Change Your Habits, Change Your Life
Welcome to the 30 Days to Better Habits course from James Clear. 30 Days to Better Habits is a simple step-by-step guide for forming habits that stick. The course will teach you the essential elements of creating
and maintaining good habits in 11 concise lessons.
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Over the next four weeks, you will learn the essential elements of creating and maintaining good habits.
There are all sorts of myths about how long it takes to build a new habit: 21 days, 30 days, 66 days. The truth is, there is nothing about time passing that magically forms a habit. Habits are created based on repetition and frequency, not by the clock ticking. The next 30 days can pass and you can do something once or you can do it 100 times.
Furthermore, the question, “How long does it take to build a new habit?” is sort of the wrong question to ask. The implicit assumption behind that question is: How long until it’s easy? How long until I don’t have to put in effort anymore? How long until I no longer have to think about it?
But here’s the truth: The honest answer to “How long does it take to build a habit?” is: forever because once you’ve stopped doing it, it is no longer a habit.
Habits are not a finish line to be crossed, they’re a lifestyle to be lived. That’s why this email course, and my overall philosophy of behavior change, takes a different approach. I’m going to teach you a set of principles you can use to cultivate a new lifestyle, not a set of tasks you can sprint through during a 30-day challenge.
This course builds upon the ideas in my best-selling book, Atomic Habits. My expectation is that most people who take this course will have read (or are reading) the book. You may have even purchased the book in combination with enrolling in this course. That said, you don’t need the book to successfully complete the course.
Atomic Habits is the most comprehensive discussion and analysis of what a habit is, how it works, and how to change it. But despite how useful the book is on its own, I hear from a lot of people who want to know where to start. What’s the first thing I should do? What do these strategies actually look like when I fit them all together in my day-to-day life? Can I get some help implementing all of this?
In this way, 30 Days to Better Habits and Atomic Habits are complementary. While you should expect many of the core ideas to be the same, I have intentionally filled the course with many new examples and applications that you can’t find in the book. When combined, the book and the course deliver a powerful, 1-2 punch.
That said, there are some important differences between the two.
30 Days to Better Habits is designed to help you take action and it offers a form of accountability that you simply can’t get by reading the book alone. Those two things will have you in prime position to build habits that last.
Now let me be clear, this is a long-term journey. This course will give you everything you need to take action immediately, but the work doesn’t stop four weeks from now.
It’s not about working for 30 days and then you’re done. But in the next four weeks, this course will set you on the path toward a new lifestyle filled with good habits.
Like I said in Atomic Habits, good habits make time your ally. The habits you repeat every day largely determine your health, wealth, and happiness.
Build the habit of working out three times per week, and you can get in the best shape of your life. Build the habit of saving $100 per month, and your savings can compound into a nest egg that gives you freedom and peace of mind. Build a gratitude or meditation habit, and you can handle whatever life throws at you with a clear mind and positive attitude.
Knowing how to change your habits means knowing how to confidently own and manage your days, focus on the behaviors that have the highest impact, and reverse-engineer the life you want. I hope you’re as excited as I am to get started.
Lesson 1 of 11
How to Choose a Habit that Sticks
The most important decision you will make is what habit to build.
Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle. It is much more important to work on the right habit than it is to work really hard. (Working hard is still important, of course.)
In this lesson, we’re going to discuss how to choose the right habit for you.
When most people think about the habits they want to build, they naturally start by considering the outcomes they want to achieve. “I want to lose weight.” Or, “I want to stop smoking.”
The alternative is to build what I call “identity-based habits” and start by focusing on who we wish to become, not what we want to achieve. (This is an idea I unpack more fully in Chapter 2 of Atomic Habits.)
Here’s the short version:
Anyone can convince themselves to practice yoga or meditation once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it becomes hard to stick with long-term changes. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.
- The goal is not to get straight A’s, the goal is to become a person who studies every day.
- The goal is not to finish a painting, the goal is to become an artist.
- The goal is not to win the game or competition, the goal is to become a person who practices every day.
The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity.
It’s one thing to say “I’m the type of person who wants this.”
It’s something very different to say “I’m the type of person who is this.”
This brings us to an important question: if your identity plays such an important role in your behavior, where does it come from in the first place?
To a large degree, your identity emerges out of your habits. It’s like a self-improvement feedback loop. The more you repeat a behavior, the more you reinforce the identity associated with that behavior. And the more you reinforce the identity, the more natural it will feel to repeat the behavior.
If you volunteer at your local homeless shelter, you start to believe you are the type of person who cares about your community. The more weekends you show up at the shelter, the more you reinforce that identity, and the easier it becomes to see community service as part of who you are.
As I say in Atomic Habits: Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
Each habit is like a suggestion: “Hey, maybe this is who I am.” No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. And when your behavior and your identity are fully aligned, you are no longer pursuing behavior change. You are simply acting like the type of person you already believe yourself to be. As Benjamin Franklin quipped, “The things you do often create the things you believe.”
So, this is the first lesson: think about your desired identity and ask, “Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want?”
What would a healthy person do? What would a productive person do? What would X do? These questions help reveal the desired identity you should be working toward and the habits that support that identity. This is the way to determine which habit you should focus on.
Once you have a handle on the type of person you want to be, you can begin taking small steps to reinforce your desired identity.
Here are some more examples of linking your habits to your desired identity:
- If you want to write a book, you should focus on becoming the type of person who writes every day.
- If you want to learn a new language, you should focus on becoming the type of person who studies every day.
- If you want to retire early, you should focus on becoming the type of person who saves money every month.
