PDF Summary:Atomic Habits, by James Clear

Do you struggle with bad habits? Do you try to create good habits that will bring positive changes to your life, but have trouble making them stick? In Atomic Habits, James Clear argues that adopting the right habits will drastically improve your life—but to do so, you must understand how habits work and how you can change yours.

In this guide, you’ll discover why habits matter and the three mindsets you can use to create them. You’ll then learn how habits form and the four keys to changing yours. Finally, you’ll learn how to continue improving habits you've implemented. Along the way, we’ll examine how other psychologists and experts approach habit formation, and we’ll explore how Clear’s theories either align with or differ from theirs.

(continued)...

Key 2: Craving: Increase the Appeal of a New Habit

You can also make creating habits easier with techniques that affect the second stage of habit formation—the craving.

Clear contends that cravings lead to action because you want a reward—not because you enjoy the reward itself. Say you eat chocolate for the first time. Your brain will release a neurotransmitter called dopamine after you experience the pleasure of eating chocolate. Now, whenever you see chocolate, your brain will release dopamine because you anticipate the pleasure of eating it. It’s this anticipatory surge of dopamine that drives you to act—not the dopamine you feel after you feel pleasure.

(Shortform note: In The Willpower Instinct, health psychologist Kelly McGonigal demonstrates how much power anticipation can have by describing how desire and dopamine drive action even if you don’t enjoy the reward. If you’re hooked on chocolate, you’ll continue to eat a chocolate bar even if it’s stale. This is due to dopamine: Your brain expects chocolate to be delicious—so your dopamine transmitters try to convince you that the next bite will be more delicious. It’s wanting—not experiencing—the reward that drives the behavior.)

If anticipation drives action, Clear hypothesizes, you should maximize the appeal of a desired behavior so that you anticipate it more. Clear outlines several ways you can do this, two of which are: (1) associating the new habit with other, positive behaviors and (2) reframing the struggle of a new habit in a positive light.

1) Connect Habits You Should Do to Things You Want to Do

Clear’s first strategy for increasing the appeal of a new habit is to sandwich a desired behavior between something you already do and something you want to do. Use the formula: “After X [current habit], I will do Y [new habit]. After I do Y, I get to do Z [craved habit].”

For example, say you struggle to study after dinner because you’d rather play video games. Try saying to yourself, “After I eat dinner, I will study for an hour. After I study for an hour, I get to play video games for an hour.” Soon, you’ll crave the study session because you’ll start to associate it with the more pleasurable activities.

(Shortform note: Only doing something you want to do after something you should do requires a lot of willpower. You might think to yourself, “Why not just play video games without studying?” In The Willpower Instinct, McGonigal explains that you can combat temptations like this by adjusting your physiology with techniques like slowing your breathing. This turns on your pause-and-plan response, which protects you from making decisions that are bad for you.)

2) Redefine Behaviors as Opportunities Instead of Obligations

Clear’s second strategy for increasing the appeal of a new habit is to redefine your behaviors: Reframe obligations as opportunities. This small change in perspective leads you to focus on the positive elements of the behavior: If you have the opportunity to study, you start to appreciate how lucky you are to be able to work towards your dream job. Focusing on the reward (the dream job) helps you view your struggles as steps to your goal, which increases your motivation to do the behavior (study).

(Shortform note: Focusing on the reward of a behavior you view as an obligation to make yourself do it is a form of extrinsic motivation: You’re doing the behavior because you want the extrinsic, external reward. In Drive, author Daniel Pink argues that extrinsic motivation works for routine tasks—but can actually decrease creativity. So if you’re trying to implement a creative habit, like painting every day, you may want to skip this strategy.)

Key 3: Response: Decrease the Difficulty

Another way to improve your habits is to focus on the third stage of habit formation: the response, or the behavior itself. Clear argues that it’s human nature to only follow through on behaviors that are easy to perform—so, to stay motivated, he recommends making behavior as effortless as possible.

Clear clarifies that making behaviors easy doesn’t mean only doing easy things. The idea is to make it easy for you to keep showing up for the behavior you want to perform. By showing up, you maintain your desired identity, which gives you pride and confidence to keep making progress.

(Shortform note: Contrary to Clear, some research suggests that, paradoxically, it’s easier to make a dramatic change than a small one. Dr. Dean Ornish designed a program that successfully helped 77% of people with heart disease change their lifestyles. This is impressive because, without the program, 90% of heart patients who undergo severe surgery don’t improve their lifestyles even if doing so would save their lives. Dr. Ornish attributes his results partly to the dramatic changes his program requires: By making dramatic changes, heart patients saw fast, dramatic results that motivated them to continue.)

Make Behaviors Easier

Clear recommends reducing the effort an action requires by removing any obstacles between you and the behavior. The more obstacles there are, the less likely you are to act.

