Use habits to be 37x better in a year (Part 4)
The lessons and practices I learned from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear
In the third part, we discussed how the second law of behavior change “make it attractive” helps you to use dopamine, Premack’s Principle and highlighting the benefits of habits to make habits more attractive so that you feel a greater urge to act. So far, we know that we have to make the habit as attractive as possible but if the habit is too hard you will feel that the cravings are not enough to make you act. That’s why you need to make the habit easy first.
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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 the third “make it easy”.
During the habit formation, a behavior becomes increasingly automatic as it is repeated. As your repeat an activity, your brain changes in order to become more efficient at doing it. Long before neuroscientist dug into the process of forming habits, repetition was known as a powerful tool for establishing habits.
You activate particular neural circuits associated with habits every time you repeat them. So framing habit formation in terms of time is flawed. It should be framed in terms of the number of repetitions. So none of the answers from the poll were right.
The more energy you require, the less likely you take action. It takes almost no energy to get into the habit of reading one page of a book each day. Habits are more likely to occur when they require less energy.
The bigger the obstacle, the more friction there is between you and the desired outcome.
If you need to travel 20 minutes out of your wat to go to the gym, you chances are you will not. If your gym is located on your way to work, you will greatly decrease the friction. By making your good habits more convenient, you’re more likely to stick to them.
Your life will be easier if you find ways to reduce friction rather than trying to solve it. In order to build better habits, we have to find ways to reduce friction associated with our good habits and add friction to our bad habits.
That’s why you need to prime your environment for use. By automating or setting up your environment, you can reduce the friction for future action, for example:
“I will lay our my workout clothes at night, so I can get up and get moving in the morning”.
Or to prepare a healthier breakfast place the pan on the stove and gather the ingredients the night before. Again to reduce any friction.
Using the “2-minute rule” can help you establish small habits that will lead to habit success. Find a simple, 2-minute version of your desired habit. You want to scale down your desired outcome.
Running a marathon becomes putting on the running shoes and stretching for two minutes. Reading an hour becomes reading one page. You need to get the routine anchored in place and then slowly build up the difficulty. After you mastered the 2-minute habit you can progress to the next phase.
To make something more you can think about ways you can create barriers of friction between yourself and the bad habit. Make it as impractical as possible.
If you want to watch less TV unplug after each use and put the remote in an inconvenient location. When you go shopping, leave your credit cards under the seat of your car if you have a bad habit of spontaneous spending. Do anything you can to make your bad habits less likely to occur.
If you want to get the book click here → Atomic Habits
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