The focus should always be on becoming that type of person, not getting a particular outcome. In the beginning, it is far more important to cast small votes for your desired identity than to worry about a particular result.
Your habits reshape your identity in a gradual way. It’s slow and nearly impossible to see. You can rarely tell a difference between who you were yesterday and who you are today. But with each rep, with each vote cast, your internal story begins to shift.
Start by focusing on who you want to become, not what you want to achieve.
Lesson 2 of 11
The Two-Minute Rule for Building Lasting Habits
When you’re trying to build a new habit, it’s easy to start too big. When you think about the change you want to make, your excitement and motivation can convince you to do too much, too soon.
Everyone’s heard things like: start small, take baby steps. But even when you know you should start small, it’s still easy to start too big.
This is why, if I have to recommend one place to start when building a new habit, I would recommend choosing a habit that is as easy as possible to perform.
The most effective way I know to do this is to follow the “Two-Minute Rule.” The Two-Minute Rule states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”
In the last lesson, you chose a habit that will cast votes for your desired identity. In this lesson, we’ll take that habit and scale it down into a two-minute version.
For example:
- “Walk 10,000 steps each day” becomes “Put on my running shoes.”
- “Keep the house tidy” becomes “put one item of dirty clothing in the laundry.”
- “Be a better partner” becomes “make my partner a cup of coffee every morning.”
- “Get straight A’s” becomes “set my books out on the desk when I get home.”
The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start. The Two-Minute Rule helps counterbalance our tendency to bite off more than we can chew. It also gives you a small way to reinforce your desired identity each day.
When all we hear about are other people’s spectacular results, it’s natural to think that we need to push ourselves to the limit to achieve anything worthwhile. I know, I’ve made that mistake many times myself. Instead, you can simplify the process by narrowing your attention to the first movement.
You may not be able to automate the whole process, but you can make the first action mindless. You’re trying to build a “gateway habit” for a larger behavior or bigger ambition that you’re ultimately working toward. Make it easy to start and the rest will follow.
You can usually figure out the gateway habits that will lead to your desired outcome by mapping out your goals on a scale from “very easy” to “very hard.” Most people start with ambitions that are big and very hard, but need to transition to habits that are small and very easy.
For instance, learning to play a song on the guitar is very hard. Learning to play the chorus of a song is very difficult. Learning to play the scales is moderately difficult. Practicing the chords is easy. Picking up the guitar and sitting down in a quiet spot is very easy. Your ultimate ambition might be to learn to play a full song, but your gateway habit is picking up your guitar and sitting down in a quiet place where you can practice. That’s how you follow the Two-Minute Rule.
Even broad life goals can be transformed into a two-minute behavior. Wanting to live a healthy life may be your ultimate ambition, but then you can ask “what do I need to live a healthy life” – I need to stay in shape. Then you can ask what do I need to stay in shape – I need to exercise. What do I need to do to exercise? I need to change into my workout clothes. And so on until you get to a behavior that takes two minutes or less – until you discover the first movement.
So, in this case, putting on your workout clothes becomes your two-minute habit that moves you toward your ultimate ambition of living a healthy life.
Or, wanting to have a happy marriage may be your ultimate ambition. So ask “what do I need to have a happy marriage?” You need to be a good partner. Then ask how you can be a good partner. You could do something each day to make your partner feel cared for. Something that makes their life easier. How could you make your partner’s life easier? You could make their morning coffee for them… and so on, searching for small ways to move toward your ultimate ambition.
People often think it’s weird to get hyped about putting on your shoes, or placing one item of clothing in the laundry basket, or making one cup of coffee, or setting your books out on the desk. But the point is not to do two minutes of work and then never do anything else. The point is to master the art of showing up.
Here’s one example:
I had one reader who told me, “When I was getting back into the gym after being away for two years I told myself all I needed to do is get to the gym with my bag and stay for ten minutes, then I’m free to go home if I want.”
It ended up working. He reclaimed his fitness habit and began exercising consistently.
The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details. For the reader that I just mentioned, it wasn’t even about exercising. He could walk into the lobby of the gym, sit down and read a book. He could go over to a workout station, set it up as if he were going to lift and not actually do any reps. He can’t do this forever of course, but in the beginning, the idea is to get comfortable with simply being in the gym. To become the type of person who goes to the gym four days per week.
As I say in Atomic Habits: standardization before optimization. Make it the standard in your life, then worry about doing it better.
Strategies like this work for another reason too: they reinforce the identity you want to build. If you show up at the gym five days in a row—even if it’s just for two minutes—you are casting votes for your new identity. You’re casting votes for the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. You’re taking the smallest action that confirms the type of person you want to be.
Lesson 3 of 11
How to Fit New Habits in Your Life
Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action.
In the last lesson, we talked about designing a two-minute version of your habit. In this lesson, we’re going to discuss the ideal time and location to insert that habit into your life. In other words, we’re going to find a clear and specific space for your new habit to live. If you can find the right time and the right place for your new habit, everything falls into place.
Here’s how to do it:
One effective way to insert a new habit into your life is with an “implementation intention.” An implementation intention is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act. That is, how you intend to implement your habit.
Scientists have found that if you make an implementation intention, you are more likely to follow through with your plans and stick to your habits. This is true whether you are building habits like recycling, studying, going to sleep early, stopping smoking, and many others.
The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill out this sentence:
I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].
Let me give you a few examples of what this looks like.
- I will make a green smoothie at 7am in my kitchen.
- I will stretch at 9pm in my bedroom.
