completing that habit difficult by increasing friction between yourself and that habit. For example, if you want to stop browsing social media for hours a day, you could create friction to partake in this habit by logging out and deleting the app from your phone. You could also give someone else access to monitor and lock your browsing ability after a certain time has elapsed during the day. Just as making it easy helps jump start a habit, making it difficult helps eliminate unwanted habits that don’t fit the identity you’re trying to create for yourself.
4. Make is satisfying:
The last step of successful habit creation is to make it satisfying. One of the most powerful tactics is to immediately reward yourself after the completion of a habit to reinforce that behavior. The key here is to reinforce good behavior within the identity you’re creating for yourself. If you are rewarding yourself for sticking to your running habit and creating the identity of a fit person, you shouldn’t reward yourself with ice cream after every run. Instead, you could reward yourself with a massage or a dip in the pool to reinforce this good habit. Another satisfying aspect of creating habits is tracking streaks. When you start a habit like running, extending your streak of days where you completed this habit is extremely satisfying. Creating a habit tracking sheet and marking an X next to every day in a row where you completed your habit creates a compounding effect of satisfaction. If you miss a day, remember that we are human and things will get in the way of our streaks. Make a vow to yourself to never miss two consecutive days of your habit and start a new streak even greater than your last!
When we follow these four steps of habit creation, we are setting ourselves up to align our lives within the identity we want to create for ourselves. Small and simple changes to our daily routine can make living the life we want much more achievable. An extraordinary life simply means getting just 1% better every day. If we can do that we will win the game of life!