For example, if you want to read more before bed, remove the obstacle of needing to get a book by placing a book on your pillow after waking up each morning.

(Shortform note: Removing an obstacle only makes performing an action easier if you remove the right obstacle. To identify what that is, examine how compatible the behavior is with existing routines as well as the time, money, physical effort, and mental effort involved. For example, placing a book on your pillow won’t help you read before bed if you’re too tired to concentrate on the book—in that case, the obstacle you really need to address is your energy level.)

Clear suggests another way to make a behavior easier: Break it down into steps that only take two minutes (or less), then do just the first two-minute step. This doesn’t mean you do a two-minute version of the habit: If you want to cook dinner every night, the first step is opening the refrigerator, not microwaving a frozen meal. Most of us try to make dramatic changes when building new habits—but dramatic changes are difficult to maintain over time. When you focus on tiny increments instead, each small success motivates you to achieve other successes. So committing to two-minute actions at a time makes it easier to perform each required step until you’ve achieved the full habit.

For example, say you decide to start cooking dinner every day. You’re successful for a few days, but on the fourth day, you’re too tired, so you order takeout. Suddenly, the behavior has stopped. Instead, break down “cook dinner every day” into easy steps that only take two minutes to do, like “open the refrigerator at dinnertime.” You can do that even when you’re tired. Once you’ve mastered that habit, the next two-minute step is to pull out one vegetable you could eat raw. The next step is to pull out a knife and cutting board. Each of these two-minute actions connect to get you to the point of being ready to make some food. The obstacles to overcome are small compared with the overwhelming idea of cooking all the time.

(Shortform note: In Tiny Habits, Fogg also recommends shrinking desired behaviors down to make them easier because small successes keep you motivated. But Fogg presents two strategies for doing so. His first strategy mimics Clear’s: Do the first step of the desired behavior to maximize your chances of repeating it. But Fogg’s second strategy is something Clear doesn’t explicitly discuss: Do a scaled-back version of your desired behavior. For example, if you want to cook dinner every night, both Fogg and Clear would recommend the first step of opening the refrigerator every night—but only Fogg would recommend the scaled-back version of microwaving a frozen meal.)

Key 4: Reward: Make It Fulfilling

Finally, Clear recommends habit formation techniques that focus on the final stage of habit formation—the reward.

Clear contends that rewards must be fulfilling for habits to form because if you don’t enjoy the results of your efforts, you won’t keep trying.

Many rewards you receive are delayed—for example, you only receive a degree after years of studying. But we’re wired to want instant gratification, and most good behaviors need time before the positive results accumulate: You sacrifice now to benefit later. So to stay motivated to continue good habits, Clear recommends finding ways to create rewards that are instantly fulfilling.

(Shortform note: In Switch, authors Chip and Dan Heath recommend one technique for providing instantly fulfilling rewards when working on a long-term goal: Build small, frequent milestones into your plan and celebrate them. This ensures a regular supply of instant gratification opportunities. Consider adopting this technique when building habits: For example, if you want to run regularly, celebrate when you’ve run a total of 5, 10, then 20 miles.)

End New Habits With Rewards

One way to create fulfilling rewards is to add positive reinforcement at the end of the desired behavior. Clear explains that we remember the end of a behavior more than any other part. So doing something immediately satisfying at the end of the behavior will keep you motivated in a way that delayed rewards can’t.

For example, the reward of a better grade next month may not elicit enough pleasure to keep you motivated to study an extra hour every day. But if you end each study session by eating a cookie, you’ll increase your motivation to study.

(Shortform note: Having trouble thinking of appropriate reinforcement? In Tiny Habits, Fogg suggests that whenever you successfully perform a habit, you celebrate in a way that makes you feel accomplished and happy: Think doing a little jig or congratulating yourself.)

Record Your Habits

Another way you can create fulfilling rewards is by consciously keeping track of your habits. Clear recommends creating a visual representation of your progress—like by marking a day on a calendar. When you can visually see your accomplishments, you’ll be motivated to continue acting.

The act of tracking can feel rewarding in itself. It’s satisfying to mark each successful completion of an action in some way. The pleasure experienced through that act becomes a cue to want to feel that satisfaction again.

(Shortform note: If you’re a perfectionist, consider tracking your habit less often than you’d like at first. For example, do a habit you want to perform every day but only track it twice a week. You’ll see enough progress to motivate you but reduce the likelihood that you’ll miss a day on your tracker—and the chances you’ll grow so discouraged by imperfection that you give up.)

Only track one major habit at a time to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the act. (Shortform note: In a separate forum, Clear adds that you should only develop one habit at a time: Many habits are actually combinations of behaviors, so taking on too many could overwhelm you.)