- I will send my partner a check-in text at the beginning of my lunch break in the office.
- I will open my textbooks at 7pm at my desk in my dorm room.
- I will make my bed after I turn off my alarm in my bedroom.
The crucial step here is finding the right time and location to insert the new habit into your daily routine. You are looking for the decisive moment where your new habit should live.
Make sure your implementation intention is specific and clear. Here are a few more examples:
- I will drink 16 ounces of water after I brush my teeth in my bathroom.
- I will recycle the junk mail after I get the mail at noon in the mail room.
- I will rank my priorities for the day at 8:30am at my desk.
When and where you choose to insert a habit into your daily routine can make a big difference. If you’re trying to add meditation into your morning routine but mornings are chaotic and your kids keep running into the room, then that may be the wrong place and time. Consider when you are most likely to be successful. Don’t ask yourself to do a habit when you’re likely to be occupied with something else.
The more tightly bound your new habit is to a specific time and location, the better the odds are that you will notice when the time comes to act.
Week 1 Summary
- True behavior change is identity change. Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym or eat healthy once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it is hard to stick with long-term changes. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are. Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
- A habit must be established before it can be improved. You need to master the art of showing up.
- If you can master the right habit at the right time, everything falls into place. The more tightly bound your new habit is to a specific time and place, the better the odds are that you will notice when the time comes to act.
Week 1 Progress Check-In
- By the end of Week 1, you should have a two-minute version of a habit that reinforces your desired identity, and a clear and specific implementation intention for adding it into your daily routine.
Lesson 4 of 11
How to Design Your Environment for Success
Welcome to Week 2. At this stage, you know the desired identity you’re trying to build. You have a two-minute version of your habit that reinforces that identity, and you’ve designed a clear and specific implementation intention for inserting this small habit into your daily routine.
Now it’s time for us to discuss a few strategies to optimize this process and make it even easier to stick with your new habit day in and day out.
One of the simplest ways to do this is to make the cues that trigger and prompt your habits as obvious and as visible as possible.
Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice the cues that stand out. Creating obvious visual cues can draw your attention toward your desired habit.
Unfortunately, the environments where we live and work often make it easy to not do certain actions because there is no obvious cue to trigger the behavior. It’s easy to not eat fruits and vegetables when they are out of sight in the bottom of the fridge. It’s easy to not do yoga when your yoga mat is hidden away in a box in the basement. It’s easy to not write “thank you” notes when the stationery is stashed away on a seldom-seen shelf. When the cues that spark a habit are subtle or hidden, they are easy to ignore.
For this reason, redesigning your environment can be one of the most effective steps you can take to instill good habits. I refer to this process as “environment design”, and I’ve experienced the power of this approach in my own life.
For many years, I’d brush my teeth consistently but I wouldn’t floss. I attempted to build a flossing habit by implementing some of the ideas we already talked about. Flossing is a quick action that takes two minutes or less to do, so it satisfies the two-minute rule. I was good to go there.
Next, I created an implementation intention: I will floss my teeth after I brush my teeth in the bathroom. But even with this simple and effective setup, I would only floss occasionally. One of the key issues holding me back was the layout of the environment.
At the time, I was storing my floss in a drawer in the bathroom. Because it was hidden away and out of sight, I would forget to use it each night after brushing my teeth. I had a good plan and clear implementation intention, but I just wouldn’t think to open the drawer. I never saw the floss, so I never used it. The cue wasn’t obvious.
Environment design was the strategy that got me over the hump. I bought a little bowl, put the floss inside, and placed it directly next to my toothbrush. Now, it was out in the open, on the counter where I could easily see it. Almost like magic, this simple environment change was all it took for me to stick with the habit of flossing. When combined with my implementation intention, it was easy for me to follow the new behavior. I will pick up the floss after I put down my tooth brush in the bathroom. Now I’ve been doing it this way for years.
Let’s discuss a few ways you can use environment design to support and reinforce your habit intentions. Here are a few ways you can redesign your environment and make the cues for your good habits more obvious:
- If you want to remember to do five burpees before you get in the shower, add a Post-It note to the shower door.
- If you want to remember to refill your water bottle every time it’s more than halfway empty, use a Sharpie to draw a small line at the halfway mark on the water bottle.
- If you want to remember to write in your journal for five minutes at 7am, store the journal on the kitchen table so you see it when you sit down for breakfast every morning.
- If you want to remember to read a book instead of looking at your phone every time you’re bored, set your phone’s lock screen photo to be a photo of the book you’re trying to finish.
- If you want to remember to go for a run every morning, lay out your workout clothes and shoes the night before.
- If you want to remember to practice your Spanish, lay out your flash cards on the kitchen table so you can flip through them as you eat.
Say you want to write five hundred words each day. When you leave your bedroom in the morning, close the door and put a Post-It Note directly at eye level that says, “Write 500 words.” At bedtime, you are not allowed to open the door until those words are written.
Similarly, if you want to begin each day by reading a good book or doing yoga or meditating, put a Post-It Note on your phone when you go to bed that says, “Do 5 minutes of yoga”. When you wake up, you’re not allowed to take off the Post-It Note and use your phone until you’ve completed the habit.
I think we can summarize this strategy as follows: If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, you need to make the cue a big part of your environment. Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one. In the long-run (and often in the short-run), your willpower will not beat your environment.
You can alter the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues. Making a better decision is easy, natural even, when the cues for good habits are right in front of you.
Lesson 5 of 11
How to Make Good Habits Automatic
In the last lesson, we discussed environment design as a method for making cues more obvious, but you can also optimize your environment to make the actions themselves easier to perform.
