James Clear

With his blog posts on JamesClear.com, he is among the most widely read habit researchers. His debut book, Atomic Habits, has evolved into the definitive handbook on the subject and a New York Times bestseller!

Here are three lessons to enable you to apply his knowledge to break negative habits and create healthy ones:

• Each time we engage in a habit, we follow a four-step sequence: cue, craving, response, and reward.
• If we wish to create new habits, they must be evident, appealing, simple, and fulfilling.
• A habit tracker can be used to track your progress and prevent you from falling off the wagon.

Let’s find out what it takes to develop new habits by studying a true master of habits!

Lesson 1: All habits follow a four-step pattern consisting of a cue, a desire, a response, and a reward.

James contends that the environment is the unseen hand that affects human conduct in terms of habits. For this reason, a cue is always the initial step in creating a habit. It may not be always external, but it will be from extrinsic sources the majority of the time. The subsequent four steps conclude the four-step sequence:

Cue. An indication that a reward is nearby, such as the aroma of a freshly baked cookie or a darkened place waiting to be illuminated.

Craving. The motivation to modify something to obtain the reward, such as eating a cookie and just being able to see.

Response. Whatever thoughts or action is required to reach the reward is the response.

Reward. Change’s gratifying feeling is accompanied by the lesson of whether or not to repeat the action.

Several well-known approaches attempt to forecast how and why we behave as we do, like Gretchen Rubin’s four inclinations, Charles Duhigg’s habit loop, and the Tiny Habits behavior model by BJ Fogg. James provides a more polished version of what Duhigg articulated in The Power of Habit; nonetheless, none of these techniques are mutually exclusive.

Lesson 2: To create habits, make them visible, appealing, simple, and rewarding.

James develops four rules of behavior modification, one for each segment of the loop, from the 4-step pattern he proposes. Here they are, along with suggestions for how to use them to encourage positive behaviors and discourage undesirable ones:

Make it obvious. Do not hide your fruit in the refrigerator; show them openly.

Make it attractive. Begin with the fruit you enjoy the most so that you will be motivated to consume it when you see it.

Make it simple. Focusing on difficult-to-peel fruits is an unnecessary source of friction. Apples and bananas, for instance, are quite easy to consume.

Make it satisfying. If you enjoy eating the fruit you choose, you will feel better as a result.

These techniques can be applied to a variety of positive behaviors, including running, spending more time with family, working on a side project, etc. Conversely, the opposite is true for negative habits. Make them invisible, unpleasant, challenging, and unsatisfying. For instance, you may hide your cigarettes, impose monetary penalties, remove all lighters, and only smoke outside when it is chilly.

Lesson 3: Using a habit tracker is a simple and fun approach to maintaining your new behaviors.

With this structure, forming and changing habits becomes enjoyable. You’ll certainly want to handle several tasks as quickly as possible, but it’s crucial not to do too much at once. Keeping track of your behaviors with a habit tracker is a simple method to hold yourself responsible without becoming overly burdensome.

The concept is straightforward: you create a log of all the behaviors you wish to adopt or forsake, and at the end of each day, you check off the ones you accomplished. This log can be a single sheet of paper, a notebook, a calendar, or an app-based digital tool.

This method is based on a productivity hack frequently known as the Seinfeld hack. Jerry Seinfeld marked his calendar with a large ‘X’ each time he came up with a joke. Soon, his objective was to maintain the chain. It is a simple but efficient method for forming positive behaviors.

And because habits are the compounding interest of self-improvement, this is a process that we should all begin now.