Use habits to be 37x better in a year (Part 6)
The lessons and practices I learned from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear
In the fifth part we discussed how the fourth law of behavior change “make it satisfying” can help you doing the habit next time again. So far, we know that we have to make the habit as obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying as possible but what does all of this help us? Here is the way I implemented those things in my everyday life.
If you did not read the first 5 articles go to my substack website. There, you will find all my published articles.
In the book “Atomic Habits” by James clear establishes four law’s of behavior change.
make it obvious
make it attractive
make it easy
make it satisfying
In this article we’re going to discuss how I implemented these laws in my own life and how you can use them too.
Ok, so it’s one thing to read a book, but another to actually apply it to your life. I’m going to try to represent how I have personally been using this book to build systems around my bad habits the past few weeks. After you guys read the book maybe your approach will be different than mine or better, or maybe there are some parts I completely missed or could improve upon, so let me know and leave a comment.
The good habits I wanted to develop were cold showers, more consistent reading and deep work sessions. The bad habits I wanted to eliminate were watching YT to entertain and to use scroll through social media mindlessly.
First I completed the habit scorecard. This gave me a good overview of habits I could try to eliminate, but more importantly it gave me an idea of daily habits I was already doing that I could stack my new habits with.
Ultimately when you find the habits you want to work on, you want to be pushing desired good habits towards the side of the spectrum where the habits are obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying, and the bad habits towards the other side where the habits are invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying.
For the cold shower habit, the first step was to make the cues more obvious. For this I used the implementation strategy and habit stacking.
“I will [behavior] after [current habit] in [this location]”
“I will take a cold shower after I brushed my teeth in the bathroom”
To make this habit more attractive I always told myself not that “I have to take a cold shower” but that “I get awake and ready for the day and increase my metabolism”.
To make the habit easy I used the 2 minute-rule to not end up like most people starting a new habit, that try to do too much too soon, I want my habit to not feel like a challenge at all. My rule was to only shower my feet cold first. If that was the only thing I accomplished then that was fine, because I showed up.
It is weird but the motivation seems to come after you get started. So most of the times when I already did my feet cold I was like:
“Okay this is not to bad let’s do the legs too”…”and the arms and upper body too”…
To make it even more easy, I never take my phone out in the morning until I showered cold. So my routine looks like:
Wake-up
Toilet
brush teeth
cold shower
suit up
So with those 3 phases of the loop systemized to get me to show up, I only had the last phase of the loop left to tackle. To make sure I keep repeating the habit, I used these tools to close up the loop.
I used a habit tracker, marking the days off the calendar becomes the reward and it also enforces me to not want to break the chain.
Mindset wise, I begin with identity and remind myself after each cold shower that:
“I want to become the kind of person who starts with a lot of energy in the day and enjoys mornings”.
With reading more consistently I more or less used the same structure. But I stacked this habits after my suit up habit. I also primed my environment, in which I put all my books I want to read in the place where I read and all my electronics away.
For the bad habit I was trying to eliminate, to make the habits invisible, I started by making my phone as boring as possible. I deleted all games and app which were entertaining, this also include Netflix. In addition, I unfollowed a lot of people on social media and only followed people which add value to my life and inspired me to work on my business. I also unfollowed all YT which entertain and followed people who I want to become.
The I also used the reprogramming tool and told myself that consuming content is lazy and does not give you anything if you didn’t take action before. I also said
“Do I want to be a consumer and stay poor or do I want to be a producer and become rich”.
To make it difficult I always put my phone in another room when I want to do deep work.
I’m actually still missing something to make it unsatisfying. I have a rough idea but I cannot really make it reality. I could have a accountability partner who checks if I actually work deep. If he gets me, I have to pay 10 bucks.
So that is how I have been using this fantastic book so far to get great results.
Go ahead and grab a copy of this book for yourself if you haven’t already, you’re going to take in the knowledge at much deeper level, from all the stories and examples that James Clear goes over, as well as some advanced techniques, which are not in this summary that will help you strengthen your habits.
Good luck in your journey and thank you for reading all of the parts from this series!
If you want to get the book click here → Atomic Habits
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