I refer to this process as “reducing friction”. The less friction associated with a habit, the more likely it is to occur. In other words, as convenience increases, so do the odds that you follow through on your habit.
When deciding where to practice a new habit, it is best to choose a place that is already along the path of your daily routine. Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life. For example, you are more likely to go to the gym if it is on your way to work because stopping doesn’t add much friction to your lifestyle. By comparison, if the gym is off the path of your normal commute—even by just a few blocks—now you’re going “out of your way” to get there.
Perhaps even more effective, is reducing the friction within your home or office. Too often, we try to start habits in high-friction environments. We try to eat healthy in a house filled with chips and cookies. We try to have a good conversation with a friend or family member while allowing our beeping phones to interrupt us constantly. We try to work on an important presentation while sitting in a room with a chatty coworker.
I liken these attempts at habit formation to forcing water through a bent hose. Imagine you’re holding a garden hose with a kink in the middle. Some water can flow through, but not very much. If you want to increase the rate at which water passes through the hose, you have two options.
The first option is to crank up the valve and force more water out. Trying to pump up your motivation to stick with a hard habit and overpower the friction in your environment is like trying to force water through a bent hose. You can do it, but it requires a lot of effort and increases the tension in your life.
It doesn’t have to be this way. You can eliminate the points of friction that hold you back. You can simply remove the bend in the hose and let water flow through naturally.
Reshaping your environment to make your habits convenient and effortless is like removing the bend in the hose. Rather than trying to overcome the friction in your life, you reduce it.
The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. You want to make your good habits the path of least resistance.
Here are some examples of how you can do exactly that:
- Put apps that promote learning or relaxation – reading apps like Audible and Pocket, or a meditation app like Headspace – on the home screen of your phone, rather than filling it with distractions like email or social media.
- Put together a home gym setup. That way, even if you don’t have time to get a full workout at the gym, you can still do a few sets at home.
- Get healthy meal kits delivered to your door with a service like Green Chef or Hello Fresh.
- Clear your work space of distractions that will take you off-task.
The ultimate way to reduce friction is to use technology and automation. This is exactly what many popular businesses are designed to do.
If you look at the most habit-forming products, you’ll notice that one of the things these goods and services do best is remove little bits of friction from your life. Meal delivery services reduce the friction of shopping for groceries. Dating apps reduce the friction of making social introductions. Ride-sharing services reduce the friction of getting across town. Text messaging reduces the friction of sending a letter in the mail.
Just as businesses use technology to automate the behavior of the masses, you can use technology to automate your own behavior.
For example, we bought a new blender. It makes making smoothies easy. You just press the smoothie button. Zero thinking. No need to set a timer or select a speed setting. It is designed to have as few moving parts as possible, which makes it easy to clean. There are only two pieces. Rinse both off and you’re ready to use it again. Some fancier models are even easier–they self-clean. Ultimately, a blender that is easier to use and easier to clean is one that gets used more often.
Technology can transform actions that were once hard, annoying, and complicated into behaviors that are easy, painless, and simple.
At this stage of the course, your focus is on optimizing your environment to make it easier to stick with your two-minute habit and follow through on your implementation intention. You don’t need more motivation. You need a more supportive environment.
Lesson 6 of 11
Prime Your Environment to Make Future Habits Easy
Sometimes readers ask me if it’s better to focus on one habit at a time or to build multiple habits. My answer is nearly always to focus on one habit. Not only is this simpler, but it also addresses an often overlooked aspect of habit formation: when you’re building one habit, you’re often building multiple habits.
Take the habit of eating healthier. There are actually a variety of habits involved in this process. You have to build the habit of going to the grocery store and shopping for new items, the habit of meal planning and deciding what to eat each week, the habit of chopping and prepping food each night, the habit of cleaning up after the meal, and so on. Eating a healthy meal is actually the easiest part. It’s often the preparation that causes you to quit.
This is true for many habits – not just eating healthy. One way to increase the odds that your habits will be performed is to walk into an environment that is ready for the habit.
I call this strategy “priming the environment.” That is, creating an environment that favors the habit that you’re trying to build.
Environment design, as we discussed in Lesson 4, makes the cues of good habits more obvious. Reducing friction, as discussed in Lesson 5, makes performing habits in the moment easier.
Priming the environment adds one more layer: it’s a way to make your future habits easier.
Here are some examples:
- Want to meditate more? Set up a comfortable, quiet place in your home where you practice meditation.
- Want to encourage your children to read more? Help them make a reading nook in their bedroom with some comfy pillows and plenty of age-appropriate reading material.
- Want to paint more? Set up your easel, paints, and brushes beforehand so you can walk in and get straight to work.
- Want to sleep better and develop a wind-down routine? Move your phone charger out of the bedroom and place a white noise machine, your favorite candle, and a couple of books on your nightstand.
Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make your future actions easy. Now your environment is ready for immediate use the next time around.
Whether we are approaching behavior change as an individual, a parent, a coach, or a leader, we should ask ourselves the same questions: “How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right? How can we prime our environments so our future habits are easier?”
Ideally, the actions that matter most should also be the actions that are easiest to do.
Week 2 Summary
- If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, you need to make the cue a big part of your environment.
- The less friction associated with a habit, the more likely it is to occur. Create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. You want to make your good habits the path of least resistance.
- One way to increase the odds that your habits will be performed is to walk into an environment that is ready for the habit. Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make your future actions easy.
