Atomic Habits: The Most Important Book About Combatting Boredom You Need to Read
Is boredom actually the culprit behind your bad habits? Here's what you can do about it.
For the last six years, one book has consistently ranked at the top of Amazon’s bestseller charts.
Want to take a guess at which book it is?
If you guessed James Clear’s 2018 bestseller Atomic Habits you’d be correct.
Dubbed “an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones,” Atomic Habits is arguably the most important book you need to read if you want to make measurable change in your life.
In the book, Clear breaks down the science – and psychology – of habits. He helps you understand why you do what you do and how you can reverse engineer your behavior to create better habits.
What makes Clear’s work so compelling is that he focuses on the root force that shapes all habits – your identity. Habits start not with what you do but who you think you are.
This essay will unpack some key points from Atomic Habits. It’ll give you an overview on everything you need to know to build better – more sustainable – habits.
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Every habit is a decision. Small decisions compound over time. Those decisions aggregate into beliefs that form your identity.
Habits are decisions on autopilot. They’re things you do over and over again, often without thinking about them.
Sometimes these decisions are good – like consistently going to the gym – but sometimes they’re not.
Take eating sweets as an example. I love to bake. Sometimes I get the urge to bake chocolate chip cookies even though I know too much sugar is bad for me. One cookie turns into two and by the time I’ve cleaned up the kitchen I’ve consumed at least half a dozen.
The choice to eat that many cookies literally compounds. Repeating decisions like that over and over again will inevitably lead to weight gain. Too much weight gain will lead to health problems. And too many health problems will degrade your quality of life.
One of the fundamental principles of Atomic Habits is the idea that decisions compound. But just as bad decisions compound negatively, good decisions have the opposite effect. Clear writes:
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.” (16)
Each decision you make leads to the formation of a habit. That habit can compound positively or negatively. If you’re looking for real change in your life, investing in good habits will compound over time into the good outcomes you want.
Your identity – or the stories you believe about yourself – shapes the actions you take or your habits.
Throughout the book, Clear references a number of feedback loops. The decision-identity feedback loop is one of the most important to understand.
Your decisions aren’t always the byproduct of conscious thought. The point of a habit is to train your brain to do something over and over again. Decisions stem from subconscious beliefs about who you think you are and how you think the world works.
These stories form your identity. While many people think an identity is fixed, it’s actually mutable. As you absorb new information throughout your life and have a variety of different experiences, your identity will change. Who you think you are now is not who you will be ten years from now.
You can think of an identity as a piece of clothing. Just like you can walk into your closet and choose a different outfit to wear, you can sort through the beliefs in your subconscious and choose the ones you want to believe in and the ones that will ultimately form your identity.
Habits are automated decisions that embody your current identity. They reflect the beliefs and stories you are telling yourself right now. Today’s habits don’t necessarily reflect who you want to become or what you aspire to do with your life in the future.
Look at debt as an example. If you believe you are a debtor – a personal character flaw – rather than being someone who has debt – your habits will reflect what you believe. You’ll see yourself in a negative light and adopt habits that reinforce your beliefs rather than recognizing debt is something that is part of the human experience and isn’t necessarily a reflection of your value as a human being.
To change a habit you need to change the stories you tell yourself. To do that, you need evidence that a story is or isn’t true.
The more proof you have, the more you’re going to believe something is true. Your current habits create proof that reinforces your pre-existing beliefs. To change your habits, you have to make a decision to adopt new habits that generate new proof for yourself.
Small habits create evidence. Evidence helps you generate new beliefs about yourself and your perceived identity.
Small habits compound because they generate evidence. The more evidence you have, the more you’ll believe something is true. It doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad, the more you believe something is true, the more you’ll continue doing it.
Because your habits emerge from the stories you tell yourself, you need to start generating evidence for yourself that allows your subconscious to create new stories. To do so, you need to do things that contradict your existing narrative.
Trying to lose weight is a good example of this. For most of my life I’ve been overweight. I became my heaviest right before the pandemic. After I started taking running more seriously and changed my diet, the weight melted off of me. After a little over a year of hard work, I lost 40 lbs and dropped a couple of dress sizes.
Weight loss has always been a goal of mine but I never adopted the right habits to make it happen. Even though I aspired to hit a certain weight I never could because my subconscious didn’t believe it was possible.
Incremental progress made after slowly adopting new, healthier habits led to weight loss. Seeing the evidence falsified my existing beliefs, forcing me to create a new narrative for myself. That narrative told me I could lose weight. Over time more of my habits changed, reflecting a person who could do just that.