Breaking Bad Habits

You likely have habits you wish you didn’t. Since a behavior must go through all four stages of habit formation to become a habit, disrupting one of those stages can break a bad habit. To do so, invert the keys from positive to negative in the following way:

1. Cue—Make it unnoticeable.
2. Craving—Decrease the appeal.
3. Response—Increase the effort.
4. Reward—Make it unfulfilling.

For example, if you want to break your habit of shopping at the mall on your way home from work, you could make the cue less noticeable by taking a different route home. You could decrease the appeal of the habit by attaching a paper to your rearview mirror that shows how much money you could save if you stopped shopping daily. You could increase the effort of shopping by parking on the bottom floor of the garage and making yourself climb the stairs to reach your desired store. Finally, since paying by cash rather than card makes you more aware of your spending, you could pay exclusively in cash: That way, shopping won’t give you the reward of stress relief but rather add to your stress by making you worry about your finances.

(Shortform note: In The Power of Habit, Duhigg presents an alternative model for breaking bad habits: Uncover the main cue and reward, then change the response in between. For example, if you learn that on your way home from work (cue), you go to the mall (response) for stress release (reward), find another response that reduces stress—like calling a friend during your commute instead.)

Finding the Right Habits

You now know how to create habits—but which habits should you develop? Clear explains that the habits you gravitate toward and are able to maintain are influenced by your genetic make-up, predispositions, and natural talents. So he recommends choosing behaviors that highlight your strengths and interests—they’ll be more enjoyable and easier to stick with.

The Big Five Personality Traits

One way to figure out your optimal behaviors is to learn what personality traits you possess.

There are five main personality traits, each with a spectrum of behavior that highlights who you are. All five are rooted in biology and typically remain unchanged throughout your life.

• Openness to experience: People high on this spectrum are more daring; people low on the spectrum are more careful.
• Conscientiousness: People high on this spectrum are more methodical; people low on this spectrum are more relaxed.
• Extroversion: People high on this spectrum are more sociable; people low on this spectrum are more reclusive.
• Agreeableness: People high on this spectrum are affable; people low on this spectrum are more withdrawn.
• Neuroticism: People high on this spectrum are more fretful; people low on this spectrum are more assured.

Why the Big Five May Not Be Useful

Assessing your personality using the Big Five traits may not be as useful as Clear contends. Psychologists use questionnaires to assess the Big Five traits—but the year after Atomic Habits was published, researchers found that these questionnaires may not accurately assess the personality traits of people from non-Westernized countries. For example, researchers found that people from non-Westernized countries tended to give different answers to different interviewers instead of answering the same way each time.

Moreover, these traits can fluctuate throughout your life. For example, people tend to become less open and extroverted as they become teenagers, then more conscientious and agreeable as they grow from younger to middle-aged adults. These traits also fluctuate because they’re not just rooted in biology—environmental factors affect them, too. For example, trauma tends to trigger changes on the neuroticism spectrum. So while the Big Five may be a useful framework for understanding your personality, it has limitations—which means you shouldn’t choose which habits to create based on that framework alone.

Clear explains that your personality doesn’t dictate which behaviors you’re capable of performing. However, your personality does suggest which behaviors you’ll most likely be successful with. For example, an extrovert may have a harder time staying off of social media than an introvert.

Clear states that there is a version of every habit that works with your personality. He recommends choosing the version that fits your natural personality—not the version that worked for others. Doing so increases the chance you’ll succeed. For example, your friend may have lost weight by working out at a gym. But if you hate crowds, skip the gym and take daily walks instead.

(Shortform note: In The Four Tendencies, Gretchen Rubin also contends that you should consider your personality when choosing what habits to develop, but her argument hinges on how your personality drives you to respond to expectations. For example, if you respond well to your own expectations, you’ll go to the gym simply because you’ve committed to doing so. But if you respond to others’ expectations better than your own, build external expectations into your habit to make sure you do it—like by hiring a personal trainer who’s expecting you.)

Continuing to Show Up

Once you successfully develop a habit, how do you ensure that it continues working for you long-term? In this section, we’ll discuss the three major potential downsides of creating habits—and the strategies Clear recommends for combating these downsides.

How to Prevent Boredom: Make Behaviors Harder

Clear contends that one potential downside with creating a habit is that you may grow bored. This is because boredom is inevitable with any repeated activity; at some point, your motivation for your new habit may wane. When this happens, it’s easy to abandon new behaviors that are still working to find more exciting behaviors. (Shortform note: If you can push through the boredom of doing a habit you’ve grown accustomed to, you might experience some unexpected benefits: Letting your mind wander during boring tasks has several benefits, like boosting creativity.)

Clear contends that making behaviors harder can help curb boredom. This is because your brain remains engaged and motivated to improve when it feels challenged. But the level of challenge is crucial: You should make the behavior just hard enough to be interesting, but easy enough that you can still do it. If the challenge is too easy, you’ll lose interest; if it's too hard, you’ll grow frustrated and give up.