Week 2 Progress Check-In
- It is now the end of the second week. At this point, you have a two-minute habit, a clear plan for where and when to add that habit into your life, and a series of small environmental changes that make it easier to stick to your habit each day.
Lesson 7 of 11
Two Strategies to Combat Fading Motivation
Welcome to Week 3. By this point in the course, you know the desired identity you’re trying to build and you have an implementation intention for inserting this small habit into your daily routine. You may have also made a few environment design changes that help nudge things along.
The expectation is that you have performed your habit at least 5-10 times by this point.
It’s possible that what we have covered so far is all you need to build a new habit. And, if so, that’s fine. The whole point of this course is to get you results. If it’s working, then it’s working. There’s no need to make it more complex than it needs to be.
However, you may have noticed that you started strong and were feeling motivated but have since fallen off course and struggled to complete your habit more than once or twice.
This decline in motivation is something that everyone experiences from time to time. In many areas of life, we assume that if we put in a little bit of effort, we’ll get a little bit of results. So, naturally, when we’re trying our best and putting in a lot of effort, we think we should get a lot of results.
But habits don’t really work this way. Rather than having some linear relationship with achievement, habits tend to have more of a compound growth curve. The greatest returns are delayed. This gap between what we expect and what we experience is what I refer to as the “plateau of latent potential.”
This plateau plays a role in any journey of improvement. You’re putting in work each day, but you feel stuck in this valley of death. You’re accumulating potential, but it hasn’t been released yet. It’s all effort, and no reward. This can be a frustrating experience, and you need something to help you stick with it while you’re waiting for the long-term rewards to accumulate.
I’d like to share two strategies you can employ to stick with a habit when your motivation begins to fade.
The first is called “temptation bundling.”
Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do. You’re more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time.
Perhaps you want to watch your favorite TV show, but you really need to fold a basket of laundry. Using temptation bundling, you could only watch that show when you are folding laundry.
Of course, some people find it hard to implement these strategies. When you know you can watch a show anytime without folding the laundry, it becomes easy to skip the “need to do” part and jump straight to the “want to do” portion. Thankfully, you can also use temptation bundling to make the process itself more enjoyable rather than only allowing yourself to enjoy something at certain times.
Maybe you want to indulge in a few pieces of your favorite candy, but you need to work on your book manuscript. Solution: only allow yourself to eat your favorite candy when you sit down to work on your book.
Maybe you want to chat and gossip with your friend, but you both need to get in shape. Using temptation bundling, you could plan gym or park dates with your friend so you can talk and get in shape together. Save your chats for when you’re walking.
Maybe you want to read romance novels, but you need to meal prep. Solution: Listen to books on Audible while you prep healthy meals for the week.
In other words, even if you don’t really want to fold laundry or work on your book or workout or meal prep, you’ll become conditioned to do it if it means you get to do something you really want to do along the way.
To utilize this strategy for yourself, you can use this formula:
“I will only [HABIT I WANT TO DO] when I [HABIT I NEED TO DO].”
Let’s look at some examples.
- I will only get a pedicure when I am processing overdue work emails.
- I will only eat my favorite snack when I’m studying French.
- I will only visit my favorite coffee shop when I’m making my budget for the next week.
The second strategy you can use to boost your motivation is referred to as a “commitment device.”
A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that locks in your actions in the future.
For example, some exercise classes enforce a strict policy where you cannot cancel within 10 hours of your class. In this way, the gym creates a commitment device: the act of signing up for the class locks in your future action.
There are many ways to create a commitment device in your own life.
- Use a website blocker to lock you out of distracting websites. Or, delete distracting apps off your phone.
- When you go to the doctor or dentist, always schedule your next appointment before you leave. Now it’s on your calendar.
- Leave your phone at home when you’re going to an important meeting or going to catch up with a friend or loved one so it can’t distract you.
- Host a monthly book club or “wine night” with friends so you’re forced to tidy up your home each month.
- Use an automated savings program that takes money from your paycheck and moves it to a separate account every month.
A well-structured commitment device requires you to put in more work to get out of the good habit than to get started on it.
Temptation bundling and commitment devices are two helpful strategies that may enable you to get over the hump and build a habit that lasts.
Lesson 8 of 11
How to Create a Reward that Makes Habits Satisfying
The vital thing in getting a habit to stick is to feel successful—even if it’s in a small way. The feeling of success is a signal that tells your brain that the habit paid off and that it was worth the effort.
This is why the reward is a key aspect of habit formation. It is the feeling that comes with a reward – pleasure, satisfaction, enjoyment – that closes the feedback loop and teaches your brain which behaviors to remember for next time.
In the first seven lessons, we’ve talked about how to make your habits easy, obvious, and attractive.
In this lesson, we’re going to discuss some strategies for closing the feedback loop on your habits in a positive and enjoyable way. In other words, we’re going to discuss how to create an effective reward that makes your habits satisfying.
One of my favorite examples comes from a group of city engineers in Stockholm, Sweden.
These engineers laid a series of sensors across a set of stairs in the subway and decorated them to resemble a giant set of piano keys. When pedestrians walked up the stairs, musical tones played from nearby speakers. Suddenly, using the stairs was fun and surprising. Each step was accompanied with a musical note. Motivated by the immediate satisfaction of making music as they walked, 66 percent more people took the stairs as they exited the subway rather than riding the escalator nearby.
This type of immediate feedback is a powerful factor in getting habits to stick. The more immediately satisfying a habit is, the more likely it will be repeated in the future.