This is why the idea behind Atomic Habits is so important. Small habits generate the evidence you need to begin dismantling an existing identity that no longer serves you. Proof that the impossible is actually possible allows you to create trust with yourself. You see that the process you’re following works, allowing you to keep cultivating new, better habits.
To generate new evidence, for yourself you need a system that challenges your existing beliefs while helping you establish new beliefs.
I shared my experience losing weight because I think it’s something you can relate to. At some point in time in life, you’re going to gain weight and try to take action to get rid of it.
Weight loss is a good example because there’s a clear process you have to follow to achieve your goal. While that process varies based on diet and exercise, weight loss is nonetheless a function of math: eat less than you burn and you’ll lose weight.
Systems are the baseline of habit change because systems – like a diet – establish a process you can follow to create evidence for yourself. The culmination of that evidence makes a goal less of an aspiration and more of something you can realistically achieve.
Your goals are like the North Star. They point you in the direction you want to head in but the goal itself isn’t what’s going to get you there. It’s your habits, the small decisions that you make every single day that turn your goals into reality.
Systemizing your goals creates habits that form a roadmap for you to follow. It’s not so much a goal that’s unachievable but the system underpinning it (or the lack thereof). As Clear writes in the book:
“Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results…You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” (23,27)
To actually change a habit and accomplish a goal, you have to establish a system that makes your habits inevitable. Your ability to create that system lies with your identity and it’s one of the reasons why understanding the relationship between your identity and your habits is so important.
Achieving a goal is a byproduct of your identity which is informed by automated decisions that form your habits. To reach whatever outcome you want to achieve, you have to essentially reprogram yourself. You have to create a new operating system (your identity) and new software (habits) to develop a process that you can follow. That process transforms your goal from something you aspire to achieve to something you can actually achieve.
Successful systems rely on automatable processes. Habits are automation for your brain. They’re behaviors your brain learns so it can repeat them automatically in the future, freeing up bandwidth.
The point of a habit is to conserve energy within a system. It’s a repeated action your brain learns and anticipates performing again in the future. That’s why your subconscious is so important. Your brain relies on the information held there in order to make decisions with the least amount of effort possible.
Think about driving as an example of this. You’ve likely spent decades driving at this point. Your brain has learned the rules of the road based on all the driving you’ve done. Driving has almost become a subconscious activity. You can get lost in deep thought without swerving into oncoming traffic.
That’s why habits are so incredibly powerful. They take your existing beliefs and operationalize them so that you don’t have to consciously think about why you’re doing what you’re doing. You just do it.
To understand how habits actually work, Clear draws on previous work from Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habit. According to Duhigg there are four core parts of a habit that create a habit loop:
Cue: what prompts the brain to initiate an action
Craving: what motivates you to take action
Response: the habit that is performed (note: this can be a thought or an action)
Reward: the thing that satisfies a craving
By breaking each of these components down, you take something that is subconscious and make it conscious. This allows you to pinpoint where a habit is formed and change your internal programming.
When you change part of a habit loop you’re actually training your brain to learn something new. The more you repeat the change, the more your brain will learn it, reprogramming your behavior.
Habit change relies on changing your beliefs about yourself and creating new, automatable processes for you to follow. The easier you make it for your brain to execute a new habit, the more likely it will do so. The rest of the book is dedicated to a process that will help you do just that when you decide that you’re ready to change your habits once and for all.
Atomic Habits prescribes four ways to disrupt habit loops so you can consciously change your behavior and generate evidence to change your beliefs.
By this point you’ve probably picked up on the implicit problem with habit change and why it’s so hard to do. You need to create evidence for yourself to establish a new identity but you first need to believe in that new identity in order to compel yourself to take action.
Put another way: you have to believe in the unknown in order to make it known.
When it comes to something like weight loss, you have to adopt the behaviors of someone who is at your ideal weight, even if you aren’t there yet yourself. Mentally, you have to create that person and become that person in order for it to manifest as reality.
That’s where small actions help. At first that’s incredibly hard to do. Over time the evidence from those habits compounds, presenting you with a new reality. You become the person you’re striving to be, disrupting your existing habit loops. This is an incremental process that allows you to form new habits that your mind can learn and automate.
In the book, Clear recommends doing four things to enable you to take the initial action on forming new, small habits:
Making a habit obvious
Making it attractive
Making it easy
Making it satisfying
The logic behind this approach is that the easier and more desirable a habit is to implement, the more likely you’ll keep doing it over and over again. And it’s this repetition that generates the new habit you seek.
To make it obvious, Clear recommends coming up with a plan. You need to link habits to specific contexts while keeping track of them.
Take working out as an example. While it’s perfectly feasible to workout from home, it’s not likely you’ll do it unless you have a home gym. Working out in your living room is the wrong context and creates friction in your mind.
