030 • Habits and the most effective way to make or break them
030 • Habits and the most effective way to make or break them
There's a reason Atomic Habits has sold over 10 million copies.
We'll look past the fact that its author James Clear is worth his salt and has created a masterpiece in almost everything required to get your book on the best-selling lists.
It's because habits are crucial to our well-being.
You can't comprehend every little decision you could be making at every point in a day.
You'd implode. This is what habits are for. They're little circuits that execute repeatable behaviour on autopilot.
But habits can be fooled. They're not always circuits for useful behaviour. Perhaps you've formed the habit of opening your email inbox as the first thing you do each morning. Perhaps you've formed the habit of scrolling on Instagram when you should be trying to get to sleep.
I've certainly had my fair share of struggles with breaking bad habits and forming good ones, and this is by no means over. We're always going to be in a battle to optimise our lives through forming better and better habits.
I wanted to write this email to talk about the number one thing that I've discovered works when it comes to altering habits.
This is to focus on changing one habit at a time.
It doesn't matter whether this is destroying a negative habit or trying to form a good one, you have to keep things simple.
Habits are tricky to pin down, so if you're not giving one your full attention, you might find it all too easy to slip into your old ways.
For a while, I wanted to form five new habits - taking supplements, meditation, sleeping on time, viewing morning sunlight and speaking to new people.
I tracked these religiously, day by day for about three months.
The progress?
I was just as sporadic with these behaviours at the end of the three months as at the start. Focusing on more than one habit at a time did not work.
You might think that taking habits one at a time is inefficient. But I say otherwise. Take me for an example. I tried for three months to form five habits and got nowhere. However, other habits I've formed through individual attention (e.g. workout tracking, breaking the habit of watching YouTube whilst I eat) have been conquered and internalised. They're now scripts in my brain that take no conscious effort to execute.
Even if it took one month per habit (normally it takes ~2 weeks so this is conservative), I'd have formed two more habits by focusing on them individually compared to focusing on them all at once.
This way, you don't have a stack of habits threatening to take over your life and overwhelm you with the pressure. You can strategically check the highest priority habits in order.
One other thing that comes hand in hand with forming habits of any kind is rock-hard resilience. Years of internalised behaviour can be extremely difficult to change, so you have to keep working without setbacks getting you down.
I wrote about my battle with Instagram over the summer, with the platform taking up so much of my mental bandwidth. I had to repeatedly put in a lot of effort to delete this account and stop logging into the platform to waste my time and energy on its content.
Most behaviours won't take this kind of commitment to change, but then we all know that often the thing that we cling on to the tightest is the thing that we most need to let go of to be able to move forward with our lives.
There's no shortcut, even when you use the above and all the tips outlined in James Clear's book. Resilience when things get difficult is what's going to change your behaviour long-term and help you succeed.
Thanks for reading! Next week's issue is the last of 2023, so I'm going to give a bumper roundup of everything that I want to share from the past year. Look out for it!
What I've created this week...
I’ve not written any long-form articles since last Friday, but I do have an important announcement.
Since the last launch, I’ve been working on upgrading my product PARAZETTEL. I now have a date for the launch of V2 of the vault - 12 January 2024.
The email list is getting regular bites of value around personal knowledge management and productivity leading up to this launch, so even if the product isn’t something you’re interested in, I’d recommend signing up.
You can do so through this link and I’ll send you an email promptly when you do…
What I've been reading recently...
10 Bullets by Zach Pogrob - I’ve been loving reading this newsletter recently. Someone I discovered on X, Zach distils some compelling stories and insights about obsession every week. Perfect for people who are prone to obsessive working on their projects, skipping meals and sleep to chase their purpose.