I am reminded of a popular story about a prank that college students played on their professor. As the story goes, the professor was known for “talking with his hands” and making lots of gestures while explaining concepts to students.
On the first day of the semester, a few students met amongst themselves and agreed that, whenever the professor raised his arms while talking, the students would nod their heads and smile approvingly at whatever he said. The students followed through on their plan and, by the end of the term, the professor was gesticulating with such vigor that his arms were flailing wildly throughout the entire lecture.
We learn which behaviors to repeat based on how they make us feel. When we take an action that feels good—like a professor looking at a room full of students smiling and nodding—we want to do more of that action in the future. In Atomic Habits, I refer to this as “The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change”: What is rewarded gets repeated. What is punished is avoided.
Receiving these immediate rewards is particularly crucial during the early stages of forming a habit.
Early on, it’s all sacrifice. You’ve gone to the gym a few times, but you’re not stronger or fitter or faster—at least, not in any noticeable sense. It’s only months later, once you shed a few pounds or your arms gain some definition, that it becomes easier to exercise for its own sake. In the beginning, you need a short-term reason to stay on track. This is why immediate rewards are essential. They keep you excited while the delayed rewards accumulate in the background.
What we’re really talking about here—when we’re discussing immediate rewards—is the ending of a behavior. The ending of any experience is vital because we tend to remember it more than other phases. You want the ending of your habit to be satisfying – watching your favorite TV show after going for a challenging run, taking a bubble bath after deep cleaning the kitchen, going to your favorite coffee shop after waking up without hitting snooze. You want a reward for a job well done.
Create an external reinforcer that aligns with your desired identity
- Walk in the woods for retirement savings (identity = freedom and control of time)
- Bubble bath for exercise habit (identity = taking care of your body)
- Every time you skip going out to dinner, transfer $50 to an account labeled “Trip to Europe”
Of course, it would be best if we didn’t need these external rewards to maintain motivation. In a perfect world, the reward for a good habit is the habit itself. In the real world, however, good habits tend to feel worthwhile only after they have provided you with something. External rewards are one of the best strategies we have for maintaining motivation while we’re waiting for those long-term outcomes to arrive.
However, there’s a crucial detail that should not be overlooked. If you’re not careful, the external reward can become the thing you end up chasing. A student only studies so they can get their allowance, rather than for the sake of learning. An employee only makes sales calls to fulfill a quota, not to serve customers and grow the business. The key is to not lose sight of your desired identity, and whenever possible, to choose an external reward that reinforces the type of person you wish to be. You want to avoid rewards that conflict with your desired identity.
Buying a new jacket is fine if you’re trying to lose weight or read more books, but it doesn’t work if you’re trying to budget and save money. You’re casting one vote for being a saver, and another for being a spender. Instead, taking a bubble bath or going on a leisurely walk are good examples of rewarding yourself with free time, which aligns with your ultimate goal of more freedom and financial independence.
Similarly, if your reward for exercising is eating a bowl of ice cream, then you’re casting votes for conflicting identities, and it ends up being a wash. Instead, maybe your reward should be a weekly massage, which is both a luxury and a vote toward taking care of your body. Now the short-term reward is aligned with your long-term vision of being a healthy person.
Eventually, as intrinsic rewards like a better mood, more energy, and reduced stress kick in, you’ll become less concerned with chasing the secondary reward. The identity itself becomes the reinforcer. You do it because it’s who you are and it feels good to be you. The more a habit becomes part of your life, the less you need outside encouragement to follow through.
Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.
That said, it takes time for the evidence to accumulate and a new identity to emerge. Immediate reinforcement helps maintain motivation in the short term while you’re waiting for the long-term rewards to arrive.
Lesson 9 of 11
Visualize Your Progress and Stay the Course with a Habit Tracker
The most effective form of motivation is progress. When we get a signal that we are moving forward, we become motivated to continue down that path.
When it comes to building better habits, a crucial step is to visualize the progress you’re making, and to be able to see yourself move forward. Perhaps the most straightforward way to visualize your progress is with a “habit tracker.”
A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit. The most basic format is to get a calendar and cross off each day you stick with your routine. For example, if you meditate on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, each of those dates gets an X. As time rolls by, the calendar becomes a record of your habit streak.
As a complement to Atomic Habits, I designed a Habit Journal exactly for this purpose. In addition to the notebook and journaling pages, each journal comes with 12 habit tracking templates, one for each month of the year. Here’s what it looks like when it’s filled out.
Of course, you don’t have to use the journal. You could use a calendar or create your own habit tracker on a sheet of paper.
Once you have created your habit tracker, the mantra to keep in mind is “never break the chain.” That is, once you start tracking your habits, you don’t want to break the chain of crossing off each day or filling in each cell.
“Don’t break the chain” is a powerful mantra. Don’t break the chain of stashing money away in your savings account every month and you’ll build wealth and gain peace of mind. Don’t break the chain of meditation and you’ll gain focus and more control over your internal state. Don’t break the chain of reading every day and you will finish 20+ books per year. Don’t break the chain of practicing guitar every day and you’ll gain mastery faster than you’d expect.
There are other forms of habit tracking outside of using a calendar. I’ve heard about quite a few of them from my readers. One woman tracked how many pages of her book manuscript she wrote each day by adding a hairpin to a container after finishing each page. Another man tracked each set of push-ups by adding marbles to a jar. Of course, there’s also the story from Atomic Habits about the successful stock broker using paper clips to track his sales calls.
No matter how you do it, these strategies provide proof of your progress. One glance at the X’s on the calendar or the marbles in the jar and you immediately know how much work you have (or haven’t) been putting in.
