Atomic Habits: A Good Way to Start the New Year!

Photo from Goodreads.

Riya Mathews

This year, are you hoping to curb your spending habits? Hoping to get back into that exercise routine? Trying to fix your sleep schedule? Wanting to spend more time off your phone? Yes, a lot of us have made our New Year’s resolutions, and year in and year out, we often fail to stick with them!

This is where I offer a solution: a book overview that will help you be better on track to achieving your goals!

James Clear’s Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones is a #1 New York Times bestselling book that has sold over fifteen million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages. It was the #1 bestselling book on Amazon in 2021, and there is no better way to talk about forming and sticking with habits without pulling on the wisdom of this book.

One word I would use to describe Clear’s book when I first read it was eye-opening. 

Clear so perfectly creates a guide that recognizes and gives strategies for self-improvement and achieving success in life through “designing habits that work for you rather than against you” (Clear). 

In this review, I will be highlighting some of the most critical things to take away from Atomic Habits and leave you with Clear’s four strategies for cultivating good habits. I will also include a personal example to help convey the four strategies portrayed in his book. 

The title of Clear’s book often sparks much interest: Atomic Habits. If we go into this, we can see the word “atomic” means a really small thing while a “habit” is a routine action. If we put it together, we can see that the main topic of this book is atomic habits, which are small actions and improvements we take on a daily basis that help build up over time to create extraordinary results.

The first strategy for building a good habit is to make it obvious. To make a habit obvious, we need to write down our habits. For example, the habit that I want to build this year is to read more books. By writing this down, we are becoming more aware of what we want to accomplish. Next, we need to identify the cues of our habits that are related to time, location, and environment. I could set a time and location for my example by saying “I will read my book at 6 a.m. on my favorite couch in the living room every day.” Here, the time and location are clearly addressed, so the habit is more likely to be followed. To make it more obvious, we need to design our environment to have the cues stand out. For my example, I should keep multiple reading materials around the house where it is easily accessible and visible. This will encourage me to read more because the visibility of things in our environment shapes what we do a lot more than what we think. 

The second strategy for building a good habit is to make it attractive. By making something attractive, it becomes likable. Clear advises that when developing a habit, it is good to pair a habit that you want to do with something you need to do. This is known as temptation bundling. For my example, I could pair drinking my morning coffee (something I enjoy) with reading my book (something that I need to do). Another thing we could do to make our habit appealing is that when we surround ourselves with people who have the same motives as us, we will be more inclined to continue with our habit. In this case, if I joined a book club, the people there are all there to read. Having this commonality with other people can motivate us to stick with our habit.

The third strategy for building a good habit is to make it easy. Habit formation is not formed on the principles of the amount of time you have been performing a habit, but rather it is the number of times you have performed it. It is more important that I read every day to keep my habit going rather than focusing on if I read for a long time on a single given day. We as humans also follow the Law of Least Effort. This law tells us that we tend to gravitate towards the option that requires the least amount of work. If this is true, then we want to make the habit we are trying to build that requires the least amount of work, making it easy. For my example, I should place my book on my couch before I go to bed every night so that it is there for me to read the next morning. 

In general, it is easier to get into a habit when we do little increments at a time. So in Atomic Habits, Clear introduces a topic called the 2-Minute Rule which states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.” When I start my habit, I should only start by reading a few pages a day. This sounds very little and pointless, but these little repetitions allow us to add on more and more each day until we achieve what we had in mind.

The fourth strategy to building a good habit is to make it satisfying. We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying. And for a habit to stick, we need to feel immediately successful, even if it is in a small way. While the other three strategies I stated before increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time, this strategy increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time. 

The feeling of making progress is a very satisfying feeling, and there is no better way to measure that than with a habit tracker. A habit tracker is a way to measure whether you did a habit—like marking a checkmark on a calendar. This provides clear evidence of your progress and can make your habits satisfying. For my reading habit, I should put a checkmark on my calendar every day after I read. This tracking helps give me visual proof of the daily streak I have built. If I end up breaking this streak and missing one day, I should try to get back on track as quickly as possible. The main goal is to never miss twice because that means the start of a new bad habit!

I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Atomic Habits for a more in-depth look at some relatable examples, concepts, and research to help you make and keep better habits.

One thing that I will leave you with that really resonated with me was when Clear stated in his book, “Small habits don’t add up. They compound. That’s the power of atomic habits. Tiny changes. Remarkable results” (Clear). Happy 2024!

Sources

An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Penguin Publishing Group.

James Clear’s Atomic Habits is Officially the #1 Best-Selling Book on Amazon for 2021