Getting a gym membership is a good step toward building a fitness habit. It forces you to go to an environment around people and equipment that is designed to help you get fit. The process of going to the gym is something you can measure and your progress can be tracked over time, creating evidence for yourself.
To make habits attractive, habits have to be irresistible. You have to want to do it otherwise you’ll find every reason not to. Dopamine release plays a crucial role in this.
In the book, Clear breaks down the relationship between dopamine and desire. He writes:
“Desire is the engine that drives behavior.” (108)
Desire isn’t what you have now but what you want in the future. This is why identity-based habit change is such an important part of the book. When you understand what you desire and dial in on it then you can take action that literally rewires your brain to make a particular action something you seek out and crave.
To make a habit easy, you have to put in the reps. You have to do it over and over again until it becomes something you do automatically.
Clear notes that the process of putting in the reps starts with showing up. In the book he gives the example of running a marathon. Before you can run a race like that you have to train for it. But before you can train for it you might have to do smaller races to build up confidence in yourself.
To do any of that you have to first start running. But what if you’re not a runner? You have to start smaller. You have to get changed and lace up your shoes before you can even go for a run.
The easier you can make the process of showing up – in this example putting on your shoes – the more likely you’ll follow through with building the remaining habits necessary to reach your ultimate goal of running a marathon.
As Clear rightfully quips in the book:
“You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.” (167).
The last thing you need to do is make a habit satisfying. You have to tie your habit with some sort of immediate reward so you can see the benefits of your hard work. This could be something simple like swinging by a coffee shop on the way home from the gym to grab a cup of coffee.
I used to do that when I started running. I would swing by a coffee shop on my way home and pick up a latte. Once I established my running habit I no longer found it necessary to treat myself, but as I was getting started, having something to look forward to at the end of my run was essential.
The more you do something and keep track of it, the more you’ll see your progress. Bringing awareness to your progress will also drive satisfaction. It gamifies the process where you want to see how long you can keep a streak going.
This is an important part of forming a new habit. As Clear warns:
“Never miss twice…missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.” (201)
At the end of the day, whatever reward you give yourself isn’t going to be the motivator that keeps you going. It’s a short-term reward to trick your brain into doing something new. What actually sustains a habit is your identity and the new beliefs you form about yourself as a result of doing the work.
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Final takeaway.
Atomic Habits is arguably the best book you can read if you want to make a change in your life. James Clear does a fantastic job of breaking a habit down into its respective parts and making it actionable. He doesn’t just tell you why you should perform a new habit but how you can do so.
The core theme of the book is to break habits down into smaller, more atomic actions. Doing this is crucial to helping you get started. Even if you just focus on doing something that represents 1% of what you actually want to accomplish, consistently doing those 1% actions will compound into bigger actions over time.
While the book is all about how to form new habits, what you might not realize is that Atomic Habits actually have nothing to do with habits at all. It’s all about managing boredom.
In all honesty, life is really boring. You wake up, perform work to directly or indirectly keep yourself alive, and sleep. You repeat this loop for years until you eventually die.
Your habits and the stories you tell yourself are essential to keep life interesting. Ironically, the things preventing you from achieving your goals are necessary to keep yourself engaged in life itself.
At the end of the book Clear gives some additional insights in a section titled “Advanced Tactics.” This part of the book is devoted to understanding how habits translate into excellence and mastery.
It’s here that Clear talks about how boredom is actually the greatest threat to success in life. Think about it, if good habits – like eating a well-balanced, nutritious meal – were as fun as eating an ice cream sundae, no one would struggle with gaining weight, would they?
Doing the right things – eating healthy, working out, spending less than you earn, reading your book, etc. – are often boring. Most of us would rather watch TV, hang out with friends, and eat whatever we want.
That’s why good habits are so difficult to cultivate. We don’t want to do what’s boring; we want to do what’s novel and interesting.
Being able to change your habits requires discipline. That’s because good habits are boring. Being able to tie good habits to rewards and make them satisfying – the prescription Clear recommends in the book – is an antidote to boredom. You have to do this if you want to be successful and achieve your goals.
As Clear writes:
“You have to fall in love with boredom.” (235)
In a world surrounded by ever changing novelty, immediate gratification, and myriad socially engineered realities, falling in love with boredom is a skill that is becoming incredibly difficult to master.
Atomic Habits is a guide for learning how to master that skill while building a more disciplined and respected identity for yourself in the process.
I don’t make this recommendation for all books but I highly recommend getting a copy that you can highlight and markup. The book is chock full of nuggets of wisdom you’ll want to refer back to over and over again.
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