These visual signals of progress can be particularly powerful on a bad day. When you’re feeling down, it’s easy to forget about all the progress you have already made. At this stage of the course, you may feel like you’re putting in a lot of effort without seeing many results. Habit tracking provides visual proof of your hard work—a subtle reminder of how far you’ve come and how consistent you’ve been.
Let’s talk about how to integrate habit tracking with the other methods we’ve discussed in this course.
In my opinion, the best strategy is to make an implementation intention for tracking.
For example:
- I record my set in my workout journal after I finish each set at the gym.
- I write down what I ate for dinner after I put my plate in the dishwasher in the kitchen.
- I record how I slept in my sleep journal after I turn my alarm off in the morning in bed.
- I put an X on the calendar after I take my medicine and vitamins in the kitchen.
- I write down a moment I shared with my kids after I put them to bed at 8pm in their bedroom.
The completion of the behavior is the cue to write it down. Of course, even with a clear intention, there will be some times when you fall off course.
Whenever this happens to me, I try to remind myself of a simple rule: “never miss twice.”
If I miss one day, I try to get back into it as quickly as possible. Missing one workout happens, but I’m not going to miss two in a row. Maybe I’ll eat an entire pizza, but I’ll follow it up with a healthy meal. I can’t be perfect, but I can avoid a second lapse. As soon as one streak ends, I get started on the next one.
The breaking of a habit doesn’t matter if the reclaiming of it is fast. The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle with our habits. The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all. Never miss twice helps you overcome that pitfall.
The key insight of this lesson is to visualize the progress you’re making each day. If you have to wait for the number on the scale to change, or for your bank account to increase, or for a sense of calm to wash over your life, then the feedback loop is often too long for you to maintain motivation.
If, however, you’re focused on tracking your actions – whether that be the number of workouts you perform each week, the number of sales call you make each day, or the amount of time you spend meditating each morning – then you’ll have immediate visual proof that you are showing up and living out the habits that are important to your life and goals.
Week 3 Summary
- Rather than having some linear relationship with achievement, habits tend to have more of a compound growth curve. The greatest returns are delayed. Temptation bundling and commitment devices are two helpful strategies that may enable you to get over the hump and build a habit that lasts.
- External rewards are one of the best strategies we have for maintaining motivation while we’re waiting for long-term outcomes to arrive.
- If you have to wait for long-term rewards, then the feedback loop is often too long for you to maintain motivation. If, however, you’re focused on tracking your actions, then you’ll have immediate visual proof that you are showing up and living out the habits that are important to your life and goals.
Week 3 Progress Check-In
- By now, at the end of week three, you will have a simple two-minute habit, a clear implementation intention that helps you identify when and where to perform the habit, an environment that is optimized for your particular habit, and a series of strategies that can provide additional incentive during periods when you lack motivation or feel like you’re sliding off course.
Lesson 10 of 11
The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Habits
Welcome to the fourth and final week of 30 Days to Better Habits. One of my primary objectives this week is to give you the resources you need to stick with your habits for the long run.
In this lesson, we’re discussing one of the most powerful drivers of habits and behavior change: the social environment.
The way that social environment influences our habits is through the tribes we belong to and the groups we are a part of.
We are all part of multiple tribes. The tribes we belong to shape our behavior.
This is true in large and small ways. Large tribes like nations, religions, and businesses can influence our behavior. And small tribes like what neighborhood you live in, what school you go to, or what organization you volunteer with can also influence your behavior.
The key factor in any of these tribes is that we have a sense of belonging. When you want to belong to a tribe, you want to repeat the habits of that tribe. We naturally soak up the habits of those around us.
If you move to a new neighborhood where your neighbors meticulously maintain their lawns, you might start gardening or landscaping your lawn too.
If you start going to a CrossFit class where all your classmates eat a Paleo diet, you might start eating that way too.
If you join a church or mosque that values community service, you might start volunteering your time as well.
Your culture sets your expectation for what is “normal.” Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.
Mike Massimino, an astronaut, is a perfect example of this concept. Massimino took a small robotics class at MIT. Of the ten people in the class, four became astronauts. If the goal was to make it into space, then that room was one of the best tribes to be in. The “normal” level of performance in that room was much higher than average. Massimino soaked up all sorts of habits related to becoming an astronaut, many of which he probably wasn’t even aware of.
This strategy can be utilized no matter what habits you desire to build. The key step is to join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.
New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every day. If you’re surrounded by readers, you’re more likely to consider reading to be a common habit. If you’re surrounded by people who recycle, you’re more likely to start recycling too. If your child is surrounded by friends who value studying and getting good grades, he or she will likely develop studious habits too.
Whenever I’m writing at home office and I get stuck, my mind immediately looks for ways to check out. I’ll pull out my phone, browse the web, or head to the kitchen in search of food. But sometimes I call another writer friend and we work together for a few hours. If I’m with a peer and my mind stalls, I just sit there for a minute or two until the mental block passes. I don’t want to be the lazy one who stops working after a few minutes, and as a result, I get three times as much done as I do on my own.
My friends who meditate tell me the same thing: it is much easier to do with someone else. When you’re meditating alone, you can give up whenever your mind wanders. Maybe you were planning on doing ten minutes of meditation, but it’s been seven minutes and, whatever, that’s good enough. But when you’re meditating with a friend and seven minutes pass, well, you don’t want to be the first one to quit. You’ll sit there the entire time.
Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe. It transforms a personal quest into a shared one. Previously, you were on your own. Your identity was singular. You are a reader. You are a musician. You are an athlete.