(Shortform note: What if you’re bored by a behavior you can’t reasonably make harder? Keep things exciting by introducing a fun, new element: For example, make your healthy breakfast habit more fun by cooking your eggs in a humorously-shaped pan.)

How difficult should it be? Clear suggests ensuring you succeed half the time. This way, you’ll experience enough success to warrant continued action and enough failure to make you work harder. Rewards experienced in this intermittent way make every attempt novel, which reduces boredom. (Shortform note: If you’ve ever struggled to not look at your phone, you’ve already experienced how intermittent rewards can create powerful habits. In Digital Minimalism, productivity expert Cal Newport describes how many technological products—like our phones— are designed to provide intermittent rewards so that we continue using them.)

How to Keep Progressing: Build on Momentum

Clear contends that a second potential downside with creating habits is that you may stop progressing. This becomes an issue when you’re using habits to automate certain behaviors you need to reach a long-term goal—like if you’re mastering scales because you eventually want to master the piano.

Habits can prevent you from progressing, Clear explains, because once you automate a behavior, you stop paying close attention to it and start to miss small mistakes. You still think you’re making progress because you’re putting in the reps, but you’re only reinforcing your bad habit. For example, once you’ve learned your scales, you might play them at the beginning of every piano practice and assume you’re making progress. But since you’re no longer focused on your scales, you don’t realize that you’re playing them at an inconsistent volume—so each time you run scales, you reinforce the habit of playing them at an inconsistent volume. Unless your actions change, you won’t grow how you want.

(Shortform note: The popularity of New York Times bestseller Outliers may partially explain why people believe that repeating a behavior is enough to progress in it. In his book, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hour rule, which stated that anybody who practices a skill for 10,000 hours can become an expert in it. But in Peak, author and psychologist Anders Ericsson, who wrote the study Gladwell based his rule on, refuted this rule, noting that how you practice is much more important than how much you practice.)

You can ensure you keep progressing by building momentum into your system. Once a behavior becomes automated, Clear recommends building on it with 1% improvements. This keeps your behavior novel and your progress continuous—and thus prevents you from getting stuck. For example, if you’re trying to master the piano, don’t just run scales once you’re comfortable playing them—improve this ability by adjusting your volume as you play the scale.

(Shortform note: In The Compound Effect, Darren Hardy also recommends shaking up your routine if your habits aren’t leading to progress. But he contends that changing your routine is enough to liven things up and help you recapture your passions—you don’t necessarily have to improve it.)

How to Continue Evolving: Craft an Adaptable Identity

Clear contends that a third potential downside with creating habits is that you can grow too attached to the identity they represent. This can make evolving past that identity difficult because if you lose that identity for any reason, you’ll lose both yourself and motivation. For example, if you have a habit of studying every day and thus identify as a “good student,” who are you when you graduate?

(Shortform note: In The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck, author Mark Manson elaborates on how growing attached to a particular identity prevents you from evolving. He contends that people avoid changes that could improve their lives because these changes challenge their identity and push them out of their comfort zone.)

To avoid losing yourself, Clear recommends, think of yourself in terms of characteristics instead of labels. When you identify with multiple characteristics instead of one label, your identity remains adaptable. For example, “I’m a good student” becomes “I’m someone who invests in learning.” You can still be that after graduation.

In this way, an adaptable identity allows you to continue beneficial habits even as the circumstances of your life inevitably change. For example, “someone who invests in learning” still reads regularly about their field, but a “good student” stops reading after graduation. An adaptable identity goes with the flow of life; a label-based identity fights against it.

(Shortform note: Just be careful what characteristics you use to define yourself. In Awaken the Giant Within, Robbins warns that tying your identity to anything likely to change will likely trigger an identity crisis in the future. So “I’m friendly” is a better characteristic to define yourself by than “I’m popular,” since popularity often fluctuates.)

Looking Forward: Continue to Reflect and Adjust

Clear contends that habit formation does not end once you build the habit. Your brain is constantly scanning your environment for cues and ways to automate behavior. Therefore, you need to continually check in with your identity and behaviors to ensure they’re still working for you.

So, Clear recommends, reflect on your habits and progress, and look for areas that promote growth and areas that require refinement. The more small adjustments in behavior you make, the more likely you will end up on the path of your choosing. You can become anyone you want and reach any goal you desire if you work hard and remain aware of the life you’re leading.

(Shortform note: You can only effectively reflect on your habits and progress if you’re able to admit when you’re failing and take that failure into stride. In Make Your Bed, retired Navy SEAL Admiral William H. McRaven shows how to do so: Instead of giving up when you fail, use failure to push yourself harder and grow stronger. For example, during SEAL training, McRaven continually performed poorly on a swimming test and had to endure extra training as a result. But this training made him stronger, and McRaven eventually became the fastest swimmer in his cohort.)