When you join a book club or a band or a cycling group, your identity becomes linked to those around you. Growth and change is no longer an individual pursuit. We are readers. We are musicians. We are cyclists.
The shared identity begins to reinforce your personal identity. This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.
Lesson 11 of 11
Habit Graduation: Moving from Two Minutes to Mastery
Congratulations! You’ve reached the final lesson of 30 Days to Better Habits. Today is “habit graduation.”
I use the term habit graduation for two reasons. Not only because you are graduating from the course and finishing what you set out to do, but also because in this lesson we will discuss how to graduate and advance from your small, initial habit to larger and more impressive habits over time.
Whenever I tell people about my approach to habits and behavior change, one of the first questions I receive is: Am I supposed to stick with a small habit forever? It makes sense to start with something tiny, but how do I know when to scale up?
These are important questions for anyone committed to continuous improvement, and I’d like to close the course by offering a few useful ways to think about answering them.
When you start out building a new habit, it’s exciting in the beginning because it’s new. When things are new, it’s novel and interesting. Over time, however, habits become routine. They become learned and the outcomes become expected. Once you know what to expect, habits tend to be less interesting. Sometimes they even become boring. This can be one of the first signals that it’s time to graduate your habit to the next level. You scale up when what was previously challenging is now the new normal.
When your old habit becomes boring, you know it’s time to move on. However, this can be a potential pitfall because, once people get bored, they start looking for something new to do: a new solution, a better approach, a different program. Pretty soon, you jump to one habit to the next, or one program to the next and you never spend enough time focusing on one thing long enough to get results. The key is once you get bored, you stick with the same habit, but find a new detail to master or get interested in.
Some examples:
You’ve been writing 100 words per day and you’ve done that for 3 months now and it’s no longer interesting. Rather than using this as evidence that you should jump to podcasting or video or YouTube, you find a new detail to obsess over related to writing. Perhaps you try to master writing better opening sentences. This renewed focus on a small portion of the process allows you to stick with the habit of writing but find something interesting in the habit.
The second thing you can do is to stick with the same habit, but scale up the intensity or volume. For example, perhaps you began a walking habit by putting on your walking shoes and going outside for two minutes each day. After a few weeks, this routine may be so easy that it feels boring to you. At this stage, you can scale up to walking for five minutes or 10 minutes. In this case, the potential pitfall is jumping from a small version of your habit to something massive. Even as you graduate from one level to another, you want to be careful to maintain small, incremental improvements. Just because you’ve mastered the art of showing up, doesn’t mean you should jump straight to the finish line.
This is the perfect time to continue walking along the habit shaping path from “very easy” to “very hard.”
Start by mastering the first two minutes of the smallest version of the behavior, then advance to an intermediate step and repeat the process. Mastering each stage before moving on to the next level. Eventually, you’ll end up with the habit you had originally hoped to build despite starting so small.
Habit graduation will always be a personal choice and require some level of guess work. One of the metrics I like to keep in mind is choosing a new level that is exciting enough that I’m no longer bored, but easy enough that I know I’ll be able to do it 98% of the time.
At this stage, you simply repeat the process you’ve already followed: Scale up to the next level, master this portion of the behavior, make it the new normal, and then repeat. If at any time you do fall off course or you feel like it’s all you can do just to show up, return to your original two-minute version.
Finally, I’d like to share a theory of motivation that you can keep in mind as you continue to advance and expand your habits. I refer to this theory as the “goldilocks rule.” It can be a useful philosophy to keep in mind when considering how big of a jump you should take when you scale your habits up.
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak levels of motivation when working on tasks of just manageable difficulty. Not too hard, not too easy, just right. This is precisely the region where habits remain motivating and exciting. Working on challenges of just manageable difficulty is a good way to keep things interesting.
One way to know that you’re in the goldilocks zone and staying on the edge of your ability is that you’re winning enough to feel successful and failing enough to feel challenged. The key aspect to focus on here as you’re trying to expand is winning enough to feel successful. If at any point, you expand your habit to a degree where you are no longer succeeding consistently, you know you have surpassed the goldilocks zone and you should scale back down to something easier. You need just enough “winning” to experience satisfaction and just enough “wanting” to experience desire.
Here are some examples:
- Once you’ve mastered lacing up your running shoes and stepping out the door, graduate to walking around the block each day. Once that’s easy, scale up again.
- Once you’ve mastered putting all the dirty clothes in the laundry hamper, include another simple cleaning task – like washing a dish right after you use it instead of letting them pile up in the sink. Once that’s easy, scale up to include another task.
- Once you’ve mastered saving $1 per week, graduate to saving $5 or $10. Continue to scale up until you “feel” it, then back off a touch.
Staying on the edge of your potential is more art than science. Nudge yourself a little, so you’re no longer bored, but not so much that you’re failing each time.
Week 4 Summary
- Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe. It transforms a personal quest into a shared one.
- We’ve discussed a variety of strategies for building habits that last. The Habit Contract brings everything together on one page and formalizes your plan for change.
- When you start out building a new habit, it’s exciting in the beginning because it’s new. Over time, however, habits become routine. Sometimes they even become boring. This can be one of the first signals that it’s time to graduate your habit to the next level. You scale up when what was previously challenging is now the new normal.
Week 4 Progress Check-In
- You’ve now finished 30 Days to Better Habits. You should have a clear plan for how to implement your two-minute habit with an implementation intention, a series of environment design changes that optimize for your desired habit, and a strategy for scaling up your habit.